s. 5.
It would be no easy matter to decide, whether Mede plus More was at a
greater distance from the meaning, or Grotius from the poetry, of this
eleventh chapter of the Revelations; whether Mede was more wild, or
Grotius more tame, flat, and prosaic.
Ib.
c. 17. s. 8.
The Old and New Testament, which by a prosopopœia are here
called the two witnesses.
Where is the probability of this so long before the existence of the
collection since called the New Testament?
Ib.
vi. c. l. s. 2.
We may draw from this passage (1
Thess
. iv. 16, 17.) the strongest
support of the fact of the ascension of Christ, or at least of St.
Paul's (and of course of the first generation of Christians') belief of
it. For had they not believed his ascent, whence could they have derived
the universal expectation of his descent, — his bodily, personal descent?
The only scruple is, that all these circumstances were parts of the
Jewish
cabala
or idea of the Messiah by the spiritualists before
the Christian æra, and therefore taken for granted with respect to Jesus
as soon as he was admitted to be the Messiah.
Ib.
s. 6.
But light-minded men, whose hearts are made dark with infidelity, care
not what antic distortions they make in interpreting Scripture, so
they bring it to any show of compliance with their own fancy and
incredulity.
Why so very harsh a censure? What moral or spiritual, or even what
physical, difference can be inferred from all men's dying, this of one
thing, that of another, a third, like the martyrs, burnt alive, or all
in the same way? In any case they all die, and all pass to judgment.
Ib.
c. 15.
With his
semi
-Cartesian,
semi
-Platonic,
semi
-Christian notions, Henry More makes a sad jumble in his
assertion of chronochorhistorical Christianity.
decisive reference
to the ascension of the visible and tangible Jesus from the surface of
the earth upward through the clouds, pointed out in the writings of St.
Paul or in the Gospel, beginning as it certainly did, and as in the copy
according to Mark it now does, with the baptism of John, or in the
writings of the Apostle John, would have been more effective in flooring
Old Nic of Amsterdam
and his familiars, than volumes of such
"maybe's," "perhapses," and "should be rendered," as these.
Ib.
viii. c. 2. c. 6.
I must confess our Saviour compiled no books, it being a piece of
pedantry below so noble and divine a person, &c.
Alas! all this is woefully beneath the dignity of Henry More, and
shockingly against the majesty of the High and Holy One, so very
unnecessarily compared with Hendrick Nicholas, of Amsterdam, mercer!
Ib.
x. c. 13. s. 5, 6.
A new sect naturally attracts to itself a portion of the madmen of the
time, and sets another portion into activity as alarmists and
oppugnants. I cannot therefore pretend to say what More might not have
found in the writings, or heard from the mouth, of some lunatic who
called himself a Quaker. But I do not recollect, in any work of an
acknowledged Friend, a denial of the facts narrated by the Evangelists,
as having really taken place in the same sense as any other facts of
history. If they were symbols of spiritual acts and processes, as Fox
and Penn contended, they must have been, or happened; — else how could
they be symbols?
It is too true, however, that the positive creed of the Quakers is and
ever has been extremely vague and misty. The deification of the
conscience, under the name of the Spirit, seems the main article of
their faith; and of the rest they form no opinion at all, considering it
neither necessary nor desirable. I speak of Quakers in general. But what
a lesson of experience does not this thirteenth chapter of so great and
good a man as H. More afford to us, who know what the Quakers really
are! Had the followers of George Fox, or any number of them
collectively, acknowledged the mad notions of this Hendrick Nicholas? If
not — —
Index p. 2
Part II. ii. c. 2.
Confutation of Grotius on the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse.
Has or has not Grotius been overrated? If Grotius applied these words
(
magnus testis et historiarum diligentissimus inquisitor
) to
Epiphanius in honest earnest, and not ironically, he must have been
greatly inferior in sound sense and critical tact both to Joseph
Scaliger and to Rhenferd. Strange, that to Henry More, a poet and a man
of fine imagination, it should never have occurred to ask himself,
whether this scene, Patmos, with which the drama commences, was not a
part of the poem, and, like all other parts, to be interpreted
symbolically? That the poetic — and I see no reason for doubting the
real — date of the Apocalypse is under Vespasian, is so evidently implied
in the five kings preceding (for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, were
abortive emperors) that it seems to me quite lawless to deny it. That
[Greek: Lateinos] is the meaning of the 666, (c. xiii. 18.) and the
treasonable character of this, are both shown by Irenæus's pretended
rejection, and his proposal of the perfectly senseless
Teitan
instead.
Folio. 1708. — Ed.
Decem dierum vix mihi est familia
. Heaut. v. i. — Ed.
Hendrick Nicholas and the Family of Love. — Ed.
Heinrichs Commentary on the Apocalypse1
P. 245.
It seems clear that Irenæus invented the unmeaning
Teitan
, in
order to save himself from the charge of treason, to which the
Lateinos
might have exposed him. See Rabelais
passim
.
P.246.
Nec magis blandiri poterit alterum illud nomen, Teitan, quod
studiose commendavit Irenœus.
No!
non studiose, sed ironice commendavit Irenæus
. Indeed it is
ridiculous to suppose that Irenæus was in earnest with
Teitan
.
His meaning evidently is: — if not
Lateinos
, which has a meaning,
it is some one of the many names having the same numeral power, to which
a meaning is to be found by the fulfillment of the prophecy. My own
conviction is, that the whole is an ill-concerted conundrum, the secret
of which died with the author. The general purpose only can be
ascertained, namely, some test, partaking of religious obligation, of
allegiance to the sovereignty of the Roman Emperor.
If I granted for a moment the truth of Heinrichs's supposition, namely,
that, according to the belief of the Apocalypt, the line of the Emperors
would cease in Titus the seventh or complete number (Galba, Otho, and
Vitellius, being omitted) by the advent of the Messiah; — if I found my
judgment more coerced by his arguments than it is, — then I should use
this book as evidence of the great and early discrepance between the
Jewish-Christian Church and the Pauline; and my present very serious
doubts respecting the identity of John the Theologian and John the
Evangelist would become fixed convictions of the contrary.
P. 91. Rev. xvii. 11.
Among other grounds for doubting this interpretation (that
the
eighth
in v.11. is Satan), I object,
- that it almost necessitates
the substitution of the Coptic Greek: aggelos for Greek: ogdoos
against all the MSS., and without any Patristic hint. For it seems a
play with words unworthy the writer, to make Satan, who possessed all
the seven, himself an eighth, and still worse if the
eighth:
- that it is not only a great and causeless inconcinnity in
style, but a wanton adding of obscurity to the obscure to have, first,
so carefully distinguished (c. xiii. 1-11.) the Greek: drák_on from
the two Greek: tháeria and the one Greek: thaeríon from the other,
and then to make Greek: thaeríon the appellative of the Greek: drák_on: as if having in one place told of Nicholas senior, Dick
and another Dick his cousin, I should soon after talk of Dick, meaning
old Nicholas by that name; that is, having discriminated Nicholas from
Dick, then to say Dick, meaning Nicholas!
Rev
. xix. 9.
These words might well bear a more recondite interpretation; that is,
Greek: outoi
(these blessed ones) are the true
Greek: lógoi
or
Greek: tékna Theou
as the Logos is the
Greek: huiòs Theou
.
Ib.
10.
According to the law of symbolic poetry this sociable angel (the
Beatrice of the Hebrew Dante) ought to be, and I doubt not is,
sensu
symbolico
, an angel; that is, the angel of the Church of Ephesus,
John the Evangelist, according to the opinion of Eusebius.
P. 294. Rev. xx.
Millennium
.
Die vorzüglichsten Bekenner Jesu sollen auferstehen, die übrigen
Menschen sollen es nicht. Hiesse jenes, sie sollen noch nach ihrem
Tode fortwürken, so wäre das letztere falsch: denn auch die übrigen
würken nach ihrem Tode durch ihre schriften, ihre Andenken, ihre
Beispiel.
Euge! Heinrichi
. O, the sublime bathos of thy prosaism — the muddy
eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only man to understand a poet!
I have too clearly before me the idea of a poet's genius to deem myself
other than a very humble poet; but in the very possession of the idea, I
know myself so far a poet as to feel assured that I can understand and
interpret a poem in the spirit of poetry, and with the poet's spirit.
Like the ostrich, I cannot fly, yet have I wings that give me the
feeling of flight; and as I sweep along the plain, can look up toward
the bird of Jove, and can follow him and say:
"Sovereign of the
air, — who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the inaccessible rock,
who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and halting-place, and,
scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right above thee, imprintest
thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that shoot back and scatter
round his glittering shafts, — I pay thee homage. Thou art my king. I
give honor due to the vulture, the falcon, and all thy noble baronage;
and no less to the lowly bird, the sky-lark, whom thou permittest to
visit thy court, and chant her matin song within its cloudy curtains;
yea the linnet, the thrush, the swallow, are my brethren: — but still I
am a bird, though but a bird of the earth.
"Monarch of our kind, I am a bird, even as thou; and I have shed
plumes, which have added beauty to the beautiful, and grace to terror,
waving over the maiden's brow and on the helmed head of the war-chief;
and majesty to grief, drooping o'er the car of death!"
Göttingen, 1821. The few following notes are, something out
of order, inserted here in consequence of their connection with the
immediately preceding remarks in the text. — Ed.
Life of Bishop Hacket1
Ib.
p. 8.
Yet he would often dispute the necessity of a country living for a
London minister to retire to in hot summer time, out of the sepulchral
air of a churchyard, where most of them are housed in the city, and
found for his own part that by Whitsuntide he did rus anhelare,
and unless he took fresh air in the vacation, he was stopt in his
lungs and could not speak clear after Michaelmas.
A plausible reason certainly why A. and B. should occasionally change
posts, but a very weak one, methinks, for A.'s having both livings all
the year through.
Ib.
p. 42-3.
The Bishop was an enemy to all separation from the Church of England;
but their hypocrisy he thought superlative that allowed the doctrine,
and yet would separate for mislike of the discipline. ... And
therefore he wished that as of old all kings and other Christians
subscribed to the Conciliary Decrees, so now a law might pass that all
justices of peace should do so in England, and then they would be more
careful to punish the depravers of Church Orders.
The little or no effect of recent experience and sufferings still more
recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a
man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on
account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be
indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal in those who did not
think them indifferent, — how doubly criminal must the imposition have
been, and how tenfold criminal the perseverance in occasioning
separation; how guilty the imprisoning, impoverishing, driving into
wildernesses their Christian brethren for admitted indifferentials in
direct contempt of St. Paul's positive command to the contrary!
Index p. 2
Serm. I. Luke ii. 7.
Moreover as the woman Mary did bring forth the son who bruised the
serpent's head, which brought sin into the world by the woman Eve, so
the Virgin Mary was the occasion of grace as the Virgin Eve was the
cause of damnation. Eve had not known Adam as yet when she was
beguiled and seduced the man; so Mary, &c.
A Rabbinical fable or gloss on Gen. iii. 1. Hacket is offensively fond
of these worse than silly vanities.
Ib.
p. 5.
The more to illustrate this, you must know that there was a twofold
root or foundation of the children of Israel for their temporal being:
Abraham was the root of the people; the kingdom was rent from Saul,
and therefore David was the root of the kingdom; among all the kings
in the pedigree none but he hath the name; and Jesse begat David the
king, and David the king begat Solomon; and therefore so often as God
did profess to spare the people, though he were angry, he says he
would do it for Abraham's sake: so often as he professeth to spare the
kingdom of Judah, he says he would do it for his servant David's sake;
so that ratione radicis, as Abraham and David are roots of the
people and kingdom, especially Christ is called the Son of David, the
Son of Abraham.
A valuable remark, and confirmative of my convictions respecting the
conversion of the Jews, namely, that whatever was ordained for them as
Abrahamidæ
is not repealed by Christianity, but only what
appertained to the republic, kingdom, or state. The modern conversions
are, as it seems to me, in the face of God's commands.
Ib.
I come to the third strange condition of the birth; it was without
travel, or the pangs of woman, as I will shew you out of these words;
fasciis involvit, that she wrapt him in swaddling clouts,
and laid him in a manger. Ipsa genitrix fuit obstetrix, says St.
Cyprian. Mary was both the mother and the midwife of the child; far be
it from us to think that the weak hand of the woman could facilitate
the work which was guided only by the miraculous hand of God. The
Virgin conceived our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, and
therefore she had not the pangs and travel of woman upon her, she
brought him forth without the curse of the flesh. These be the
Fathers' comparisons. As bees draw honey from the flower without
offending it, as Eve was taken out of Adam's side without any grief to
him, as a sprig issues out of the bark of a tree, as the sparkling
light from the brightness of the star, such ease was it to Mary to
bring forth her first born son; and therefore having no weakness in
her body, feeling no want of vigor, she did not deliver him to any
profane hand to be drest, but by a special ability, above all that are
newly delivered, she wrapt him in swaddling clouts. Gravida, sed
non gravabatur; she had a burden in her womb, before she was
delivered, and yet she was not burdened for her journey which she took
so instantly before the time of the child's birth. From Nazareth to
Bethlem was above forty miles, and yet she suffered it without
weariness or complaint, for such was the power of the Babe, that
rather he did support the Mother's weakness than was supported; and as
he lighted his Mother's travel by the way from Nazareth to Bethlem
that it was not tedious to her tender age, so he took away all her
dolour and imbecility from her travel in child-birth, and therefore
she wrapt him in swaddling clouts.
A very different paragraph indeed, and quite on the cross road to Rome!
It really makes me melancholy; but it is one of a thousand instances of
the influence of Patristic learning, by which the Reformers of the Latin
Church were distinguished from the renovators of the Christian religion.
Can we wonder that the strict Protestants were jealous of the
backsliding of the Arminian prelatical clergy and of Laud their leader,
when so strict a Calvinist as Bishop Hacket could trick himself up in
such fantastic rags and lappets of Popish monkery! — could skewer such
frippery patches, cribbed from the tyring room of Romish Parthenolatry,
on the sober gown and cassock of a Reformed and Scriptural Church!
Ib.
p. 7.
But to say the truth, was he not safer among the beasts than he could
be elsewhere in all the town of Bethlem? His enemies perchance would
say unto him, as Jael did to Sisera, Turn in, turn in, my Lord,
when she purposed to kill him; as the men of Keilah made a fair shew
to give David all courteous hospitality, but the issue would prove, if
God had not blessed him, that they meant to deliver him into the hands
of Saul that sought his blood. So there was no trusting of the
Bethlemites. Who knows, but that they would have prevented Judas, and
betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver unto Herod? More humanity is
to be expected from the beasts than from some men, and therefore she
laid him in a manger.
Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove otherwise, I should have
inferred from these Sermons that Hacket from his first boyhood had been
used to make themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on all
the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had found abundant
nourishment for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities in the
study of the Fathers and glossers; and remained a
junior soph
all
his life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a
triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in
offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the
dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the
Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a
traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on
the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in
it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its
overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as
the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on
the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that
stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war!
Ib.
Serm. II. Luke ii. 8.
Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the
great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the
other gods which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not
please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was
a god not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention.
, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and
Suetonius — above all, of Tacitus and Pliny — outweigh in my mind the
positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same
ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by
Tertullian
.
Ib.
Serm. III. Luke ii. 9.
But our bodies shall revive out of that dust into which they were
dissolved, and live for ever in the resurrection of the righteous.
I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of
this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant,
Thou fool! not that, &c
. I have at times almost been tempted to
conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine
disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and
therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists'
Greek: katà sárka
to
the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens;
for so Tarsus was called.
And was there no symptom of a commencing relapse to the errors of that
Church which had equalled the traditions of men, yea, the dreams of
phantasts with the revelations of God, when a chosen elder with the law
of truth before him, and professing to divide and distribute the bread
of life, could, paragraph after paragraph, place such unwholesome
vanities as these before his flock, without even a hint which might
apprize them that the gew-gaw comfits were not part of the manna from
heaven? All this superstitious trash about angels, which the Jews
learned from the Persian legends, asserted as confidently as if Hacket
had translated it word for word from one of the four Gospels! Salmasius,
if I mistake not, supposes the original word to have been bachelors,
young unmarried men. Others interpret angels as meaning the bishop and
elders of the Church. More probably it was a proverbial expression
derived from the Cherubim in the Temple: something as the country folks
used to say to children, Take care, the Fairies will hear you! It was a
common notion among the Jews, in the time of St. Paul, that their angels
were employed in carrying up their prayers to the throne of God. Of
course they must have been in special attendance in a house of prayer.
After much search and much thought on the subject of angels as a diverse
kind of finite beings, I find no sufficing reason to hold it for a
revealed doctrine, and if not revealed it is assuredly no truth of
philosophy, which, as I have elsewhere remarked, can conceive but three
kinds:
- the infinite reason;
- the finite rational; and
- the finite
irrational — that is, God, man, and beast.
What indeed, even for the
vulgar, is or can an archangel be but a man with wings, better or worse
than the wingless species according as the feathers are white or black?
I would that the word had been translated instead of Anglicised in our
English Bible.
The following paragraph is one of Hacket's sweetest passages. It is
really a beautiful little hymn.
By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur
in the angels' message to set out the majesty of the Son of God: and I
beseech you observe, — all you that would keep a good Christmas as you
ought, — that the glory of God is the best celebration of his Son's
nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but
rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed, without riot,
without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride and vain
pomp, in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were
round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but
frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered
outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss
rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the
people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanctity
of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in
want! This is the glory of God shining round, and the most Christian
solemnizing of the birth of Jesus.
Index p. 2
As the Temptation is found in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and
Luke, it must have formed part of the
Prot-evangelion
, or
original Gospel; — from the Apostles, therefore, it must have come, and
from some or all who had heard the account from our Lord himself. How,
then, are we to understand it? To confute the whims and superstitious
nugacities of these Sermons, and the hundred other comments and
interpretations
ejusdem farinæ
, would be a sad waste of time. Yet
some meaning, and that worthy of Christ, it must have had. The struggle
with the suggestions of the evil principle, first, to force his way and
compel belief by a succession of miracles, disjoined from moral and
spiritual purpose, — miracles for miracles' sake; — second, doubts of his
Messianic character and divinity, and temptations to try it by some
ordeal at the risk of certain death; — third, to interpret his mission,
as his countrymen generally did, to be one of conquest and
royalty; — these perhaps — but I am lost in doubt.
Index p. 2
Luke IX. 33.
I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren,
my kinsmen according to the flesh.
Rom. ix. 3.
St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he
speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a
transient passion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse, — an
impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and
not completed by an act and confirmation of the will, — as a striking
proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the
welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compassion
for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted
it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so
they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as
possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying
child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!'
Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine passage in
Shakspeare — Hotspur's rapture-like reverie — so often ridiculed by
shallow wits. In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing
weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the
moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the
infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the
present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might
inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden
sense of the depth of its moral strength.