The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (page 5)

thereby apostatizing from the covenant of faith by free grace. And this was the decision of the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem. Acts’ xv. Rhenferd, in his Treatise on the Ebionites and other pretended heretics in Palestine, so grossly and so ignorantly calumniated by Epiphanius, has written excellently well on this subject. Jeremy Taylor is mistaken throughout.

Ib. s. iv. p. 459.

And so it was in this great question of circumcision.

It is really wonderful that a man like Bishop Taylor could have read the New Testament, and have entertained a doubt as to the decided opinion of all the Apostles, that every born Jew was bound to be circumcised. Opinion? The very doubt never suggested itself. When something like this opinion was slanderously attributed to Paul, observe the almost ostentatious practical contradiction of the calumny which was adopted by him at the request and by the advice of the other Apostles. (‘Acts’, xxi. 21-26.) The rite of circumcision, I say, was binding on all the descendants of Abraham through Isaac for all time even to the end of the world; but the whole law of Moses was binding on the Jewish Christians till the heaven and the earth–that is, the Jewish priesthood and the state–had passed away in the destruction of the temple and city; and the Apostles observed every tittle of the Law.

Ib. s. vi. p. 460.

The heresy of the Nicolaitans.

Heresy is not a proper term for a plainly anti-Christian sect. Nicolaitans is the literal Greek translation of Balaamites; destroyers of the people. ‘Rev’. ii. 14, 15.

Ib. s. viii. p. 461.

For heresy is not an error of the understanding, but an error of the will.

Most excellent. To this Taylor should have adhered, and to its converse. Faith is not an accuracy of logic, but a rectitude of heart.

Ib. p. 462.

It was the heresy of the Gnostics, that it was no matter how men lived, so they did but believe aright.

I regard the extinction of all the writings of the Gnostics among the heaviest losses of Ecclesiastical literature. We have only the account of their inveterate enemies. Individual madmen there have been in all ages, but I do not believe that any sect of Gnostics ever held this opinion in the sense here supposed.

Ib.

And, indeed, if we remember that St. Paul reckons heresy amongst the works of the flesh, and ranks it with all manner of practical impieties, we shall easily perceive that if a man mingles not a vice with his opinion,–if he be innocent in his life, though deceived in his doctrine,–his error is his misery not his crime; it makes him an argument of weakness and an object of pity, but not a person sealed up to ruin and reprobation.

O admirable! How could Taylor, after this, preach and publish his Sermon in defence of persecution, at least against toleration!

Ib. s. xxii. p. 479.

Ebion, Manes.

No such man as Ebion ever, as I can see, existed; [3] and Manes is rather a doubtful ‘ens’.

Ib. s. xxxi. p. 487.

But I shall observe this, that although the Nicene Fathers in that case, at that time, and in that conjuncture of circumstances, did well, &c.

What Bull and Waterland have urged in defence of the Nicene Fathers is (like every thing else from such men) most worthy of all attention. They contend that no other term but [Greek: homoousia] could secure the Christian faith against both the two contrary errors, Tritheism with subversion of the unity of the Godhead on the one hand, and creature-worship on the other. For, to use Waterland’s mode of argument, [4] either Eusebius of Nicomedia with the four other dissenters at Nice were right or wrong in their assertion, that Christ could not be of the [Greek: ousia] of the self-originated First by derivation, as a son from a father:–if they were right, they either must have discovered some third distinct and intelligible form of origination in addition to ‘begotten’ and ‘created’, or they had not and could not. Now the latter was notoriously the fact. Therefore to deny the [Greek: homoousia] was implicitly to deny the generation of the second Person, and thus to assert his creation. But if he was a creature, he could not be adorable without idolatry. Nor did the chain of inevitable consequences stop here. His characteristic functions of Redeemer, Mediator, King, and final Judge, must all cease to be attributable to Christ; and the conclusion is, that between the Homoousian scheme and mere Psilanthropism there is no intelligible ‘medium’. If this, then, be not a fundamental article of faith, what can be?

To this reasoning I really can discern no fair reply within the sphere of conceptual logic, if it can be made evident that the term [Greek: homoousios] is really capable of achieving the end here set forth. One objection to the term is, that it was not translatable into the language of the Western Church. Consubstantial is not the translation: ‘substantia’ answers to [Greek: hypostasis], not to [Greek: ousia]; and hence, when [Greek: hypostasis] was used by the Nicene Fathers in distinction from [Greek: ousia], the Latin Church was obliged to render it by some other word, and thus introduced that most unhappy and improper term ‘persona’. Would you know my own inward judgment on this question, it is this: first, that this pregnant idea, the root and form of all ideas, is not within the sphere of conceptual logic,–that is, of the understanding,–and is therefore of necessity inexpressible; for no idea can be adequately represented in words:–secondly, that I agree with Bull and Waterland against Bishop Taylor, that there was need of a public and solemn decision on this point:–but, lastly, that I am more than doubtful respecting the fitness or expediency of the term [Greek: homoousios], and hold that the decision ought to have been negative. For at first all parties agreed in the positive point, namely, that Christ was the Son of God, and that the Son of God was truly God, “or very God of very God.” All that was necessary to be added was, that the only begotten Son of God was not created nor begotten in time. More than this might be possible, and subject of insight; but it was not determinable by words, and was therefore to be left among the rewards of the Spirit to the pure in heart in inward vision and silent contemplation.

Ib. s. xl. p. 495.

All that is necessary to give a full and satistory import to this excellent paragraph, and to secure it from all inconvenient consequences, is to understand the distinction between the objective and general revelation, by which the whole Church is walled around and kept together (‘principium totalitatis et cohaesionis’), and the subjective revelation, the light from the life (‘John’ i. 4.), by which the individual believers, each according to the grace given, grow in faith. For the former, the Apostles’ Creed, in its present form, is more than enough; for the latter, it might be truly said in the words of the fourth Gospel, that all the books which the world could contain would not suffice to set forth explicitly that mystery in which all treasures of knowledge are hidden, ‘reconduntur’.

From the Apostles’ Creed, nevertheless, if regarded in the former point of view, several clauses must be struck out, not as false, but as not necessary. “I believe that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead on the third day; and I receive him as the Christ, the Son of the living God, who died for the remission of the sins of as many as believe in the Father through him, in whom we have the promise of life everlasting.” This is the sufficient creed. More than this belongs to the Catechism, and then to the study of the Scriptures.

Ib. s. vi. p. 506.

So did the ancient Papias understand Christ’s millenary reign upon earth, and so depressed the hopes of Christianity and their desires to the longing and expectation of temporal pleasures and satisfactions. And he was followed by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, and indeed, the whole Church generally, till St. Austin and St. Jerome’s time, who, first of any whose works are extant, did reprove the error.

Bishop Taylor is, I think, mistaken in two points; first, that the Catholic Millenaries looked forward to carnal pleasures in the kingdom of Christ;–for even the Jewish Rabbis of any note represented the ‘Millenium’ as the preparative and transitional state to perfect spiritualization:–second, that the doctrine of Christ’s reign upon earth rested wholly or principally on the twentieth chapter of the Revelations, which actually, in my judgment, opposes it.

I more than suspect that Austin’s and Jerome’s strongest ground for rejecting the second coming of our Lord in his kingly character, was, that they were tired of waiting for it. How can we otherwise interpret the third and fourth clauses of the Lord’s Prayer, or, perhaps, the [Greek: en toi kairoi toutoi], ‘in hoc seculo’, (x. 30) of St. Mark? If the first three Gospels, joined with the unbroken faith and tradition of the Church for nearly three centuries, can decide the question, the Millenarians have the best of the argument.

Vol. viii. s. ix. p. 22.

One thing only I observe (and we shall find it true in most writings, whose authority is urged in questions of theology), that the authority of the tradition is not it which moves the assent, but the nature of the thing; and because such a canon is delivered, they do not therefore believe the sanction or proposition so delivered, but disbelieve the tradition if they do not like the matter, and so do not judge of the matter by the tradition, but of the tradition by the matter.

This just and acute remark is, in fact, no less applicable to Scripture in all doctrinal points, and if infidelity is not to overspread England as well as France, the same criterion (that is, the internal evidence) must be extended to all points, to the narratives no less than to the precept. The written words must be tried by the Word from the beginning, in which is life, and that life the light of men. Reduce it to the noetic pentad, or universal form of contemplation, except where all the terms are absolute, and consequently there is no ‘punctum indifferens, –in divinis tetras, in omnibus aliis pentas,’ and the form stands thus. [5]

Ib. s. iii. p. 36.

So that it cannot make it divine and necessary to be heartily believed. It may make it lawful, not make it true; that is, it may possibly, by such means, become a law, but not a truth.

This is a sophism which so evident a truth did not need. Apply the reasoning to an act of Parliament previously to the royal sanction. Will it hold good to say, if it was law after the sanction, it was law before? The assertion of the Papal theologians is, that the divine providence may possibly permit even the majority of a legally convened Council to err; but by force of a divine promise cannot permit both a majority and the Pope to err on the same point. The flaw in this is, that the Romish divines rely on a conditional promise unconditionally. To Taylor’s next argument the Romish respondent would say, that an exception, grounded on a specific evident necessity, does not invalidate the rule in the absence of any equally evident necessity.

Taylor’s argument is a [Greek: metabasis eis allo genos]. It is not the truth, but the sign or mark, by which the Church at large may know that it is truth, which is here provided for; that is, not the truth simply, but the obligation of receiving it as such. Ten thousand may apprehend the latter, only ten of whom might be capable of determining the former.

Ib. 5.

So that now (that we may apply this) there are seven general Councils, which by the Church of Rome are condemned of error … The council of Ariminum, consisting of six hundred Bishops.

It is the mark of a faction that it never hesitates to sacrifice a greater good common to them and to their opponents to a lesser advantage obtained over those opponents. Never was there a stranger instance of imprudence, at least, than the act of the Athanasian party in condemning so roundly the great Council of Ariminum as heretical, and for little more than the charitable wish of the many hundred Bishops there assembled to avoid a word that had set all Christendom by the ears. They declared that [Greek: ho agennaetos pataer, kai ho achron_os gennaetos uhios, kai to pneuma ekporeuomenon] were substantially (hypostatik_os) distinct, but nevertheless, one God; and though there might be some incautious phrases used by them, the good Bishops declared that if their decree was indeed Arian, or introduced aught to the derogation of the Son’s absolute divinity, it was against their knowledge and intention, and that they renounced it.

Ib. s. x. p. 46.

Gratian says, that the Council means by a concubine a wife married ‘sine dote et solennitate’; but this is daubing with untempered mortar.

Here I think Taylor wrong and Gratian right; for not a hundred years ago the very same decree was passed by the Lutheran clergy in Prussia, determining that left-hand marriages were to be discouraged, but did not exclude from communion. These marriages were invented for the sake of poor nobles: they could have but that one wife, and the children followed the rank and title of the mother, not of the father.

Ib. s. vii. p. 56.

Thirdly; for ‘pasce oves’, there is little in that allegation besides the boldness of the objectors.

I have ever thought that the derivation of the Papal monarchy from the thrice repeated command, ‘pasce oves’, the most brazen of all the Pope’s bulls. It was because Peter had given too good proof that he was more disposed to draw the sword for Christ than to perform the humble duties of a shepherd, that our Lord here strongly, though tenderly, reminds him of his besetting temptation. The words are most manifestly a reproof and a warning, not a commission. In like manner the very letter of the famous paronomastic text proves that Peter’s confession, not Peter himself, was the rock. His name was, perhaps, not so much stone as stoner; not so much rock as rockman; and Jesus hearing this unexpected confession of his mysterious Sonship (for this is one of the very few cases in which the internal evidence decides for the superior fidelity of the first Gospel), and recognizing in it an immediate revelation from heaven, exclaims, “Well, art thou the man of the rock; ‘and upon this rock will I build my church,'” not on this man. Add too, that the law revealed to Moses and the confession of the divine attributes, are named the rock, both in the Pentateuch and in the Psalms.

Mark has simply, ‘Thou art the Christ’; Luke, ‘The Christ of God’; [6] but that Jesus was the Messiah had long been known by the Apostles, at all events conjectured. Had not John so declared him at the baptism? Besides, it was included among the opinions concerning our Lord which led to his question, the aim of which was not simply as to the Messiahship, but that the Messiah, instead of a mere descendant of David, destined to reestablish and possess David’s throne, was the Jehovah himself, ‘the Son of the living God; God manifested in the flesh’. 1 ‘Tim’. iii. 16.

Ib. s. viii. p. 62.

And yet again, another degree of uncertainty is, to whom the Bishops of Rome do succeed. For St. Paul was as much Bishop of Rome as St. Peter was; there he presided, there he preached, and he it was that was the doctor of the uncircumcision and of the Gentiles, St. Peter of the circumcision and of the Jews only; and therefore the converted Jews at Rome might with better reason claim the privilege of St. Peter, than the Romans and the Churches in her communion, who do not derive from Jewish parents.

I wonder that Taylor should have introduced so very strong an argument merely ‘obiter’. If St. Peter ever was at Rome, it must have been for the Jewish converts or _convertendi_ exclusively, and on what do the earliest Fathers rest the fact of Peter’s being at Rome? Do they appeal to any document? No; but to their own arbitrary and most improbable interpretation of the word Babylon in St. Peter’s first epistle. [7] I am too deeply impressed with the general difficulty arising out of the strange eclipse of all historic documents, of all particular events, from the arrival of St. Paul at Rome as related by St. Luke and the time when Justin Martyr begins to shed a scanty light, to press any particular instance of it. Yet, if Peter really did arrive at Rome, and was among those destroyed by Nero, it is strange that the Bishop and Church of Rome should have preserved no record of the particulars.

Ib. s. xv. p. 71.

But what shall we think of that decretal of Gregory the Third, who wrote to Boniface his legate in Germany, ‘quod illi, quorum uxores infirmitate aliqua morbida debitum reddere noluerunt, aliis poterant nubere.’

Supposing the ‘noluerunt’ to mean ‘nequeunt’, or at least any state of mind and feeling that does not exclude moral attachment, I, as a Protestant, abominate this decree of Gregory III; for I place the moral, social, and spiritual helps and comforts as the proper and essential ends of Christian marriage, and regard the begetting of children as a contingent consequence. But on the contrary tenet of the Romish Church, I do not see how Gregory could consistently decree otherwise.

Ib. s. iii. p. 82.

Nor that Origen taught the pains of hell not to have an eternal duration.

And yet there can be no doubt that Taylor himself held with Origen on this point. But, ‘non licebat dogmatizare oppositum, quia determinatum fuerat.’

Ib. p. 84.

And except it be in the Apostles’ Creed and articles of such nature, there is nothing which may with any color be called a consent, much less tradition universal.

It may be well to remember, whenever Taylor speaks of the Apostles’ Creed, that Pearson’s work on that Creed was not then published. Nothing is more suspicious than copies of creeds in the early Fathers; it was so notoriously the custom of the transcribers to make them square with those in use in their own time.

Ib. s. iv.

Such as makes no invasion upon their great reputation, which I desire should be preserved as sacred as it ought.

The vision of the mitre dawned on Taylor; and his recollection of Laud came to the assistance of the Fathers; of many of whom in his heart Taylor, I think, entertained a very mean opinion. How could such a man do otherwise? I could forgive them their nonsense and even their economical falsehoods; but their insatiable appetite for making heresies, and thus occasioning the neglect or destruction of so many valuable works, Origen’s for instance, this I cannot forgive or forget.

Ib. s. i. p. 88.

Of the incompetency of the Church, in its diffusive capacity, to be judge of controversies; and the impertinency of that pretence of the Spirit.

Now here begin my serious differences with Jeremy Taylor, which may be characterized in one sentence; ideas ‘versus’ conceptions and images. I contend that the Church in the Christian sense is an idea;–not therefore a chimera, or a fancy, but a real being and a most powerful reality. Suppose the present state of science in this country, with this only difference that the Royal and other scientific societies were not founded: might I not speak of a scientific public, and its influence on the community at large? Or should I be talking of a chimera, a shadow, or a non-entity? Or when we speak with honest pride of the public spirit of this country as the power which supported the nation through the gigantic conflict with France, do we speak of nothing, because we cannot say,–“It is in this place or in that catalogue of names?” At the same time I most readily admit that no rule can be grounded formally on the supposed assent of this ideal Church, the members of which are recorded only in the book of life at any one moment. In Taylor’s use and application of the term, Church, the visible Christendom, and in reply to the Romish divines, his arguments are irrefragable.

Ib. s. ii. p. 93,

So that if they read, study, pray, search records, and use all the means of art and industry in the pursuit of truth, it is not with a resolution to follow that which shall seem truth to them, but to confirm what before they did believe.

Alas, if Protestant and Papist were named by individuals answering or not answering to this description, what a vast accession would not the Pope’s muster-roll receive! In the instance of the Council of Trent, the iniquity of the Emperor and the Kings of France and Spain consisted in their knowledge that the assembly at Trent had no pretence to be a general Council, that is, a body representative of the Catholic or even of the Latin Church. It may be, and in fact it is, very questionable whether any Council, however large and fairly chosen, is not an absurdity except under the universal faith that the Holy Ghost miraculously dictates all the decrees: and this is irrational, where the same superseding Spirit does not afford evidence of its presence by producing unanimity. I know nothing, if I may so say, more ludicrous than the supposition of the Holy Ghost contenting himself with a majority, in questions respecting faith, or decrees binding men to inward belief, which again binds a Christian to outward profession. Matters of discipline and ceremony, having peace and temporal order for their objects, are proper enough for a Council; but these do not need any miraculous interference. Still if any Council is admitted in matters of doctrine, those who have appealed to it must abide by the determination of the majority, however they might prefer the opinion of the minority, just as in acts of Parliament.

Ib. s. xi. p. 98.

Of some causes of error in the exercise of reason, which are inculpate in themselves.

It is a lamentable misuse of the term, reason,–thus to call by that name the mere faculty of guessing and babbling. The making reason a faculty, instead of a light, and using the term as a mere synonyme of the understanding, and the consequent ignorance of the true nature of ideas, and that none but ideas are objects of faith–are the grounds of all Jeremy Taylor’s important errors.

Ib.

But men may understand what they please, especially when they are to expound oracles.

If this sentence had occurred in Hume or Voltaire!

Ib. s. iii. p. 103.

And then if ever truth be afflicted, she shall also be destroyed.

Here and in many other passages of his other works Jeremy Taylor very unfairly states this argument of the anti-prelatic party. It was not that the Church of England was afflicted (the Puritans themselves had been much more afflicted by the prelates); but that having appealed to the decision of the sword, the cause was determined against it. But in fact it is false that the Puritans ever did argue as Taylor represents them. Laud and his confederates had begun by incarcerating, scourging, and inhumanly mutilating their fellow Christians for not acceding to their fancies, and proceeded to goad and drive the King to levy or at least maintain war against his Parliament: and the Parliamentary party very naturally cited their defeat and the overthrow of the prelacy as a judgment on their blood-thirstiness, not as a proof of their error in questions of theology.

Ib. s. iv. p. 105.

All that I shall say, &c. ‘ad finem’.

An admirable paragraph. Taylor is never more himself, never appears greater, or wiser, than when he enters on this topic, namely, the many and various causes beside truth which occasion men to hold an opinion for truth.

Ib. s. vii. p. 111.

Of such men as these it was said by St. Austin: ‘Caeteram turbam non intelligendi vivacitas, sed credendi simplicitas tutissimam facit.’

Such charity is indeed notable policy: salvation made easy for the benefit of obedient dupes.

Ib. s. ii. p. 119.

I deny not but certain and known idolatry, or any other sort of practical impiety with its principiant doctrine, may be punished corporally, because it is no other but matter of fact.

In the Jewish theocracy, I admit; because the fact of idolatry was a crime, namely, ‘crimen laesae majestatis’, an overt act subversive of the fundamental law of the state, and breaking asunder the ‘vinculum et copulam unitatis et cohaesionis’. But in making the position general, Taylor commits the ‘sophisma omissi essentialis’; he omits the essential of the predicate, namely, criminal;–not its being a fact rendering it punishable, but its being a criminal fact.

Ib. s. iii.

Oh that this great and good man, who saw and has expressed so large a portion of the truth,–(if by the Creed I might understand the true Apostles’, that is, the Baptismal Creed, free from the additions of the first five centuries, I might indeed say the whole truth),–had but brought it back to the great original end and purpose of historical Christianity, and of the Church visible, as its exponent, not as a ‘hortus siccus’ of past revelations,–but an ever enlarging inclosed ‘area’ of the opportunity of individual conversion to, and reception of, the spirit of truth! Then, instead of using this one truth to inspire a despair of all truth, a reckless scepticism within, and a boundless compliance without, he would have directed the believer to seek for light where there was a certainty of finding it, as far as it was profitable for him, that is, as far as it actually was light for him. The visible Church would be a walled Academy, a pleasure garden, in which the intrants having presented their ‘symbolum portae’, or admission-contract, walk at large, each seeking private audience of the invisible teacher,–alone now, now in groups,–meditating or conversing,–gladly listening to some elder disciple, through whom (as ascertained by his intelligibility to me) I feel that the common Master is speaking to me,–or lovingly communing with a class-fellow, who, I have discovered, has received the same lesson from the inward teaching with myself,–while the only public concerns in which all, as a common weal, exercised control and vigilance over each, are order, peace, mutual courtesy and reverence, kindness, charity, love, and the fealty and devotion of all and each to the common Master and Benefactor!

Ib. s. viii. p. 124.

It is characteristic of the man and the age, Taylor’s high-strained reverential epithets to the names of the Fathers, and as rare and naked mention of Luther, Melancthon, Calvin–the least of whom was not inferior to St. Augustin, and worth a brigade of the Cyprians, Firmilians, and the like. And observe, always ‘Saint’ Cyprian!

Ib. s. xii. p. 128-9.

Gibbon’s enumeration of the causes, not miraculous, of the spread of Christianity during the first three centuries is far from complete. This, however, is not the greatest defect of this celebrated chapter. The proportions of importance are not truly assigned; nay, the most effective causes are only not omitted–mentioned, indeed, but ‘quasi in transitu’, not developed or distinctly brought out: for example, the zealous despotism of the Caesars, with the consequent exclusion of men of all ranks from the great interests of the public weal, otherwise than as servile instruments; in short, the direct contrary of that state and character of men’s minds, feelings, hopes and fancies, which elections, Parliaments, Parliamentary reports, and newspapers produce in England; and this extinction of patriotism aided by the melting down of states and nations in the one vast yet heterogeneous Empire;–the number and variety of the parts acting only to make each insignificant in its own eyes, and yet sufficient to preclude all living interest in the peculiar institutions and religious forms of Rome; which beginning in a petty district, had, no less than the Greek republics, its mythology and [Greek: thraeskeia] intimately connected with localities and local events. The mere habit of staring or laughing at nine religions must necessarily end in laughing at the tenth, that is, the religion of the man’s own birth-place. The first of these causes, that is, the detachment of all love and hope from the things of the visible world, and from temporal objects not merely selfish, must have produced in thousands a tendency to, and a craving after, an internal religion, while the latter occasioned an absolute necessity of a mundane as opposed to a national or local religion. I am far from denying or doubting the influence of the excellence of the Christian faith in the propagation of the Christian Church or the power of its evidences; but still I am persuaded that the necessity of some religion, and the untenable nature and obsolete superannuated character of all the others, occasioned the conversion of the largest though not the worthiest part of the new-made Christians. Here, though exploded in physics, we have recourse to the ‘horror vacui’ as an efficient cause. This view of the subject can offend or startle those only who, in their passion for wonderment, virtually exclude the agency of Providence from any share in the realizing of its own benignant scheme; as if the disposition of events by which the whole world of human history, from north and south, east and west, directed their march to one central point, the establishment of Christendom, were not the most stupendous of miracles! It is a yet sadder consideration, that the same men who can find God’s presence and agency only in sensuous miracles, wholly misconceive the characteristic purpose and proper objects of historic Christianity and of the outward and visible Church, of which historic Christianity is the ground and the indispensable condition; but this is a subject delicate and dangerous, at all events requiring a less scanty space than the margins of these honestly printed pages.

Ib. s. iv. p. 133.

The death of Ananias and Sapphira, and the blindness of Elymas the sorcerer, amount not to this, for they were miraculous inflictions.

One great difficulty respecting, not the historic truth (of which there can be no rational doubt), but the miraculous nature, of the sudden deaths of Ananias and Sapphira is derived from the measure which gave occasion to it, namely, the sale of their property by the new converts of Palestine, in order to establish that community of goods, which, according to a Rabbinical tradition, existed before the Deluge, and was to be restored by the children of Seth (one of the names which the Jewish Christians assumed) before the coming of the Son of Man. Now this was a very gross and carnal, not to say fanatical, misunderstanding of our Lord’s words, and had the effect of reducing the Churches of the Circumcision to beggary, and of making them an unnecessary burthen on the new Churches in Greece and elsewhere. See Rhenferd as to this.

The fact of Elymas, however, concludes the miraculous nature of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, which, taken of themselves, would indeed have always been supposed, but could scarcely have been proved, the result of a miraculous or superhuman power. There are for me, I confess, great difficulties in this incident, especially when it is compared with our Lord’s reply to the Apostles’ proposal of calling down fire from heaven. ‘The Son of Man is not come to destroy’, &c. At all events it is a subject that demands and deserves deep consideration.

Ib. s. i. p. 141.

The religion of Jesus Christ is ‘the form of sound doctrine and wholesome words’, which is set down in Scripture indefinitely, actually conveyed to us by plain places, and separated as for the question of necessary or not necessary by the Symbol of the Apostles.

I cannot refrain from again expressing my surprise at the frequency and the undoubting positiveness of this assertion in so great a scholar, so profound a Patrician, as Jeremy Taylor was. He appears ‘bona fide’ to have believed the absurd fable of this Creed having been a pic-nic to which each of the twelve Apostles contributed his ‘symbolum’. Had Jeremy Taylor taken it for granted so completely and at so early an age, that he read without attending to the various passages in the Fathers and ecclesiastical historians, which shew the gradual formation of this Creed? It is certainly possible, and I see no other solution of the problem.

Ib. s. ix. p. 153.

‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’. The dread of these words is, I fear, more influential on my spirit than either the duty of charity or my sense of Taylor’s high merits, in enabling me to struggle against the strong inclination to pass the sentence of dishonesty on the reasoning in this paragraph. Had I met the passage in Richard Baxter or in Bishop Hall, it would have made no such unfavourable impression. But Taylor was so acute a logician, and had made himself so completely master of the subject, that it is hard to conceive him blind to sophistry so glaring. I am myself friendly to Infant Baptism, but for that reason feel more impatience of any unfairness in its defenders.

Ib. Ad. iii. and xiii. p. 178.

But then, that God is not as much before hand with Christian as with Jewish infants is a thing which can never be believed by them who understand that in the Gospel God opened all his treasures of mercies, and unsealed the fountain itself; whereas, before, he poured forth only rivulets of mercy and comfort.

This is mere sophistry; and I doubt whether Taylor himself believed it a sufficient reply to his own argument. There is no doubt that the primary purpose of Circumcision was to peculiarize the Jews by an indelible visible sign; and it was as necessary that Jewish infants should be known to be Jews as Jewish men. Then humanity and mere safety determined that the bloody rite should be performed in earliest infancy, as soon as the babe might be supposed to have gotten over the fever of his birth. This is clear; for women had no correspondent rite, but the same result was obtained by the various severe laws concerning their marriage with aliens and other actions.

Ib. p. 180.

And as those persons who could not be circumcised (I mean the females), yet were baptized, as is notorious in the Jews’ books and story.

Yes, but by no command of God, but only their own fancies.

Ib. Ad. iv. p. 181.

‘Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter therein’: receive it as a little child receives it, that is, with innocence, and without any let or hinderance.

Is it not evident that Christ here converted negatives into positives? As a babe is without malice negatively, so you must be positively and by actuation, that is, full of love and meekness; as the babe is unresisting, so must you be docile, and so on.

Ib. Ad. v.

And yet, notwithstanding this terrible paragraph, Taylor believed that infants were not a whit the worse off for not being baptized. Strange contradiction! They are born in sin, and Baptism is the only way of deliverance; and yet it is not. For the infant is ‘de se’ of the kingdom of heaven. Christ blessed them, not in order to make them so, but because they already were so. So that this argument seems more than all others demonstrative for the Anabaptist, and to prove that Baptism derives all its force if it be celestial magic, or all its meaning if it be only a sacrament and symbol, from the presumption of actual sin in the person baptized.

Ib. Ad. xv. p. 186.

And he that hath without difference commanded that all nations should be baptized, hath without difference commanded all sorts of persons.

Even so our Lord commanded all men to repent, did he therefore include babes of a month old? [8] Yes, when they became capable of repentance. And even so babes are included in the general command of Baptism, that is, as soon as they are baptizable. But Baptism supposed both repentance and a promise; babes are not capable of either, and therefore not of Baptism. For the physical element was surely only the sign and seal of a promise by a counter promise and covenant. The rite of Circumcision is wholly inapplicable; for there a covenant was between Abraham and God, not between God and the infant. “Do so and so to all your male children, and I will favor them. Mark them before the world as a peculiar and separate race, and I will then consider them as my chosen people.” But Baptism is personal, and the baptized a subject not an object; not a thing, but a person; that is, having reason, or actually and not merely potentially. Besides, Jeremy Taylor was too sound a student of Erasmus and Grotius not to know the danger of screwing up St. Paul’s accommodations of Jewish rites, meant doubtless as inducements of rhetoric and innocent compliances with innocent and invincible prejudices, into articles of faith. The conclusions are always true; but all the arguments are not and were never intended to be reducible into syllogisms demonstrative.

Ib. Ad. xviii. p. 191.

But let us hear the answer. First, it is said, that Baptism and the Spirit signify the same thing; for by water is meant the effect of the Spirit.

By the ‘effect,’ the Anabaptist clearly means the ‘causa causans’, the ‘act of the Spirit.’ As well might Taylor say that a thought is not thinking, because it is the effect of thinking. Had Taylor been right, the water to be an apt sign ought to have been dirty water; for that would be the ‘res effecta’. But it is pure water, therefore ‘res agens’.

Ib. p. 192.

For it is certain and evident, that regeneration or new birth is here enjoined to all as of absolute and indispensable necessity.

Yet Taylor himself has denied it over and over again in his tracts on Original Sin; and how is it in harmony with the words of Christ–‘Of such are the kingdom of heaven’? Are we not regenerated back to a state of spiritual infancy? Yet for such Anti-paedobaptists as hold the dogma of original guilt it is doubtless a fair argument; but Taylor ought not to have used it as certain and evident in itself, and not merely ‘ad hominem et per accidens’. As making a bow is in England the understood conventional mark or visible language of reverence, so in the East was Baptism the understood outward and visible mark of conversion and initiation. So much for the visible act: then for the particular meaning affixed to it by Christ. This was [Greek: metanoia], an adoption of a new principle of action and consequent reform of conduct; a cleansing, but especially a cleansing away of the carnal film from the mind’s eye. Hence the primitive Church called baptism [Greek: ph_os], light, and the Eucharist [Greek: z_oae], life. Baptism, therefore, was properly the sign, the ‘precursor’, or rather the first act, the ‘initium’, of that regeneration of which the whole spiritual life of a Christian is the complete process; the Eucharist indicating the means, namely, the continued assimilation of and to the Divine Humanity. Hence the Eucharist was called the continuation of the Incarnation.

Ib.

And yet it does not follow that they should all be baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire. But it is meant only that that glorious effect should be to them a sign of Christ’s eminency above him; they should see from him a Baptism greater than that of John.

This is exactly of a piece with that gloss of the Socinians in evasion of St. Paul’s words concerning Christ’s emptying himself of the form of God, and becoming a servant, which all the world of Christians had interpreted of the Incarnation. But no! it only referred to the miracle of his transfiguration!

… ‘credat Judaeus Apella!
Non ego’.

St. John could not mean this, unless he denied the distinct personality of the Holy Ghost. For it was the Holy Ghost that then descended ‘as the substitute of Christ; nor does St. Luke even hint that it was understood to be a Baptism, even if we suppose the ‘tongues of fire’ to be anything visual, and not as we say, Victory sate on his helmet like an eagle. The spirit of eloquence descended into them like a tongue of fire, and that they spoke different languages is, I conceive, no where said; but only that being rustic Galileans they yet spake a dialect intelligible to all the Jews from the most different provinces. For it is clear they were all Jews, and, as Jews, had doubtless a ‘lingua communis’ which all understood when spoken, though persons of education only could speak it. Even so a German boor understands, but yet cannot talk in, High German, that is, the language of his Bible and Hymn-book. So it is with the Scotch of Aberdeen with regard to pure English. In short Taylor’s arguments press on the Anabaptists, only as far as the Anabaptists baptize at all; they are in fact attacks on Baptism; and it would only follow from them that the Baptist is more rational than the Paedobaptist, but that the Quaker is more consistent than either. To pull off your hat is in Europe a mark of respect. What, if a parent in his last will should command his children and posterity to pull off their hats to their superiors,–and in course of time these children or descendants emigrated to China, or some place, where the same ceremony either meant nothing, or an insult. Should we not laugh at them if they did not interpret the words into, Pay reverence to your superiors. Even so Baptism was the Jewish custom, and natural to those countries; but with us it would be a more significant rite if applied as penance for excess of zeal and acts of bigotry, especially as sprinkling.

Ib. p. 196.

But farther yet I demand, can infants receive Christ in the Eucharist?

Surely the wafer and the tea-spoonful of wine might be swallowed by an infant, as well as water be sprinkled upon him. But if the former is not the Eucharist because without faith and repentance, so cannot the latter, it would seem, be Baptism. For they are declared equal adjuncts of both Sacraments. The argument therefore is a mere ‘petitio principii sub lite’.

Ib. Ad. ix. p. 197.

The promise of the Holy Ghost is made to all, to us and to our children: and if the Holy Ghost belongs to them, then Baptism belongs to them also.

If this be not rank enthusiasm I know not what is. The Spirit is promised to them, first, as protection and providence, and as internal operation when those faculties are developed, in and by which the Spirit co-operates. Can Taylor shew an instance in Scripture in which the Holy Spirit is said to operate simply, and without the co-operation of the subject?

Ib. Ad. xix. p. 199.

And when the boys in the street sang Hosanna to the Son of David, our blessed Lord said that if they had held their peace, the stones of the street would have cried out Hosanna.

By the same argument I could defend the sprinkling of mules and asses with holy water, as is done yearly at Rome on St. Antony’s day, I believe. For they are capable of health and sickness, of restiveness and of good temper, and these are all emanations from their Creator. Besides in the great form of Baptism the words are not [Greek: en onomati], but [Greek: eis to onoma], and many learned men have shewn that they may mean ‘into the power or influence’ of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. But spiritual influences suppose capability in act of receiving them; and we must either pretend to believe that the soul of the babe, that is, his consciousness, is acted on without his consciousness, or that the instrumental cause is antecedent by years to its effect, which would be a conjunction disjunctive with a vengeance. Again, Baptism is nothing except as followed by the Spirit; but it is irrational to say, that the Spirit acts on the mere potentialities of an infant. For wherein is the Spirit, as used in Scripture in appropriation to Christians, different from God’s universal providence and goodness, but that the latter like the sun may shine on the wicked and on the good, on the passive and on those who by exercise increase its effect; whereas the former always implies a co-operant subject, that is, a developed reason. When God gave his Spirit miraculously to the young child, Daniel, he at the same time miraculously hastened the development of his understanding.

Ib. Ad. xxviii. p. 205.

But we see also that although Christ required faith of them who came to be healed, yet when any were brought, or came in behalf of others, he only required faith of them who came, and their faith did benefit to others….

But this instance is so certain a reproof of this objection of theirs, which is their principal, which is their all, that it is a wonder to me they should not all be convinced at the reading and observing of it.

So far from certainty, I find no strength at all in this reproof. Doubtless Christ at a believer’s request might heal his child’s or his servant’s bodily sickness; for this was an act of power, requiring only an object. But is it any where said, that at a believer’s request he gave the Spirit and the graces of faith to an unbeliever without any mental act, or moral co-operation of the latter? This would have been a proof indeed; but Taylor’s instance is a mere ‘ad aliud’.

Ib. Ad. xxxi. p. 207.

And although there are some effects of the Holy Spirit which require natural capacities to be their foundation; yet those are the [Greek: energaemata] or powers of working: but the [Greek: charismata], and the inheritance and the title to the promises require nothing on our part, but that we can receive them.

The Bishop flutters about and about, but never fairly answers the question, What does Baptism do? The Baptist says it attests forgiveness of sins, as the reward of faith and repentance. This is intelligible; but as to the [Greek: charismata]–the children of believers, if so taught and educated, are surely entitled to the promises; and what analogy is there in this to any one act of power and gift of powers mentioned as [Greek: charismata], when the word is really used in contradistinction from [Greek: energaemata] Baptism is spoken of many times by St. Paul properly as well as metaphorically, and in the former sense it is never described as a [Greek: charisma] on a passive recipient, while in the latter sense it always respects an [Greek: energaema] of the Spirit of God, and a [Greek: synergaema] in the spirit of the recipient. All that Taylor can make out is, that Baptism effects a potentiality in a potentiality, or a chalking of chalk to make white white.

Ib. p. 210.

And if it be questioned by wise men whether the want of it do not occasion their eternal loss, and it is not questioned whether Baptism does them any hurt or no, then certainly to baptize them is the surer way without all peradventure.

Now this is the strongest argument of all against Infant Baptism, and that which alone weighed at one time with me, namely, that it supposes and most certainly encourages a belief concerning God, the most blasphemous and intolerable; and no human wit can express this more forcibly and affectingly than Taylor himself has done in his Letter to a Lady on Original Sin. It is too plain to be denied that the belief of the strict necessity of Infant Baptism, and the absolute universality of the practice did not commence till the dogma of original guilt had begun to despotize in the Church: while that remained uncertain and sporadic, Infant Baptism was so too; some did it, many did not. But as soon as Original Sin in the sense of actual guilt became the popular creed, then all did it. [9]

Ib. s. xvi. p. 224.

And although they have done violence to all philosophy and the reason of man, and undone and cancelled the principles of two or three sciences, to bring in this article; yet they have a divine revelation, whose literal and grammatical sense, if that sense were intended, would warrant them to do violence to all the sciences in the circle. And indeed that Transubstantiation is openly and violently against natural reason is no argument to make them disbelieve it, who believe the mystery of the Trinity in all those niceties of explication which are in the School (and which now-a-days pass for the doctrine of the Church), with as much violence to the principles of natural and supernatural philosophy as can be imagined to be in the point of Transubstantiation.

This is one of the many passages in Taylor’s works which lead me to think that his private opinions were favorable to Socinianism. Observe, to the views of Socinus, not to modern Unitarianism, as taught by Priestley and Belsham. And doubtless Socinianism would much more easily bear a doubt, whether the difference between it and the orthodox faith was not more in words than in the things meant, than the Arian hypothesis. A mere conceptualist, at least, might plausibly ask whether either party, the Athanasian or the Socinian, had a sufficiently distinct conception of what the one meant by the hypostatical union of the Divine Logos with the man Jesus; or the other of his plenary, total, perpetual, and continuous inspiration, to have any well-grounded assurance, that they do not mean the same thing.

Moreover, no one knew better than Jeremy Taylor that this apparent soar of the hooded falcon, faith, to the very empyrean of bibliolatry amounted in fact to a truism of which the following syllogism is a fair illustration. All stones are men: all men think: ‘ergo’, all stones think. The ‘major’ is taken for granted, the minor no one denies; and then the conclusion is good logic, though a very foolish untruth. Or, if an oval were demonstrated by Euclid to be a circle, it would be a circle; and if it were a demonstrable circle, it would be a circle, though the strait lines drawable from the centre to the circumference are unequal. If we were quite certain that an omniscient Being, incapable of deceiving, or being deceived, had assured us that 5 X 5 = 6 X 3, and that the two sides of a certain triangle were together less than the third, then we should be warranted in setting at nought the science of arithmetic and geometry. On another occasion, as when it was the good Bishop’s object to expose the impudent assertions of the Romish Church since the eleventh century, he would have been the first to have replied by a counter syllogism.

If we are quite certain that any writing pretending to divine origin contains gross contradictions to demonstrable truths ‘in eodem genere’, or commands that outrage the clearest principles of right and wrong; then we may be equally certain that the pretence is a blasphemous falsehood, inasmuch as the compatibility of a document with the conclusions of self-evident reason, and with the laws of conscience, is a condition ‘a priori’ of any evidence adequate to the proof of its having been revealed by God.

This principle is clearly laid down both by Moses and by St. Paul. If a man pretended to be a prophet, he was to predict some definite event that should take place at some definite time, at no unreasonable distance: and if it were not fulfilled, he was to be punished as an impostor. But if he accompanied his prophecy with any doctrine subversive of the exclusive Deity and adorability of the one God of heaven and earth, or any seduction to a breach of God’s commandments, he was to be put to death at once, all other proof of his guilt and imposture being superfluous. [10] So St. Paul. If any man preach another Gospel, though he should work all miracles, though he had the appearance and evinced the superhuman powers of an angel from heaven–he was at once, in contempt of all imaginable sensuous miracles, to be holden accursed. [11]

Ib. s. xviii. p. 225.

And now for any danger to men’s persons for suffering such a doctrine, this I shall say, that if they who do it are not formally guilty of idolatry, there is no danger that they whom they persuade to it, should be guilty … When they believe it to be no idolatry, then their so believing it is sufficient security from that crime, which hath so great a tincture and residency in the will, that from thence only it hath its being criminal.

Will not this argument justify all idolaters? For surely they believe themselves worshippers either of the Supreme Being under a permitted form, or of some son of God (as Apollo) to whom he has delegated such and such powers. If this be the case, there is no such crime as idolatry: yet the second commandment expressly makes the worshipping of God in or before a visual image of him not only idolatry, but the most hateful species of it. Now do they not worship God in the visible form of bread, and prostrate themselves before pictures of the Trinity? Are we so mad as to suppose that the pious heathens thought the statue of Jupiter, Jove himself? No; and yet these heathens were idolaters. But there was no such being as Jupiter. No! Was there no King of Kings and Lord of Lords; and does the name Jove instead of Jehovah (perhaps the same word too) make the difference? Were Marcus Antoninus and Epictetus idolaters?

UNUM NECESSARIUM; OR THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF REPENTANCE.

1. The first great divines among the Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and their compeers and successors, had thrown the darkness of storms on an awful fact of human nature, which in itself had only the darkness of negations. What was certain, but incomprehensible, they rendered contradictory and absurd by a vain attempt at explication. It was a fundamental fact, and of course could not be comprehended; for to comprehend, and thence to explain, is the same as to perceive, and thence to point out, a something before the given fact, and Standing to it in the relation of cause to effect. Thus they perverted original sin into hereditary guilt, and made God act in the spirit of the cruellest laws of jealous governments towards their enemies, upon the principle of treason in the blood. This was brought in to explain their own explanation of God’s ways, and then too often God’s alleged way in this case was adduced to justify the cruel state law of treason in the blood.

2. In process of time, good men and of active minds were shocked at this; but, instead of passing back to the incomprehensible fact, with a vault over the unhappy idol forged for its comprehension, they identified the two in name; and while in truth their arguments applied only to a false theory, they rejected the fact for the sake of the mis-solution, and fell into far worse errors. For the mistaken theorist had built upon a foundation, though but a superstructure of chaff and straw; but the opponents built on nothing. Aghast at the superstructure, these latter ran away from that which is the sole foundation of all human religion.

3. Then came the persecutions of the Arminians in Holland; then the struggle in England against the Arminian Laud and all his party–terrible persecutors in their turn of the Calvinists and systematic divines; then the Civil War and the persecutions of the Church by the Puritans in their turn; and just in this state of heated feelings did Taylor write these Works, which contain dogmas subversive of true Christian faith, namely, his ‘Unum Necessarium’, or Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, which reduces the cross of Christ to nothing, especially in the seventh chapter of the same, and the after defences of it in his Letters on Original Sin to a Lady, and to the Bishop of Rochester; and the Liberty of Prophesying, which, putting toleration on a false ground, has left no ground at all for right or wrong in matters of Christian faith.

In the marginal notes, which I have written in these several treatises on Repentance, I appear to myself to have demonstrated that Taylor’s system has no one advantage over the Lutheran in respect of God’s attributes; that it is ‘bona fide’ Pelagianism (though he denies it; for let him define that grace which Pelagius would not accept, because incompatible with free will and merit, and profess his belief in it thus defined, and every one of his arguments against absolute decrees tell against himself); and lastly, that its inevitable logical consequences are Socinianism and ‘quae sequuntur’. In Tillotson the face of Arminianism looked out fuller, and Christianity is represented as a mere arbitrary contrivance of God, yet one without reason. Let not the surpassing eloquence of Taylor dazzle you, nor his scholastic retiary versatility of logic illaqueate your good sense. Above all do not dwell too much on the apparent absurdity or horror of the dogma he opposes, but examine what he puts in its place, and receive candidly the few hints which I have admarginated for your assistance, being in the love of truth and of Christ,

Your Brother.

I have omitted one remark, probably from over fullness of intention to have inserted it.

1. The good man and eloquent expresses his conjectural belief that, if Adam had not fallen, Christ would still have been necessary, though not perhaps by Incarnation. Now, in the first place, this is only a play thought of himself, and Scotus, and perhaps two or three others in the Schools; no article of faith or of general presumption; consequently it has little serious effect even on the guessers themselves. In the next place, if it were granted, yet it would be a necessity wholly ‘ex parte Dei’, not at all ‘ex parte Hominis’:–for what does it amount to but this–that God having destined a creature for two states, the earthly rational, and the heavenly spiritual, and having chosen to give him, in the first instance, faculties sufficient only for the first state, must afterwards superinduce those sufficient for the second state, or else God would at once and the same time destine and not destine. This therefore is a mere fancy, a theory, but not a binding religion; no covenant.

2. But the Incarnation, even after the fall of Adam, he clearly makes to be specifically of no necessity. It was only not to take away peevishly the estate of grace from the poor innocent children, because of the father,–according to the good Bishop, a poor ignorant, who before he ate the apple of knowledge did not know what right and wrong was; and Christ’s Incarnation would have been no more necessary then than it was before, according to Taylor’s belief. Here again the Incarnation is wholly a contrivance ‘ex parte Dei’, and no way resulting from any default of man.

3. Consequently Taylor neither saw nor admitted any ‘a priori’ necessity of the Incarnation from the nature of man, and which, being felt by man in his own nature, is itself the greatest of proofs for the admission of it, and the strongest pre-disposing cause of the admission of all proof positive. Not having this, he was to seek ‘ab extra’ for proofs in facts, in historical evidence in the world of sense. The same causes produce the same effects. Hence Grotius, Taylor, and Baxter (then, as appears in his Life, in a state of uneasy doubt), were the first three writers of evidences of the Christian religion, such as have been since followed up by hundreds,–nine-tenths of them Socinians or Semi-Socinians, and which, taking head and tail, I call the Grotio-Paleyan way.

4. Hence the good man was ever craving for some morsel out of the almsbasket of all external events, in order to prove to himself his own immortality; and, with grief and shame I tell it, became evidence and authority in Irish stories of ghosts, and apparitions, and witches. Let those who are astonished refer to Glanville on Witches, and they will be more astonished still. The fact now stated at once explains and justifies my anxiety in detecting the errors of this great and excellent genius at their fountain head,–the question of Original Sin: for how important must that error be which ended in bringing Bishop Jeremy Taylor forward as an examiner, judge, and witness in an Irish apparition case!

Ib. s. xxxviii. p. 278.

Although God exacts not an impossible law under eternal and insufferable pains, yet he imposes great holiness in unlimited and indefinite measures, with a design to give excellent proportions of reward answerable to the greatness of our endeavour. Hell is not the end of them that fail in the greatest measures of perfection; but great degrees of heaven shall be their portion who do all that they can always, and offend in the fewest instances.

It is not to be denied that one if not more of the parables appears to sanction this, but the same parables would by consequence seem to favour a state of Purgatory. From John, Paul, and the philosophy of the doctrine, I should gather a different faith, and find a sanction for this too in one of the parables, namely, that of the labourer at the eleventh hour. Heaven, bliss, union with God through Christ, do not seem to me comparative terms, or conceptions susceptible of degree. But it is a difficult question. The first Fathers of the Reformation, and the early Fathers of the primitive Church, present different systems, and in a very different spirit.

Ib. p. 324-328.

Descriptions of repentance taken from the Holy Scriptures.

This is a beautiful collection of texts. Still the pious but unconverted Jew (a Moses Mendelsohn, for instance), has a right to ask, What then did Christ teach or do, such and of such additional moment as to be rightfully entitled the founder of a new law, instead of being, like Isaiah and others, an enforcer and explainer of the old? If Christianity, or the ‘opus operans’ of Redemption, was synchronous with the Fall of man, then the same answer must be returned to the passages here given from the Old Testament as to those from the New; namely, that Sanctification is the result of Redemption, not its efficient cause or previous condition. Assuredly [Greek: metanoaesis] and Sanctification differ only as the plant and the growth or growing of the plant. But the words of the Apostle (it will be said) are exhortative and dehortative. Doubtless! and so would be the words of a wise physician addressed to a convalescent. Would this prove that the patient’s revalescence had been independent of the medicines given him? The texts are addressed to the free will, and therefore concerning possible objects of free will. No doubt! Should that process, the end and virtue of which is to free the will, destroy the free will? But I cannot make it out to my understanding, how the two are compatible.–Answer; the spirit knows the things of the spirit. Here lies the sole true ground of Latitudinarianism, Arminian, or Socinian; and this is the sole and sufficient confutation; ‘spiritualia spiritus cognoscit’. Would you understand with your ears instead of hearing with your understanding? Now, as the ears to the understanding, so is the understanding to the spirit. This Plato knew; and art thou a master in Israel, and knowest it not?

Ib. p. 330.

‘Who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace’.

By this passage we must interpret the words “sin wilfully,” in reference to an unpardonable sin, in the preceding sentence.

Of the moral capacity of sinful habits.

Ib. s. ii. p. 432.

Probably from the holiness of his own life, Taylor has but just fluttered about a bad habit, not fully described it. He has omitted, or rather described contradictorily, the case of those with whom the objections to sin are all strengthened, the dismal consequences more glaring and always present to them as an avenging fury, the sin loathed, detested, hated; and yet, spite of all this, nay, the more for all this, perpetrated. Both lust and intemperance would furnish too many instances of these most miserable victims.

Ib. s. xxxix. p. 456.

For every vicious habit being radicated in the will, and being a strong love, inclination and adhesion to sin, unless the natural being of this love be taken off, the enmity against God remains.

But the most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy of this “grace of God:” he never denies, yet never admits, it any separate operancy ‘per se’. And this, I fancy, is the true distinction of Arminianisrn and Calvinism in their moral effects. Arminianism is cruel to individuals, for fear of damaging the race by false hopes and improper confidences; while Calvinism is horrible for the race, but full of consolation to the suffering individual.

The next section is, taken together, one of the many instances that confirm my opinion that Calvinism (Archbishop Leighton’s for example), compared with Taylor’s Arminianism, is as the lamb in the wolf’s skin to the wolf in the lamb’s skin: the one is cruel in the phrases, the other in the doctrine.

Ib. s. lvi. p. 469.

But if a single act of contrition cannot procure pardon of sins that are habitual, then a wicked man that returns not till it be too late to root out vicious habits, must despair of salvation. I answer, &c.

Would not Taylor’s purposes have been sufficiently attained by pressing the contrast between attrition and contrition with faith, and the utter improbability that the latter (which alone can be efficient), shall be vouchsafed to a sinner who has continued in his sins in the flattery of a death-bed repentance; a blasphemy that seems too near that against the Holy Ghost? My objection to Taylor is, that he seems to reduce the death of Christ almost to a cypher; a contrivance rather to reconcile the attributes of God, than an act of infinite love to save sinners. But the truth is, that this is the peccant part of Arminianism, and Tillotson is yet more open than Taylor. Forbid me, common goodness, that I should think Tillotson conscious of Socinianism! but that his tenets involved it, I more than suspect. See his Discourses on Transubstantiation, and those near it in the same volume.

Ib. lxiv. p. 478.

Now there is no peradventure, but new-converted persons, heathens newly giving up their names to Christ and being baptized, if they die in an hour, and were baptized half an hour after they believe in Christ, are heirs of salvation.

This granted, I should little doubt of confuting all the foregoing, as far as I object to it. I would rather be ‘durus pater infantum’, like Austin, than ‘durus pater aegrotantium’. Taylor considers all Christians who are so called.

Ib. s. lxvi. p. 481.

All this paragraph is as just as it is fine and lively, but far from confirming Taylor’s doctrine. The case is as between one individual and a general rule. I know God’s mercy and Christ’s merits; but whether your heart has true faith in them, I cannot know. ‘Be it unto thee according to thy faith’, said Christ: so should his ministers say. All these passages, however, are utterly irreconcilable with the Roman doctrine, that the priest’s absolution is operant, and not simply declarative. As to the decisions of Paulinus and Asterius, it is to be feared that they had the mortmain bequests and compensations in view more than the words of St. Paul, or the manifest purposes of redemption by faith. Yea, Taylor himself has his ‘redime peccata eleemosynis’.

By the by, I know of few subjects that have been more handled and less rationally treated than this of alms-giving. Every thing a rich man purchases beyond absolute necessaries, ought to be purchased in the spirit of alms, that is, as the most truly beneficial way of disparsing that wealth, of which he is the steward, not owner.

Ib.

St. Paul taught us this secret, that sins are properly made habitual upon the stock of impunity. ‘Sin taking occasion by the law wrought in me all concupiscence’; [Greek: ‘aphormaen labousa’], ‘apprehending impunity,’ [Greek: ‘dia taes entolaes’], ‘by occasion of the commandment,’ that is, so expressed and established as it was; because in the commandment forbidding to lust or covet, there was no penalty annexed or threatened in the sanction or in the explication. Murder was death, and so was adultery and rebellion. Theft was punished severely too; and so other things in their proportion; but the desires God left under a bare restraint, and affixed no penalty in the law. Now sin, that is, men that had a mind to sin, taking occasion hence, &c.

This is a very ingenious and very plausible exposition of St. Paul’s words; but surely, surely, it is not the right one. I find both the meaning and the truth of the Apostle’s words in the vividness and consequently attractive and ad-(or in-)sorbent power given to an image or thought by the sense of its danger, by the consciousness of its being forbidden,–which, in an unregenerate and unassisted will, struggling with, or even exciting, the ever ready inclination of corrupted nature, produces a perplexity and confusion which again increase the person’s susceptibility of the soliciting image or fancy so intensified. Guilt and despair add a stimulus and sting to lust. See Iago in Shakspeare.

Ib. s. xi. p. 500.

It was not well with thee when thou didst first enter into the suburbs of hell by single actions of sin, &c.

Aye! this is excellent indeed, and worthy of a guardian angel of the Church. When Jeremy Taylor escapes from the Mononomian Romaism, which netted him in his too eager recoil from the Antinomian boar, brought forth and foddered (as he imagined) in Calvin’s stye; when from this wiry net he escapes into the devotional and the dietetic, as into a green meadow-land, with springs, and rivulets, and sheltering groves, where he leads his flock like a shepherd;–then it is that he is most himself,–then only he is all himself, the whole Jeremy Taylor; or if there be one other subject graced by the same total heautophany, it is in the pouring forth of his profound common sense on the ways and weaknesses of men and conflicting sects, as for instance, in the admirable birth, parentage, growth, and consummation of a religious controversy in his ‘Dissuasive from Popery’.

Ib. s. xiii. p. 502.

Let every old man that repents of the sins of his evil life be very diligent in the search of the particulars; that by drawing them into a heap, and spreading them before his eyes, he may be mightily ashamed at their number and burthen.

I dare not condemn, but I am doubtful of this as a universal rule. If there be a true hatred of sin, the precious time and the spiritual ‘nisus’ will, I think, be more profitably employed in enkindling meditation on holiness, and thirstings after the mind of Christ.

Ib. ss. xxxi-xxxv. pp..517, 518.

Scarce a word in all this but for form’s sake concerning the merits and sacrifice of the Incarnate God! Surely Luther would not have given this advice to a dying penitent, but have directed him rather to employ his little time in agony of prayer to Christ, or in earnest meditations on the astounding mystery of his death. In Taylor man is to do every thing.

Vol. IX. s. xi. p. 5.

For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment even to the lesser sins and sinners, which he only had first threatened to Adam; and so Adam brought it upon them.

And such a phrase as this used by a man in a refutation of Original Sin, on the ground of its incompatibility with God’s attributes! “Exasperated” with those whom Taylor declares to have been innocent and most unfortunate, the two things that most conciliate love and pity!

Ib. p. 6.

If the sequel of the paragraph, comparing God to David in one of his worst actions, be not blasphemy, the reason is that the good man meant it not as such. ‘In facto est, sed non’ in agents.

Ib. ss. xvi. xvii. pp. 8, 9.

For the further explication of which it is observable that the word ‘sinner’ and ‘sin’ in Scripture is used for any person, that hath a fault or a legal impurky, a debt, a vitiosity, defect, or imposition, &c.

These facts, instead of explaining away Original Sin, are unintelligible, nay, absurd and immoral, except as shadows, types, and symbols of it, and of the Redemption from it. Observe, too, that Taylor never dares explain what he means by “Adam was mortal of himself and we are mortal from him:” he did not dare affirm that soul and body are alike material and perishable, even as the lute and the potentiality of music in the lute. And yet if he believed the contrary, then, in his construction of the doctrine of Original Sin, what has Christ done? St. John died in the same sense as Abel died: and in the sense of the Church of England neither died, but only slept in the Lord.

This same system forced Taylor into the same error which Warburton afterwards dressed up with such trappings and trammels of erudition, in direct contempt of the plain meaning of the Church’s article; and he takes it for granted, in many places, that the Jews under Moses knew only of temporal life and the death of the body. Lastly, he greatly degrades the mind of man by causelessly representing death as an evil in itself, which, if it be considered as a crisis, or phenomenal change, incident to a progressive being, ought as little to be thought so, as the casting of the caterpillar’s skin to make room for the wings of the butterfly. It is the unveiling of the Psyche.

I do not affirm this as an article of Christian faith; but I say that no candid writer ought to hide himself in double meanings. Either he should have used the term ‘death’ (‘ex Adamo’) as loss of body, or as change of mode of being and of its circumstances; and again this latter as either evil for all, or as evil or good according to the moral habits of each individual.

Observe, however, once for all, that I do not pretend to account for Original Sin. I declare it to be an unaccountable fact. How can we explain a ‘species’, when we are wholly in the dark as to the ‘genus’? Now guilt itself, as well as all other immediate facts of free will, is absolutely inexplicable; of course original guilt. If we will perversely confound the intelligible with the sensible world, misapply the logic appropriate to _phaenomena_ and the categories, or forms, which are empty except as substantialized in facts of experience, in order to use them as the Procrustes’ bed of faith respecting noumena: if in short, we will strive to understand that of which we can only know [Greek: hoti esti], we may and must make as wild work with reason, will, conscience, guilt, and virtue, as with Original Sin and Redemption. On every subject first ask, Is it among the [Greek: aisthaeta], or the [Greek: noumena]?

Ib. s. xxiii. p. 12.

It could not make us heirs of damnation. This I shall the less need to insist upon, because, of itself, it seems so horrid to impute to the goodness and justice of God to be author of so great calamity to innocents, &c.

Never was there a more hazardous way of reasoning, or rather of placing human ignorance in the judgment seat over God’s wisdom. The whole might be closely parodied in support of Atheism: rather, this is but a paraphrase of the old atheistic arguments. Either God could not, or would not, prevent the moral and physical evils of the universe, including the everlasting anguish of myriads of millions: therefore he is either not all-powerful or not all-good: but a being deficient in power or goodness is not God:–_Ergo, &c._

Ib. s. xxv. p. 13.

I deny not but all persons naturally are so, that they cannot arrive at heaven; but unless some other principle be put into them, or some great grace done for them, must for ever stand separate from seeing the face of God.

But this is but accidentally occasioned by the sin of Adam. Just so might I say, that without the great grace of air done for them no living beings could live. If it mean more, pray where was the grace in creating a being, who without an especial grace must pass into utter misery? If Taylor reply; but the grace was added in Christ: why so say the Calvinists. According to Taylor there is no fall of man; but only an act and punishment of a man, which punishment consisted in his living in the kitchen garden, instead of the flower garden and orchard: and Cain was as likely to have murdered Abel before, as after, the eating of the forbidden fruit. But the very name of the fruit confutes Taylor. Adam altered his nature by it. Cain did not. What Adam did, I doubt not, we all do. Time is not with things of spirit.

Ib. s. xxvii. p. 14.

Is hell so easy a pain, or are the souls of children of so cheap, so contemptible a price, that God should so easily throw them into hell?

This is an argument against the ‘sine qua non’ of Baptism, not against Original Sin.

Ib. s. lxvii. p. 49.

Origen said enough to be mistaken in the question. [Greek: Hhara to Adam koinae pant’on esti. Kai ta kata taes gynaikos, ouk esti kath aes ou legetai.] ‘Adam’s curse is common to all. And there is not a woman on earth, to whom may not be said those things which were spoken to this woman.’

Origen’s words ought to have prevented all mistake, for he plainly enough overthrows the phantom of hereditary guilt; and as to guilt from a corruption of nature, it is just such guilt as the carnivorous appetites of a weaned lion, or the instinct of a brood of ducklings to run to water. What then is it? It is an evil, and therefore seated in the will; common to all men, the beginning of which no man can determine in himself or in others. How comes this? It is a mystery, as the will itself. Deeds are in time and space, therefore have a beginning. Pure action, that is, the will, is a ‘noumenon’, and irreferable to time. Thus Origen calls it neither hereditary nor original, but universal sin. The curse of Adam is common to all men, because what Adam did, we all do: and thus of Eve. You may substitute any woman in her place, and the same words apply. This is the true solution of this unfortunate question. The [Greek: pr’oton pseudos] is in the dividing the will from the acts of the will. The will is ‘ego-agens’.

Ib. s. lxxxii. p. 52.

This paragraph, though very characteristic of the Author, is fitter for a comedy than for a grave discourse. It puts one in mind of the play–“More sacks in the mill! Heap, boys, heap!”

Ib. s. lxxxiv. p. 56.

‘Praeposterum est’ (said Paulus the lawyer) ‘ante nos locupletes dici quam acquisiverimus’. We cannot be said to lose what we never had; and our fathers’ goods were not to descend upon us, unless they were his at his death.

Take away from me the knowledge that he was my father, dear Bishop, and this will be true. But as it stands, the whole is, “says Paulus the Lawyer;” and, “Well said, Lawyer!” say I.

Ib. p. 57.

Which though it was natural, yet from Adam it began to be a curse; just as the motion of a serpent upon his belly, which was concreated with him, yet upon this story was changed into a malediction and an evil adjunct.

How? I should really like to understand this.

Ib. ch. vii. p. 73 ‘in initio’.

In this most eloquent treatise we may detect sundry logical lapses, sometimes in the statement, sometimes in the instances, and once or twice in the conclusions. But the main and pervading error lies in the treatment of the subject ‘in genere’ by the forms and rules of conceptual logic; which deriving all its material from the senses, and borrowing its forms from the sense ([Greek: aisthaesis kathara]) or intuitive faculty, is necessarily inapplicable to spiritual mysteries, the very definition or contra-distinguishing character of which is that they transcend the sense, and therefore the understanding, the faculty, as Archbishop Leighton and Immanuel Kant excellently define it, which judges according to sense. In the Aids to Reflection, [12] I have shewn that the proper function of the understanding or mediate faculty is to collect individual or sensible concretes into kinds and sorts (‘genera et species’) by means of their common characters (‘notae communes’); and to fix and distinguish these conceptions (that is, generalized perceptions) by words. Words are the only immediate objects of the understanding. Spiritual verities, or truths of reason ‘respective ad realia’, and herein distinguished from the merely formal, or so called universal truths, are differenced from the conceptions of the understanding by the immediatcy of the knowledge, and from the immediate truths of sense,–that is, from both pure and mixed intuitions,–by not being sensible, that is, not representable by figure, measurement or weight; nor connected with any affection of our sensibility, such as color, taste, odors, and the like. And such knowledges we, when we speak correctly, name ideas.

Now Original Sin, that is, sin that has its origin in itself, or in the will of the sinner, but yet in a state or condition of the will not peculiar to the individual agent, but common to the human race, is an idea: and one diagnostic or contra-distinguishing mark appertaining to all ideas, is, that they are not adequately expressible by words. An idea can only be expressed (more correctly suggested) by two contradictory positions; as for example; the soul is all in every part;–nature is a sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, and its circumference no where, and the like.

Hence many of Bishop Taylor’s objections, grounded on his expositions of the doctrine, prove nothing more than that the doctrine concerns an idea. But besides this, Taylor everywhere assumes the consequences of Original Sin as superinduced on a pre-existing nature, in no essential respect differing from our present nature;–for instance, on a material body, with its inherent appetites and its passivity to material agents;–in short, on an animal nature in man. But this very nature, as the antagonist of the spirit or supernatural principle in man, is in fact the Original Sin,–the product of the will indivisible from the act producing it; just as in pure geometry the mental construction is indivisible from the constructive act of the intuitive faculty. Original Sin, as the product, is a fact concerning which we know by the light of the idea itself, that it must originate in a self-determination of a will. That which we do not know is how it originates, and this we cannot explain; first, from the necessity of the subject, namely, the will; and secondly, because it is an idea, and all ideas are inconceivable. It is an idea, because it is not a conception.

Ib. s. ii. p. 74, 75.

And they are injurious to Christ, who think that from Adam we might have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it; ‘he brought life and immortality to light through the gospel’. It is a singular benefit given by God to mankind through Jesus Christ.

And none inherit it but those who are born of Christ; ‘ergo’, bad men and infidels are not immortal. Immortality is one thing, a happy immortality another. St. Paul meant the latter: Taylor either the former, or his words have no meaning at all; for no man ever thought or dreamed that we inherited heaven from Adam, but that as sons of Adam, that is, as men, we have souls that do not perish with the body. I often suspect that Taylor, in ‘abditis fidei’ [Greek: es_oterikaes], inclined to the belief that there is no other immortality but heaven, and that hell is a ‘paena damni negativa, haud privativa’. I own myself strongly inclined to it;–but so many texts against it! I am confident that the doctrine would be a far stronger motive than the present; for no man will believe eternal misery of himself, but millions would admit, that if they did not amend their lives they would be undeserving of living for ever.

Ib. s. vi. p. 77.

[Greek: hina mae plaemmura ton en haemin katapontisae logismon eis ton taes hamartias buthon.]

“Lest the tumultuous crowd throw the reason within us over bridge into the gulf of sin.” What a vivid figure! It is enough to make any man set to work to read Chrysostom.

Ib.

… ‘peccantes mente sub una.’

Note Prudentius’s use of ‘mente sub una’ for ‘in one person.’

Ib. p. 78.

For even now we see, by a sad experience, that the afflicted and the miserable are not only apt to anger and envy, but have many more desires and more weaknesses, and consequently more aptnesses to sin in many instances than those who are less troubled. And this is that which was said by Arnobius; ‘proni ad culpas, et ad libidinis varios appetitos vitio sumus infirmitatis ingenitae’.

No. Arnobius never said so good and wise a thing in his lifetime. His quoted words have no such profound meaning.

Ib. s. vii. p. 78.

That which remained was a reasonable soul, fitted for the actions of life and reason, but not of anything that was supernatural.

What Taylor calls reason I call understanding, and give the name reason to that which Taylor would have called spirit.

Ib. s. xii. p. 84.

And all that evil which is upon us, being not by any positive infliction, but by privative, or the taking away gifts, and blessings, and graces from us, which God, not having promised to give, was neither naturally, nor by covenant, obliged to give,–it is certain he could not be obliged to continue that to the sons of a sinning father, which to an innocent father he was not obliged to give.

Oh! certainly not, if hell were not attached to acts and omissions, which without these very graces it is morally impossible for men to avoid. Why will not Taylor speak out?

Ib. s. xiv. p. 85.

The doctrine of the ancient Fathers was that free will remained in us after the Fall.

Yea! as the locomotive faculty in a man in a strait waistcoat. Neither St. Augustine nor Calvin denied the remanence of the will in the fallen spirit; but they, and Luther as well as they, objected to the flattering epithet ‘free’ will. In the only Scriptural sense, as concerning the unregenerate, it is implied in the word will, and in this sense, therefore, it is superfluous and tautologic; and, in any other sense, it is the fruit and final end of Redemption,–the glorious liberty of the Gospel.

Ib. s. xvi. p. 92.

For my part I believe this only as certain, that nature alone cannot bring them to heaven, and that Adam left us in a state in which we could not hope for it.

This is likewise my belief, and that man must have had a Christ, even if Adam had continued in Paradise–if indeed the history of Adam be not a ‘mythos’; as, but for passages in St. Paul, we should most of us believe; the serpent speaking, the names of the trees, and so on; and the whole account of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis seems to me clearly to say:–“The literal fact you could not comprehend if it were related to you; but you may conceive of it as if it had taken place thus and thus.”

Ib. s. 1. p. 166.

That in some things our nature is cross to the divine commandment, is not always imputable to us, because our natures were before the commandment.

This is what I most complain of in Jeremy Taylor’s ethics; namely, that he constantly refers us to the deeds or ‘phenomena’ in time, the effluents from the source, or like the ‘species’ of Epicurus; while the corrupt nature is declared guiltless and irresponsible; and this too on the pretext that it was prior in time to the commandment, and therefore not against it. But time is no more predicable of eternal reason than of will; but not of will; for if a will be at all, it must be ‘ens spirituale’; and this is the first negative definition of spiritual–whatever having true being is not contemplable in the forms of time and space. Now the necessary consequence of Taylor’s scheme is a conscience-worrying, casuistical, monkish work-holiness. Deeply do I feel the difficulty and danger that besets the opposite scheme; and never would I preach it, except under such provisos as would render it perfectly compatible with the positions previously established by Taylor in this chapter, s. xliv. p. 158. ‘Lastly; the regenerate not only hath received the Spirit of God, but is wholly led by him,’ &c.

Ib.

If this Treatise of Repentance contain Bishop Taylor’s habitual and final convictions, I am persuaded that in some form or other he believed in a Purgatory. In fact, dreams and apparitions may have been the pretexts, and the immense addition of power and wealth which the belief entailed on the priesthood, may have been their motives for patronizing it; but the efficient cause of its reception by the churches is to be found in the preceding Judaic legality and monk-moral of the Church, according to which the fewer only could hope for the peace of heaven as their next immediate state. The holiness that sufficed for this would evince itself (it was believed) by the power of working miracles.

Ib. s. lii. p. 208.

‘It shall not be pardoned in this world nor in the world to come’; that is, neither to the Jews nor to the Gentiles. For ‘saeculum hoc’, this world, in Scripture, is the period of the Jews’ synagogue, and [Greek: mellon aion], the world to come, is taken for the Gospel, or the age of the Messias, frequently among the Jews.

This is, I think, a great and grievous mistake. The Rabbis of best name divide into two or three periods, the difference being wholly in the words; for the dividers by three meant the same as those by two.

The first was the ‘dies expectationis’, or ‘hoc saeculum,’ [Greek: en touto kairo]: the second ‘dies Messiae’, the time of the Messiah, that is, the ‘millenium’: the third the ‘saeculum futurum’, or future state, which last was absolutely spiritual and celestial.

But many Rabbis made the ‘dies Messiae’ part, that is, the consummation of this world, the conclusive Sabbath of the great week, in which they supposed the duration of the earth or world of the senses to be comprised; but all agreed that the ‘dies’, or thousand years, of the Messiah was a transitional state, during which the elect were gradually defecated of body, and ripened for the final or spiritual state.

During the ‘millenium’ the will of God will be done on earth, no less, though in a lower glory, than it will be done hereafter in heaven.

Now it is to be carefully observed that the Jewish doctors or Rabbis (all such at least as remained unconverted) had no conception or belief of a suffering Messiah, or of a period after the birth of the Messiah, previous to the kingdom, and of course included in the time of expectation.

The appearance of the Messiah and his assumption of the throne of David were to be contemporaneous. The Christian doctrine of a suffering Messiah, or of Christ as the high priest and intercessor, has of course introduced a modification of the Jewish scheme.

But though there is a seeming discrepance in different texts in the first three Gospels, yet the Lord’s Prayer appears to determine the question in favour of the elder and present Rabbinical belief; that is, it does not date the ‘dies Messiae,’ or kingdom of the Lord, from his Incarnation, but from a second coming in power and glory, and hence we are taught to pray for it as an event yet future.

Nay, our Lord himself repeatedly speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, as yet to come. Assuredly our Lord ascended the throne and became a King on his final departure from his disciples. But it was the throne of his Father, and he an invisible King, the sovereign Providence to whom all power was committed.

And this celestial kingdom cannot be identified with that under which the divine will will be done on earth as it is in heaven; that is, when on this earth the Church militant shall be one in holiness with the triumphant Church.

The difficulties, I confess, are great; and for those who believe the first Gospel (and this in its present state) to have been composed by the Apostle Matthew, or at worst to be a literal and faithful translation from a Hebrew (Syro-Chaldaic) Gospel written by him, and who furthermore contend for its having been word by word dictated by an infallible Spirit, the necessary duty of reconciling the different passages in the first Gospel with each other, and with others in St. Luke’s, is, ‘me saltern judice’, a most Herculean one.

The most consistent and rational scheme is, I am persuaded, that which is adopted in the Apocalypse. The new creation, commencing with our Lord’s resurrection, and measured as the creation of this world (‘hujus saeculi’, [Greek: toutou ai_onos]) was by the doctors of the Jewish church–namely, as a week–divided into two principal epochs,–the six sevenths or working days, during which the Gospel was gradually to be preached in all the world, and the number of the elect filled up,–and the seventh, the Sabbath of the Messiah, or the kingdom of Christ on earth in a new Jerusalem.

But as the Jewish doctors made the day (or one thousand years) of Messiah, a part, because the consummation, of this world, [Greek: toutou aionos toutou kairou], so the first Christians reversely made the kingdom commence on the first (symbolical) day of the sacred week, the last or seventh day of which was to be the complete and glorious manifestation of this kingdom. If any one contends that the kingdom of the Son of Man, and the re-descent of our Lord with his angels in the clouds, are to be interpreted spiritually,

I have no objection; only you cannot pretend that this was the interpretation of the disciples. It may be the right, but it was not the Apostolic belief.

Ib. s. 1. p. 257.

For this was giving them pardon, by virtue of those words of Christ, ‘Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted;’ that is, if ye, who are the stewards of my family, shall admit any one to the kingdom of Christ on earth, they shall be admitted to the participation of Christ’s kingdom in heaven; and what ye bind here shall be bound there; that is, if they be unworthy to partake of Christ here, they shall be accounted unworthy to partake of Christ hereafter.

Then without such a gift of reading the hearts of men, as priests do not now pretend to, this text means almost nothing. A wicked shall not, but a good man shall, be admitted to heaven; for if you have with good reason rejected any one here, I will reject him hereafter, amounts to no more than the rejection or admission of men according to their moral fitness or unfitness, the truth or unsoundness of their faith and repentance. I rather think that the promise, like the miraculous insight which it implies, was given to the Apostles and first disciples exclusively, and that it referred almost wholly to the admission of professed converts to the Church of Christ.

‘In fine’.

I have written but few marginal notes to this long Treatise, for the whole is to my feeling and apprehension so Romish, so anti-Pauline, so unctionless, that it makes my very heart as dry as the desert sands, when I read it. Instead of partial animadversions, I prescribe the chapter on the Law and the Gospel, in Luther’s ‘Table Talk’, as the general antidote. [13]

VINDICATION OF THE GLORY OF THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL SIN.

Ib. Obj. iv. p. 346.

But if Original Sin be not a sin properly, why are children baptized? And what benefit comes to them by Baptism? I answer, as much as they need, and are capable of.

The eloquent man has plucked just prickles enough out of the dogma of Original Sin to make a thick and ample crown of thorns for his opponents; and yet left enough to tear his own clothes off his back, and pierce through the leather jerkin of his closeliest wrought logic. In this answer to this objection he reminds me of the renowned squire, who first scratched out his eyes in a quickset hedge, and then leaped back and scratched them in again. So Jeremy Taylor first pulls out the very eyes of the doctrine, leaves it blind and blank, and then leaps back into it and scratches them in again, but with a most opulent squint that looks a hundred ways at once, and no one can tell which it really looks at.

Ib.

By Baptism children are made partakers of the Holy Ghost and of the grace of God; which I desire to be observed in opposition to the Pelagian heresy, who did suppose nature to be so perfect, that the grace of God was not necessary, and that by nature alone, they could go to heaven; which because I affirm to be impossible, and that Baptism is therefore necessary, because nature is insufficient and Baptism is the great channel of grace, &c.

What then of the poor heathens, that is, of five-sixths of all mankind. Would more go to hell by nature alone? If so: where is God’s justice in Taylor’s plan more than in Calvin’s?

Ib. Obj. v. p. 355.

Although I have shewn the great excess and abundance of grace by Christ over the evil that did descend by Adam; yet the proportion and comparison lies in the main emanation of death from one, and life from the other.

Does Jeremy Taylor then believe that the sentence of death on Adam and his sons extended to the soul; that death was to be absolute cessation of being! Scarcely I hope. But if bodily only, where is the difference between ‘ante’ and ‘post Christum?’

Ib. p. 356.

Not that God could be the author of a sin to any, but that he appointed the evil which is the consequent of sin, to be upon their heads who descended from the sinner.

Rare justice! and this too in a tract written to rescue God’s justice from the Supra- and Sub-lapsarians! How quickly would Taylor have detected in an adversary the absurd realization contained in this and the following passages of the abstract notion, sin, from the sinner: as if sin were any thing but a man sinning, or a man who has sinned! As well might a sin committed in Sirius or the planet Saturn justify the infliction of conflagration on the earth and hell-fire on all its rational inhabitants. Sin! the word sin! for abstracted from the sinner it is no more: and if not abstracted from him, it remains separate from all others.

Ib. p. 358.

The consequent of this discourse must needs at least be this; that it is impossible that the greatest part of mankind should be left in the eternal bonds of hell by Adam; for then quite contrary to the discourse of the Apostle, there had been abundance of sin, but a scarcity of grace.

And yet Jeremy Taylor will not be called a Pelagian. Why? Because without grace superadded by Christ no man could be saved: that is, all men must go to hell, and this not for any sin, but from a calamity, the consequences of another man’s sin, of which they were even ignorant. God would not condemn them the sons of Adam for sin, but only inflicted on them an evil, the necessary effect of which was that they should all troop to the devil! And this is Jeremy Taylor’s defence of God’s justice! The truth is Taylor was a Pelagian, believed that without Christ thousands, Jews and heathens, lived wisely and holily, and went to heaven; but this he did not dare say out, probably not even to himself; and hence it is that he flounders backward and forward, now upping and now downing.