[742] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 121.

41. It can hardly be conceived that any one would think the worse of human nature or of himself by reading these magnificent lamentations of Pascal. He adorns and ennobles the degeneracy he exaggerates. The ruined aqueduct, the broken column, the desolated city, suggest no ideas but of dignity and reverence. No one is ashamed of a misery which bears witness to his grandeur. If we should persuade a labourer that the blood of princes flows in his veins, we might spoil his contentment with the only lot he has drawn, but scarcely kill in him the seeds of pride.

42. Pascal, like many others who have dwelt on this alledged degeneracy of mankind, seems never to have disentangled his mind from the notion that what we call human nature has not merely an arbitrary and grammatical, but an intrinsic objective reality. The common and convenient forms of language, the analogies of sensible things, which the imagination readily supplies, conspire to delude us into this fallacy. Each man is born with certain powers and dispositions which constitute his own nature; and the resemblance of these in all his fellows produces a general idea, or a collective appellation, whichever we may prefer to say, called the nature of man; but few would in this age contend for the existence of this as a substance capable of qualities, and those qualities variable, or subject to mutation. The corruption of human nature is therefore a phrase which may convey an intelligible meaning, if it is acknowledged to be merely analogical and inexact, but will mislead those who do not keep this in mind. Man’s nature, as it now is, that which each man and all men possess, is the immediate workmanship of God, as much as at his creation; nor is any other hypothesis consistent with theism.

43. This notion of a real universal in human nature, presents to us in an exaggerated light those anomalies from which writers of Pascal’s school are apt to infer some vast change in our original constitution. Exaggerated, I say, for it cannot be denied, that we frequently perceive a sort of incoherence, as it appears at least to our defective vision, in the same individual; and, like threads of various hues shot through one web, the love of vice and of virtue, the strength and weakness of the heart, are wonderfully blended in self-contradictory and self-destroying conjunction. But even if we should fail altogether in solving the very first steps of this problem, there is no course for a reasonable being, except to acknowledge the limitations of his own faculties; and it seems rather unwarrantable, on the credit of this humble confession, that we do not comprehend the depths of what has been withheld from us, to substitute something far more incomprehensible and revolting to our moral and rational capacities in its place. “What,” says Pascal, “can be more contrary to the rules of our wretched justice, than to damn eternally an infant incapable of volition, for an offence wherein he seems to have had no share, and which was committed six thousand years before he was born? Certainly, nothing shocks us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. Man is more inconceivable without this mystery, than the mystery is inconceivable to man.”

Vindications of Christianity. 45. Among the works immediately designed to confirm the truth of Christianity, a certain reputation was acquired, through the known erudition of its author, by the Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, bishop of Avranches. This is paraded with definitions, axioms, and propositions, in order to challenge the name it assumes. But the axioms, upon which so much is to rest, are often questionable or equivocal; as, for instance: Omnis prophetia est verax, quæ prædixit res eventu deinde completas—equivocal in the word verax. Huet also confirms his axioms by argument, which shows that they are not truly such. The whole book is full of learning; but he frequently loses sight of the points he would prove, and his quotations fall beside the mark. Yet he has furnished much to others, and possibly no earlier work on the same subject is so elaborate and comprehensive. The next place, if not a higher one, might be given to the treatise of Abbadie, a French refugee, published in 1684. His countrymen bestow on it the highest eulogies; but it was never so well known in England, and is now almost forgotten. The oral conferences of Limborch with Orobio, a Jew of considerable learning and ability, on the prophecies relating to the Messiah, were reduced into writing and published; they are still in some request. No book of this period among many that were written, reached so high a reputation in England as Leslie’s Short Method with the Deists, published in 1694: in which he has started an argument, pursued with more critical analysis by others, on the peculiarly distinctive marks of credibility that pertain to the scriptural miracles. The authenticity of this little treatise has been idly questioned on the Continent, for no better reason than that a translation of it has been published in a posthumous edition (1732) of the works of Saint Real, who died in 1692. But posthumous editions are never deemed of sufficient authority to establish a literary title against possession; and Prosper Marchand informs us, that several other tracts, in this edition of Saint Real, are erroneously ascribed to him. The internal evidence that the Short Method was written by a protestant should be conclusive.[743]

[743] The Biographie Universelle, art. Leslie, says: Cet ouvrage, qui passe pour ce qu’il a fait de mieux, lui a été contesté. Le Docteur Gleigh [sic] a fait de grands efforts pour prouver qu’il appartenait à Leslie, quoiqu’il fût publié parmi les ouvrages de l’Abbe de Saint Real, mort en 1692. It is melancholy to see this petty spirit of cavil against an English writer in so respectable a work as the Biographic Universelle. No grands efforts could be required from Dr. Gleig or anyone else, to prove that a book was written by Leslie, which bore his name, which was addressed to an English peer, and had gone through many editions; when there is literally no claimant on the other side; for a posthumous edition, forty years after an author’s death, without attestation, is no literary evidence at all, even where a book is published for the first time, much less where it has a known status as the production of a certain author. This is so manifest to anyone who has the slightest tincture of critical judgment, that we need not urge the palpable improbability of ascribing to Saint Real, a Romish ecclesiastic, an argument which turns peculiarly on the distinction between the scriptural miracles and those alledged upon inferior evidence. I have lost, or never made, the reference to Prosper Marchand; but the passage will be found in his Dictionnaire Historique, which contains a full article on Saint Real.

Progress of tolerant principles. 46. Every change in public opinion which this period witnessed, confirmed the principles of religious toleration, that had taken root in the earlier part of the century; the progress of a larger and more catholic theology, the weakening of bigotry in the minds of laymen, and the consequent disregard of ecclesiastical clamour, not only in England and Holland, but to a considerable extent in France; we might even add, the violent proceedings of the last government, in the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and the cruelties which attended it. Louis XIV., at a time when mankind were beginning to renounce the very theory of persecution, renewed the ancient enormities of its practice, and thus unconsciously gave the aid of moral sympathy and indignation to the adverse argument. The Protestant refugees of France, scattered among their brethren, brought home to all minds the great question of free conscience; not with the stupid and impudent limitation which even protestants had sometimes employed, that truth indeed might not be restrained, but that error might; a broader foundation was laid by the great advocates of toleration in this period, Bayle, Limborch, and Locke, as it had formerly been by Taylor and Episcopius.[744]

[744] The Dutch clergy, and a French minister in Holland, Jurieu, of great polemical fame in his day, though now chiefly known by means of his adversaries, Bayle and Le Clerc, strenuously resisted both the theory of general toleration, and the moderate or liberal principles in religion which were connected with it. Le Clerc passed his life in fighting this battle, and many articles in the Bibliothèque Universelle relate to it.

Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary. 47. Bayle, in 1686, while yet the smart of his banishment was keenly felt, published his Philosophical Commentary on the text in Scripture, “Compel them to come in;” a text which some of the advocates of persecution were accustomed to produce. He gives in the first part nine reasons against this literal meaning, among which none are philological. In the second part he replies to various objections. This work of Bayle does not seem to me as subtle and logical as he was wont to be, notwithstanding the formal syllogisms with which he commences each of his chapters. His argument against compulsory conversions, which the absurd interpretation of the text by his adversaries required, is indeed irresistible; but this is far from sufficiently establishing the right of toleration itself. It appears not very difficult for a skilful sophist, and none was more so than Bayle himself, to have met some of his reasoning with a specious reply. The sceptical argument of Taylor, that we can rarely be sure of knowing the truth ourselves, and consequently of condemning in others what is error, he touches but slightly; nor does he dwell on the political advantages which experience has shown a full toleration to possess. In the third part of the Philosophical Commentary, he refutes the apology of Augustin for persecution; and a few years afterwards he published a supplement answering a book of Jurieu, which had appeared in the mean time.

Locke’s Letter on Toleration. 48. Locke published anonymously his Letter on Toleration in 1689. The season was propitious; a legal tolerance of public worship had first been granted to the dissenters after the revolution, limited indeed to such as held most of the doctrines of the church, but preparing the nation for a more extensive application of its spirit. In the Liberty of Prophesying, Taylor had chiefly in view to deduce the justice of tolerating a diversity in religion from the difficulty of knowing the truth. He is not very consistent as to the political question, and limits too narrowly the province of tolerable opinions. Locke goes more expressly to the right of the civil magistrate, not omitting, but dwelling less forcibly on the latitudinarian scepticism of his predecessor. His own theory of government came to his aid. The clergy in general, and perhaps Taylor himself, had derived the magistrate’s jurisdiction from paternal power. And as they apparently assumed this power to extend over adult children, it was natural to give those who succeeded to it in political communities, a large sway over the moral and religious behaviour of subjects. Locke, adopting the opposite theory of compact, defines the commonwealth to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests. He denies altogether that the care of souls belongs to the civil magistrate, as it has never been committed to him. “All the power of civil government relates only to men’s civil interests, is confined to the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come.”

49. The admission of this principle would apparently decide the controversy, so far as it rests on religious grounds. But Locke has recourse to several other arguments independent of it. He proves, with no great difficulty, that the civil power cannot justly, or consistently with any true principle of religion, compel men to profess what they do not believe. This, however, is what very few would, at present, be inclined to maintain. The real question was as to the publicity of opinions deemed heterodox, and especially in social worship; and this is what those who held the magistrate to possess an authority patriarchal, universal, and arbitrary, and who were also rigidly tenacious of the necessity of an orthodox faith, and perfectly convinced that it was no other than their own, would hardly be persuaded to admit by any arguments that Locke has alledged. But the tendency of public opinion had begun to manifest itself against both these tenets of the high-church party, so that, in the eighteenth century, the principles of general tolerance became too popular to be disputed with any chance of attention. Locke was engaged in a controversy, through his first letter on toleration, which produced a second and a third; but it does not appear that these, though longer than the first, have considerably modified its leading positions.[745] It is to be observed that he pleads for the universal toleration of all modes of worship not immoral in their nature, or involving doctrines inimical to good government; placing in the latter category some tenets of the church of Rome.

[745] Warburton has fancied that Locke’s real sentiments are only discoverable in his first Letter on Toleration, and that in the two latter he “combats his intolerant adversary quite through the controversy with his own principles, well foreseeing, that at such a time of prejudice arguments built on received opinions would have greatest weight, and make quickest impression on the body of the people whom it was his business to gain.” Biogr. Britannica, art. Locke.

French Sermons. 50. It is confessed by Goujet that, even in the middle of the seventeenth century, France could boast very little of pulpit eloquence. Frequent quotations from heathen writers and from the schoolmen, with little solid morality and less good reasoning, make up the sermons of that age.[746] But the revolution in this style, as in all others, though perhaps gradual, was complete in the reign of Louis XIV. A slight sprinkling of passages from the fathers, and still more frequently from the Scriptures, but always short, and seeming to rise out of the preacher’s heart, rather than to be sought for in his memory, replaced that intolerable parade of a theological common place book, which had been as customary in France as in England. The style was to be the perfection of French eloquence, the reasoning persuasive rather than dogmatic, the arrangement more methodical and distributive than at present, but without the excess we find in our old preachers. This is the general character of French sermons; but those who most adorned the pulpit, had of course their individual distinctions. Without delaying to mention those who are now not greatly remembered, such as La Rue, Hubert, Mascaron, we must confine ourselves to three of high reputation, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Fléchier.

[746] Bibliothèque Française, vol. ii., p. 283.

Bourdaloue. 51. Bourdaloue, a Jesuit, but as little of a Jesuit in the worst acceptation of the word, as the order has produced, is remarkably simple, earnest, practical: he convinces rather than commands; and by convincing he persuades; for his discourses tend always to some duty, to something that is to be done or avoided. His sentences are short, interrogative, full of plain and solid reasoning, unambitious in expression, and wholly without that care in the choice of words and cadences which we detect in Bossuet and Fléchier. No one would call Bourdaloue a rhetorician, and though he continually introduces the fathers, he has not caught their vices of language.[747]

[747] The public did justice to Bourdaloue, as they generally do to a solid and impressive style of preaching. Je crois, says Goujet, p. 300, que tout le monde convient qu’aucun autre ne lui est supérieur. C’est le grand maître pour l’éloquence de la chaire; c’est le prince des prédicateurs. Le public n’a jamais été partagé sur son sujet; la ville et la cour l’ont également estimé et admiré. C’est qu’il avoit réuni en sa personne tous les grands caractères de la bonne éloquence; la simplicité du discours Chrétien avec la majesté et la grandeur, le sublime avec l’intelligible et le populaire, la force avec la douceur, la véhémence avec l’onction, la liberté avec la justesse, et le plus vive ardeur avec la plus pure lumière.

Compared with Bossuet. 52. Bourdaloue is almost in the same relation to Bossuet, as Patru to Le Maistre, though the two orators of the pulpit are far above those of the bar. As the one is short, condensed, plain, reasoning, and though never feeble, not often what is generally called eloquent, so the other is animated, figurative, rather diffuse and prodigal of ornament, addressing the imagination more than the judgment, rich and copious in cadence, elevating the hearer to the pitch of his own sublimity. Bossuet is sometimes too declamatory; and Bourdaloue perhaps sometimes borders on dryness. Much in the sermons of the former is true poetry; but he has less of satisfactory and persuasive reasoning than the latter. His tone is also, as in all his writings, too domineering and dogmatical for those who demand something beyond the speaker’s authority when they listen.

Funeral discourses of Bossuet. 53. The sermons, however, of Bossuet, taken generally, are not reckoned in the highest class of his numerous writings; perhaps scarcely justice has been done to them. His genius, on the other hand, by universal confession, never shone higher than in the six which bear the name of Oraisons Funèbres. They belong in substance so much more naturally to the province of eloquence than of theology, that I should have reserved them for another place, if the separation would not have seemed rather unexpected to the reader. Few works of genius perhaps in the French language are better known, or have been more prodigally extolled. In that style of eloquence which the ancients called demonstrative, or rather descriptive (επιδεικτικος), the style of panegyric or commemoration, they are doubtless superior to those justly celebrated productions of Thucydides and Plato that have descended to us from Greece; nor has Bossuet been equalled by any later writer. Those on the Queen of England, on her daughter the Duchess of Orleans, and on the Prince of Condé, outshine the rest; and if a difference is to be made among these, we might, perhaps, after some hesitation, confer the palm on the first. The range of topics is so various, the thoughts so just, the images so noble and poetical, the whole is in such perfect keeping, the tone of awful contemplation, is so uniform, that if it has not any passages of such extraordinary beauty as occur in the other two, its general effect on the mind is more irresistible.[748]

[748] An English preacher of conspicuous renown for eloquence was called upon, within no great length of time, to emulate the funeral discourse of Bossuet on the sudden death of Henrietta of Orleans. He had before him a subject incomparably more deep in interest, more fertile in great and touching associations—he had to describe, not the false sorrow of courtiers, not the shriek of sudden surprise that echoed by night in the halls of Versailles, not the apocryphal penitence of one so tainted by the world’s intercourse, but the manly grief of an entire nation in the withering of those visions of hope which wait upon the untried youth of royalty, in its sympathy with grandeur annihilated, with beauty and innocence precipitated into the tomb. Nor did he sink beneath this subject, except as compared with Bossuet. The sermon to which my allusion will be understood, is esteemed by many the finest effort of this preacher; but if read together with that of its prototype, it will be laid aside as almost feeble and unimpressive.

54. In this style, much more of ornament, more of what speaks in the spirit, and even the very phrase, of poetry, to the imagination and the heart, is permitted by a rigorous criticism, than in forensic or in deliberative eloquence. The beauties that rise before the author’s vision are not renounced; the brilliant colours of his fancy are not subdued; the periods assume a more rhythmical cadence, and emulate, like metre itself, the voluptuous harmony of musical intervals; the whole composition is more evidently formed to delight; but it will delight to little purpose, or even cease, in any strong sense of the word, to do so at all, unless it is ennobled by moral wisdom. In this Bossuet was pre-eminent; his thoughts are never subtle or far-fetched; they have a sort of breadth, a generality of application, which is peculiarly required in those who address a mixed assembly, and which many that aim at what is profound and original are apt to miss. It may be confessed, that these funeral discourses are not exempt from some defects, frequently inherent in panegyrical eloquence; they are sometimes too rhetorical, and do not appear to show so little effort as some have fancied; the amplifications are sometimes too unmeasured, the language sometimes borders too nearly on that of the stage; above all, there is a tone of adulation not quite pleasing to a calm posterity.

Fléchier. 55. Fléchier (the third name of the seventeenth century, for Massillon belongs only to the next), like Bossuet, has been more celebrated for his funeral sermons than for any others; but, in this line, it is unfortunate for him to enter into unavoidable competition with one whom he cannot rival. The French critics extol Fléchier for the arrangement and harmony of his periods; yet, even in this, according to La Harpe, he is not essentially superior to Bossuet; and, to an English ear, accustomed to the long swell of our own writers, and of the Ciceronian school in Latin, he will probably not give so much gratification. He does not want a moral dignity, or a certain elevation of thought, without which the funeral panegyric must be contemptible; but he has not the majestic tone of Bossuet; he does not, like him, raise the heroes and princes of the earth in order to abase them by paintings of mortality and weakness, or recall the hearer in every passage to something more awful than human power, and more magnificent than human grandeur. This religious solemnity, so characteristic in Bossuet, is hardly felt in the less emphatic sentences of Fléchier. Even where his exordium is almost worthy of comparison, as in the funeral discourse on Turenne, we find him degenerate into a trivial eulogy, and he flatters both more profusely and with less skill. His style is graceful, but not without affectation and false taste. La Harpe has not ill compared him to Isocrates among the orators of Greece, the place of Demosthenes being, of course, reserved for Bossuet.[749]

[749] The native critics ascribe a reform in the style of preaching to Paolo Segneri, whom Corniani does not hesitate to call, with the sanction, he says, of posterity, the father of Italian eloquence. It is to be remembered, that in no country has the pulpit been so much degraded by empty declamation, and even by a stupid buffoonery. “The language of Segneri,” the same writer observes, “is always full of dignity and harmony. He inlaid it with splendid and elegant expressions, and has thus obtained a place among the authors to whom authority has been given by the Della Crusca dictionary. His periods are flowing, natural, and intelligible, without the affectation of obsolete Tuscanisms, which pass for graces of the language with many.” Tiraboschi, with much commendation of Segneri, admits that we find in him some vestiges of the false taste he endeavoured to reform. The very little that I have seen of the sermons of Segneri, gives no impression of any merit that can be reckoned more than relative to the miserable tone of his predecessors. The following specimen is from one of his most admired sermons:—E Cristo non potrà ottenere da voi che gli rimettiate un torto, un affronto, un aggravio, una parolina? Che vorreste da Christo? Vorreste ch’egli vi si gettasse supplichevole a’ piedi a chiedergli questa grazia? Io son quasi per dire ch’egli il farebbe; perchè se non dubiti di prostrarsi a’ piedi di un traditore, qual’era Guida, di lavarglieli, di asciugarglieli, di baciarglieli, non si vergognerebbe, cred’io, di farsi vedere ginocchioni a’ piè vostri. Ma vi fa bisogno di tanto per muovervi a compiacerlo? Ah Cavalieri, Cavalieri, io non vorrei questa volta farvi arrossire. Nel resto io so di certo, che se altrettanto fosse a voi domandato da quella donna che chiamate la vostra dama, da quella, di cui forsennati idolatrate il volto, indovinate le voglie, ambite le grazie, non vi farete pregar tanto a concederglielo. E poi vi fate pregar tanto da un Dio per voi crocefisso? O confusione! O vitupero! O vergogna! Raccolta di Prose Italiane (in Classici Italiani), vol. ii., p. 345.

This is certainly not the manner of Bossuet, and more like that of a third-rate Methodist among us.

English sermons—Barrow. 56. The style of preaching in England was less ornamental, and spoke less to the imagination and affections, than these celebrated writers of the Gallican church; but in some of our chief divines it had its own excellencies. The sermons of Barrow display a strength of mind, a comprehensiveness and fertility, which have rarely been equalled. No better proof can be given than his eight sermons on the government of the tongue; copious and exhaustive without tautology or superfluous declamation, they are, in moral preaching, what the best parts of Aristotle are in ethical philosophy, with more of development and a more extensive observation. It would be said of these sermons, and indeed, with a few exceptions, of all those of Barrow, that they are not what is called evangelical; they indicate the ascendancy of an Arminian party, dwelling far more than is usual in the pulpit on moral and rational, or even temporal, inducements, and sometimes hardly abstaining from what would give a little offence in later times.[750] His quotations also from ancient philosophers, though not so numerous as in Taylor, are equally uncongenial to our ears. In his style, notwithstanding its richness and occasional vivacity, we may censure a redundancy and excess of apposition; it is not sufficient to avoid strict tautology; no second phrase (to lay down a general rule not without exception) should be so like the first, that the reader would naturally have understood it to be comprised therein. Barrow’s language is more antiquated and formal than that of his age; and he abounds too much in uncommon words of Latin derivation, frequently such as appear to have no authority but his own.

[750] Thus, in his sermon against evil speaking (xvi.), Barrow treats it as fit “for rustic boors or men of coarsest education and employment, who, having their minds debased by being conversant in meanest affairs, do vent their sorry passions and bicker about their petty concernments in such strains, who also, not being capable of a fair reputation, or sensible of disgrace to themselves, do little value the credit of others, or care for aspersing it. But such language is unworthy of those persons, and cannot easily be drawn from them, who are wont to exercise their thoughts about nobler matters,” &c. No one would venture this now from the pulpit.

South. 57. South’s sermons begin, in order of date, before the Restoration, and come down to nearly the end of the century. They were much celebrated at the time, and retain a portion of their renown. This is by no means surprising. South had great qualifications for that popularity which attends the pulpit, and his manner was at that time original. Not diffuse, not learned, not formal in argument like Barrow, with a more natural structure of sentences, a more pointed, though by no means a more fair and satisfactory turn of reasoning, with a style clear and English, free from all pedantry, but abounding with those colloquial novelties of idiom, which, though now become vulgar and offensive, the age of Charles II. affected, sparing no personal or temporary sarcasm, but, if he seems for a moment to tread on the verge of buffoonery, recovering himself by some stroke of vigorous sense and language; such was the witty Dr. South, whom the courtiers delighted to hear. His sermons want all that is called unction, and sometimes even earnestness, which is owing, in a great measure, to a perpetual tone of gibing at rebels and fanatics; but there is a masculine spirit about them, which, combined with their peculiar characteristics, would naturally fill the churches where he might be heard. South appears to bend towards the Arminian theology, without adopting so much of it as some of his contemporaries.

Tillotson. 59. The sermons of Tillotson were, for half a century, more read than any in our language. They are now bought almost as waste paper, and hardly read at all. Such is the fickleness of religious taste, as abundantly numerous instances would prove. Tillotson is reckoned verbose and languid. He has not the former defect in nearly so great a degree as some of his eminent predecessors; but there is certainly little vigour or vivacity in his style. Full of the Romish controversy, he is perpetually recurring to that “world’s debate;” and he is not much less hostile to all the Calvinistic tenets. What is most remarkable in the theology of Tillotson is his strong assertion, in almost all his sermons, of the principles of natural religion and morality, not only as the basis of all revelation, without a dependence on which it cannot be believed, but as nearly coincident with Christianity in its extent, a length to which few at present would be ready to follow him. Tillotson is always of a tolerant and catholic spirit, enforcing right actions rather than orthodox opinions, and obnoxious, for that and other reasons, to all the bigots of his own age.

Expository Theology. 60. It has become necessary to draw towards a conclusion of this chapter; the materials are far from being exhausted. In expository, or, as some call it, exegetical theology, the English divines had already taken a conspicuous station. Andrès, no partial estimator of Protestant writers, extols them with marked praise.[751] Those who belonged to the earlier part of the century form a portion of a vast collection, the Critici Sacri, published by one Bee, a bookseller, in 1660. This was in nine folio volumes; and in 1669, Matthew Pool, a nonconforming minister, produced his Synopsis Criticorum, in five volumes, being, in great measure, an abridgment and digest of the former. Bee complained of the infraction of his copyright, or rather his equitable interest; but such a dispute hardly pertains to our history.[752] The work of Pool was evidently a more original labour than the former. Hammond, Patrick, and other commentators, do honour to the Anglican church in the latter part of the century.

[751] I soli Inglesi, che ampio spazio non dovrebbono occupare in questo capo dell’esegetica sacra, se l’istituto della nostr’opera ci permettesse tener dietro a tutti i più degni della nostra stima? Vol. xix., p. 253.

[752] Chalmers.

Pearson on the Creed. 61. Pearson’s Exposition of the Apostle’s Creed, published in 1659, is a standard book in English divinity. It expands beyond the literal purport of the creed itself to most articles of orthodox belief, and is a valuable summary of arguments and authorities on that side. The closeness of Pearson, and his judicious selection of proofs, distinguish him from many, especially the earlier, theologians. Some might surmise that his undeviating adherence to what he calls the church is hardly consistent with independence of thinking; but, considered as an advocate, he is one of much judgment and skill. Such men as Pearson and Stillingfleet, would have been conspicuous at the bar, which we could not quite affirm of Jeremy Taylor.

Simon’s Critical Histories. 62. Simon, a regular priest of the congregation called The Oratory, which has been rich in eminent men, owes much of his fame to his Critical History of the Old Testament. This work, bold in many of its positions, as it then seemed to both the Catholic and Protestant orthodox, after being nearly strangled by Bossuet in France, appeared at Rotterdam in 1685. Bossuet attacked it with extreme vivacity, but with a real inferiority to Simon, both in learning and candour.[753] Le Clerc on his side carped more at the Critical History than it seems to deserve. Many paradoxes, as they then were called, in his famous work are now received as truth, or at least pass without reproof. Simon may possibly be too prone to novelty, but a love of truth as well as great acuteness are visible throughout. His Critical History of the New Testament was published in 1689, and one or two more works of a similar description before the close of the century.

[753] Défense de la Tradition des Saints Pères. Œuvres de Bossuet, vol. v., and Instructions sur la Version du N. T., imprimée à Trevoux, Id. vol. iv., 313. Bausset, Vie de Bossuet, iv., 276.

63. I have, on a former occasion, adverted, in a corresponding chapter, to publications on witchcraft, and similar superstitions. Several might be mentioned at this time; the belief in such tales was assailed by a prevalent scepticism which called out their advocates. Of these, the most unworthy to have exhibited their great talents in such a cause were our own philosophers Henry More and Joseph Glanvil. The Sadducismus Triumphatus, or Treatise on Apparitions, by the latter, has passed through several editions, while his Scepsis Scientifica has hardly been seen, perhaps, by six living persons. A Dutch minister, by name Bekker, raised a great clamour against himself by a downright denial of all power to the devil, and consequently to his supposed instruments, the ancient beldams of Holland and other countries. His Monde Enchanté, originally published in Dutch, is in four volumes, written in a systematic manner and with tedious prolixity. There was no ground for imputing infidelity to the author, except the usual ground of calumniating everyone who quits the beaten path in theology; but his explanations of scripture in the case of the demoniacs and the like are, as usual with those who have taken the same line, rather forced. The fourth volume which contains several curious stories of imagined possession, and some which resemble what is now called magnetism, is the only part of Bekker’s once celebrated book that can be read with any pleasure. Bekker was a Cartesian, and his theory was built too much on Cartesian assumptions of the impossibility of spirit acting on body, which are easily parried by denying his inference from them.

CHAPTER XXIX.

1. The Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics, though shaken on every side, and especially by the rapid progress of the Cartesian theories, had not lost their hold over the theologians of the Roman church, or even the protestant universities, at the beginning of this period, and hardly at its close. Brucker enumerates several writers of that class in Germany;[754] and we find, as late as 1693, a formal injunction by the Sorbonne, that none who taught philosophy in the colleges under its jurisdiction should introduce any novelties, or swerve from the Aristotelian doctrine.[755] The Jesuits, rather unfortunately for their credit, distinguished themselves as strenuous advocates of the old philosophy, and thus lost the advantage they had obtained in philology as enemies of barbarous prejudice, and encouragers of a progressive spirit in their disciples. Rapin, one of their most accomplished men, after speaking with little respect of the Novum Organum, extols the disputations of the schools as the best method in the education of young men, who, as he fancies, have too little experience to delight in physical science.[756]

[754] Vol. iv. See his long and laborious chapter on the Aristotelian philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; no one else seems to have done more than copy Brucker.

[755] Cum relatum esset ad Societatem (Sorbonicam) nonnullos philosophiæ, professores, ex iis etiam aliquando qui ad Societatem anhelant, novas quasdam doctrinas in philosophicis sectari, minusque Aristotelicæ doctrinæ studere, quam hactenus usurpatum fuerit in Academiâ Parisiensi, censuit Societas injungendum esse illis, imo et iis qui docent philosophiam in collegiis suo regimini creditis, ne deinceps novitatibus studeant, aut ab Aristotelica doctrina deffectant. 31 Dec. 1693. Argentré, Collectio Judiciorum, iii., 150.

[756] Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 368. He admits, however, that to introduce more experiment and observation would be an improvement. Du reste il y a apparence que les loix, qui ne souffrent point d’innovation dans l’usage des choses universellement établies, n’autoriseront point d’autre méthode que celle qui est aujourd’hui en usage dans les universités; afin de ne pas donner trop de licence à la passion qu’on a naturellement pour les nouvelles opinions, dont le cours est d’une dangereuse conséquence dans un état bien réglé; vu particulièrement que la philosophie est un des organes dont se sert la religion pour s’expliquer dans ses décisions.

Their decline. Thomas White. 2. It is a difficult and dangerous choice, in a new state of public opinion (and we have to make it at present), between that which may itself pass away, and that which must efface what has gone before. Those who clung to the ancient philosophy believed that Bacon and Descartes were the idols of a transitory fashion, and that the wisdom of long ages would regain its ascendancy. They were deceived, and their own reputation has been swept off with the systems to which they adhered. Thomas White, an English catholic priest, whose Latin appellation is Albius, endeavoured to maintain the Aristotelian metaphysics and the scholastic terminology in several works, and especially in an attack upon Glanvil’s Vanity of Dogmatizing. This book, entitled Sciri, I know only through Glanvil’s reply in his second edition, by which White appears to be a mere Aristotelian. He was a friend of Sir Kenelm Digby, who was himself, though a man of considerable talents, incapable of disentangling his mind from the Peripatetic hypotheses. The power of words indeed is so great, the illusions of what is called realism, or of believing that general terms have an objective exterior being, are so natural, and especially so bound up both with our notions of essential, especially theological, truth, and with our popular language, that no man could in that age be much censured for not casting off his fetters, even when he had heard the call to liberty from some modern voices. We find that even after two centuries of a better method, many are always ready to fall back into a verbal process of theorising.

Logic. 3. Logic was taught in the Aristotelian method, or rather in one which, with some change for the worse, had been gradually founded upon it. Burgersdicius, in this and in other sciences, seems to have been in repute; Smiglecius also is mentioned with praise.[757] These lived both in the former part of the century. But they were superceded, at least in England, by Wallis, whose Institutio Logicæ ad Communes Usus Accommodata was published in 1687. He claims as an improvement upon the received system, the classifying singular propositions among universals.[758] Ramus had made a third class of them, and in this he seems to have been generally followed. Aristotle, though it does not appear that he is explicit on the subject, does not rank them as particular. That Wallis is right cannot be doubted by anyone who reflects at all; but his originality we must not assert. The same had been perceived by the authors of the Port-Royal Logic; a work to which he has made no allusion.[759] Wallis claims also as his own the method of reducing hypothetical to categorical syllogisms, and proves it elaborately in a separate dissertation. A smaller treatise, still much used at Oxford, by Aldrich, Compendium Artis Logicæ, 1691, is clear and concise, but seems to contain nothing very important; and he alludes to the Art de Penser in a tone of insolence, which must rouse indignation in those who are acquainted with that excellent work. Aldrich’s censures are, in many instances, mere cavil and misrepresentation; I do not know that they are right in any.[760] Of the Art de Penser itself we shall have something to say in the course of this chapter.

[757] La Logique de Smiglecius, says Rapin, est un bel ouvrage. The same writer proceeds to observe that the Spaniards of the preceding century had corrupted logic by their subtleties. En se jettant dans des spéculations creuses qui n’avoient rien de réel, leur philosophes trouvèrent l’art d’avoir de la raison malgré le bon sens, et de donner de la couleur, et même je ne scai quoi de specieuse, à ce qui étoit de plus déraisonnable, p. 382. But this must have been rather the fault of their metaphysics than of what is strictly called logic.

[758] Atque hoc signanter notatum velim, quia novus forte hic videar, et præter aliorum loquendi formulam hæc dicere. Nam plerique logici propositionem quam vocant singularem, hoc est, de subjecto individuo sive singulari, pro particulari habent, non universali. Sed perperam hoc faciunt, et præter mentem Aristotelis (qui, quantum memini, nunquam ejusmodi singularem, την κατα μερος appellat aut pro tali habet) et præter rei naturam: Non enim hic agitur de particularitate subjecti (quod ατομον vocat Aristotelis, non κατα μερος) sed de partialitate prædicationis.... Neque ego interim novator censendus sum qui hæc dixerim, sed illi potius novatores qui ab Aristotelica doctrina recesserint; eoque multa introduxerint incommoda de quibus suo loco dicetur, p. 125. He has afterwards a separate dissertation or thesis to prove this more at length. It seems that the Ramists held a third class of propositions, neither universal nor particular, to which they gave the name of propria, equivalent to singular.

[759] Art de Penser, part ii., chap. iii.

[760] One of Aldrich’s charges against the author of the Art de Penser is, that he brings forward as a great discovery the equality of the angles of a chiliagon to 1996 right angles; and another is, that he gives as an example of a regular syllogism one that has obviously five terms; thus expecting the Oxford students, for whom he wrote, to believe, that Antony Arnauld neither knew the first book of Euclid, nor the mere rudiments of common logic.

Stanley’s History of Philosophy. 4. Before we proceed to those whose philosophy may be reckoned original or at least modern, a very few deserve mention who have endeavoured to maintain or restore that of antiquity. Stanley’s History of Philosophy, in 1655, is in great measure confined to biography, and comprehends no name later than Carneades. Most is derived from Diogenes Laertius; but an analysis of the Platonic philosophy is given from Alcinous, and the author has compiled one of the Peripatetic system from Aristotle himself. The doctrine of the Stoics is also elaborately deduced from various sources. Stanley on the whole brought a good deal from an almost untrodden field; but he is merely a historian, and never a critic of philosophy. He does not mention Epicurus at all, probably because Gassendi had so well written that philosopher’s life.

Gale’s Court of Gentiles. 5. Gale’s Court of the Gentiles, partly in 1669 and partly in later years, is incomparably a more learned work, than that of Stanley. Its aim is to prove that all heathen philosophy, whether barbaric or Greek, was borrowed from the Scriptures, or at least from the Jews. The first part is entitled Of Philology, which traces the same leading principle by means of language; the second, Of Philosophy: the third treats of the Vanity of Philosophy, and the fourth of Reformed Philosophy, “wherein Plato’s moral and metaphysic or prime philosophy is reduced to an useful form and method.” Gale has been reckoned among Platonic philosophers, and indeed he professes to find a great resemblance between the philosophy of Plato and his own. But he is a determined Calvinist in all respects, and scruples not to say, “Whatever God wills is just, because he wills it;” and again, “God willeth nothing without himself because it is just, but it is therefore just because he willeth it. The reasons of good and evil extrinsic to the divine essence are all dependent on the divine will, either decernent or legislative.”[761] It is not likely that Plato would have acknowledged such a disciple.

[761] Part iv., p. 339.

Cudworth’s Intellectual System. 6. A much more eminent and enlightened man than Gale, Ralph Cudworth, by his Intellectual System of the Universe, published in 1678, but written several years before, placed himself in a middle point between the declining and rising schools of philosophy; more independent of authority, and more close, perhaps, in argument than the former, but more prodigal of learning, more technical in language, and less conversant with analytical and inductive processes of reasoning than the latter. Upon the whole, however, he belongs to the school of antiquity, and probably his wish was to be classed with it. Cudworth was one of those whom Hobbes had roused by the atheistic and immoral theories of the Leviathan; nor did any antagonist perhaps of that philosopher bring a more vigorous understanding to the combat. This understanding was not so much obstructed in its own exercise by a vast erudition, as it was sometimes concealed by it from the reader. Cudworth has passed more for a recorder of ancient philosophy, than for one who might stand in a respectable class among philosophers; and his work, though long, being unfinished, as well as full of digression, its object has not been fully apprehended.

His plastic nature. 9. This leads Cudworth to his own famous theory of a plastic nature, a device to account for the operations of physical laws without the continued agency of the Deity. Of this plastic energy he speaks in rather a confused and indefinite manner giving it in one place a sort of sentient life, or what he calls “a drowsy unawakened cogitation,” and always treating it as an entity or real being. This language of Cudworth, and indeed the whole hypothesis of a plastic nature, was unable to stand the searching eye of Bayle, who, in an article of his dictionary, pointed out its unphilosophical and dangerous assumptions. Le Clerc endeavoured to support Cudworth against Bayle, but with little success.[762] It has had, however, some partizans, though rather among physiologists than metaphysicians. Grew adopted it to explain vegetation; and the plastic nature differs only, as I conceive, from what Hunter and Abernethy have called life in organised bodies by its more extensive agency; for if we are to believe that there is a vital power, not a mere name for the sequence of phenomena, which marshals the molecules of animal and vegetable substance, we can see no reason why a similar energy should not determine other molecules to assume geometrical figures in crystallization. The error or paradox consists in assigning a real unity of existence, and a real power of causation, to that which is unintelligent.

[762] Biblothèque Choisie, vol. v.

His account of old philosophy. 10. The fourth chapter of the Intellectual System, of vast length, and occupying half the entire work, launches into a sea of old philosophy, in order to show the unity of a supreme God to have been a general belief of antiquity. “In this fourth chapter,” he says “we were necessitated by the matter itself to run out into philology and antiquity, as also in the other parts of the book we do often give an account of the doctrine of the ancients; which, however, some over-severe philosophers may look upon fastidiously or undervalue and depreciate, yet as we conceived it often necessary, so possibly may the variety thereof not be ungrateful to others, and this mixture of philology throughout the whole sweeten and allay the severity of philosophy to them; the main thing which the book pretends to, in the meantime, being the philosophy of religion. But for our part, we neither call philology, nor yet philosophy, our mistress, but serve ourselves of either as occasion requireth.”[763]

[763] Preface, p. 37.

11. The whole fourth chapter may be reckoned one great episode, and as it contains a store of useful knowledge on ancient philosophy, it has not only been more read than the remaining part of the Intellectual System, but has been the cause, in more than one respect, that the work has been erroneously judged. Thus, Cudworth has been reckoned, by very respectable authorities, in the Platonic school of philosophers, and even in that of the later Platonists; for which I perceive little other reason than that he has gone diffusely into a supposed resemblance between the Platonic and Christian Trinity. Whether we agree with him in this or no, the subject is insulated, and belongs only to the history of theological opinion; in Cudworth’s own philosophy he appears to be an eclectic, not the vassal of Plato, Plotinus, or Aristotle, though deeply versed in them all.

His arguments against atheism. 12. In the fifth and last chapter of the first and only book of the Intellectual System, Cudworth, reverting to the various atheistical arguments which he had stated in the second chapter, answers them at great length, and though not without much erudition, perhaps more than was requisite, yet depending chiefly on his own stores of reasoning. And inasmuch as even a second-rate philosopher ranks higher in literary precedence than the most learned reporter of other men’s doctrine, it may be unfortunate for Cudworth’s reputation that he consumed so much time in the preceding chapter upon mere learning, even though that should be reckoned more useful and valuable than his own reasonings. These, however, are frequently valuable, and, as I have intimated above, he is partially tinctured by the philosophy of his own generation, while he endeavours to tread in the ancient paths. Yet he seems not aware of the place which Bacon, Descartes, and Gassendi were to hold; and not only names them sometimes with censure, hardly with praise, but most inexcusably throws out several intimations that they had designedly served the cause of atheism. The disposition of the two former to slight the argument from final causes, though it might justly be animadverted upon, could not warrant this most uncandid and untrue aspersion. But justice was even-handed; Cudworth himself did not escape the slander of bigots; it was idly said by Dryden, that he had put the arguments against a Deity so well, that some thought he had not answered them, and if Warburton may be believed, the remaining part of the Intellectual System was never published, on account of the world’s malignity in judging of the first.[764] Probably it was never written.

[764] Warburton’s preface to Divine Legation, vol. ii.

13. Cudworth is too credulous and uncritical about ancient writings, defending all as genuine, even where his own age had been sceptical. His terminology is stiff and pedantic, as is the case with all our older metaphysicians, abounding in words, which the English language has not recognised. He is full of the ancients, but rarely quotes the schoolmen. Hobbes is the adversary with whom he most grapples; the materialism, the resolving all ideas into sensation, the low morality of that writer, were obnoxious to the animadversion of so strenuous an advocate of a more elevated philosophy. In some respects, Cudworth has, as I conceive, much the advantage; in others, he will generally be thought by our metaphysicians to want precision and logical reasoning; and, upon the whole, we must rank him, in philosophical acumen, far below Hobbes, Malebranche, and Locke, but also far above any mere Aristotelians, or retailers of Scotus and Aquinas.

More. 14. Henry More, though by no means less eminent than Cudworth in his own age, ought not to be placed on the same level. More fell not only into the mystical notions of the later Platonists, but even of the Cabbalistic writers. His metaphysical philosophy was borrowed in great measure from them; and though he was in correspondence with Descartes, and enchanted with the new views that opened upon him, yet we find that he was reckoned much less of a Cartesian afterwards, and even wrote against parts of the theory.[765] The most peculiar tenet of More was the extension of spirit; acknowledging and even striving for the souls’ immateriality, he still could not conceive it to be unextended. Yet it seems evident that if we give extension as well as figure, which is implied in finite extension, to the single self-conscious monad, qualities as heterogeneous to thinking as material impenetrability itself, we shall find it in vain to deny the possibility at least of the latter. Some, indeed, might question whether what we call matter is any real being at all, except as extension under peculiar conditions. But this conjecture need not here be pressed.

[765] Baillet, Vie de Descartes, liv. vii. It must be observed that More never wholly agreed with Descartes. Thus they differed about the omnipresence of the Deity; Descartes thought that he was partout à raison de sa puissance, et qu’à raison de son essence il n’a absolument aucune rélation au lieu. More, who may be called a lover of extension, maintained a strictly local presence. Œuvres de Descartes, vol. x., p. 239.

Gassendi. 15. Gassendi himself, by the extensiveness of his erudition, may be said to have united the two schools of speculative philosophy, the historical and the experimental, though the character of his mind determined him far more towards the latter. He belongs in point of time rather to the earlier period of the century; but his Syntagma Philosophicum having been published in 1658, we have deferred the review of it for this volume. This posthumous work, in two volumes folio, and nearly 1600 pages closely printed in double columns, is divided into three parts, the Logic, the Physics, and the Ethics; the second occupying more than five-sixths of the whole. |His Logic.| The Logic is introduced by two proœmial books; one containing a history of the science from Zeno of Elea, the parent of systematic logic, to Bacon and Descartes;[766] the other, still more valuable, on the criteria of truth; shortly criticising also, in a chapter of this book, the several schemes of logic which he had merely described in the former. After stating very prolixly, as is usual with him, the arguments of the sceptics against the evidence of the senses, and those of the dogmatics, as he calls them, who refer the sole criterion of truth to the understanding, he propounds a sort of middle course. It is necessary, he observes, before we can infer truth, that there should be some sensible sign, αισθητον σημειον; for, since all the knowledge we possess is derived from the sense, the mind must first have some sensible image, by which it may be led to a knowledge of what is latent and not perceived by sense. Hence, we may distinguish in ourselves a double criterion; one by which we perceive the sign—namely, the senses; another, by which we understand through reasoning the latent thing—namely, the intellect or rational faculty.[767] This he illustrates by the pores of the skin, which we do not perceive, but infer their existence by observing the permeation of moisture.

[766] Prætereundum porro non est ob eam, quâ est, celebritatem Organum, sive logica Francisci Baconis Verulamii. He extols Bacon highly, but gives an analysis of the Novum Organum without much criticism. De Logicæ Origine, c. x.

Logica Verulamii, Gassendi says in another place, tota ac per se ad physicam, atque adeo ad veritatem notitiamve rerum germanam habendam contendit. Præcipuè autem in eo est, ut bene imaginemur, quatenus vult esse imprimis exuenda omnia præjudicia ac novas deinde notiones ideasve ex novis debitèque factis experimentis inducendas. Logica Cartesii rectè quidem Verulamii imitatione ab eo exorditur, quod ad bene imaginandum prava prejudicia exuenda, recta vero induenda vult, &c., p. 90.

[767] P. 81. If this passage be well attended to, it will show how the philosophy of Gassendi has been misunderstood by those who confound it with the merely sensual school of metaphysicians. No one has more clearly, or more at length, distinguished the αισθητον σημειον, the sensible associated sign, from the unimaginable objects of pure intellect, as we shall soon see.

His theory of ideas. 16. In the first part of the treatise itself on Logic, to which these two books are introductory, Gassendi lays down again his favourite principle, that every idea in the mind is ultimately derived from the senses. But while what the senses transmit are only singular ideas, the mind has the faculty of making general ideas out of a number of these singular ones when they resemble each other.[768] In this part of his Logic he expresses himself clearly and unequivocally a conceptualist.

[768] P. 93.

17. The Physics were expanded with a prodigality of learning upon every province of nature. Gassendi is full of quotation, and his systematic method manifests the comprehensiveness of his researches. In the third book of the second part of the third section of the Physics, he treats of the immateriality, and, in the fourteenth, of the immortality of the soul, and maintains the affirmative of both propositions. This may not be what those who judge of Gassendi merely from his objections to the Meditations of Descartes have supposed. But a clearer insight into his metaphysical theory will be obtained from the ninth book of the same part of the Physics, entitled, De Intellectu, on the Human Understanding.

And of the nature of the soul. 18. In this book, after much display of erudition on the tenets of philosophers, he determines the soul to be an incorporeal substance, created by God, and infused into the body, so that it resides in it as an informing and not merely a present nature, forma informans, et non simpliciter assistens.[769] He next distinguishes intellection or understanding from imagination or perception; which is worthy of particular notice, because in his controversy with Descartes he had thrown out doubts as to any distinction between them. We have in ourselves a kind of faculty which enables us, by means of reasoning, to understand that which by no endeavours we can imagine or represent to the mind.[770] Of this the size of the sun, or innumerable other examples might be given; the mind having no idea suggested by the imagination of the sun’s magnitude, but knowing it by a peculiar process of reasoning. And hence we infer that the intellectual soul is immaterial, because it understands that which no material image presents to it, as we infer also that the imaginative faculty is material, because it employs the images supplied by sense. It is true that the intellect makes use of these sensible images, as steps towards its reasoning upon things which cannot be imagined; but the proof of its immateriality is given by this, that it passes beyond all material images, and attains a true knowledge of that whereof it has no image.

[769] P. 440.