Waterland has not mastered the full force of [Greek: hae kata phusin zoae]. If indeed he had taken in the full force of the whole of this invaluable fragment, he would never have complimented the following extract from Irenaeus, as saying the same thing “in fuller and stronger words.” Compared with the fragment from Justin, it is but the flat common-place logic of analogy, so common in the early Fathers.
Ib. p. 340.
‘Qui nude tantum hominem eum dicunt ex Joseph generatum * * moriuntur.’
‘Non nude hominem’–not a mere man do I hold Jesus to have been and to be; but a perfect man and, by personal union with the Logos, perfect God. That his having an earthly father might be requisite to his being a perfect man I can readily suppose; but why the having an earthly father should be more incompatible with his perfect divinity, than his having an earthly mother, I cannot comprehend. All that John and Paul believed, God forbid that I should not!
Chap. VII. p. 389.
It is a sufficient reason for not receiving either them (‘Arian doctrines’), or the interpretations brought to support them, that the ancients, in the best and purest times, either knew nothing of them, or if they did, condemned them.
As excellent means of raising a presumption in the mind of the falsehood of Arianism and Socinianism, and thus of preparing the mind for a docile reception of the great idea itself–I admit and value the testimonies from the writings of the early Fathers. But alas! the increasing dimness, ending in the final want of the idea of this all-truths- including truth of the Tetractys eternally manifested in the Triad; –this, this is the ground and cause of all the main heresies from Semi-Arianism, recalled by Dr. Samuel Clarke, to the last setting ray of departing faith in the necessitarian Psilanthropism of Dr. Priestley.
Ib. p. 41-2, &c.
I cannot but think that Waterland’s defence of the Fathers in these pages against Barbeyrac, is below his great powers and characteristic vigour of judgment. It is enough that they, the Fathers of the first three centuries, were the lights of their age, and worthy of all reverence for their good gifts. But it appears to me impossible to deny their credulity; their ignorance, with one or two exceptions, in the interpretation of the Old Testament; or their hardihood in asserting the truth of whatever they thought it for the interest of the Church, and for the good of souls, to have believed as true. A whale swallowed Jonah; but a believer in all the assertions and narrations of Tertullian and Irenaeus would be more wonder-working than Jonah; for such a one must have swallowed whales.
[Footnote 1: The Importance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity asserted, in reply to some late pamphlets. 2nd edit. Lond. 1734.]
* * * * *
NOTES ON SKELTON.[1]
1825.
Burdy’s Life of Skelton, p. 22.
She lived until she was a hundred and five. The omission of his prayers on the morning it happened, he supposed ever after to be the cause of this unhappy accident. So early was his mind impressed with a lively sense of religious duty.
In anecdotes of this kind, and in the instances of eminently good men, it is that my head and heart have their most obstinate falls out. The question is:–To what extent the undoubted subjective truth may legitimately influence our judgment as to the possibility of the objective.
Ib. p. 67.
The Bishop then gave him the living of Pettigo in a wild part of the county of Donegal, having made many removals on purpose to put him in that savage place, among mountains, rocks, and heath, * * *. When he got this living he had been eighteen years curate of Monaghan, and two of Newtown-Butler, during which time he saw, as he told me, many illiterate boys put over his head, and highly preferred in the Church without having served a cure.
Though I have heard of one or two exceptions stated in proof that nepotism is not yet extinct among our Prelates, yet it is impossible to compare the present condition of the Church, and the disposal of its dignities and emoluments with the facts recorded in this Life, without an honest exultation.
Ib. p. 106.
He once declared to me that he would resign his living, if the Athanasian Creed were removed from the Prayer Book; and I am sure he would have done so.
Surely there was more zeal than wisdom in this declaration. Does the Athanasian or rather the ‘pseudo’-Athanasian Creed differ from the Nicene, or not? If not, it must be dispensable at least, if not superfluous. If it does differ, which of the two am I to follow;–the profession of an anonymous individual, or the solemn decision of upwards of three hundred Bishops convened from all parts of the Christian world?
Vol. I. p. 177-180.
No problem more difficult or of more delicate treatment than the ‘criteria’ of miracles; yet none on which young divines are fonder of displaying their gifts. Nor is this the worst. Their charity too often goes to wreck from the error of identifying the faith in Christ with the arguments by which they think it is to be supported. But surely if two believers meet at the same goal of faith, it is a very secondary question whether they travelled thither by the same road of argument. In this and other passages of Skelton, I recognize and reverence a vigorous and robust intellect; but I complain of a turbidness in his reasoning, a huddle in his sequence, and here and there a semblance of arguing in a circle–from the miracle to the doctrine, and from the doctrine to the miracle. Add to this a too little advertency to the distinction between the evidence of a miracle for A, an eye-witness, and for B, for whom it is the relation of a miracle by an asserted eye-witness; and again between B, and X, Y, Z, for whom it is a fact of history. The result of my own meditations is, that the evidence of the Gospel, taken as a total, is as great for the Christians of the nineteenth century, as for those of the Apostolic age. I should not be startled if I were told it was greater. But it does not follow, that this equally holds good of each component part. An evidence of the most cogent clearness, unknown to the primitive Christians, may compensate for the evanescence of some evidence, which they enjoyed. Evidences comparatively dim have waxed into noon-day splendour; and the comparative wane of others, once effulgent, is more than indemnified by the ‘synopsis’ [Greek: tou pantos], which we enjoy, and by the standing miracle of a Christendom commensurate and almost synonymous with the civilized world. I make this remark for the purpose of warning the divinity student against the disposition to overstrain particular proofs, or rest the credibility of the Gospel too exclusively on some one favourite point. I confess, that I cannot peruse page 179 without fancying that I am reading some Romish Doctor’s work, dated from a community where miracles are the ordinary news of the day.
P. S. By the by, the Rev. Philip Skelton is of the true Irish breed; that is, a brave fellow, but a bit of a bully. “Arrah, by St. Pathrick! but I shall make cold mutton of you, Misther Arian.”
Ib. p. 182.
If in this he appears to deal fairly by us, proving such things as admit of it, by reason; and such as do not, by the authority of his miracles, &c.
Are ‘we’ likely to have miracles performed or pretended before our eyes? If not, what may all this mean? If Skelton takes for granted the veracity of the Evangelists, and the precise verity of the Gospels, the truth and genuineness of the miracles is included:–and if not, what does he prove? The exact accordance of the miracles related with the ideal of a true miracle in the reason, does indeed furnish an argument for the probable truth of the relation. But this does not seem to be Skelton’s intention.
Ib. p. 185.
But to remedy this evil, as far as the nature of the thing will permit, a genuine record of the true religion must be kept up, that its articles may not be in danger of total corruption in such a sink of opinions.
Anything rather than seek a remedy in that which Scripture itself declares the only one. Alas! these bewilderments (the Romanists urge) have taken place especially through and by the misuse of the Scriptures. Whatever God has given, we ought to think necessary;–the Scriptures, the Church, the Spirit. Why disjoin them?
Ib. p. 186.
Now a perpetual miracle, considered as the evidence of any thing, is nonsense; because were it at first ever so apparently contrary to the known course of nature, it must in time be taken for the natural effect of some unknown cause, as all physical ‘phaenomena’, if far enough traced, always are; and consequently must fall into a level, as to a capacity of proving any thing, with the most ordinary appearances of nature, which, though all of them miracles, as to the primary cause of their production, can never be applied to the proof of an inspiration, because ordinary and common.
I doubt this, though I have no doubt that it would be pernicious. The yearly blossoming of Aaron’s rod is against Skelton, who confounds single facts with classes of ‘phaenomena’, and he draws his conclusion from an arbitrary and, as seems to me, senseless definition of a miracle.
Ib. p. 214. End of Discourse II.
Skelton appears to have confounded two errors very different in kind and in magnitude;–that of the Infidel, against whom his arguments are with few exceptions irrefragable; and that of the Christian, who, sincerely believing the Law, the Prophecies, the miracles and the doctrines, all in short which in the Scriptures themselves is declared to have been revealed, does not attribute the same immediate divinity to all and every part of the remainder. It would doubtless be more Christian-like to substitute the views expressed in the next Discourse (III.); but still the latter error is not as the former.
Ib. p. 234.
But why should not the conclusion be given up, since it is possible Christ may have had two natures in him, so as to have been less than the Father in respect to the one, and equal to him in respect to the other.
I understand these words (‘My Father is greater than I’) of the divinity–and of the Filial subordination, which does not in the least encroach on the equality necessary to the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit. Bishop Bull does the same. See too Skelton’s own remarks in Discourse V. p. 265.
Ib. p. 251.
This was necessary, because their Law was ordained by angels.
Now this is an instance of what I cannot help regarding as a superstitious excess of reverence for single texts. We know that long before the Epistle to the Hebrews was written, the Alexandrian Church, which by its intercourse with Greek philosophers, chiefly Platonists, had become ashamed of the humanities of the Hebrew Scriptures, in defiance of those Scriptures had pretended, that it was not the Supreme Being who gave the Law in person to Moses, but some of his angels. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, arguing ‘ad homines’, avails himself of this, in order to prove that on their own grounds the Mosaic was of dignity inferior to the Christian dispensation. To get rid of this no-difficulty in a single verse or two in the Epistles, Skelton throws an insurmountable difficulty on the whole Mosaic history.
Ib. p. 265.
Therefore, he saith, ‘I’ (as a man) ‘can of myself do nothing’.
Even of this text I do not see the necessity of Skelton’s parenthesis (as a man). Nay it appears to me (I confess) to turn a sublime and most instructive truth into a truism. “But if not as the Son of God, therefore ‘a fortiori’ not as the Son of man, and more especially, as such, in all that refers to the redemption of mankind.”
Ib. p. 267.
To this glory Christ, as God, was entitled from all eternity; but did not acquire a right to it as man, till he had paid the purchase by his blood.
I too hold this for a most important truth; but yet could wish it to have been somewhat differently expressed; as thus:–“but did not acquire it as man till the means had been provided and perfected by his blood.”
Ib. p. 268.
If Christ in one place, (‘John’ xiv. 28,) says, ‘My Father is greater than I’; he must be understood of his relation to the Father as his Son, born of a woman.
I do not see the necessity of this: does not Christ say, ‘My Father and I will come and we will dwell in you?’ Nay, I dare confidently affirm that in no one passage of St. John’s Gospel is our Lord declared in any special sense the Son of the First Person of the Trinity in reference to his birth from a woman. And remember it is from St. John’s Gospel that the words are cited. So too the answer to Philip ought to be interpreted by ch. i. 18. of the same Gospel.
Ib. p. 276.
I confess I do not agree with Skelton’s interpretation of any of these texts entirely. Because I hold the Nicene Faith, and revere the doctrine of the Trinity as the fundamental article of Christianity, I apply to Christ as the Second Person, almost all the texts which Skelton explains of his humanity. At all events 1 consider ‘the first-born of every creature’ as a false version of the words, which (as the argument and following verse prove) should be rendered ‘begotten before’, (or rather ‘superlatively before’), ‘all that was created or made; for by him’ they were made.
Ib.
‘Of that day, and that hour knoweth no man, no not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’
I cannot explain myself here; but I have long thought that our Saviour meant in these words [Greek: ainittein taen theotaeta ahutou]–and that like the problem proposed by him to the Scribes, they were intended to prepare the minds of the disciples for this awful mystery–[Greek: ei mae ho pataer]–“unless, or if not, as the Father knows it;” while in St. Matthew the equivalent sense is given by the omission of the [Greek: oud’ ho uhios], and its inclusion in the Father. ‘As the Father knoweth me, so know I the Father’.
It would have been against the general rule of Scripture prophecies, and the intention of the revelation in Christ, that the first Christians should have been so influenced in their measures and particular actions, as they could not but have been by a particular foreknowledge of the express and precise time at which Jerusalem was to be destroyed. To reconcile them to this uncertainty, our Lord first teaches them to consider this destruction the close of one great epoch, or [Greek: aion], as the type of the final close of the whole world of time, that is, of all temporal things; and then reasons with them thus:–“Wonder not that I should leave you ignorant of the former, when even the highest order of heavenly intelligences know not the latter, [Greek: oud’ ho uhios, ei mae ho pataer]; nor should I myself, but that the Father knows it, all whose will is essentially known to me as the Eternal Son. But even to me it is not revealably communicated.” Such seems to me the true sense of this controverted passage in Mark, and that it is borne out by many parallel texts in St. John, and that the correspondent text in Matthew, which omits the [Greek: oud’ ho huios], conveys the same sense in equivalent terms, the word [Greek: emou] including the Son in the [Greek: pataer monos]. For to his only-begotten Son before all time the Father showeth all things.
Ib. p. 279.
But whether we can reconcile these words to our belief of Christ’s prescience and divinity, or not, matters little to the debate about his divinity itself; since we can so fully prove it by innumerable passages of Scripture, too direct, express, and positive, to be balanced by one obscure passage, from ‘whence the Arian is to draw the consequence himself, which may possibly be wrong’.
Very good.
Ib. p. 280.
‘We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding 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.’–l John v. 20. The whole connection evidently shows the words to be spoken of Christ.
That the words comprehend Christ is most evident. All that can be fairly concluded from 1 Cor. viii. 6, is this:–that the Apostles, Paul and John, speak of the Father as including and comprehending the Son and the Holy Ghost, as his Word and his Spirit; but of these as inferring or supposing the Father, not comprehending him. Whenever, therefore, respecting the Godhead itself, containing both deity and dominion, the term God is distinctively used, it is applied to the Father, and Lord to the Son.
Ib. p. 281.
But, farther, it is objected that Christ cannot be God, since God calls him ‘his servant’ more than once, particularly ‘Isaiah’ xlii. 1.
The Prophets often speak of the anti-type, or person typified, in language appropriate to, and suggested by, the type itself. So, perhaps, in this passage, if, as I suppose, Hezekiah was the type immediately present to Isaiah’s imagination. However, Skelton’s answer is quite sufficient.
Ib. p. 287.
Hence it appears, that in the passage objected, (1 ‘Cor’. xv. 24, &c.) Christ is spoken of purely as that Man whom ‘God had highly exalted, and to whom he had given a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.’ (Phil. ii. 9, 10.)
I must confess that this exposition does not quite satisfy me. I cannot help thinking that something more and deeper was meant by the Apostle; and this must be sought for in the mystery of the Trinity itself, ‘in which’ (mystery) ‘all treasures of knowledge are hidden’.
Ib. p. 318.
Hence, perhaps, may be best explained what St. Peter says in the second Epistle, after pleading a miracle. ‘We have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto you do well that you take heed.’
I believe that St. Peter neither said it, nor meant this; but that [Greek: Bebaioteron] follows ‘the prophetic word’. We have also the word of prophecy more firm;–that is; we have, in addition to the evidence of the miracles themselves, this further confirmation, that they are the fulfilment of known prophecies.
Ib. p. 327.
Agreeable to these passages of the Prophet, St. Peter tells us (‘Acts’ x. 38), ‘God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and power’.
I have often to complain that too little attention is paid by commentators to the history and particular period in which certain speeches were delivered, or words written. Could St. Peter with propriety have introduced the truth to a prejudiced audience with its deepest mysteries? Must he not have begun with the most evident facts?
Ib. Disc. VIII.
The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity vindicated.
Were I a Clergyman, the paragraphs from p. 366 to p. 370, both inclusive, of this Discourse should form the conclusion of my Sermon on Trinity Sunday,–whether I preached at St. James’s, or in a country village.
Ib. pp. 374-378.
As a reason why we should doubt our own judgment, it is quite fair to remind the objector, that the same difficulty occurs in the scheme of God’s ordinary providence. But that a difficulty in a supposed article of revealed truth is solved by the occurrence of the same or of an equivalent difficulty in the common course of human affairs–this I find it hard to conceive. How was the religious, as distinguished from the moral, sense first awakened? What made the human soul feel the necessity of a faith in God, but the apparent incongruity of certain dispensations in this world with the idea of God, with the law written in the heart? Is not the reconciling of these facts or ‘phaenomena’ with the divine attributes, one of the purposes of a revealed religion? But even this is not a full statement of the defect complained of in this solution. A difficulty which may be only apparent (like that other of the prosperity of the wicked) is solved by the declaration of its reality! A difficulty grounded on the fact of temporal and outward privations and sufferings, is solved by being infinitely increased, that is, by the assertion of the same principle on the determination of our inward and everlasting weal and woe. That there is nothing in the Christian Faith or in the Canonical Scriptures, when rightly interpreted, that requires such an argument, or sanctions the recourse to it, I believe myself to have proved in the Aids to Reflection. For observe that “to solve” has a scientific, and again a religious sense, and that in the latter, a difficulty is satisfactorily solved, as soon as its insolvibility for the human mind is proved and accounted for.
Ib. (Disc. XIV. pp. 500-502.)
Christianity proved by Miracles.
I cannot see and never could, the purpose, or ‘cui bono’, of this reasoning. To whom is it addressed? To a man who denies a God, or that God can reveal his will to mankind? If such a man be not below talking to, he must first be convinced of his miserable blindness respecting these truths; for these are clearly presupposed in every proof of miracles generally.
Again, does he admit the authenticity of the Gospels, and the veracity of the Evangelists? Does he credit the facts there related, and as related? If not, these points must be proved; for these are clearly presupposed in all reasoning on the particular miracles of the Christian dispensation. If he does, can he deny that many acts of Christ were wonderful;–that reanimating a dead body in which putrefaction had already commenced,–and feeding four thousand men with a few loaves and fishes, so that the fragments left greatly exceeded the original total quantity,–were wonderful events? Should such a man, ‘compos mentis’, exist, (which I more than doubt,) what could a wise man do but stare–and leave him? Christ wrought many wonderful works, implying admirable power, and directed to the most merciful and beneficent ends; and these acts were such signs of his divine mission, as rendered inattention or obstinate averseness to the truths and doctrines which he promulgated, inexcusable, and indeed on any hypothesis but that of immoral dispositions and prejudices, utterly inconceivable. In what respect, I pray, can this statement be strengthened by any reasoning about the nature and distinctive essence of miracles ‘in abstracto’? What purpose can be answered by any pretended definition of a miracle? If I met with a disputatious word-catcher, or logomachist, who sought to justify his unbelief on this ground, I should not hesitate to say–“Never mind whether it is a miracle or no. Call it what you will;–but do you believe the fact? Do you believe that Christ did by force of his will and word multiply instantaneously twelve loaves and a few small fishes, into sufficient food for a hungering multitude of four thousand men and women?” When I meet with, or from credible authority hear of, a man who believes this fact, and yet thinks it no sign of Christ’s mission; when I can even conceive of a man in his right senses who, believing all the facts and events related in the New Testament, and as there related, does yet remain a Deist, I may think it time to enter into a disquisition respecting the right definition of a miracle; and meantime, I humbly trust that believing with my whole heart and soul in the wonderful works of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I shall not forfeit my title of Christian, though I should not subscribe to this or that divine’s right definition of his ‘idea’ of a miracle; which word is with me no ‘idea’ at all, but a general term; the common surname, as it were, of the wonderful works wrought by the messengers of God to man in the Patriarchal, Mosaic, and Christian dispensations.
It is to these notions and general definitions, far more than to the facts themselves, that the arguments of Infidels apply; and from which they derive their plausibility. Nor is this all. The Infidel imitates the divine, and adopts the same mode of arguing, namely, by this substantiation of mere general or collective terms. For instance, Hume’s argument (stated, by the by, before he was born, and far more forcibly, by Dr. South, who places it in the mouth of Thomas,) [2]–reduce it to the particular facts in question, and its whole speciousness vanishes. I am speaking of the particular facts and actions of the Gospel; of those, and those only. Now that I should be deceived, or the eye-witnesses have been deceived, under all the circumstances of those miracles, with all antecedents, accompaniments, and consequents, is quite as contrary to, that is, unparalleled in my experience, as the return to life of a dead man.
So again in the second paragraph of page 502, [3] the position is true or false according to the definition of a miracle. In the narrower sense of the term, miracle,–that is, a consequent presented to the outward senses without an adequate antecedent, ejusdem generis,–it is not only false but detractory from the Christian religion. It is a main, nay, an indispensable evidence; but it is not the only, no, nor if comparison be at all allowable, the highest and most efficient; unless, indeed, the term evidence is itself confined to grounds of conviction offered to the senses, but then the position is a mere truism.
There is yet another way of reasoning, which I utterly dislike; namely, by putting imaginary cases of imaginary miracles, as Paley has done. “If a dozen different individuals, all men of known sense and integrity, should each independently of the other pledge their everlasting weal on the truth, that they saw a man beheaded and quartered, and that on a certain person’s prayer or bidding, the quarters reunited, and then a new head grew on and from out of the stump of the neck: and should the man himself assure you of the same, shew you the junctures, and identify himself to you by some indelible mark, with which you had been previously acquainted,–could you withstand this evidence?” What could a judicious man reply but–“When such an event takes place, I will tell you; but what has this to do with the reasons for our belief in the truth of the written records of the Old and New Testament? Why do you fly off from the facts to a gigantic fiction,–when the possibility of the ‘If’ with respect to a much less startling narration is the point in dispute between us?”
Such and so peculiar, and to an honest mind so unmistakeable, is the character of veracity and simplicity on the very countenance, as it were, of the Gospel, that every remove of the inquirer’s attention from the facts themselves is a remove of his conversion. It is your business to keep him from wandering, not to set him the example.
Never, surely, was there a more unequal writer than Skelton;–in the discourses on the Trinity, the compeer of Bull and Waterland; and yet the writer of these pages, 500-501! Natural magic! a stroke of art! for example, converting the Nile into blood! And then his definition of a miracle. Suspension of the laws of nature! suspension–laws–nature! Bless me! a chapter would be required for the explanation of each several word of this definition, and little less than omniscience for its application in any one instance. An effect presented to the senses without any adequate antecedent, ‘ejusdem generis’, is a miracle in the philosophic sense. Thus: the corporeal ponderable hand and arm raised with no other known causative antecedent, but a thought, a pure act of an immaterial essentially invisible imponderable will, is a miracle for a reflecting mind. Add the words, ‘praeter experientiam’: and we have the definition of a miracle in the popular, practical, and appropriated sense.
Vol. III.
That all our thoughts and views respecting our Faith should be consistent with each other, and with the attributes of God, is most highly desirable: but when the great diversities of men’s understandings, and the unavoidable influence of circumstances on the mind, are considered, we may hope from the Divine mercy, that the agreement in the result will suffice; and that he who sincerely and efficiently believes that Christ left the glory which he had with the Father before all worlds, to become man and die for our salvation,–that by him we may, and by him alone we can, be saved,–will be held a true believer,–whether he interprets the words ‘sacrifice,’ ‘purchase,’ ‘bargain,’ ‘satisfaction,’ of the creditor by full payment of the ‘debt,’ and the like as proper and literal expressions of the redeeming act and the cause of our salvation, as Skelton seems to have done;–or (as I do) as figurative language truly designating the effects and consequences of this adorable act and process.
Ib. p. 393.
But were the prospect of a better parish, in case of greater diligence, set before him by his Bishop, on the music of such a promise, like one bit by a ‘tarantula’, we should probably soon see him in motion, and serving God, (O shameful!) for the sake of Mammon, as if his torpid body had been animated anew by a returning soul.
Without any high-flying in Christian morality, I cannot keep shrinking from the wish here expressed; at all events, I cannot sympathize with, or participate in, the expectation of “an infinite advancement” from men so motived.
Ib. p. 394.
Yet excommunication, the inherent discipline of the Church, which it exercised under persecution, which it is still permitted to exercise under the present establishment.
Rarely I suspect, without exposing the Clergyman to the risk of an action for damages, or some abuse. There are few subjects that more need investigation, yet require more vigour and soundness of judgment to be rightly handled, than this of Christian discipline in a Church established by law. It is indeed a most difficult and delicate problem, and supplied Baxter with a most plausible and to me the only perplexing of his numerous objections to our Ecclesiastical Constitution. On the other hand, I saw clearly that he was requiring an impossibility; and that his argument carried on to its proper consequences concluded against all Church Establishment, not more against the National Church of which he complained, than the one of his own clipping and shaping which he would have substituted; consequently, every proof (and I saw many and satisfactory proofs) of the moral and political necessity of an Established Church, was at the same time a pledge that a deeper insight would detect some flaw in the reasoning of the Disciplinarians. For if A. be right and requisite, B., which is incompatible with A., cannot be rightly required. And this it was, that first led me to the distinction between the ‘Ecclesia’ and an ‘Enclesia’, concerning which see my Essay on Establishment and Dissent, in which I have met the objection to my position, that Christian discipline is incompatible with a Church established by law, from the fact of the discipline of the Church of Scotland. [4] Who denies that it is in the power of a legislature to punish certain offences by ignominy, and to make the clergy magistrates in reference to these? The question is, whether it is wise or expedient, which it may be, or rather may have been, in Scotland, and the contrary in England? Wise or unwise, this is not discipline, not Christian discipline, enforced only by spiritual motives, enacted by spiritual authority, and submitted to for conscience’ sake.
Ib. p. 446.
Be this as it may, the foreknowledge and the decree were both eternal. Here now it is a clear point that the moral actions of all accountable agents were, with certainty, fore-known, and their doom unalterably fixed, long before any one of them existed.
Strange that so great a man as Skelton should first affirm eternity of both, yet in the next sentence talk of “long before.” These Reflections [5] are excellent, but here Skelton offends against his own canons. I should feel no reluctance, moral or speculative, in accepting the apparent necessity of both propositions, as a sufficient reason for believing both; and the transcendancy of the subject as a sufficient solution of their apparent incompatibility. But yet I think that another view of the subject, not less congruous with universal reason and more agreeable to the light of reason in the human understanding, might be defended, without detracting from any perfection of the Divine Being. Nay, I think that Skelton needed but one step more to have seen it.
Ib. p. 478.
‘In fine.’
To what purpose were these Reflections, taken as a whole, written? I cannot answer. To dissuade men from reasoning on a subject beyond our faculties? Then why all this reasoning?
Vol. IV. p. 28. Deism Revealed.
‘Shepherd’. Were you ever at Constantinople, Sir?
‘Dechaine’. Never.
‘Shep.’ Yet I believe you have no more doubt there is such a city, than that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones.
‘Temp.’ I am sure 1 have not.
‘Dech.’ Nor I; but what then?
‘Shep.’ Pray, Mr. Dechaine, did you see Julius Caesar assassinated in the Capitol?
‘Dech.’ A pretty question! No indeed, Sir.
‘Shep.’ Have you any doubts about the truth of what is told us by the historians concerning that memorable transaction?
‘Dech.’ Not the least.
‘Shep.’ Pray, is it either self-evident or demonstrable to you, at this time and place, that there is any such city as Constantinople, or that there ever was such a man as Caesar?
‘Dech.’ By no means.
‘Shep.’ And you have all you know concerning the being of either the city, or the man, merely from the report of others, who had it from others, and so on, through many links of tradition?
‘Dech.’ I have.
‘Shep.’ You see then, that there are certain cases, in which the evidence of things not seen nor either sensibly or demonstrably perceived, can justly challenge so entire an assent, that he who should pretend to refuse it in the fullest measure of acquiescence, would be deservedly esteemed the most stupid or perverse of mankind.
That there is a sophism here, every one must feel in the very fact of being ‘non-plus’d’ without being convinced. The sophism consists in the instance being ‘haud ejusdem generis’ ([Greek: elegchos metabaseos eis allo genos]); and what the allogeneity is between the assurance of the being of Madrid or Constantinople, and the belief of the fact of the resurrection of Christ, I have shown elsewhere. The universal belief of the ‘tyrannicidium’ of Julius Caesar is doubtless a fairer instance, but the whole mode of argument is unsound and unsatisfying. Why run off from the fact in question, or the class at least to which it belongs? The victory can be but accidental–a victory obtained by the unguarded logic, or want of logical foresight of the antagonist, who needs only narrow his positions to narrations of facts and events, in our judgment of which we are not aided by the analogy of previous and succeeding experience, to deprive you of the opportunity of skirmishing thus on No Man’s land. But this is Skelton’s ruling passion, sometimes his strength–too often his weakness. He must force the reader to believe: or rather he has an antagonist, a wilful infidel or heretic always and exclusively before his imagination; or if he thinks of the reader at all, it is as of a partizan enjoying every hard thump, and smashing ‘fister’ he gives the adversary, whom Skelton hates too cordially to endure to obtain any thing from him with his own liking. No! It must be against his will, and in spite of it. No thanks to him–the dog could not help himself! How much more effectual would he have found it to have commenced by placing himself in a state of sympathy with the supposed sceptic or unbeliever;–to have stated to him his own feelings, and the real grounds on which they rested;–to have shown himself the difference between the historical facts which the sceptic takes for granted and believes spontaneously, as it were,–and those, which are to be the subject of discussion; and this brings the question at once to the proof. And here, after all, lies the strength of Skelton’s reasoning, which would have worked far more powerfully, had it come first and single, and with the whole attention directed towards it.
Ib. p. 35.
‘Templeton.’ Surely the resurrection of Christ, or any other man, cannot be a thing impossible with God. It is neither above his power, nor, when employed for a sufficient purpose, inconsistent with his majesty, wisdom, and goodness.
This is the ever open and vulnerable part of Deism. The Deist, as a Deist, believes, ‘implicite’ at least, so many and stupendous miracles as to render his disbelief of lesser miracles, simply because they are miraculous, gross inconsistencies. To have the battle fairly fought out, Spinoza, or a Bhuddist, or a Burmese Gymnosoph, should be challenged. Then, I am deeply persuaded, would the truth appear in full evidence, that no Christ, no God,–and, conversely, if the Father, then the Son. I can never too often repeat, that revealed religion is a pleonasm. –Religion is revelation, and revelation the only religion.
Ib. p. 37.
‘Shep.’ Those believers, whose faith is to rely on the truth of the Christian history, rest their assent on a written report made by eye-witnesses; which report the various Churches and sects, jealous of one another, took care to preserve genuine and uncorrupted, at least in all material points, and all the religious writers in every age since have amply attested.
A divine of the present day who shall undertake the demonstration of the truth of Christianity by external evidences, or historically, must not content himself with assuming or asserting this. He must either prove it; or prove that such proof is not necessary. I myself should be quite satisfied if I proved the former position in respect to the fourth Gospel, and showed that the evidence of the other three was equivalent to a record by an eye-witness: which would not be at all inconsistent with my contending at the same time for the authenticity of the first Gospel, or rather for the Catholic interpretation of the title-words [Greek: Kata Matthaion], as the more probable opinion, which a sound divine will neither abandon nor overload, neither place it in the foundation, nor on the other hand suffer it to be extruded from the wall. Believe me, there is great, very great, danger in these broad unqualified assertions that Skelton deals in. Even though the balance of evidence should be on his side, yet the inquirer will be unfavourably affected by the numerous doubts and difficulties which an acquaintance with the more modern works of Biblical criticism will pour upon him, and for which his mind is wholly unprepared. To meet with a far weaker evidence than we had taken it for granted we were to find, gives the same shake to the mind, that missing a stair gives to the body.
Ib. p. 243.
‘Temp.’ You, Mr. Dechaine, seem to forget that God is just; and you, Mr. Shepherd, that he is merciful
‘Dech.’ I insist, that, as God is merciful, he will forgive.
‘Shep.’ And I insist, that, as he is just, he will punish.
‘Temp.’ Pray Mr. Dechaine, are you able, upon the Deistical scheme to rid yourself of this difficulty?
‘Dech.’ I see no difficulty in it at all. God gives us laws only for our good, and will never suffer those laws to become a snare to us, and the occasion of our eternal misery.
Here is the ‘cardo’! The man of sense asserts that it is necessary for the good of all, that a code of laws should exist, while yet it is impossible that all should at all times be obeyed by each person: but what is impossible cannot be required. Nevertheless, it may be required that no ‘iota’ of any one of these laws should be wilfully and deliberately transgressed, nor is there any one for the transgression of which the transgressor must not hold himself punishable. “And yet” (says our man of sense,) “what may not be said of any one point, or any one moment, cannot be denied of the collective agency of a whole life, or any considerable section of it. Here we find ourselves constrained by our best feelings to praise or condemn, to reward or punish, according as a great predominance of acts of obedience or disobedience, and a continued love of the better, or the lusting after the worst, manifests the maxim (‘regula maxima’), the radical will and proper character of the individual. So parents judge of their children; so schoolmasters of their scholars; so friends of friends, and even so will God judge his creatures, if we are to trust in our common sense, or believe the repeated declarations in the Old Testament.” And now I should be glad to hear any satisfactory ‘sensible’ reply to this, or any answer that does not fly higher than ‘sense’ can follow, and pierce into “the thick clouds” of decried metaphysics! For no fair reply can be imagined, but one which would find the root of the moral evil, the true [Greek: ponaeron], in this very impossibility.
Ib. p. 249.
‘Cunningham.’ But how does all this discourse about sacrifices and the natural light show that your faith does not ascribe injustice to God in putting an innocent person to death for the transgressions of the guilty?
‘Shep.’ Was Christ innocent?
‘Cunn.’ ‘He was without sin.’
‘Shep.’ And he was put to death by the appointment and predetermination of God?
‘Cunn.’ The Jews put him to death.
‘Shep.’ Do not evade the question. Was he not ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’? Was he not ‘so delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, that the Jews, having taken him, by wicked hands crucified and slew him?’
‘Cunn’. And what then?
‘Shep’. Nothing; but that you are to answer, as well as I, for saying that God predetermined the death of this only innocent person.
I am less pleased with this volume than with any of the preceding. Ask your own heart and conscience whether (for instance,) they are satisfied with this defence ‘duri per durius’: or whether frightening a modest query into silence by perverting it into an accusation of the Almighty, by virtue of a conclusion borrowed from the Calvinistic theory of Predestination, is not more in the spirit of Job’s comforters, than becomes a minister of the Apostolic Church of England and Ireland? Such arguments are but edge-tools at the safest, but more often they may rather be likened to the two-edged blade of Parysatis’s knife, the one of which was poisoned. Leave them to Calvin, or those who dare appropriate Calvin’s words, that “God’s absolute will is the only rule of his justice;”–thus dividing the divine attributes. Yet Calvin himself distinguishes the hidden from the revealed God, even as the Greek Fathers distinguished the [Greek: thelaema Theou], the absolute ground of all being, from the [Greek: Boulae tou Theou], as the cause and disposing providence of all existence.
But I disapprove of the plan and spirit of this work, (Deism Revealed.) The cold-hearted, worldly-minded, cunning Deist, or the coarse sensual Infidel, is of all men the least likely to be converted; and the conscientious, inquiring, though misled and perplexed, Sceptic will throw aside a book at once, as not applicable to his case, which treats every doubt as a crime, and supposes that there is no doubt at all possible but in a bad heart and from wicked wishes. Compare this with St. Paul’s language concerning the Jews.
So again, pp. 225, &c. of this volume. Do not the plainest intuitions of our moral and rational being confirm the positions here attributed to the Deist, Dechaine? Are they not the same by which Melancthon de-Calvinized, at least de-Augustinized, the heroic Luther;–those which constitute one of the only two essential differences between the Augsburg Confession and the Calvinistic Articles of Faith? And can anything be more flittery and special-pleading than Skelton’s objections? And again, p. 507, “and that prayer which he (Tindal) is reported to have used a little before his death, ‘If there is a God, I desire he may have mercy on me;'”–was it Christian-like to publish and circulate a blind report–so improbable and disgusting, as to demand the strongest and most unsuspicious testimony for its reception?
Ib. p. 268.
‘Shep’. Pray, Mr. Dechaine, if a person, whom you knew to be an honest and clear-sighted man, should solemnly assure you he saw a dead man restored to life, what would you think of his testimony?
‘Dech’. As I could not possibly have as strong an assurance of his honesty, clear-sightedness, and penetration, as of the great improbability of the fact, I should not believe him.
‘Shep’. Well; it is true he might be deceived himself, or intend to impose on you. But in case ten such persons should all, at different times, confirm the same report, how would this affect you?
There is one inconvenience, not to say danger, in this argument of Mr. Shepherd’s; namely, that of its not standing in the same force, when it comes to be repeated in the particular miraculous facts in support of which it is adduced.
Ib. p. 281.
No other ancient book can be so well proved to have been the work of the author it is now ascribed to, as every book of the New Testament can be proved to have been written by him whose name it hath all along borne.
This is true to the full extent that the defence of the divinity of our religion needs, or perhaps permits, and I see no advantage gained by asserting more. I must lose all power of distinction, before I can affirm that the genuineness of the first Gospel,–that in its present form it was written by Matthew, or is a literal translation of a Gospel written by him,–rests on as strong external evidence as Luke’s, or on as strong internal evidence as St. John’s. Sufficient that the evidence greatly preponderates in its favor.
[Footnote 1: The complete Works of the late Rev. Philip Skelton, Rector of Fintona. 6. vols. 8vo. London, 1824. ‘Ed.’]
[Footnote 2: See South’s Works, vol. iii. p. 500. Clarendon edit. 1823 –Ed.]
[Footnote 3: But it will be proper to observe, that it strikes directly at the very root of Revelation, which cannot possibly give any other evidence of itself, as the dictate of God, but what must be drawn from miracles, wrought to prove the divine mission of those who publish it to the world.]
[Footnote 4: The Editor is not aware of the existence of the Essay here mentioned. But see for the distinction of the ‘Ecclesia’ and ‘Enclesia’, the Church and State, 3rd edit.–Ed.]
[Footnote 5: On Predestination, as far as p. 445.]
* * * * *
NOTES ON ANDREW FULLER’S CALVINISTIC AND SOCINIAN SYSTEMS EXAMINED AND COMPARED. [1] 1807.
Letter III. p. 38.
They (the Jews) did not deny that to be God’s own Son was to be equal with the Father, nor did they allege that such an equality would destroy the divine unity: a thought of this kind never seems to have occurred to their minds.
In so truly excellent a book as this is, I regret that this position should rest on an assertion. The equality of Christ would not, indeed, destroy the unity of God the Father, considered as one Person: but, unless we presume the Jews in question acquainted with the great truth of the Tri-unity, we must admit that it would be considered as implying Ditheism. Now that some among the Jews had made very near approaches, though blended with errors, to the doctrine taught in John, c. i., we can prove from the writings of Philo;–and the Socinians can never prove that these Jews did not know at least of the doctrine of their schools concerning the only-begotten Word–[Greek: Logos monogenaes],–not as an attribute, much less as an abstraction or personification–but as a distinct ‘Hypostasis’ [Greek: symphysikae]:-and hence it might be shown that their offence was that the carpenter’s son, the Galilean, should call himself the [Greek: Theos phaneros]. This might have been rendered more than probable by the concluding sentence of Christ’s answer to the disciples of John;–‘and blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me’ (Luke vii. 23.); which appears to have no adequate or even tolerable meaning, unless in reference to the passage in Isaiah, (lxi. 1, 2.) prophesying that Jehovah himself would come among them, and do the things which our Saviour states himself to have done. Thus, too, I regret that the answer of our Lord, (John x. 34-36.) being one of the imagined strong-holds of the Socinians, should not have been more fully cleared up. I doubt not that Fuller’s is a true interpretation; and that no other is consistent with our Lord’s various other declarations. But the words in and by themselves admit a more plausible misinterpretation than is elsewhere the case of Socinian displanations. In short, I think both passages would have been better deferred to a further part of the work.
Let me add that a mighty and comparatively new argument against the Socinians may be most unanswerably deduced from this reply of our Lord’s, even were it considered as a mere ‘argumentum ad homines’: –namely, that it was not his Messiahship that so offended the Jews, but his Sonship; otherwise, our Saviour’s language would have neither force, motive, or object. “Even were I no more than the Messiah, in your meanest conceptions of that character, yet after what I have done before your eyes, nothing but malignant hearts could have prevented you from adopting a milder interpretation of my words, when in your own Scriptures there exists a precedent that so much more than merely justifies me.” And this I believe to be the meaning of the words as intended to be understood by the Jews in question; though, doubtless, Fuller’s sense exists ‘implicite’. No candid person would ever call it an evasion, to prove the injustice and malignity of an accuser even from his own grounds:–“You charge me falsely; but even were your charge true, namely, that I am a mere man, and yet call myself the Son of God, still it would not follow that I have been guilty of blasphemy.” But as understood by the modern Unicists, it would verily, verily, be an evasive ambiguity, most unworthy of Christian belief concerning his Saviour. Common charity would have demanded of him to have said:–“I am a mere man: I do not pretend to be more; but I used the words in analogy to the words, ‘Ye are as Gods’; and I have a right to do so: for though a mere man, I am the great Prophet and Messenger which Moses promised you.”
Letter V. p. 72.
If Dr. Priestley had formed his estimate of human virtue by that great standard which requires love to God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves,–instead of representing men by nature as having “more virtue than vice,”–he must have acknowledged with the Scripture, that ‘the whole world lieth in wickedness–that every thought and imagination of their heart is only evil continually’–and that ‘there is none of them that doeth good, no not one’.
To this the Unicists would answer, that by ‘the whole world’ is meant all the worldly-minded;–no matter in how direct opposition to half a score other texts! “One text at a time!” sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!–and in this way they go on pulling out hair by hair from the horse’s tail, (say rather, dreaming that they do so,) and then conclude with a shout that the horse never had a tail! For why? This hair is not a tail, nor that, nor the third, and so on to the very last; and how can all do what none of all does?–Ridiculous as this is, it is a fair image of Socinian logic. Thank God, their plucking out is a mere fancy;–and the sole miserable reality is the bare rump which they call their religion;–but that is the ape’s own growth.
Ib. p. 77.
First, that all punishments are designed for the good of the whole, and less or corrective punishments for the good of the offender, is admitted. * * God never inflicts punishment for the sake of punishing.
This is not, [Greek: hos emoige dokei], sufficiently guarded. That all punishments work for the good of the whole, and that the good of the whole is included in God’s design, I admit: but that this is the sole cause, and the sole justification of divine punishment, I cannot, I dare not, concede;–because I should thus deny the essential evil of guilt, and its inherent incompatibility with the presence of a Being of infinite holiness. Now, exclusion from God implies the sum and utmost of punishment; and this would follow from the very essence of guilt and holiness, independently of example, consequence, or circumstance.
Letter VI. p. 90.
(The systems compared as to their tendency to promote morality in general.)
I have hitherto made no objection to, no remark on, any one part of this Letter; for I object to the whole–not as Calvinism, but–as what Calvin would have recoiled from. How was it that so good and shrewd a man as Andrew Fuller should not have seen, that the difference between a Calvinist and a Priestleyan Materialist-Necessitarian consists in this:–The former not only believes a will, but that it is equivalent to the ‘ego ipse’, to the actual self, in every moral agent; though he believes that in human nature it is an enslaved, because a corrupt, will. In denying free will to the unregenerated he no more denies will, than in asserting the poor negroes in the West Indies to be slaves I deny them to be men. Now the latter, the Priestleyan, uses the word will,–not for any real, distinct, correspondent power, but,–for the mere result and aggregate of fibres, motions, and sensations; in short, it is a mere generic term with him, just as when we say, the main current in a river.
Now by not adverting to this, and alas! misled by Jonathan Edwards’s book, Fuller has hidden from himself and his readers the damnable nature of the doctrine–not of necessity (for that in its highest sense is identical with perfect freedom; they are definitions each of the other); but–of extraneous compulsion. O! even this is not adequate to the monstrosity of the thought. A denial of all agency;–or an assertion of a world of agents that never act, but are always acted upon, and yet without any one being that acts;–this is the hybrid of Death and Sin, which throughout this letter is treated so amicably! Another fearful mistake, and which is the ground of the former, lies in conceding to the Materialist, ‘explicite et implicite’, that the [Greek: noumenon], the ‘intelligibile’, the ‘ipseitas super sensibilis’, of guilt is in time, and of time, and, consequently, a mechanism of cause and effect;–in other words, in confounding the [Greek: phainomena, ta rheonta, ta mae ontos onta],–all which belong to time, and cannot be even thought of except as effects necessarily predetermined by the precedent causes, (themselves in their turn effects of other causes),–with the transsensual ground or actual power.
After such admissions, no other possible defence can be made for Calvinism or any other ‘ism’ than the wretched recrimination: “Why, yours, Dr. Priestley, is just as bad!”–Yea, and no wonder:–for in essentials both are the same. But there was no reason for Fuller’s meddling with the subject at all,–metaphysically, I mean.
Ib. p. 95.
If the unconditionality of election render it unfriendly to virtue, it must be upon the supposition of that view of things, “which attributes more to God, and less to man,” having such ascendancy; which is the very reverse of what Dr. Priestley elsewhere teaches, and that in the same performance.
But in both systems, as Fuller has erroneously stated his own, man is annihilated. There is neither more nor less; it is all God; all, all are but ‘Deus infinite modificatus’:–in brief, both systems are not Spinosism, for no other reason than that the logic and logical consequency of 10 Fullers + 10 X 10 Dr. Priestleys, piled on each other, would not reach the calf of Spinoza’s leg. Both systems of necessity lead to Spinosism, nay, to all the horrible consequences attributed to it by Spinoza’s enemies. O, why did Andrew Fuller quit the high vantage ground of notorious facts, plain durable common sense, and express Scripture, to delve in the dark in order to countermine mines under a spot, on which he had no business to have wall, tent, temple, or even standing-ground!
[Footnote 1: The Calvinistic and Socinian Systems examined and compared, as to their moral tendency; in a series of Letters addressed to the friends of vital and practical religion; especially those amongst Protestant Dissenters. By Andrew Fuller. Market Harborough. 1793.]
* * * * *
NOTES ON WHITAKER’S ORIGIN OF ARIANISM DISCLOSED. [1] 1810.
Chap. I. 4. p. 30.
‘Making himself equal with God’.
Whoever reads the four verses (John v. 16-19,) attentively, judging of the meaning of each part by the context, must needs, I think, see that the [Greek: ison heauton poion ton Theo] (18) refers,–not to the [Greek: patera idion elege ton Theon], (18) or the [Greek: ho pataer mou] (17), but–to the [Greek: ergazetai, kago ergazomai] (17). The 19th verse, which is directly called Jesus’ reply, takes no notice whatever of the [Greek: ho pataer mou] (17), but consists wholly of a justification of the [Greek: kago ergazomai].
1803.
The above was written many years ago. I still think the remark plausible, though I should not now express myself so positively. I imagined the Jews to mean: “he has evidently used the words [Greek: ho pataer mou]–not in the sense in which all good men may use them, but–in a literal sense, because by the words that followed, [Greek: ergazetai, kago ergazomai], he makes himself equal to God.” To justify these words seemed to me to be the purport of Christ’s reply.
Chap. II. 1. p. 34.
[Greek: (Philon)–peri men oun ta theia kai patria mathaemata, poson te kai paelikon eisenaenektai ponon, ergo pasi daelos kai peri ta philosopha de kai eleutheria taes exothen paideias oios tis aen, ouden dei legein hoti kai malista taen kata Platona kai Pythagoran ezaelokos agogaen, dienegken apantas tous kath’ heauton, historeitai].
Euseb. Hist. II. 4.
Philo’s acquaintance with the doctrines of the heathens was known only by historical report to Eusebius; while the writings of Philo displayed his knowledge in the religion of the Jews.
Strange comment. Might I not, after having spoken of Dun Scotus’s works, say;–“he is reported to have surpassed all his contemporaries in subtlety of logic:”–yet still mean no other works than those before mentioned? Are not Philo’s works full of, crowded with, Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy? Eusebius knew from his works that he was a great Platonic scholar; but that he was greater than any other man of his age, he could only learn from report or history. That Virgil is a great poet I know from his poems; but that he was the greatest of the Augustan age, I must learn from Quinctilian and others.
Ib. p. 35.
Philo and the author of the Wisdom of Solomon,–(or rather, perhaps, authors; for the first ten chapters form a complete work of themselves,)–were both Cabalistico-Platonizing Jews of Alexandria. As far as, being such, they must agree, so far they do agree; and as widely as such men could differ, do they differ. Not only the style of the Wisdom of Solomon is generically different from Philo’s,–so much so that I should deem it a free translation from a Hebrew original,–but also in all the ‘minutiae’ of traditional history and dogma it contradicts Philo. Philo attributes the creation of man to angels; and they infused the evil principle through their own imperfections. In the Book of Wisdom, God created man spotless, and the Devil tempting him occasioned the Fall. So the whole account of the plagues of Egypt differs as widely as possible, even to absolute contradiction. The origin of idolatry is explained altogether differently by Philo, and by the Book of Wisdom. In short, so unsupported is the tradition that many have supposed an elder Philo as the author. That the second and third chapters allude to Christ is a groundless hypothesis. The ‘just man’ is called ‘the son of God’, Jehovah, [Greek: pais Kyrion];–but Christ’s specific title which was deemed blasphemous by the Jews, was ‘Ben Elohim’, [Greek: uhios tou Theou];–and the fancy that Philo was a Christian in heart, but dared not openly profess himself such, is too absurd. Why no traces in his latest work, or those of his middle age? Why not the least variation in his religious or philosophical creeds in his latter works, written long after the resurrection, from those composed by him before, or a few years after, Christ’s birth? Some of Philo’s earlier works must have been written when our Lord was in his infancy, or at least boyhood.
In short, just take all those passages of Philo which most closely resemble others in the Wisdom of Solomon, and contain the same or nearly the same thoughts, and write them in opposite columns, and no doubt will remain that Philo was not the composer of the Book of Wisdom. Philo subtle, and with long involved periods knit together by logical connectives: the Book of Wisdom sententious, full of parallelisms, assertory and Hebraistic throughout. It was either composed by a man who tried to Hebraize the Greek, or, if a translator, by one who tried to Greecise the Hebraisms of his original–not to disguise or hide them–but only so as to prevent them from repelling or misleading the Greek reader. The different use of the Greek particles in the Wisdom of Solomon, and in the works of Philo, is sufficient to confute the hypothesis of Philo being the author. As little could it have been written by a Christian. For it could not have been a Christian of Palestine, from the overflowing Alexandrine Platonism;–nor a Christian at all; for it contradicts the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and in no wise connects any redemptory or sacrificial virtue with the death of his ‘just man’;–denies original sin in the Christian sense, and explains the vice and virtue of mankind by the actions of the souls of men in a state of pre-existence. No signs or miracles are referred to in the account of ‘the just man’; and that it was intended as a generalization is evident from the change of the singular into the plural number in the third chapter.
The result is, in my judgment, that this Book was composed by an unknown Jew of Alexandria, either sometime before, or at the same time with, Christ. I do not think St. Paul’s parallel passages amount to any proof of quotation or allusion;–they contain the common doctrine of the spiritualized Judaism in the Cabala;–and yet the work could scarcely have been written long before Christ, or it would certainly have been quoted or mentioned by Philo, and most probably by Josephus. And this, too, is an answer to the splendid and well-supported hypothesis of its being a translation from a Chaldaic original, composed by Jerubbabel. The variations of the Syriac translation,–which are so easily explained by translating the passage into the Chaldaic, when the cause of the mistake in the Greek or of the variation in the Syriac, is seen at once,–are certainly startling; but they are too free; and how could the Fathers, Jerome for example, remain ignorant of the existence of this Chaldaic original? My own opinion is, as I said before, that the Book was written in Greek by an Alexandrian Jew, who had formed his style on that of the LXX., and was led still further to an imitation of the Old Testament manner by the nature of his fiction, and as a dramatic propriety, and yet deviated from it partly on account of the very remoteness of his Platonic conceptions from the simplicity and poverty of the Hebrew; and partly because of the wordy rhetoric epidemic in Alexandria: and that it was written before the death, if not the birth, of Christ, I am induced to believe, because I do not think it probable that a book composed by a Jew, who had confessed Christ after the resurrection, would so soon have been received by the Christians, and so early placed in the very next rank to works of full inspiration.
Taken, therefore, as a work ‘ante’, or at least ‘extra, Christum’, it is most valuable as ascertaining the opinions of the learned Jews on many subjects, and the general belief concerning immortality, and a day of judgment. On this ground Whitaker might have erected a most formidable battery, that would have played on the very camp and battle-array of the Socinians, that is, of those who consider Christ only as a teacher of important truths.
In referring to the Cabala, I am not ignorant of the date of the oldest Rabbinical writings which contain or refer to this philosophy, but I coincide with Eichorn, and very many before Eichorn, that the foundations of the Cabala were laid and well known long before Christ, though not all the fanciful superstructure. I am persuaded that new light might be thrown on the Apocalypse by a careful study of the Book Sohar, and of whatever else there may be of that kind. The introduction (i. 4,) is clearly Cabala:–the [Greek: ho on, kai ho aen, kai ho erchomenos]= 3, and the ‘seven spirits’ = 10 ‘Sephiroth’, constituting together the ‘Adam Kadmon’, the second Adam of St. Paul, the incarnate one in the Messiah.
Were it not for the silence of Philo and Josephus, which I am unable to explain if the Wisdom of Solomon was written so long before Christ, I might perhaps incline to believe it composed shortly after, if not during, the persecution of the Jews in Egypt under Ptolemy Philopator. This hypothesis would give a particular point to the bitter exposure of idolatry, to the comparison between the sufferings of the Jews, and those of idolatrous nations, to the long rehearsal and rhetorical declaration of the plagues of Egypt, and to the reward of ‘the just man’ after a death of martyrdom; and would besides help to explain the putting together of the first ten chapters, and the fragment contained in the remaining chapters. They were works written at the same time, and by the same author: nay, I do not think it absurd to suppose, that the chapters after the tenth were annexed by the writer himself, as a long explanatory appendix; or, possibly, if they were once a separate work, these nine concluding chapters were parts of a book composed during the persecution in Egypt, the introduction and termination of which, being personal and of local application, were afterwards omitted or expunged in order not to give offence to the other Egyptians,–perhaps, to spare the shame of such Jews as had apostatized through fear, and in general not to revive heart-burnings. In modern language I should call these chapters in their present state a Note on c. x. 15-19.
On a reperusal of this Book, I rather believe that these latter chapters never formed part of any other work, but were composed as a sort of long explanatory Postscript, with particular bearing on certain existing circumstances, to which this part of the Jewish history was especially applicable. Nay, I begin to find the silence of Philo and Josephus less inexplicable, and to imagine that I discover the solution of this problem in the very title of the Book. No one expects to find any but works of authenticity enumerated in these writers; but to this a work, calling itself the Wisdom of Solomon, both being a fiction and never meant to pass for anything else, could make no pretensions. To have approximated it to the Holy Books of the nation would have injured the dignity of the Jewish Canon, and brought suspicion on the genuine works of Solomon, while it would have exposed to a charge of forgery a composition which was in itself only an innocent dramatic monologue. N. B. This hypothesis possesses all the advantages, and involves none of the absurdity of that which would attribute the ‘Ecclesiasticus’ to the infamous Jason, the High Priest. More than one commentator, I find, has suspected that the Wisdom of Solomon and the second book of Maccabees were by the same author. I think this nothing.
Ib. p. 36.
Philo throws out a number of declarations, that shew his own and the Jewish belief in a secondary sort of God, a God subordinate in origin to the Father of all, yet most intimately united with him, and sharing his most unquestionable honours.
The belief of the Alexandrian Jews who had acquired Greek philosophy, no doubt;–but of the Palestine Jews?
Ib. 2. p. 48.
St. John also is witnessed by a heathen (Amelius,) and by one who put him down for a barbarian, to have represented the Logos as “the Maker of all things,” as “with ‘God’,” and as “God.” And St. John is attested to have declared this, “not even as shaded over, but on the contrary as placed in full view.”
Stranger still. Whitaker could scarcely have read the Greek. Amelius says, that these truths, if stripped of their allegorical dress, ([Greek: metapephrasmena ek taes tou Barbarou theologias]) would be plain;–that is, that John in an allegory, as of one particular man, had shadowed out the creation of all things by the Logos, and the after union of the Logos with human nature,–that is, with all men. That this is his meaning, consult Plotinus.
Ib. 9. p. 107.
“Seest thou not,” adds Philo, in the same spirit of subtilizing being into power, and dividing the Logos into two.
Who that had even rested but in the porch of the Alexandrian philosophy, would not rather say, ‘of substantiating powers and attributes into being?’ What is the whole system from Philo to Plotinus, and thence to Proclus inclusively, but one fanciful process of hypostasizing logical conceptions and generic terms? In Proclus it is Logolatry run mad.
Chap. III. 1. p. 131-2.
Such would be the evidence for that divinity, to accompany the Book of Wisdom, if we considered it to be as old as Solomon, or only as the Son of Sirach. But I consider it to be much later than either, and actually a work of Philo’s. * * The language is very similar to Philo’s; flowing, lively and happy.
How is it possible to have read the short Hebraistic sentences of the Book of Wisdom, and the long involved periods that characterize the style of all Philo’s known writings, and yet attribute both to one writer? But indeed I know no instance of assertions made so audaciously, or of passages misrepresented and even mistranslated so grossly, as in this work of Whitaker. His system is absolute naked Tritheism.
Ib.
The righteous man is shadowed out by the author with a plain reference to our Saviour himself. “‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous’,” &c.
How then could Philo have remained a Jew?
Ib. 2. p. 195.
In all effects that are voluntary, the cause must be prior to the effect, as the father is to the son in human generation. But in all that are necessary, the effect must be coeval with the cause; as the stream is with the fountain, and light with the sun. Had the sun been eternal in its duration, light would have been co-eternal with it.
A just remark; but it cuts two ways. For these necessary effects are not really but only logically different or distinct from the cause:–the rays of the sun are only the sun diffused, and the whole rests on the sensitive form of material space. Take away the notion of material space, and the whole distinction perishes.
Chap. IV. 1. p. 266.
Justin accordingly sets himself to shew, that in the beginning, before all creatures, God generated a certain rational power out of himself.
Is it not monstrous that the Jews having, according to Whitaker, fully believed a Trinity, one and all, but half a century or less before Trypho, Justin should never refer to this general faith, never reproach Trypho with the present opposition to it as a heresy from their own forefathers, even those who rejected Christ, or rather Jesus as Christ?–But no!–not a single objection ever strikes Mr. Whitaker, or appears worthy of an answer. The stupidest become authentic–the most fantastic abstractions of the Alexandrine dreamers substantial realities! I confess this book has satisfied me how little erudition will gain a man now-a-days the reputation of vast learning, if it be only accompanied with dash and insolence. It seems to me impossible, that Whitaker can have written well on the subject of Mary, Queen of Scots, his powers of judgment being apparently so abject. For instance, he says that the grossest moral improbability is swept away by positive evidence:–as if positive evidence (that is, the belief I am to yield to A. or B.) were not itself grounded on moral probabilities. Upon my word Whitaker would have been a choice judge for Charles II. and Titus Oates.
Ib. p. 267.
Justin therefore proceeds to demonstrate it, (the pre-existence of Christ,) asserting Joshua to have given only a temporary inheritance to the Jews, &c.
A precious beginning of a precious demonstration! It is well for me that my faith in the Trinity is already well grounded by the Scriptures, by Bishop Bull, and the best parts of Plotinus, or this man would certainly have made me either a Socinian or a Deist.
Ib. 2. p. 270.
The general mode of commencing and concluding the Epistles of St. Paul, is a prayer of supplication for the parties, to whom they were addressed; in which he says, ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and’–from whom besides?–‘the Lord Jesus Christ’; in which our Saviour is at times invoked alone, as ‘the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all’; and is even ‘invoked’ the first at times as, ‘the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all’; shews us plainly, &c.
Invoked! Surely a pious wish is not an invocation. “May good angels attend you!” is no invocation or worship of angels. The essence of religions adoration consists in the attributing, by an act of prayer or praise, a necessary presence to an object–which not being distinguishable, if the object be sensuously present, we may safely define adoration as an acknowledgement of the actual and necessary presence of an intelligent being not present to our senses. “May lucky stars shoot influence on you!” would be a very foolish superstition, –but to say in earnest! “O ye stars, I pray to you, shoot influences on me,” would be idolatry. Christ was visually present to Stephen; his invocation therefore was not perforce an act of religious adoration, an acknowledgment of Christ’s deity.
[Footnote 1: The Origin of Arianism Disclosed. By John Whitaker, B.D. London, 1791.]
* * * * *
NOTES ON OXLEE ON THE TRINITY AND INCARNATION. [1] 1827
Strange–yet from the date of the book of the Celestial Hierarchies of the pretended Dionysius the Areopagite to that of its translation by Joannes Scotus Erigena, the contemporary of Alfred, and from Scotus to the Rev. John Oxlee in 1815, not unfrequent–delusion of mistaking Pantheism, disguised in a fancy dress of pious phrases, for a more spiritual and philosophic form of Christian Faith! Nay, stranger still:–to imagine with Scotus and Mr. Oxlee that in a scheme which more directly than even the grosser species of Atheism, precludes all moral responsibility and subverts all essential difference of right and wrong, they have found the means of proving and explaining, “the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation,” that is, the great and only sufficient antidotes of the right faith against this insidious poison. For Pantheism–trick it up as you will–is but a painted Atheism. A mask of perverted Scriptures may hide its ugly face, but cannot change a single feature.
Introduction, p. 4.
In the infancy of the Christian Church, and immediately after the general dispersion which necessarily followed the sacking of Jerusalem and Bither, the Greek and Latin Fathers had the fairest opportunity of disputing with the Jews, and of evincing the truth of the Gospel dispensation; but unfortunately for the success of so noble a design, they were totally ignorant of the Hebrew Scriptures, and so wanted in every argument that stamp of authority, which was equally necessary to sanction the principles of Christianity, and to command the respect of their Jewish antagonists. For the confirmation of this remark I may appeal to the Fathers themselves, but especially to Barnabas, Justin, and Irenaeus, who in their several attempts at Hebrew learning betray such portentous signs of ignorance and stupidity, that we are covered with shame at the sight of their criticisms.
Mr. Oxlee would be delighted in reading Jacob Rhenferd’s Disquisition on the Ebionites and other supposed heretics among the Jewish Christians. And I cannot help thinking that Rhenferd, who has so ably anticipated Mr. Oxlee on this point, and in Jortin’s best manner displayed the gross ignorance of the Gentile Fathers in all matters relating to Hebrew learning, and the ludicrous yet mischievous results thereof, has formed a juster though very much lower opinion of these Fathers, with a few exceptions, than Mr. Oxlee. I confess that till the light of the twofoldness of the Christian Church dawned on my mind, the study of the history and literature of the Church during the first three or four centuries infected me with a spirit of doubt and disgust which required a frequent recurrence to the writings of John and Paul to preserve me whole in the Faith.
Prop. I. ch. i. p. 16.
The truth of the doctrine is vehemently insisted on, in a variety of places, by the great R. Moses ben Maimon; who founds upon it the unity of the Godhead, and ranks it among the fundamental articles of the Jewish religion. Thus in his celebrated Letter to the Jews of Marseilles he observes, &c.
But what is obtained by quotations from Maimonides more than from Alexander Hales, or any other Schoolman of the same age? The metaphysics of the learned Jew are derived from the same source, namely, Aristotle; and his object was the same, as that of the Christian Schoolmen, namely, to systematize the religion he professed on the form and in the principles of the Aristotelian philosophy.
By the by, it is a serious defect in Mr. Oxlee’s work, that he does not give the age of the writers whom he cites. He cannot have expected all his readers to be as learned as himself.
Ib. ch. iii. p. 26.
Mr. Oxlee seems too much inclined to identify the Rabbinical interpretations of Scripture texts with their true sense; when in reality the Rabbis themselves not seldom used those interpretations as a convenient and popular mode of conveying their own philosophic opinions. Neither have I been able to admire the logic so general among the divines of both Churches, according to which if one, two, or perhaps three sentences in any one of the Canonical books appear to declare a given doctrine, all assertions of a different character must have been meant to be taken metaphorically.
Ib. p. 26-7.
The Prophet Isaiah, too, clearly inculcates the spirituality of the Godhead in the following declaration: ‘But Egypt is man, and not God: and their horses flesh, and not spirit’. (c. xxxi. 3.) * * *. In the former member the Prophet declares that Egypt was man, and not God; and then in terms of strict opposition enforces the sentiment by adding, that their cavalry was flesh, and not spirit; which is just as if he had said: ‘But Egypt, which has horses in war, is only a man, that is, flesh, and not God, who is spirit’.
Assuredly this is a false interpretation, and utterly unpoetical. It is even doubtful whether [Hebrew: unable to transliterate. txt Ed.] (‘ruach’) in this place means ‘spirit’ in contradistinction to ‘matter’ at all, and not rather air or wind. At all events, the poetic decorum, the proportion, and the antithetic parallelism, demand a somewhat as much below God, as the horse is below man. The opposition of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ in the Gospel of St. John, who thought in Hebrew, though he wrote in Greek, favours our common version,–‘flesh and not spirit’: but the place in which this passage stands, namely, in one of the first forty chapters of Isaiah, and therefore written long before the Captivity, together with the majestic simplicity characteristic of Isaiah’s name gives perhaps a greater probability to the other: ‘Egypt is man, and not God; and her horses flesh, and not wind’. If Mr. Oxlee renders the fourth verse of Psalm civ.–‘He maketh spirits his messengers’, (for our version–‘He maketh his angels spirits’–is without a violent inversion senseless), this is a case in point for the use of the word, ‘spirits’, in the sense of incorporeal beings. (Mr. Oxlee will hardly, I apprehend, attribute the opinion of some later Rabbis, that God alone and exclusively is a Spirit, to the Sacred Writers, easy as it would be to quote a score of texts in proof of the contrary.) I, however, cannot doubt that the true rendering of the above-mentioned verse in the Psalms is;–‘He maketh the winds his angels or messengers, and the lightnings his ministrant servants’.
As to Mr. Oxlee’s ‘abstract intelligences,’ I cannot but think ‘abstract’ for ‘pure,’ and even pure intelligences for incorporeal, a lax use of terms. With regard to the point in question, the truth seems to be this. The ancient Hebrews certainly distinguished the principle or ground of life, understanding, and will from ponderable, visible, matter. The former they considered and called ‘spirit’, and believed it to be an emission from the Almighty Father of Spirits: the latter they called ‘body’; and in this sense they doubtless believed in the existence of incorporeal beings. But that they had any notion of immaterial beings in the sense of Des Cartes, is contrary to all we know of them, and of every other people in the same degree of cultivation. Air, fire, light, express the degrees of ascending refinement. In the infancy of thought the life, soul, mind, are supposed to be air–‘anima, animus’, that is, [Greek: anemos], spiritus, [Greek: pneuma]. In the childhood, they are fire, ‘mens ignea, ignicula’, and God himself [Greek: pur noeron, pur aeizoon]. Lastly, in the youth of thought, they are refined into light; and that light is capable of subsisting in a latent state, the experience of the stricken flint, of lightning from the clouds, and the like, served to prove, or at least, it supplied a popular answer to the objection;–“If the soul be light, why is it not visible?” That the purest light is invisible to our gross sense, and that visible light is a compound of light and shadow, were answers of a later and more refined period. Observe, however, that the Hebrew Legislator precluded all unfit applications of the materializing fancy by forbidding the people to ‘imagine’ at all concerning God. For the ear alone, to the exclusion of all other bodily sense, was he to be designated, that is, by the Name. All else was for the mind–by power, truth, wisdom, holiness, mercy.
Prop. II. ch. ii. p. 36.
I fear I must surrender my hope that Mr. Oxlee was an exception to the rule, that the study of Rabbinical literature either finds a man ‘whimmy’, or makes him so. If neither the demands of poetic taste, nor the peculiar character of oracles, were of avail, yet morality and piety might seem enough to convince any one that this vision of Micaiah, (2 ‘Chron’. c. xviii. 18, &c.) was the poetic form, the veil, of the Prophet’s meaning. And a most sublime meaning it was. Mr. Oxlee should recollect that the forms and personages of visions are all and always symbolical.
Ib. pp. 39-40.
It will not avail us much, however, to have established their incorporeity or spirituality, if what R. Moses affirms be true * * *. This impious paradox * *. Swayed, however, by the authority of so great a man, even R. David Kimchi has dilapsed into the same error, &c.
To what purpose then are the crude metaphysics of these later Rabbis brought forward, differing as they do in no other respect from the theological ‘dicta’ of the Schoolmen, but that they are written in a sort of Hebrew. I am far from denying that an interpreter of the Scriptures may derive important aids from the Jewish commentators: Aben Ezra, (about 1150) especially, was a truly great man. But of this I am certain, that he only will be benefited who can look down upon their works, whilst studying them;–that is, he must thoroughly understand their weaknesses, superstitions, and rabid appetite for the marvellous and the monstrous; and then read them as an enlightened chemist of the present day would read the writings of the old alchemists, or as a Linnaeus might peruse the works of Pliny and Aldrovandus. If he can do this, well;–if not, he will line his skull with cobwebs.
Ib. pp. 40, 41.
But how, I would ask, is this position to be defended? Surely not by contradicting almost every part of the inspired volumes, in which such frequent mention occurs of different and distinct angels appearing to the Patriarchs and Prophets, sometimes in groups, and sometimes in limited numbers * *. It is, indeed, so wholly repugnant to the general tenor of the Sacred Writings, and so abhorrent from the piety of both Jew and Christian, that the learned author himself, either forgetting what he had before advanced, or else postponing his philosophy to his religion, has absolutely maintained the contrary in his explication of the Cherubim, &c.
I am so far from agreeing with Mr. Oxlee on these points, that I not only doubt whether before the Captivity any fair proof of the existence of Angels, in the present sense, can be produced from the inspired Scriptures,–but think also that a strong argument for the divinity of Christ, and for his presence to the Patriarchs and under the Law, rests on the contrary, namely, that the Seraphim were images no less symbolical than the Cherubim. Surely it is not presuming too much of a Clergyman of the Church of England to expect that he would measure the importance of a theological tenet by its bearings on our moral and spiritual duties, by its practical tendencies. What is it to us whether Angels are the spirits of just men made perfect, or a distinct class of moral and rational creatures? Augustine has well and wisely observed that reason recognizes only three essential kinds;–God, man, beast. Try as long as you will, you can never make an Angel anything but a man with wings on his shoulders.
Ib. ch. III. p. 58.
But this deficiency in the Mosaic account of the creation is amply supplied by early tradition, which inculcates not only that the angels were created, but that they were created, either on the second day, according to R. Jochanan, or on the fifth, according to R. Chanania.
Inspired Scripture amply supplied by the Talmudic and Rabbinical traditions!–This from a Clergyman of the Church of England!
I am, I confess, greatly disappointed. I had expected, I scarce know why, to have had some light thrown on the existence of the Cabala in its present form, from Ezekiel to Paul and John. But Mr. Oxlee takes it as he finds it, and gravely ascribes this patch-work of corrupt Platonism or Plotinism, with Chaldean, Persian, and Judaic fables and fancies, to the Jewish Doctors, as an original, profound, and pious philosophy in its fountain-head! The indispensable requisite not only to a profitable but even to a safe study of the Cabala is a familiar knowledge of the docimastic philosophy, that is, a philosophy, which has for its object the trial and testing of the weights and measures themselves, the first principles, definitions, postulates, axioms of logic and metaphysics. But this is in no other way possible but by our enumeration of the mental faculties, and an investigation of the constitution, function, limits, and applicability ‘ad quas res’, of each. The application to this subject of the rules and forms of the understanding, or discursive logic, or even of the intuitions of the reason itself, if reason be assumed as the first and highest, has Pantheism for its necessary result. But this the Cabalists did: and consequently the Cabalistic theosophy is Pantheistic, and Pantheism, in whatever drapery of pious phrases disguised, is (where it forms the whole of a system) Atheism, and precludes moral responsibility, and the essential difference of right and wrong. One of the two contra-distinctions of the Hebrew Revelation is the doctrine of positive creation. This, if not the only, is the easiest and surest criterion between the idea of God and the notion of a ‘mens agitans molem’. But this the Cabalists evaded by their double meaning of the term, ‘nothing’, namely as nought = 0, and as no ‘thing’; and by their use of the term, as designating God. Thus in words and to the ear they taught that the world was made out of nothing; but in fact they meant and inculcated, that the world was God himself expanded. It is not, therefore, half a dozen passages respecting the first three ‘proprietates'[2] in the Sephiroth, that will lead a wise man to expect the true doctrine of the Trinity in the Cabalistic scheme: for he knows that the scholastic value, the theological necessity, of this doctrine consists in its exhibiting an idea of God, which rescues our faith from both extremes, Cabalo-Pantheism, and Anthropomorphism. It is, I say, to prevent the necessity of the Cabalistic inferences that the full and distinct developement of the doctrine of the Trinity becomes necessary in every scheme of dogmatic theology. If the first three ‘proprietates’ are God, so are the next seven, and so are all ten. God according to the Cabalists is all in each and one in all. I do not say that there is not a great deal of truth in this; but I say that it is not, as the Cabalists represent it, the whole truth. Spinoza himself describes his own philosophy as in substance the same with that of the ancient Hebrew Doctors, the Cabalists–only unswathed from the Biblical dress.
Ib. p. 61.
Similar to this is the declaration of R. Moses ben Maimon. “For that influence, which flows from the Deity to the actual production of abstract intelligences flows also from the intelligences to their production from each other in succession,” &c.
How much trouble would Mr. Oxlee have saved himself, had he in sober earnest asked his own mind, what he meant by emanation; and whether he could attach any intelligible meaning to the term at all as applied to spirit.
Ib. p. 65.
Thus having, by variety of proofs, demonstrated the fecundity of the Godhead, in that all spiritualities, of whatever gradation, have originated essentially and substantially from it, like streams from their fountain; I avail myself of this as another sound argument, that in the sameness of the divine essence subsists a plurality of Persons.
A plurality with a vengeance! Why, this is the very scoff of a late Unitarian writer,–only that he inverts the order. Mr. Oxlee proves ten trillions of trillions in the Deity, in order to deduce ‘a fortiori’ the rationality of three: the Unitarian from the Three pretends to deduce the equal rationality of as many thousands.
Ib. p. 66.
So, if without detriment to piety great things may be compared with small, I would contend, that every intelligency, descending by way of emanation or impartition from the Godhead, must needs be a personality of that Godhead, from which it has descended, only so vastly unequal to it in personal perfection, that it can form no part of its proper existency.
Is not this to all intents and purposes ascribing partibility to God? Indeed it is the necessary consequence of the emanation scheme?–Unequal!–Aye, various ‘wicked’ personalities of the Godhead?–How does this rhyme?–Even as a metaphor, emanation is an ill-chosen term; for it applies only to fluids. ‘Ramenta’, unravellings, threads, would be more germane.
[Footnote 1: The Christian Doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation considered and maintained on the principles of Judaism. By the Rev. John Oxlee. London, 1815.]
[Footnote 2: That is, Intelligence or the Crown, Knowledge, Wisdom. Ed.]
* * * * *
NOTES ON A BARRISTER’S HINTS ON EVANGELICAL PREACHING. 1810. [1]
For only that man understands in deed Who well remembers what he well can do; The faith lives only where the faith doth breed Obedience to the works it binds us to. And as the Life of Wisdom hath exprest– ‘If this ye know, then do it and be blest’.
LORD BROOK.
‘In initio’.
There is one misconception running through the whole of this Pamphlet, the rock on which, and the quarry out of which, the whole reasoning, is built;–an error therefore which will not indeed destroy its efficacy as a [Greek: misaetron] or anti-philtre to inflame the scorn of the enemies of Methodism, but which must utterly incapacitate it for the better purpose of convincing the consciences or allaying the fanaticism of the Methodists themselves; this is the uniform and gross mis-statement of the one great point in dispute, by which the Methodists are represented as holding the compatibility of an impure life with a saving faith: whereas they only assert that the works of righteousness are the consequence, not the price, of Redemption, a gift included in the great gift of salvation;–and therefore not of merit but of imputation through the free love of the Saviour.
Part I. p. 49.
It is enough, it seems, that all the disorderly classes of mankind, prompted as they are by their worst passions to trample on the public welfare, should ‘know’ that they are, what every one else is convinced they are, the pests of society, and the evil is remedied. They are not to be exhorted to honesty, sobriety, or the observance of any laws, human or divine–they must not even be entreated to do their best. “Just as ‘absurd’ would it be,” we are told, “in a physician to send away his patient, when labouring under some desperate disease, with a recommendation to do his utmost towards his own cure, and then to come to him to finish it, as it is in the minister of the ‘Gospel’ to propose to the sinner ‘to do his best’, by way of healing the disease of the soul–and then to come to the Lord Jesus to perfect his recovery. The ‘only’ previous qualification is to ‘know’ our misery, and the remedy is prepared.” See Dr. Hawker’s Works, vol. vi. p. 117.
For “know,” let the Barrister substitute “feel;” that is, we know it as we know our life; and then ask himself whether the production of such a state of mind in a sinner would or would not be of greater promise as to his reformation than the repetition of the Ten Commandments with paraphrases on the same.–But why not both? The Barrister is at least as wrong in the undervaluing of the one as the pseudo-Evangelists in the exclusion of the other.
Ib. p. 51.
Whatever these new Evangelists may teach to the contrary, the present state of public morals and of public happiness would assume a very different appearance if the thieves, swindlers, and highway robbers, would ‘do their best’ towards maintaining themselves by honest labour, instead of perpetually planning new systems of fraud, and new schemes of depredation.
That is, if these thieves had a different will–not a mere wish, however anxious:–for this wish “the libertine” doubtless has, as described in p. 50,–but an effective will. Well, and who doubts this? The point in dispute is, as to the means of producing this reformation in the will; which, whatever the Barrister may think, Christ at least thought so difficult as to speak of it, not once or twice, but uniformly, as little less than miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation. This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol ‘sarsaparilla’, and ‘lignum vitae’, or ‘senna’ in contempt of all mercurial preparations.
Ib. p. 56.
Not for the revenues of an Archbishop would he exhort them to a duty ‘unknown in Scripture’, of adding their five talents to the five they have received, &c.
All this is mere calumny and wilful misstatement of the tenets of Wesley, who never doubted that we are bound to improve our ‘talents’, or, on the other hand, that we are equally bound, having done so, to be equally thankful to the Giver of all things for the power and the will by which we improved the talents, as for the original capital which is the object of the improvement. The question is not whether Christ will say, ‘Well done thou good and faithful servant’, &c.;–but whether the servant is to say it of himself. Now Christ has delivered as positive a precept against our doing this as the promise can be that he will impute it to us, if we do not impute it to our own merits.
Ib. p. 60.
The complaints of the profligacy of servants of every class, and of the depravity of the times are in every body’s hearing:–and these Evangelical tutors–the dear Mr. Lovegoods of the day–deserve the best attention of the public for thus instructing the ignorant multitude, who are always ready enough to neglect their moral duties, to despise and insult those by whom they are taught.
All this is no better than infamous slander, unless the Barrister can prove that these depraved servants and thieves are Methodists, or have been wicked in proportion as they were proselyted to Methodism. O folly! This is indeed to secure the triumph of these enthusiasts.
Ib.
It must afford him (Rowland Hill) great consolation, amidst the increasing immorality * * * that when their village Curate exhorts them, if they have ‘faith’ in the doctrine of a world to come, to add to it those ‘good works’ in which the sum and substance of religion consist, he has led them to ridicule him, as ‘chopping a new-fashioned’ logic.
That this is either false or nugatory, see proved in The Friend.
Ib. p. 68.
Tom Payne himself never laboured harder to root all virtue out of society.–Mandeville nor Voltaire never even laboured so much.
Indeed!
Ib.
They were content with declaring their disbelief of a future state.
In what part of their works? Can any wise man read Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, and not see that it is a keen satire on the inconsistency of Christians, and so intended.
Ib. p. 71.