The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
by
Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
Part 3 out of 7
Ib.
And certainly our works are more ours than our faith is; and man
concurs otherwise in the acting and perpetration of a good work, than
he doth in the reception and admission of faith.
Why? Because Donne confounds the act of faith with the assent of the
fancy and understanding to certain words and conceptions. Indeed, with
all my reverence for Dr. Donne, I must warn against the contents of this
page, as scarcely tenable in logic, unsound in metaphysics, and unsafe,
slippery divinity; and principally in that he confounds faith--
essentially an act, the fundamental work of the Spirit--with belief,
which is then only good when it is the effect and accompaniment of faith.
Ib. p. 80. D.
Because things good in their institution may he depraved in their
practice--'ergone nihil ceremoniarum rudioribus dabitur, ad juvandam
eorum imperitiam?'
Some ceremonies may be for the conservation of order and civility, or to
prevent confusion and unseemliness; others are the natural or
conventional language of our feelings, as bending the knees, or bowing
the head; and to neither of these two sorts do I object. But as to the
'adjuvandam rudiorum imperitiam', I protest against all such ceremonies,
and the pretexts for them, 'in toto'. What? Can any ceremony be more
instructive than the words required to explain the ceremony? I make but
two exceptions, and those where the truths signified are so vital, so
momentous, that the very occasion and necessity of explaining the sign
are of the highest spiritual value. Yet, alas! to what gross and
calamitous superstitions have not even the visible signs in Baptism and
the Eucharist given occasion!
Ib. p. 81. E.
Blessed St. Augustine reports, (if that epistle be St. Augustine's)
that when himself was writing to St. Hierome, to know his opinion of
the measure and quality of the joy and glory of heaven, suddenly in
his chamber there appeared 'ineffabile lumen', says he, an
unspeakable, an unexpressible light, ... and out of that light issued
this voice, 'Hieronymi anima sum', &c.
The grave recital of this ridiculous legend is one instance of what I
have called the Patristic leaven in Donne, who assuredly had no belief
himself in the authenticity of this letter. But yet it served a purpose.
As to Master Conradus, just above, who could read at night by the light
at his fingers' ends, he must of course have very recently been shaking
hands with Lucifer.
Ib. p. 83. D.
Eve's recognition upon the birth of her first son, 'Cain I have
gotten, I possess a man from the Lord.'
'I have gotten the Jehovah-man', is, I believe, the true rendering
and sense of the Hebrew words. Eve, full of the promise, supposed her
first-born, the first-born on earth, to be the promised deliverer.
Ib. p. 84. D. E.
Serm. IX. Rom. xiii. 7. p. 86,
Admirable passages. Ib. p. 90. A.
That soul that is accustomed, &c.
Ib. p. 94. A. B.
Serm. XII. Mat. v. 2. p. 112.
Ib. B. C. D.
The disposition of our Church divines, under James I, to bring back the
stream of the Reformation to the channel and within the banks formed in
the first six centuries of the Church, and their alienation from the
great patriarchs of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, and
others, who held the Fathers of the 'ante'-Papal Church, with
exception of Augustine, in light esteem, this disposition betrays itself
here and in many other parts of Donne. For here Donne plays the Jesuit,
disguising the truth, that even as early as the third century the Church
had begun to Paganize Christianity, under the pretext, and no doubt in
the hope, of Christianizing Paganism. The mountain would not go to
Mahomet, and therefore Mahomet went to the mountain.
Ib. p. 115. A.
An excellent passage.
Ib. p. 117. E.
And therefore when the prophet says, 'Quis sapiens, et intelliget haec?
Who is so wise as to find out this way'? he places this cleanness
which we inquire after in wisdom. What is wisdom?
The primitive Church appropriated the name to the third 'hypostasis' of
the Trinity; hence 'Sancta Sophia' became the distinctive name of the
Holy Ghost; and the temple at Constantinople, dedicated by Justinian to
the Holy Ghost, is called the Church--alas! now the mosque--of Santa
Sophia. Now this suggests, or rather implies, a far better and more
precise definition of wisdom than Donne's. The distinctive title of the
Father, as the Supreme Will, is the Good; that of the only-begotten
Word, as the Supreme Reason, ('Ens Realissimum', [Greek: Ho_O N], the
Being) is the True; and the Spirit proceeding from the Good through the
True is the Wisdom. Goodness in the form of truth is wisdom. Wisdom is
the pure will, realizing itself intelligently, or the good manifesting
itself as the truth, and realized in the act. Wisdom, life, love,
beauty, the beauty of holiness, are all 'synonyma' of the Holy Spirit.
6, December, 1831.
Ib. p. 121. A.
The Arians' opinion, that God the Father only was invisible, but the
Son 'and the Holy Ghost' might be seen.
Here we have an instance, one of many, of the inconveniences and
contradictions that arise out of the assumed contrary essences of body
and soul; both substances, and independent of each other, yet so
absolutely diverse as that the one is to be defined by the negation of
the other.
Serm. XIII. Job xvi. 17, 18, 19. p. 127.
Ib. p. 129. A. B. C.
Ib. pp. 134. 135.
Truly excellent.
Serm. XV. 1 Cor. xv. 26. p. 144.
Ib. D.
Who, then, is this enemy? an enemy that may thus far think himself
equal to God, that as no man ever saw God, and lived; so no man ever
saw this enemy, and lived; for it is death.
This borders rather too closely on the Irish Franciscan's conclusion to
his sermon of thanksgiving: "Above all, brethren, let us thankfully laud
and extol God's transcendant mercy in putting death at the end of life,
and thereby giving us all time for repentance!"
Dr. Donne was an eminently witty man in a very witty age; but to the
honour of his judgment let it be said, that though his great wit is
evinced in numberless passages, in a few only is it shown off. This
paragraph is one of those rare exceptions.
N. B. Nothing in Scripture, nothing in reason, commands or authorizes us
to assume or suppose any bodiless creature. It is the incommunicable
attribute of God. But all bodies are not flesh, nor need we suppose that
all bodies are corruptible. 'There are bodies celestial'. In the three
following paragraphs of this sermon, we trace wild fantastic positions
grounded on the arbitrary notion of man as a mixture of heterogeneous
components, which Des Cartes shortly afterwards carried into its
extremes. On this doctrine the man is a mere phenomenal result, a sort
of brandy-sop or toddy-punch. It is a doctrine unsanctioned by, and
indeed inconsistent with, the Scriptures. It is not true that body
'plus' soul makes man. Man is not the 'syntheton' or composition of body
and soul, as the two component units. No; man is the unit, the
'prothesis', and body and soul are the two poles, the positive and
negative, the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' of the man; even as attraction
and repulsion are the two poles in and by which one and the same magnet
manifests itself.
Ib. p. 146. B.
For it is not so great a depopulation to translate a city from
merchants to husbandmen, from shops to ploughs, as it is from many
husbandmen to one shepherd; and yet that hath been often done.
For example, in the Highlands of Scotland in our own day.
Ib. p. 148. A.
The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell
me how high or how large that was. It tells me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust
of great persons' graves is speechless too, it says nothing, it
distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst
not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not, look upon, will trouble
thine eyes, if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath
blown the dust of the churchyard unto the church, and the man sweeps
out the dust of the church into the church-yard, who will undertake to
sift those dusts again, and to pronounce;--this is the patrician, this
is the noble, flour, and this the yeomanly, this the plebeian, bran.
[8]
Very beautiful indeed.
Ib. p. 149. C.
But when I lie under the hands of that enemy, that hath reserved
himself to the last, to my last bed; then when I shall be able to stir
no limb in any other measure than a fever or a palsy shall shake them;
when everlasting darkness shall have an inchoation in the present
dimness of mine eyes, and the everlasting gnashing in the present
chattering of my teeth, and the everlasting worm in the present
gnawing of the agonies of my body and anguishes of my mind; when the
last enemy shall watch my remediless body, and my disconsolate soul
there,--there, where not the physician in his way, perchance not the
priest in his, shall be able to give any assistance; and when he hath
sported himself with my misery, &c.
This is powerful; but is too much in the style of the monkish preachers:
'Papam redolet'. Contrast with this Job's description of death, [9] and
St. Paul's 'sleep in the Lord'.
Ib. p. 150. A.
Neither doth Calvin carry those emphatical words which are so often
cited for a proof of the last resurrection,--'that he knows his
Redeemer lives, that he knows he shall stand the last man upon earth,
that though his body be destroyed, yet in his flesh and with his eyes
shall he see God'--to any higher sense than so, that how low soever he
be brought, to what desperate state soever he be reduced in the eyes
of the world, yet he assures himself of a resurrection, a reparation,
a restitution to his former bodily health, and worldly fortune which
he had before. And such a resurrection we all know Job had.
I incline to Calvin's opinion, but am not decided. 'After my skin', must
be rendered 'according to, or as far as my skin is concerned.' 'Though
the flies and maggots in my ulcers have destroyed my skin, yet still,
and in my flesh, I shall see God as my Redeemer'. Now St. Paul says,
that flesh and blood cannot ([Greek: sarx kai aima--ou dynantai])
inherit the kingdom of heaven, that is, the spiritual world. Besides how
is the passage, as commonly interpreted, consistent with the numerous
expressions of doubt and even of despondency in Job's speeches? [10]
Ib. B. C. (Ezekiel's vision xxxvii.)
I cannot but think that Dr. Donne, by thus antedating the distinct
belief of the Jews in the resurrection, "which you all know already,"
destroys in great measure the force and sublimity of this vision.
Besides, it does not seem, in the common people at least, to have been
much more than a mongrel Egyptian-catacomb sort of faith, or rather
superstition.
_In fine_. This is one of Donne's least estimable discourses; the worst
sermon on the best text. Yet what a Donne-like passage is this that
follows!
P. 146. A.
Let the whole world be in thy consideration as one house; and then
consider in that, in the peaceful harmony of creatures, in the
peaceful succession, and connexion of causes and effects, the peace of
nature. Let this kingdom, where God hath blessed thee with a being, be
the gallery, the best room of that house, and consider in the two
walls of that gallery, the Church and the state, the peace of a royal
and religious wisdom. Let thine own family be a cabinet in this
gallery, and find in all the boxes thereof, in the several duties of
wife and children, and servants, the peace of virtue, and of the
father and mother of all virtues, active discretion, passive
obedience; and then lastly, let thine own bosom be the secret box and
reserve in this cabinet, and then the gallery of the best home that
can be had, peace with the creature, peace in the Church, peace in the
state, peace in thy house, peace in thy heart, is a fair model, and a
lovely design even of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is _visio pacis_,
where there is no object but peace.
Serm. XVI. John xi. 35. p. 153.
Ib. C.
The Masorites (the Masorites are the critics upon the Hebrew Bible,
the Old Testament) cannot tell us, who divided the chapters of the Old
Testament into verses: neither can any other tell, who did it in the
New Testament. [11]
How should the Masorites, when the Hebrew Scriptures were not as far as
we know divided into verses at all in their time? The Jews seem to have
adopted the invention from the Christians, who were led to it in the
construction of Concordances.
Ib. p. 154. E.
If they killed Lazarus, had not Christ done enough to let them see
that he could raise him again?
Malice, above all party-malice, is indeed a blind passion, but one can
scarcely conceive the chief priests such dolts as to think that Christ
could raise Lazarus again. Their malice blinded them as to the nature of
the incident, made them suppose a conspiracy between Jesus and the
family of Lazarus, a mock burial, in short; and this may be one, though
it is not, I think, the principal, reason for this greatest miracle
being omitted in the other Gospels.
Ib. p. 155. B.
Christ might ungirt himself, and give more scope and liberty to his
passions than any other man; both because he had no original sin
within to drive him, &c.
How then is he said to have 'condemned sin in the flesh'? Without guilt,
without actual sin, assuredly he was; but [Greek: egeneto sarx], and
what can we mean by original sin relatively to the flesh, but that man
is born with an animal life and a material organism that render him
temptible to evil, and which tends to dispose the life of the will to
contradict the light of the reason? Did St. Paul by [Greek: homoi_omati
sarkos hamartias] mean a deceptive resemblance? [12]
Ib. D.
I can see no possible edification that can arise from these
_ultra_-Scriptural speculations respecting our Lord.
Ib. p. 157. A.
Though the Godhead never departed from the carcase ... yet because the
human soul was departed from it, he was no man.
Donne was a poor metaphysician; that is, he never closely questioned
himself as to the absolute meaning of his words. What did he mean by the
'soul?' what by the 'body?' [13]
Ib. D.
And I know that there are authors of a middle nature, above the
philosophers, and below the Scriptures, the Apocryphal books.
A whimsical instance of the disposition in the mind for every pair of
opposites to find an intermediate,--a 'mesothesis' for every 'thesis'
and 'antithesis'. Thus Scripture may be opposed to philosophy; and then
the Apocryphal books will be philosophy relatively to Scripture, and
Scripture relatively to philosophy.
Ib. p. 159. B.
And therefore the same author (Epiphanius) says, that because they
thought it an uncomely thing for Christ to weep for any temporal
thing, some men have expunged and removed that verse out of St. Luke's
Gospel, that 'Jesus, when he saw that city, wept'. [14]
This, by the by, rather indiscreetly lets out the liberties, which the
early Christians took with their sacred writings. Origen, who, in answer
to Celsus's reproach on this ground, confines the practice to the
heretics, furnishes proofs of the contrary himself in his own comments.
Ib. p. 161. D.
That world, which finds itself in an authumn in itself, finds itself
in a spring in our imaginations.
Worthy almost of Shakspeare!
Serm. XVII. Matt. xix. 17. p. 163.
Ib. E.
The words are part of a dialogue, of a conference, between Christ and
a man who proposed a question to him; to whom Christ makes an answer
by way of another question, 'Why callest thou me good?' &c. In the
words, and by occasion of them, we consider the text, the context, and
the pretext; not as three equal parts of the building; but the
context, as the situation and prospect of the house, the pretext, as
the access and entrance into the house, and then the text itself, as
the house itself, as the body of the building: in a word, in the text
the words; in the context the occasion of the words; in the pretext
the purpose, the disposition of him who gave the occasion.
What a happy example of elegant division of a subject! And so also the
'compendium' of Christianity in the preceding paragraph (D). Our great
divines were not ashamed of the learned discipline to which they had
submitted their minds under Aristotle and Tully, but brought the
purified products as sacrificial gifts to Christ. They baptized the
logic and manly rhetoric of ancient Greece.
Ib. p. 164. A. B.
Excellent illustration of fragmentary morality, in which each man takes
his choice of his virtues and vices.
Ib. D.
Men perish with whispering sins, nay, with silent sins, sins that
never tell the conscience they are sins, as often as with crying sins.
Yea, I almost doubt whether the truth here so boldly asserted is not of
more general necessity for ordinary congregations, than the denunciation
of the large sins that cannot remain 'in incognito'.
Ib. p. 165. A.
'Venit procurrens, he came running'. Nicodemus came not so, Nicodemus
durst not avow his coming, and therefore he came creeping, and he came
softly, and he came seldom, and he came by night.
Ah! but we trust in God that he did in fact come. The adhesion, the
thankfulness, the love which arise and live after the having come,
whether from spontaneous liking, or from a beckoning hope, or from a
compelling good, are the truest 'criteria' of the man's Christianity.
Ib. B.
When I have just reason to think my superiors would have it thus, this
is music to my soul; when I hear them say they would have it thus,
this is rhetoric to my soul; when I see their laws enjoin it to be
thus, this is logic to my soul; but when I see them actually, really,
clearly, constantly do thus, this is a demonstration to my soul, and
demonstration is the powerfullest proof. The eloquence of inferiors is
in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action.
A just representation, I doubt not, of the general feeling and principle
at the time Donne wrote. Men regarded the gradations of society as God's
ordinances, and had the elevation of a self-approving conscience in
every feeling and exhibition of respect for those of ranks superior to
their own. What a contrast with the present times! Is not the last
sentence beautiful? "The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the
eloquence of superiors is in action."
Ib. B. and C.
He came to Christ, he ran to him; and when he was come, as St. Mark
relates it, 'he fell upon his knees to Christ'. He stood not then
Pharisaically upon his own legs, his own merits, though he had been a
diligent observer of the commandments before, &c.
All this paragraph is an independent truth; but I doubt whether in his
desire to make every particle exemplary, to draw some Christian moral
from it, Donne has not injudiciously attributed, _quasi per prolepsin_,
merits inconsistent with the finale of a wealthy would-be proselyte. At
all events, a more natural and, perhaps, not less instructive
interpretation might be made of the sundry movements of this religiously
earnest and zealous admirer of Christ, and worshipper of Mammon. O, I
have myself known such!
Ib. D.
He was no ignorant man, and yet he acknowledged that he had somewhat
more to learn of Christ than he knew yet. Blessed are they that
inanimate all their knowledge, consummate all in Christ Jesus, &c.
The whole paragraph is pure gold. Without being aware of this passage in
Donne, I expressed the same conviction, or rather declared the same
experience, in the appendix [15] to the Statesman's Manual. O! if only one
day in a week, Christians would consent to have the Bible as the only
book, and their minister's labour to make them find all substantial good
of all other books in their Bibles!
Ib. E.
I remember one of the Panegyrics celebrates and magnifies one of the
Roman emperors for this, that he would marry when he was young; that
he would so soon confine and limit his pleasures, so soon determine
his affections in one person.
It is surely some proof of the moral effect which Christianity has
produced, that in all Protestant countries, at least, a writer would be
ashamed to assign this as a ground of panegyric; as if promiscuous
intercourse with those of the other sex had been a natural good, a
privilege, which there was a great merit in foregoing! O! what do not
women owe to Christianity! As Christians only it is that they do, or
ordinarily can, cease to be things for men, instead of co-persons in one
spiritual union.
Ib. p. 166. A.
But such is often the corrupt inordinateness of greatness, that it
only carries them so much beyond other men, but not so much nearer to
God.
Like a balloon, away from earth, but not a whit nearer the arch of
heaven. There is a praiseworthy relativeness and life in the morality of
our best old divines. It is not a cold law in brass or stone; but "this
I may and should think of my neighbour, this of a great man," &c.
Ib. p. 167. A.
Christ was pleased to redeem this man from this error, and bring him
to know truly what he was, that he was God. Christ therefore doth not
rebuke this man, by any denying that he himself was good; for Christ
doth assume that addition to himself, 'I am the good shepherd'.
Neither doth God forbid that those good parts which are in men should
be celebrated with condign praise. We see that God, as soon as he saw
that any thing was good, he said so, he uttered it, he declared it,
first of the light, and then of other creatures. God would be no
author, no example of smothering the due praise of good actions. For
surely that man hath no zeal to goodness in himself, that affords no
praise to goodness in other men.
Very fine. But I think another--not, however, a different--view might be
taken respecting our Lord's intention in these words. The young noble,
who came to him, had many praiseworthy traits of character; but he
failed in the ultimate end and aim. What ought only to have been valued
by him as means, was loved, and had a worth given to it, as an end in
itself. Our Lord, who knew the hearts of men, instantly in the first
words applies himself to this, and takes the occasion of an ordinary
phrase of courtesy addressed to himself, to make the young man aware of
the difference between a mere relative good and that which is absolutely
good; that which may be called good, when regarded as a mean to good,
but which must not be mistaken for, or confounded with, that which is
good, and itself the end.
Ib. B. C. D.
All excellent, and D. most so. Thus, thus our old divines showed the
depth of their love and appreciation of the Scriptures, and thus led
their congregations to feel and see the same. Here is Donne's authority
(_Deus non est ens_, &c.) for what I have so earnestly endeavored to
show, that _Deus est ens super ens_, the ground of all being, but
therein likewise absolute Being, in that he is the eternal
self-affirmant, the I Am in that I Am; and that the key of this mystery
is given to us in the pure idea of the will, as the alone _Causa Sui_.
O! compare this manhood of our Church divinity with the feeble dotage of
the Paleyan school, the 'natural' theology, or watchmaking scheme, that
knows nothing of the maker but what can be proved out of the watch, the
unknown nominative case of the verb impersonal _fit--et natura est_; the
'it,' in short, in 'it rains,' 'it snows,' 'it is cold,' and the
like. When, after reading the biographies of Walton and his
contemporaries, I reflect on the crowded congregations, on the
thousands, who with intense interest came to their hour and two hour
long sermons, I cannot but doubt the fact of any true progression, moral
or intellectual, in the mind of the many. The tone, the matter, the
anticipated sympathies in the sermons of an age form the best moral
criterion of the character of that age.
Ib. E.
His name of Jehova we admire with a reverence.
Say, rather, Jehova, his name. It is not so properly a name of God, as
God the Name,--God's name and God.
Ib. p. 169. A.
Land, and money, and honour must be called goods, though but of
fortune, &c.
We should distinguish between the conditions of our possessing goods and
the goods themselves. Health, for instance, is ordinarily a condition of
that working and rejoicing for and in God, which are goods in the end,
and of themselves. Health, competent fortune, and the like are good as
the negations of the preventives of good; as clear glass is good in
relation to the light, which it does not exclude. Health and ease
without the love of God are plate glass in the darkness.
Ib. p. 170.
Much of this page consists of play on words; as, that which is useful as
rain, and that which is of use as rain on a garden after drouth. There
is also much sophistry in it. Pain is not necessarily an ultimate evil.
As the mean of ultimate good, it may be a relative good; but surely that
which makes pain, anguish, heaviness necessary in order to good, must be
evil. And so the Scripture determines. They are the _wages of sin_; but
God's infinite mercy raises them into sacraments, means of grace. Sin is
the only absolute evil; God the only absolute good. But as myriads of
things are good relatively through participation of God, so are many
things evil as the fruits of evil. What is the apostasy, or fall of
spirits? That that which from the essential perfection of the Absolute
Good could not but be possible, that is, have a potential being, but
never ought to have been actual, did nevertheless strive to be
actual?--But this involved an impossibility; and it actualized only its
own potentiality.
What is the consequence of the apostasy? That no philosophy is possible
of man and nature but by assuming at once a zenith and a nadir, God and
'Hades'; and an ascension from the one through and with a condescension
from the other; that is, redemption by prevenient and then auxiliary
grace.
Ib. p. 171. B.
So says St. Augustine, 'Audeo dicere', though it be boldly said, yet I
must say it, 'utile esse cadere in aliquod manifestum peccatum', &c.
No doubt, a sound sense may be forced into these words: but why use
words, into which a sound sense must be forced? Besides, the subject is
too deep and too subtle for a sermon. In the two following paragraphs,
especially, Dr. Donne is too deep, and not deep enough. He treads
waters, and dangerous waters. N. B. The Familists.
Serm. XVIII. Acts, ii. 36. p. 175.
Ib. B.
I would paraphrase, or rather lead the way to this text, something as
follows:--
Truth is a common interest; it is every man's duty to convey it to his
brother, if only it be a truth that concerns or may profit him, and he
be competent to receive it. For we are not bound to say the truth, where
we know that we cannot convey it, but very probably may impart a
falsehood instead; no falsehoods being more dangerous than truths
misunderstood, nay, the most mischievous errors on record having been
half-truths taken as the whole.
But let it be supposed that the matter to be communicated is a fact of
general concernment, a truth of deep and universal interest, a momentous
truth involved in a most awe-striking fact, which all responsible
creatures are competent to understand, and of which no man can safely
remain in ignorance. Now this is the case with the matter, on which I am
about to speak; 'therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly,
that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord
and Christ!'
Ib. p. 176. A. B. C.
True Christian love not only permits, but enjoins, courtesy. God
himself, says Donne, gave us the example.
Ib. p. 177. A. C. E.
All excellent, and E. of deeper worth. All that is wanting here is to
determine the true sense of 'knowing God,'--that sense in which it is
revealed that to know God is life ever-lasting.
Ib p. 178. A.
Now the universality of this mercy hath God enlarged and extended very
far, in that he proposes it even to our knowledge; 'sciant', let all
know it. It is not only 'credant', let all believe it; for the
infusing of faith is not in our power; but God hath put it in our
power to satisfy their reason, &c.
A question is here affirmatively started of highest importance and of
deepest interest, that is, faith so distinguished from reason, 'credat'
from 'sciat', that the former is an infused grace 'not in our power;'
the latter an inherent quality or faculty, on which we are able to
calculate as man with man. I know not what to say to this. Faith seems
to me the coadunation of the individual will with the reason, enforcing
adherence alike of thought, act, and affection to the Universal Will,
whether revealed in the conscience, or by the light of reason, however
the same may contravene, or apparently contradict, the will and mind of
the flesh, the presumed experience of the senses and of the
understanding, as the faculty, or intelligential yet animal instinct, by
which we generalize the notices of the senses, and substantiate their
'spectra' or 'phaenomena'. In this sense, therefore, and in this only, I
agree with Donne.
'No man cometh to Christ unless the' 'Father lead him'. The corrupt will
cannot, without prevenient as well as auxiliary grace, be unitively
subordinated to the reason, and again, without this union of the moral
will, the reason itself is latent. Nevertheless, I see no advantage in
not saying the 'will,' or in substituting the term 'faith' for it. But
the sad non-distinction of the reason and the understanding throughout
Donne, and the confusion of ideas and conceptions under the same term,
painfully inturbidates his theology. Till this distinction of the
[Greek: nous] and the [Greek: phronaema sarkos] be seen, nothing can be
seen aright. Till this great truth be mastered, and with the sight that
is insight, other truths may casually take possession of the mind, but
the mind cannot possess them. If you know not this, you know nothing;
for if you know not the diversity of reason from the understanding, you
know not reason; and reason alone is knowledge.
All that follows in B. is admirable, worthy of a divine of the Church of
England, the National and the Christian, and indeed proves that Donne
was at least possessed by the truth which I have always labored to
enforce, namely, that faith is the 'apotheosis' of the reason in
man, the complement of reason, the will in the form of the reason. As
the basin-water to the fountain shaft, such is will to reason in faith.
The whole will shapes itself in the image of God wherein it had been
created, and shoots on high toward, and in the glories of, Heaven!
Ib. D.
If we could have been in Paradise, and seen God take a clod of red
earth, and make that wretched clod of contemptible earth such a body
as should be fit to receive his breath, &c.
A sort of pun on the Hebrew word 'Adam' or red earth, common in Donne's
age, but unworthy of Donne, who was worthy to have seen deeper into the
Scriptural sense of the 'ground,' the Hades, the multeity, the many
'absque numero el infra numerum', that which is below, as God is that
which transcends, intellect.
Ib. p. 179. B.
We place in the School, for the most part, the infinite merit of
Christ Jesus ... rather 'in pacto' than 'in persona', rather that this
contract was thus made between the Father and the Son, than that
whatsoever that person, thus consisting of God and Man, should do,
should, only in respect of the person, be of an infinite value and
extension to that purpose, &c.
O, this is sad misty divinity! far too scholastical for the pulpit, far
too vague and unphilosophic for the study.
Ib. p. 180. A.
'Quis nisi infidelis negaverit apud inferos fuisse Christum?' says St.
Augustine.
Where? [16] Pearson expressly asserts and proves that the clause was in
none of the ancient creeds or confessions. And even now the sense of
these words, 'He descended into hell', is in no Reformed Church
determined as an article of faith.
Ib. p. 182. D.
'Audacter dicam', says St. Hierome, 'cum omnia posset Deus, suscitare
virginem post ruinam non potest.'
One instance among hundreds of the wantonness of phrase and fancy in the
Fathers. What did Jerome mean? 'quod Deus membranam hymenis luniformem
reproducere nequit?' No; that were too absurd. What then?--that God
cannot make what has been not to have been? Well then, why not say that,
since that is all you can mean?
Serm. XIX. Rev. xx. 6. p. 183.
The exposition of the text in this sermon is a lively instance how much
excellent good sense a wise man, like Donne, can bring forth on a
passage which he does not understand. For to say that it may mean either
X, or Y, or Z, is to confess he knows not what it means; but that if it
be X. then, &c.; if Y. then, &c.; and lastly if it be Z. then, &c.; that
is to say, that he understands X, Y, and Z; but does not understand the
text itself.
Ib. p. 185. B.
Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons,
compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in
the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the
Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her
child, &c.
Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth,
that of Diocletian, Donne's assertion here would be extravagant.
Serra. XXXIV. Rom. viii. 16. p. 332.
Ib. p. 335. A.
But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.
If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on
some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a
supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the
sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in
the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something
extra-natural.
But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no
doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects--yet
still our only mirror--to contemplate all we can of God, this word
'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.
For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found
in himself as man 'in genere', we have to look into ourselves, and there
we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the
first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence ([Greek: nous])
from being ([Greek:to on]), with the will as an accompaniment, but not
from it as a cause,--in order, though not necessarily in time,
precedent. This is true filiation.
The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict
identities, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from
intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act,
necessarily and coeternally.
For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is
involved in the very idea of God, one of whose intellectual definitions
is, the 'synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi
inclusive, quoad se,' of all conceivable 'antitheses;' even as the best
moral definition--(and, O! how much more godlike to us in this state of
antithetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!)--is, God is
love.
This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates
immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly
intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards
the moral.
For what is love? Union with the desire of union. God therefore is the
cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system
of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue.
Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not
divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is
equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in
effluent love or holy action.
Now will is the true principle of identity, of selfness, even in our
common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but
the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the
notion expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one God.
There are three Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is
totally all in each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own
minds, but can understand by no analogy.
For "the wind ministrant to divers at the same moment"--thence, to aid
the fancy--borrows or rather steals from the mind the idea of 'total 'in
omni parte',' which alone furnishes the analogy; but that both it and by
it a myriad of other material images do enwrap themselves 'in hac veste
non sua,' and would be even no objects of conception if they did not;
yea, that even the very words, 'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in
all languages that answer to them, suppose this trans-impression from
the mind, is an argument better than all analogy.
Serm. XXXV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341.
Ib. p. 342. B.
First then, for the first term, 'sin,' we use to ask in the
school, whether any action of man's can have 'rationem demeriti;'
whether it can be said to offend God, or to deserve ill of God? for
whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with God.
This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad
consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the 'cui bono? cui
malo?' system of ethics,--that system which places the good and evil
of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or
passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself.
For, according to this system, God must be either a passible and
dependent being,--that is, not God,--or else he must have no interest,
arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice.
The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an
implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as
it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain
'in genere', evil has a true being in the order of things) is not
only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily
implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness,--that
is, of God.
For to say that I believe in a God, but not that he is omnipotent,
omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in terms as to say,
I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from its centre to its
circumference are equal.
I cannot read the profound truth so clearly expressed by Donne in the
next paragraph--"it does not only want that rectitude, but it should
have that rectitude, and therefore hath a sinful want"--without an
uneasy wonder at its incongruity with the preceding dogmas.
Serm. LXXI. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 717.
Ib. p.725. A.
But still consider, that they did but leave their nets, they did not
burn them. And consider, too, that they left but nets, those things
which might entangle them, and retard them in their following of
Christ, &c.
An excellent paragraph grounded on a mere pun. Such was the taste of the
age; and it is an awful joy to observe, that not great learning, great
wit, great talent, not even (as far as without great virtue that can be)
great genius, were effectual to preserve the man from the contagion, but
only the deep and wise enthusiasm of moral feeling. Compare in this
light Donne's theological prose even with that of the honest Knox; and,
above all, compare Cowley with Milton.
Serm. LXXII. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 726.
Ib. p.727. A.-E.
It is amusing to see the use which the Christian divines make of the
very facts in favour of their own religion, with which they triumphantly
battered that of the heathens; namely, the gross and sinful
anthropomorphitism of their representations of the Deity; and yet the
heathen philosophers and priests--Plutarch for instance--tell us as
plainly as Donne or Aquinas can do, that these are only accommodations
to human modes of conception,--the divine nature being in itself
impassible;--how otherwise could it be the prime agent?
Paganism needs a true philosophical judge. Condemned it will be,
perhaps, more heavily than by the present judges, but not from the same
statutes, nor on the same evidence.
'In fine.'
If our old divines, in their homiletic expositions of Scripture,
wire-drew their text, in the anxiety to evolve out of the words the
fulness of the meaning expressed, implied, or suggested, our modern
preachers have erred more dangerously in the opposite extreme, by making
their text a mere theme, or 'motto', for their discourse. Both err in
degree; the old divines, especially the Puritans, by excess, the modern
by defect. But there is this difference to the disfavor of the latter,
that the defect in degree alters the kind. It was on God's holy word
that our Hookers, Donnes, Andrewses preached; it was Scripture bread
that they divided, according to the needs and seasons. The preacher of
our days expounds, or appears to expound, his own sentiments and
conclusions, and thinks himself evangelic enough if he can make the
Scripture seem in conformity with them.
Above all, there is something to my mind at once elevating and soothing
in the idea of an order of learned men reading the many works of the
wise and great, in many languages, for the purpose of making one book
contain the life and virtue of all others, for their brethren's use who
have but that one to read. What, then, if that one book be such, that
the increase of learning is shown by more and more enabling the mind to
find them all in it! But such, according to my experience--hard as I am
on threescore--the Bible is, as far as all moral, spiritual, and
prudential,--all private, domestic, yea, even political, truths arid
interests are concerned. The astronomer, chemist, mineralogist, must go
elsewhere; but the Bible is the book for the man.
[Footnote 1: The LXXX Sermons, fol. 1640.--Ed.]
[Footnote 2:
"Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians
was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin 'Defensio Fidei
Nicoenoe', using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think,
he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a
Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by
an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England,
and in good humour with the Church of Rome."
'Table Talk,' 2d edit. p. 41.--Ed.]
[Footnote 3: Rom. vi. 3, 4, 5.--Ed.]
[Footnote 4: John i 14. Gal. iv 4. Ed.]
[Footnote 5: See the whole argument on the difference of the reason and
the understanding, in the 'Aids to Reflection', 3d edit. pp. 206-227.
Ed.]
[Footnote 6: See the author's entire argument upon this subject in the
'Church and State'.--Ed.]
[Footnote 7: Galat. ii 20.--Ed.]
[Footnote 8: Compare 'Hamlet', Act V. sc. 1. This sermon was preached,
March 8, 1628-9.--Ed.]
[Footnote 9: C. iii. 13, &c.--Ed.]
[Footnote 10: See, however, the author's expressions at, I believe, a
rather later period.
"I now think, after many doubts, that the passage; 'I know that my
Redeemer liveth', &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination,
a 'quasi' prophecy. I know not how this can be; but in spite of all my
difficulties, this I do know, that I shall be recompensed!"
'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 80.--Ed.]
[Footnote 11: How so? Is it not admitted that Robert Stephens first
divided the New Testament into verses in 1551? See the testimony to that
effect of Henry Stephens, his son, in the Preface to his
Concordance.--Ed. ]
[Footnote 12: 'Rom'. viii. 3. Mr. C. afterwards expressed himself to the
same effect:
"Christ's body, as mere body, or rather carcase (for body is an
associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than
mine or yours; that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from
its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How
could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced?"
'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 261.--Ed.]
[Footnote 13: See Hooker's admirable declaration of the doctrine:--
"These natures from the moment of their first combination have been
and are for ever inseparable. For even when his soul forsook the
tabernacle of his body, his Deity forsook neither body nor soul. If it
had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ was
buried, or that the person of Christ did raise up itself from the
dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be
termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God
in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not
both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulchre.
The like is also to be said of the soul, otherwise we are plainly and
inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ therefore for ever
one and the self-same, was only touching bodily substance concluded
within the grave, his soul only from thence severed, but by personal
union his Deity still unseparably joined with both."
E. P. V. 52. 4.--'Keble's edit'. Ed. ]
[Footnote 14: xix. 41.--Ed. ]
[Footnote 15: (C.) which should be (B.)
"The object of the preceding discourse was to recommend the Bible as
the end and centre of our reading and meditation. I can truly affirm
of myself, that my studies have been profitable and availing to me
only so far, as I have endeavored to use all my other knowledge as a
glass enabling me to receive more light in a wider field of vision
from the Word of God."
Ed.]
[Footnote 16: Ep. 99. See Pearson, Art. v.--Ed. ]
HENRY MORE'S THEOLOGICAL WORKS. [1]
There are three principal causes to which the imperfections and errors
in the theological schemes and works of our elder divines, the glories
of our Church,--men of almost unparalleled learning and genius, the rich
and robust intellects from the reign of Elizabeth to the death of
Charles II,--may, I think, be reasonably attributed. And striking,
unusually striking, instances of all three abound in this volume; and in
the works of no other divine are they more worthy of being regretted:
for hence has arisen a depreciation of Henry More's theological
writings, which yet contain more original, enlarged, and elevating views
of the Christian dispensation than I have met with in any other single
volume. For More had both the philosophic and the poetic genius,
supported by immense erudition. But unfortunately the two did not
amalgamate. It was not his good fortune to discover, as in the preceding
generation William Shakspeare discovered, a mordaunt' or common base of
both, and in which both the poetic and the philosophical power blended
in one.
These causes are,--
First, and foremost,--the want of that logical [Greek: propaideia
dokimastikae], that critique of the human intellect, which, previously
to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the
weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the
heaven-descended 'nosce teipsum', in respect to the intellective part of
man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by Lord
Bacon in his 'Novum Organum', and brought to a systematic completion by
Immanuel Kant in his 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft, der Urtheilskrajt, und
der metaphysiche Anfangsgruende der Naturwissenschaft'.
From the want of this searching logic, there is a perpetual confusion of
the subjective with the objective in the arguments of our divines,
together with a childish or anile overrating of human testimony, and an
ignorance in the art of sifting it, which necessarily engendered
credulity.
Second,--the ignorance of natural science, their physiography scant in
fact, and stuffed out with fables; their physiology imbrangled with an
inapplicable logic and a misgrowth of 'entia rationalia', that is,
substantiated abstractions; and their physiogony a blank or dreams of
tradition, and such "intentional colours" as occupy space but cannot
fill it. Yet if Christianity is to be the religion of the world, if
Christ be that Logos or Word that 'was in the beginning', by whom all
things 'became'; if it was the same Christ who said, 'Let there be
light'; who in and by the creation commenced that great redemptive
process, the history of life which begins in its detachment from nature,
and is to end in its union with God;--if this be true, so true must it
be that the book of nature and the book of revelation, with the whole
history of man as the intermediate link, must be the integral and
coherent parts of one great work: and the conclusion is, that a scheme
of the Christian faith which does not arise out of, and shoot its beams
downward into, the scheme of nature, but stands aloof as an insulated
afterthought, must be false or distorted in all its particulars. In
confirmation of this position, I may challenge any opponent to adduce a
single instance in which the now exploded falsities of physical science,
through all its revolutions from the second to the seventeenth century
of the Christian aera, did not produce some corresponding warps in the
theological systems and dogmas of the several periods.
The third and last cause, and especially operative in the writings of
this author, is the presence and regnancy of a false and fantastic
philosophy, yet shot through with refracted light from the not risen but
rising truth,--a scheme of physics and physiology compounded of
Cartesian mechanics and empiricism (for it was the credulous childhood
of experimentalism), and a corrupt, mystical, theurgical,
pseudo-Platonism, which infected the rarest minds under the Stuart
dynasty. The only not universal belief in witchcraft and apparitions,
and the vindication of such monster follies by such men as Sir M. Hale,
Glanville, Baxter, Henry More, and a host of others, are melancholy
proofs of my position. Hence, in the first chapters of this volume, the
most idle inventions of the ancients are sought to be made credible by
the most fantastic hypotheses and analogies.
To the man who has habitually contemplated Christianity as interesting
all rational finite beings, as the very 'spirit of truth', the
application of the prophecies as so many fortune-tellings and
soothsayings to particular events and persons, must needs be felt as
childish--like faces seen in the moon, or the sediments of a teacup. But
reverse this, and a Pope and a Buonaparte can never be wanting,--the
molehill becomes an Andes. On the other hand, there are few writers
whose works could be so easily defecated as More's. Mere omission would
suffice; and perhaps one half (an unusually large proportion) would come
forth from the furnace pure gold; if but a fourth, how great a gain!
EXPLANATION OF THE GRAND MYSTERY OF GODLINESS.
Dedication. 'Servorum illius omnium indignissimus.'
'Servus indignissimus,' or 'omnino indignus', or any other positive
self-abasement before God, I can understand; but how an express avowal
of unworthiness, comparatively superlative, can consist with the
Job-like integrity and sincerity of profession especially required in a
solemn address to Him, to whom all hearts are open, this I do not
understand in the case of such men as Henry More, Jeremy Taylor, Richard
Baxter were, and by comparison at least with the multitude of evil
doers, must have believed themselves to be.
Ib. V. c.14. s.3.
This makes me not so much wonder at that passage of Providence, which
allowed so much virtue to the bones of the martyr Babylas, once bishop
of Antioch, as to stop the mouth of Apollo Daphneus when Julian would
have enticed him to open it by many a fat sacrifice. To say nothing of
several other memorable miracles that were done by the reliques of
saints and martyrs in those times.
Strange lingering of childish credulity in the most learned and in many
respects enlightened divines of the Protestant episcopal church even to
the time of James II! The Popish controversy at that time made a great
clearance.
Ib. s. 9.
At one time Professor Eichorn had persuaded me that the Apocalypse was
authentic; that is, a Danielitic dramatic poem written by the Apostle
and Evangelist John, and not merely under his name. But the repeated
perusal of the vision has sadly unsettled my conclusion. The entire
absence of all spirituality perplexes me, as forming so strong a
contrast with the Gospel and Epistles of John; and then the too great
appearance of an allusion to the fable of Nero's return to life and
empire, to Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana on the one hand (that is
the Eichornian hypothesis), and the insurmountable difficulties of
Joseph Mede and others on to Bicheno and Faber on the other. In short, I
feel just as both Luther and Calvin felt,--that is, I know not what to
make of it, and so leave it alone.
It is much to be regretted that we have no contemporary history of
Apollonius, or of the reports concerning him, and the popular notions in
his own time. For from the romance of Philostratus we cannot be sure as
to the fact of the lies themselves. It may be a lie, that there ever was
such or such a lie in circulation.
Ib. c. 15. s. 2.
Fourthly. The 'little horn', Dan. vii, that rules 'for a time and
times and half a time', it is evident that it is not Antiochus
Epiphanes, because this 'little horn' is part of the fourth
beast--namely, the Roman.
Is it quite clear that the Macedonian was not the fourth empire;
1. the Assyrian;
2. the Median;
3. the Persian;
4. the Macedonian?
However, what a strange prophecy, that, 'e confesso' having been
fulfilled, remains as obscure as before!
Ib. s. 6
'And ye shall have the tribulation of ten days',--that is, the utmost
extent of tribulation; beyond which there is nothing further, as there
is no number beyond ten.
It means, I think, the very contrary. 'Decent dierum' is used even in
Terence for a very short time. [2] In the same way we say, a nine days'
wonder.
Ib. c. 16. s. 1.
But for further conviction of the excellency of Mr. Mede's way above
that of Grotius, I shall compare some of their main interpretations.
Hard to say which of the two, Mede's or Grotius', is the more
improbable. Beyond doubt, however, the Cherubim are meant as the scenic
ornature borrowed from the Temple.
Ib. s. 2.
That this 'rider of the white horse' is Christ, they both agree
in.
The 'white horse' is, I conceive, Victory or Triumph--that is, of the
Roman power--followed by Slaughter, Famine, and Pestilence. All this is
plain enough. The difficulty commences after the writer is deserted by
his historical facts, that is, after the sacking of Jerusalem.
Ib. s. 5.
It would be no easy matter to decide, whether Mede plus More was at a
greater distance from the meaning, or Grotius from the poetry, of this
eleventh chapter of the Revelations; whether Mede was more wild, or
Grotius more tame, flat, and prosaic.
Ib. c. 17. s. 8.
The Old and New Testament, which by a 'prosopopoeia' are here called
the 'two witnesses.'
Where is the probability of this so long before the existence of the
collection since called the New Testament?
Ib. vi. c. l. s. 2.
We may draw from this passage (1 'Thess'. iv. 16, 17.) the strongest
support of the fact of the ascension of Christ, or at least of St.
Paul's (and of course of the first generation of Christians') belief of
it. For had they not believed his ascent, whence could they have derived
the universal expectation of his descent,--his bodily, personal descent?
The only scruple is, that all these circumstances were parts of the
Jewish 'cabala' or idea of the Messiah by the spiritualists before the
Christian aera, and therefore taken for granted with respect to Jesus as
soon as he was admitted to be the Messiah.
Ib. s. 6.
But light-minded men, whose hearts are made dark with infidelity, care
not what antic distortions they make in interpreting Scripture, so
they bring it to any show of compliance with their own fancy and
incredulity.
Why so very harsh a censure? What moral or spiritual, or even what
physical, difference can be inferred from all men's dying, this of one
thing, that of another, a third, like the martyrs, burnt alive, or all
in the same way? In any case they all die, and all pass to judgment.
Ib. c. 15.
With his 'semi'-Cartesian, 'semi'-Platonic, 'semi'-Christian notions,
Henry More makes a sad jumble in his assertion of chronochorhistorical
Christianity. One decisive reference to the ascension of the visible and
tangible Jesus from the surface of the earth upward through the clouds,
pointed out in the writings of St. Paul or in the Gospel, beginning as
it certainly did, and as in the copy according to Mark it now does, with
the baptism of John, or in the writings of the Apostle John, would have
been more effective in flooring Old Nic of Amsterdam [3] and his
familiars, than volumes of such "maybe's," "perhapses," and "should be
rendered," as these.
Ib. viii. c. 2. c. 6.
I must confess our Saviour compiled no books, it being a piece of
pedantry below so noble and divine a person, &c.
Alas! all this is woefully beneath the dignity of Henry More, and
shockingly against the majesty of the High and Holy One, so very
unnecessarily compared with Hendrick Nicholas, of Amsterdam, mercer!
Ib. x. c. 13. s. 5, 6.
A new sect naturally attracts to itself a portion of the madmen of the
time, and sets another portion into activity as alarmists and
oppugnants. I cannot therefore pretend to say what More might not have
found in the writings, or heard from the mouth, of some lunatic who
called himself a Quaker. But I do not recollect, in any work of an
acknowledged Friend, a denial of the facts narrated by the Evangelists,
as having really taken place in the same sense as any other facts of
history. If they were symbols of spiritual acts and processes, as Fox
and Penn contended, they must have been, or happened;--else how could
they be symbols?
It is too true, however, that the positive creed of the Quakers is and
ever has been extremely vague and misty. The deification of the
conscience, under the name of the Spirit, seems the main article of
their faith; and of the rest they form no opinion at all, considering it
neither necessary nor desirable. I speak of Quakers in general. But what
a lesson of experience does not this thirteenth chapter of so great and
good a man as H. More afford to us, who know what the Quakers really
are! Had the followers of George Fox, or any number of them
collectively, acknowledged the mad notions of this Hendrick Nicholas? If
not----
INQUIRY INTO THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.
Part II. ii. c. 2.
Confutation of Grotius on the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse.
Has or has not Grotius been overrated? If Grotius applied these words
('magnus testis et historiarum diligentissimus inquisitor') to
Epiphanius in honest earnest, and not ironically, he must have been
greatly inferior in sound sense and critical tact both to Joseph
Scaliger and to Rhenferd. Strange, that to Henry More, a poet and a man
of fine imagination, it should never have occurred to ask himself,
whether this scene, Patmos, with which the drama commences, was not a
part of the poem, and, like all other parts, to be interpreted
symbolically? That the poetic--and I see no reason for doubting the
real--date of the Apocalypse is under Vespasian, is so evidently implied
in the five kings preceding (for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, were
abortive emperors) that it seems to me quite lawless to deny it. That
[Greek: Lateinos] is the meaning of the 666, (c. xiii. 18.) and the
treasonable character of this, are both shown by Irenaeus's pretended
rejection, and his proposal of the perfectly senseless 'Teitan' instead.
[Footnote 1: Folio. 1708.--Ed.]
[Footnote 2: 'Decem dierum vix mihi est familia'. Heaut. v. i.--Ed.]
[Footnote 3: Hendrick Nicholas and the Family of Love.--Ed.]
HEINRICHS'S COMMENTARY ON THE APOCALYPSE. [1]
P. 245.
It seems clear that Irenaeus invented the unmeaning 'Teitan', in order to
save himself from the charge of treason, to which the 'Lateinos' might
have exposed him. See Rabelais 'passim'.
P.246.
'Nec magis blandiri poterit alterum illud nomen, Teitan, quod studiose
commendavit Irenoeus'.
No! 'non studiose, sed ironice commendavit Irenaeus'. Indeed it is
ridiculous to suppose that Irenaeus was in earnest with 'Teitan'. His
meaning evidently is:--if not 'Lateinos', which has a meaning, it is
some one of the many names having the same numeral power, to which a
meaning is to be found by the fulfillment of the prophecy. My own
conviction is, that the whole is an ill-concerted conundrum, the secret
of which died with the author. The general purpose only can be
ascertained, namely, some test, partaking of religious obligation, of
allegiance to the sovereignty of the Roman Emperor.
If I granted for a moment the truth of Heinrichs's supposition, namely,
that, according to the belief of the Apocalypt, the line of the Emperors
would cease in Titus the seventh or complete number (Galba, Otho, and
Vitellius, being omitted) by the advent of the Messiah;--if I found my
judgment more coerced by his arguments than it is,--then I should use
this book as evidence of the great and early discrepance between the
Jewish-Christian Church and the Pauline; and my present very serious
doubts respecting the identity of John the Theologian and John the
Evangelist would become fixed convictions of the contrary.
P. 91. Rev. xvii. 11.
Among other grounds for doubting this interpretation (that 'the eighth'
in v.11. is Satan), I object, 1. that it almost necessitates the
substitution of the Coptic [Greek: aggelos] for [Greek: ogdoos] against
all the MSS., and without any Patristic hint. For it seems a play with
words unworthy the writer, to make Satan, who possessed all the seven,
himself an 'eighth', and still worse if 'the eighth': 2. that it is not
only a great and causeless inconcinnity in style, but a wanton adding of
obscurity to the obscure to have, first, so carefully distinguished (c.
xiii. 1-11.) the [Greek: drak_on] from the two [Greek: thaeria], and the
one [Greek: thaerion] from the other, and then to make [Greek: thaerion]
the appellative of the [Greek: drak_on]: as if having in one place told
of Nicholas 'senior', Dick and another Dick his cousin, I should soon
after talk of Dick, meaning old Nicholas by that name; that is, having
discriminated Nicholas from Dick, then to say Dick, meaning Nicholas!
Rev. xix. 9.
These words might well bear a more recondite interpretation; that is,
[Greek: outoi] (these blessed ones) are the true [Greek: logoi] or
[Greek: tekna Theou], as the Logos is the [Greek: huios Theou].
Ib. 10.
According to the law of symbolic poetry this sociable angel (the
Beatrice of the Hebrew Dante) ought to be, and I doubt not is, 'sensu
symbolico', an angel; that is, the angel of the Church of Ephesus, John
the Evangelist, according to the opinion of Eusebius.
P. 294. Rev. xx. 'Millennium'.
'Die vorzueglichsten Bekenner Jesu sollen auferstehen, die uebrigen
Menschen sollen es nicht. Hiesse jenes, sie sollen noch nach ihrem
Tode fortwuerken, so waere das letztere falsch: denn auch die uebrigen
wuerken nach ihrem Tode durch ihre schriften, ihre Andenken, ihre
Beispiel.'
'Euge! Heinrichi'. O, the sublime bathos of thy prosaism--the muddy
eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only man to understand a poet!
I have too clearly before me the idea of a poet's genius to deem myself
other than a very humble poet; but in the very possession of the idea, I
know myself so far a poet as to feel assured that I can understand and
interpret a poem in the spirit of poetry, and with the poet's spirit.
Like the ostrich, I cannot fly, yet have I wings that give me the
feeling of flight; and as I sweep along the plain, can look up toward
the bird of Jove, and can follow him and say:
"Sovereign of the air,--who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the
inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and
halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right
above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that
shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts,--I pay thee
homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to the vulture, the falcon,
and all thy noble baronage; and no less to the lowly bird, the
sky-lark, whom thou permittest to visit thy court, and chant her matin
song within its cloudy curtains; yea the linnet, the thrush, the
swallow, are my brethren:--but still I am a bird, though but a bird of
the earth.
"Monarch of our kind, I am a bird, even as thou; and I have shed
plumes, which have added beauty to the beautiful, and grace to terror,
waving over the maiden's brow and on the helmed head of the war-chief;
and majesty to grief, drooping o'er the car of death!"
[Footnote 1: Goettingen, 1821. The few following notes are, something out
of order, inserted here in consequence of their connection with the
immediately preceding remarks in the text.--Ed.]
LIFE OF BISHOP HACKET. [1]
Ib. p. 8.
Yet he would often dispute the necessity of a country living for a
London minister to retire to in hot summer time, out of the sepulchral
air of a churchyard, where most of them are housed in the city, and
found for his own part that by Whitsuntide he did 'rus anhelare', and
unless he took fresh air in the vacation, he was stopt in his lungs
and could not speak clear after Michaelmas.
A plausible reason certainly why A. and B. should occasionally change
posts, but a very weak one, methinks, for A.'s having both livings all
the year through.
Ib. p. 42-3.
The Bishop was an enemy to all separation from the Church of England;
but their hypocrisy he thought superlative that allowed the doctrine,
and yet would separate for mislike of the discipline. ... And
therefore he wished that as of old all kings and other Christians
subscribed to the Conciliary Decrees, so now a law might pass that all
justices of peace should do so in England, and then they would be more
careful to punish the depravers of Church Orders.
The little or no effect of recent experience and sufferings still more
recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a
man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on
account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be
indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal in those who did not
think them indifferent,--how doubly criminal must the imposition have
been, and how tenfold criminal the perseverance in occasioning
separation; how guilty the imprisoning, impoverishing, driving into
wildernesses their Christian brethren for admitted indifferentials in
direct contempt of St. Paul's positive command to the contrary!
HACKET'S SERMONS.
Serm. I. Luke ii. 7.
Moreover as the woman Mary did bring forth the son who bruised the
serpent's head, which brought sin into the world by the woman Eve, so
the Virgin Mary was the occasion of grace as the Virgin Eve was the
cause of damnation. Eve had not known Adam as yet when she was
beguiled and seduced the man; so Mary, &c.
A Rabbinical fable or gloss on Gen. iii. 1. Hacket is offensively fond
of these worse than silly vanities.
Ib. p. 5.
The more to illustrate this, you must know that there was a twofold
root or foundation of the children of Israel for their temporal being:
Abraham was the root of the people; the kingdom was rent from Saul,
and therefore David was the root of the kingdom; among all the kings
in the pedigree none but he hath the name; and Jesse begat David the
king, and David the king begat Solomon; and therefore so often as God
did profess to spare the people, though he were angry, he says he
would do it for Abraham's sake: so often as he professeth to spare the
kingdom of Judah, he says he would do it for his servant David's sake;
so that 'ratione radicis', as Abraham and David are roots of the
people and kingdom, especially Christ is called the Son of David, the
Son of Abraham.
A valuable remark, and confirmative of my convictions respecting the
conversion of the Jews, namely, that whatever was ordained for them as
'Abrahamidae' is not repealed by Christianity, but only what appertained
to the republic, kingdom, or state. The modern conversions are, as it
seems to me, in the face of God's commands.
Ib.
I come to the third strange condition of the birth; it was without
travel, or the pangs of woman, as I will shew you out of these words;
'fasciis involvit', that 'she wrapt him in swaddling clouts, and laid
him in a manger. Ipsa genitrix fuit obstetrix', says St. Cyprian. Mary
was both the mother and the midwife of the child; far be it from us to
think that the weak hand of the woman could facilitate the work which
was guided only by the miraculous hand of God. The Virgin conceived
our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, and therefore she had not the
pangs and travel of woman upon her, she brought him forth without the
curse of the flesh. These be the Fathers' comparisons. As bees draw
honey from the flower without offending it, as Eve was taken out of
Adam's side without any grief to him, as a sprig issues out of the
bark of a tree, as the sparkling light from the brightness of the
star, such ease was it to Mary to bring forth her first born son; and
therefore having no weakness in her body, feeling no want of vigor,
she did not deliver him to any profane hand to be drest, but by a
special ability, above all that are newly delivered, she wrapt him in
swaddling clouts. 'Gravida, sed non gravabatur'; she had a burden in
her womb, before she was delivered, and yet she was not burdened for
her journey which she took so instantly before the time of the child's
birth. From Nazareth to Bethlem was above forty miles, and yet she
suffered it without weariness or complaint, for such was the power of
the Babe, that rather he did support the Mother's weakness than was
supported; and as he lighted his Mother's travel by the way from
Nazareth to Bethlem that it was not tedious to her tender age, so he
took away all her dolour and imbecility from her travel in
child-birth, and therefore 'she wrapt him in swaddling clouts'.
A very different paragraph indeed, and quite on the cross road to Rome!
It really makes me melancholy; but it is one of a thousand instances of
the influence of Patristic learning, by which the Reformers of the Latin
Church were distinguished from the renovators of the Christian religion.
Can we wonder that the strict Protestants were jealous of the
backsliding of the Arminian prelatical clergy and of Laud their leader,
when so strict a Calvinist as Bishop Hacket could trick himself up in
such fantastic rags and lappets of Popish monkery!--could skewer such
frippery patches, cribbed from the tyring room of Romish Parthenolatry,
on the sober gown and cassock of a Reformed and Scriptural Church!
Ib. p. 7.
But to say the truth, was he not safer among the beasts than he could
be elsewhere in all the town of Bethlem? His enemies perchance would
say unto him, as Jael did to Sisera, 'Turn in, turn in, my Lord', when
she purposed to kill him; as the men of Keilah made a fair shew to
give David all courteous hospitality, but the issue would prove, if
God had not blessed him, that they meant to deliver him into the hands
of Saul that sought his blood. So there was no trusting of the
Bethlemites. Who knows, but that they would have prevented Judas, and
betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver unto Herod? More humanity is
to be expected from the beasts than from some men, and therefore she
laid him in a manger.
Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove otherwise, I should have
inferred from these Sermons that Hacket from his first boyhood had been
used to make themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on all
the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had found abundant
nourishment for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities in the
study of the Fathers and glossers; and remained a 'junior soph' all his
life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a
triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in
offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the
dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the
Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a
traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on
the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in
it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its
overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as
the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on
the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that
stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war!
Ib. Serm. II. Luke ii. 8.
Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the
great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the
other gods which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not
please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was
a god not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention.
Here, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and
Suetonius--above all, of Tacitus and Pliny--outweigh in my mind the
positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same
ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by
Tertullian. [2]
Ib. Serm. III. Luke ii. 9.
But our bodies shall revive out of that dust into which they were
dissolved, and live for ever in the resurrection of the righteous.
I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of
this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant,
'Thou fool! not that, &c.' I have at times almost been tempted to
conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine
disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and
therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists' [Greek: kata sarka] to
the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens;
for so Tarsus was called.
And was there no symptom of a commencing relapse to the errors of that
Church which had equalled the traditions of men, yea, the dreams of
phantasts with the revelations of God, when a chosen elder with the law
of truth before him, and professing to divide and distribute the bread
of life, could, paragraph after paragraph, place such unwholesome
vanities as these before his flock, without even a hint which might
apprize them that the gew-gaw comfits were not part of the manna from
heaven? All this superstitious trash about angels, which the Jews
learned from the Persian legends, asserted as confidently as if Hacket
had translated it word for word from one of the four Gospels! Salmasius,
if I mistake not, supposes the original word to have been bachelors,
young unmarried men. Others interpret angels as meaning the bishop and
elders of the Church. More probably it was a proverbial expression
derived from the Cherubim in the Temple: something as the country folks
used to say to children, Take care, the Fairies will hear you! It was a
common notion among the Jews, in the time of St. Paul, that their angels
were employed in carrying up their prayers to the throne of God. Of
course they must have been in special attendance in a house of prayer.
After much search and much thought on the subject of angels as a diverse
kind of finite beings, I find no sufficing reason to hold it for a
revealed doctrine, and if not revealed it is assuredly no truth of
philosophy, which, as I have elsewhere remarked, can conceive but three
kinds; 1. the infinite reason; 2. the finite rational; and 3. the finite
irrational--that is, God, man, and beast. What indeed, even for the
vulgar, is or can an archangel be but a man with wings, better or worse
than the wingless species according as the feathers are white or black?
I would that the word had been translated instead of Anglicised in our
English Bible.
The following paragraph is one of Hacket's sweetest passages. It is
really a beautiful little hymn.
By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur
in the angels' message to set out the majesty of the Son of God: and I
beseech you observe,--all you that would keep a good Christmas as you
ought,--that the glory of God is the best celebration of his Son's
nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but
rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed, without riot,
without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride and vain
pomp, in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were
round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but
frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered
outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss
rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the
people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanctity
of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in
want! This is the glory of God shining round, and the most Christian
solemnizing of the birth of Jesus.
SERMONS ON THE TEMPTATION.
As the Temptation is found in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and
Luke, it must have formed part of the 'Prot-evangelion', or original
Gospel;--from the Apostles, therefore, it must have come, and from some
or all who had heard the account from our Lord himself. How, then, are
we to understand it? To confute the whims and superstitious nugacities
of these Sermons, and the hundred other comments and interpretations
'ejusdem farinae', would be a sad waste of time. Yet some meaning, and
that worthy of Christ, it must have had. The struggle with the
suggestions of the evil principle, first, to force his way and compel
belief by a succession of miracles, disjoined from moral and spiritual
purpose,--miracles for miracles' sake;--second, doubts of his Messianic
character and divinity, and temptations to try it by some ordeal at the
risk of certain death;--third, to interpret his mission, as his
countrymen generally did, to be one of conquest and royalty;--these
perhaps--but I am lost in doubt.
SERMON ON THE TRANSFIGURATION.
Luke IX. 33.
'I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren,
my kinsmen according to the flesh'.
Rom. ix. 3.
St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he
speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a
transient passion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse,--an
impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and
not completed by an act and confirmation of the will,--as a striking
proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the
welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compassion
for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted
it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so
they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as
possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying
child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!'
Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine passage in
Shakspeare--Hotspur's rapture-like reverie--so often ridiculed by
shallow wits. In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing
weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the
moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the
infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the
present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might
inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden
sense of the depth of its moral strength.
SERMON ON THE RESURRECTION.
Acts II. 4.
Thirdly, the necessity of it: 'for it was not possible that he should
be holden of death'.
One great error of textual divines is their inadvertence to the dates,
occasion, object and circumstances, at and under which the words were
written or spoken. Thus the simple assertion of one or two facts
introductory to the teaching of the Christian religion is taken as
comprising or constituting the Christian religion itself. Hence the
disproportionate weight laid on the simple fact of the resurrection of
Jesus, detached from the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption.
Ib.
St. Austin says, that Tully, in his '3 lib. de Republica', disputed
against the reuniting of soul and body. His argument was, To what end?
Where should they remain together? For a body cannot be assumed into
heaven. I believe God caused those famous monuments of his wit to
perish, because of such impious opinions wherewith they were farced.
I believe, however, that these books have recently themselves enjoyed a
resurrection by the labor of Angelo Mai. [3]
Ib.
And let any equal auditor judge if Job were not an Anti-Socinian; Job
xix. 26. 'Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my
flesh shall I see God, whom I shall behold for myself, and mine eyes
shall see, and not another'.
This text rightly rendered is perhaps nothing to the purpose, but may
refer to the dire cutaneous disease with which Job was afflicted. It may
be merely an expression of Job's confidence of his being justified in
the eyes of men, and in this life. [4]
In the whole wide range of theological 'mirabilia', I know none stranger
than the general agreement of orthodox divines to forget to ask
themselves what they precisely meant by the word 'body.' Our Lord's and
St. Paul's meaning is evident enough, that is, the personality.
Ib.
St. Chrysostom's judgment upon it ('having loosed the pains of death')
is, that when Christ came out of the grave, death itself was delivered
from pain and anxiety--[Greek: _odike katechon auton thanatos, kai ta
deina epasche.] Death knew it held him captive whom it ought not to
have seized upon, and therefore it suffered torments like a woman in
travail till it had given him up again. Thus he. But the Scripture
elsewhere testifies, that death was put to sorrow because it had lost
its sting, rather than released from sorrow by our Saviour's
resurrection.
Most noticeable! See the influence of the surrounding myriotheism in the
'dea Mors!'
Ib.
Let any competent judge read Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, and
then these Sermons, and so measure the stultifying, nugifying effect of
a blind and uncritical study of the Fathers, and the exclusive
prepossession in favor of their authority in the minds of many of our
Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I.
HACKET'S LIFE OF LORD KEEPER WILLIAMS. [5]
Prudence installed as virtue, instead of being employed as one of her
indispensable handmaids, and the products of this exemplified and
illustrated in the life of Archbishop Williams, as a work, I could
warmly recommend to my dearest Hartley. Williams was a man bred up to
the determination of being righteous, both honorably striving and
selfishly ambitious, but all within the bounds and permission of the
law, the reigning system of casuistry; in short, an egotist in morals,
and a worldling in impulses and motives. And yet by pride and by innate
nobleness of nature munificent and benevolent, with all the negative
virtues of temperance, chastity, and the like,--take this man on his
road to his own worldly aggrandizement. Winding his way through a grove
of powerful rogues, by flattery, professions of devoted attachment, and
by actual and zealous as well as able services, and at length becoming
in fact nearly as great a knave as the knaves (Duke of Buckingham for
example) whose favor and support he had been conciliating,--till at last
in some dilemma, some strait between conscience and fear, and increased
confidence in his own political strength, he opposes or hesitates to
further some too foolish or wicked project of his patron knave, or
affronts his pride by counselling a different course (not a less wicked,
but one more profitable and conducive to his Grace's elevation);-and
then is 'floored' or crushed by him, and falls unknown and unpitied.
Such was that truly wonderful scholar and statesman, Archbishop
Williams.
Part 1. s. 61.
'And God forbid that any other course, should be attempted. For this
liberty was settled on the subject, with such imprecations upon the
infringers, that if they should remove these great landmarks, they
must look for vengeance, as if entailed by public vows on them and
their posterity.' These were the Dean's instructions, &c.
He deserves great credit for them. They put him in strong contrast with
Laud.
Ib. s. 80.
Thus for them both together he solicits:--My most noble lord, what
true applause and admiration the King and your Honor have gained, &c.
All this we, in the year 1833, should call abject and base; but was it
so in Bishop Williams? In the history of the morality of a people,
prudence, yea cunning, is the earliest form of virtue. This is expressed
in Jacob, and in Ulysses and all the most ancient fables. It will
require the true philosophic calm and serenity to distinguish and
appreciate the character of the morality of our great men from Henry
VIII to the close of James I,--'nullum numen abest, si sit
prudentia',--and of those of Charles I to the Restoration. The
difference almost amounts to contrast.
Ib. s. 81-2.
How is it that any deeply-read historian should not see how imperfect
and precarious the rights of personal liberty were during this period;
or, seeing it, refuse to do justice to the patriots under Charles I? The
truth is, that from the reign of Edward I, (to go no farther backward),
there was a spirit of freedom in the people at large, which all our
kings in their senses were cautious not to awaken by too rudely treading
on it; but for individuals, as such, there was none till the conflict
with the Stuarts.
Ib. s. 84.
Of such a conclusion of state, 'quae aliquando incognita, semper
justa', &c.
This perversion of words respecting the decrees of Providence to the
caprices of James and his beslobbered minion the Duke of Buckingham, is
somewhat nearer to blasphemy than even the euphuism of the age can
excuse.
Ib. s. 85.
... tuus, O Jacobe, quod optas
Explorare labor, mihi jussa capessere fas est.
In our times this would be pedantic wit: in the days of James I, and in
the mouth of Archbishop Williams it was witty pedantry.
Ib. s. 89.
He that doth much in a short life products his mortality.
'Products' for 'produces;' that is, lengthens out, 'ut apud geometros'.
But why Hacket did not say 'prolongs,' I know not.
Ib.
See what a globe of light there is in natural reason, which is the
same in every man: but when it takes well, and riseth to perfection,
it is called wisdom in a few.
The good affirming itself--(the will, I am)--begetteth the true, and
wisdom is the spirit proceeding. But in the popular acceptation, common
sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Ib. s. 92.
A well-spirited clause, and agreeable to holy assurance, that truth is
more like to win than love. Could the light of such a Gospel as we
profess be eclipsed with the interposition of a single marriage?
And yet Hacket must have lived to see the practical confutation of this
shallow Gnathonism in the result of the marriage with the Papist
Henrietta of France!
Ib. s. 96.
"Floud," says the Lord Keeper, "since I am no Bishop in your opinion,
I will be no Bishop to you."
I see the wit of this speech; but the wisdom, the Christianity, the
beseemingness of it in a Judge and a Bishop,--what am I to say of that?
Ib.
And after the period of his presidency (of the Star Chamber), it is
too well known how far the enhancements were stretched. 'But the
wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood'. Prov. 30-33.
We may learn from this and fifty other passages, that it did not require
the factious prejudices of Prynne or Burton to look with aversion on the
proceedings of Laud. Bishop Hacket was as hot a royalist as a loyal
Englishman could be, yet Laud was 'allii nimis'.
Ib. s. 97.
New stars have appeared and vanished: the ancient asterisms remain;
there's not an old star missing.
If they had been, they would not have been old. This therefore, like
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