I cannot express how much it grieves me, that our Clergy should still think it fit and expedient to defend the measures of the High Churchmen from Laud to Sheldon, and to speak of the ejected ministers, Calamy, Baxter, Gouge, Howe, and others, as schismatics, factionists, fanatics, or Pharisees:—thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the present Dissenters from it. And this seems the more impolitic, when it must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward, Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the great majority at least) would have molested.
Appendix II. p. 37.
If I can prove that it hath been the universal practice of the Churchin nudum apertum caput manus imponere, doth it follow that this is essential, and the contrary null?
How likewise can it be proved that the imposition of hands in Ordination did not stand on the same ground as the imposition of hands in sickness; that is, the miraculous gifts of the first preachers of the Gospel? All Protestants admit that the Church retained several forms so originated, after the cessation of the originating powers, which were the substance of these forms.
Ib.
If you think not only imposition to be essential, but also that nothing else is essential, or that all are true ministers that are ordained by a lawful Bishop permanuum impositionem, then do you egregiouslytibi ipsi imponere.
Baxter, like most scholastic logicians, had a sneaking affection for puns. The cause is,—the necessity of attending to the primary sense of words, that is, the visual image or general relation expressed, and which remains common to all the after senses, however widely or even incongruously differing from each other in other respects. For the same reason, schoolmasters are commonly punsters. "I have indorsed your Bill, Sir," said a pedagogue to a merchant, meaning he had flogged his son William.—My old master the Rev. James Bowyer, the
Hercules furens
of the phlogistic sect, but else an incomparable teacher,—used to translate,
Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu
,—first reciting the Latin words, and observing that they were the fundamental article of the Peripatetic school,—"You must flog a boy, before you can make him understand;"—or, "You must lay it in at the tail before you can get it into the head."
Ib.p. 45.
Then, that the will must follow the practical intellect whether right or wrong,—that is no precept, but the nature of the soul in its acting, because that the will ispotentia cæca, non nata ad intelligendum, sed ad volendum vel nolendum intellectum.
This is the main fault in Baxter's metaphysics, that he so often substantiates distinctions into dividuous self-subsistents. As here;—for a will not intelligent is no will.
Appendix. III. p. 55.
And for many ages no other ordinarily baptised but infants. If Christ had no Church then, where was his wisdom, his love, and his power? What was become of the glory of his redemption, and his Catholic Church, that was to continue to the end?
But the Antipœdo-Baptists would deny any such consequences as applicable to them, who are to act according to the circumstances, in which God, who ordains his successive manifestations in due correspondence with other lights and states of things, has placed them. He does not exclude from the Church of Christ (say they) those whom we do not accept into the communion of our particular Society, any more than the House of Lords excludes Commoners from being Members of Parliament. And we do this because—we think that such promiscuous admission would prolong an error which would be deadly to us, though not to you who interpret the Scriptures otherwise.
In fine.
There are two senses in which the words, 'Church of England,' may be used;—first, with reference to the idea of the Church as an estate of this Christian Realm, protesting against the Papal usurpation, comprising, first, the interests of a permanent learned class, that is, the Clergy;—secondly, those of the proper, that is, the infirm poor, from age or sickness;—and thirdly, the adequate proportional instruction of all in all classes by public prayer, recitation of the Scriptures, by expounding, preaching, catechizing, and schooling, and last, not least, by the example and influence of a pastor and a schoolmaster placed as a germ of civilization and cultivation in every parish throughout the land. To this idea, the Reformed Church of England with its marriable and married Clergy would have approximated, if the revenues of the Church, as they existed at the death of Henry VII., had been rightly transferred by his successor;—transferred, I mean, from reservoirs, which had by degeneracy on the one hand, and progressive improvement on the other, fallen into ruin, and in which those revenues had stagnated into contagion or uselessness,—transferred from what had become public evils to their original and inherent purpose of public benefits, instead of being sacrilegiously alienated by a transfer to private proprietors. That this was impracticable, is historically true; but no less true is it philosophically, that this impracticability, arising wholly from moral causes, (namely, the loose manners and corrupt principles of a great majority in all classes during the dynasty of the Tudors,) does not prevent this wholesale sacrilege, from deserving the character of the "first and deadliest wound inflicted on the Constitution of the kingdom; which term, in the body politic, as in bodies natural, expresses not only what is and has been evolved, but likewise whatever is potentially contained in the seminal principle of the particular body, and which would in its due time have appeared but for emasculation in its infancy.
This
, however, is the first sense of the words, Church of England
4
.
The second is the Church of England as now by law established, and by practice of the law actually existing. That in the first sense it is the object of my admiration and the earthly
ne plus ultra
of my religious aspirations, it were superfluous to say: but I may be allowed to express iny conviction, that on our recurring to the same ends and objects, (the restoration of a national and circulating property in counterpoise of individual possession, disposable and heritable) though in other forms and by other means perhaps, the decline or progress of this country depends. In the second sense of the words I can sincerely profess, that I love and honour the Church of England, comparatively, beyond any other Church established or unestablished now existing in Christendom; and it is wholly in consequence of this deliberate and most affectionate filial preference, that I have read this work, and Calamy's historical writings, with so deep and so melancholy an interest. And I dare avow that I cannot but regard as an ignorant bigot every man who (especially since the publicity and authentication of the contents of the Stuart Papers, Memoirs and Life of James II. &c.) can place the far later furious High Church compilations and stories of Walker and others in competition with the veracity and general verity of Baxter and Calamy; or can forget that the great body of Non-conformists to whom these great and good men belonged, were not dissenters from the established Church willingly, but an orthodox and numerous portion of the Church. Omitting then the wound received by religion generally under Henry VIII., and the shameless secularizations clandestinely effected during the reigns of Elizabeth and the first James, I am disposed to consider the three following as the grand evil epochs of our present Church. First, The introduction and after-predominance of Latitudinarianism under the name of Arminianism, and the spirit of a conjoint Romanism and Socinianism at the latter half or towards the close of the reign of James I. in the persons of Montague, Laud, and their confederates. Second, The ejection of the two thousand ministers after the Restoration, with the other violences in which the Churchmen made themselves the dupes of Charles, James, the Jesuits, and the French Court. (See the Stuart Papers
passim
). It was this that gave consistence and enduring strength to Schism in this country, prevented the pacation of Ireland, and prepared for the separation of America at a far too early period for the true interest of either country. Third, The surrender by the Clergy of the right of taxing themselves, and the Jacobitical follies that combined with the former to put it in the power of the Whig party to deprive the Church of her Convocation,—a bitter disgrace and wrong, to which most unhappily the people were rendered indifferent by the increasing contrast of the sermons of the Clergy with the Articles and Homilies of the Church itself,—but a wrong nevertheless which already has avenged, and will sooner or later be seen to avenge, itself on the State and the governing classes that continue this boast of a short-sighted policy; the same policy which in our own days would have funded the property of the Church, and, by converting the Clergy into salaried dependents on the Government
pro tempore
, have deprived the Establishment of its fairest honor, that of being neither enslaved to the court, nor to the congregations; the same policy, alas! which even now pays and patronizes a Board of Agriculture to undermine all landed property by a succession of false, shallow, and inflammatory libels against tithes.
These are my weighed sentiments: and fervently desiring, as I do, the perpetuity and prosperity of the established Church, zealous for its rights and dignity, preferring its forms, believing its Articles of Faith, and holding its Book of Common Prayer and its translation of the Scriptures among my highest privileges as a Christian and an Englishman, I trust that I may both entertain and avow these sentiments without forfeiting any part of my claim to the name of a faithful member of the Church of England.
June 1820.
N. B. As to Warburton's Alliance of the Church and State, I object to the title (Alliance), and to the matter and mode of the reasoning. But the inter-dependence of the Church and the State appears to me a truth of the highest practical importance. Let but the temporal powers protect the subjects in their just rights as subjects merely: and I do not know of any one point in which the Church has the right or the necessity to call in the temporal power as its ally for any purpose exclusively ecclesiastic. The right of a firm to dissolve its partnership with any one partner, breach of contract having been proved, and publicly to announce the same, is common to all men as social beings.
I spoke above of "Romanism." But call it, if you like, Laudism, or Lambethism in temporalities and ceremonials, and of Socinianism in doctrine, that is, a retaining of the word but a rejecting or interpreting away of the sense and substance of the Scriptural Mysteries. This spirit has not indeed manifested itself in the article of the Trinity, since Waterland gave the deathblow to Arianism, and so left no alternative to the Clergy, but the actual divinity or mere humanity of our Lord; and the latter would be too impudent an avowal for a public reader of our Church Liturgy: but in the articles of original sin, the necessity of regeneration, the necessity of redemption in order to the possibility of regeneration, of justification by faith, and of prevenient and auxiliary grace,—all I can say with sincerity is, that our orthodoxy seems so far in an improving state, that I can hope for the time when Churchmen will use the term Arminianism to express a habit of belief opposed not to Calvinism, or the works of Calvin, but to the Articles of our own Church, and to the doctrine in which all the first Reformers agreed.
Note—that by Latitudinarianism, I do not mean the particular tenets of the divines so called, such as Dr. H. More, Cudworth and their compeers, relative to toleration, comprehension, and the general belief that in the greater number of points then most controverted, the pious of all parties were far more nearly of the same mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see: I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason;—when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls
Greek: phrónaema sarkòs
, the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone. This I have elsewhere called the spirit of Socinianism, which may work in many whose tenets are anti-Socinian.
Law is—
conclusio per regulam generis singulorum in genere isto inclusorum
. Now the extremes
et inclusa
are contradictory terms. Therefore extreme cases are not capable subjects of law
a priori
, but must proceed on knowledge of the past, and anticipation of the future, and the fulfilment of the anticipation is the proof, because the only possible determination, of the accuracy of the knowledge. In other words the agents may be condemned or honored according to their intentions, and the apparent source of their motives; so we honor Brutus, but the extreme case itself is tried by the event.
Footnote 1:
Relliquiæ Baxterianæ
: or Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times. Published from his manuscript, by Matthew Sylvester.—London,
folio
. 1699.
return to footnote mark
Footnote 2:
See Hooker E. P. V. xviii. 3. Vol. II. p. 80. Keble.
Ed
.
return
Footnote 3:
See
Table Talk
, p. 162. 2nd edit.
Ed.
return
Footnote 4:
See the
Church and State
, p. 73, 3rd edit.—
Ed.
return
Contents/Index
Surely if ever work not in the sacred Canon might suggest a belief of inspiration,—of something more than human,—this it is. When Mr. Elwyn made this assertion, I took it as the hyperbole of affection: but now I subscribe to it seriously, and bless the hour that introduced me to the knowledge of the evangelical, apostolical Archbishop Leighton.
April 1814.
Next to the inspired Scriptures—yea, and as the vibration of that once struck hour remaining on the air, stands Leighton's Commentary on the 1st Epistle of St. Peter.
Comment Vol. I. p. 2.
—their redemption and salvation by Christ Jesus; that inheritance of immortality bought by his blood for them, and the evidence and stability of their right and title to it.
By the blood of Christ I mean this. I contemplate the Christ,
In the former he is
relative ad intellectum humanum, lux lucifica, sol intelligibilis: relative ad existentiam humanam, anima animans, calor fovens
. In the latter he is
vita vivificans, principium spiritualis, id est, veræ reproductionis in vitam veram
. Now this principle, or
vis vitæ vitam vivificans
, considered in
forma passiva, assimilationem patiens
, at the same time that it excites the soul to the vital act of assimilating—this is the Blood of Christ, really present through faith to, and actually partaken by, the faithful. Of this the body is the continual product, that is, a good life-the merits of Christ acting on the soul, redemptive.
Ib.pp. 13-15.
Of their sanctification:elect unto obedience, &c.
That the doctrines asserted in this and the two or three following pages cannot be denied or explained away, without removing (as the modern Unitarians), or (as the Arminians) unsettling and undermining, the foundations of the Faith, I am fully convinced; and equally so, that nothing is gained by the change, the very same logical consequences being deducible from the tenets of the Church Arminians;—scarcely more so, indeed, from those which they still hold in common with Luther, Zuinglius, Calvin, Knox, and Cranmer and the other Fathers of the Reformation in England, and which are therefore most unfairly entitled Calvinism—than from those which they have attempted to substitute in their place. Nay, the shock given to the moral sense by these consequences is, to my feelings, aggravated in the Arminian doctrine by the thin yet dishonest disguise. Meantime the consequences appear to me, in point of logic, legitimately concluded from the terms of the premisses. What shall we say then? Where lies the fault? In the original doctrines expressed in the premisses? God forbid. In the particular deductions, logically considered? But these we have found legitimate. Where then? I answer in deducing any consequences by such a process, and according to such rules. The rules are alien and inapplicable; the process presumptuous, yea, preposterous. The error,
Greek: to prôton pseudos
, lies in the false assumption of a logical deducibility at all, in this instance.
First:—because the terms from which the conclusion must be drawn-(
termini in majore præmissi, a quibus scientialiter et scientifice demonstrandum erat
) are accommodations and not scientific—that is, proper and adequate, not
per idem
, but
per quam maxime simile
, or rather
quam maxime dissimile
:
Secondly;—because the truths in question are transcendant, and have their evidence, if any, in the ideas themselves, and for the reason; and do not and cannot derive it from the conceptions of the understanding, which cannot comprehend the truths, but is to be comprehended in and by them, (
John
i. 5.):
Lastly, and chiefly;—because these truths, as they do not originate in the intellective faculty of man, so neither are they addressed primarily to our intellect; but are substantiated for us by their correspondence to the wants, cravings, and interests of the moral being, for which they were given, and without which they would be devoid of all meaning,—
vox et præterea nihil
. The only conclusions, therefore, that can be drawn from them, must be such as are implied in the origin and purpose of their revelation; and the legitimacy of all conclusions must be tried by their consistency with those moral interests, those spiritual necessities, which are the proper final cause of the truths and of our faith therein. For some of the faithful these truths have, I doubt not, an evidence of reason; but for the whole household of faith their certainty is in their working. Now it is this, by which, in all cases, we know and determine existence in the first instance. That which works in us or on us exists for us. The shapes and forms that follow the working as its results or products, whether the shapes cognizable by sense or the forms distinguished by the intellect, are after all but the particularizations of this working; its proper names, as it were, as John, James, Peter, in respect of human nature. They are all derived from the relations in which finite beings stand to each other; and are therefore heterogeneous and, except by accommodation, devoid of meaning and purpose when applied to the working in and by which God makes his existence known to us, and (we may presume to say) especially exists for the soul in whom he thus works. On these grounds, therefore, I hold the doctrines of original sin, the redemption therefrom by the Cross of Christ, and change of heart as the consequent; without adopting the additions to the doctrines inferred by one set of divines, the modern Calvinists, or acknowledging the consequences burdened on the doctrines by their antagonists. Nor is this my faith fairly liable to any inconvenience, if only it be remembered that it is a spiritual working, of which I speak, and a spiritual knowledge,—not through the
medium
of image, the seeking after which is superstition; nor yet by any sensation, the watching for which is enthusiasm, and the conceit of its presence fanatical distemperature. "Do the will of the Father, and ye shall
know
it."
We must distinguish the life and the soul; though there is a certain sense in which the life may be called the soul; that is, the life is the soul of the body. But the soul is the life of the man, and Christ is the life of the soul. Now the spirit of man, the spirit subsistent, is deeper than both, not only deeper than the body and its life, but deeper than the soul; and the Spirit descendent and supersistent is higher than both. In the regenerated man the height and the depth become one—the Spirit communeth with the spirit—and the soul is the
inter-ens
, or
ens inter-medium
between the life and the spirit;—the
participium
, not as a compound, however, but as a
medium indifferens
—in the same sense in which heat may be designated as the indifference between light and gravity. And what is the Reason?—The spirit in its presence to the understanding abstractedly from its presence in the will,—nay, in many, during the negation of the latter. The spirit present to man, but not appropriated by him, is the reason of man:—the reason in the process of its identification with the will is the spirit.
Ib.pp. 63-4.
Can we deny that it is unbelief of those things that causeth this neglect and forgetting of them? The discourse, the tongue of men and angels cannot beget divine belief of the happiness to come; only He that gives it, gives faith likewise to apprehend it, and lay hold upon it, and upon our believing to be filled with joy in the hopes of it.
Most true, most true!
Ib.p. 68.
In spiritual trials that are the sharpest and most fiery of all, when the furnace is within a man, when God doth not only shut up his loving-kindness from its feeling, but seems to shut it up in hot displeasure, when he writes bitter things against it; yet then to depend upon him, and wait for his salvation, this is not only a true, but a strong and very refined faith indeed, and the more he smites, the more to cleave to him. * * * Though I saw, as it were, his hand lifted up to destroy me, yet from that same hand would I expect salvation.
Bless God, O my soul, for this sweet and strong comforter! It is the honey in the lion.
Ib.p. 75.
This natural men may discourse of, and that very knowingly, and give a kind of natural credit to it as to a history that may be true; but firmly to believe that there is divine truth in all these things, and to have a persuasion of it stronger than of the very things we see with our eyes; such an assent as this is the peculiar work of the Spirit of God, and is certainly saving faith.
Lord I believe: help thou my unbelief!
My reason acquiesces, and I believe enough to fear. O, grant me the belief that brings sweet hope!
Ib.p. 76.
Faith * * causes the soul to find all that is spoken of him in the word, and his beauty there represented, to be abundantly true, makes it really taste of his sweetness, and by that possesses the heart more strongly with his love, persuading it of the truth of those things, not by reasons and arguments, but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, that they only know that have it.
Either this is true, or religion is not religion; that is, it adds nothing to our human reason;
non religat
. Grant it, grant it me, O Lord!
Ib.pp. 104-5.
This sweet stream of their doctrine did, as the rivers, make its own banks fertile and pleasant as it ran by, and flowed still forward to after ages, and by the confluence of more such prophecies grew greater as it went, till it fell in with the main current of the Gospel in the New Testament, both acted and preached by the great Prophet himself, whom they foretold to come, and recorded by his Apostles and Evangelists, and thus united into one river, clear as crystal. This doctrine of salvation in the Scriptures hath still refreshed the city of God, his Church under the Gospel, and still shall do so, till it empty itself into the ocean of eternity.
In the whole course of my studies I do not remember to have read so beautiful an allegory as this; so various and detailed, and yet so just and natural.
Ib.p. 121.
There is a truth in it, that all sin arises from some kind of ignorance * * *. For were the true visage of sin seen at a full light, undressed and unpainted, it were impossible, while it so appeared, that any one soul could be in love with it, but would rather flee from it as hideous and abominable.
This is the only (defect, shall I say? No, but the only) omission I have felt in this divine Writer—for him we understand by feeling, experimentally—that he doth not notice the horrible tyranny of habit. What the Archbishop says, is most true of beginners in sin; but this is the foretaste of hell, to see and loathe the deformity of the wedded vice, and yet still to embrace and nourish it.
Ib.p. 122.
He calls those times wherein Christ was unknown to them,the times of their ignorance. Though the stars shine never so bright, and the moon with them in its full, yet they do not, altogether, make it day: still it is night till the sun appear.
How beautiful, and yet how simple, and as it were unconscious of its own beauty!
Ib.p. 124.
You were running to destruction in the way of sin, and there was a voice, together with the Gospel preaching to your ear, that spake into your heart, and called you back from that path of death to the way of holiness, which is the only way of life. He hath severed you from the mass of the profane world, and picked you out to be jewels for himself.
O, how divine! Surely, nothing less than the Spirit of Christ could have inspired such thoughts in such language. Other divines,—Donne and Jeremy Taylor for instance,—have converted their worldly gifts, and applied them to holy ends; but here the gifts themselves seem unearthly.
Ib.p. 138.
As in religion, so in the course and practice of men's lives, the stream of sin runs from one age to another, and every age makes it greater, adding somewhat to what it receives, as rivers grow in their course by the accession of brooks that fall into them; and every man when he is born, falls like a drop into this main current of corruption, and so is carried down it, and this by reason of its strength, and his own nature, which willingly dissolves into it, and runs along with it.
In this single period we have religion, the spirit,—philosophy, the soul,—and poetry, the body and drapery united;—Plato glorified by St. Paul; and yet coming as unostentatiously as any speech from an innocent girl of fifteen.
Ib.p. 158.
The chief point of obedience is believing; the proper obedience to truth is to give credit to it.
This is not quite so perspicuous and single-sensed as Archbishop Leighton's sentences in general are. This effect is occasioned by the omission of the word "this," or "divine," or the truth "in Christ." For truth in the ordinary and scientific sense is received by a spontaneous, rather than chosen by a voluntary, act; and the apprehension of the same (belief) supposes a position of congruity rather than an act of obedience. Far otherwise is it with the truth that is the object of Christian faith: and it is this truth of which Leighton is speaking. Belief indeed is a living part of this faith; but only as long as it is a living part. In other words, belief is implied in faith; but faith is not necessarily implied in belief.