,numerus omues numeros ponens, nunquam positus!4
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Editor: Henry Nelson Coleridge Posting Date: September 2, 2014 [EBook #8956] Release Date: September, 2005 First Posted: August 30, 2003 Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY REMAINS--SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE *** Produced by Clytie Siddall and Distributed Proofreaders
,
which, whatever is assumed as the first, must be presumed as its
antecedent; 
, without an article, and yet not as an
adjective. See John i. 18. 
as
differenced from Ib.1, 
. Thence
; the supreme reason; the
Jehovah; the Son; the Word; whose attribute is the True (the truth, the
light, the fiat); and whose definition is, the pleroma of being,
whose essential poles are unity and distinctity; or the essential
infinite in the form of the finite; — lastly, the relatively objective,
deitas objectiva in relation to the I Am as the deitas subjectiva;
the divine objectivity.
John
i. 3 and 16.
.That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe in his name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.Again
John i. 9-14.
We will come unto him, and make our abode with him.As truly and as really as your soul resides constitutively in your living body, so truly, really, personally, and substantially does Christ dwell in every regenerate man.
John xiv. 23.
First then, that we may come to this heavenly feast holy, and adorned with the wedding garment, Matt. xxii. 11, we must search our hearts, and examine our consciences, not only till we see our sins, but until we hate them.But what if a man, seeing his sin, earnestly desire to hate it? Shall he not at the altar offer up at once his desire, and the yet lingering sin, and seek for strength? Is not this sacrament medicine as well as food? Is it an end only, and not likewise the means? Is it merely the triumphal feast; or is it not even more truly a blessed refreshment for and during the conflict?
This confession of sins must not be in general terms only, that we are sinners with the rest of mankind, but it must be a special declaration to God of all our most heinous sins in thought, word, and deed.Luther was of a different judgment. He would have us feel and groan under our sinfulness and utter incapability of redeeming ourselves from the bondage, rather than hazard the pollution of our imaginations by a recapitulation and renewing of sins and their images in detail. Do not, he says, stand picking the flaws out one by one, but plunge into the river, and drown them! — I venture to be of Luther's doctrine.
But if a man, either by reason of extremity of sickness, &c.I think this rubric, in what I conceive to be its true meaning, a precious document, as fully acquitting our Church of all Romish superstition, respecting the nature of the Eucharist, in relation to the whole scheme of man's redemption. But the latter part of it
'he doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth'seems to me very incautiously expressed, and scarcely to be reconciled with the Church's own definition of a sacrament in general. For in such a case, where is
'the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace given?'1
'Should it occur to any one that the doctrine blamed in the text, is but in accordance with that of the Church of England, in her rubric concerning spiritual communion, annexed to the Office for Communion of the Sick: he may consider, whether that rubric, explained (as if possible it must be) in consistency with the definition of a sacrament in the Catechism, can be meant for any but rare and extraordinary cases: cases as strong in regard of the Eucharist, as that of martyrdom, or the premature death of a well-disposed catechumen, in regard of Baptism.'Keble's Pref. to Hooker, p. 85, n. 70. Ed.
Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you.Why should the obsolete, though faithful, Saxon translation of
be retained? Why not 'good tidings?' Why thus change a most
appropriate and intelligible designation of the matter into a mere
conventional name of a particular book? how that Christ died for our sins.But the meaning of
is, that Christ
died through the sins, and for the sinners. He died through our sins,
and we live through his righteousness.This man went down to his house justified rather than the other.Not simply justified, observe; but justified rather than the other,
, — that is, less remote from salvation.— that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded. ...Rather — "that with that enlarged capacity, which without thee we cannot acquire, there may likewise be an increase of the gift, which from thee alone we can wholly receive."
Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies; that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.To the dispensations of the twilight dawn, to the first messengers of the redeeming word, the yet lisping utterers of light and life, a strength and a power were given because of the enemies, greater and of more immediate influence, than to the seers and proclaimers of a clearer day: — even as the first re-appearing crescent of the eclipsed moon shines for men with a keener brilliance, than the following larger segments, previously to its total emersion.
Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.Power + idea = angel.
Ascribe ye the power to God over Israel: his worship and strength is in the clouds.The 'clouds' in the symbolical language of the Scriptures mean the events and course of things, seemingly effects of human will or chance, but overruled by Providence.
Give the king thy judgments, O God; and thy righteousness unto the king's son.God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, the only begotten, the Son of God and God, King of Kings, and the Son of the King of Kings!
O think upon thy congregation, whom thou hast purchased and redeemed of old.The Lamb sacrificed from the beginning of the world, the God-Man, the Judge, the self-promised Redeemer to Adam in the garden!
Thou smotest the heads of Leviathan in pieces; and gavest him to be meat for the people in the wilderness.Does this allude to any real tradition?1 The Psalm appears to have been composed shortly before the captivity of Judah.
Dost than shew wonders among the dead, or shall the dead rise up again and praise thee? &c.Compare Ezekiel xxxvii.
the waters stand in the hills.No; stood above the mountains. The reference is to the Deluge.
Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord.If even to seek the Lord be joy, what will it be to find him? Seek me, O Lord, that I may be found by thee!
The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Sion; (saying) Rule, &c.v. 3. Understand:
'Thy people shall offer themselves willingly in the day of conflict in holy clothing, in their best array, in their best arms and accoutrements. As the dew from the womb of the morning, in number and brightness like dew-drops; so shall be thy youth, or the youth of thee, the young volunteer warriors.'v. 5.
'He shall shake,'concuss, concutiet reges die iræ suæ,
'smite in sunder, or wound, the heads;'some word answering to the Latin conquassare.
As the rivers in the south.Does this allude to the periodical rains?1
It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the magistrate, to wear weapons, and to serve in the wars.This is a very good instance of an unseemly matter neatly wrapped up. The good men recoiled from the plain words:
'It is lawful for Christian men at the command of a king to slaughter as many Christians as they can!'Well! I could most sincerely subscribe to all these articles.
Mr. Travers excepted against Mr. Hooker, for that in one of his sermons he declared, 'That the assurance of what we believe by the word of God, is not to us so certain as that which we perceive by sense.' And Mr. Hooker confesseth he said so, and endeavours to justify it by the reasons following.There is, I confess, a shade of doubt on my mind as to this position of Hooker's. Yet I do not deny that it expresses a truth. The question in my mind is, only, whether it adequately expresses the whole truth. The ground of my doubt lies in my inability to compare two things that differ in kind. It is impossible that any conviction of the reason, even where no act of the will advenes as a co-efficient, should possess the vividness of an immediate object of the senses; for the vividness is given by sensation. Equally impossible is it that any truth of the super-sensuous reason should possess the evidence of the pure sense. Even the mathematician does not find the same evidence in the results of transcendental algebra as in the demonstrations of simple geometry. But has he less assurance? In answer to Hooker's argument I say, — that God refers to our sensible experience to aid our will by the vividness of sensible impressions, and also to aid our understanding of the truths revealed, — not to increase the conviction of their certainty where they have been understood.
The next thing hereunto is, to impute all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established.How readily would this, and indeed all the disputes respecting the powers and constitution of Church government have been settled, or perhaps prevented, had there been an insight into the distinct nature and origin of the National Church and the Church under Christ!3 To the ignorance of this, all the fierce contentions between the Puritans and the Episcopalians under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, all the errors and exorbitant pretensions of the Church of Scotland, and the heats and antipathies of our present Dissenters, may be demonstrably traced.
Pythagoras, by bringing up his scholars in the speculative knowledge of numbers, made their conceits therein so strong, that when they came to the contemplation of things natural, they imagined that in every particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of all the creatures of God.I am not so conversant with the volumes of Duns Scotus as to be able to pronounce positively whether he is an exception, but I can think of no other instance of high metaphysical genius in an Englishman. Judgment, solid sense, invention in specialties, fortunate anticipations and instructive foretact of truth, — in these we can shew giants. It is evident from this example from the Pythagorean school that not even our incomparable Hooker could raise himself to the idea, so rich in truth, which is contained in the words
numero, pondere, et mensura generantur cœli et terra.O, that Hooker had ever asked himself concerning will, absolute will,
Ib. p. 183.
numerus omues numeros ponens, nunquam positus!4
When they of the 'Family of Love' have it once in their heads, that Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers, &c.If the Familists thought of Christ as a quality, it was a grievous error indeed. But I have my doubts whether this was not rather an inference drawn by their persecutors.
When instruction doth them no good, let them feel but the least degree of most mercifully-tempered severity, they fasten on the head of the Lord's vicegerents here on earth, whatsoever they any where find uttered against the cruelty of blood-thirsty men, and to themselves they draw all the sentences which Scripture hath in favor of innocency persecuted for the truth.How great the influence of the age on the strongest minds, when so eminently wise a man as Richard Hooker could overlook the obvious impolicy of inflicting punishments which the sufferer himself will regard as merits, and all who have any need to be deterred will extol as martyrdom! Even where the necessity could be plausibly pretended, it is war, not punitive law; — and then Augustine's argument for Sarah!
We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the blessed apostles were here conversant.Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason. Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name
He would have had superintendents.A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged Hooker to shew, first, that the constitution of the Church in Christ was a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators were bona fide determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy, — for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies, — were not the substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament. It is my own belief that the Puritans and the Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole errors, were both equally in the wrong; — the Prelatists in contending for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective number
or ecclesia, which
only belonged, but which rightfully did belong, to the National Church
as a component estate of the realm, the enclesia; — the Puritans
in requiring of the enclesia what was only requisite or possible
for the ecclesia5. Archbishop Grindal is an illustrious
exception. He saw the whole truth, and that the functions of the
enclesiastic and those of the ecclesiastic were not the less distinct,
because both were capable of being exercised by the same person; and
vice versa, not the less compatible in the same subject because
distinct in themselves. The Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench is a
Fellow of the Royal Society.An argument necessary and demonstrative is such, as being proposed unto any man, and understood, the mind cannot choose but inwardly assent. Any one such reason dischargeth, I grant, the conscience, and setteth it at full liberty.I would not concede even so much as this. It may well chance that even an argument demonstrative, if understood, may be adducible against some one sentence of a whole liturgy; and yet the means of removing it without a palpable overbalance of evil may not exist for a time; and either there is no command against schism, or we are bound in such small matters to offer the sacrifice of willing silence to the public peace of the Church. This would not, however, prevent a minister from pointing out the defect in his character as a doctor or learned theologian.
For adventuring to erect the discipline of Christ without the leave of the Christian magistrate, haply ye may condemn us as fools, in that we hazard thereby our estates and persons further than you which are that way more wise think necessary: but of any offence or sin therein committed against God, with what conscience can you accuse us, when your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the peremptory commandments of God; that no mortal man can dispense with them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining thereunto?Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible phasis or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual.
Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned.Quære. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century.
That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law.See the essays on method, in the Friend6. Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to assert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters; — and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words assert the pre-existence of the thing to all its constituent powers, qualities, and properties. Now this is either — first, equivalent to the assertion of a prima et nuda materia, so happily ridiculed by the author of Hudibras7, and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives: — or secondly, the words assert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having asserted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen. All laws, indeed, are constitutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that constitutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used proleptice in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phænomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature. The law is res noumenon; the thing is res phenomenon8 A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance, — causa sub-faciens.
In which essential Unity of God, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit.If 'conceit' here means conception, the remark is most true; for the Trinity is an idea, and no idea can be rendered by a conception. An idea is essentially inconceivable. But if it be meant that the Trinity is otherwise inconceivable than as the divine eternity and every attribute of God is and must be, then neither the commonness of the language here used, nor the high authority of the user, can deter me from denouncing it as untrue and dangerous. So far is it from being true, that on the contrary, the Trinity is the only form in which an idea of God is possible, unless indeed it be a Spinosistic or World-God.
But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God, and leaving these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and divine, creatures: touching angels which are spirits immaterial and intellectual, &c.All this disquisition on the angels confirms my remark that our admirable Hooker was a giant of the race Aristotle versus Plato. Hooker was truly judicious, — the consummate synthesis of understanding and sense. An ample and most ordonnant conceptionist, to the tranquil empyrean of ideas he had not ascended. Of the passages cited from Scripture how few would bear a strict scrutiny; being either,
Since their fall, their practices have been the clean contrary unto those before mentioned. For being dispersed, some in the air, some on the earth, some in the water, some among the minerals, dens, and caves, that are under the earth; they have, by all means laboured to effect a universal rebellion against the laws, and as far as in them lieth, utter destruction of the works of God.Childish; but the childishness of the age, without which neither Hooker nor Luther could have acted on their contemporaries with the intense and beneficent energy with which, they (God be praised!) did act.
Thus much therefore may suffice for angels, the next unto whom in degree are men.St. Augustine well remarks that only three distinct genera of living beings are conceivable:
It is no improbable opinion therefore which the arch-philosopher was of.There are, and can be, only two schools of philosophy, differing in kind and in source. Differences in degree and in accident, there may be many; but these constitute schools kept by different teachers with different degrees of genius, talent, and learning; — auditories of philosophizers, not different philosophies. Schools of psilology (the love of empty noise) and misosophy are here out of the question. Schools of real philosophy there are but two, — best named by the arch-philosopher of each, namely, Plato and Aristotle. Every man capable of philosophy at all (and there are not many such) is a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian9. Hooker, as may be discerned from the epithet of arch-philosopher applied to the Stagyrite, sensu monarchico, was of the latter family, — a comprehensive, vigorous, discreet, and discretive conceptualist, — but not an ideist.
Of this point therefore we are to note, that sith men naturally have no free and perfect power to command whole politic multitudes of men, therefore utterly without our consent, we could in such sort be at no man's commandment living. And to be commanded we do consent, when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement. Wherefore as any man's deed past is good as long as himself continueth; so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent.No nobler or clearer example than this could be given of what an idea is as contra-distinguished from a conception of the understanding, correspondent to some fact or facts, quorum notæ communes concapiuntur, — the common characters of which are taken together under one distinct exponent, hence named a conception; and conceptions are internal subjective words. Reflect on an original social contract, as an event or historical fact; and its gross improbability, not to say impossibility, will stare you in the face. But an ever originating social contract as an idea, which exists and works continually and efficaciously in the moral being of every free citizen, though in the greater number unconsciously, or with a dim and confused consciousness, — what a power it is!10 As the vital power compared with the mechanic; as a father compared with a moulder in wax or clay, such is the power of ideas compared with the influence of conceptions and notions.
I nothing doubt but that Christian men should much better frame themselves to those heavenly precepts, which our Lord and Saviour with so great instancy gave us concerning peace and unity, if we did all concur in desire to have the use of ancient Councils again renewed, rather than these proceedings continued, which either make all contentions endless, or bring them to one only determination, and that of all other the worst, which is by sword.This is indeed a subject that deserves a serious consideration: and it may be said in favour of Hooker's proposal, namely, that the use of ancient Councils be renewed, that a deep and universal sense of the abuse of Councils progressively from the Nicene to that of Trent, and our knowledge of the causes, occasions, and mode of such abuse, are so far presumptive for its non-recurrency as to render it less probable that honest men will pervert them from ignorance, and more difficult for unprincipled men to do so designedly. Something too must be allowed for an honourable ambition on the part of the persons so assembled, to disappoint the general expectation, and win for themselves the unique title of the honest Council. But still comes the argument, the blow of which I might more easily blunt than parry, that if Roman Catholic and Protestant, or even Protestant Episcopalian and Protestant Presbyterian divines were generally wise and charitable enough to form a Christian General Council, there would be no need of one.
So that nature even in this life doth plainly claim and call for a more divine perfection than either of these two that have been mentioned.Whenever I meet with an ambiguous or multivocal word, without its meaning being shown and fixed, I stand on my guard against a sophism. I dislike this term, 'nature,' in this place. If it mean the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, it is an inapt term; for reason is supernatural. Now that reason in man must have been first actuated by a direct revelation from God, I have myself proved, and do not therefore deny that faith as the means of salvation was first made known by revelation; but that reason is incapable of seeing into the fitness and superiority of these means, or that it is a mystery in any other sense than as all spiritual truths are mysterious, I do deny and deem it both a false and a dangerous doctrine.
Concerning that faith, hope and charity, without which there can be no salvation; was there ever any mention made saving only in that law which God himself hath from heaven revealed? There is not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three, more than hath, been supernaturally received from the mouth of the eternal God.That reason could have discovered these divine truths is one thing; that when discovered by revelation, it is capable of apprehending the beauty and excellence of the things revealed is another. I may believe the latter, while I utterly reject the former. That all these cognitions, together with the fealty or faithfulness in the will whereby the mind of the flesh is brought under captivity to the mind of the spirit (the sensous understanding to the reason) are supernatural, I not only freely grant, but fervently contend. But why the very perfection of reason, namely, those ideas or truth-powers, in which both the spiritual light and the spiritual life are co-inherent and one, should be called super-rational, I do not see. For reason is practical as well as theoretical; or even though I should exclude the practical reason, and confine the term reason to the highest intellective power, — still I should think it more correct to describe the mysteries of faith as plusquam rationalia than super-rational. But the assertions that provoke the remark arose for the greater part, and still arise, out of the confounding of the reason with the understanding. In Hooker, and the great divines of his age, it was merely an occasional carelessness in the use of the terms that reason is ever put where they meant the understanding; for, from other parts of their writings, it is evident that they knew and asserted the distinction, nay, the diversity of the things themselves; to wit, that there was in man another and higher light than that of the faculty judging according to sense, that is our understandings. But, alas! since the Revolution, it has ceased to be a mere error of language, and in too many it now amounts to a denial of reason!
To urge any thing as part of that supernatural and celestially revealed truth which God hath taught, and not to shew it in Scripture; this did the ancient Fathers evermore think unlawful, impious, execrable.Even this must be received cum grano salis. To be sure, with the licences of interpretation, which the Fathers of the first three or four centuries allowed themselves, and with the arcana of evolution by word, letter, allegory, yea, punning, which they applied to detached sentences or single phrases of Holy Writ, it would not be easy to imagine a position which they could not 'shew in Scripture.' Let this be elucidated by the texts even now cited by the Romish priests for the truth of purgatory, indulgence, image-worship, invocation of dead men, and the like. The assertion therefore must be thus qualified. The ancient Fathers anathematized any doctrine not consentaneous with Scripture and deducible from it, either pari ratione or by consequence; as when Scripture clearly commands an end, but leaves the means to be determined according to the circumstances, as for example, the frequent assembly of Christians. The appointment of a Sunday or Lord's day is evidently the fittest and most effectual mean to this end; but yet it was not practicable, that is the mean did not exist till the Roman government became Christian. But as soon as this event took place, the duty of keeping the Sunday holy is truly, though implicitly, contained in the Apostolic text.
Again, with a negative argument, David is pressed concerning the purpose he had to build a temple unto the Lord: Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not build me a house to dwelt in. Wheresoever I have walked with all Israel, spake I one word to any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people, saying, Why have ye not built me a house?The wisdom of the divine goodness both in the negative, the not having authorized any of the preceding Judges from Moses downwards to build a temple — and in the positive, in having commanded David to prepare for it, and Solomon to build it — I have not seen put in the full light in which it so well deserves to be. The former or negative, or the evils of a splendid temple-worship and its effects on the character of the priesthood, — evils, when not changed to good by becoming the antidote and preventive of far greater evils, — would require much thought both to set forth and to comprehend. But to give any reflecting reader a sense of the providential foresight evinced in the latter, and this foresight beyond the reach of any but the Omniscient, it will be only necessary to remind him of the separation of the ten tribes and the breaking up of the realm into the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel in the very next reign. Without the continuity of succession provided for by this vast and splendid temple, built and arranged under the divine sanction attested by miracles — what criterion would there have existed for the purity of this law and worship? what security for the preservation and incorruption of the inspired writings?
That there is a city of Rome, that Pius Quintus and Gregory the Thirteenth, and others, have been Popes of Rome, I suppose we are certainly enough persuaded. The ground of our persuasion, who never saw the place nor persons before named, can be nothing but man's testimony. Will any man here notwithstanding allege those mentioned human infirmities as reasons why these things should be mistrusted or doubted of? Yea, that which is more, utterly to infringe the force and strength of man's testimony, were to shake the very fortress of God's truth.In a note on a passage in Skelton's Deism Revealed11, I have detected the subtle sophism that lurks in this argument, as applied by later divines in vindication of proof by testimony, in relation to the miracles of the Old and New Testament. As thus applied, it is a
though so unobvious, that a very acute and
candid reasoner might use the argument without suspecting the
paralogism. It is not testimony, as testimony, that necessitates us to
conclude that there is such a city as Rome — but a reasoning, that forms
a branch of mathematical science. So far is our conviction from being
grounded on our confidence in human testimony that it proceeds on our
knowledge of its fallible character, and therefore can find no
sufficient reason for its coincidence on so vast a scale, but in the
real existence of the object. That a thousand lies told by as many
several and unconnected individuals should all be one and the same, is a
possibility expressible only by a fraction that is already, to all
intents and purposes, equal to nought.The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.'The division in thought of those things which in nature are distinct, yet one, that is, distinguished without breach of unity, is the mother,' — so I should have framed the position. Will, reason, life, — ideas in relation to the mind, are instances; entiæ indivise interdistinctæ; and the main arguments of the atheists, materialists, deniers of our Lord's divinity and the like, all rest on the asserting of division as a necessary consequence of distinction.
Of both translations the better I willingly acknowledge that which cometh nearer to the very letter of the original verity; yet so that the other may likewise safely enough be read, without any peril at all of gainsaying as much as the least jot or syllable of God's most sacred and precious truth.Hooker had far better have rested on the impossibility and the uselessness, if possible, of a faultless translation; and admitting certain mistakes, and oversights, have recommended them for notice at the next revision; and then asked, what objection such harmless trifles could be to a Church that never pretended to infallibility! But in fact the age was not ripe enough even for a Hooker to feel, much less with safety to expose, the Protestants' idol, that is, their Bibliolatry.
Their only proper and direct proof of the thing in question had been to shew, in what sort and how far man's salvation doth necessarily depend upon the knowledge of the word of God; what conditions, properties, and qualities there are, whereby sermons are distinguished from other kinds of administering the word unto that purpose; and what special property or quality that is, which being no where found but in sermons, maketh them effectual to save souls, and leaveth all other doctrinal means besides destitute of vital efficacy.Doubtless, Hooker was a theological Talus, with a club of iron against, opponents with pasteboard helmets, and armed only with crabsticks! But yet, I too, too often find occasion to complain of him as abusing his superior strength. For in a good man it is an abuse of his intellectual superiority, not to use a portion of it in stating his Christian opponents' cause, his brethren's (though dissentient, and perhaps erring, yet still brethren's,) side of the question, not as they had stated and argued it, but as he himself with his higher gifts of logic and foresight could have set it forth. But Hooker flies off to the general, in which he is unassailable; and does not, as in candour he should have done, inquire whether the question would not admit of, nay, demand, a different answer, when applied solely or principally to the circumstances, the condition and the needs of the English parishes, and the population at large, at the particular time when the Puritan divines wrote, and he, Hooker, replied to them. Now let the cause be tried in this way, and I should not be afraid to attempt the proof of the paramount efficacy of preaching on the scheme, and in the line of argument laid down by himself in this section. In short, Hooker frequently finds it convenient to forget the homely proverb; 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating.' Whose parishes were the best disciplined, whose flocks the best fed, the soberest livers, and the most awakened and best informed Christians, those of the zealous preaching divines, or those of the prelatic clergy with their readers? In whose churches and parishes were all the other pastoral duties, catechizing, visiting the poor and the like, most strictly practised?
The people which have no way to come to the knowledge of God, no prophesying, no teaching, perish. But that they should of necessity perish, where any one way of knowledge lacketh, is more than the words of Solomon import.But what was the fact? Were those congregations that had those readers of whom the Puritans were speaking — were they, I say, equally well acquainted with, and practically impressed by, the saving truths of the Gospel? Were they not rather perishing for lack of knowledge? To reply, — It was their own fault; they ought to have been more regular in their attendance at church, and more attentive, when there, to what was there read, — is to my mind too shocking, nay, antichristian.
Now all these things being well considered, it shall be no intricate matter for any man to judge with indifferency, on which part the good of the church is most conveniently sought; whether on ours, whose opinion is such as hath been shewed, or else on theirs, who leaving no ordinary way of salvation for them unto whom the word of God is but only read, do seldom name them but with great disdain and contempt, who execute that service in the church of Christ.If so, they were much to be blamed. But surely this was not the case with the better and wiser part of those who, clinging to the tenets and feelings of the first Reformers, and honouring Archbishop Grindal as much as they dreaded his Arminian successors, were denominated Puritans! They limited their censures to exclusive reading, — to reading as the substitute for, and too often for the purpose of doing away with, preaching.
Thus was the memory of that sign which they had in baptism a kind of bar or prevention to keep them even from apostasy, whereinto the frailty of flesh and blood, overmuch fearing to endure shame, might peradventure the more easily otherwise have drawn them.I begin to fear that Hooker is not suited to my nature. I cannot bear round-abouts for the purpose of evading the short cut straight before my eyes. Exempli gratia; I find myself tempted in this place to ejaculate Psha! somewhat abruptly, and ask, 'How many in twenty millions of Christian men and women ever reverted to the make-believe impression of the Cross on their forehead in unconscious infancy, by the wetted tip of the clergyman's finger as a preservative against anger and resentment? 'The whole church of God!' Was it not the same church which, neglecting and concealing the Scriptures of God, introduced the adoration of the Cross, the worshipping of relics, holy water, and all the other countless mummeries of Popery? Something might be pretended for the material images of the Cross worn at the bosom or hung up in the bed-chamber. These may, and doubtless often do, serve as silent monitors; but this eye-falsehood or pretence of making a mark that is not made, is a gratuitous superstition, that cannot be practised without serious danger of leading the vulgar to regard it as a charm. Hooker should have asked — Has it hitherto had this effect on Christians generally? Is it likely to produce this effect and this principally? In common honesty he must have answered, No! — Do I then blame the Church of England for retaining this ceremony? By no means. I justify it as a wise and pious condescension to the inveterate habits of a people newly dragged, rather than drawn, out of Papistry; and as a pledge that the founders and fathers of the Reformation in England regarded innovation as per se an evil, and therefore requiring for its justification not only a cause, but a weighty cause. They did well and piously in deferring the removal of minor spots and stains to the time when the good effects of the more important reforms had begun to shew themselves in the minds and hearts of the laity. — But they do not act either wisely or charitably who would eulogize these maculæ as beauty-spots and vindicate as good what their predecessors only tolerated as the lesser evil.
For in actions of this kind we are more to respect what the greatest part of men is commonly prone to conceive, than what some few men's wits may devise in construction of their own particular meanings. Plain it is, that a false opinion of some personal divine excellency to be in those things which either nature or art hath framed causeth always religious adoration.How strongly might this most judicious remark be turned against Hooker's own mode of vindicating this ceremony!
The Church had received from Christ a promise that such as have believed in him these signs and tokens should follow them.The man who verily and sincerely believes the narrative in St. John's Gospel of the feeding of five thousand persons with a few loaves and small fishes, and of the raising of Lazarus, in the plain and literal sense, cannot be reasonably suspected of rejecting, or doubting, any narrative concerning Christ and his Apostles, simply as miraculous. I trust, therefore, that no disbelief of, or prejudice against, miraculous events and powers will be attributed to me, as the ground or cause of my strong persuasion that the latter verses of the last chapter of St. Mark's Gospel were an additament of a later age, for which St. Luke's Acts of the Apostles misunderstood supplied the hints.
'To cast out devils, to speak with tongues, to drive away serpents, to be free from the harm which any deadly poison could work, and to cure diseases by imposition of hands.' Mark xvi.
As there could be in natural bodies no motion of anything, unless there were some which moveth all things, and continueth immoveable; even so in politic societies, there must be some unpunishable, or else no man shall suffer punishment.It is most painful to connect the venerable, almost sacred, name of Richard Hooker with such a specimen of puerile sophistry, scarcely worthy of a court bishop's trencher chaplain in the slavering times of our Scotch Solomon. It is, however, of some value, some interest at least, as a striking example of the confusion of an idea with a conception. Every conception has its sole reality in its being referable to a thing or class of things, of which, or of the common characters of which, it is a reflection. An idea is a power,
which constitutes its own reality, and is in order of thought
necessarily antecedent to the things in which it is more or less
adequately realized, while a conception is as necessarily posterior.If it were so in matters of faith, then, as all men have equal certainty of this, so no believer should be more scrupulous and doubtful than another. But we find the contrary. The angels and spirits of the righteous in heaven have certainty most evident of things spiritual: but this they have by the light of glory. That which we see by the light of grace, though it be indeed more certain; yet it is not to us so evidently certain, as that which sense or the light of nature will not suffer a man to doubt of.Hooker's meaning is right; but he falls into a sad confusion of words, blending the thing and the relation of the mind to the thing. The fourth moon of Jupiter is certain in itself; but evident only to the astronomer with his telescope.
The other, which we call the certainty of adherence, is when the heart doth cleave and stick unto that which it doth believe. This certainty is greater in us than the other ... (down to) the fourth question resteth, and so an end of this point.These paragraphs should be written in gold. O! may these precious words be written on my heart!
But we say, our salvation is by Christ alone; therefore howsoever, or whatsoever, we add unto Christ in the matter of salvation, we overthrow Christ. Our case were very hard, if this argument, so universally meant as it is proposed, were sound and good. We ourselves do not teach Christ alone, excluding our own faith, unto justification; Christ alone, excluding our own work, unto sanctification; Christ alone, excluding the one or the other as unnecessary unto salvation. ... As we have received, so we teach that besides the bare and naked work, wherein Christ, without any other associate, finished all the parts of our redemption and purchased salvation himself alone; for conveyance of this eminent blessing unto us, many things are required, as, to be known and chosen of God before the foundations of the world; in the world to be called, justified, sanctified; after we have left the world to be received into glory; Christ in every of these hath somewhat which he worketh alone. &c. &c.No where out of the Holy Scripture have I found the root and pith of Christian faith so clearly and purely propounded as in this section. God, whose thoughts are eternal, beholdeth the end, and in the completed work seeth and accepteth every stage of the process. I dislike only the word 'purchased;' — not that it is not Scriptural, but because a metaphor well and wisely used in the enforcement and varied elucidation of a truth, is not therefore properly employed in its exact enunciation. I will illustrate, amplify and divide the word with Paul; but I will propound it collectively with John. If in this admirable passage aught else dare be wished otherwise, it is the division and yet confusion of time and eternity, by giving an anteriority to the latter.
If it were not a strong deluding spirit which hath possession of their hearts; were it possible but that they should see how plainly they do herein gainsay the very ground of apostolic faith?... The Apostle, as if he had foreseen how the Church of Rome would abuse the world in time by ambiguous terms, to declare in what sense the name of grace must be taken, when we make it the cause of our salvation, saith, He saved us according to his mercy, &c.In all Christian communities there have been and ever will be too many Christians in name only; — too many in belief and notion only: but likewise, I trust, in every acknowledged Church, Eastern or Western, Greek, Roman, Protestant, many of those in belief, more or less erroneous, who are Christians in faith and in spirit. And I neither do nor can think, that any pious member of the Church of Rome did ever in his heart attribute any merit to any work as being his work.12 A grievous error and a mischievous error there was practically in mooting the question at all of the condignity of works and their rewards. In short, to attribute merit to any agent but God in Christ, our faith as Christians forbids us; and to dispute about the merit of works abstracted from the agent, common sense ought to forbid us.
I said directly and plainly to all men's understanding, that it was not indeed to be doubted, but many of the Fathers were saved; but the means, said I, was not their ignorance, which excuseth no man with God, but their knowledge and faith of the truth, which, it appeareth, God vouchsafed them, by many notable monuments and records extant of it in all ages.Not certainly, if the ignorance proceeded directly or indirectly from a defect or sinful propensity of the will; but where no such cause is imaginable, in such cases this position of Master Travers is little less than blasphemous to the divine goodness, and in direct contradiction to an assertion of St. Paul's13, and to an evident consequence from our Saviour's own words on the polygamy of the fathers.14
The next thing discovered, is an opinion about the assurance of men's persuasion in matters of faith. I have taught, he saith, 'That the assurance of things which we believe by the word, is not so certain as of that we perceive by sense.'A useful instance to illustrate the importance of distinct, and the mischief of equivocal or multivocal, terms. Had Hooker said that the fundamental truths of religion, though perhaps even more certain, are less evident than the facts of sense, there could have been no misunderstanding. Thus the demonstrations of algebra possess equal certainty with those of geometry, but cannot lay claim to the same evidence. Certainty is positive, evidence relative; the former, strictly taken, insusceptible of more or less, the latter capable of existing in many different degrees.
In spirit I am with you to the world's end.O how grateful should I be to be made intuitive of the truth intended in the words — In spirit I am with you!
Touching the latter affection of fear, which respecteth evils to come, as the other which we have spoken of doth present evils; first, in the nature thereof it is plain that we are not every future evil afraid. Perceive we not how they, whose tenderness shrinketh at the least rase of a needle's point, do kiss the sword that pierceth their souls quite thorow?In this and in sundry similar passages of this venerable writer there is
a very plausible, but even therefore the
more dangerous, sophism; but the due detection and exposure of which
would exceed the scanty space of a marginal comment. Briefly, what does
Hooker comprehend in the term 'pain?' Whatsoever the soul finds adverse
to her well being, or incompatible with her free action? In this sense
Hooker's position is a mere truism. But if pain be applied exclusively
to the soul finding itself as life, then it is an error.Fear then in itself being mere nature cannot in itself be sin, which sin is not nature, but therefore an accessary deprivation.I suspect a misprint, and that it should be depravation. But if not nature, then it must be a super-induced and incidental depravation of nature. The principal, namely fear, is nature; but the sin, that is, that it is a sinful fear, is but an accessary
'Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. ... Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.'Table Talk, 2d Edit. p. 95. — Ed.
Si quis dixerit justitiam acceptam non conservari atque etiam augeri coram. Deo per bona opera; sed opera ipsa fructus solummodo et signa esse justificationis adeptæ, non autem ipsius augendæ causam; anathema sit.Sess. VI. Can. 24.
... Si quis dixerit hominis justificati bona opera ita esse dona Dei, ut non sint etiam bona ipsius justificati merita; aut ipsum justificatum bonis operibus, quæ ab eo per Dei gratiam, et Jesu Christi meritum, cujus vivum membrum est, fiunt, non vere mereri augmentum gratiæ, vitam æternam, et ipsius vitæ æternæ, si tamen in gratia decesserit, conscecutionem atque etiam gloriæ augmentum, anathema sit.Ib. Can. 32. — Ed.
Fly-leaf. — Hannah Scollock, her book, February 10, 1787.
This, Hannah Scollock! may have been the case;
Your writing therefore I will not erase.
But now this book, once yours, belongs to me,
The Morning Post's and Courier's S. T. C.; —
Elsewhere in College, knowledge, wit and scholerage
To friends and public known, as S. T. Coleridge.
Witness hereto my hand, on Ashly Green,
One thousand, twice four hundred, and fourteen
Year of our Lord — and of the month November,
The fifteenth day, if right I do remember.
But men desired only to be like unto God in omniscience and the general knowledge of all things which may be communicated to a creature, as in Christ it is to his human soul.Surely this is more than doubtful; and even the instance given is irreconcilable with Christ's own assertion concerning the last day, which must be understood of his human soul, by all who hold the faith delivered from the foundation, namely, his deity. Field seems to have excerpted this incautiously from the Schoolmen, who on this premiss could justify the communicability of adoration, as in the case of the saints. Omniscience, it may be proved, implies omnipotence. The fourth of the arguments in this section, and, as closely connected with it, the first (only somewhat differently stated) seem the strongest, or rather the only ones. For the second is a mere anticipation of the fourth, and all that is true in the third is involved in it.
And began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.That is, I humbly apprehend, in other than the Hebrew and Syrochaldaic languages, which (with rare and reluctant exceptions in favor of the Greek) were appropriated to public prayer and exhortation, just as the Latin in the Romish Church. The new converts preached and prayed, each to his companions in his and their dialect; — they were all Jews, but had assembled from all the different provinces of the Roman and Parthian empires, as the Quakers among us to the yearly meeting in London; this was a sign, not a miracle. The miracle consisted in the visible and audible descent of the Holy Ghost, and in the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, as explained by St. Peter himself. Acts ii. 15.
Aliud est etymologia nominis et aliud significatio nominis. Etymologia attenditur secundum id it quo imponitur nomen ad significandum: nominis vero significatio secundum id ad quod significandum imponitur.This passage from Aquinas would be an apt motto for a critique on Horne Tooke's Diversions of Purley. The best service of etymology is, when the sense of a word is still unsettled, and especially when two words have each two meanings; A=a-b, and B=a-b, instead of A=a and B=b. Thus reason and understanding as at present popularly confounded. Here the etyma, — ratio, the relative proportion of thoughts and things, — and understanding, as the power which substantiates phænomena (substat eis) — determine the proper sense. But most often the etyma being equivalent, we must proceed ex arbitrio, as 'law compels,' 'religion obliges;' or take up what had been begun in some one derivative. Thus 'fanciful' and 'imaginative,' are discriminated; — and this supplies the ground of choice for giving to fancy and imagination, each its own sense. Cowley is a fanciful writer, Milton an imaginative poet. Then I proceed with the distinction, how ill fancy assorts with imagination, as instanced in Milton's Limbo.3
The reason why our translators, in the beginning, did choose rather to use the word 'congregation' than 'Church,' was not, as the adversary maliciously imagineth, for that they feared the very name of the Church; but because as by the name of religion and religious men, ordinarily in former times, men understood nothing but factitias religiones, as Gerson out of Anselme calleth them, that is, the professions of monks and friars, so, &c.For the same reason the word religion for
in St.
James4 ought now to be altered to ceremony or ritual. The whole
version has by change of language become a dangerous mistranslation, and
furnishes a favorite text to our moral preachers, Church Socinians and
other christened pagans now so rife amongst us. What was the substance
of the ceremonial law is but the ceremonial part of the Christian
religion; but it is its solemn ceremonial law, and though not the same,
yet one with it and inseparable, even as form and substance. Such is St.
James's doctrine, destroying at one blow Antinomianism and the Popish
popular doctrine of good works.But if the Church of God remains in Corinth, where there were divisions, sects, emulations, &c. ... who dare deny those societies to be the Churches of God, wherein the tenth part of these horrible evils and abuses is not to be found?It is rare to meet with sophistry in this sound divine; but here he seems to border on it. For first the Corinthian Church upon admonition repented of its negligence; and secondly, the objection of the Puritans was, that the constitution of the Church precluded discipline.
The first publishers of the Gospel of Christ delivered a rule of faith to the Christian Churches which they founded, comprehending all those articles that are found in that epitome of Christian religion, which we call the Apostles' Creed.This needs proof. I rather believe that the so called Apostles' Creed was really the Creed of the Roman or Western church, (and possibly in its present form, the catechismal rather than the baptismal creed), — and that other churches in the East had Creeds equally ancient, and, from their being earlier troubled with Anti Trinitarian heresies, more express on the divinity of Christ than the Roman.
Fourthly, that it is no less absurd to say, as the Papists do, that our satisfaction is required as a condition, without which Christ's satisfaction is not appliable unto us, than to say, Peter hath paid the debt of John, and he to whom it was due accepteth of the same payment, conditionally if he pay it himself also.This6 propriation of a metaphor, namely, forgiveness of sin and abolition of guilt through the redemptive power of Christ's love and of his perfect obedience during his voluntary assumption of humanity, expressed, on account of the sameness of the consequences in both cases, by the payment of a debt for another, which debt the payer had not himself incurred, — the propriation of this, I say, by transferring the sameness from the consequents to the antecedents is the one point of orthodoxy (so called, I mean) in which I still remain at issue. It seems to me so evidently a
A metaphor is an
illustration of something less known by a more or less partial
identification of it with something better understood. Thus St. Paul
illustrates the consequences of the act of redemption by four different
metaphors drawn from things most familiar to those, for whom it was to
be illustrated, namely, sin-offerings or sacrificial expiation;
reconciliation; ransom from slavery; satisfaction of a just creditor by
vicarious payment of the debt. These all refer to the consequences of
redemption. 
redemptoris, and by this
interpretation substituting an identification absolute for an equation
proportional.Personality is nothing but the existence of nature itself.God alone had his nature in himself; that is, God alone contains in himself the ground of his own existence. But were this definition of Field's right, we might predicate personality of a worm, or wherever we find life. Better say, — personality is individuality existing in itself, but with a nature as its ground.
Accursing Eutyches as a heretic.It puzzles me to understand what sense Field gave to the word, heresy. Surely every slight error, even though persevered in, is not to be held a heresy, or its asserters accursed. The error ought at least to respect some point of faith essential to the great ends of the Gospel. Thus the phrase 'cursing Eutyches,' is to me shockingly unchristian. I could not dare call even the opinion cursed, till I saw how it injured the faith in Christ, weakened our confidence in him, or lessened our love and gratitude.
If ye be circumcised ye are fallen from grace, and Christ can profit you nothing.It seems impossible but that these words had a relation to the particular state of feeling and belief, out of which the anxiety to be circumcised did in those particular persons proceed, and not absolutely, and at all times to the act itself, seeing that St. Paul himself circumcised Timothy from motives of charity and prudence.
The things that pertain to the Christian faith and religion are of two sorts; for there are some things explicite, some things implicite credenda; that is, there are some things that must be particularly and expressly known and believed, as that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Ghost God, and yet they are not three Gods but one God; and some other, which though all men, at all times, be not bound upon the peril of damnation to know and believe expressly, yet whosoever will be saved must believe them at least implicite, and in generality, as that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fled into Egypt.Merciful Heaven! Eternal misery and the immitigable wrath of God, and the inextinguishable fire of hell amid devils, parricides, and haters of God and all goodness — this is the verdict which a Protestant divine passes against the man, who though sincerely believing the whole Nicene creed and every doctrine and precept taught in the New Testament, and living accordingly, should yet have convinced himself that the first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke were not parts of the original Gospels!
So in the beginning, Nestorius did not err, touching the unity of Christ's person in the diversity of the natures of God and man; but only disliked that Mary should be called the mother of God: which form of speaking when some demonstrated to be very fitting and unavoidable, if Christ were God and man in the unity of the same person, he chose rather to deny the unity of Christ's person than to acknowledge his temerity and rashness in reproving that form of speech, which the use of the church had anciently received and allowed.A false charge grounded on a misconception of the Syriac terms. Nestorius was perfectly justifiable in his rejection of the epithet
as applied to the mother of Jesus. The Church was
even then only too ripe for the idolatrous hyper-dulia of the
Virgin. Not less weak is Field's defence of the propriety of the term.
Set aside all reference to this holy mystery, and let me ask, I trust
without offence, whether by the same logic a mule's dam might not be
called 
because the horse and ass were united in one
and the same subject. The difference in the perfect God and perfect man
does not remove the objection: for an epithet, which conceals half of a
truth, the power and special concerningness of which, relatively to our
redemption by Christ, depends on our knowledge of the whole, is a
deceptive and a dangerously deceptive epithet. Thus, then, the Fathers did sometimes, when they had particular occasions to remember the Saints, and to speak of them, by way of apostrophe, turn themselves unto them, and use words of doubtful compellation, praying them, if they have any sense of these inferior things, to be remembrancers to God for them.The distinct gradations of the process, by which commemoration and rhetorical apostrophes passed finally into idolatry, supply an analogy of mighty force against the heretical hypothesis of the modern Unitarians. Were it true, they would have been able to have traced the progress of the Christolatry from the lowest sort of Christodulia with the same historical distinctness against the universal Church, that the Protestants have that of hierolatry against the Romanists. The gentle and soft censures which our divines during the reign of the Stuarts pass on the Roman Saint worship, or hieroduly, as an inconvenient superstition, must needs have alarmed the faithful adherents to the Protestantism of Edward VI and the surviving exiles of bloody Queen Mary's times, and their disciples.
The miracles that God wrought in times past by them made many to attribute more to them than was fit, as if they had a generality of presence, knowledge, and working; but the wisest and best advised never durst attribute any such thing unto them.To a truly pious mind awfully impressed with the surpassing excellency of God's ineffable love to fallen man, in the revelation of himself to the inner man through the reason and conscience by the spiritual light and substantiality — (for the conscience is to the spirit or reason what the understanding is to the sense, a substantiative power); this consequence of miracles is so fearful, that it cannot but redouble his zeal against that fashion of modern theologists which would convert miracles from a motive to attention and solicitous examination, and at best from a negative condition of revelation, into the positive foundation of Christian faith. Ib.c.22. p.116.
But if this be as vile a slander as ever Satanist devised, the Lord reward them that have been the authors and advisers of it according to their works.O no! no! this the good man did not utter from his heart, but from his passion. A vile and wicked slander it was and is. O may God have turned the hearts of those who uttered it, or may it be among their unknown sins done in ignorance, for which the infinite merits of Christ may satisfy! I am most assured that if Dr. Field were now alive, or if any one had but said this to him, he would have replied — "I thank thee, brother, for thy Christian admonition. Add thy prayer, and pray God to forgive me my inconsiderate zeal!"
For what rectitude is due to the specifical act of hating God? or what rectitude is it capable of?Is this a possible act to any man understanding by the word God what we mean by God?
(the 
of Timæus Locrus) from the will or personal attributes of God
— 
— planted the germ of the only possible solution, or rather perhaps, in
words less exceptionable and more likely to be endured in the schools of
modern theology, brought forward the truth involved in Behmen's too bold
distinction of God and the ground of God; — who yet in this is to be
excused, not only for his good aim and his ignorance of scholastic
terms, but likewise because some of the Fathers expressed themselves no
less crudely in the other extreme; though it is not improbable that the
meaning was the same in both. At least Behmen constantly makes
self-existence a positive act, so as that by an eternal 
or mysterious intercirculation God wills himself out of
the ground 
), — indifferentia
absoluta realitatis infinitæ et infinitæ potentialitatis) — and
again by his will, as God existing, gives being to the ground, 
. Solus Deus est; — itaque
principium, qui ex seipso dedit sibi ipse principium. Deus ipse sui
origo est, suæque causa substantiæ, id quod est, ex se et in se
continens. Ex seipso procreatus ipse se fecit, &c., of Synesius,
Jerome, Hilary, and Lactantius and others involve the same conception.The seventh is the heresy of Sabellius, which he saith was revived by Servetus. So it was indeed, that Servetus revived in our time the damnable heresy of Sabellius, long since condemned in the first ages of the Church. But what is that to us? How little approbation he found amongst us, the just and honourable proceeding against him at Geneva will witness to all posterity.Shocking as this act must and ought to be to all Christians at present; yet this passage and a hundred still stronger from divines and Church letters contemporary with Calvin, prove Servetus' death not to be Calvin's guilt especially, but the common opprobrium of all European Christendom, — of the Romanists whose laws the Senate of Geneva followed, and from fear of whose reproaches (as if Protestants favoured heresy) they executed them, — and of the Protestant churches who applauded the act and returned thanks to Calvin and the Senate for it.7
The twelfth heresy imputed to us is the heresy of Jovinian, concerning whom we must observe, that Augustine ascribeth unto him two opinions which Hierome mentioneth not; who yet was not likely to spare him, if he might truly have been charged with them. The first, that Mary ceased to be a virgin when she had borne Christ; the second, that all sins are equal.Neither this nor that is worthy the name of opinion; it is mere unscriptural, nay, anti-scriptural gossiping. Are we to blame, or not rather to praise, the anxiety manifested by the great divines of the church of England under the Stuarts not to remove further than necessary from the Romish doctrines? Yet one wishes a bolder method; for example, as to Mary's private history after the conception and birth of Christ, we neither know nor care about it.
For the opinions wherewith Hierome chargeth him, this we briefly answer. First, if he absolutely denied that the Saints departed do pray for us, as it seemeth he did by Hierome's reprehension, we think he erred.Yet not heretically; and if he meant only that we being wholly ignorant, whether they do or no, ought to act as if we knew they did not, he is perfectly right; for whatever ye do, do it in faith. As to the ubiquity of saints, it is Jerome who is the heretic, nay, idolater, if he reduced his opinion to practice. It perplexes me, that Field speaks so doubtingly on a matter so plain as the incommunicability of omnipresence.
Touching the second objection, that Bucer and Calvin deny original sin, though not generally, as did Zuinglius, yet at least in the children of the faithful. If he had said that these men affirm the earth doth move, and the heavens stand still, he might have as soon justified it against them, as this he now saith.Very noticeable. A similar passage occurs even so late as in Sir Thomas Brown, just at the dawn of the Newtonian system, and after Kepler. What a lesson of diffidence!8
For we do not deny the distinction of venial and mortal sins; but do think, that some sins are rightly said to be mortal and some venial; not for that some are worthy of eternal punishment and therefore named mortal, others of temporal only, and therefore judged venial as the Papists imagine: but for that some exclude grace out of that man in which they are found and so leave him in a state wherein he hath nothing in himself that can or will procure him pardon: and other, which though in themselves considered, and never remitted, they be worthy of eternal punishment, yet do not so far prevail as to banish grace, the fountain of remission of all misdoings.Would not the necessary consequence of this be, that there are no actions that can be pronounced mortal sins by mortals; and that what we might fancy venial might in individual cases be mortal and vice versa.
First, because every offence against God may justly be punished by him in the strictness of his righteous judgments with eternal death, yea, with annihilation; which appeareth to be most true, for that there is no punishment so evil, and so much to be avoided, as the least sin that may be imagined. So that a man should rather choose eternal death, yea, utter annihilation, than commit the least offence in the world.I admit this to be Scriptural; but what is wanted is, clearly to state the difference between eternal death and annihilation. For who would not prefer the latter, if the former mean everlasting misery?
But he will say, Cyprian calleth the Roman Church the principal Church whence sacerdotal unity hath her spring; hereunto we answer, that the Roman Church, not in power of overruling all, but in order is the first and principal; and that therefore while she continueth to hold the truth, and encroacheth not upon the right of other Churches, she is to have the priority; but that in either of these cases she may be forsaken without breach of that unity, which is essentially required in the parts of the Church.This is too large a concession. The real ground of the priority of the Roman see was that Rome, for the first three or perhaps four centuries, was the metropolis of the Christian world. Afterwards for the very same reason the Patriarch of New Rome or Constantinople claimed it; and never ceased to assert at least a co-equality. Had the Apostolic foundation been the cause, Jerusalem and Antioch must have had priority; not to add that the Roman Church was not founded by either Paul or Peter as is evident from the epistle to the Romans.
But first, it is impious to think of destroying Christ in any sort. For though it be true, that in sacrificing of Christ on the altar of the cross, the destroying and killing of him was implied, and this his death was the life of the world, yet all that concurred to the killing of him, as the Jews, the Roman soldiers, Pilate, and Judas sinned damnably, and so had done, though they had shed his blood with an intention and desire, that by it the world might be redeemed.Is not this going too far? Would it not imply almost that Christ himself could not righteously sacrifice himself, especially when we consider that the Romanists would have a right to say, that Christ himself had commanded it? But Bellarmine's conceit9 is so absurd that it scarce deserves the compliment of a serious confutation. For if sacramental being be opposed to natural or material, as noumenon to phænomenon, place is no attribute or possible accident of it in se; consequently, no alteration of place relatively to us can affect, much less destroy, it; and even were it otherwise, yet translocation is not destruction; for the body of Christ, according to themselves, doth indeed nourish our souls, even as a fish eaten sustains another fish, but yet with this essential difference, that it ceases not to be and remain itself, and instead of being converted converts; so that truly the only things sacrificed in the strict sense are all the evil qualities or deficiencies which divide our souls from Christ.
That which we do is done in remembrance of that which was then done; for he saith, Do this in remembrance of me.This is a metastasis of Scripture. Do this in remembrance of me, that is, that which Christ was then doing. But Christ was not then suffering, or dying on the cross.
That the Saints do pray for us in genere, desiring God to be merciful to us, and to do unto us whatsoever in any kind he knoweth needful for our good, there is no question made by us.To have placed this question in its true light, so as to have allowed the full force to the Scriptures asserting the communion of Saints and the efficacy of their intercession without undue concessions to the hierolatria of the Romish church, would have implied an acquaintance with the science of transcendental analysis, and an insight into the philosophy of ideas not to be expected in Field, and which was then only dawning in the mind of Lord Bacon. The proper reply to Brerely would be this: the communion and intercession of Saints is an idea, and must be kept such. But the Romish church has changed it away into the detail of particular and individual conceptions, and imaginations, into names and fancies.
The Papists and we agree that original sin is the privation of original righteousness; but they suppose there was in nature without that addition of grace, a power to do good, &c.Nothing seems wanting to this argument but a previous definition and explanation of the term, 'nature.' Field appears to have seen the truth, namely, that nature itself is a peccant (I had almost said an unnatural) state, or rather no State at all,
.And surely the words of Augustine do not import that she had no sin, but that she overcame it, which argueth a conflict; neither doth he say he will acknowledge she was without sin, but that he will not move any question touching her, in this dispute of sins and sinners.Why not say at once, that this anti-Scriptural superstition had already begun? I scarcely know whether to be pleased or grieved with that edging on toward the Roman creed, that exceeding, almost Scriptural, tenderness for the divines of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, which distinguishes the Church of England dignitaries, from Elizabeth inclusively to our Revolution in 1688, from other Protestants.
Of these five kinds of liberty, the two first agree only to God, so that in the highest degreeI add, except as in God, and God in us. Now the latter alone is will; for it alone is ens super ens. And here lies the mystery, which I dare not openly and promiscuously reveal., that is, freedom of will is proper to God only; and in this sense Calvin and Luther rightly deny that the will of any creature is or ever was free.
Yet doth not God's working upon the will take from it the power of dissenting, and doing the contrary; but so inclineth it, that having liberty to do otherwise, yet she will actually determine so.This will not do. Were it true, then my understanding would be free in a mathematical proportion; or the whole position amounts only to this, that the will, though compelled, is still the will. Be it so; yet not a free will. In short, Luther and Calvin are right so far. A creaturely will cannot be free; but the will in a rational creature may cease to be creaturely, and the creature,
finally cease in
consequence; and this neither Luther nor Calvin seem to have seen. In
short, where omnipotence is on one side, what but utter impotence can
remain for the other? To make freedom possible, the antithesis
must be removed. The removal of this antithesis of the creature
to God is the object of the Redemption, and forms the glorious liberty
of the Gospel. More than this I am not permitted to expose. Neither can Vega avoid the evidence of the testimonies of the Fathers, and the decree of the Council of Trent, so that he must be forced to confess that no man can so collectively fulfil the law as not to sin, and consequently, that no man can perform that the law requireth.The paralogism of Vega as to this perplexing question seems to lurk in the position that God gives a law which it is impossible we should obey collectively. But the truth is, that the law which God gave, and which from the essential holiness of his nature it is impossible he should not have given, man deprived himself of the ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? God forbid! But for the law I had not sinned. But had I not been sinful the law would not have occasioned me to sin, but would have clothed me with righteousness, by the transmission of its splendour. Let God be just, and every man a liar.
The Church of God is named the 'Pillar of Truth;' not as if truth did depend on the Church, &c.Field might have strengthened his argument, by mention of the custom of not only affixing records and testimonials to the pillars, but books, &c.
Others therefore, to avoid this absurdity, run into that other before mentioned, that we believe the things that are divine by the mere and absolute command of our will, not finding any sufficient motives and reasons of persuasion.Field, nor Count Mirandula have penetrated to the heart of this most fundamental question. In all proper faith the will is the prime agent, but not therefore the choice. You may call it reason if you will, but then carefully distinguish the speculative from the practical reason, and the reason itself from the understanding.
Illius virtute (saith he) illuminati, jam non aut nostro, aut aliorum judicio credimus a Deo esse Scripturam, sed supra humanum judicium certo certius constituimus, non secus ac si ipsius Dei numen illic intueremur, hominum ministerio ab ipsissimo Dei ore fluxisse.Greatly doth this fine passage need explanation, that knowing what it doth mean, the reader may understand what it doth not mean, nor of necessity imply. Without this insight, our faith may be terribly shaken by difficulties and objections. For example; If all the Scripture, then each component part; thence every faithful Christian infallible, and so on.
In the second the light of divine reason causeth approbation of that they believe: in the third sort, the purity of divine understanding apprehendeth most certainly the things believed, and causeth a foretasting of those things that hereafter more fully shall be enjoyed.Here too Field distinguishes the understanding from the reason, as experience following perception of sense. But as perception through the mere presence of the object perceived, whether to the outward or inner sense, is not insight which belongs to the 'light of reason,' therefore Field marks it by 'purity' that is unmixed with fleshly sensations or the idola of the bodily eye. Though Field is by no means consistent in his epitheta of the understanding, he seldom confounds the word itself. In theological Latin, the understanding, as influenced and combined with the affections and desires, is most frequently expressed by cor, the heart. Doubtless the most convenient form of appropriating the terms would be to consider the understanding as man's intelligential faculty, whatever be its object, the sensible or the intelligible world; while reason is the tri-unity, as it were, of the spiritual eye, light, and object.
Of the Papists preferring the Church's authority before the Scripture.Field, from the nature and special purpose of his controversy, is reluctant to admit any error in the Fathers, — too much so indeed; and this is an instance. We all know what we mean by the Scriptures, but how know we what they mean by the Church, which is neither thing nor person? But this is a very difficult subject.
First, so as if the Church might define contrary to the Scriptures, as she may contrary to the writings of particular men, how great soever.Verbally, the more sober divines of the Church of Rome do not assert this; but practically and by consequence they do. For if the Church assign a sense contradictory to the true sense of the Scripture, none dare gainsay it.10
This we deny, and will in due place improve their error herein.That is, prove against, detect, or confute.
If the comparison be made between the Church consisting of all the believers that are and have been since Christ appeared in the flesh, so including the Apostles, and their blessed assistants the Evangelists, we deny not but that the Church is of greater authority, antiquity, and excellency than the Scriptures of the New Testament, as the witness is better than his testimony, and the law-giver greater than the laws made by him, as Stapleton allegeth.The Scriptures may be and are an intelligible and real one, but the Church on earth can in no sense be such in and through itself, that is, its component parts, but only by their common adherence to the body of truth made present in the Scripture. Surely you would not distinguish the Scripture from its contents?
For the better understanding whereof we must observe, as Occam fitly noteth, that an article of faith is sometimes strictly taken only for one of those divine verities, which are contained in the Creed of the Apostles: sometimes generally for any catholic verity.I am persuaded, that this division will not bear to be expanded into all its legitimate consequences sine periculo vel fidei vel charitatis. I should substitute the following:
And therefore before and without such determination, men seeing clearly the deduction of things of this nature from the former, and refusing to believe them, are condemned of heretical pertinacy.Rather, I should think, of a nondescript lunacy than of heretical pravity. A child may explicitly know that 5 + 5 = 10, yet not see that therefore 10 - 5 = 5; but when he has seen it how he can refrain from believing the latter as much as the former, I have no conception.
And the third of jurisdiction; and so they that have supreme power, that is, the Bishops assembled in a general Council, may interpret the Scriptures, and by their authority suppress all them that shall gainsay such interpretations, and subject every man that shall disobey such determinations as they consent upon, to excommunication and censures of like nature.This would be satisfactory, if only Field had cleared the point of the communion in the Lord's Supper; whether taken spiritually, though in consequence of excommunication not ritually, it yet sufficeth to salvation. If so, excommunication is merely declarative, and the evil follows not the declaration but that which is truly declared, as when Richard says that Francis deserves the gallows, as a robber. The gallows depends on the fact of the robbery, not on Richard's saying.
In the 1 Cor. 15. the Greek, that now is, hath in all copies; the first man was of the earth, earthly; the second man is the Lord from heaven. The latter part of this sentence Tertullian supposeth to have been corrupted, and altered by the Marcionites. Instead of that the Latin text hath; the second man was from heaven, heavenly, as Ambrose, Hierome, and many of the Fathers read also.There ought to be, and with any man of taste there can be, no doubt that our version is the true one. That of Ambrose and Jerome is worthy of mere rhetoricians; a flat formal play of antithesis instead of the weight and solemnity of the other.11 According to the former the scales are even, in the latter the scale of Christ drops down at once, and the other flies to the beam like a feather weighed against a mass of gold.
And again he saith, that every soul, immediately upon the departure hence, is in this appointed invisible place, having there either pain, or ease and refreshing; that there the rich man is in pain, and the poor in a comfortable estate. For, saith he, why should we not think, that the souls are tormented, or refreshed in this invisible place, appointed for them in expectation of the future judgment?This may be adduced as an instance, specially, of the evil consequences of introducing the idolon of time as an ens reale into spiritual doctrines, thus understanding literally what St. Paul had expressed by figure and adaptation. Hence the doctrine of a middle state, and hence Purgatory with all its abominations; and an instance, generally, of the incalculable possible importance of speculative errors on the happiness and virtue of man-kind.
— — whence the soulP. L. v. 426. — Ed.
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive.
Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt.14th Oct. 1554. — Ed.
'But to circle the earth, as the heavenly bodies do,' &c. 'So we may see that the opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth, which astronomy itself cannot correct, because it is not repugnant to any of the phænomena, yet natural history may correct.'Advancement of Learning, B. II. — Ed.
Fides catholica, says Bellarmine, docet omnem virtutem esse bonam, omne vitium esse malum. Si autem erraret Papa præcipiendo vitia vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere vitia esse bona et virtutes malas, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare.De Pont. Roman. IV. 5. — Ed.
The Vulgate is:
primus homo de terra, terrenus; secundus homo de cœlis, cœlestis.Ed.
| Prothesis Christ the Word |
||
| Thesis The Scriptures |
Mesothesis The Holy Spirit |
Antithesis The Church |
| Synthesis The Preacher |
What could God pay for me? What could God suffer? God himself could not; and therefore God hath taken a body that could.God forgive me, — or those who first set abroad this strange
this debtor and creditor scheme of expounding
the mystery of Redemption, or both! But I never can read the words, 'God
himself could not; and therefore took a body that could' — without being
reminded of the monkey that took the cat's paw to take the chestnuts out
of the fire, and claimed the merit of puss's sufferings. I am sure,
however, that the ludicrous images, under which this gloss of the
Calvinists embodies itself to my fancy, never disturb my recollections
of the adorable mystery itself. It is clear that a body, remaining a
body, can only suffer as a body: for no faith can enable us to believe
that the same thing can be at once A. and not A. Now that the body of
our Lord was not transelemented or transnatured by the pleroma
indwelling, we are positively assured by Scripture. Therefore it would
follow from this most unscriptural doctrine, that the divine justice had
satisfaction made to it by the suffering of a body which had been
brought into existence for this special purpose, in lieu of the debt of
eternal misery due from, and leviable on, the bodies and souls of all
mankind! It is to this gross perversion of the sublime idea of the
Redemption by the cross, that we must attribute the rejection of the
doctrine of redemption by the Unitarian, and of the Gospel in
toto by the more consequent Deist.And yet, even this dwelling fullness, even in this person Christ Jesus, by no title of merit in himself, but only quia complacuit, because it pleased the Father it should be so.This, in the intention of the preacher, may have been sound, but was it safe, divinity? In order to the latter, methinks, a less equivocal word than 'person' ought to have been adopted; as 'the body and soul of the man Jesus, considered abstractedly from the divine Logos, who in it took up humanity into deity, and was Christ Jesus.' Dare we say that there was no self-subsistent, though we admit no self-originated, merit in the Christ? It seems plain to me, that in this and sundry other passages of St. Paul, the Father means the total triune Godhead.
First, we are to consider this fullness to have been in Christ, and then, from this fullness arose his merits; we can consider no merit in Christ himself before, whereby he should merit this fullness; for this fullness was in him before he merited any thing; and but for this fullness he had not so merited. Ille homo, ut in unitatem filii Dei assumeretur, unde meruit? How did that man (says St. Augustine, speaking of Christ, as of the son of man), how did that man merit to be united in one person with the eternal Son of God? Quid egit ante? Quid credidit? What had he done? Nay, what had he believed? Had he either faith or works before that union of both natures?Dr. Donne and St. Augustine said this without offence; but I much question whether the same would be endured now. That it is, however, in the spirit of Paul and of the Gospel, I doubt not to affirm, and that this great truth is obscured by what in my judgment is the post-Apostolic Christopœdia, I am inclined to think.
What canst thou imagine he could foresee in thee? a propensness, a disposition to goodness, when his grace should come? Either there is no such propensness, no such disposition in thee, or, if there be, even that propensness and disposition to the good use of grace, is grace; it is an effect of former grace, and his grace wrought before he saw any such propensness, any such disposition; grace was first, and his grace is his, it is none of thine.One of many instances in dogmatic theology, in which the half of a divine truth has passed into a fearful error by being mistaken for the whole truth.
God's justice required blood, but that blood is not spilt, but poured from that head to our hearts, into the veins and wounds of our own souls: there was blood shed, but no blood lost.It is affecting to observe how this great man's mind sways and oscillates between his reason, which demands in the word 'blood' a symbolic meaning, a spiritual interpretation, and the habitual awe for the letter; so that he himself seems uncertain whether he means the physical lymph, serum, and globules that trickled from the wounds of the nails and thorns down the sides and face of Jesus, or the blood of the Son of Man, which he who drinketh not cannot live. Yea, it is most affecting to see the struggles of so great a mind to preserve its inborn fealty to the reason under the servitude to an accepted article of belief, which was, alas! confounded with the high obligations of faith; — faith the co-adunation of the finite individual will with the universal reason, by the submission of the former to the latter. To reconcile redemption by the material blood of Jesus with the mind of the spirit, he seeks to spiritualize the material blood itself in all men! And a deep truth lies hidden even in this. Indeed the whole is a profound subject, the true solution of which may best, God's grace assisting, be sought for in the collation of Paul with John, and specially in St. Paul's assertion that we are baptized into the death of Christ, that we may be partakers of his resurrection and life3. It was not on the visible cross, it was not directing attention to the blood-drops on his temples and sides, that our blessed Redeemer said, This is my body, and this is my blood!
But if we consider those who are in heaven, and have been so from the first minute of their creation, angels, why have they, or how have they any reconciliation? &c.The history and successive meanings of the term 'angels' in the Old and New Testaments, and the idea that shall reconcile all as so many several forms, and as it were perspectives, of one and the same truth — this is still a desideratum in Christian theology.
For, at the general resurrection, (which is rooted in the resurrection of Christ, and so hath relation to him) the creature shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God; for which the whole creation groans, and travails in pain yet. (Rom. viii. 21.) This deliverance then from this bondage the whole creature hath by Christ, and that is their reconciliation. And then are we reconciled by the blood of his cross, when having crucified ourselves by a true repentance, we receive the real reconciliation in his blood in the sacrament. But the most proper and most literal sense of these words, is, that all things in heaven and earth be reconciled to God (that is, to his glory, to a fitter disposition to glorify him) by being reconciled to another in Christ; that in him, as head of the church, they in heaven, and we upon earth, be united together as one body in the communion of saints.A very meagre and inadequate interpretation of this sublime text. The philosophy of life, which will be the corona et finis coronans of the sciences of comparative anatomy and zoology, will hereafter supply a fuller and nobler comment.
The blood of the sacrifices was brought by the high priest in sanctum sanctorum, into the place of greatest holiness; but it was brought but once, in festo expiationis, in the feast of expiation; but in the other parts of the temple it was sprinkled every day. The blood of the cross of Christ Jesus hath had this effect in sancto sanctorum, &c. ... (to) Christ Jesus.A truly excellent and beautiful paragraph.
If you will mingle a true religion, and a false religion, there is no reconciling of God and Belial in this text. For the adhering of persons born within the Church of Rome to the Church of Rome, our law says nothing to them if they come; but for reconciling to the Church of Rome, for persons born within the allegiance of the king, or for persuading of men to be so reconciled, our law hath called by an infamous and capital name of treason, and yet every tavern and ordinary is full of such traitors, &c.A strange transition from the Gospel to the English statute-book! But I may observe, that if this statement could be truly made under James I, there was abundantly ampler ground for it in the following reign. And yet with what bitter spleen does Heylyn, Laud's creature, arraign the Parliamentarians for making the same complaint!
. But
were it asked of me: Do you then believe our Lord to have been the Son
of Mary by Joseph? I reply: It is a point of religion with me to have no
belief one way or the other. I am in this way like St. Paul, more than
content not to know Christ himself 
. It is enough for
me to know that the Son of God became flesh, 
4 and more than this, it appears to me, was
unknown to the Apostles, or, if known, not taught by them as
appertaining to a saving faith in Christ.It is a singular testimony, how acceptable to God that state of virginity is. He does not dishonor physic that magnifies health; nor does he dishonor marriage, that praises virginity; let them embrace that state that can, &c.One of the sad relics of Patristic super-moralization, aggravated by Papal ambition, which clung to too many divines, especially to those of the second or third generation after Luther. Luther himself was too spiritual, of too heroic faith, to be thus blinded by the declamations of the Fathers, whom, with the exception of Augustine, he held in very low esteem.
And Helvidius said, she had children after.Annon Scriptura ipsa? And a 'heresy,' too! I think I might safely put the question to any serious, spiritual-minded, Christian: What one inference tending to edification, in the discipline of will, mind, or affections, he can draw from the speculations of the last two or three pages of this Sermon respecting Mary's pregnancy and parturition? Can — I write it emphatically — can such points appertain to our faith as Christians, which every parent would decline speaking of before a family, and which, if the questions were propounded by another in the presence of my daughter, aye, or even of my, no less, in mind and imagination, innocent wife, I should resent as an indecency?
God sent forth his Son made of a woman.I never can admit that
and 
in St.
Paul and St. John are adequately, or even rightly, rendered by the
English 'made.'What miserable revolutions and changes, what downfalls, what break-necks and precipitations may we justly think ourselves ordained to, if we consider, that in our coming into this world out of our mothers' womb, we do not make account that a child comes right, except it come with the head forward, and thereby prefigure that headlong falling into calamities which it must suffer after?The taste for these forced and fantastic analogies, Donne, with the greater number of the learned prelatic divines from James I. to the Restoration, acquired from that too great partiality for the Fathers, from Irenæus to Bernard, by which they sought to distinguish themselves from the Puritans.
That now they (the Jews,) express a kind of conditional acknowledgment of it, by this barbarous and inhuman custom of theirs, that they always keep in readiness the blood of some Christian, with which they anoint the body of any that dies amongst them, with these words; "If Jesus Christ were the Messias, then may the blood of this Christian avail thee to salvation!"Is it possible that Donne could have given credit to this absurd legend! It was, I am aware, not an age of critical acumen; grit, bran, and flour, were swallowed in the unsifted mass of their erudition. Still that a man like Donne should have imposed on himself such a set of idle tales, as he has collected in the next paragraph for facts of history, is scarcely credible; that he should have attempted to impose them on others, is most melancholy.
He takes the name of the son of a woman, and wanes the miraculous name of the son of a virgin. — Christ waned the glorious name of Son of God, and the miraculous name of Son of a virgin too; which is not omitted to draw into doubt the perpetual virginity of the blessed virgin, the mother of Christ, &c.Very ingenious; but likewise very presumptuous, this arbitrary attribution of St. Paul's silence, and presumable ignorance of the virginity of Mary, to Christ's own determination to have the fact passed over.
If there were reason for it, it were no miracle.The announcement of the first comet, that had ever been observed, might excite doubt in the mind of an astronomer, to whom, from the place where he lived, it had not been visible. But his reason could have been no objection to it. Had God pleased, all women might have conceived,
as many of the polypi and planariæ do.
Not on any such ground do I suspend myself on this as an article of
faith; but because I doubt the evidence.Though we may think thus in the law of reason, yet, &c.It is, and has been, a misfortune, a grievous and manifold loss and hindrance for the interests of moral and spiritual truth, that even our best and most vigorous theologians and philosophers of the age from Edward VI to James II so generally confound the terms, and so too often confound the subjects themselves, reason and understanding; yet the diversity, the difference in kind, was known to, and clearly admitted by, many of them, — by Hooker for instance, and it is implied in the whole of Bacon's Novum Organum. Instead of the 'law of reason,' Donne meant, and ought to have said, 'judging according to the ordinary presumptions of the understanding,' that is, the faculty which, generalizing particular experiences, judges of the future by analogy to the past.
And therefore to be under the Law, signifies here thus much; to be a debtor to the law of nature, to have a testimony in our hearts and consciences, that there lies a law upon us, which we have no power in ourselves to perform, &c.This exposition of the term law in the epistles of St. Paul is most just and important. The whole should be adopted among the notes to the epistle to the Romans, in every Bible printed with notes.
And this was his first work, to redeem, to vindicate them from the usurper, to deliver them from the intruder, to emancipate them from the tyrant, to cancel the covenant between hell and them, and restore them so far to their liberty, as that they might come to their first master, if they would; this was redeeming.There is an absurdity in the notion of a finite divided from, and superaddible to, the infinite, — of a particular quantum of power separated from, not included in, omnipotence, or all-power. But, alas! we too generally use the terms that are meant to express the absolute, as mere comparatives taken superlatively. In one thing only are we permitted and bound to assert a diversity, namely, in God and Hades, the good and the evil will. This awful mystery, this truth, at once certain and incomprehensible, is at the bottom of all religion; and to exhibit this truth free from the dark phantom of the Manicheans, or the two co-eternal and co-ordinate principles of good and evil, is the glory of the Christian religion.
We shall consider that that preparation, and disposition, and acquiescence, which Simeon had in his epiphany, in his visible seeing of Christ then, is offered to us in this epiphany, in this manifestation and application of Christ in the sacrament; and that therefore every penitent, and devout, and reverent, and worthy receiver hath had in that holy action his now; there are all things accomplished to him; and his for, for his eyes have seen his salvation; and so may be content, nay glad, to depart in peace.O! would that Donne, or rather that Luther before him, had carried out this just conception to its legitimate consequences; — that as the sacrament of the Eucharist is the epiphany for as many as receive it in faith, so the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ himself in the flesh, were the epiphanies, the sacramental acts and phænomena of the Deus patiens, the visible words of the invisible Word that was in the beginning, symbols in time and historic fact of the redemptive functions, passions, and procedures of the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world; — the incarnation, cross, and passion, — in short, the whole life of Christ in the flesh, dwelling a man among men, being essential and substantive parts of the process, the total of which they represented; and on this account proper symbols of the acts and passions of the Christ dwelling in man, as the Spirit of truth, and for as many as in faith have received him, in Seth and Abraham no less effectually than in John and Paul! For this is the true definition of a symbol, as distinguished from the thing, on the one hand, and from a mere metaphor, or conventional exponent of a thing, on the other. Had Luther mastered this great idea, this master-truth, he would never have entangled himself in that most mischievous Sacramentary controversy, or had to seek a murky hiding-hole in the figment of Consubstantiation.
In the first part, then ... More he asks not, less he takes not for any man, upon any pretence of any unconditional decree.A beautiful paragraph, well worth extracting, aye, and re-preaching.
When thou comest to this seal of thy peace, the sacrament, pray that God will give thee that light that may direct and establish thee in necessary and fundamental things; that is, the light of faith to see that the Body and Blood of Christ is applied to thee in that action; but for the manner, how the Body and Blood of Christ is there, wait his leisure, if he have not yet manifested that to thee: grieve not at that, wonder not at that, press not for that; for he hath not manifested that, not the way, not the manner of his presence in the Sacrament to the Church.O! I have ever felt, and for many years thought that this rem credimus, modum nescimus, is but a poor evasion. It seems to me an attempt so to admit an irrational proposition as to have the credit of denying it, or to separate an irrational proposition from its irrationality. I admit 2 + 2 = 5; how I do not pretend to know, but in some way not in contradiction to the multiplication table. To spiritual operations the very term 'mode' is perhaps inapplicable, for these are immediate. To the linking of this with that, of A. with Z. by intermedia, the term 'mode,' — the question 'how?' is properly applied. The assimilation of the spirit of a man to the Son of God, to God as the Divine Humanity, — this spiritual transubstantiation, like every other process of operative grace, is necessarily modeless. The whole question is concerning the transmutation of the sensible elements. Deny this, and to what does the modum nescimus refer? We cannot ask how that is done, which we declare not done at all. Admit this transmutation, and you necessarily admit by implication the Romish dogma, of the separation of a sensible thing from the sensible accidents which constitute all we ever meant by the thing. To rationalize this figment of his church, Bossuet has recourse to Spinosism, and dares make God the substance and sole ens reale of all body, and by this very hypothesis baffles his own end, and does away all miracle in the particular instance.
When I pray in my chamber, I build a temple there that hour; and that minute, when I cast out a prayer in the street, I build a temple there; and when my soul prays without any voice, my very body is then a temple.Good; but it would be better to regard solitary, family, and templar devotion as distinctions in sort, rather than differences in degree. All three are necessary.
And that more fearful occasion of coming, when they came only to elude the law, and proceeding in their treacherous and traitorous religion in their heart, and yet communicating with us, draw God himself into their conspiracies; and to mock us, make a mock of God, and his religion too.What, then, was their guilt, who by terror and legal penalties tempted their fellow Christians to this treacherous mockery? Donne should have asked himself that question.
It hath been doubted, and disputed, and denied too, that this text, O my Lord, send I pray thee by the hand of him whom thou wilt send, hath any relation to the sending of the Messiah, to the coming of Christ, to Christmas day; yet we forbear not to wait upon the ancient Fathers, and as they said, to say, that Moses at last determines all in this, O my Lord, &c. It is a work, next to the great work of the redemption of the whole world, to redeem Israel out of Egypt; and therefore do both works at once, put both into one hand, and mitte quem missurus es, Send him whom I know thou wilt send; him, whom, pursuing thine own decree, thou shouldest send; send Christ, send him now, to redeem Israel from Egypt.This is one of the happier accommodations of the gnosis, that is, the science of detecting the mysteries of faith in the simplest texts of the Old Testament history, to the contempt or neglect of the literal and contextual sense. It was, I conceive, in part at least, this gnosis, and not knowledge, as our translation has it, that St. Paul warns against, and most wisely, as puffing up, inflating the heart with self-conceit, and the head with idle fancies.
But as a thoughtful man, a pensive, a considerative man, that stands still for a while with his eyes fixed upon the ground before his feet, when he casts up his head, hath presently, instantly the sun or the heavens for his object; he sees not a tree, nor a house, nor a steeple by the way, but as soon as his eye is departed from the earth where it was long fixed, the next thing he sees is the sun or the heavens; — so when Moses had fixed himself long upon the consideration of his own insufficiency for this service, when he took his eye from that low piece of ground, himself, considered as he was then, he fell upon no tree, no house, no steeple, no such consideration as this — God may endow me, improve me, exalt me, enable me, qualify me with faculties fit for this service, but his first object was that which presented an infallibility with it, Christ Jesus himself, the Messias himself, &c.Beautifully imagined, and happily applied.
That germen Jehovæ, as the prophet Esay calls Christ, that offspring of Jehova, that bud, that blossom, that fruit of God himself, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Redeemer, Christ Jesus, grows upon every tree in this paradise, the Scripture; for Christ was the occasion before, and is the consummation after, of all Scripture.If this were meant to the exclusion or neglect of the primary sense, — if we are required to believe that the sacred writers themselves had such thoughts present to their minds, — it would, doubtless, throw the doors wide open to every variety of folly and fanaticism. But it may admit of a safe, sound, and profitable use, if we consider the Bible as one work, intended by the Holy Spirit for the edification of the Church in all ages, and having, as such, all its parts synoptically interpreted, the eldest by the latest, the last by the first, and the middle by both. Moses, or David, or Jeremiah (we might in this view affirm) meant so and so, according to the context, and the light under which, and the immediate or proximate purposes for which, he wrote: but we, who command the whole scheme of the great dispensation, may see a higher and deeper sense, of which the literal meaning was a symbol or type; and this we may justifiably call the sense of the spirit.
So in our liturgy we stand up at the profession of the creed thereby to declare to God and his Church our readiness to stand to, and our readiness to proceed in, that profession.Another Church might sit down, thereby denoting a resolve to abide in this profession. These things are indifferent; but charity, love of peace, and on indifferent points to prefer another's liking to our own, and to observe an order once established for order's sake, — these are not indifferent.
Howsoever all intend that this is a name that denotes essence, being: Being is the name of God, and of God only.Rather, I should say, 'the eternal antecedent of being;' I that shall be in that I will to be; the absolute will; the ground of being; the self-affirming actus purissimus.
Therefore we have a clearer light than this; firmiorem propheticum sermonem, says St. Peter; we have a more sure word of the prophets; that is, as St. Augustine reads that place, clariorem, a more manifest, a more evident, declaration in the prophets, than in nature, of the will of God towards man, &c.The sense of this text, as explained by the context, seems to me this; — that, in consequence of the fulfilment of so large a proportion of the oracles, the Christian Church has not only the additional light given by the teaching and miracles of Christ, but even the light vouchsafed to the old Church (the prophetic) stronger and clearer.
He spake personally, and he spake aloud, in the declaration of miracles; but quis credidit auditui Filii? Who believed even his report? Did they not call his preaching sedition, and call his miracles conjuring? Therefore, we have a clearer, that is, a nearer light than the written Gospel, that is, the Church.True; yet he who should now venture to assert this truth, or even contend for a co-ordinateness of the Church and the Written Word, must bear to be thought a semi-Papist, an ultra high-Churchman. Still the truth is the truth.
Some of the later authors in the Roman Church ... have noted (in several of the Fathers) some inclinations towards that opinion, that the devil retaining still his faculty of free-will, is therefore capable of repentance, and so of benefit by this coming of Christ.If this be assumed, — namely, the free-will of the devil, — as a consequence would indeed follow his capability of repenting, and the possibility that he may repent. But then he is no longer what we mean by the devil; he is no longer the evil spirit, but simply a wicked soul.
As though God had said Qui sum, my name is I am; yet in truth it is Qui ero, my name is I shall be.Nay, I will or shall be in that I will to be. I am that only one who is self-originant, causa sui, whose will must be contemplated as antecedent in idea to or deeper than his own co-eternal being. But 'antecedent,' 'deeper,' &c. are mere vocabula impropria, words of accommodation, that may suggest the idea to a mind purified from the intrusive phantoms of space and time, but falsify and extinguish the truth, if taken as adequate exponents.
We affirm that it is not only as impious and irreligious a thing, but as senseless and as absurd a thing, to deny that the Son of God hath redeemed the world, as to deny that God hath created the world.A bold but a true saying. The man who, cannot see the redemptive agency in the creation has but a dim apprehension of the creative power.
This is the difference between God's mercy and his judgments, that sometimes his judgments may he plural, complicated, enwrapped in one another; but his mercies are always so, and cannot be otherwise.A just sentiment beautifully expressed.
Whereas the Christian religion is, as Gregory Nazianzen says, simplex et nuda, nisi prave in artem difficillimam converteretur: it is a plain, an easy, a perspicuous truth.A religion of ideas, spiritual truths, or truth-powers, — not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding, — is therefore simplex et nuda, that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the simplex et nuda of Gregory be perverted to the Socinian, 'plain and easy for the meanest understandings!' The truth in Christ, like the peace of Christ, passeth all understanding. If ever there was a mischievous misuse of words, the confusion of the terms, 'reason' and 'understanding,' 'ideas' and 'notions,' or 'conceptions,' is most mischievous; a Surinam toad with a swarm of toadlings sprouting out of its back and sides.
Either of the names of this day were text enough for a sermon, Purification or Candlemas. Join we them together, and raise we only this one note from both, that all true purification is in the light, &c.The illustration of the name of the day contained in the first two or three paragraphs of this sermon would be censured as quaint by our modern critics. Would to heaven we had but even a few preachers capable of such quaintnesses!
Every good work hath faith for the root; but every faith hath not good works for the fruit thereof.Faith, that is, fidelity — the fealty of the finite will and understanding to the reason, the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, as one with, and representative of, the absolute will, and to the ideas or truths of the pure reason, the supersensuous truths, which in relation to the finite will, and as meant to determine the will, are moral laws, the voice and dictates of the conscience; — this faith is properly a state and disposition of the will, or rather of the whole man, the I, or finite will, self-affirmed. It is therefore the ground, the root, of which the actions, the works, the believings, as acts of the will in the understanding, are the trunk and the branches. But these must be in the light. The disposition to see must have organs, objects, direction, and an outward light. The three latter of these our Lord gives to his disciples in this blessed sermon on the Mount, preparatorily, and, as Donne rightly goes on to observe, presupposing faith as the ground and root. Indeed the whole of this and the next page affords a noble specimen, how a minister of the Church of England should preach the doctrine of good works, purified from the poison of the practical Romish doctrine of works, as the mandioc is evenomated by fire, and rendered safe, nutritious, a bread of life. To Donne's exposition the heroic Solifidian, Martin Luther himself, would have subscribed, hand and heart.
And therefore our latter men of the Reformation are not to be blamed, who for the most, pursuing St. Cyril's interpretation, interpret this universal light that lighteneth every man to be the light of nature.The error here, and it is a grievous error, consists in the word 'nature.' There is, there can be, no light of nature: there may be a light in or upon nature; but this is the light that shineth down into the darkness, that is, the nature, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. All ideas, or spiritual truths, are supernatural.
Velle et nolle nostrum est, to assent, or to dis-assent, is our own.Is not this, even with the saving afterwards, too nakedly expressed?
And certainly our works are more ours than our faith is; and man concurs otherwise in the acting and perpetration of a good work, than he doth in the reception and admission of faith.Why? Because Donne confounds the act of faith with the assent of the fancy and understanding to certain words and conceptions. Indeed, with all my reverence for Dr. Donne, I must warn against the contents of this page, as scarcely tenable in logic, unsound in metaphysics, and unsafe, slippery divinity; and principally in that he confounds faith — essentially an act, the fundamental work of the Spirit — with belief, which is then only good when it is the effect and accompaniment of faith.
Because things good in their institution may he depraved in their practice — ergone nihil ceremoniarum rudioribus dabitur, ad juvandam eorum imperitiam?Some ceremonies may be for the conservation of order and civility, or to prevent confusion and unseemliness; others are the natural or conventional language of our feelings, as bending the knees, or bowing the head; and to neither of these two sorts do I object. But as to the adjuvandam rudiorum imperitiam, I protest against all such ceremonies, and the pretexts for them, in toto. What? Can any ceremony be more instructive than the words required to explain the ceremony? I make but two exceptions, and those where the truths signified are so vital, so momentous, that the very occasion and necessity of explaining the sign are of the highest spiritual value. Yet, alas! to what gross and calamitous superstitions have not even the visible signs in Baptism and the Eucharist given occasion!
Blessed St. Augustine reports, (if that epistle be St. Augustine's) that when himself was writing to St. Hierome, to know his opinion of the measure and quality of the joy and glory of heaven, suddenly in his chamber there appeared ineffabile lumen, says he, an unspeakable, an unexpressible light, ... and out of that light issued this voice, Hieronymi anima sum, &c.The grave recital of this ridiculous legend is one instance of what I have called the Patristic leaven in Donne, who assuredly had no belief himself in the authenticity of this letter. But yet it served a purpose. As to Master Conradus, just above, who could read at night by the light at his fingers' ends, he must of course have very recently been shaking hands with Lucifer.
Eve's recognition upon the birth of her first son, Cain I have gotten, I possess a man from the Lord.I have gotten the Jehovah-man, is, I believe, the true rendering and sense of the Hebrew words. Eve, full of the promise, supposed her first-born, the first-born on earth, to be the promised deliverer.
| Ib. p. 84. D. E. | |
| Serm. IX. Rom. xiii. 7. p. 86, | |
| Admirable passages. (side-note) |
Ib. p. 90. A.
That soul that is accustomed, &c. |
| Ib. p. 94. A. B. |
And therefore when the prophet says, Quis sapiens, et intelliget hæc? Who is so wise as to find out this way? he places this cleanness which we inquire after in wisdom. What is wisdom?The primitive Church appropriated the name to the third hypostasis of the Trinity; hence Sancta Sophia became the distinctive name of the Holy Ghost; and the temple at Constantinople, dedicated by Justinian to the Holy Ghost, is called the Church — alas! now the mosque — of Santa Sophia. Now this suggests, or rather implies, a far better and more precise definition of wisdom than Donne's. The distinctive title of the Father, as the Supreme Will, is the Good; that of the only-begotten Word, as the Supreme Reason, (Ens Realissimum,
the
Being) is the True; and the Spirit proceeding from the Good through the
True is the Wisdom. Goodness in the form of truth is wisdom. Wisdom is
the pure will, realizing itself intelligently, or the good manifesting
itself as the truth, and realized in the act. Wisdom, life, love,
beauty, the beauty of holiness, are all synonyma of the Holy Spirit.The Arians' opinion, that God the Father only was invisible, but the Son and the Holy Ghost might be seen.Here we have an instance, one of many, of the inconveniences and contradictions that arise out of the assumed contrary essences of body and soul; both substances, and independent of each other, yet so absolutely diverse as that the one is to be defined by the negation of the other.
Who, then, is this enemy? an enemy that may thus far think himself equal to God, that as no man ever saw God, and lived; so no man ever saw this enemy, and lived; for it is death.This borders rather too closely on the Irish Franciscan's conclusion to his sermon of thanksgiving: "Above all, brethren, let us thankfully laud and extol God's transcendant mercy in putting death at the end of life, and thereby giving us all time for repentance!"
For it is not so great a depopulation to translate a city from merchants to husbandmen, from shops to ploughs, as it is from many husbandmen to one shepherd; and yet that hath been often done.For example, in the Highlands of Scotland in our own day.
The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or how large that was. It tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless too, it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not, look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of the churchyard unto the church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the church into the church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce; — this is the patrician, this is the noble, flour, and this the yeomanly, this the plebeian, bran.8Very beautiful indeed.
But when I lie under the hands of that enemy, that hath reserved himself to the last, to my last bed; then when I shall be able to stir no limb in any other measure than a fever or a palsy shall shake them; when everlasting darkness shall have an inchoation in the present dimness of mine eyes, and the everlasting gnashing in the present chattering of my teeth, and the everlasting worm in the present gnawing of the agonies of my body and anguishes of my mind; when the last enemy shall watch my remediless body, and my disconsolate soul there, — there, where not the physician in his way, perchance not the priest in his, shall be able to give any assistance; and when he hath sported himself with my misery, &c.This is powerful; but is too much in the style of the monkish preachers: Papam redolet. Contrast with this Job's description of death,9 and St. Paul's sleep in the Lord.
Neither doth Calvin carry those emphatical words which are so often cited for a proof of the last resurrection, — that he knows his Redeemer lives, that he knows he shall stand the last man upon earth, that though his body be destroyed, yet in his flesh and with his eyes shall he see God — to any higher sense than so, that how low soever he be brought, to what desperate state soever he be reduced in the eyes of the world, yet he assures himself of a resurrection, a reparation, a restitution to his former bodily health, and worldly fortune which he had before. And such a resurrection we all know Job had.I incline to Calvin's opinion, but am not decided. After my skin, must be rendered 'according to, or as far as my skin is concerned.' Though the flies and maggots in my ulcers have destroyed my skin, yet still, and in my flesh, I shall see God as my Redeemer. Now St. Paul says, that flesh and blood cannot
)
inherit the kingdom of heaven, that is, the spiritual world. Besides how
is the passage, as commonly interpreted, consistent with the numerous
expressions of doubt and even of despondency in Job's speeches?10Let the whole world be in thy consideration as one house; and then consider in that, in the peaceful harmony of creatures, in the peaceful succession, and connexion of causes and effects, the peace of nature. Let this kingdom, where God hath blessed thee with a being, be the gallery, the best room of that house, and consider in the two walls of that gallery, the Church and the state, the peace of a royal and religious wisdom. Let thine own family be a cabinet in this gallery, and find in all the boxes thereof, in the several duties of wife and children, and servants, the peace of virtue, and of the father and mother of all virtues, active discretion, passive obedience; and then lastly, let thine own bosom be the secret box and reserve in this cabinet, and then the gallery of the best home that can be had, peace with the creature, peace in the Church, peace in the state, peace in thy house, peace in thy heart, is a fair model, and a lovely design even of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is visio pacis, where there is no object but peace.
The Masorites (the Masorites are the critics upon the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament) cannot tell us, who divided the chapters of the Old Testament into verses: neither can any other tell, who did it in the New Testament.11How should the Masorites, when the Hebrew Scriptures were not as far as we know divided into verses at all in their time? The Jews seem to have adopted the invention from the Christians, who were led to it in the construction of Concordances.
If they killed Lazarus, had not Christ done enough to let them see that he could raise him again?Malice, above all party-malice, is indeed a blind passion, but one can scarcely conceive the chief priests such dolts as to think that Christ could raise Lazarus again. Their malice blinded them as to the nature of the incident, made them suppose a conspiracy between Jesus and the family of Lazarus, a mock burial, in short; and this may be one, though it is not, I think, the principal, reason for this greatest miracle being omitted in the other Gospels.
Christ might ungirt himself, and give more scope and liberty to his passions than any other man; both because he had no original sin within to drive him, &c.How then is he said to have _condemned sin in the flesh?_ Without guilt, without actual sin, assuredly he was; but
, and
what can we mean by original sin relatively to the flesh, but that man
is born with an animal life and a material organism that render him
temptible to evil, and which tends to dispose the life of the will to
contradict the light of the reason? Did St. Paul by 
mean a deceptive resemblance?12I can see no possible edification that can arise from these ultra-Scriptural speculations respecting our Lord.Ib. p. 157. A.
Though the Godhead never departed from the carcase ... yet because the human soul was departed from it, he was no man.Donne was a poor metaphysician; that is, he never closely questioned himself as to the absolute meaning of his words. What did he mean by the 'soul?' what by the ' body?'13
And I know that there are authors of a middle nature, above the philosophers, and below the Scriptures, the Apocryphal books.A whimsical instance of the disposition in the mind for every pair of opposites to find an intermediate, — a mesothesis for every thesis and antithesis. Thus Scripture may be opposed to philosophy; and then the Apocryphal books will be philosophy relatively to Scripture, and Scripture relatively to philosophy.
And therefore the same author (Epiphanius) says, that because they thought it an uncomely thing for Christ to weep for any temporal thing, some men have expunged and removed that verse out of St. Luke's Gospel, that Jesus, when he saw that city, wept.14This, by the by, rather indiscreetly lets out the liberties, which the early Christians took with their sacred writings. Origen, who, in answer to Celsus's reproach on this ground, confines the practice to the heretics, furnishes proofs of the contrary himself in his own comments.
That world, which finds itself in an authumn in itself, finds itself in a spring in our imaginations.Worthy almost of Shakspeare!
The words are part of a dialogue, of a conference, between Christ and a man who proposed a question to him; to whom Christ makes an answer by way of another question, Why callest thou me good? &c. In the words, and by occasion of them, we consider the text, the context, and the pretext; not as three equal parts of the building; but the context, as the situation and prospect of the house, the pretext, as the access and entrance into the house, and then the text itself, as the house itself, as the body of the building: in a word, in the text the words; in the context the occasion of the words; in the pretext the purpose, the disposition of him who gave the occasion.What a happy example of elegant division of a subject! And so also the compendium of Christianity in the preceding paragraph (D). Our great divines were not ashamed of the learned discipline to which they had submitted their minds under Aristotle and Tully, but brought the purified products as sacrificial gifts to Christ. They baptized the logic and manly rhetoric of ancient Greece.
Men perish with whispering sins, nay, with silent sins, sins that never tell the conscience they are sins, as often as with crying sins.Yea, I almost doubt whether the truth here so boldly asserted is not of more general necessity for ordinary congregations, than the denunciation of the large sins that cannot remain in incognito.
Venit procurrens, he came running. Nicodemus came not so, Nicodemus durst not avow his coming, and therefore he came creeping, and he came softly, and he came seldom, and he came by night.Ah! but we trust in God that he did in fact come. The adhesion, the thankfulness, the love which arise and live after the having come, whether from spontaneous liking, or from a beckoning hope, or from a compelling good, are the truest criteria of the man's Christianity.
When I have just reason to think my superiors would have it thus, this is music to my soul; when I hear them say they would have it thus, this is rhetoric to my soul; when I see their laws enjoin it to be thus, this is logic to my soul; but when I see them actually, really, clearly, constantly do thus, this is a demonstration to my soul, and demonstration is the powerfullest proof. The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action.A just representation, I doubt not, of the general feeling and principle at the time Donne wrote. Men regarded the gradations of society as God's ordinances, and had the elevation of a self-approving conscience in every feeling and exhibition of respect for those of ranks superior to their own. What a contrast with the present times! Is not the last sentence beautiful? "The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action."
He came to Christ, he ran to him; and when he was come, as St. Mark relates it, he fell upon his knees to Christ. He stood not then Pharisaically upon his own legs, his own merits, though he had been a diligent observer of the commandments before, &c.All this paragraph is an independent truth; but I doubt whether in his desire to make every particle exemplary, to draw some Christian moral from it, Donne has not injudiciously attributed, quasi per prolepsin, merits inconsistent with the finale of a wealthy would-be proselyte. At all events, a more natural and, perhaps, not less instructive interpretation might be made of the sundry movements of this religiously earnest and zealous admirer of Christ, and worshipper of Mammon. O, I have myself known such!
He was no ignorant man, and yet he acknowledged that he had somewhat more to learn of Christ than he knew yet. Blessed are they that inanimate all their knowledge, consummate all in Christ Jesus, &c.The whole paragraph is pure gold. Without being aware of this passage in Donne, I expressed the same conviction, or rather declared the same experience, in the appendix15 to the Statesman's Manual. O! if only one day in a week, Christians would consent to have the Bible as the only book, and their minister's labour to make them find all substantial good of all other books in their Bibles!
I remember one of the Panegyrics celebrates and magnifies one of the Roman emperors for this, that he would marry when he was young; that he would so soon confine and limit his pleasures, so soon determine his affections in one person.It is surely some proof of the moral effect which Christianity has produced, that in all Protestant countries, at least, a writer would be ashamed to assign this as a ground of panegyric; as if promiscuous intercourse with those of the other sex had been a natural good, a privilege, which there was a great merit in foregoing! O! what do not women owe to Christianity! As Christians only it is that they do, or ordinarily can, cease to be things for men, instead of co-persons in one spiritual union.
But such is often the corrupt inordinateness of greatness, that it only carries them so much beyond other men, but not so much nearer to God.Like a balloon, away from earth, but not a whit nearer the arch of heaven. There is a praiseworthy relativeness and life in the morality of our best old divines. It is not a cold law in brass or stone; but "this I may and should think of my neighbour, this of a great man," &c.
Christ was pleased to redeem this man from this error, and bring him to know truly what he was, that he was God. Christ therefore doth not rebuke this man, by any denying that he himself was good; for Christ doth assume that addition to himself, I am the good shepherd. Neither doth God forbid that those good parts which are in men should be celebrated with condign praise. We see that God, as soon as he saw that any thing was good, he said so, he uttered it, he declared it, first of the light, and then of other creatures. God would be no author, no example of smothering the due praise of good actions. For surely that man hath no zeal to goodness in himself, that affords no praise to goodness in other men.Very fine. But I think another — not, however, a different — view might be taken respecting our Lord's intention in these words. The young noble, who came to him, had many praiseworthy traits of character; but he failed in the ultimate end and aim. What ought only to have been valued by him as means, was loved, and had a worth given to it, as an end in itself. Our Lord, who knew the hearts of men, instantly in the first words applies himself to this, and takes the occasion of an ordinary phrase of courtesy addressed to himself, to make the young man aware of the difference between a mere relative good and that which is absolutely good; that which may be called good, when regarded as a mean to good, but which must not be mistaken for, or confounded with, that which is good, and itself the end.
His name of Jehova we admire with a reverence.Say, rather, Jehova, his name. It is not so properly a name of God, as God the Name, — God's name and God.
Land, and money, and honour must be called goods, though but of fortune, &c.We should distinguish between the conditions of our possessing goods and the goods themselves. Health, for instance, is ordinarily a condition of that working and rejoicing for and in God, which are goods in the end, and of themselves. Health, competent fortune, and the like are good as the negations of the preventives of good; as clear glass is good in relation to the light, which it does not exclude. Health and ease without the love of God are plate glass in the darkness.
So says St. Augustine, Audeo dicere, though it be boldly said, yet I must say it, utile esse cadere in aliquod manifestum peccatum, &c.No doubt, a sound sense may be forced into these words: but why use words, into which a sound sense must be forced? Besides, the subject is too deep and too subtle for a sermon. In the two following paragraphs, especially, Dr. Donne is too deep, and not deep enough. He treads waters, and dangerous waters. N.B. The Familists.
Now the universality of this mercy hath God enlarged and extended very far, in that he proposes it even to our knowledge; sciant, let all know it. It is not only credant, let all believe it; for the infusing of faith is not in our power; but God hath put it in our power to satisfy their reason, &c.A question is here affirmatively started of highest importance and of deepest interest, that is, faith so distinguished from reason, credat from sciat, that the former is an infused grace 'not in our power;' the latter an inherent quality or faculty, on which we are able to calculate as man with man. I know not what to say to this. Faith seems to me the coadunation of the individual will with the reason, enforcing adherence alike of thought, act, and affection to the Universal Will, whether revealed in the conscience, or by the light of reason, however the same may contravene, or apparently contradict, the will and mind of the flesh, the presumed experience of the senses and of the understanding, as the faculty, or intelligential yet animal instinct, by which we generalize the notices of the senses, and substantiate their spectra or phænomena. In this sense, therefore, and in this only, I agree with Donne. No man cometh to Christ unless the Father lead him. The corrupt will cannot, without prevenient as well as auxiliary grace, be unitively subordinated to the reason, and again, without this union of the moral will, the reason itself is latent. Nevertheless, I see no advantage in not saying the 'will,' or in substituting the term 'faith' for it. But the sad non-distinction of the reason and the understanding throughout Donne, and the confusion of ideas and conceptions under the same term, painfully inturbidates his theology. Till this distinction of the
and the 
be seen, nothing can be
seen aright. Till this great truth be mastered, and with the sight that
is insight, other truths may casually take possession of the mind, but
the mind cannot possess them. If you know not this, you know nothing;
for if you know not the diversity of reason from the understanding, you
know not reason; and reason alone is knowledge.If we could have been in Paradise, and seen God take a clod of red earth, and make that wretched clod of contemptible earth such a body as should be fit to receive his breath, &c.A sort of pun on the Hebrew word Adam or red earth, common in Donne's age, but unworthy of Donne, who was worthy to have seen deeper into the Scriptural sense of the 'ground,' the Hades, the multeity, the many absque numero el infra numerum, that which is below, as God is that which transcends, intellect.
We place in the School, for the most part, the infinite merit of Christ Jesus ... rather in pacto than in persona, rather that this contract was thus made between the Father and the Son, than that whatsoever that person, thus consisting of God and Man, should do, should, only in respect of the person, be of an infinite value and extension to that purpose, &c.O, this is sad misty divinity! far too scholastical for the pulpit, far too vague and unphilosophic for the study.
Quis nisi infidelis negaverit apud inferos fuisse Christum? says St. Augustine.Where?16 Pearson expressly asserts and proves that the clause was in none of the ancient creeds or confessions. And even now the sense of these words, He descended into hell, is in no Reformed Church determined as an article of faith.
Audacter dicam, says St. Hierome, cum omnia posset Deus, suscitare virginem post ruinam non potest.One instance among hundreds of the wantonness of phrase and fancy in the Fathers. What did Jerome mean? quod Deus membranam hymenis luniformem reproducere nequit? No; that were too absurd. What then? — that God cannot make what has been not to have been? Well then, why not say that, since that is all you can mean?
Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons, compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her child, &c.Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's assertion here would be extravagant.
But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural. But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects — yet still our only mirror — to contemplate all we can of God, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.
)
from being 
, with the will as an accompaniment, but not
from it as a cause, — in order, though not necessarily in time,
precedent. This is true filiation. The second is an act of the will and
the reason, in their purity strict identities, and therefore not
begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and
essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and
coeternally. First then, for the first term, sin, we use to ask in the school, whether any action of man's can have rationem demeriti; whether it can be said to offend God, or to deserve ill of God? for whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with God.This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the cui bono? cui malo? system of ethics, — that system which places the good and evil of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself. For, according to this system, God must be either a passible and dependent being, — that is, not God, — or else he must have no interest, arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice. The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain in genere, evil has a true being in the order of things) is not only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness, — that is, of God. For to say that I believe in a God, but not that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in terms as to say, I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from its centre to its circumference are equal.
But still consider, that they did but leave their nets, they did not burn them. And consider, too, that they left but nets, those things which might entangle them, and retard them in their following of Christ, &c.An excellent paragraph grounded on a mere pun. Such was the taste of the age; and it is an awful joy to observe, that not great learning, great wit, great talent, not even (as far as without great virtue that can be) great genius, were effectual to preserve the man from the contagion, but only the deep and wise enthusiasm of moral feeling. Compare in this light Donne's theological prose even with that of the honest Knox; and, above all, compare Cowley with Milton.
"Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicoenoe, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England, and in good humour with the Church of Rome."Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 41. — Ed.
"I now think, after many doubts, that the passage; I know that my Redeemer liveth, &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a quasi prophecy. I know not how this can be; but in spite of all my difficulties, this I do know, that I shall be recompensed!"Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 80. — Ed.
"Christ's body, as mere body, or rather carcase (for body is an associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than mine or yours; that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced?"Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 261. — Ed.
"These natures from the moment of their first combination have been and are for ever inseparable. For even when his soul forsook the tabernacle of his body, his Deity forsook neither body nor soul. If it had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ was buried, or that the person of Christ did raise up itself from the dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulchre. The like is also to be said of the soul, otherwise we are plainly and inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ therefore for ever one and the self-same, was only touching bodily substance concluded within the grave, his soul only from thence severed, but by personal union his Deity still unseparably joined with both."E. P. V. 52. 4. — Keble's edit. Ed.
"The object of the preceding discourse was to recommend the Bible as the end and centre of our reading and meditation. I can truly affirm of myself, that my studies have been profitable and availing to me only so far, as I have endeavored to use all my other knowledge as a glass enabling me to receive more light in a wider field of vision from the Word of God."Ed.
, that critique of the human intellect, which, previously
to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the
weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the
heaven-descended nosce teipsum, in respect to the intellective
part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by
Lord Bacon in his Novum Organum, and brought to a systematic
completion by Immanuel Kant in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, der
Urtheilskrajt, und der metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der
Naturwissenschaft.This makes me not so much wonder at that passage of Providence, which allowed so much virtue to the bones of the martyr Babylas, once bishop of Antioch, as to stop the mouth of Apollo Daphneus when Julian would have enticed him to open it by many a fat sacrifice. To say nothing of several other memorable miracles that were done by the reliques of saints and martyrs in those times.Strange lingering of childish credulity in the most learned and in many respects enlightened divines of the Protestant episcopal church even to the time of James II! The Popish controversy at that time made a great clearance.
Fourthly. The little horn, Dan. vii, that rules for a time and times and half a time, it is evident that it is not Antiochus Epiphanes, because this little horn is part of the fourth beast — namely, the Roman.Is it quite clear that the Macedonian was not the fourth empire;
And ye shall have the tribulation of ten days, — that is, the utmost extent of tribulation; beyond which there is nothing further, as there is no number beyond ten.It means, I think, the very contrary. Decent dierum is used even in Terence for a very short time2. In the same way we say, a nine days' wonder.
But for further conviction of the excellency of Mr. Mede's way above that of Grotius, I shall compare some of their main interpretations.Hard to say which of the two, Mede's or Grotius', is the more improbable. Beyond doubt, however, the Cherubim are meant as the scenic ornature borrowed from the Temple.
That this rider of the white horse is Christ, they both agree in.The white horse is, I conceive, Victory or Triumph — that is, of the Roman power — followed by Slaughter, Famine, and Pestilence. All this is plain enough. The difficulty commences after the writer is deserted by his historical facts, that is, after the sacking of Jerusalem.
The Old and New Testament, which by a prosopopœia are here called the two witnesses.Where is the probability of this so long before the existence of the collection since called the New Testament?
But light-minded men, whose hearts are made dark with infidelity, care not what antic distortions they make in interpreting Scripture, so they bring it to any show of compliance with their own fancy and incredulity.Why so very harsh a censure? What moral or spiritual, or even what physical, difference can be inferred from all men's dying, this of one thing, that of another, a third, like the martyrs, burnt alive, or all in the same way? In any case they all die, and all pass to judgment.
I must confess our Saviour compiled no books, it being a piece of pedantry below so noble and divine a person, &c.Alas! all this is woefully beneath the dignity of Henry More, and shockingly against the majesty of the High and Holy One, so very unnecessarily compared with Hendrick Nicholas, of Amsterdam, mercer!
Confutation of Grotius on the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse.Has or has not Grotius been overrated? If Grotius applied these words (magnus testis et historiarum diligentissimus inquisitor) to Epiphanius in honest earnest, and not ironically, he must have been greatly inferior in sound sense and critical tact both to Joseph Scaliger and to Rhenferd. Strange, that to Henry More, a poet and a man of fine imagination, it should never have occurred to ask himself, whether this scene, Patmos, with which the drama commences, was not a part of the poem, and, like all other parts, to be interpreted symbolically? That the poetic — and I see no reason for doubting the real — date of the Apocalypse is under Vespasian, is so evidently implied in the five kings preceding (for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, were abortive emperors) that it seems to me quite lawless to deny it. That [Greek: Lateinos] is the meaning of the 666, (c. xiii. 18.) and the treasonable character of this, are both shown by Irenæus's pretended rejection, and his proposal of the perfectly senseless Teitan instead.
Nec magis blandiri poterit alterum illud nomen, Teitan, quod studiose commendavit Irenœus.No! non studiose, sed ironice commendavit Irenæus. Indeed it is ridiculous to suppose that Irenæus was in earnest with Teitan. His meaning evidently is: — if not Lateinos, which has a meaning, it is some one of the many names having the same numeral power, to which a meaning is to be found by the fulfillment of the prophecy. My own conviction is, that the whole is an ill-concerted conundrum, the secret of which died with the author. The general purpose only can be ascertained, namely, some test, partaking of religious obligation, of allegiance to the sovereignty of the Roman Emperor.
for 
against all the MSS., and without any Patristic hint. For it seems a
play with words unworthy the writer, to make Satan, who possessed all
the seven, himself an eighth, and still worse if the
eighth:
from
the two 
and the one 
from the other,
and then to make the appellative of the : as if having in one place told of Nicholas senior, Dick
and another Dick his cousin, I should soon after talk of Dick, meaning
old Nicholas by that name; that is, having discriminated Nicholas from
Dick, then to say Dick, meaning Nicholas!
(these blessed ones) are the true 
or
as the Logos is the 
.Die vorzüglichsten Bekenner Jesu sollen auferstehen, die übrigen Menschen sollen es nicht. Hiesse jenes, sie sollen noch nach ihrem Tode fortwürken, so wäre das letztere falsch: denn auch die übrigen würken nach ihrem Tode durch ihre schriften, ihre Andenken, ihre Beispiel.Euge! Heinrichi. O, the sublime bathos of thy prosaism — the muddy eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only man to understand a poet!
"Sovereign of the air, — who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts, — I pay thee homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to the vulture, the falcon, and all thy noble baronage; and no less to the lowly bird, the sky-lark, whom thou permittest to visit thy court, and chant her matin song within its cloudy curtains; yea the linnet, the thrush, the swallow, are my brethren: — but still I am a bird, though but a bird of the earth.
"Monarch of our kind, I am a bird, even as thou; and I have shed plumes, which have added beauty to the beautiful, and grace to terror, waving over the maiden's brow and on the helmed head of the war-chief; and majesty to grief, drooping o'er the car of death!"
Yet he would often dispute the necessity of a country living for a London minister to retire to in hot summer time, out of the sepulchral air of a churchyard, where most of them are housed in the city, and found for his own part that by Whitsuntide he did rus anhelare, and unless he took fresh air in the vacation, he was stopt in his lungs and could not speak clear after Michaelmas.A plausible reason certainly why A. and B. should occasionally change posts, but a very weak one, methinks, for A.'s having both livings all the year through.
The Bishop was an enemy to all separation from the Church of England; but their hypocrisy he thought superlative that allowed the doctrine, and yet would separate for mislike of the discipline. ... And therefore he wished that as of old all kings and other Christians subscribed to the Conciliary Decrees, so now a law might pass that all justices of peace should do so in England, and then they would be more careful to punish the depravers of Church Orders.The little or no effect of recent experience and sufferings still more recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal in those who did not think them indifferent, — how doubly criminal must the imposition have been, and how tenfold criminal the perseverance in occasioning separation; how guilty the imprisoning, impoverishing, driving into wildernesses their Christian brethren for admitted indifferentials in direct contempt of St. Paul's positive command to the contrary!
Moreover as the woman Mary did bring forth the son who bruised the serpent's head, which brought sin into the world by the woman Eve, so the Virgin Mary was the occasion of grace as the Virgin Eve was the cause of damnation. Eve had not known Adam as yet when she was beguiled and seduced the man; so Mary, &c.A Rabbinical fable or gloss on Gen. iii. 1. Hacket is offensively fond of these worse than silly vanities.
The more to illustrate this, you must know that there was a twofold root or foundation of the children of Israel for their temporal being: Abraham was the root of the people; the kingdom was rent from Saul, and therefore David was the root of the kingdom; among all the kings in the pedigree none but he hath the name; and Jesse begat David the king, and David the king begat Solomon; and therefore so often as God did profess to spare the people, though he were angry, he says he would do it for Abraham's sake: so often as he professeth to spare the kingdom of Judah, he says he would do it for his servant David's sake; so that ratione radicis, as Abraham and David are roots of the people and kingdom, especially Christ is called the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.A valuable remark, and confirmative of my convictions respecting the conversion of the Jews, namely, that whatever was ordained for them as Abrahamidæ is not repealed by Christianity, but only what appertained to the republic, kingdom, or state. The modern conversions are, as it seems to me, in the face of God's commands.
I come to the third strange condition of the birth; it was without travel, or the pangs of woman, as I will shew you out of these words; fasciis involvit, that she wrapt him in swaddling clouts, and laid him in a manger. Ipsa genitrix fuit obstetrix, says St. Cyprian. Mary was both the mother and the midwife of the child; far be it from us to think that the weak hand of the woman could facilitate the work which was guided only by the miraculous hand of God. The Virgin conceived our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, and therefore she had not the pangs and travel of woman upon her, she brought him forth without the curse of the flesh. These be the Fathers' comparisons. As bees draw honey from the flower without offending it, as Eve was taken out of Adam's side without any grief to him, as a sprig issues out of the bark of a tree, as the sparkling light from the brightness of the star, such ease was it to Mary to bring forth her first born son; and therefore having no weakness in her body, feeling no want of vigor, she did not deliver him to any profane hand to be drest, but by a special ability, above all that are newly delivered, she wrapt him in swaddling clouts. Gravida, sed non gravabatur; she had a burden in her womb, before she was delivered, and yet she was not burdened for her journey which she took so instantly before the time of the child's birth. From Nazareth to Bethlem was above forty miles, and yet she suffered it without weariness or complaint, for such was the power of the Babe, that rather he did support the Mother's weakness than was supported; and as he lighted his Mother's travel by the way from Nazareth to Bethlem that it was not tedious to her tender age, so he took away all her dolour and imbecility from her travel in child-birth, and therefore she wrapt him in swaddling clouts.A very different paragraph indeed, and quite on the cross road to Rome! It really makes me melancholy; but it is one of a thousand instances of the influence of Patristic learning, by which the Reformers of the Latin Church were distinguished from the renovators of the Christian religion.
But to say the truth, was he not safer among the beasts than he could be elsewhere in all the town of Bethlem? His enemies perchance would say unto him, as Jael did to Sisera, Turn in, turn in, my Lord, when she purposed to kill him; as the men of Keilah made a fair shew to give David all courteous hospitality, but the issue would prove, if God had not blessed him, that they meant to deliver him into the hands of Saul that sought his blood. So there was no trusting of the Bethlemites. Who knows, but that they would have prevented Judas, and betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver unto Herod? More humanity is to be expected from the beasts than from some men, and therefore she laid him in a manger.Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove otherwise, I should have inferred from these Sermons that Hacket from his first boyhood had been used to make themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on all the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had found abundant nourishment for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities in the study of the Fathers and glossers; and remained a junior soph all his life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war!
Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the other gods which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was a god not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention.Here, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and Suetonius — above all, of Tacitus and Pliny — outweigh in my mind the positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by Tertullian2.
But our bodies shall revive out of that dust into which they were dissolved, and live for ever in the resurrection of the righteous.I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant, Thou fool! not that, &c. I have at times almost been tempted to conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists'
to
the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens;
for so Tarsus was called.By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur in the angels' message to set out the majesty of the Son of God: and I beseech you observe, — all you that would keep a good Christmas as you ought, — that the glory of God is the best celebration of his Son's nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed, without riot, without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride and vain pomp, in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanctity of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in want! This is the glory of God shining round, and the most Christian solemnizing of the birth of Jesus.
I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a transient passion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse, — an impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and not completed by an act and confirmation of the will, — as a striking proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compassion for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!' Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine passage in Shakspeare — Hotspur's rapture-like reverie — so often ridiculed by shallow wits. In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden sense of the depth of its moral strength.
Rom. ix. 3.
Thirdly, the necessity of it: for it was not possible that he should be holden of death.One great error of textual divines is their inadvertence to the dates, occasion, object and circumstances, at and under which the words were written or spoken. Thus the simple assertion of one or two facts introductory to the teaching of the Christian religion is taken as comprising or constituting the Christian religion itself. Hence the disproportionate weight laid on the simple fact of the resurrection of Jesus, detached from the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption.
St. Austin says, that Tully, in his 3 lib. de Republica, disputed against the reuniting of soul and body. His argument was, To what end? Where should they remain together? For a body cannot be assumed into heaven. I believe God caused those famous monuments of his wit to perish, because of such impious opinions wherewith they were farced.I believe, however, that these books have recently themselves enjoyed a resurrection by the labor of Angelo Mai3.
And let any equal auditor judge if Job were not an Anti-Socinian; Job xix. 26. Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall behold for myself, and mine eyes shall see, and not another.This text rightly rendered is perhaps nothing to the purpose, but may refer to the dire cutaneous disease with which Job was afflicted. It may be merely an expression of Job's confidence of his being justified in the eyes of men, and in this life4.
St. Chrysostom's judgment upon it (having loosed the pains of death) is, that when Christ came out of the grave, death itself was delivered from pain and anxiety —Most noticeable! See the influence of the surrounding myriotheism in the dea Mors!. Death knew it held him captive whom it ought not to have seized upon, and therefore it suffered torments like a woman in travail till it had given him up again. Thus he. But the Scripture elsewhere testifies, that death was put to sorrow because it had lost its sting, rather than released from sorrow by our Saviour's resurrection.
'And God forbid that any other course, should be attempted. For this liberty was settled on the subject, with such imprecations upon the infringers, that if they should remove these great landmarks, they must look for vengeance, as if entailed by public vows on them and their posterity.' These were the Dean's instructions, &c.He deserves great credit for them. They put him in strong contrast with Laud.
Thus for them both together he solicits: — My most noble lord, what true applause and admiration the King and your Honor have gained, &c.All this we, in the year 1833, should call abject and base; but was it so in Bishop Williams? In the history of the morality of a people, prudence, yea cunning, is the earliest form of virtue. This is expressed in Jacob, and in Ulysses and all the most ancient fables. It will require the true philosophic calm and serenity to distinguish and appreciate the character of the morality of our great men from Henry VIII to the close of James I, — nullum numen abest, si sit prudentia, — and of those of Charles I to the Restoration. The difference almost amounts to contrast.
Of such a conclusion of state, quæ aliquando incognita, semper justa, &c.This perversion of words respecting the decrees of Providence to the caprices of James and his beslobbered minion the Duke of Buckingham, is somewhat nearer to blasphemy than even the euphuism of the age can excuse.
— — tuus, O Jacobe, quod optasIn our times this would be pedantic wit: in the days of James I, and in the mouth of Archbishop Williams it was witty pedantry.
Explorare labor, mihi jussa capessere fas est.
He that doth much in a short life products his mortality.'Products' for 'produces;' that is, lengthens out, ut apud geometros. But why Hacket did not say 'prolongs,' I know not.
See what a globe of light there is in natural reason, which is the same in every man: but when it takes well, and riseth to perfection, it is called wisdom in a few.The good affirming itself — (the will, I am) — begetteth the true, and wisdom is the spirit proceeding. But in the popular acceptation, common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
A well-spirited clause, and agreeable to holy assurance, that truth is more like to win than love. Could the light of such a Gospel as we profess be eclipsed with the interposition of a single marriage?And yet Hacket must have lived to see the practical confutation of this shallow Gnathonism in the result of the marriage with the Papist Henrietta of France!
"Floud," says the Lord Keeper, "since I am no Bishop in your opinion, I will be no Bishop to you."I see the wit of this speech; but the wisdom, the Christianity, the beseemingness of it in a Judge and a Bishop, — what am I to say of that?
And after the period of his presidency (of the Star Chamber), it is too well known how far the enhancements were stretched. But the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood. Prov. 30-33.We may learn from this and fifty other passages, that it did not require the factious prejudices of Prynne or Burton to look with aversion on the proceedings of Laud. Bishop Hacket was as hot a royalist as a loyal Englishman could be, yet Laud was allii nimis.
New stars have appeared and vanished: the ancient asterisms remain; there's not an old star missing.If they had been, they would not have been old. This therefore, like many of Lord Bacon's illustrations, has more wit than meaning. But it is a good trick of rhetoric. The vividness of the image, per se, makes men overlook the imperfection of the simile. "You see my hand, the hand of a poor, puny fellow-mortal; and will you pretend not to see the hand of Providence in this business? He who sees a mouse must be wilfully blind if he does not see an elephant!"
Restraint is not a medicine to cure epidemical diseases.A most judicious remark.
The least connivance in the world towards the person of a Papist.It is clear to us that this illegal or præter-legal and desultory toleration by connivance at particular cases, — this precarious depending on the momentary mood of the King, and this in a stretch of a questioned prerogative, — could neither satisfy nor conciliate the Roman-Catholic potentates abroad, but was sure to offend and alarm the Protestants at home. Yet on the other hand, it is unfair as well as unwise to censure the men of an age for want of that which was above their age. The true principle, much more the practicable rules, of toleration were in James's time obscure to the wisest; but by the many, laity no less than clergy, would have been denounced as soul-murder and disguised atheism. In fact — and a melancholy fact it is, — toleration then first becomes practicable when indifference has deprived it of all merit. In the same spirit I excuse the opposite party, the Puritans and Papaphobists.
But this invisible consistory shall be confusedly diffused over all the kingdom, that many of the subjects shall, to the intolerable exhausting of the wealth of the realm, pay double tithes, double offerings, double fees, in regard of their double consistory. And if Ireland be so poor as it is suggested, I hold, under correction, that this invisible consistory is the principal cause of the exhausting thereof.A memorable remark on the evil of the double priesthood in Ireland.
Dr. Bishop, the new Bishop of Chalcedon, is to come to London privately, and I am much troubled at it, not knowing what to advise his majesty as things stand at this present. If you were shipped with the Infanta, the only counsel were to let the judges proceed with him presently; hang him out of the way, and the King to blame my lord of Canterbury or myself for it.Striking instance and illustration of the tricksy policy which in the seventeenth century passed for state wisdom even with the comparatively wise. But there must be a Ulysses before there can be an Aristides and Phocion.
That a rector or vicar had not only an office in the church, but a freehold for life, by the common law, in his benefice.O! if Archbishop Williams had but seen in a clear point of view what he indistinctly aims at, — the essential distinction between the nationalty and its trustees and holders, and the Christian Church and its ministers6.
I will represent him (the archbishop of Spalato) in a line or two, that he was as indifferent, or rather dissolute, in practice as in opinion. For in the same chapter, art. 35, this is his Nicolaitan doctrine: — A pluralitate uxorum natura humana non abhorret, imo fortasse neque ab earum communitate.How so? The words mean only that the human animal is not withholden by any natural instinct from plurality or even community of females. It is not asserted, that reason and revelation do not forbid both the one and the other, or that man unwithholden would not be a Yahoo, morally inferior to the swallow. The emphasis is to be laid on natura, not on humana. Humanity forbids plural and promiscuous intercourse, not however by the animal nature of man, but by the reason and religion that constitute his moral and spiritual nature.
But being thrown out into banishment, and hunted to be destroyed as a partridge in the mountain, he subscribed against his own hand, which yet did not prejudice Athanasius his innocency: —I have ever said this of Sir John Cheke. I regret his recantation as one of the cruelties suffered by him, and always see the guilt flying off from him and settling on his persecutors.
I conclude, therefore, that his Highness having admitted nothing in these oaths or articles, either to the prejudice of the true, or the equalizing or authorizing of the other, religion, but contained himself wholly within the limits of penal statutes and connivances, wherein the state hath ever challenged and usurped a directing power, &c.Three points seem wanting to render the Lord Keeper's argument air-tight; —
Yet opinions were so various, that some spread it for a fame, that, &c.Was it not required of — at all events usual for — all present at a Council to subscribe their names to the act of the majority? There is a modern case in point, I think, that of Sir Arthur Wellesley's signature to the Convention of Cintra.
For to forbid judges against their oath, and justices of peace (sworn likewise), not to execute the law of the land, is a thing unprecedented in this kingdom. Durus sermo, a harsh and bitter pill to be digested upon a sudden, and without some preparation.What a fine India-rubber conscience Hacket, as well as his patron, must have had! Policy with innocency,' 'cunning with conscience,' lead up the dance to the tune of 'Tantara rogues all!'
Wherefore he waives the strong and full defence he had made upon stopping of an original writ, and deprecates all offence by that maxim of the law which admits of a mischief rather than an inconvenience: which was as much as to say, that he thought it a far less evil to do the lady the probability of an injury (in her own name) than to suffer those two courts to clash together again.All this is a tangle of sophisms. The assumption is, it is better to inflict a private wrong than a public one: we ought to wrong one rather than many. But even then, it is badly stated. The principle is true only where the tolerating of the private wrong is the only means of preventing a greater public wrong. But in this case it was the certainty of the wrong of one to avoid the chance of an inconvenience that might perchance be the occasion of wrong to many, and which inconvenience both easily might and should have been remedied by rightful measures, by mutual agreement between the Bishop and Chancellor, and by the King, or by an act of Parliament.
'Truly, Sir, this is my dark lantern, and I am not ashamed to inquire of a Dalilah to resolve a riddle; for in my studies of divinity I have gleaned up this maxim, licet uti alieno peccato; — though the Devil make her a sinner, I may make good use of her sin.' Prince, merrily, 'Do you deal in such ware?' 'In good faith, Sir,' says the Keeper, 'I never saw her face.'And Hacket's evident admiration, and not merely approbation, of this base Jesuitry, — this divinity which had taught the Archbishop licere uti alieno peccato! But Charles himself was a student of such divinity, and yet (as rogues of higher rank comfort the pride of their conscience by despising inferior knaves) I suspect that the 'merrily' was the Sardonic mirth of bitter contempt; only, however, because he disliked Williams, who was simply a man of his age, his baseness being for us, not for his contemporaries, or even for his own mind. But the worst of all is the Archbishop's heartless disingenuousness and moon-like nodes towards his kind old master the King. How much of truth was there in the Spaniard's information respecting the intrigues of the Prince and the Duke of Buckingham? If none, if they were mere slanders, if the Prince had acted the filial part toward his father and King, and the Duke the faithful part towards his master and only too fond and affectionate benefactor, what more was needed than to expose the falsehoods? But if Williams knew that there was too great a mixture of truth in the charges, what a cowardly ingrate to his old friend to have thus curried favor with the rising sun by this base jugglery!
He was the topsail of the nobility, and in power and trust of offices far above all the nobility.James I was no fool, and though through weakness of character an unwise master, yet not an unthinking statesman; and I still want a satisfactory solution of the accumulation of offices on Buckingham.
Prudent men will continue the oblations of their forefathers' piety.The danger and mischief of going far back, and yet not half far enough! Thus Hacket refers to the piety of individuals our forefathers as the origin of Church property. Had he gone further back, and traced to the source, he would have found these partial benefactions to have been mere restitutions of rights co-original with their own property, and as a national reserve for the purposes of national existence — the condition sine qua non of the equity of their proprieties; for without civilization a people cannot be, or continue to be, a nation. But, alas! the ignorance of the essential distinction of a national clerisy, the Ecclesia, from the Christian Church. The Ecclesia has been an eclipse to the intellect of both Churchmen and Sectarians, even from Elizabeth to the present day, 1833.
And being threatened, his best mitigation was, that perhaps it was not safe for him to deny so great a lord; yet it was safest for his lordship to be denied. ... The king heard the noise of these crashes, and was so pleased, that he thanked God, before many witnesses, that he had put the Keeper into that place: 'For,' says he, 'he that will not wrest justice for Buckingham's sake, whom I know he loves, will never be corrupted with money, which he never loved.'Strange it must seem to us; yet it is evident that Hacket thought it necessary to make a mid something, half apology and half eulogy, for the Lord Keeper's timid half resistance to the insolence and iniquitous interference of the minion Duke. What a portrait of the times! But the dotage of the King in the maintenance of the man, whose insolence in wresting justice he himself admits! Yet how many points, both of the times and of the King's personal character, must be brought together before we can fairly solve the intensity of James's minionism, his kingly egotism, his weak kindheartedness, his vulgar coarseness of temper, his systematic jealousy of the ancient nobles, his timidity, and the like!
'Sir,' says the Lord Keeper, 'will you be pleased to listen to me, taking in the Prince's consent, of which I make no doubt, and I will shew how you shall furnish the second and third brothers with preferments sufficient to maintain them, that shall cost you nothing. ... If they fall to their studies, design them to the bishoprics of Durham and Winchester, when they become void. If that happen in their nonage, which is probable, appoint commendatories to discharge the duty for them for a laudable allowance, but gathering the fruits for the support of your grandchildren, till they come to virility to be consecrated,' &c.Williams could not have been in earnest in this villanous counsel, but he knew his man. This conceit of dignifying dignities by the Simoniacal prostitution of them to blood-royal was just suited to James's fool-cunningness.
... To yield not only passive obedience (which is due) but active also, &c.'Which is due.' What in the name of common sense can this mean, that is, speculatively? Practically, the meaning is clear enough, namely, that we should do what we can to escape hanging; but the distinction is for decorum, and so let it pass.
This is the venom of this new doctrine, that by making us the King's creatures, and in the state of minors or children, to take away all our property; which would leave us nothing of our own, and lead us (but that God hath given us just and gracious Princes) into slavery.And yet this just and gracious Prince prompts, sanctions, supports, and openly rewards this envenomer, in flat contempt of both Houses of Parliament, — protects and prefers him and others of the same principles and professions on account of these professions! And the Parliament and nation were inexcusable, forsooth, in not trusting to Charles's assurances, or rather the assurances put in his mouth by Hyde, Falkland, and others, that he had always abhorred these principles.
When they saw he was not selfish (it is a word of their own new mint), &c.Singular! From this passage it would seem that our so very common word 'selfish' is no older than the latter part of the reign of Charles I.
Their political aphorisms are far more dangerous, that His Majesty is not the highest power in his realms; that he hath not absolute sovereignty; and that a Parliament sitting is co-ordinate with him in it.Hacket himself repeatedly implies as much; for would he deny that the King with the Lords and Commons is not more than the King without them? or that an act of Parliament is not more than a proclamation?
What a venomous spirit is in that serpent Milton, that black-mouthed Zoilus, that blows his viper's breath upon those immortal devotions from the beginning to the end! This is he that wrote with all irreverence against the Fathers of our Church, and showed as little duty to the father that begat him: the same that wrote for the Pharisees, that it was lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause, — and against Christ, for not allowing divorces: the same, O horrid! that defended the lawfulness of the greatest crime that ever was committed, to put our thrice-excellent King to death: a petty schoolboy scribbler, that durst grapple in such a cause with the prince of the learned men of his age, Salmasius,A contemporary of Bishop Racket's designates Milton as the author of a profane and lascivious poem entitled Paradise Lost. The biographer of our divine bard ought to have made a collection of all such passages. A German writer of a Life of Salmasius acknowledges that Milton had the better in the conflict in these words: 'Hans (Jack) von Milton — not to be compared in learning and genius with the incomparable Salmasius, yet a shrewd and cunning lawyer,' &c. O sana posteritas!, as Eunapius says of Ammonius, Plutarch's scholar in Egypt, the delight, the music of all knowledge, who would have scorned to drop a pen-full of ink against so base an adversary, but to maintain the honor of so good a King ... Get thee behind me, Milton! Thou savourest not the things that be of truth and loyalty, but of pride, bitterness, and falsehood. There will be a time, though such a Shimei, a dead dog in Abishai's phrase, escape for a while ... It is no marvel if this canker-worm Milton, &c.
Dare they not trust him that never broke with them? And I have heard his nearest servants say, that no man could ever challenge him of the least lie.What! this after the publication of Charles's letters to the Queen! Did he not within a few months before his death enter into correspondence with, and sign contradictory offers to, three different parties, not meaning to keep any one of them; and at length did he not die with something very like a falsehood in his mouth in allowing himself to be represented as the author of the Icon Basilike?
If an under-sheriff had arrested Harry Martin for debt, and pleaded that he did not imprison his membership, but his Martinship, would the Committee for privileges be fobbed off with that distinction?To make this good in analogy, we must suppose that Harry Martin had notoriously neglected all the duties, while he perverted and abused all the privileges, of membership: and then I answer, that the Committee of privileges would have done well and wisely in accepting the under-sheriff's distinction, and, out of respect for the membership, consigning the Martinship to the due course of law.
That every soul should be subject to the higher powers. The higher power under which they lived was the mere power and will of Cæsar, bridled in by no law.False, if meant de jure; and if de facto, the plural powers would apply to the Parliament far better than to the King, and to Cromwell as well as to Nero. Every even decently good Emperor professed himself the servant of the Roman Senate. The very term Imperator, as Gravina observes, implies it; for it expresses a delegated and instrumental power. Before the assumption of the Tribunitial character by Augustus, by which he became the representative of the majority of the people, — majestatem indutus est, — Senatus consulit, Populus jubet, imperent Consules, was the constitutional language.
Yet so much dissonancy there was between his tongue and his heart, that he triumphed in the murder of Cæsar, the only Roman that exceeded all their race in nobleness, and was next to Tully in eloquence.There is something so shameless in this self-contradiction as of itself almost to extinguish the belief that the prelatic royalists were conscientious in their conclusions. For if the Senate of Rome were not a lawful power, what could be? And if Cæsar, the thrice perjured traitor, was neither perjured nor traitor, only because he by his Gaulish troops turned a republic into a monarchy, — with what face, under what pretext, could Hacket abuse 'Sultan Cromwell?'
Ea omnia super Christo Pilatus, et ipse jam pro sua conscientia Christianus, Cæsari tum Tiberio nuntiavit.Apologet, ii. 624. See the account in Eusebius. Hist. Eccl. ii.2. — Ed.
And the breath of the people is like the voice of an exterminating angel, not so killing but so secret.That is, in such wise. It would be well to note, after what time 'as' became the requisite correlative to 'so,' and even, as in this instance, the preferable substitute. We should have written 'as' in both places probably, but at all events in the latter, transplacing the sentences 'as secret though not so killing;' or 'not so killing, but quite as secret.' It is not generally true that Taylor's punctuation is arbitrary, or his periods reducible to the post-Revolutionary standard of length by turning some of his colons or semi-colons into full stops. There is a subtle yet just and systematic logic followed in his pointing, as often as it is permitted by the higher principle, because the proper and primary purpose, of our stops, and to which alone from their paucity they are adequate, — that I mean of enabling the reader to prepare and manage the proportions of his voice and breath. But for the true scheme of punctuation,
see the blank
page over leaf which I will try to disblank into a prize of more worth
than can be got at the E.O.'s and little goes of Lindley Murray2.But the most complained that, in my ways to persuade a toleration, I helped some men too far, and that I armed the Anabaptists with swords instead of shields, with a power to offend us, besides the proper defensitives of their own ... But wise men understand the thing and are satisfied. But because all men are not of equal strength; I did not only in a discourse on purpose demonstrate the true doctrine in that question, but I have now in this edition of that book answered all their pretensions, &c.No; in the might of his genius he called up a spirit which he has in vain endeavored to lay, or exorcise from the conviction.
For episcopacy relies not upon the authority of Fathers and Councils, but upon Scripture, upon the institution of Christ, or the institution of the Apostles, upon a universal tradition, and a universal practice, not upon the words and opinions of the doctors: it hath as great a testimony as Scripture itself hath, &c.We must make allowance for the intoxication of recent triumph and final victory over a triumphing and victorious enemy; or who but would start back at the aweless temerity of this assertion? Not to mention the evasion; for who ever denied the historical fact, or the Scriptural occurrence of the word expressing the fact, namely, episcopi, episcopatus?? What was questioned by the opponents was,
But the interest of the Bishops is conjunct with the prosperity of the King, besides the interest of their own security, by the obligation of secular advantages. For they who have their livelihood from the King, and are in expectance of their fortune from him, are more likely to pay a tribute of exacter duty, than others, whose fortunes are not in such immediate dependency on His Majesty.The cat out of the bag! Consult the whole reigns of Charles I and II and the beginning of James II. Jeremy Taylor was at this time (blamelessly for himself and most honourably for his patrons) ambling on the high road of preferment; and to men so situated, however sagacious in other respects, it is not given to read the signs of the times. Little did Taylor foresee that to indiscreet avowals, like these, on the part of the court clergy, the exauctorations of the Bishops and the temporary overthrow of the Church itself would be in no small portion attributable. But the scanty measure and obscurity (if not rather, for so bright a luminary, the occultation) of his preferment after the Restoration is a problem, of which perhaps his virtues present the most probable solution.
A second return that episcopacy makes to royalty, is that which is the duty of all Christians, the paying tributes and impositions.This is true; and it was an evil hour for the Church, — and led to the loss of its Convocation, the greatest and, in an enlarged state-policy, the most impolitic affront ever offered by a government to its own established Church, — in which the clergy surrendered their right of taxing themselves.
I mean the conversion of the kingdom from Paganism by St. Augustine, Archbishop of Canterbury; and the Reformation begun and promoted by Bishops.From Paganism in part; but in part from primitive Christianity to Popery. But neither this nor the following boast will bear narrow looking into, I suspect.
In all those accursed machinations, which the device and artifice of hell hath invented for the supplanting of the Church, inimicus homo, that old superseminator of heresies and crude mischiefs, hath endeavoured to be curiously compendious, and, with Tarquin's device, putare summa papaverum.
Quœre-spiritualiter papaveratorurn?
His next onset was by Julian, and occidere presbyterium, that was his province. To shut up public schools, to force Christians to ignorance, to impoverish and disgrace the clergy, to make them vile and dishonorable, these are his arts; and he did the devil more service in this fineness of undermining, than all the open battery of ten great rams of persecution.What felicity, what vivacity of expression! Many years ago Mr. Mackintosh gave it as an instance of my perverted taste, that I had seriously contended that in order to form a style worthy of Englishmen, Milton and Taylor must be studied instead of Johnson, Gibbon, and Junius; and now I see by his introductory Lecture given at Lincoln's Inn, and just published, he is himself imitating Jeremy Taylor, or rather copying his semi-colon punctuation, as closely as he can. Amusing it is to observe, how by the time the modern imitators are at the half-way of the long breathed period, the asthmatic thoughts drop down, and the rest is, — words! I have always been an obstinate hoper: and even this is a datum and a symptom of hope to me, that a better, an ancestral, spirit is forming and will appear in the rising generation.
First, because here is a concourse of times; for now after that these times have been called the last times for 1600 years together, our expectation of the great revelation is very near accomplishing.Rather a whimsical consequence, that because a certain party had been deceiving themselves for sixteen centuries they were likely to be in the right at the beginning of the seventeenth. But indeed I question whether in all Taylor's voluminous writings there are to be found three other paragraphs so vague and misty-magnific as this is. It almost reminds me of the "very cloudy and mighty alarming" in Foote.
If there be such a thing as the power of the keys, by Christ concredited to his Church, for the binding and loosing delinquents and penitents respectively on earth, then there is clearly a court erected by Christ in his Church.We may, without any heretical division of person, economically distinguish our Lord's character as Jesus, and as Christ, so far that during his sojourn on earth, from his baptism at least to his crucifixion, he was in some respects his own Elias, bringing back the then existing Church to the point at which the Prophets had placed it; that is, distinguishing the ethica from the politica, what was binding on the Jews as descendants of Abraham and inheritors of the patriarchal faith from the statutes obligatory on them as members of the Jewish state.
Were Sent forth to disperse and
promulgate with suitable gifts, powers, and evidences. Postquam unusquisque eos quos baptizabat suos putabat esse, non Christi, et diceretur in populis, Ego sum Pauli, Ego Apollo, Ego autem Cephæ, in toto orbe decretum est ut unus de presbyteris electus superponeretur cateris, ut schismatum semina tollerentur.The natural inference would, methinks, be the contrary. There would be more persons inclined and more likely to attach an ambition to their belonging to a single eminent leader and head than to a body, — rather to Cæsar, Marius, or Pompey, than to the Senate. But I have ever thought that the best, safest, and at the same time sufficient, argument is, that by the nature of human affairs and the appointments of God's ordinary providence every assembly of functionaries will and must have a president; that the same qualities which recommended the individual to this dignity would naturally recommend him to the chief executive power during the intervals of legislation, and at all times in all points already ruled; that the most solemn acts, Confirmation and Ordination, would as naturally be confined to the head of the executive in the state ecclesiastic, as the sign manual and the like to the king in all limited monarchies; and that in course of time when many presbyteries would exist in the same district, Archbishops and Patriarchs would arise pari ratione as Bishops did in the first instance. Now it is admitted that God's extraordinary appointments never repeal but rather perfect the laws of his ordinary providence: and it is enough that all we find in the New Testament tends to confirm and no where forbids, contradicts, or invalidates the course of government, which the Church, we are certain, did in fact pursue.
But those things which Christianity, as it prescinds from the interest of the republic, hath introduced, all them, and all the causes emergent from them, the Bishop is judge of.... Receiving and disposing the patrimony of the Church, and whatsoever is of the same consideration according to the fortyfirst canon of the Apostles. Præcipimus ut in potestate sua episcopus ecclesice res habeat. Let the Bishops have the disposing of the goods of the Church; adding this reason: si enim animte hominum pretiosæ illi sint creditæ, multo magis eum oportet curam pecuniarum gerere. He that is intrusted with our precious souls may much more be intrusted with the offertories of faithful people.Let all these belong to the overseer of the Church: to whom else so properly? but what is the nature of the power by which he is to enforce his orders? By secular power? Then the Bishop's power is no derivative from Christ's royalty; for his kingdom is not of the world; but the monies are Cæsar's; and the cura pecuniarum must be vested where the donors direct, the law of the land permitting.
Such are the delinquencies of clergymen, who are both clergy and subjects too; clerus Domini, and regis subditi: and for their delinquencies, which are in materia justiæ, the secular tribunal punishes, as being a violation of that right which the state must defend; but because done by a person who is a member of the sacred hierarchy, and hath also an obligation of special duty to his Bishop, therefore the Bishop also may punish him; and when the commonwealth hath inflicted a penalty, the Bishop also may impose a censure, for every sin of a clergyman is two.But why of a clergyman only? Is not every sheep of his flock a part of the Bishop's charge, and of course the possible object of his censure? The clergy, you say, take the oath of obedience. Aye! but this is the point in dispute.
So that ever since then episcopal jurisdiction hath a double part, an external and an internal: this is derived from Christ, that from the king, which because it is concurrent in all acts of jurisdiction, therefore it is that the king is supreme of the jurisdiction, namely, that part of it which is the external compulsory.If Christ delegated no external compulsory power to the Bishops, how came it the duty of princes to God to do so? It has been so since — -yes! since the first grand apostasy from Christ to Constantine.
Bishops ut sic are not secular princes, must not seek for it; but some secular princes may be Bishops, as in Germany and in other places to this day they are. For it is as unlawful for a Bishop to have any land, as to have a country; and a single acre is no more due to the order than a province; but both these may be conjunct in the same person, though still, by virtue of Christ's precept, the functions and capacities must be distinguished.True; but who with more indignant scorn attacked this very distinction when applied by the Presbyterians to the kingship, when they professed to fight for the King against Charles? And yet they had on their side both the spirit of the English constitution and the language of the law. The King never dies; the King can do no wrong. Elsewhere, too, Taylor could ridicule the Romish prelate, who fought and slew men as a captain at the head of his vassals, and then in the character of a Bishop absolved his other homicidal self. However, whatever St. Peter might understand by Christ's words, St. Peter's three-crowned successors have been quite of Taylor's opinion that they are to be paraphrased thus:
"Simon Peter, as my Apostle, you are to make converts only by humility, voluntary poverty, and the words of truth and meekness; but if by your spiritual influence you can induce the Emperor Tiberius to make you Tetrarch of Galilee or Prefect of Judaea, thenIb. p. 276.— you may lord it as loftily as you will, and deliver as Tetrarch or Prefect those stiff-necked miscreants to the flames for not having been converted by you as an Apostle."
I end with the golden rule of Vincentius Lirinensis: — magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.Alas! this golden rule comes full and round from the mouth; nor do I deny that it is pure gold: but like too many other golden rules, in order to make it cover the facts which the orthodox asserter of episcopacy at least, and the chaplain of Archbishop Laud and King Charles the Martyr must have held himself bound to bring under it, it must be made to display another property of the sovereign metal, its malleableness to wit; and must be beaten out so thin, that the weight of truth in the portion appertaining to each several article in the orthodox systems of theology will be so small, that it may better be called gilt than gold; and if worth having at all, it will be for its show, not for its substance. For instance, the aranea theologica may draw out the whole web of the Westminster Catechism from the simple creed of the beloved Disciple, — whoever believeth with his heart, and professeth with his mouth, that Jesus is Lord and Christ, — shall be saved. If implicit faith only be required, doubtless certain doctrines, from which all other articles of faith imposed by the Lutheran, Scotch, or English Churches, may be deduced, have been believed ubique, semper, et ab omnibus. But if explicit and conscious belief be intended, I would rather that the Bishop than I should defend the golden rule against Semler.
Not like women or children when they are affrighted with fire in their clothes. We shaked off the coal indeed, but not our garments, lest we should have exposed our Churches to that nakedness which the excellent men of our sister Churches complained to be among themselves.O, what convenient things metaphors and similes are, so charmingly indeterminate! On the general reader the literal sense operates: he shivers in sympathy with the poor shift-less matron, the Church of Geneva. To the objector the answer is ready — it was speaking metaphorically, and only meant that she had no shift on the outside of her gown, that she made a shift without an over-all. Compare this sixth section with the manful, senseful, irrebuttable fourth section — a folio volume in a single paragraph! But Jeremy Taylor would have been too great for man, had he not occasionally fallen below himself.
And since all that cast off the Roman yoke thought they had title enough to be called Reformed, it was hard to have pleased all the private interests and peevishness of men that called themselves friends; and therefore that only in which the Church of Rome had prevaricated against the word of God, or innovated against Apostolical tradition, all that was pared away.Aye! here is the ovum, as Sir Everard Home would say, the proto-parent of the whole race of controversies between Protestant and Protestant; and each had Gospel on their side. Whatever is not against the word of God is for it, — thought the founders of the Church of England. Whatever is not in the word of God is a word of man, a will-worship presumptuous and usurping, — thought the founders of the Church of Scotland and Geneva. The one proposed to themselves to be reformers of the Latin Church, that is, to bring it back to the form which it had during the first four centuries; the latter to be the renovators of the Christian religion as it was preached and instituted by the Apostles and immediate followers of Christ thereunto specially inspired. Where the premisses are so different, who can wonder at the difference in the conclusions?
It began early to discover its inconvenience; for when certain zealous persons fled to Frankfort to avoid the funeral piles kindled by the Roman Bishops in Queen Mary's time, as if they had not enemies enough abroad, they fell foul with one another, and the quarrel was about the Common Prayer Book.But who began the quarrel? Knox and his recent biographer lay it to Dr. Cox and the Liturgists.
Here therefore it became law, was established by an act of Parliament, was made solemn by an appendant penalty against all that on either hand did prevaricate a sanction of so long and so prudent consideration.Truly evangelical way of solemnizing a party measure, and sapientizing Calvin's tolerabiles ineptias by making them ineptias usque ad carcerem et verbera intolerantes!
But the Common Prayer Book had the fate of St. Paul; for when it had scaped the storms of the Roman See, yet a viper sprung out of Queen Mary's fires, &c.As Knox and his friends confined themselves to the inspired word, whether vipers or no, they were not adders at all events.
For, if we deny to the people a liberty of reading the Scriptures, may they not complain, as Isaac did against the inhabitants of the land, that the Philistines had spoiled his well and the fountains of living water? If a free use to all of them and of all Scriptures were permitted, should not the Church herself have more cause to complain of the infinite licentiousness and looseness of interpretations, and of the commencement of ten thousand errors, which would certainly be consequent to such permission? Reason and religion will chide us in the first, reason and experience in the latter ... The Church with great wisdom hath first held this torch out; and though for great reasons intervening and hindering, it cannot be reduced to practice, yet the Church hath shewn her desire to avoid the evil that is on both hands, and she hath shewn the way also, if it could have been insisted in.If there were not, at the time this Preface, or this paragraph at least, was written or published, some design on foot or sub lingua of making advances to the continental catholicism for the purpose of conciliating the courts of Austria, France and Spain, in favor of the Cavalier and Royalist party at home and abroad, this must be considered as a useless and worse than useless avowal. The Papacy at the height of its influence never asserted a higher or more anti-Protestant right than this of dividing the Scriptures into permitted and forbidden portions. If there be a functionary of divine institution, synodical or unipersonal, who with the name of the 'Church' has the right, under circumstances of its own determination, to forbid all but such and such parts of the Bible, it must possess potentially, and under other circumstances, a right of withdrawing the whole book from the unlearned, who yet cannot be altogether unlearned; for the very prohibition supposes them able to do what, a few centuries before, the majority of the clergy themselves were not qualified to do, that is, read their Bible throughout. Surely it would have been politic in the writer to have left out this sentence, which his Puritan adversaries could not fail to translate into the Church shewing her teeth though she dared not bite. I bitterly regret these passages; neither our incomparable Liturgy, nor this full, masterly, and unanswerable defence of it, requiring them.
So that the Church of England, in these manners of dispensing the power of the keys, does cut off all disputings and impertinent wranglings, whether the priest's power were judicial or declarative; for possibly it is both, and it is optative too, and something else yet; for it is an emanation from all the parts of his ministry, and he never absolves, but he preaches or prays, or administers a sacrament; for this power of remission is a transcendent, passing through all the parts of the priestly offices. For the keys of the kingdom of heaven are the promises and the threatenings of the Scripture, and the prayers of the Church, and the Word, and the Sacraments, and all these are to be dispensed by the priest, and these keys are committed to his ministry, and by the operation of them all he opens and shuts heaven's gates ministerially.No more ingenious way of making nothing of a thing than by making it every thing. Omnify the disputed point into a transcendant, and you may defy the opponent to lay hold of it. He might as well attempt to grasp an aura electrica.
Thus the Holy Ghost brought to their memory all things which Jesus spake and did, and, by that means, we come to know all that the Spirit knew to be necessary for us.Alas! it is one of the sad effects or results of the enslaving Old Bailey fashion of defending, or, as we may well call it, apologizing for, Christianity, — introduced by Grotius and followed up by the modern Alogi, whose wordless, lifeless, spiritless, scheme of belief it alone suits, — that we dare not ask, whether the passage here referred to must necessarily be understood as asserting a miraculous remembrancing, distinctly sensible by the Apostles; whether the gift had any especial reference to the composition of the Gospels; whether the assumption is indispensable to a well grounded and adequate confidence in the veracity of the narrators or the verity of the narration; if not, whether it does not unnecessarily entangle the faith of the acute and learned inquirer in difficulties, which do not affect the credibility of history in its common meaning — rather indeed confirm our reliance on its authority in all the points of agreement, that is, in every point which we are in the least concerned to know, — and expose the simple and unlearned Christian to objections best fitted to perplex, because easiest to be understood, and within the capacity of the shallowest infidel to bring forward and exaggerate; and lastly, whether the Scriptures must not be read in that faith which comes from higher sources than history, that is, if they are read to any good and Christian purpose. God forbid that I should become the advocate of mechanical infusions and possessions, superseding the reason and responsible will. The light a priori, in which, according to my conviction, the Scriptures must be read and tried, is no other than the earnest, What shall I do to be saved? with the inward consciousness, — the gleam or flash let into the inner man through the rent or cranny of the prison of sense, however produced by earthquake, or by decay, — as the ground and antecedent of the question; and with a predisposition towards, and an insight into, the a priori probability of the Christian dispensation as the necessary consequents. This is the holy spirit in us praying to the Spirit, without which no man can say that Jesus is the Lord: a text which of itself seems to me sufficient to cover the whole scheme of modern Unitarianism with confusion, when compared with that other, — I am the Lord (Jehovah): that is my name; and my glory will I not give to another. But in the Unitarian's sense of 'Lord,' and on his scheme of evidence, it might with equal justice be affirmed, that no man can say that Tiberius was the Emperor but by the Holy Ghost.
And that this is for this reason called a gift and grace, or issue of the Spirit, is so evident and notorious, that the speaking of an ordinary revealed truth, is called in Scripture, a speaking by the spirit, 1 Cor. xii. 8. No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost. For, though the world could not acknowledge Jesus for the Lord without a revelation, yet now that we are taught this truth by Scripture, and by the preaching of the Apostles, to which they were enabled by the Holy Ghost, we need no revelation or enthusiasm to confess this truth, which we are taught in our creeds and catechisms, &c.I do not, nay I dare not, hesitate to denounce this assertion as false in fact and the paralysis of all effective Christianity. A greater violence offered to Scripture words is scarcely conceivable. St. Paul asserts that no man can. Nay, says Taylor, every man that knows his catechism can; but unless some six or seven individuals had said it by the Holy Ghost some seventeen or eighteen hundred years ago, no man could say so.
And yet, because the Holy Ghost renewed their memory, improved their understanding, supplied to some their want of human learning, and so assisted them that they should not commit an error in fact or opinion, neither in the narrative nor dogmatical parts, therefore they wrote by the spirit.And where is the proof? — and to what purpose, unless a distinct and plain diagnostic were given of the divinities and the humanities which Taylor himself expressly admits in the text of the Scriptures? And even then what would it avail unless the interpreters and translators, not to speak of the copyists in the first and second centuries, were likewise assisted by inspiration? As to the larger part of the Prophetic books, and the whole of the Apocalypse, we must receive them as inspired truths, or reject them as simple inventions or enthusiastic delusions. But in what other book of Scripture does the writer assign his own work to a miraculous dictation or infusion? Surely the contrary is implied in St. Luke's preface. Does the hypothesis rest on one possible construction of a single passage in St. Paul, 2 Tim. iii. 16.? And that construction resting materially on a
not found in the oldest MSS., when the context would
rather lead us to understand the words as parallel with the other
assertion of the Apostle, that all good works are given from God, — that
is, Every divinely inspired writing is profitable, &c. Finally,
will not the certainty of the competence and single mindedness of the
writers suffice; this too confirmed by the high probability, bordering
on certainty, that God's especial grace worked in them; and that an
especial providence watched over the preservation of writings, which, we
know, both are and have been of such pre-eminent importance to
Christianity, and yet by natural means? But alas! any thing will be
pretended, rather than admit the necessity of internal evidence, or than
acknowledge, among the external proofs, the convictions and spiritual
experiences of believers, though they should be common to all the
faithful in all ages of the Church! But in all superstition there is a
heart of unbelief, and, vice versa, where an individual's belief
is but a superficial acquiescence, credulity is the natural result and
accompaniment, if only he be not required to sink into the depths of his
being, where the sensual man can no longer draw breath. It is not the
profession of Socinian tenets, but the spirit of Socinianism in the
Church itself that alarms me. This, this, is the dry rot in the beams
and timbers of the Temple!So that let the devotion be ever so great, set forms of prayer will be expressive enough of any desire, though importunate as extremity itself.This, and much of the same import in this treatise, is far more than Taylor, mature in experience and softened by afflictions, would have written. Besides, it is in effect, though not in logic, a deserting of his own strong and unshaken ground of the means and ends of public worship.
When Christ was upon the Mount, he gave it for a pattern, &c.I cannot thoroughly agree with Taylor in all he says on this point. The Lord's Prayer is an encyclopedia of prayer, and of all moral and religious philosophy under the form of prayer. Besides this, that nothing shall be wanting to its perfection, it is itself singly the best and most divine of prayers. But had this been the main and primary purpose, it must have been thenceforward the only prayer permitted to Christians; and surely some distinct references to it would have been found in the Apostolic writings.
Now then I demand, whether the prayer of Manasses be so good a prayer as the Lord's prayer? Or is the prayer of Judith, or of Tobias, or of Judas Maccabeus, or of the son of Sirach, is any of these so good? Certainly no man will say they are; and the reason is, because we are not sure they are inspired by the Holy Spirit of God.How inconsistent Taylor often is, the result of the system of economizing truth! The true reason is the inverse. The prayers of Judith and the rest are not worthy to be compared with the Lord's Prayer; therefore neither is the spirit in which they were conceived worthy to be compared with the spirit from which the Lord's Prayer proceeded: and therefore with all fulness of satisfaction we receive the latter, as indeed and in fact our Lord's dictation.
That the Apostles did use the prayer their Lord taught them, I think needs not much be questioned.Ad contra, see above. But that they did not till the siege of Jerusalem deviate unnecessarily from the established usage of the Synagogue is beyond rational doubt. We may therefore safely maintain that a set form was sanctioned by Apostolic practice; though the form was probably settled after the converts from Paganism began to be the majority of Christians.
Now that they tied themselves to recitation of the very words of Christ's prayer pro loco et tempore, I am therefore easy to believe, because I find they were strict to a scruple in retaining the sacramental words which Christ spake when he instituted the blessed Sacrament.Not a case in point. Besides it assumes the controverted sense of
as "in these words" versus "to this purport."
Grotius and Lightfoot, however, have settled this dispute by proving
that the Lord's prayer is a selection of prayers from the Jewish ritual:
and a most happy and valuable inference against novelties obtruded for
novelty's sake does Grotius draw from this fact. When I consider the
manner in which the Jews usually quoted or referred to particular
passages of Scripture, it does not seem altogether improbable that the
several articles of the Oratio Dominica might have been the
initial sentences of several prayers; but I have not the least doubt
that by the loud utterance of the My God! my God! why hast thou
forsaken me? our blessed Redeemer referred to and recalled to John
and Mary that most wonderful and prophetic twenty-second Psalm. And what
a glorious light does not this throw on the whole scene of the
crucifixion, and in what additional loveliness does it not present the
god-like character of the crucified Son of Man! With the very facts
before them, of which the former and larger portion of the Psalm
referred to resembles a detailed history rather than a prophecy, — with
what force, and with what lively consolation and infusion of stedfast
hope and faith, when all human grounds of hope had sunk from under them,
must not the obvious and inevitable inference have flashed on the
convictions of the holy mother and the beloved disciple! "If all we now
behold was pre-ordained and so distinctly predicted; if the one mournful
half of the prophecy has been so entirely and minutely fulfilled, after
so great a lapse of ages, dare we, can we, doubt for a moment that the
glorious remainder will with equal fidelity be accomplished?" Thus to
his very last moments did our Lord (setting as it beseemed the sun of
righteousness to set) manifest with a wider and wider face of glory his
self-oblivious love. In the act he was offering, he himself was a
sacrifice of love for the whole creation; and yet the cup overflowed
into particular streams; first, for his enemies, his persecutors, and
murderers; then for his friends and humanly nearest relative; Woman,
behold thy son! O what a transfer! Nor does the proposed
interpretation preclude any inward and mysterious sense of the words
My God! my God! — though I confess I have never yet met with a
single plausible resolution of the words into any one of the mysteries
of the Trinity, or the Incarnation, or the Passion. Nay, were there any
necessity for supposing such an allusion, which there is not, the
obvious interpretation would, I fear, too dangerously favor the heresy
of those who divided and severed the divinity from the humanity; so that
not the incarnate God, very God of very God, would have atoned for us on
the cross, but the incarnating man; a heresy which either denies or
reduces to an absurdity the whole doctrine of redemption, that is,
Christianity itself, which rests on the two articles of faith; first,
the necessity, and secondly, the reality of a Redeemer — both articles
alike incompatible with redemption by a mere man. And I the rather make the inference from the preceding argument because of the cognation one hath with the other; for the Apostles did also in the consecration of the Eucharist use the Lord's Prayer; and that together with the words of institution was the only form of consecration, saith St. Gregory; and St. Jerome affirms, that the Apostles, by the command of their Lord, used this prayer in the benediction of the elements.This section is an instance of impolitic management of a cause, into which Jeremy Taylor was so often seduced by the fertility of his intellect and the opulence of his erudition. An antagonist by exposing the improbability of the tradition, (and most improbable it surely is), and the little credit due to Saint Gregory and Saint Jerome (not forgetting a Miltonic sneer at their saintship), might draw off the attention from the unanswerable parts of Taylor's reasoning and leave an impression of his having been confuted.
But besides this, when the Apostles had received great measures of the spirit, and by their gift of prayer composed more forms for the help and comfort of the Church, &c.Who would not suppose, that the first two lines were an admitted point of history, instead of a bare conjecture in the form of a bold assertion? O, dearest man! so excellent a cause did not need such Bellarminisms.
And the Fathers of the Council of Antioch complain against Paulus Samosatenus, quod Psalmos et cantus, qui ad Domini nostri Jesu Christi honorem decantari solent, tanquam recentiores, et a viris recentioris memorioe editos, exploserit.This Sam-in-satin-hose, or Paul, the same-as-Satan-is, might, I think, have found his confutation in Pliny's Letter to Trajan. Carmen Christo, quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem.
Which together with theAn ingenious but not tenable solution of Justin Martyr'sthe lectionarium of the Church, the books of the Apostles and Prophets spoken of by Justin Martyr, and said to be used in the Christian congregations, are the constituent parts of liturgy.
which were presumably a Gospel
not the same, and yet so nearly the same, as our Matthew, that its
history and character involve one of the hardest problems of Christian
antiquity. By the by, one cause of the small impression — (small in
proportion to their vast superiority in knowledge and genius) — which
Jeremy Taylor and his compeers made on the religious part of the
community by their controversial writings during the life of Charles I
is to be found in their undue predilection for Patristic learning and
authority. This originated in the wish to baffle the Papists at their
own weapons; but it could not escape notice, that the latter, though
regularly beaten, were yet not so beaten, but that they always kept the
field: and when the same mode of warfare was employed against the
Puritans, it was suspected as Papistical.For the offices of prose we find but small mention of them in the very first time, save only in general terms, and that such there were, and that St. James, St. Mark, St. Peter, and others of the Apostles and Apostolical men, made Liturgies; and if these which we have at this day were not theirs, yet they make probation that these Apostles left others, or else they were impudent people that prefixed their names so early, and the Churches were very incurious to swallow such a bole, if no pretension could have been reasonably made for their justification.A rash and dangerous argument. 1810.
which in its nature has no legitimate object
but history and outward phœnomena, stand in slavish dread like a
child at its house of cards, lest a single card removed may endanger the
whole foundationless edifice. 1819.— — that helps and harms,it could be administered by special prescription, it might do good service as a narcotic for zealotry, or a solvent for bigotry.
Which life and death have sealed with counter charms —
And first I answer, that whatsoever is against the foundation of faith is out of the limits of my question, and does not pretend to compliance or toleration.But as all truths hang together, what error is there which may not be proved to be against the foundation of faith? An inquisitor might make the same code of toleration, and in the next moment light the faggots around a man who had denied the infallibility of Pope and Council.
Indeed if by a heresy we mean that which is against an article of creed, and breaks part of the covenant made between God and man by the mediation of Jesus Christ, I grant it to be a very grievous crime, a calling God's veracity into question, &c.How can he be said to question God's veracity, whose belief is that God never declared it, — who perhaps disbelieves it, because he thinks it opposite to God's honor? For example: — Original sin, in the literal sense of the article, was held by both Papists and Protestants (with exception of the Socinians) as the fundamental article of Christianity; and yet our Jeremy Taylor himself attacked and reprobated it. Why? because he thought it dishonored God. Why may not another man believe the same of the Incarnation, and affirm that it is equal to a circle assuming the essence of a square, and yet remaining a circle? But so it is; we spoil our cause, because we dare not plead it in toto; and a half truth serves for a proof of the opposite falsehood. Jeremy Taylor dared not carry his argument into all its consequences.
Of the nature of faith, and that its duty is completed in believing the articles of the Apostle's creed.This section is for the most part as beautifully written as it was charitably conceived; yet how vain the attempt! Jeremy Taylor ought to have denied that Christian faith is at all intellectual primarily, but only probably; as, cœcteris paribus, it is probable that a man with a pure heart will believe an intelligent Creator. But the faith resides in the predisposing purity of heart, that is, in the obedience of the will to the uncorrupted conscience. For take Taylor's instances; and I ask whether the words or the sense be meant? Surely the latter. Well then, I understand, and so did the dear Bishop, by these texts the doctrine of a Redeemer, who by his agonies of death actually altered the relations of the spirits of all men to their Maker, redeemed them from sin and death eternal, and brought life and immortality into the world. But the Socinian uses the same texts; and means only that a good and gifted teacher of pure morality died a martyr to his opinions, and by his resurrection proved the possibility of all men rising from the dead. He did nothing; — he only taught and afforded evidence. Can two more diverse opinions be conceived? God here; mere man there. Here a redeemer from guilt and corruption, and a satisfaction for offended holiness; there a mere declarer that God imputed no guilt wherever, with or without Christ, the person had repented of it. What could Jeremy Taylor say for the necessity of his sense (which is mine) but what might be said for the necessity of the Nicene Creed? And then as to Rom. x. 9, how can the text mean any thing, unless we know what St. Paul implied in the words the Lord Jesus. From other parts of his writings we know that he meant by the word Lord his divinity or at least essential superhumanity. But the Socinian will not allow this; or, allowing it, denies St. Paul's authority in matters of speculative faith. As well then might I say, it is sufficient for you to believe and repeat the words forte miles reddens; and though one of you mean by it "Perhaps I may be balloted for the militia," and the other understands it to mean, that "Reading is forty miles from London," you are still co-symbolists and believers! While a third person may say, I believe, but do not comprehend, the words; that is, I believe that the person who first used them meant something that is true, — what I do not know; that is, I believe his veracity.
In the pursuance of this great truth, the Apostles, or the holy men, their contemporaries and disciples, composed a creed to be a rule of faith to all Christians; as appears in Irenæus, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Austin, Ruffinus, and divers others; which creed, unless it had contained all the entire object of faith, and the foundation of religion, &c.Jeremy Taylor does not appear to have been a critical scholar. His reading had been oceanic; but he read rather to bring out the growths of his own fertile and teeming mind than to inform himself respecting the products of those of other men. Hence his reliance on the broad assertions of the Fathers; yet it is strange that he should have been ignorant that the Apostles' Creed was growing piecemeal for several centuries.
All catechumens in the Latin Church coming to baptism were interrogated concerning their faith, and gave satisfaction on the recitation of this Creed.I very much doubt this, and rather believe that our present Apostles' Creed was no more than the first instruction of the catechumens prior to baptism; and (as I conclude from Eusebius) that at baptism they professed a more mysterious faith; — the one being the milk, the other the strong meat. Where is the proof that Tertullian was speaking of this Creed? Eusebius speaks in as high terms of the Symbolum Fidei, and, defending himself against charges of heresy, says, "Did I not at my baptism, in the Symbolum Fidei, declare my belief in Christ as God and the co-eternal Word?" The true Creed it was impiety to write down; but such was never the case with the present or initiating Creed. Strange, too, that Jeremy Taylor, who has in this very work written so divinely of tradition, should assume as a certainty that this Creed was in a proper sense Apostolic. Is then the Creed of greater authority than the inspired Scriptures? And can words in the Creed be more express than those of St. Paul to the Colossians, speaking of Christ as the creative mind of his Father, before all worlds, begotten before all things created?
Neither are we obliged to make these Articles more particular and minute than the Creed. For since the Apostles, and indeed our blessed Lord himself, promised heaven to them who believed him to be the Christ that was to come into the world, and that he who believes in him should be partaker of the resurrection and life eternal, he will be as good as his word. Yet because this article was very general, and a complexion rather than a single proposition, the Apostles and others our Fathers in Christ did make it more explicit: and though they have said no more than what lay entire and ready formed in the bosom of the great Article, yet they made their extracts to great purpose and absolute sufficiency; and therefore there needs no more deductions or remoter consequences from the first great Article than the Creed of the Apostles.Most true; but still the question returns, what was meant by the phrase the Christ? Contraries cannot both be true. The Christ could not be both mere man and incarnate God. One or the other must believe falsely on this great key-stone of all the intellectual faith in Christianity. For so it is; alter it, and everything alters; as is proved in Trinitarianism and Socinianism. No two religions can be more different; — I know of no two equally so.
The Church hath power to intend our faith, but not to extend it; to make our belief more evident, but not more large and comprehensive.This and the preceding pages are scarcely honest. For Jeremy Taylor begins with admitting that the Creed might have been composed by others. He has no proof of that most absurd fable of the twelve Apostles clubbing to make it; yet here all he says assumes its inspiration as a certain fact.
But for the present there is no insecurity in ending there where the Apostles ended, in building where they built, in resting where they left us, unless the same infallibility which they had had still continued, which I think I shall hereafter make evident it did not.What a tangle of contradictions Taylor thrusts himself into by the attempt to support a true system, a full third of which he was afraid to mention, and another third was by the same fear induced to deny — at least to take for granted the contrary: for example, the absolute plenary inspiration and infallibility of the Apostles and Evangelists; and yet that their whole function, as far as the consciences of their followers were concerned, was to repeat the two or three sentences, that Jesus was Christ (so says one of the Evangelists), the Christ of God (so says another), the Christ the Son of the living God (so says a third), that he rose from the dead, and for the remission of sins, to as many as believed and professed that he was the Christ or the Lord, and died and rose for the remission of sins. Surely no miraculous communication of God's infallibility was necessary for this. But if this infallibility was stamped on all they said and wrote, is it credible that any part should not be equally binding? I declare I can make nothing out of this section, but that it is necessary for men to believe the Apostles' Creed; but what they believe by it is of no consequence. For instance; what if I chose to understand by the word 'dead' a state of trance or suspended animation; — language furnishing plenty of analogies — dead in a swoon — dead drunk — and so on; — should I still be a Christian? 'Born of the Virgin Mary.' What if, as Priestley and others, I interpreted it as if we should say, 'the former Miss Vincent was his mother.' I need not say that I disagree with Taylor's premisses only because they are not broad enough, and with his aim and principal conclusion only because it does not go far enough. I would have the law grounded wholly in the present life, religion only on the life to come. Religion is debased by temporal motives, and law rendered the drudge of prejudice and passion by pretending to spiritual aims. But putting this aside, and judging of this work solely as a chain of reasoning, I seem to find one leading error in it; namely, that Taylor takes the condition of a first admission into the Church of Christ for the fullness of faith which was to be gradually there acquired. The simple acknowledgment, that they accepted Christ as their Lord and King was the first lisping of the infant believer at which the doors were opened, and he began the process of growth in the faith.
The great heresy that troubled them was the doctrine of the necessity of keeping the law of Moses, the necessity of circumcision, against which doctrine they were therefore zealous, because it was a direct overthrow to the very end and excellency of Christ's coming.The Jewish converts were still bound to the rite of circumcision, not indeed as under the Law, or by the covenant of works, but as the descendants of Abraham, and by that especial covenant which St. Paul rightly contends was a covenant of grace and faith. But the heresy consisted wholly in the attempt to impose this obligation on the Gentile converts, in the infatuation of some of the Galatians, who, having no pretension to be descendants of Abraham, could, as the Apostle urges, only adopt the rite as binding themselves under the law of works, and thereby apostatizing from the covenant of faith by free grace. And this was the decision of the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem. Acts xv. Rhenferd, in his Treatise on the Ebionites and other pretended heretics in Palestine, so grossly and so ignorantly calumniated by Epiphanius, has written excellently well on this subject. Jeremy Taylor is mistaken throughout.
And so it was in this great question of circumcision.It is really wonderful that a man like Bishop Taylor could have read the New Testament, and have entertained a doubt as to the decided opinion of all the Apostles, that every born Jew was bound to be circumcised. Opinion? The very doubt never suggested itself. When something like this opinion was slanderously attributed to Paul, observe the almost ostentatious practical contradiction of the calumny which was adopted by him at the request and by the advice of the other Apostles. (Acts, xxi. 21-26.) The rite of circumcision, I say, was binding on all the descendants of Abraham through Isaac for all time even to the end of the world; but the whole law of Moses was binding on the Jewish Christians till the heaven and the earth — that is, the Jewish priesthood and the state — had passed away in the destruction of the temple and city; and the Apostles observed every tittle of the Law.
The heresy of the Nicolaitans.Heresy is not a proper term for a plainly anti-Christian sect. Nicolaitans is the literal Greek translation of Balaamites; destroyers of the people. Rev. ii. 14, 15.
For heresy is not an error of the understanding, but an error of the will.Most excellent. To this Taylor should have adhered, and to its converse. Faith is not an accuracy of logic, but a rectitude of heart.
It was the heresy of the Gnostics, that it was no matter how men lived, so they did but believe aright.I regard the extinction of all the writings of the Gnostics among the heaviest losses of Ecclesiastical literature. We have only the account of their inveterate enemies. Individual madmen there have been in all ages, but I do not believe that any sect of Gnostics ever held this opinion in the sense here supposed.
And, indeed, if we remember that St. Paul reckons heresy amongst the works of the flesh, and ranks it with all manner of practical impieties, we shall easily perceive that if a man mingles not a vice with his opinion, — if he be innocent in his life, though deceived in his doctrine, — his error is his misery not his crime; it makes him an argument of weakness and an object of pity, but not a person sealed up to ruin and reprobation.O admirable! How could Taylor, after this, preach and publish his Sermon in defence of persecution, at least against toleration!
Ebion, Manes.No such man as Ebion ever, as I can see, existed3; and Manes is rather a doubtful ens.
But I shall observe this, that although the Nicene Fathers in that case, at that time, and in that conjuncture of circumstances, did well, &c.What Bull and Waterland have urged in defence of the Nicene Fathers is (like every thing else from such men) most worthy of all attention. They contend that no other term but
could secure the
Christian faith against both the two contrary errors, Tritheism with
subversion of the unity of the Godhead on the one hand, and
creature-worship on the other. For, to use Waterland's mode of argument4, either Eusebius of Nicomedia with the four other dissenters at Nice
were right or wrong in their assertion, that Christ could not be of the
of the self-originated First by derivation, as a son from
a father: — if they were right, they either must have discovered some
third distinct and intelligible form of origination in addition to
begotten and created, or they had not and could not. Now the latter
was notoriously the fact. Therefore to deny the was
implicitly to deny the generation of the second Person, and thus to
assert his creation. But if he was a creature, he could not be adorable
without idolatry. Nor did the chain of inevitable consequences stop
here. His characteristic functions of Redeemer, Mediator, King, and
final Judge, must all cease to be attributable to Christ; and the
conclusion is, that between the Homoousian scheme and mere
Psilanthropism there is no intelligible medium. If this, then, be
not a fundamental article of faith, what can be?
is really capable of achieving the end here set forth. One
objection to the term is, that it was not translatable into the language
of the Western Church. Consubstantial is not the translation:
substantia answers to 
, not to ; and
hence, when was used by the Nicene Fathers in
distinction from , the Latin Church was obliged to render
it by some other word, and thus introduced that most unhappy and
improper term persona. Would you know my own inward judgment on
this question, it is this: first, that this pregnant idea, the root and
form of all ideas, is not within the sphere of conceptual logic, — that
is, of the understanding, — and is therefore of necessity inexpressible;
for no idea can be adequately represented in words: — secondly, that I
agree with Bull and Waterland against Bishop Taylor, that there was need
of a public and solemn decision on this point: — but, lastly, that I am
more than doubtful respecting the fitness or expediency of the term
, and hold that the decision ought to have been
negative. For at first all parties agreed in the positive point, namely,
that Christ was the Son of God, and that the Son of God was truly God,
"or very God of very God." All that was necessary to be added was, that
the only begotten Son of God was not created nor begotten in time. More
than this might be possible, and subject of insight; but it was not
determinable by words, and was therefore to be left among the rewards of
the Spirit to the pure in heart in inward vision and silent
contemplation.So did the ancient Papias understand Christ's millenary reign upon earth, and so depressed the hopes of Christianity and their desires to the longing and expectation of temporal pleasures and satisfactions. And he was followed by Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Tertullian, Lactantius, and indeed, the whole Church generally, till St. Austin and St. Jerome's time, who, first of any whose works are extant, did reprove the error.Bishop Taylor is, I think, mistaken in two points; first, that the Catholic Millenaries looked forward to carnal pleasures in the kingdom of Christ; — for even the Jewish Rabbis of any note represented the Millenium as the preparative and transitional state to perfect spiritualization: — second, that the doctrine of Christ's reign upon earth rested wholly or principally on the twentieth chapter of the Revelations, which actually, in my judgment, opposes it.
, in hoc seculo, (x. 30) of St. Mark?
If the first three Gospels, joined with the unbroken faith and tradition
of the Church for nearly three centuries, can decide the question, the
Millenarians have the best of the argument.One thing only I observe (and we shall find it true in most writings, whose authority is urged in questions of theology), that the authority of the tradition is not it which moves the assent, but the nature of the thing; and because such a canon is delivered, they do not therefore believe the sanction or proposition so delivered, but disbelieve the tradition if they do not like the matter, and so do not judge of the matter by the tradition, but of the tradition by the matter.This just and acute remark is, in fact, no less applicable to Scripture in all doctrinal points, and if infidelity is not to overspread England as well as France, the same criterion (that is, the internal evidence) must be extended to all points, to the narratives no less than to the precept. The written words must be tried by the Word from the beginning, in which is life, and that life the light of men. Reduce it to the noetic pentad, or universal form of contemplation, except where all the terms are absolute, and consequently there is no punctum indifferens, — in divinis tetras, in omnibus aliis pentas, and the form stands thus5.
So that it cannot make it divine and necessary to be heartily believed. It may make it lawful, not make it true; that is, it may possibly, by such means, become a law, but not a truth.This is a sophism which so evident a truth did not need. Apply the reasoning to an act of Parliament previously to the royal sanction. Will it hold good to say, if it was law after the sanction, it was law before? The assertion of the Papal theologians is, that the divine providence may possibly permit even the majority of a legally convened Council to err; but by force of a divine promise cannot permit both a majority and the Pope to err on the same point. The flaw in this is, that the Romish divines rely on a conditional promise unconditionally. To Taylor's next argument the Romish respondent would say, that an exception, grounded on a specific evident necessity, does not invalidate the rule in the absence of any equally evident necessity.
It is not the
truth, but the sign or mark, by which the Church at large may know that
it is truth, which is here provided for; that is, not the truth simply,
but the obligation of receiving it as such. Ten thousand may apprehend
the latter, only ten of whom might be capable of determining the former.So that now (that we may apply this) there are seven general Councils, which by the Church of Rome are condemned of error ... The council of Ariminum, consisting of six hundred Bishops.It is the mark of a faction that it never hesitates to sacrifice a greater good common to them and to their opponents to a lesser advantage obtained over those opponents. Never was there a stranger instance of imprudence, at least, than the act of the Athanasian party in condemning so roundly the great Council of Ariminum as heretical, and for little more than the charitable wish of the many hundred Bishops there assembled to avoid a word that had set all Christendom by the ears. They declared that
were substantially 
distinct, but nevertheless, one God; and though there might be some
incautious phrases used by them, the good Bishops declared that if their
decree was indeed Arian, or introduced aught to the derogation of the
Son's absolute divinity, it was against their knowledge and intention,
and that they renounced it.Gratian says, that the Council means by a concubine a wife married sine dote et solennitate; but this is daubing with untempered mortar.Here I think Taylor wrong and Gratian right; for not a hundred years ago the very same decree was passed by the Lutheran clergy in Prussia, determining that left-hand marriages were to be discouraged, but did not exclude from communion. These marriages were invented for the sake of poor nobles: they could have but that one wife, and the children followed the rank and title of the mother, not of the father.
Thirdly; for pasce oves, there is little in that allegation besides the boldness of the objectors.I have ever thought that the derivation of the Papal monarchy from the thrice repeated command, pasce oves, the most brazen of all the Pope's bulls. It was because Peter had given too good proof that he was more disposed to draw the sword for Christ than to perform the humble duties of a shepherd, that our Lord here strongly, though tenderly, reminds him of his besetting temptation. The words are most manifestly a reproof and a warning, not a commission. In like manner the very letter of the famous paronomastic text proves that Peter's confession, not Peter himself, was the rock. His name was, perhaps, not so much stone as stoner; not so much rock as rockman; and Jesus hearing this unexpected confession of his mysterious Sonship (for this is one of the very few cases in which the internal evidence decides for the superior fidelity of the first Gospel), and recognizing in it an immediate revelation from heaven, exclaims, "Well, art thou the man of the rock; and upon this rock will I build my church," not on this man. Add too, that the law revealed to Moses and the confession of the divine attributes, are named the rock, both in the Pentateuch and in the Psalms.
And yet again, another degree of uncertainty is, to whom the Bishops of Rome do succeed. For St. Paul was as much Bishop of Rome as St. Peter was; there he presided, there he preached, and he it was that was the doctor of the uncircumcision and of the Gentiles, St. Peter of the circumcision and of the Jews only; and therefore the converted Jews at Rome might with better reason claim the privilege of St. Peter, than the Romans and the Churches in her communion, who do not derive from Jewish parents.I wonder that Taylor should have introduced so very strong an argument merely obiter. If St. Peter ever was at Rome, it must have been for the Jewish converts or convertendi exclusively, and on what do the earliest Fathers rest the fact of Peter's being at Rome? Do they appeal to any document? No; but to their own arbitrary and most improbable interpretation of the word Babylon in St. Peter's first epistle7. I am too deeply impressed with the general difficulty arising out of the strange eclipse of all historic documents, of all particular events, from the arrival of St. Paul at Rome as related by St. Luke and the time when Justin Martyr begins to shed a scanty light, to press any particular instance of it. Yet, if Peter really did arrive at Rome, and was among those destroyed by Nero, it is strange that the Bishop and Church of Rome should have preserved no record of the particulars.
But what shall we think of that decretal of Gregory the Third, who wrote to Boniface his legate in Germany, quod illi, quorum uxores infirmitate aliqua morbida debitum reddere noluerunt, aliis poterant nubere.Supposing the noluerunt to mean nequeunt, or at least any state of mind and feeling that does not exclude moral attachment, I, as a Protestant, abominate this decree of Gregory III; for I place the moral, social, and spiritual helps and comforts as the proper and essential ends of Christian marriage, and regard the begetting of children as a contingent consequence. But on the contrary tenet of the Romish Church, I do not see how Gregory could consistently decree otherwise.
Nor that Origen taught the pains of hell not to have an eternal duration.And yet there can be no doubt that Taylor himself held with Origen on this point. But, non licebat dogmatizare oppositum, quia determinatum fuerat.
And except it be in the Apostles' Creed and articles of such nature, there is nothing which may with any color be called a consent, much less tradition universal.It may be well to remember, whenever Taylor speaks of the Apostles' Creed, that Pearson's work on that Creed was not then published. Nothing is more suspicious than copies of creeds in the early Fathers; it was so notoriously the custom of the transcribers to make them square with those in use in their own time.
Such as makes no invasion upon their great reputation, which I desire should be preserved as sacred as it ought.The vision of the mitre dawned on Taylor; and his recollection of Laud came to the assistance of the Fathers; of many of whom in his heart Taylor, I think, entertained a very mean opinion. How could such a man do otherwise? I could forgive them their nonsense and even their economical falsehoods; but their insatiable appetite for making heresies, and thus occasioning the neglect or destruction of so many valuable works, Origen's for instance, this I cannot forgive or forget.
Of the incompetency of the Church, in its diffusive capacity, to be judge of controversies; and the impertinency of that pretence of the Spirit.Now here begin my serious differences with Jeremy Taylor, which may be characterized in one sentence; ideas versus conceptions and images. I contend that the Church in the Christian sense is an idea; — not therefore a chimera, or a fancy, but a real being and a most powerful reality. Suppose the present state of science in this country, with this only difference that the Royal and other scientific societies were not founded: might I not speak of a scientific public, and its influence on the community at large? Or should I be talking of a chimera, a shadow, or a non-entity? Or when we speak with honest pride of the public spirit of this country as the power which supported the nation through the gigantic conflict with France, do we speak of nothing, because we cannot say, — "It is in this place or in that catalogue of names?" At the same time I most readily admit that no rule can be grounded formally on the supposed assent of this ideal Church, the members of which are recorded only in the book of life at any one moment. In Taylor's use and application of the term, Church, the visible Christendom, and in reply to the Romish divines, his arguments are irrefragable.
So that if they read, study, pray, search records, and use all the means of art and industry in the pursuit of truth, it is not with a resolution to follow that which shall seem truth to them, but to confirm what before they did believe.Alas, if Protestant and Papist were named by individuals answering or not answering to this description, what a vast accession would not the Pope's muster-roll receive! In the instance of the Council of Trent, the iniquity of the Emperor and the Kings of France and Spain consisted in their knowledge that the assembly at Trent had no pretence to be a general Council, that is, a body representative of the Catholic or even of the Latin Church. It may be, and in fact it is, very questionable whether any Council, however large and fairly chosen, is not an absurdity except under the universal faith that the Holy Ghost miraculously dictates all the decrees: and this is irrational, where the same superseding Spirit does not afford evidence of its presence by producing unanimity. I know nothing, if I may so say, more ludicrous than the supposition of the Holy Ghost contenting himself with a majority, in questions respecting faith, or decrees binding men to inward belief, which again binds a Christian to outward profession. Matters of discipline and ceremony, having peace and temporal order for their objects, are proper enough for a Council; but these do not need any miraculous interference. Still if any Council is admitted in matters of doctrine, those who have appealed to it must abide by the determination of the majority, however they might prefer the opinion of the minority, just as in acts of Parliament.
Of some causes of error in the exercise of reason, which are inculpate in themselves.It is a lamentable misuse of the term, reason, — thus to call by that name the mere faculty of guessing and babbling. The making reason a faculty, instead of a light, and using the term as a mere synonyme of the understanding, and the consequent ignorance of the true nature of ideas, and that none but ideas are objects of faith — are the grounds of all Jeremy Taylor's important errors.
But men may understand what they please, especially when they are to expound oracles.If this sentence had occurred in Hume or Voltaire!
And then if ever truth be afflicted, she shall also be destroyed.Here and in many other passages of his other works Jeremy Taylor very unfairly states this argument of the anti-prelatic party. It was not that the Church of England was afflicted (the Puritans themselves had been much more afflicted by the prelates); but that having appealed to the decision of the sword, the cause was determined against it. But in fact it is false that the Puritans ever did argue as Taylor represents them. Laud and his confederates had begun by incarcerating, scourging, and inhumanly mutilating their fellow Christians for not acceding to their fancies, and proceeded to goad and drive the King to levy or at least maintain war against his Parliament: and the Parliamentary party very naturally cited their defeat and the overthrow of the prelacy as a judgment on their blood-thirstiness, not as a proof of their error in questions of theology.
All that I shall say, &c. ad finem.An admirable paragraph. Taylor is never more himself, never appears greater, or wiser, than when he enters on this topic, namely, the many and various causes beside truth which occasion men to hold an opinion for truth.
Of such men as these it was said by St. Austin: Cæteram turbam non intelligendi vivacitas, sed credendi simplicitas tutissimam facit.Such charity is indeed notable policy: salvation made easy for the benefit of obedient dupes.
I deny not but certain and known idolatry, or any other sort of practical impiety with its principiant doctrine, may be punished corporally, because it is no other but matter of fact.In the Jewish theocracy, I admit; because the fact of idolatry was a crime, namely, crimen læsæ majestatis, an overt act subversive of the fundamental law of the state, and breaking asunder the vinculum et copulam unitatis et cohæsionis. But in making the position general, Taylor commits the sophisma omissi essentialis; he omits the essential of the predicate, namely, criminal; — not its being a fact rendering it punishable, but its being a criminal fact.
intimately connected with localities and local
events. The mere habit of staring or laughing at nine religions must
necessarily end in laughing at the tenth, that is, the religion of the
man's own birth-place. The first of these causes, that is, the
detachment of all love and hope from the things of the visible world,
and from temporal objects not merely selfish, must have produced in
thousands a tendency to, and a craving after, an internal religion,
while the latter occasioned an absolute necessity of a mundane as
opposed to a national or local religion. I am far from denying or
doubting the influence of the excellence of the Christian faith in the
propagation of the Christian Church or the power of its evidences; but
still I am persuaded that the necessity of some religion, and the
untenable nature and obsolete superannuated character of all the others,
occasioned the conversion of the largest though not the worthiest part
of the new-made Christians. Here, though exploded in physics, we have
recourse to the horror vacui as an efficient cause. This view of the
subject can offend or startle those only who, in their passion for
wonderment, virtually exclude the agency of Providence from any share in
the realizing of its own benignant scheme; as if the disposition of
events by which the whole world of human history, from north and south,
east and west, directed their march to one central point, the
establishment of Christendom, were not the most stupendous of miracles!
It is a yet sadder consideration, that the same men who can find God's
presence and agency only in sensuous miracles, wholly misconceive the
characteristic purpose and proper objects of historic Christianity and
of the outward and visible Church, of which historic Christianity is the
ground and the indispensable condition; but this is a subject delicate
and dangerous, at all events requiring a less scanty space than the
margins of these honestly printed pages.The death of Ananias and Sapphira, and the blindness of Elymas the sorcerer, amount not to this, for they were miraculous inflictions.One great difficulty respecting, not the historic truth (of which there can be no rational doubt), but the miraculous nature, of the sudden deaths of Ananias and Sapphira is derived from the measure which gave occasion to it, namely, the sale of their property by the new converts of Palestine, in order to establish that community of goods, which, according to a Rabbinical tradition, existed before the Deluge, and was to be restored by the children of Seth (one of the names which the Jewish Christians assumed) before the coming of the Son of Man. Now this was a very gross and carnal, not to say fanatical, misunderstanding of our Lord's words, and had the effect of reducing the Churches of the Circumcision to beggary, and of making them an unnecessary burthen on the new Churches in Greece and elsewhere. See Rhenferd as to this.
The religion of Jesus Christ is the form of sound doctrine and wholesome words, which is set down in Scripture indefinitely, actually conveyed to us by plain places, and separated as for the question of necessary or not necessary by the Symbol of the Apostles.I cannot refrain from again expressing my surprise at the frequency and the undoubting positiveness of this assertion in so great a scholar, so profound a Patrician, as Jeremy Taylor was. He appears bona fide to have believed the absurd fable of this Creed having been a pic-nic to which each of the twelve Apostles contributed his symbolum. Had Jeremy Taylor taken it for granted so completely and at so early an age, that he read without attending to the various passages in the Fathers and ecclesiastical historians, which shew the gradual formation of this Creed? It is certainly possible, and I see no other solution of the problem.
But then, that God is not as much before hand with Christian as with Jewish infants is a thing which can never be believed by them who understand that in the Gospel God opened all his treasures of mercies, and unsealed the fountain itself; whereas, before, he poured forth only rivulets of mercy and comfort.This is mere sophistry; and I doubt whether Taylor himself believed it a sufficient reply to his own argument. There is no doubt that the primary purpose of Circumcision was to peculiarize the Jews by an indelible visible sign; and it was as necessary that Jewish infants should be known to be Jews as Jewish men. Then humanity and mere safety determined that the bloody rite should be performed in earliest infancy, as soon as the babe might be supposed to have gotten over the fever of his birth. This is clear; for women had no correspondent rite, but the same result was obtained by the various severe laws concerning their marriage with aliens and other actions.
And as those persons who could not be circumcised (I mean the females), yet were baptized, as is notorious in the Jews' books and story.Yes, but by no command of God, but only their own fancies.
Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter therein: receive it as a little child receives it, that is, with innocence, and without any let or hinderance.Is it not evident that Christ here converted negatives into positives? As a babe is without malice negatively, so you must be positively and by actuation, that is, full of love and meekness; as the babe is unresisting, so must you be docile, and so on.
And he that hath without difference commanded that all nations should be baptized, hath without difference commanded all sorts of persons.Even so our Lord commanded all men to repent, did he therefore include babes of a month old8? Yes, when they became capable of repentance. And even so babes are included in the general command of Baptism, that is, as soon as they are baptizable. But Baptism supposed both repentance and a promise; babes are not capable of either, and therefore not of Baptism. For the physical element was surely only the sign and seal of a promise by a counter promise and covenant. The rite of Circumcision is wholly inapplicable; for there a covenant was between Abraham and God, not between God and the infant. "Do so and so to all your male children, and I will favor them. Mark them before the world as a peculiar and separate race, and I will then consider them as my chosen people." But Baptism is personal, and the baptized a subject not an object; not a thing, but a person; that is, having reason, or actually and not merely potentially. Besides, Jeremy Taylor was too sound a student of Erasmus and Grotius not to know the danger of screwing up St. Paul's accommodations of Jewish rites, meant doubtless as inducements of rhetoric and innocent compliances with innocent and invincible prejudices, into articles of faith. The conclusions are always true; but all the arguments are not and were never intended to be reducible into syllogisms demonstrative.
But let us hear the answer. First, it is said, that Baptism and the Spirit signify the same thing; for by water is meant the effect of the Spirit.By the 'effect,' the Anabaptist clearly means the causa causans, the 'act of the Spirit.' As well might Taylor say that a thought is not thinking, because it is the effect of thinking. Had Taylor been right, the water to be an apt sign ought to have been dirty water; for that would be the res effecta. But it is pure water, therefore res agens.
For it is certain and evident, that regeneration or new birth is here enjoined to all as of absolute and indispensable necessity.Yet Taylor himself has denied it over and over again in his tracts on Original Sin; and how is it in harmony with the words of Christ — Of such are the kingdom of heaven? Are we not regenerated back to a state of spiritual infancy? Yet for such Anti-pædobaptists as hold the dogma of original guilt it is doubtless a fair argument; but Taylor ought not to have used it as certain and evident in itself, and not merely ad hominem et per accidens. As making a bow is in England the understood conventional mark or visible language of reverence, so in the East was Baptism the understood outward and visible mark of conversion and initiation. So much for the visible act: then for the particular meaning affixed to it by Christ. This was
an adoption of a new principle of action and consequent reform of
conduct; a cleansing, but especially a cleansing away of the carnal film
from the mind's eye. Hence the primitive Church called baptism 
light, and the Eucharist 
life. Baptism,
therefore, was properly the sign, the precursor, or rather the
first act, the initium, of that regeneration of which the whole
spiritual life of a Christian is the complete process; the Eucharist
indicating the means, namely, the continued assimilation of and to the
Divine Humanity. Hence the Eucharist was called the continuation of the
Incarnation.And yet it does not follow that they should all be baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire. But it is meant only that that glorious effect should be to them a sign of Christ's eminency above him; they should see from him a Baptism greater than that of John.This is exactly of a piece with that gloss of the Socinians in evasion of St. Paul's words concerning Christ's emptying himself of the form of God, and becoming a servant, which all the world of Christians had interpreted of the Incarnation. But no! it only referred to the miracle of his transfiguration!
— — credat Judæus Apella!St. John could not mean this, unless he denied the distinct personality of the Holy Ghost. For it was the Holy Ghost that then descended as the substitute of Christ; nor does St. Luke even hint that it was understood to be a Baptism, even if we suppose the tongues of fire to be anything visual, and not as we say, Victory sate on his helmet like an eagle. The spirit of eloquence descended into them like a tongue of fire, and that they spoke different languages is, I conceive, no where said; but only that being rustic Galileans they yet spake a dialect intelligible to all the Jews from the most different provinces. For it is clear they were all Jews, and, as Jews, had doubtless a lingua communis which all understood when spoken, though persons of education only could speak it. Even so a German boor understands, but yet cannot talk in, High German, that is, the language of his Bible and Hymn-book. So it is with the Scotch of Aberdeen with regard to pure English. In short Taylor's arguments press on the Anabaptists, only as far as the Anabaptists baptize at all; they are in fact attacks on Baptism; and it would only follow from them that the Baptist is more rational than the Pædobaptist, but that the Quaker is more consistent than either. To pull off your hat is in Europe a mark of respect. What, if a parent in his last will should command his children and posterity to pull off their hats to their superiors, — and in course of time these children or descendants emigrated to China, or some place, where the same ceremony either meant nothing, or an insult. Should we not laugh at them if they did not interpret the words into, Pay reverence to your superiors. Even so Baptism was the Jewish custom, and natural to those countries; but with us it would be a more significant rite if applied as penance for excess of zeal and acts of bigotry, especially as sprinkling.
Non ego.
But farther yet I demand, can infants receive Christ in the Eucharist?Surely the wafer and the tea-spoonful of wine might be swallowed by an infant, as well as water be sprinkled upon him. But if the former is not the Eucharist because without faith and repentance, so cannot the latter, it would seem, be Baptism. For they are declared equal adjuncts of both Sacraments. The argument therefore is a mere petitio principii sub lite.
The promise of the Holy Ghost is made to all, to us and to our children: and if the Holy Ghost belongs to them, then Baptism belongs to them also.If this be not rank enthusiasm I know not what is. The Spirit is promised to them, first, as protection and providence, and as internal operation when those faculties are developed, in and by which the Spirit co-operates. Can Taylor shew an instance in Scripture in which the Holy Spirit is said to operate simply, and without the co-operation of the subject?
And when the boys in the street sang Hosanna to the Son of David, our blessed Lord said that if they had held their peace, the stones of the street would have cried out Hosanna.By the same argument I could defend the sprinkling of mules and asses with holy water, as is done yearly at Rome on St. Antony's day, I believe. For they are capable of health and sickness, of restiveness and of good temper, and these are all emanations from their Creator. Besides in the great form of Baptism the words are not
but
and many learned men have shewn that they may
mean 'into the power or influence' of the Father, the Son, and the
Spirit. But spiritual influences suppose capability in act of receiving
them; and we must either pretend to believe that the soul of the babe,
that is, his consciousness, is acted on without his consciousness, or
that the instrumental cause is antecedent by years to its effect, which
would be a conjunction disjunctive with a vengeance. Again, Baptism is
nothing except as followed by the Spirit; but it is irrational to say,
that the Spirit acts on the mere potentialities of an infant. For
wherein is the Spirit, as used in Scripture in appropriation to
Christians, different from God's universal providence and goodness, but
that the latter like the sun may shine on the wicked and on the good, on
the passive and on those who by exercise increase its effect; whereas
the former always implies a co-operant subject, that is, a developed
reason. When God gave his Spirit miraculously to the young child,
Daniel, he at the same time miraculously hastened the development of his
understanding.But we see also that although Christ required faith of them who came to be healed, yet when any were brought, or came in behalf of others, he only required faith of them who came, and their faith did benefit to others....So far from certainty, I find no strength at all in this reproof. Doubtless Christ at a believer's request might heal his child's or his servant's bodily sickness; for this was an act of power, requiring only an object. But is it any where said, that at a believer's request he gave the Spirit and the graces of faith to an unbeliever without any mental act, or moral co-operation of the latter? This would have been a proof indeed; but Taylor's instance is a mere ad aliud.
But this instance is so certain a reproof of this objection of theirs, which is their principal, which is their all, that it is a wonder to me they should not all be convinced at the reading and observing of it.
And although there are some effects of the Holy Spirit which require natural capacities to be their foundation; yet those are theThe Bishop flutters about and about, but never fairly answers the question, What does Baptism do? The Baptist says it attests forgiveness of sins, as the reward of faith and repentance. This is intelligible; but as to theor powers of working: but the
and the inheritance and the title to the promises require nothing on our part, but that we can receive them.
— the children of believers, if so
taught and educated, are surely entitled to the promises; and what
analogy is there in this to any one act of power and gift of powers
mentioned as when the word is really used in
contradistinction from Baptism is spoken of many
times by St. Paul properly as well as metaphorically, and in the former
sense it is never described as a 
on a passive
recipient, while in the latter sense it always respects an 
of the Spirit of God, and a 
in the spirit
of the recipient. All that Taylor can make out is, that Baptism effects
a potentiality in a potentiality, or a chalking of chalk to make white
white.And if it be questioned by wise men whether the want of it do not occasion their eternal loss, and it is not questioned whether Baptism does them any hurt or no, then certainly to baptize them is the surer way without all peradventure.Now this is the strongest argument of all against Infant Baptism, and that which alone weighed at one time with me, namely, that it supposes and most certainly encourages a belief concerning God, the most blasphemous and intolerable; and no human wit can express this more forcibly and affectingly than Taylor himself has done in his Letter to a Lady on Original Sin. It is too plain to be denied that the belief of the strict necessity of Infant Baptism, and the absolute universality of the practice did not commence till the dogma of original guilt had begun to despotize in the Church: while that remained uncertain and sporadic, Infant Baptism was so too; some did it, many did not. But as soon as Original Sin in the sense of actual guilt became the popular creed, then all did it9.
And although they have done violence to all philosophy and the reason of man, and undone and cancelled the principles of two or three sciences, to bring in this article; yet they have a divine revelation, whose literal and grammatical sense, if that sense were intended, would warrant them to do violence to all the sciences in the circle. And indeed that Transubstantiation is openly and violently against natural reason is no argument to make them disbelieve it, who believe the mystery of the Trinity in all those niceties of explication which are in the School (and which now-a-days pass for the doctrine of the Church), with as much violence to the principles of natural and supernatural philosophy as can be imagined to be in the point of Transubstantiation.This is one of the many passages in Taylor's works which lead me to think that his private opinions were favorable to Socinianism. Observe, to the views of Socinus, not to modern Unitarianism, as taught by Priestley and Belsham. And doubtless Socinianism would much more easily bear a doubt, whether the difference between it and the orthodox faith was not more in words than in the things meant, than the Arian hypothesis. A mere conceptualist, at least, might plausibly ask whether either party, the Athanasian or the Socinian, had a sufficiently distinct conception of what the one meant by the hypostatical union of the Divine Logos with the man Jesus; or the other of his plenary, total, perpetual, and continuous inspiration, to have any well-grounded assurance, that they do not mean the same thing.
And now for any danger to men's persons for suffering such a doctrine, this I shall say, that if they who do it are not formally guilty of idolatry, there is no danger that they whom they persuade to it, should be guilty ... When they believe it to be no idolatry, then their so believing it is sufficient security from that crime, which hath so great a tincture and residency in the will, that from thence only it hath its being criminal.Will not this argument justify all idolaters? For surely they believe themselves worshippers either of the Supreme Being under a permitted form, or of some son of God (as Apollo) to whom he has delegated such and such powers. If this be the case, there is no such crime as idolatry: yet the second commandment expressly makes the worshipping of God in or before a visual image of him not only idolatry, but the most hateful species of it. Now do they not worship God in the visible form of bread, and prostrate themselves before pictures of the Trinity? Are we so mad as to suppose that the pious heathens thought the statue of Jupiter, Jove himself? No; and yet these heathens were idolaters. But there was no such being as Jupiter. No! Was there no King of Kings and Lord of Lords; and does the name Jove instead of Jehovah (perhaps the same word too) make the difference? Were Marcus Antoninus and Epictetus idolaters?
Although God exacts not an impossible law under eternal and insufferable pains, yet he imposes great holiness in unlimited and indefinite measures, with a design to give excellent proportions of reward answerable to the greatness of our endeavour. Hell is not the end of them that fail in the greatest measures of perfection; but great degrees of heaven shall be their portion who do all that they can always, and offend in the fewest instances.It is not to be denied that one if not more of the parables appears to sanction this, but the same parables would by consequence seem to favour a state of Purgatory. From John, Paul, and the philosophy of the doctrine, I should gather a different faith, and find a sanction for this too in one of the parables, namely, that of the labourer at the eleventh hour. Heaven, bliss, union with God through Christ, do not seem to me comparative terms, or conceptions susceptible of degree. But it is a difficult question. The first Fathers of the Reformation, and the early Fathers of the primitive Church, present different systems, and in a very different spirit.
Descriptions of repentance taken from the Holy Scriptures.This is a beautiful collection of texts. Still the pious but unconverted Jew (a Moses Mendelsohn, for instance), has a right to ask, What then did Christ teach or do, such and of such additional moment as to be rightfully entitled the founder of a new law, instead of being, like Isaiah and others, an enforcer and explainer of the old? If Christianity, or the opus operans of Redemption, was synchronous with the Fall of man, then the same answer must be returned to the passages here given from the Old Testament as to those from the New; namely, that Sanctification is the result of Redemption, not its efficient cause or previous condition. Assuredly
and Sanctification
differ only as the plant and the growth or growing of the plant. But the
words of the Apostle (it will be said) are exhortative and dehortative.
Doubtless! and so would be the words of a wise physician addressed to a
convalescent. Would this prove that the patient's revalescence had been
independent of the medicines given him? The texts are addressed to the
free will, and therefore concerning possible objects of free will. No
doubt! Should that process, the end and virtue of which is to free the
will, destroy the free will? But I cannot make it out to my
understanding, how the two are compatible. — Answer; the spirit knows the
things of the spirit. Here lies the sole true ground of
Latitudinarianism, Arminian, or Socinian; and this is the sole and
sufficient confutation; spiritualia spiritus cognoscit. Would you
understand with your ears instead of hearing with your understanding?
Now, as the ears to the understanding, so is the understanding to the
spirit. This Plato knew; and art thou a master in Israel, and knowest it
not?Who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace.By this passage we must interpret the words "sin wilfully," in reference to an unpardonable sin, in the preceding sentence.
Of the moral capacity of sinful habits.Ib. s. ii. p. 432. Probably from the holiness of his own life, Taylor has but just fluttered about a bad habit, not fully described it. He has omitted, or rather described contradictorily, the case of those with whom the objections to sin are all strengthened, the dismal consequences more glaring and always present to them as an avenging fury, the sin loathed, detested, hated; and yet, spite of all this, nay, the more for all this, perpetrated. Both lust and intemperance would furnish too many instances of these most miserable victims.
For every vicious habit being radicated in the will, and being a strong love, inclination and adhesion to sin, unless the natural being of this love be taken off, the enmity against God remains.But the most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy of this "grace of God:" he never denies, yet never admits, it any separate operancy per se. And this, I fancy, is the true distinction of Arminianisrn and Calvinism in their moral effects. Arminianism is cruel to individuals, for fear of damaging the race by false hopes and improper confidences; while Calvinism is horrible for the race, but full of consolation to the suffering individual.
But if a single act of contrition cannot procure pardon of sins that are habitual, then a wicked man that returns not till it be too late to root out vicious habits, must despair of salvation. I answer, &c.Would not Taylor's purposes have been sufficiently attained by pressing the contrast between attrition and contrition with faith, and the utter improbability that the latter (which alone can be efficient), shall be vouchsafed to a sinner who has continued in his sins in the flattery of a death-bed repentance; a blasphemy that seems too near that against the Holy Ghost? My objection to Taylor is, that he seems to reduce the death of Christ almost to a cypher; a contrivance rather to reconcile the attributes of God, than an act of infinite love to save sinners. But the truth is, that this is the peccant part of Arminianism, and Tillotson is yet more open than Taylor. Forbid me, common goodness, that I should think Tillotson conscious of Socinianism! but that his tenets involved it, I more than suspect. See his Discourses on Transubstantiation, and those near it in the same volume.
Now there is no peradventure, but new-converted persons, heathens newly giving up their names to Christ and being baptized, if they die in an hour, and were baptized half an hour after they believe in Christ, are heirs of salvation.This granted, I should little doubt of confuting all the foregoing, as far as I object to it. I would rather be durus pater infantum, like Austin, than durus pater ægrotantium. Taylor considers all Christians who are so called.
St. Paul taught us this secret, that sins are properly made habitual upon the stock of impunity. Sin taking occasion by the law wrought in me all concupiscence;This is a very ingenious and very plausible exposition of St. Paul's words; but surely, surely, it is not the right one. I find both the meaning and the truth of the Apostle's words in the vividness and consequently attractive and ad-(or in-)sorbent power given to an image or thought by the sense of its danger, by the consciousness of its being forbidden, — which, in an unregenerate and unassisted will, struggling with, or even exciting, the ever ready inclination of corrupted nature, produces a perplexity and confusion which again increase the person's susceptibility of the soliciting image or fancy so intensified. Guilt and despair add a stimulus and sting to lust. See Iago in Shakspeare.'apprehending impunity,'
'by occasion of the commandment,' that is, so expressed and established as it was; because in the commandment forbidding to lust or covet, there was no penalty annexed or threatened in the sanction or in the explication. Murder was death, and so was adultery and rebellion. Theft was punished severely too; and so other things in their proportion; but the desires God left under a bare restraint, and affixed no penalty in the law. Now sin, that is, men that had a mind to sin, taking occasion hence, &c.
Let every old man that repents of the sins of his evil life be very diligent in the search of the particulars; that by drawing them into a heap, and spreading them before his eyes, he may be mightily ashamed at their number and burthen.I dare not condemn, but I am doubtful of this as a universal rule. If there be a true hatred of sin, the precious time and the spiritual nisus will, I think, be more profitably employed in enkindling meditation on holiness, and thirstings after the mind of Christ.
For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment even to the lesser sins and sinners, which he only had first threatened to Adam; and so Adam brought it upon them.And such a phrase as this used by a man in a refutation of Original Sin, on the ground of its incompatibility with God's attributes! "Exasperated" with those whom Taylor declares to have been innocent and most unfortunate, the two things that most conciliate love and pity!
For the further explication of which it is observable that the word 'sinner' and 'sin' in Scripture is used for any person, that hath a fault or a legal impurky, a debt, a vitiosity, defect, or imposition, &c.These facts, instead of explaining away Original Sin, are unintelligible, nay, absurd and immoral, except as shadows, types, and symbols of it, and of the Redemption from it. Observe, too, that Taylor never dares explain what he means by "Adam was mortal of himself and we are mortal from him:" he did not dare affirm that soul and body are alike material and perishable, even as the lute and the potentiality of music in the lute. And yet if he believed the contrary, then, in his construction of the doctrine of Original Sin, what has Christ done? St. John died in the same sense as Abel died: and in the sense of the Church of England neither died, but only slept in the Lord.
we may and must make as wild work with reason, will,
conscience, guilt, and virtue, as with Original Sin and Redemption. On
every subject first ask, Is it among the 
or the
?It could not make us heirs of damnation. This I shall the less need to insist upon, because, of itself, it seems so horrid to impute to the goodness and justice of God to be author of so great calamity to innocents, &c.Never was there a more hazardous way of reasoning, or rather of placing human ignorance in the judgment seat over God's wisdom. The whole might be closely parodied in support of Atheism: rather, this is but a paraphrase of the old atheistic arguments. Either God could not, or would not, prevent the moral and physical evils of the universe, including the everlasting anguish of myriads of millions: therefore he is either not all-powerful or not all-good: but a being deficient in power or goodness is not God: — Ergo, &c.
I deny not but all persons naturally are so, that they cannot arrive at heaven; but unless some other principle be put into them, or some great grace done for them, must for ever stand separate from seeing the face of God.But this is but accidentally occasioned by the sin of Adam. Just so might I say, that without the great grace of air done for them no living beings could live. If it mean more, pray where was the grace in creating a being, who without an especial grace must pass into utter misery? If Taylor reply; but the grace was added in Christ: why so say the Calvinists. According to Taylor there is no fall of man; but only an act and punishment of a man, which punishment consisted in his living in the kitchen garden, instead of the flower garden and orchard: and Cain was as likely to have murdered Abel before, as after, the eating of the forbidden fruit. But the very name of the fruit confutes Taylor. Adam altered his nature by it. Cain did not. What Adam did, I doubt not, we all do. Time is not with things of spirit.
Is hell so easy a pain, or are the souls of children of so cheap, so contemptible a price, that God should so easily throw them into hell?This is an argument against the sine qua non of Baptism, not against Original Sin.
Origen said enough to be mistaken in the question.Origen's words ought to have prevented all mistake, for he plainly enough overthrows the phantom of hereditary guilt; and as to guilt from a corruption of nature, it is just such guilt as the carnivorous appetites of a weaned lion, or the instinct of a brood of ducklings to run to water. What then is it? It is an evil, and therefore seated in the will; common to all men, the beginning of which no man can determine in himself or in others. How comes this? It is a mystery, as the will itself. Deeds are in time and space, therefore have a beginning. Pure action, that is, the will, is a noumenon, and irreferable to time. Thus Origen calls it neither hereditary nor original, but universal sin. The curse of Adam is common to all men, because what Adam did, we all do: and thus of Eve. You may substitute any woman in her place, and the same words apply. This is the true solution of this unfortunate question. The'Adam's curse is common to all. And there is not a woman on earth, to whom may not be said those things which were spoken to this woman.'
is in the dividing
the will from the acts of the will. The will is ego-agens.Præposterum est (said Paulus the lawyer) ante nos locupletes dici quam acquisiverimus. We cannot be said to lose what we never had; and our fathers' goods were not to descend upon us, unless they were his at his death.Take away from me the knowledge that he was my father, dear Bishop, and this will be true. But as it stands, the whole is, "says Paulus the Lawyer;" and, "Well said, Lawyer!" say I.
Which though it was natural, yet from Adam it began to be a curse; just as the motion of a serpent upon his belly, which was concreated with him, yet upon this story was changed into a malediction and an evil adjunct.How? I should really like to understand this.
or
intuitive faculty, is necessarily inapplicable to spiritual mysteries,
the very definition or contra-distinguishing character of which is that
they transcend the sense, and therefore the understanding, the faculty,
as Archbishop Leighton and Immanuel Kant excellently define it, which
judges according to sense. In the Aids to Reflection,12 I have shewn
that the proper function of the understanding or mediate faculty is to
collect individual or sensible concretes into kinds and sorts (genera
et species) by means of their common characters (notæ
communes); and to fix and distinguish these conceptions (that is,
generalized perceptions) by words. Words are the only immediate objects
of the understanding. Spiritual verities, or truths of reason
respective ad realia, and herein distinguished from the merely
formal, or so called universal truths, are differenced from the
conceptions of the understanding by the immediatcy of the knowledge, and
from the immediate truths of sense, — that is, from both pure and mixed
intuitions, — by not being sensible, that is, not representable by
figure, measurement or weight; nor connected with any affection of our
sensibility, such as color, taste, odors, and the like. And such
knowledges we, when we speak correctly, name ideas.And they are injurious to Christ, who think that from Adam we might have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it; he brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. It is a singular benefit given by God to mankind through Jesus Christ.And none inherit it but those who are born of Christ; ergo, bad men and infidels are not immortal. Immortality is one thing, a happy immortality another. St. Paul meant the latter: Taylor either the former, or his words have no meaning at all; for no man ever thought or dreamed that we inherited heaven from Adam, but that as sons of Adam, that is, as men, we have souls that do not perish with the body. I often suspect that Taylor, in abditis fidei
inclined to the belief that there is no other immortality but heaven,
and that hell is a pæna damni negativa, haud privativa. I own
myself strongly inclined to it; — but so many texts against it! I am
confident that the doctrine would be a far stronger motive than the
present; for no man will believe eternal misery of himself, but millions
would admit, that if they did not amend their lives they would be
undeserving of living for ever."Lest the tumultuous crowd throw the reason within us over bridge into the gulf of sin." What a vivid figure! It is enough to make any man set to work to read Chrysostom.
— — peccantes mente sub una.Note Prudentius's use of mente sub una for 'in one person.'
For even now we see, by a sad experience, that the afflicted and the miserable are not only apt to anger and envy, but have many more desires and more weaknesses, and consequently more aptnesses to sin in many instances than those who are less troubled. And this is that which was said by Arnobius; proni ad culpas, et ad libidinis varios appetitos vitio sumus infirmitatis ingenitæ.No. Arnobius never said so good and wise a thing in his lifetime. His quoted words have no such profound meaning.
That which remained was a reasonable soul, fitted for the actions of life and reason, but not of anything that was supernatural.What Taylor calls reason I call understanding, and give the name reason to that which Taylor would have called spirit.
And all that evil which is upon us, being not by any positive infliction, but by privative, or the taking away gifts, and blessings, and graces from us, which God, not having promised to give, was neither naturally, nor by covenant, obliged to give, — it is certain he could not be obliged to continue that to the sons of a sinning father, which to an innocent father he was not obliged to give.Oh! certainly not, if hell were not attached to acts and omissions, which without these very graces it is morally impossible for men to avoid. Why will not Taylor speak out?
The doctrine of the ancient Fathers was that free will remained in us after the Fall.Yea! as the locomotive faculty in a man in a strait waistcoat. Neither St. Augustine nor Calvin denied the remanence of the will in the fallen spirit; but they, and Luther as well as they, objected to the flattering epithet 'free' will. In the only Scriptural sense, as concerning the unregenerate, it is implied in the word will, and in this sense, therefore, it is superfluous and tautologic; and, in any other sense, it is the fruit and final end of Redemption, — the glorious liberty of the Gospel.
For my part I believe this only as certain, that nature alone cannot bring them to heaven, and that Adam left us in a state in which we could not hope for it.This is likewise my belief, and that man must have had a Christ, even if Adam had continued in Paradise — if indeed the history of Adam be not a mythos; as, but for passages in St. Paul, we should most of us believe; the serpent speaking, the names of the trees, and so on; and the whole account of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis seems to me clearly to say: — "The literal fact you could not comprehend if it were related to you; but you may conceive of it as if it had taken place thus and thus."
That in some things our nature is cross to the divine commandment, is not always imputable to us, because our natures were before the commandment.This is what I most complain of in Jeremy Taylor's ethics; namely, that he constantly refers us to the deeds or phenomena in time, the effluents from the source, or like the species of Epicurus; while the corrupt nature is declared guiltless and irresponsible; and this too on the pretext that it was prior in time to the commandment, and therefore not against it. But time is no more predicable of eternal reason than of will; but not of will; for if a will be at all, it must be ens spirituale; and this is the first negative definition of spiritual — whatever having true being is not contemplable in the forms of time and space. Now the necessary consequence of Taylor's scheme is a conscience-worrying, casuistical, monkish work-holiness. Deeply do I feel the difficulty and danger that besets the opposite scheme; and never would I preach it, except under such provisos as would render it perfectly compatible with the positions previously established by Taylor in this chapter, s. xliv. p. 158. 'Lastly; the regenerate not only hath received the Spirit of God, but is wholly led by him,' &c.
It shall not be pardoned in this world nor in the world to come; that is, neither to the Jews nor to the Gentiles. For sæculum hoc, this world, in Scripture, is the period of the Jews' synagogue, andThis is, I think, a great and grievous mistake. The Rabbis of best name divide into two or three periods, the difference being wholly in the words; for the dividers by three meant the same as those by two.the world to come, is taken for the Gospel, or the age of the Messias, frequently among the Jews.
: the second dies Messiæ, the time of the
Messiah, that is, the millenium: the third the sæculum
futurum, or future state, which last was absolutely spiritual and
celestial. 
) was by the doctors of the
Jewish church — namely, as a week — divided into two principal
epochs, — the six sevenths or working days, during which the Gospel was
gradually to be preached in all the world, and the number of the elect
filled up, — and the seventh, the Sabbath of the Messiah, or the kingdom
of Christ on earth in a new Jerusalem. 
so
the first Christians reversely made the kingdom commence on the first
(symbolical) day of the sacred week, the last or seventh day of which
was to be the complete and glorious manifestation of this kingdom. If
any one contends that the kingdom of the Son of Man, and the re-descent
of our Lord with his angels in the clouds, are to be interpreted
spiritually, For this was giving them pardon, by virtue of those words of Christ, Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted; that is, if ye, who are the stewards of my family, shall admit any one to the kingdom of Christ on earth, they shall be admitted to the participation of Christ's kingdom in heaven; and what ye bind here shall be bound there; that is, if they be unworthy to partake of Christ here, they shall be accounted unworthy to partake of Christ hereafter.Then without such a gift of reading the hearts of men, as priests do not now pretend to, this text means almost nothing. A wicked shall not, but a good man shall, be admitted to heaven; for if you have with good reason rejected any one here, I will reject him hereafter, amounts to no more than the rejection or admission of men according to their moral fitness or unfitness, the truth or unsoundness of their faith and repentance. I rather think that the promise, like the miraculous insight which it implies, was given to the Apostles and first disciples exclusively, and that it referred almost wholly to the admission of professed converts to the Church of Christ.
But if Original Sin be not a sin properly, why are children baptized? And what benefit comes to them by Baptism? I answer, as much as they need, and are capable of.The eloquent man has plucked just prickles enough out of the dogma of Original Sin to make a thick and ample crown of thorns for his opponents; and yet left enough to tear his own clothes off his back, and pierce through the leather jerkin of his closeliest wrought logic. In this answer to this objection he reminds me of the renowned squire, who first scratched out his eyes in a quickset hedge, and then leaped back and scratched them in again. So Jeremy Taylor first pulls out the very eyes of the doctrine, leaves it blind and blank, and then leaps back into it and scratches them in again, but with a most opulent squint that looks a hundred ways at once, and no one can tell which it really looks at.
By Baptism children are made partakers of the Holy Ghost and of the grace of God; which I desire to be observed in opposition to the Pelagian heresy, who did suppose nature to be so perfect, that the grace of God was not necessary, and that by nature alone, they could go to heaven; which because I affirm to be impossible, and that Baptism is therefore necessary, because nature is insufficient and Baptism is the great channel of grace, &c.What then of the poor heathens, that is, of five-sixths of all mankind. Would more go to hell by nature alone? If so: where is God's justice in Taylor's plan more than in Calvin's?
Although I have shewn the great excess and abundance of grace by Christ over the evil that did descend by Adam; yet the proportion and comparison lies in the main emanation of death from one, and life from the other.Does Jeremy Taylor then believe that the sentence of death on Adam and his sons extended to the soul; that death was to be absolute cessation of being! Scarcely I hope. But if bodily only, where is the difference between ante and post Christum?
Not that God could be the author of a sin to any, but that he appointed the evil which is the consequent of sin, to be upon their heads who descended from the sinner.Rare justice! and this too in a tract written to rescue God's justice from the Supra- and Sub-lapsarians! How quickly would Taylor have detected in an adversary the absurd realization contained in this and the following passages of the abstract notion, sin, from the sinner: as if sin were any thing but a man sinning, or a man who has sinned! As well might a sin committed in Sirius or the planet Saturn justify the infliction of conflagration on the earth and hell-fire on all its rational inhabitants. Sin! the word sin! for abstracted from the sinner it is no more: and if not abstracted from him, it remains separate from all others.
The consequent of this discourse must needs at least be this; that it is impossible that the greatest part of mankind should be left in the eternal bonds of hell by Adam; for then quite contrary to the discourse of the Apostle, there had been abundance of sin, but a scarcity of grace.And yet Jeremy Taylor will not be called a Pelagian. Why? Because without grace superadded by Christ no man could be saved: that is, all men must go to hell, and this not for any sin, but from a calamity, the consequences of another man's sin, of which they were even ignorant. God would not condemn them the sons of Adam for sin, but only inflicted on them an evil, the necessary effect of which was that they should all troop to the devil! And this is Jeremy Taylor's defence of God's justice! The truth is Taylor was a Pelagian, believed that without Christ thousands, Jews and heathens, lived wisely and holily, and went to heaven; but this he did not dare say out, probably not even to himself; and hence it is that he flounders backward and forward, now upping and now downing.
And they who are born eunuchs should be less infected by Adam's pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of desires.The fact happens to be false: and then the vulgarity, most unworthy of our dear Jeremy Taylor, of taking the mode of the manifestation of the disobedience of the will to the reason, for the disobedience itself. St. James would have taught him that he who offendeth against one, offendeth against all; and that there is some truth in the Stoic paradox that all crimes are equal. Equal is indeed a false phrase; and therein consists the paradox, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is the same as the falsehood. The truth is they are all the same in kind; but unequal in degree. They are all alike, though not equally, against the conscience.
So that there is no necessity of a third place; but it concludes only that in the state of separation from God's presence there is great variety of degrees and kinds of evil, and every one is not the extreme.What is this? If hell be a state, and not a mere place, and a particular state, its meaning must in common sense be a state of the worst sort. If then there be a mere pæna damni, that is, the not being so blest as some others may be; this is a different state in genere from the pæna sensus: ergo, not hell; ergo rather a third state; or else heaven. For every angel must be in it, than whom another angel is happier; that is negatively damned, though positively very happy.
Just so it is in infants: hell was not made for man, but for devils; and therefore it must be something besides mere nature that can bear any man thither: mere nature goes neither to heaven or hell.And how came the devils there? If it be hard to explain how Adam fell; how much more hard to solve how purely spiritual beings could fall? And nature! What? so much of nature, and no kind of attempt at a definition of the word? Pray what is nature?
I do not say that we, by that sin (original) deserved that death, neither can death be properly a punishment of us, till we superadd some evil of our own; yet Adam's sin deserved it, so that it was justly left to fall upon us, we, as a consequent and punishment of his sin, being reduced to our natural portion.How? What is this but flying to the old Supra-lapsarian blasphemy of a right of property in God over all his creatures, and destroying that sacred distinction between person and thing which is the light and the life of all law human and divine? Mercy on us! Is not agony, is not the stone, is not blindness, is not ignorance, are not headstrong, inherent, innate, and connate, passions driving us to sin when reason is least able to withhold us, — are not all these punishments, grievous punishments, and are they not inflicted on the innocent babe? Is not this the result infused into the milk not mingled of St. Peter;15 spotting the immaculate begotten, souring and curdling the innocence without sin or malice?16 And if this be just, and compatible with God's goodness, why all this outcry against St. Austin and the Calvinists and the Lutherans, whose whole addition is a lame attempt to believe guilt, where they cannot find it, in order to justify a punishment which they do find?
But then for the evil of punishment, that may pass further than the action. If it passes upon the innocent, it is not a punishment to them, but an evil inflicted by right of dominion; but yet by reason of the relation of the afflicted to him that sinned, to him it is a punishment.Here the snake peeps out, and now takes its tail into its mouth. Right of dominion! Nonsense! Things are not objects of right or wrong. Power of dominion I understand, and right of judgment I understand; but right of dominion can have no immediate, but only a relative, sense. I have a right of dominion over this estate, that is, relatively to all other persons. But if there be a jus dominandi over rational and free agents, then why blame Calvin? For all attributes are then merged in blind power: and God and fate are the same:
Strange Trinity! God, Necessity, and the Devil. But Taylor's scheme has far worse consequences than Calvin's: for it makes the whole scheme of Redemption a theatrical scenery. Just restore our bodies and corporeal passions to a perfect equilibrium and fortunate instinct, and, there being no guilt or defect in the soul, the Son of God, the Logos, and Supreme Reason, might have remained unincarnate, uncrucified. In short, Socinianism is as inevitable a deduction from Taylor's scheme as Deism or Atheism is from Socinianism.
of the intelligible or causative world. This (I
should say of Original Sin) is mystery! We do not so properly believe
it, as we know it. What is actual must be possible. But if we will
confound actuals with reals, and apply the rules of the latter to cases
of the former, we must blame ourselves for the clouds and darkness and
storms of opposing winds, which the error will not fail to raise. By the
same process an Atheist may demonstrate the contradictory nature of
eternity, of a being at once infinite and of resistless causality, and
yet intelligent. Jeremy Taylor additionally puzzled himself with Adam,
instead of looking into the fact in himself.To this it is answered as you see, there is a double guilt; a guilt of person, and of nature. That is taken away, this is not: for sacraments are given to persons, not to natures.I need no other passage but this to convince me that Jeremy Taylor, the angle in which the two apices of logic and rhetoric meet, consummate in both, was yet no metaphysician. Learning, fancy, discursive intellect, tria juncta in uno, and of each enough to have alone immortalized a man, he had; but yet
. Images, conceptions, notions, such as leave him but one rival,
Shakspeare, there were; but no ideas. Taylor was a Gassendist. O! that
he had but meditated in the silence of his spirit on the mystery of an
I AM! He would have seen that a person, quoad person, can
have nothing common or generic; and that where this finds place, the
person is corrupted by introsusception of a nature, which becomes evil
thereby, and on this relation only is an evil nature. The nature itself,
like all other works of God, is good, and so is the person in a yet
higher sense of the word, good, like all offsprings of the Most High.
But the combination is evil, and this not the work of God; and one of
the main ends and results of the doctrine of Original Sin is to silence
and confute the blasphemy that makes God the author of sin, without
avoiding it by fleeing to the almost equal blasphemy against the
conscience, that sin in the sense of guilt does not exist.The question of transubstantiation.I have no doubt that if the Pythagorean bond had successfully established itself, and become a powerful secular hierarchy, there would have been no lack of furious partizans to assert, yea, and to damn and burn such as dared deny, that one was the same as two; two being two in the same sense as one is one; that consequently 2 + 2 = 2 and 1 + 1 = 4. But I should most vehemently doubt that this was the intention of Pythagoras, or the sense in which the mysterious dogma was understood by the thinking part of his disciples, who nevertheless were its professed believers. I should be prepared to find that the true import and purport of the article was no more than this; — that the one in order to its manifestation must appear in and as two; that the act of re-union was simultaneous with that of the self-production, (in the geometrical use of the word 'produce,' as when a point produces, or evolves, itself on each side into a bipolar line), and that the Triad is therefore the necessary form of the Monad.
But for our dear afflicted mother, she is under the portion of a child in the state of discipline, her government indeed hindered, but her worshippings the same, the articles as true, and those of the church of Rome as false as ever.O how much there is in these few words, — the sweet and comely sophistry, not of Taylor, but of human nature. Mother! child! state of discipline! government hindered! that is to say, in how many instances, scourgings hindered, dungeoning in dens foul as those of hell, mutilation of ears and noses, and flattering the King mad with assertions of his divine right to govern without a Parliament, hindered. The best apology for Laud, Sheldon, and their fellows will ever be that those whom they persecuted were as great persecutors as themselves, and much less excusable.
In Synaxi Transubstantiationem sero definivit Ecclesia; diu satis erat credere, sive sub pane consecrate, sive quocunque modo adesse verum corpus Christi; so said the great Erasmus.Verum corpus, that is, res ipsissima, or the thing in its actual self, opposed
.Now that the spiritual is also a real presence, and that they are hugely consistent, is easily credible to them that believe the gifts of the Holy Ghost are real graces, and a spirit is a proper substance.But how the body of Christ, as opposed to his Spirit and to his Godhead, can be taken spiritually, hic labor, hoc opus est. Plotinus says,
; so we must say here 
.So we may say of the blessed Sacrament; Christ is more truly and really present in spiritual presence than in corporal; in the heavenly effect than in the natural being.But the presence of Christ is not in question, but the presence of Christ's body and blood. Now that Christ effected much for us by coming in the body, which could not or would not have been effected had he not assumed the body, we all, Socinians excepted, believe; but that his body effected it, other than as Christ in the body, where shall we find? how can we understand?
So when it is said, Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God, that is, corruption shall not inherit; and in the resurrection, our bodies are said to be spiritual, that is, not in substance, but in effect and operation.This is, in the first place, a wilful interpretation, and secondly, it is absurd; for what sort of flesh and blood would incorruptible flesh and blood be? As well might we speak of marble flesh and blood. But in Taylor's mind, as seen throughout, the logician was predominant over the philosopher, and the fancy outbustled the pure intuitive imagination. In the sense of St. Paul, as of Plato and all other dynamic philosophers, flesh and blood is ipso facto corruption, that is, the spirit of life in the mid or balancing state between fixation and reviviscence. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? is a Hebraism for 'this death which the body is.' For matter itself is but spiritus in coagulo, and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being restored; it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital organ. In short, Taylor seems to fall into the very fault he reproves in Bellarmine, and with this additional evil, that his reasoning looks more like tricking or explaining away a mystery. For wherein does the Sacrament of the Eucharist differ from that of Baptism, nay, even of grace before meat, when performed fervently and in faith? Here too Christ is present in the hearts of the faithful by blessing and grace. I see at present no other way of interpreting the text so as not to make the Sacrament a mere arbitrary memento, but by an implied negative. In propriety, the word is confined to no portion of corporality in particular. "This (the bread and wine) are as truly my flesh and blood as the phænomena which you now behold and name as such."
But because the words do perfectly declare our sense, and are owned publicly in our doctrine and manner of speaking, it will be in vain to object against us those words of the Fathers, which use the same expressions: for if by virtue of those words 'really,' 'substantially,' 'corporally,' 'verily and indeed,' and 'Christ's body and blood,' the Fathers shall be supposed to speak for Transubstantiation, they may as well suppose it to be our doctrine too; for we use the same words, and therefore those authorities must signify nothing against us, unless these words can be proved in them to signify more than our sense of them does import; and by this truth, many, very many of their pretences are evacuated.A sophism, dearest Jeremy. We use the words because these early Fathers used them, and have forced our own definitions on them. But should we have chosen these words to express our opinion by, if there had been no controversy on the subject? But the Fathers chose and selected these words as the most obvious and natural.
It is much insisted upou that it be inquired whether, when we say we believe Christ's body to be really in the Sacrament, we mean 'that body, that flesh, that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified, dead, and buried?' I answer, that I know none else that he had or hath: there is but one body of Christ natural and glorified.This may be true, or at least intelligible, of Christ's humanity or personal identity as
, but applied to the phenomenal
flesh and blood, it is nonsense. For if every atom of the human frame be
changed by succession in eleven or twelve years, the body born of the
Virgin could not be the body crucified, much less the body crucified be
the body glorified, spiritual and incorruptible. I construe the words of
Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Taylor below,17 literally, and they
perfectly express my opinion; namely, that Christ, both in the
institution of the Eucharist and in the sixth chapter of John, spoke of
his humanity as a noumenon, not of the specific flesh and blood
which were its phænomena at the last supper and on the cross. But
Jeremy Taylor was a semi-materialist, and though no man better managed
the logic of substance and accidents, he seems to have formed no clear
metaphysical notion of their actual meaning. Taken notionally, they are
mere interchangeable relations, as in concentric circles the outmost
circumference is the substance, the other circles its accidents; but if
I begin with the second and exclude the first from my thoughts, then
this is substance and the interior ones accidents, and so on; but taken
really, we mean the complex action of co-agents on our senses, and
accident as only an agent acting on us. Thus we say, the beer has turned
sour: sour is the accident of the substance beer. But, in fact, a new
agent, oxygen, has united itself with other agents in the joint
composition, the essence of which new comer is to be sour: at all
events, Taylor's construction is a mere assertion, meaning no more than
'in this sense only can I subscribe to the words of Bertram, Jerome, and
Clement.'
would be, that any remarkable number should offer union on a given
profession of faith chiefly negative, as we protest against the
authority of the Church in temporals; that the words agreed to by Beza
and Espencœus, on the part of the Reformers and Romanists respectively,
at Poissy, used with implicit faith, shall suffice. Credimus in usu
cœntæ Dominicæ vere, reipsa, substantialiter, seu in substantia, verum
corpus et sanguinem Christi spirituali et ineffabili modo esse,
exhiberi, sumi a fidelibus communicantibus.The other Schoolman I am to reckon in this account, is Gabriel Biel.Taylor should have informed the reader that Gabriel Biel is but the echo of Occam, and that both were ante-Lutheran Protestants in heart, and as far as they dared, in word likewise.
So that if, according to the Casuists, especially of the Jesuits' order, it be lawful to follow the opinion of any one probable doctor, here we have five good men and true, besides Occam, Bassolis, and Mechior Camus, to acquit us from our search after this question in Scripture.Taylor might have added Erasmus, who, in one of his letters, speaking of Œcolampadius's writings on the Eucharist, says "ut seduci posse videantur etiam electi," and adds, that he should have embraced his interpretations, "nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiæ;" that is, Œcolampadius has convinced me, and I should avow my conviction, but for motives of personal prudence and regard for the public peace.
That which neither can feel or be felt, see or be seen, move or be moved, change or be changed, neither do or suffer corporally, cannot certainly be eaten corporally; but so they affirm concerning the body of our blessed Lord; it cannot do or suffer corporally in the Sacrament, therefore it cannot be eaten corporally, any more than a man can chew a spirit, or eat a meditation, or swallow a syllogism into his belly.Absurd as the doctrine of Transubstantiation may thus be made, yet Taylor here evidently confounds a spirit, ens realissimum, with a mere notion or ens logicum. On this ground of the spirituality of all powers
it would not be difficult to evade many of
Taylor's most plausible arguments. Enough, however, and more than enough
would be left in their full force.Besides this, I say this corporal union of our bodies to the body of God incarnate, which these great and witty dreamers dream of, would make man to be God.But yet not God, nor absolutely. I am in my Father, even so ye are in me.
By this time I hope I may conclude, that Transubstantiation is not taught by our blessed Lord in the sixth chapter of St. John: Johannes de tertia et Eucharistica cæna nihil quidem scribit, eo quod cæteri tres Evangelistæ ante ilium eam plene descripsissent. They are the words of Stapleton and are good evidence against them.I cannot satisfy my mind with this reason, though the one commonly assigned both before and since Stapleton: and yet ignorant, when, why, and for whom John wrote his Gospel, I cannot substitute a better or more probable one. That John believed the command of the Eucharist to have ceased with the destruction of the Jewish state, and the obligation of the cup of blessing among the Jews, — or that he wrote it for the Greeks, unacquainted with the Jewish custom, — would be not improbable, did we not know that the Eastern Church, that of Ephesus included, not only continued this Sacrament, but rivalled the Western Church in the superstition thereof.
Now I argue thus: if we eat Christ's natural body, we eat it either naturally or spiritually: if it be eaten only spiritually, then it is spiritually digested, &c.What an absurdity in the word 'it' in this passage and throughout!
The accidents, proper to a substance, are for the manifestation, a notice of the substance, not of themselves; for as the man feels, but the means by which he feels is the sensitive faculty, so that which is felt, is the substance, and the means by which it is felt is the accident.This is the language of common sense, rightly so called, that is, truth without regard or reference to error; thus only differing from the language of genuine philosophy, which is truth intentionally guarded against error. But then in order to have supported it against an acute antagonist, Taylor must, I suspect, have renounced his Gassendis and other Christian Epicuri. His antagonist would tell him; when a man strikes me with a stick, I feel the stick, and infer the man; but pari ratione, I feel the blow, and infer the stick; and this is tantamount to, — I feel, and by a mechanism of my thinking organ attribute causation to precedent or co-existent images; and this no less in states in which you call the images unreal, that is, in dreams, than when they are asserted by you to have an outward reality.
But when a man, by the ministry of the senses, is led into the apprehension of a wrong object, or the belief of a false proposition, then he is made to believe a lie, &c.There are no means by which a man without chemical knowledge could distinguish two similarly shaped lumps, one of sugar and another of sugar of lead. Well! a lump of sugar of lead lies among other artefacts on the shelf of a collector; and with it a label, "Take care! this is not sugar, though it looks so, but crystallized oxide of lead, and it is a deadly poison." A man reads this label, and yet takes and swallows the lump. Would Taylor assert that the man was made to swallow a poison? Now this (would the Romanist say) is precisely the case of the consecrated elements, only putting food and antidote for poison; that is, as far as this argument of Jeremy Taylor is concerned.
Just upon this account it is, that St. John's argument had been just nothing in behalf of the whole religion: for that God was incarnate, that Jesus Christ did such miracles, that he was crucified, that he arose again, and ascended into heaven, that he preached these sermons, that he gave such commandments, he was made to believe by sounds, by shapes, by figures, by motions, by likenesses, and appearances, of all the proper accidents.A Socinian might turn this argument with equal force at least, but I think with far greater, against the Incarnation. But it is a sophism, that actually did lead, to Socinianism: for surely bread and wine are less disparate from flesh and blood, than a human body from the Omnipresent Spirit. The disciples would, according to Taylor, Tillotson, and the other Latitudinarian common sense divines, have been justified in answering: "All our senses tell us you are only a man: how should, we believe you when you say the contrary? If we are not to believe all our senses, much less can we believe that we actually hear you."
And yet no sense can be deceived in that which it always perceives alike: 'The touch can never be deceived.'Every common juggler falsifies this assertion when he makes the pressure from a shilling seem the shilling itself. "Are you sure you feel it?" "Yes." "Then open your hand. Presto! 'Tis gone." From this I gather that neither Taylor nor Aristotle ever had the nightmare.
The purpose of which discourse is this: that no notices are more evident and more certain than the notices of sense; but if we conclude contrary to the true dictate of senses, the fault is in the understanding, collecting false conclusions from right premises. It follows, therefore, that in the matter of the Eucharist we ought to judge that which our senses tell us.Very unusually lax reasoning for Jeremy Taylor, whose logic is commonly legitimate even where his metaphysic is unsatisfactory. What Romanist ever asserted that a communicant's palate deceived him, when it reported the taste of bread or of wine in the elements?
When we discourse of mysteries of faith and articles of religion, it is certain that the greatest reason in the world, to which all other reasons must yield, is this — 'God hath said it, therefore it is true.'Doubtless: it is a syllogism demonstrative. All that God says is truth, is necessarily true. But God hath said this; ergo, &c. But how is the minor to be proved, that God hath said this? By reason? But it is against reason. By the senses? But it is against the senses.
First; for Christ's body, his natural body, is changed into a spiritual body, and it is not now a natural body, but a spiritual, and therefore cannot be now in the Sacrament after a natural manner, because it is so no where, and therefore not there: It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.But mercy on me! was this said of the resurgent body of Jesus? a spiritual body, of which Jesus said it was not a spirit. If tangible by Thomas's fingers, why not by his teeth, that is, manducable?
So that if there were a plain revelation of Transubstantiation, then this argument were good when there are so many seeming impossibilities brought against the Holy Trinity ... And therefore we have found difficulties, and shall for ever, till, in this article, the Church returns to her ancient simplicity of expression.Taylor should have said, it would have very greatly increased the difficulty of proving that it was really revealed, but supposing that certain, then doubtless it must be believed as far as nonsense can be believed, that is, negatively. From the Apostles' Creed it may be possible to deduce the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity; but assuredly it is not fully expressed therein: and what can Taylor mean by the Church returning to her first simplicity in this article? What less could she say if she taught the doctrine at all, than that the Word and the Spirit are spoken of every where in Scripture as individuals, each distinct from the other, and both from the Father: that of both all the divine attributes are predicated, except self-origination; that the Spirit is God, and the Word is God, and that they with the Father are the one God? And what more does she say now? But Taylor, like Swift, had a strong tendency to Sabellianism.
Now concerning this, it is certain it implies a contradiction, that two bodies should be in one place, or possess the place of another, till that be cast forth.So far from it that I believe the contrary; and it would puzzle Taylor to explain a thousand phænomena in chemistry on his certainty. But Taylor assumed matter to be wholly quantitative, which granted, his opinion would become certain.
The door might be made to yield to his Creator as easily as water, which is fluid, be made firm under his feet; for consistence or lability are not essential to wood and water.Here the common basis of water, ice, vapour, steam, aqua crystallina, and (possibly) water-gas is called water, and confounded with the species water, that is, the common base plus a given proportion of caloric. To the species water continuity and lability are essential.
The words in the text areThank God! Here comes common sense.in the past tense, the gates or doors having been shut; but that they were shut in the instant of Christ's entry, it says not: they might of course, if Christ had so pleased, have been insensibly opened, and shut in like manner again; and, if the words be observed, it will appear that St. John mentioned the shutting the doors in relation to the Apostles' fear, not to Christ's entering: he intended not (so far as appears) to declare a miracle.
The sentence of the Fathers in the third general Council, that at Ephesus; — 'that it should not be lawful for any man to publish or compose another faith or creed than that which was defined by the Nicene Council.'Upon what ground then does the Church of England reconcile with this decree its reception of the so called Athanasian creed?
We consider that the doctrines upon which it (Purgatory) is pretended reasonable, are all dubious, and disputable at the very best. Such are ... that the taking away the guilt of sins does not suppose the taking away the obligation to punishment; that is, that when a man's sin is pardoned, he may be punished without the guilt of that sin as justly as with it.The taking away the guilt does not, however, imply of necessity the natural removal of the consequences of sin. And in this sense, I suppose, the subtler Romanists would defend this accursed doctrine. A man may have bitterly repented and thoroughly reformed the sin of drunkenness, and by this genuine metanoia and faith in Christ crucified have obtained forgiveness of the guilt, and yet continue to suffer a heavy punishment in a schirrous liver or incurable dyspepsy. But who authorized the Popes to extend this to the soul?
St. Ambrose saith that 'death is a haven of rest.'Consider the strange and oftentimes awful dreams accompanying the presence of irritating matter in the lower abdomen, and the seeming appropriation of particular sorts of dream images and incidents to affections of particular organs and viscera. Do the material causes act positively, so that with the removal of the body by death the total cause is removed, and of course the effects? Or only negatively and indirectly, by lessening and suspending that continuous texture of organic sensation, which, by drawing outward the attention of the soul, sheaths her from her own state and its corresponding activities? — A fearful question, which I too often agitate, and which agitates me even in my dreams, when most commonly I am in one of Swedenborg's hells, doubtful whether I am once more to be awaked, and thinking our dreams to be the true state of the soul disembodied when not united with Christ. On awaking from such dreams, I never fail to find some local pain, circa- or infra-umbilical, with kidney affections, and at the base of the bladder.
When he talks of being infallible, if the notion be applied to his Church, then he means an infallibility antecedent, absolute, unconditionate, such as will not permit the Church ever to err.Taylor himself was infected with the spirit of casuistry, by which saving faith is placed in the understanding, and the moral act in the outward deed. How infinitely safer the true Lutheran doctrine: God cannot be mocked; neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the understanding, save, nor error condemn; — to love truth sincerely is spiritually to have truth; and an error becomes a personal error, not by its aberration from logic or history, but so far as the causes of such error are in the heart, or may be traced back to some antecedent un-Christian wish or habit; — to watch over the secret movements of the heart, remembering ever how deceitful a thing it is, and that God cannot be mocked, though we may easily dupe ourselves: these, as the ground-work with prayer, study of the Scriptures, and tenderness to all around us, as the consequents, are the Christian's rule, and supersede all books of casuistry, which latter serve only to harden our feelings and pollute the imagination. To judge from the Roman casuists, nay, I ought to say, from Taylor's own Ductor Dubitantium, one would suppose that a man's points of belief and smallest determinations of outward conduct, — however pure and charitable his intentions, and however holy or blameless the inward source of those intentions or convictions in his past and present state of moral being, — were like the performance of an electrical experiment, and would blow a man's salvation into atoms from a mere unconscious mistake in the arrangement and management of the apparatus.
Only for their comfort this they might have also observed in that book, — that there is not half so much excuse for the Papists as there is for the Anabaptists; and yet it was but an excuse at the best, as appears in those full answers I have given to all their arguments, in the last edition of that book, among the polemical discourses in folio.Nay, dear Bishop! but such an excuse, as compared with your after attempt to evacuate it, resembles a coat of mail of your own forging, which you boil, in order to melt it away into invisibility. You only hide it by foam and bubbles, by wavelets and steam-clouds, of ebullient rhetoric: I speak of the Anabaptists as Anti-pædobaptists.
Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doth; but I have called you friends, for all things I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.I never thought of this text before, but it seems to me a stronger passage in favour of Psilanthropism, or modern Socinianism, — a doctrine which of all heresies I deem the most fundamental and the worst (the impurities of madmen out of the question), — than I have ever seen, and far stronger than that concerning the day of judgment, which in its apparent sense is clearly high Arianism, or teaching the super-angelical, yet infra-divine, nature of Christ. We must interpret it
not as all things absolutely,
but as all things concerning your interests, all things
that it behoves you to know. Else it would contradict Christ's words,
None knoweth the Father but the Son, that is, truly and totally.
For Christ does not promise in this life to give us the same degree of
knowledge as he himself possessed, but only a quantum sufficit of
the kind. This is clear by St. John's all things, which assuredly
did not include either the discoveries of Newton or of Davy.The Churches have troubled themselves with infinite variety of questions, and divided their precious unity, and destroyed charity, and instead of contending against the devil and all his crafty methods, they have contended against one another, and excommunicated one another, and anathematized and damned one another; and no man is the better after all, but most men are very much the worse; and the Churches are in the world still divided about questions that commenced twelve or thirteen ages since, and they are like to be so for ever, till Elias come, &c.I remember no passages of the Fathers nearer to inspired Scripture than this and similar ones of Jeremy Taylor, in which, quitting the acute logician, he combines his heart with his head, and utters general, and inclusive, and reconciling truths of charity and of common sense. All amounts but to this: — what is binding on all must be possible to all. But conformity of intellectual conclusions is not possible. Faith therefore cannot reside totally in the understanding. But to do what we believe we ought to do is possible to all, therefore binding on all; therefore the unum necessarium of Christian faith. Talk not of bad conscience; it is like bad sense, that is, no sense; and we all know that we may wilfully lie till we involuntarily believe the lie as truth; but causa causæ est causa vera causati.
But if you mean the Catholic Church, then, if you mean her, an abstracted separate being from all particulars, you pursue a cloud, and fall in love with an idea and a child of fancy.Here Taylor uses 'idea' as opposed to image or distinct phantasm; and this is with few exceptions his general sense, and even the exceptions are only metaphors from the general sense, that is, images so faint, indefinite and fluctuating as to be almost no images, that is, ideas; as we say of a very thin body, it is a ghost or spirit, the lowest degree of one kind being expressed by the opposite kind.
'Miracles' were, in the beginning of Christianity, a note of true believers: Christ told us so. And he also taught us that Anti-Christ should be revealed in lying signs and wonders, and commanded us, by that token, to take heed of them.An excellent distinction between a note or mark by which a thing already proved may be known, and the proofs of the thing. Thus the poisonous qualities of the nightshade are established by the proper proofs, and the marks by which a plant may be known to be the nightshade, are the number, position, colour, and so on, of its filaments, petals, and the rest.
The 'spirit of prophecy' is also a pretty sure note of the true Church, and yet...I deny not but there have been some prophets in the Church of Rome: Johannes de Rupe Scissa, Anselmus, Marsicanus, Robert Grosthead, Bishop of Lincoln, St. Hildegardis, Abbot Joachim, whose prophecies and pictures prophetical were published by Theophrastus Paracelsus, and John Adrasder, and by Paschalinus Regiselmus, at Venice, 1589; but (as Ahab said concerning Micaiah) these do not prophesy good concerning Rome, but evil, &c.This paragraph is an exquisite specimen of grave and dignified irony, telum quod cedere simulat retorquentis. In contrast with this stands the paragraph on note 15, (p. 381.) which is a coarse though not unmerited sneer, or, as a German would have expressed himself, 'an of-Jeremy-Taylor-unworthy, though a-not-of-the-Roman-Catholic-Papicolar-polemics-unmerited, sneer.'
... excepting only some Popes have been remarked by their own histories for funest and direful deaths.In the adoption of this word 'funest' into the English language by apocope of the final us, Taylor is supported by 'honest' and 'modest;' but then the necessity of pronouncing funest should have excluded it, the superlative final being an objection to all of them, though outweighed in the others. A common reader would pronounce it 'funest,' and perhaps mistake it for 'funniest.'
... sacraments, which to be seven, is with them an article of faith.The fastidious exclusion of this and similar idioms in modern writing occasions unnecessary embarrassment for the writer, both in narration and argumenting, and contributes to the monotony of our style.
The Fathers and Schoolmen differ greatly in the definition of a Sacrament.Had it been in other respects advisable, it would, I think, have been theologically convenient, if our Reformers had contra-distinguished Baptism and the Lord's Supper by the term Mysteries, and allowed the name of Sacrament to Ordination, Confirmation, and Marriage.
And he did so to the Jews ... tradition was not relied upon; it was not trusted with any law of faith or manners.This all the later Jews deny, affirming an oral communication from Moses to the Seventy, on as lame pretences as the Roman Catholics, and for the same vile purposes as reproved by Christ, who, if he had believed the story, would not have condemned traditions of men generally without exception, and would not have proved the immortality of the Patriarchs by a text which seems to have had no such primary intention, though it may contain the deduction potentialiter.
From this principle, as it is promoted by the Fanatics, they derive a wandering, unsettled, and a dissolute religion, &c.The evils of the Fanatic persuasion here so powerfully, so exquisitely, stated and enforced by our all-eloquent Bishop, supply no proof or even presumption against the tenet of the Spirit rightly expressed. For catholicity is the distinctive mark, the conditio sine qua non, of a spiritual teaching; and if men that dream with their eyes open mistake for this the very contrary, that is, their own particular fancies, or perhaps sensations, who can help it?
They affirm that the Scriptures are full, that they are a perfect rule, that they contain all things necessary to salvation; and from hence they confuted all heresies.Yes, the heretics were so confuted, I grant; because these would not acknowledge any other authority but that of the Scriptures, and these too forged or corrupted by themselves; but by the Scriptures that remained unaltered the early Fathers of the Church both demonstrated the omissions and interpolations of the heretical canons and the false doctrines of the heresy itself. But so far from following the same rule to the members of the true Church, they made the applicability of this way of proof the criterion of a heretic.
'Which truly they then preached, but afterwards by the will of God delivered to us in the Scriptures, which was to be the pillar and ground to our faith.'Lessing has shown this to be a false and even ungrammatical rendering of Irenæus's words. The columen et fundamentum fidei, are the Creed, or economy of salvation.
regula fidei, or æconomia
salutis.... that the tradition ecclesiastical, that is, the whole doctrine taught by the Church of God, and preached to all men, is in the Scripture.It is only by the whole context and purpose of the work, and this too interpreted by the known doctrine of the age, that the intent of the sentences here quoted can be determined, relatively to the point in question. But even as they stand here, they do not assert that the Traditio Ecclesiastica was grounded on, or had been deduced from, the Scriptures; nor that by Scripture Clemens meant principally the New Testament; and that the Scriptures contain the Tradition Ecclesiastical or Catholic Faith the Romish divines admit and contend.
As our Saviour imposed silence upon the Sadducees by the word of his doctrine, and faithfully convinced that false opinion which they thought to be truth; so also shall the followers of Christ do, by the examples of Scripture, by which according to sound doctrine every voice of Pharaoh ought to be silent.Does not this prove too much; namely, that nothing exists in the New which does not likewise exist in the Old Testament?
Which words I the rather remark, because this article of the consubstantiality of Christ with the Father is brought as an instance (by the Romanists) of the necessity of tradition, to make up the insufficiency of Scripture.How shall I make this rhyme to Taylor's own assertion, in the last paragraph of sect. xix. of his Episcopacy Asserted,20 in which he clearly refers to this very question as relying on tradition for its clearness? Jeremy Taylor was a true Father of the Church, and would furnish as fine a subject for a concordantia discordantiarum as St. Austin himself. For the exoteric and esoteric he was a very Pythagoras.
... for one or two of them say, Theophilus spake against Origen, for broaching fopperies of his own, and particularly, that Christ's flesh was consubstantial with the Godhead.Origen doubtless meant the caro noumenon, and was quite right. But never was a great man so misunderstood as Origen.
Sed et alia, quoe absque auctoritate et testimoniis Scripturarum, quasi traditione Apostolica, sponte reperiunt atque contingunt, percutit gladius Dei.Is it clear that Scripturarum depends on auctoritate? It may well mean they who without the authority of the Church, or Scriptural testimony pretend to an Apostolical Tradition.
"Those things which they make and find, as it were, by Apostolical tradition, without the authority and testimonies of Scripture, the word of God smites."
But lastly, if in the plain words of Scripture be contained all that is simply necessary to all, then it is clear, by Bellarmine's confession, that St. Austin affirmed that the plain places of Scripture are sufficient to all laics and all idiots, or private persons, and then it is very ill done to keep them from the knowledge and use of the Scriptures, which contain all their duty both of faith and good life; so it is very unnecessary to trouble them with any thing else, there being in the world no such treasure and repository of faith and manners, and that so plain, that it was intended for all men, and for all such men is sufficient. "Read the Holy Scriptures wherein you shall find some things to be holden, and some to be avoided."And yet in the preface to his Apology for authorized and set forms of Liturgy,21 Taylor regrets that the Church of England was not able to confine the laity to such selections of Holy Writ as are in her Liturgy. But Laud was then alive: and Taylor partook of his trepidatiunculæ towards the Church of Rome.
And all these are nothing else, but a full subscription to, and an excellent commentary upon, those words of St. Paul, Let no man pretend to be wise above what is written.Had St. Paul anything beyond the Law and the Prophets in his mind?
St. Paul's way of teaching us to expound Scripture is, that he that prophesies should do itYet in his Liberty of Prophesying22 Taylor turns this way into mere ridicule. I love thee, Jeremy! but an arrant theological barrister that thou wast, though thy only fees were thy desires of doing good in questionibus singulis.
Only, because we are sure there was some false dealing in this matter, and we know there might be much more than we have discovered, we have no reason to rely upon any tradition for any part of our faith, any more than we could do upon Scripture, if one book or chapter of it should be detected to be imposture.What says Jeremy Taylor then to the story of the woman taken in adultery, (John, c. viii. 3-11.) which Chrysostom disdains to comment on? If true, how could it be omitted in so many, and these the most authentic, copies? And if this for fear of scandal, why not others? And who does not know that falsehood may be effected as well by omissions as by interpolations? But if false, — then — but Taylor draws the consequence himself.
So that the tradition concerning the Scriptures being extrinsical to Scripture is also extrinsical to the question: this tradition cannot be an objection against the sufficiency of Scripture to salvation, but must go before this question. For no man inquires whether the Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation, unless he believe that there are Scriptures, that these are they, and that they are the word of God. All this comes to us by tradition, that is, by universal undeniable testimony.Very just, and yet this idle argument is the favourite, both shield and sword, of the Romanists: as if I should pretend to learn the Roman history from tradition, because by tradition I know such histories to have been written by Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus!
The more natural consequence is that their proposition is either mistaken or uncertain, or not an article of faith (which is rather to be hoped, lest we condemn all the Greek Churches as infidels or perverse heretics), or else that it can be derived from Scripture, which last is indeed the most probable, and pursuant to the doctrine of those wiser Latins who examined things by reason and not by prejudice.It is remarkable that both Stillingfleet and Taylor favoured the Greek opinion. But Bull's Defensio Fidei Nicænæ was not yet published. It is to me evident that if the Holy Ghost does not proceed through and from the Son as well as from the Father, then the Son is not the adequate substantial idea of the Father. But according to St. Paul, he is — ergo, &c. N.B. These "ergos, &c." in legitimate syllogisms, where the major and minor have been conceded, are binding on all human beings, with the single anomaly of the Quakers. For with them nothing is more common than to admit both major and minor, and, when you add the inevitable consequence, to say "Nay! I do not think so, Friend! Thou art worldly wise, Friend!"
And since that villain of a man, Pope Hildebrand, as Cardinal Beno relates in his Life, could, by shaking of his sleeve make sparks of fire fly from it.If this was fact, was it an idiosyncrasy, as I have known those who by combing their hair can elicit sparks with a crackling as from a cat's back rubbed. It is very possible that the sleeve might be silk, tightened either on a very hairy arm, or else on woollen, and by shaking it might be meant stripping the silk suddenly off, which would doubtless produce flashes and sparks.
And therefore St. Paul left an excellent precept to the Church to avoid profanas vocum novitates, 'the prophane newness of words;' that is, it is fit that the mysteries revealed in Scripture should be preached and taught in the words of the Scripture, and with that simplicity, openness, easiness, and candor, and not with new and unhallowed words, such as that of Transubstantiation.Are not then Trinity, Tri-unity, hypostasis, perichoresis, diphysis, and others, excluded? Yet Waterland very ingeniously, nay more, very honestly and sensibly, shews the necessity of these terms per accidens. The profanum fell back on the heretics who had occasioned the necessity.
"The oblation of a cake was a figure of the Eucharistical bread which the Lord commanded to do in remembrance of his passion." These are Justin's words in that place.Justin Martyr could have meant no more, and the Greek construction means no more, than that the cake we offer is the representative, substitute, and fac-simile of the bread which Christ broke and delivered.
However, if you will not commit downright idolatry, as some of their saints teach you, then you must be careful to observe these plain distinctions; and first be sure to remember that when you worship an image, you do it not materially but formally; not as it is of such a substance, but as it is a sign; next take care that you observe what sort of image it is, and then proportion your right kind to it, that you do not give latria to that where hyperdulia is only due; and be careful that if dulia only be due, that your worship be not hyperdulical, &c.A masterly specimen of grave dignified irony. Indeed, Jeremy Taylor's Works would be of more service to an English barrister than those of Demosthenes, Æschines, and Cicero taken together.
A man cannot well understand an essence, and hath no idea of it in his mind, much less can a painter's pencil do it.Noticeable, that this is the only instance I have met in any English classic before the Revolution of the word 'idea' used as synonymous with a mental image. Taylor himself has repeatedly placed the two in opposition; and even here I doubt whether he has done otherwise. I rather think he meant by the word 'idea' a notion under an indefinite and confused form, such as Kant calls a schemaor vague outline, an imperfect embryo of a concrete, to the individuation of which the mind gives no conscious attention; just as when I say — "any thing," I may imagine a poker or a plate; but I pay no attention to its being this rather than that; and the very image itself is so wandering and unstable that at this moment it may be a dim shadow of the one, and in the next of some other thing. In this sense, idea is opposed to image in degree instead of kind; yet still contra-distinguished, as is evident by the sequel, "much less can a painter's pencil do it:" for were it an image, individui et concreti, then the painter's pencil could do it as well as his fancy or better.
This very poor church.With the exception of Spain, the Church establishment in Ireland is now, I conceive, the richest in Europe; though by the most iniquitous measure of the Irish Parliament, most iniquitously permitted to acquire the force of law at the Union, the Irish Church was robbed of the tithes from all pasture lands. What occasioned so great a change in its favour since the time of Charles II?
And amidst these and very many more inconveniences it was greatly necessary that God should send us such a king.Such a king! O sorrow and shame! Why, why, O Genius! didst thou suffer thy darling son to crush the fairest flower of thy garland beneath a mitre of Charles's putting on!
For besides that the great usefulness of this ministry will greatly endear the Episcopal order, to which (that I may use St. Hierom's words) "if there be not attributed a more than common power and authority, there will be as many schisms as priests," &c.On this ground the Romish divines justify the Papacy. The fact of the Scottish Church is the sufficient answer to both. Episcopacy needs not rash assertions for its support.
For it is a sure rule in our religion, and is of an eternal truth, that "they who keep not the unity of the Church, have not the Spirit of God."Contrast with this our xixth and xxth Articles on the Church. The Irish Roman Catholic Bishops, methinks, must have read this with delight. What an over hasty simpleton that James II was! Had he waited and caressed the Bishops, they would have taken the work off his hands.
collectively.
exhibitable powers, faculties.
Were it otherwise what strange and fearful consequences would follow
from the assertion, the Holy Spirit was not yet fallen upon any of
them."And do you actually believe the presence of the material water in the baptizing of infants or adults is essential to their salvation, so indispensably so that the omission of the water in the Baptism of an infant who should die the day after would exclude that infant from the kingdom of heaven, and whatever else is implied in the loss of salvation?"I should not be surprised, I say, to hear this question answered with an emphatic,
"Yes, Sir! I do actually believe this, for thus I find it written, and herein begins my right to the name of a Christian, that I have exchanged my reason for the Holy Scriptures: I acknowledge no reason but the Bible."But as this intrepid respondent, though he may dispense with reason, cannot quite so easily free himself from the obligations of common sense and the canons of logic, — both of which demand consistency, and like consequences from like premisses in rebus ejusdem generis, in subjects of the same class, — I do find myself tempted to wonder, some small deal, at the unscrupulous substitution of a few drops of water sprinkled on the face for the Baptism, that is, immersion or dipping, of the whole person, even if the rivers or running waters had been thought non-essential.
Dupliciter vero sanguis Christi et caro intelligitur, spiritualis ilia atque divina, de qua ipse dixit, Caro mea vere est cibus, &c., vel caro et sanguis, quæ crucifixa est, et qui militis effusus est lancea.In Epist. Ephes. c. i.
Ipsum regem tradunt, volventem commentaries Numæ, quum ibi occulta solennia sacrificia Jovi Elicio facta invenisset, operatum his sacris se abdidisse; sed non rite initum aut curatum id sacrum esse; nee solum nullam ei oblatam Cælestium speciem, sed ira Jovis, sollicitati prava religione, fulmine ictum cum domo conflagrasse.L. i. c. xxxi. Ed.
"This also rests upon the practice apostolical and traditive interpretation of holy Church, and yet cannot be denied that so it ought to be, by any man that would not have his Christendom suspected. To these I add the communion of women, the distinction of books apocryphal from canonical, that such books were written by such Evangelists and Apostles, the whole tradition of Scripture itself, the Apostles' Creed, &c. ... These and divers others of greater consequence, (which I dare not specify for fear of being misunderstood,) rely but upon equal faith with this of Episcopacy,"&c. Ed.
"We intended not," says Baxter, "to dig down the banks, or pull up the hedge, and lay all waste and common, when we desired the Prelates' tyranny might cease."But the question is, would these 'erring good' men have been either willing or able to assist in this work, if the more erring Lauds and Sheldons had not run riot in the opposite direction? And as for the 'bestial herd,' — compare the whole body of Parliamentarians, all the fanatical sects included, with the royal and prelatical party in the reign of Charles II. These were, indeed, a bestial herd. See Baxter's unwilling and Burnet's honest description of the moral discipline throughout the realm under Cromwell.
No; for the intention had been under the pretext of abating one tyranny to establish a far severer and more galling in its stead: in doing this the banks had been thrown down, and the hedge destroyed; and while the bestial herd who broke in rejoiced in the havoc, Baxter, and other such erring though good men, stood marvelling at the mischief, which never could have been effected, if they had not mainly assisted in it.
They passed with equal facility from strict Puritanism to the utmost license of practical and theoretical impiety, as Antinomians or as Atheists, and from extreme profligacy to extreme superstition in any of its forms.'They!' How many? and of these how many that would not have been in Bedlam, or fit for it, under some other form? A madman falls into love or religion, and then, forsooth! it is love or religion that drove him mad.
In an evil hour were the doctrines of the Gospel sophisticated with questions which should have been left in the Schools for those who are unwise enough to employ themselves in excogitations of useless subtlety.But what, at any rate, had Bunyan to do with the Schools? His perplexities clearly rose out of the operations of his own active but unarmed mind on the words of the Apostle. If anything is to be arraigned, it must be the Bible in English, the reading of which is imposed (and, in my judgment, well and wisely imposed) as a duty on all who can read. Though Protestants, we are not ignorant of the occasional and partial evils of promiscuous Bible-reading; but we see them vanish when we place them beside the good.
False notions of that corruption of our nature which it is almost as perilous to exaggerate as to dissemble.I would have said "which it is almost as perilous to misunderstand as to deny."
But the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he had been a blackguard, &c.All this narrative, with the reflections on the facts, is admirable and worthy of Robert Southey: full of good sense and kind feeling — the wisdom of love.
But the Sectaries had kept their countrymen from it (the Common Prayer Book), while they had the power, and Bunyan himself in his sphere laboured to dissuade them from it.Surely the fault lay in the want, or in the feeble and inconsistent manner, of determining and supporting the proper powers of the Church. In fact, the Prelates and leading divines of the Church were not only at variance with each other, but each with himself.
| Prothesis Christ the Word |
||
| Thesis The Scriptures |
Mesothesis The Holy Spirit |
Antithesis The Church |
| Synthesis The Preacher2 |
"But there are two ways of obeying," he observed; "the one to do that which I in my conscience do believe that I am bound to do, actively; and where I cannot obey actively, there I am willing to lie down, and to suffer what they shall do unto me."Genuine Christianity worthy of John and Paul!
"They that will have heaven, they must run for it, because the devil, the law, sin, death and hell, follow them. There is never a poor soul that is going to heaven, but the devil, the law, sin, death and hell make after that soul. The devil, your adversary, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. And I will assure you the devil is nimble; he can run apace; he is light of foot; he hath overtaken many; he hath turned up their heels, and hath given them an everlasting fall. Also the law! that can shoot a great way: have a care thou keep out of the reach of those great guns the Ten Commandments! Hell also hath a wide mouth," &c.It is the fashion of the day to call every man, who in his writings or discourses gives a prominence to the doctrines on which, beyond all others, the first Reformers separated from the Romish communion, a Calvinist. Bunyan may have been one, but I have met with nothing in his writings (except his Anti-pædobaptism, to which too he assigns no saving importance) that is not much more characteristically Lutheran; for instance, this passage is the very echo of the chapter on the Law and Gospel, in Luther's Table Talk.
Bunyan concludes with something like a promise of a third part. There appeared one after his death, and it has had the fortune to be included in many editions of the original work.It is remarkable that Southey should not have seen, or having seen, have forgotten to notice, that this third part is evidently written by some Romish priest or missionary in disguise.
The early part of his life was an open course of wickedness.Southey, in the Life prefixed to his edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, has, in a manner worthy of his head and heart, reduced this oft repeated charge to its proper value. Bunyan was never, in our received sense of the word, wicked. He was chaste, sober, honest; but he was a bitter blackguard; that is, damned his own and his neighbour's eyes on slight or no occasion, and was fond of a row. In this our excellent Laureate has performed an important service to morality. For the transmutation of actual reprobates into saints is doubtless possible; but like the many recorded facts of corporeal alchemy, it is not supported by modern experiments.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world.That in the Apocalypse the wilderness is the symbol of the world, or rather of the worldly life, Bunyan discovered by the instinct of a similar genius. The whole Jewish history, indeed, in all its details is so admirably adapted to, and suggestive of, symbolical use, as to justify the belief that the spiritual application, the interior and permanent sense, was in the original intention of the inspiring Spirit, though it might not have been present, as an object of distinct consciousness, to the inspired writers.
... where was a den.The jail. Mr. Bunyan wrote this precious book in Bedford jail, where he was confined on account of his religion. The following anecdote is related of him. A Quaker came to the jail, and thus addressed him:
"Friend Bunyan, the Lord sent me to seek for thee, and I have been through several counties in search of thee, and now I am glad I have found thee."To which Mr. Bunyan replied,
"Friend, thou dost not speak the truth in saying the Lord sent thee to seek me; for the Lord well knows that I have been in this jail for some years; and if he had sent thee, he would have sent thee here directly."Note in Edwards.
is almost a
synonyme of genius; the moral life in the intellectual light, the will
in the reason; and without it, says Seneca, nothing truly great was ever
achieved by man.And not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?"Note in Edwards.
Reader, was this ever your case? Did you ever see your sins, and feel the burden of them, so as to cry out in the anguish of your soul, What must I do to be saved? If not, you will look on this precious book as a romance or history, which no way concerns you; you can no more understand the meaning of it than if it were wrote in an unknown tongue, for you are yet carnal, dead in your sins, lying in the arms of the wicked one in false security. But this book is spiritual; it can only be understood by spiritually quickened souls who have experienced that salvation in the heart, which begins with a sight of sin, a sense of sin, a fear of destruction and dread of damnation. Such and such only commence Pilgrims from the City of Destruction to the heavenly kingdom.
Now whereas thou sawest that as soon as the first began to sweep, the dust did so fly about that the room by him could not be cleansed, but that thou wast almost choked therewith; this is to show thee, that the Law, instead of cleansing the heart (by its working) from sin, doth revive, put strength into, and increase it in the soul, even as it doth discover and forbid it; for it doth not give power to subdue.See Luther's Table Talk. The chapters in that work named "Law and Gospel," contain the very marrow of divinity. Still, however, there remains much to be done on this subject; namely, to show how the discovery of sin by the Law tends to strengthen the sin; and why it must necessarily have this effect, the mode of its action on the appetites and impetites through the imagination and understanding; and to exemplify all this in our actual experience.
Then I saw that one came to Passion, and brought him a bag of treasure, and poured it down at his feet; the which he took up, and rejoiced therein, and withal laughed Patience to scorn; but I beheld but awhile, and he had lavished all away, and had nothing left him but rags.One of the not many instances of faulty allegory in The Pilgrim's Progress; that is, it is no allegory. The beholding "but awhile," and the change into "nothing but rags," is not legitimately imaginable. A longer time and more interlinks are requisite. It is a hybrid compost of usual images and generalized words, like the Nile-born nondescript, with a head or tail of organized flesh, and a lump of semi-mud for the body. Yet, perhaps, these very defects are practically excellencies in relation to the intended readers of The Pilgrim's Progress.
The Interpreter answered, "This is Christ, who continually, with the oil of his grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart; by the means of which, notwithstanding what the Devil can do, the souls of his people prove gracious still. And in that thou sawest that the man stood behind the wall to maintain the fire, this is to teach thee, that it is hard for the tempted to see how this work of grace is maintained in the soul."This is beautiful; yet I cannot but think it would have been still more appropriate, if the waterpourer had been a Mr. Legality, a prudentialist offering his calculation of consequences as the moral antidote to guilt and crime; and if the oil-instillator, out of sight and from within, had represented the corrupt nature of man, that is, the spiritual will corrupted by taking up a nature into itself.
What, then, has the sinner who is the subject of grace no hand in keeping up the work of grace in the heart? No! It is plain Mr. Bunyan was not an Arminian.Note in Edwards.
I left off to watch and be sober; I laid the reins upon the neck of my lustsThis single paragraph proves, in opposition to the assertion in the preceding note in Edwards, that in Bunyan's judgment there must be at least a negative co-operation of the will of man with the divine grace, an energy of non-resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit. But the error of the Calvinists is, that they divide the regenerate will in man from the will of God, instead of including it.
" So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble; and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more."Alas! how many Protestants make a mental idol of the Cross, scarcely less injurious to the true faith in the Son of God than the wooden crosses and crucifixes of the Romanists! — and this, because they have not been taught that Jesus was both the Christ and the great symbol of Christ.
We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding (or discernment of reason) that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
1. John, v. 20, 21.
And besides, say they, if we get into the way, what matters which way we get in? If we are in, we are in. Thou art but in the way, who, as we perceive, came in at the gate: and we are also in the way, that came tumbling over the wall: wherein now is thy condition better than ours?The allegory is clearly defective, inasmuch as 'the way' represents two diverse meanings;
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.Illustrate this by a simile. Labouring under chronic bronchitis, I am told to inhale chlorine as a specific remedy; but I can do this only by dissolving a saturated solution of the gas in warm water, and then breathing the vapour. Now what the aqueous vapour or steam is to the chlorine, that our deeds, our outward life,
Gal. ii. 20.
is to faith.And the other took directly up the way to Destruction, which led him into a wide field, full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell, and rose no more.This requires a comment. A wide field full of mountains and of dark mountains, where Hypocrite stumbled and fell! The images here are unusually obscure.
They showed him Moses' rod, the hammer and nail with which Jael slew Sisera.I question whether it would be possible to instance more strikingly the power of a predominant idea (that true mental kaleidoscope with richly-coloured glass) on every object brought before the eye of the mind through its medium, than this conjunction of Moses' rod with the hammer of the treacherous assassin Jael, and similar encomiastic references to the same detestable murder, by Bunyan and men like Bunyan, good, pious, purely-affectioned disciples of the meek and holy Jesus; yet the erroneous preconception that whatever is uttered by a Scripture personage is, in fact, uttered by the infallible Spirit of God, makes Deborahs of them all.
All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out, &c. This is the best way; to own Satan's charges, if they be true; yea, to exaggerate them also, to exalt the riches of the grace of Christ above all, in pardoning all of them freely.Note in Edwards.
One thing I would not let slip: I took notice that now poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice; and thus I perceived it: just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind.There is a very beautiful letter of Archbishop Leighton's to a lady under a similar distemperature of the imagination4. In fact, it can scarcely not happen under any weakness and consequent irritability of the nerves to persons continually occupied with spiritual self-examination. No part of the pastoral duties requires more discretion, a greater practical psychological science. In this, as in what not?
For that he perceived God was with them, though in that dark and dismal state; and why not, thought he, with me, though by reason of the impediment that attends this place, I cannot perceive it? But it may be asked, Why doth the Lord suffer his children to walk in such darkness? It is for his glory: it tries their faith in him, and excites prayer to him: but his love abates not in the least towards them, since he lovingly inquires after them, Who is there among you that feareth the Lord and walketh in darkness, and hath no light? Then he gives most precious advice to them: Let him trust in the Lord, and stay himself upon his God.Yes! even in the sincerest believers, being men of reflecting and inquiring minds, there will sometimes come a wintry season, when the vital sap of faith retires to the root, that is, to atheism of the will. But though he slay me, yet will I cling to him.
And as for the other (Pope), though he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.O that Blanco White would write in Spanish the progress of a pilgrim from the Pope's cave to the Evangelist's wicket-gate and the Interpreter's house!
And let us assure ourselves that, at the day of doom, men shall be judged according to their fruit. It will not be said then, "Did you believe?" but "Were you doers or talkers only?" and accordingly shall be judged.All the doctors of the Sorbonne could not have better stated the Gospel medium between Pelagianism and Antinomian-Solifidianism, more properly named Sterilifidianism. It is, indeed, faith alone that saves us; but it is such a faith as cannot be alone. Purity and beneficence are the epidermis, faith and love the cutis vera of Christianity. Morality is the outward cloth, faith the lining; both together form the wedding-garment given to the true believer in Christ, even his own garment of righteousness, which, like the loaves and fishes, he mysteriously multiplies. The images of the sun in the earthly dew-drops are unsubstantial phantoms; but God's thoughts are things: the images of God, of the Sun of Righteousness, in the spiritual dew-drops are substances, imperishable substances.
Fine-spun speculations and curious reasonings lead men from simple truth and implicit faith into many dangerous and destructive errors. The Word records many instances of such for our caution. Be warned to study simplicity and godly sincerity. Note in Edwards on Doubting Castle.
But how contrary to this is the walk and conduct of some who profess to be pilgrims, and yet can wilfully and deliberately go upon the Devil's ground, and indulge themselves in carnal pleasures and sinful diversions.But what pleasures are carnal, — what are sinful diversions, — so I mean as that I may be able to determine what are not? Shew us the criterion, the general principle; at least explain whether each individual case is to be decided for the individual by his own experience of the effects of the pleasure or the diversion, in dulling or distracting his religious feelings; or can a list, a complete list, of all such pleasures be made beforehand?
Note in Edwards on the Enchanted Ground.
Against all which evils fasting is the proper remedy.It would have been well if the writer had explained exactly what he meant by the fasting, here so strongly recommended; during what period of time abstinence from food is to continue and so on. The effects, I imagine, must in good measure depend on the health of the individual. In some constitutions, fasting so disorders the stomach as to produce the very contrary of good; — confusion of mind, loose imaginations against the man's own will, and the like.
of philosophy
was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards.Besides, when we review our own immortal souls and their dependency upon some Almighty mind, we know that we neither did nor could produce ourselves, and withal know that all that power which lies within the compass of ourselves will serve for no other purpose than to apply several pre-existent things one to another, from whence all generations and mutations arise, which are nothing else but the events of different applications and complications of bodies that were existent before; and therefore that which produced that substantial life and mind by which we know ourselves, must be something much more mighty than we are, and can be no less indeed than omnipotent, and must also be the first architect andA Rhodian leap! Where our knowledge of a cause is derived from our knowledge of the effect, which is falsely (I think) here supposed, nothing can be logically, that is, apodeictically, inferred, but the adequacy of the former to the latter. The mistake, common to Smith, with a hundred other writers, arises out of an equivocal use of the word 'know.' In the scientific sense, as implying insight, and which ought to be the sense of the word in this place, we might be more truly said to know the soul by God, than to know God by the soul.of all other beings, and the perpetual supporter of them.
So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus asThis fragment is misquoted and misunderstood: for —'as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches with her furious mouth.'
it
should be 
unperfumed, inornate lays, not redolent of
art. — Render it thus:
— — — Not her's
To win the sense by words of rhetoric,
Lip-blossoms breathing perishable sweets;
But by the power of the informing Word
Roll sounding onward through a thousand years
Her deep prophetic bodements.
is with ecstatic mouth.
was to conquer the
body by abstracting the attention from it. Our maxim is to conciliate
the body by attending to it, and counteracting or precluding one set of
sensations by another, the servile dependence of the mind on the body
remaining the same. Instead of the due subservience of the body to the
mind (the favorite language of our Sidneys and Miltons) we hear nothing
at present but of health, good digestion, pleasurable state of general
feeling, and the like.
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