It
will be time enough to boast, when to our own tolerance we have added their zeal, learning, and indefatigable industry
7
.
Ib.p. 13, 14.
If religion consists in listening to long prayers, and attending long sermons, in keeping up an outside appearance of devotion, and interlarding the most common discourse with phrases of Gospel usage:—if this is religion, then are the disciples of Methodism pious beyond compare. But in real humility of heart, in mildness of temper, in liberality of mind, in purity of thought, in openness and uprightness of conduct in private life, in those practical virtues which are the vital substance of Christianity,—in these are they superior? No. Public observation is against the fact, and the conclusion to which such observation leads is rarely incorrect. * * The very name of the sect carries with it an impression of meanness and hypocrisy. Scarce an individual that has had any dealings with those belonging to it, but has good cause to remember it from some circumstance of low deception or of shuffling fraud. Its very members trust each other with caution and reluctance. The more wealthy among them are drained and dried by the leeches that perpetually fasten upon them. The leaders, ignorant and bigoted—I speak of them collectively—present us with no counter-qualities that can conciliate respect. They have all the craft of monks without their courtesy, and all the subtlety of Jesuits without their learning.
In the whole
Bibliotlieca theologica
I remember no instance of calumny so gross, so impudent, so unchristian. Even as a single robber, I mean he who robs one man, gets hanged, while the robber of a million is a great man, so it seems to be with calumny. This worthy Barrister will be extolled for this audacious slander of thousands, for which, if applied to any one individual, he would be in danger of the pillory. This paragraph should be quoted: for were the charge true, it is nevertheless impossible that the Barrister should know it to be true. He positively asserts as a truth known to him what it is impossible he should know:—he is therefore doubly a slanderer; for first, the charge is a gross calumny; and were it otherwise, he would still be a slanderer, for he could have no proof, no ground for such a charge.
Ib.p. 15.
Amidst all this spirit of research we find nothing—comparatively nothing—of improvement in that science of all others the most important in its influence * * *. Religion, except from the emancipating energy of a few superior minds, which have dared to snap asunder the cords which bound them to the rock of error * * * has been suffered to remain in its principles and in its doctrines, just what it was when the craft of Catholic superstition first corrupted its simplicity. So, so. Here it comes out at last! It is not the Methodists; no; it is all and each of all Europe, Infidels and Socinians excepted! O impudence! And then the exquisite self-conceit of the blunderer!
Ib.p. 29.
—If ofdifferent denominations, how were they thus conciliated to a society of this ominous nature, from which they must themselves of necessity be excluded by that indispensable condition of admittance, "a unionof religious sentiment in thegreat doctrines:" which very want of union it is that creates thesedifferent denominations?
No, Barrister! they mean that men of different denominations may yet all believe in the corruption of the human will, the redemption by Christ, the divinity of Christ as consubstantial with the Father, the necessity of the Holy Spirit, or grace (meaning more than the disposition of circumstances), and the necessity of faith in Christ superadded to a belief of his actions and doctrines,—and yet differ in many other points. The points enumerated are called the great points, because all Christians agree in them excepting the Arians and Socinians, who for that reason are not deemed Christians by the rest. The Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Arminian, the Greek, with all their sub-divisions, do yet all accord in these articles:—the booksellers might have said, all who repeat the Nicene Creed.
N. B.
I do not approve, or defend, nay, I dislike, these "United Theological Booksellers": but this utter Barrister is their best friend by attacking them so as to secure to them victory, and all the advantages of being known to have been wickedly slandered;—the best shield a faulty cause can protend against the javelin of fair opposition.
Ib.p. 56.
Our Saviour never in any single instance reprobated the exercise of reason: on the contrary, he reprehends severely those who did not exercise it. Carnal reason is not a phrase to be found in his Gospel; he appealed to the understanding in all he said, and in all he taught. He never requiredfaithin his disciples, without first furnishing sufficientevidenceto justify it. He reasoned thus: If I have done what nohuman powercould do, you must admit that my power isfrom above, &c.
Good heavens! did he not uniformly require faith as the condition of obtaining the "evidence," as this Barrister calls it—that is, the miracle? What a shameless perversion of the fact! He never did reason thus. In one instance only, and then upbraiding the base sensuality of the Jews, he said: "If ye are so base as not to believe what I say from the moral evidence in your own consciences, yet pay some attention to it even for my works' sake." And this, an
argumentum ad hominem,
a bitter reproach (just as if a great chemist should say;—Though you do not care for my science, or the important truths it presents, yet, even as an amusement superior to that of your jugglers to whom you willingly crowd, pay some attention to me)—this is to be set up against twenty plain texts and the whole spirit of the whole Gospel! Besides, Christ could not reason so; for he knew that the Jews admitted both natural and demoniacal miracles, and their faith in the latter he never attacked; though by an
argumentum ad hominem
(for it is no argument in itself) he denied its applicability to his own works. If Christ had reasoned so, why did not the Barrister quote his words, instead of putting imaginary words in his mouth?
Ib.60, 61.
Religion is a system ofrevealedtruth; and to affirm of any revealed truth, that wecannot understandit, is, in effect, either to deny that it has been revealed, or—which is the same thing—to admit that it has been revealed in vain.
It is too worthless! I cannot go on. Merciful God! hast thou not revealed to us the being of a conscience, and of reason, and of will;—and does this Barrister tell us, that he "understands" them? Let him know that he does not even understand the very word understanding. He does not seem to be aware of the school-boy distinction between the
Greek: hóti esti
and the
Greek: dióti
? But to all these silly objections religion must for ever remain exposed as long as the word Revelation is applied to any thing that can be 'bona fide' given to the mind
ab extra
, through the senses of eye, ear, or touch. No! all revelation is and must be
ab intra
; the external
phænomena
can only awake, recall evidence, but never reveal. This is capable of strict demonstration.
Afterwards the Barrister quotes from Thomas Watson respecting things above comprehension in the study of nature: "in these cases, the
fact
is evident, the cause lies in obscurity, deeply removed from all the knowledge and penetration of man." Then what can we believe respecting these causes? And if we can believe nothing respecting them, what becomes of them as arguments in support of the proposition that we ought, in religion, to believe what we cannot understand?
Are there not facts in religion, the causes and constitution of which are mysteries?
Footnote 1:
Hints to the Public and the Legislature on the nature and effect of Evangelical Preaching. By a Barrister. Fourth Edition, 1808.
return to footnote mark
Footnote 2:
See
Aids to Reflection
, p. 14, 4th edition.—
Ed.
return
Footnote 3:
Quart. Review
, vol. ii. p. 187.—
Ed.
return
Footnote 4:
See vol. i., p. 217.—
Ed.
return
Footnote 5:
"And from this account of obligation it follows, that we can he obliged to nothing but what we ourselves are to gain or lose something by; for nothing else can be a violent motive to us. As we should not be obliged to obey the laws, or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure or pain, somehow or other depended upon our obedience; so neither should we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practise virtue, or to obey the commands of God."
Paley's Moral and Polit. Philosophy
, B. II. c. 2.
"The difference, and the only difference, ('between prudence and duty',) is this; that in the one case we consider what we shall gain or lose in the present world; in the other case, we consider also what we shall gain or lose in the world to come."
Ib.
c. 3.—
Ed.
return
Footnote 6:
Friend
, Vol. I. Essays X. and XI. 3rd edition—
Ed.
return
Footnote 7:
See
Table Talk
, pp. 282 and 304. 2d edit.—
Ed.
return
Contents/Index
1825.
Disc. IV. Pt. I. p. 140.
As to systems of religion alien from Christianity, if any of them have taught the doctrine of eternal life, the reward of obedience, as a dogma of belief, that doctrine is not their boast, but their burden and difficulty; inasmuch as they could never defend it. They could never justify it on independent grounds of deduction, nor produce their warrant and authority to teach it. In such precarious and unauthenticated principles it may pass for a conjecture, or pious fraud, or a splendid phantom: it cannot wear the dignity of truth.
Ah, why did not Mr. Davison adhere to the manly, the glorious, strain of thinking from p. 134 (
Since Prophecy
, &c.) to p. 139. (
that mercy
) of this discourse? A fact is no subject of scientific demonstration speculatively: we can only bring analogies, and these Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, and others did bring; but their main argument remains to this day the main argument—namely, that none but a wicked man dares doubt it. When it is not in the light of promise, it is in the law of fear, at all times a part of the conscience, and presupposed in all spiritual conviction.
Ib.p. 160.
Some indeed have sought thestarand thesceptreof Balaam's prophecy, where they cannot well be found, in the reign of David; for though a sceptre might be there, the star properly is not.
Surely this is a very weak reason. A far better is, I think, suggested by the words,
I shall see him—I shall behold him
;—which in no intelligible sense could be true of Balaam relatively to David.
Ib.p. 162.
The Israelites could not endure the voice and fire of Mount Sinai. They asked an intermediate messenger between God and them, who should temper the awfulness of his voice, and impart to them his will in a milder way.
Deut
. xviii. 15. Is the following argument worthy our consideration? If, as the learned Eichhorn, Paulus of Jena, and others of their school, have asserted, Moses waited forty days for a tempest, and then, by the assistance of the natural magic he had learned in the temple of Isis,
initiated
the law, all our experience and knowledge of the way in which large bodies of men are affected would lead us to suppose that the Hebrew people would have been keenly excited, interested, and elevated by a spectacle so grand and so flattering to their national pride. But if the voices and appearances were indeed divine and supernatural, well must we assume that there was a distinctive, though verbally inexpressible, terror and disproportion to the mind, the senses, the whole
organismus
of the human beholders and hearers, which might both account for, and even in the sight of God justify, the trembling prayer which deprecated a repetition.
Ib.p. 164.
To justify its application to Christ, the resemblance between him and Moses has often been deduced at large, and drawn into a variety of particulars, among which several points have been taken minute and precarious, or having so little of dignity or clearness of representation in them, that it would be wise to discard them from the prophetic evidence.
With our present knowledge we are both enabled and disposed thus to evolve the full contents of the word
like
; but I cannot help thinking that the contemporaries of Moses (if not otherwise orally instructed,) must have understood it in the first and historical sense, at least, of Joshua.
Ib.p. 168.
A distinguished commentator on the laws of Moses, Michaelis, vindicates their temporal sanctions on the ground of the Mosaic Code being of the nature of a civil system, to the statutes of which the rewards of a future state would be incongruous and unsuitable.
I never read either of Michaelis's Works, but the same view came before me whenever I reflected on the Mosaic Code. Who expects in realities of any kind the sharp outline and exclusive character of scientific classification? It is the predominance of the characterizing constituent that gives the name and class. Do not even our own statute laws, though co-existing with a separate religious Code, contain many 'formulae' of words which have no sense but for the conscience? Davison's stress on the word
covet
, in the tenth commandment, is, I think, beyond what so ancient a Code warrants;—and for the other instances, Michaelis would remind him that the Mosaic constitution was a strict theocracy, and that Jehovah, the God of all, was their
king
. I do not know the particular mode in which Michaelis propounds and supports this position; but the position itself, as I have presented it to my own mind, seems to me among the strongest proofs of the divine origin of the Law, and an essential in the harmony of the total scheme of Revelation.
Disc. IV. Pt. II. p. 180.
But the first law meets him on his own terms; it stood upon a present retribution; the execution of its sentence is matter of history, and the argument resulting from it is to be answered, before the question is carried to another world.
This is rendered a very powerful argument by the consideration, that though so vast a mind as that of Moses, though perhaps even a Lycurgus, might have distinctly foreseen the ruin and captivity of the Hebrew people as a necessary result of the loss of nationality, and the abandonment of the law and religion which were their only point of union, their centre of gravity,—yet no human intellect could have foreseen the perpetuity of such a people as a distinct race under all the aggravated curses of the law weighing on them; or that the obstinacy of their adherence to their dividuating institutes in persecution, dispersion, and shame, should be in direct proportion to the wantonness of their apostasy from the same in union and prosperity.
Disc. V. Pt. II. p. 234.
Except under the dictate of a constraining inspiration, it is not easy to conceive how the master of such a work, at the time when he had brought it to perfection, and beheld it in its lustre, the labour of so much opulent magnificence and curious art, and designed to beexceeding magnifical, of fame, and of glory throughout all countries, should be occupied with the prospect of its utter ruin and dilapidation, and that too under theopprobriumof God's vindictive judgment upon it, nor to imagine how that strain of sinister prophecy, that forebodes of malediction, should be ascribed to him, if he had no such vision revealed.
Here I think Mr. Davison should have crushed the objection of the Infidel grounded on Solomon's subsequent idolatrous impieties. The Infidel argues, that these are not conceivable of a man distinctly conscious of a prior and supernatural inspiration, accompanied with supernatural manifestations of the divine presence.
Disc. VI. Pt. I. p. 283.
In order to evade this conclusion, nothing is left but to deny that Isaiah, or any person of his age, wrote the book ascribed to him.
This too is my conclusion, but (if I do not delude myself) from more evident, though not perhaps more certain, premisses. The age of the Cyrus prophecies is the great object of attack by Eichhorn and his compilers; and I dare not say, that in a controversy with these men Davison's arguments would appear sufficient. But this was not the intended subject of these Discourses.
Disc. VI. Pt. II. p. 289.
But how does he express that promise? In the images of the resurrection and an immortal state. Consequently, there is implied in the delineation of the lower subject the truth of the greater.
This reminds me of a remark, I have elsewhere made respecting the expediency of separating the arguments addressed to, and valid for, a believer, from the proofs and vindications of Scripture intended to form the belief, or to convict the Infidel.
Disc. VI. Pt. IV. p. 325.
When Cyrus became master of Babylon, the prophecies of Isaiah were shewn or communicated to him, wherein were described his victory, and the use he was appointed to make of it in the restoration of the Hebrew people. (Ezrai. 1, 2.)
This I had been taught to regard as one of Josephus's legends; but upon this passage who would not infer that it had Ezra for its authority,—who yet does not expressly say that even the prophecy of the far later Jeremiah was known or made known to Cyrus, who (Ezra tells us) fulfilled it? If Ezra had meant the prediction of Isaiah by the words, 'he hath charged me', &c., why should he not have referred to it together with, or even instead of, Jeremiah? Is it not more probable that a living prophet had delivered the charge to Cyrus? See
Ezra
vi. 14.—Again, Davison makes Cyrus speak like a Christian, by omitting the affix 'of Heaven to the Lord God' in the original. Cyrus speaks as a Cyrus might be supposed to do,—namely, of a most powerful but yet national deity, of a God, not of God. I have seen in so many instances the injurious effect of weak or overstrained arguments in defence of religion, that I am perhaps more jealous than I need be in the choice of evidences. I can never think myself the worse Christian for any opinion I may have formed, respecting the price of this or that argument, of this or that divine, in support of the truth. For every one that I reject, I could supply two, and these
Greek: anékdota
Ib.p. 336.
Meanwhile this long repose and obscurity of Zerubbabel's family, and of the whole house of David, during so many generations prior to the Gospel, was one of the preparations made whereby to manifest more distinctly the proper glory of it, in the birth of the Messiah.
In whichever way I take this, whether addressed to a believer for the purpose of enlightening, or to an inquirer for the purpose of establishing, his faith in prophecy, this argument appears to me equally perplexing and obscure. It seems,
prima facie
, almost tantamount to a right of inferring the fulfilment of a prophecy in B., which it does not mention, from its entire failure and falsification in A., which, and which alone, it does mention.
Ib.p. 370.
Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
Almost every page of this volume makes me feel my own ignorance respecting the interpretation of the language of the Hebrew Prophets, and the want of the one idea which would supply the key. Suppose an Infidel to ask me, how the Jews were to ascertain that John the Baptist was Elijah the Prophet;—am I to assert the pre-existence of John's personal identity as Elijah? If not, why Elijah rather than any other Prophet? One answer is obvious enough, that the contemporaries of John held Elijah as the common representative of the Prophets; but did Malachi do so?
Ib.p. 373.
I cannot conceive a more beautiful synopsis of a work on the Prophecies of the Old Testament, than is given in this Recapitulation. Would that its truth had been equally well substantiated! That it can be, that it will be, I have the liveliest faith;—and that Mr. Davison has contributed as much as we ought to expect, and more than any contemporary divine, I acknowledge, and honor him accordingly. But much, very much, remains to be done, before these three pages merit the name of a Recapitulation.
Disc. VII. p. 375.
If I needed proof of the immense importance of the doctrine of Ideas, and how little it is understood, the following discourse would supply it.
The whole discussion on Prescience and Freewill, with exception of the page or two borrowed from Skelton, displays an unacquaintance with the deeper philosophy, and a helplessness in the management of the particular question, which I know not how to reconcile with the steadiness and clearness of insight evinced in the earlier Discourses. I neither do nor ever could see any other difficulty on the subject, than what is contained and anticipated in the idea of eternity.
By Ideas I mean intuitions not sensuous, which can be expressed only by contradictory conceptions, or, to speak more accurately, are in themselves necessarily both inexpressible and inconceivable, but are suggested by two contradictory positions. This is the essential character of all ideas, consequently of eternity, in which the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence are included. Now prescience and freewill are in fact nothing more than the two contradictory positions by which the human understanding struggles to express successively the idea of eternity. Not eternity in the negative sense as the mere absence of succession, much less eternity in the senseless sense of an infinite time; but eternity,—the Eternal; as Deity, as God. Our theologians forget that the objection applies equally to the possibility of the divine will; but if they reply that prescience applied to an eternal,
Entis absoluti tota et simultanea fruitio
, is but an anthropomorphism, or term of accommodation, the same answer serves in respect of the human will; for the epithet human does not enter into the syllogism. As to contingency, whence did Mr. Davison learn that it is a necessary accompaniment of freedom, or of free action? My philosophy teaches me the very contrary.
Ib.p. 392.
He contends, without reserve, that the free actions of men are not within the divine prescience; resting his doctrine partly on the assumption that there are no strict and absolute predictions in Scripture of those actions in which men are represented as free and responsible; and partly on the abstract reason, that such actions are in their nature impossible to be certainly foreknown.
I utterly deny contingency except in relation to the limited and imperfect knowledge of man. But the misery is, that men write about freewill without a single meditation on will absolutely; on the idea
Greek: katt' exochàen
without any idea; and so bewilder themselves in the jungle of alien conceptions; and to understand the truth they overlay their reason.
Disc. VIII. p. 416.
It would not be easy to calculate the good which a man like Mr. Davison might effect, under God, by a work on the Messianic Prophecies, specially intended for and addressed to the present race of Jews,—if only he would make himself acquainted with their objections and ways of understanding Scripture. For instance, a learned Jew would perhaps contend that this prophecy of Isaiah (c. ii. 2-4,) cannot fairly be interpreted of a mere local origination of a religion historically; as the drama might be described as going forth from Athens, and philosophy from Academus and the Painted Porch, but must refer to an established and continuing seat of worship,
a house of the God of Jacob
. The answer to this is provided in the preceding verse,
in the top of the mountains
; which irrefragably proves the figurative character of the whole prediction.
Ib.p. 431.
One point, however, is certain and equally important, namely, that the Christian Church, when it comes to recognize more truly the obligation imposed upon it by the original command of its Founder,Go teach all nations, &c.
That the duty here recommended is deducible from this text is quite clear to my mind; but whether it is the direct sense and primary intention of the words; whether the first meaning is not negative,—(