In fine
.
I have written but few marginal notes to this long Treatise, for the
whole is to my feeling and apprehension so Romish, so anti-Pauline, so
unctionless, that it makes my very heart as dry as the desert sands,
when I read it.
of partial animadversions, I prescribe the
chapter on the Law and the Gospel, in Luther's
Table Talk
, as the
general antidote.
index p. 2
Ib.
Obj. iv. p. 346.
But if Original Sin be not a sin properly, why are children baptized?
And what benefit comes to them by Baptism? I answer, as much as they
need, and are capable of.
The eloquent man has plucked just prickles enough out of the dogma of
Original Sin to make a thick and ample crown of thorns for his
opponents; and yet left enough to tear his own clothes off his back, and
pierce through the leather jerkin of his closeliest wrought logic. In
this answer to this objection he reminds me of the renowned squire, who
first scratched out his eyes in a quickset hedge, and then leaped back
and scratched them in again. So Jeremy Taylor first pulls out the very
eyes of the doctrine, leaves it blind and blank, and then leaps back
into it and scratches them in again, but with a most opulent squint that
looks a hundred ways at once, and no one can tell which it really looks
at.
Ib.
By Baptism children are made partakers of the Holy Ghost and of the
grace of God; which I desire to be observed in opposition to the
Pelagian heresy, who did suppose nature to be so perfect, that the
grace of God was not necessary, and that by nature alone, they could
go to heaven; which because I affirm to be impossible, and that
Baptism is therefore necessary, because nature is insufficient and
Baptism is the great channel of grace, &c.
What then of the poor heathens, that is, of five-sixths of all mankind.
Would more go to hell by nature alone? If so: where is God's justice in
Taylor's plan more than in Calvin's?
Ib.
Obj. v. p. 355.
Although I have shewn the great excess and abundance of grace by
Christ over the evil that did descend by Adam; yet the proportion and
comparison lies in the main emanation of death from one, and life from
the other.
Does Jeremy Taylor then believe that the sentence of death on Adam and
his sons extended to the soul; that death was to be absolute cessation
of being! Scarcely I hope. But if bodily only, where is the difference
between
ante
and
post Christum?
Ib.
p. 356.
Not that God could be the author of a sin to any, but that he
appointed the evil which is the consequent of sin, to be upon their
heads who descended from the sinner.
Rare justice! and this too in a tract written to rescue God's justice
from the Supra- and Sub-lapsarians! How quickly would Taylor have
detected in an adversary the absurd realization contained in this and
the following passages of the abstract notion, sin, from the sinner: as
if sin were any thing but a man sinning, or a man who has sinned! As
well might a sin committed in Sirius or the planet Saturn justify the
infliction of conflagration on the earth and hell-fire on all its
rational inhabitants. Sin! the word sin! for abstracted from the sinner
it is no more: and if not abstracted from him, it remains separate from
all others.
Ib.
p. 358.
The consequent of this discourse must needs at least be this; that it
is impossible that the greatest part of mankind should be left in the
eternal bonds of hell by Adam; for then quite contrary to the
discourse of the Apostle, there had been abundance of sin, but a
scarcity of grace.
And yet Jeremy Taylor will not be called a Pelagian. Why? Because
without grace superadded by Christ no man could be saved: that is, all
men must go to hell, and this not for any sin, but from a calamity, the
consequences of another man's sin, of which they were even ignorant. God
would not condemn them the sons of Adam for sin, but only inflicted on
them an evil, the necessary effect of which was that they should all
troop to the devil! And this is Jeremy Taylor's defence of God's
justice! The truth is Taylor was a Pelagian, believed that without
Christ thousands, Jews and heathens, lived wisely and holily, and went
to heaven; but this he did not dare say out, probably not even to
himself; and hence it is that he flounders backward and forward, now
upping and now downing.
truth, this eloquent Treatise may be compared to a statue of Janus,
with one face fixed on certain opponents, full of life and force, a
witty scorn on the lip, a brow at once bright and weighty with
satisfying reason: the other looking at the something instead of that
which had been confuted, maimed, noseless, and weather-bitten into a
sort of visionary confusion and indistinctness.
It looks like
this — aye and very like that — but how like it is, too, such another
thing!
index p. 3
Ib.
p. 367.
And they who are born eunuchs should be less infected by Adam's
pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of
desires.
The fact happens to be false: and then the vulgarity, most unworthy of
our dear Jeremy Taylor, of taking the mode of the manifestation of the
disobedience of the will to the reason, for the disobedience itself. St.
James would have taught him that he who offendeth against one, offendeth
against all; and that there is some truth in the Stoic paradox that all
crimes are equal. Equal is indeed a false phrase; and therein consists
the paradox, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is the same as
the falsehood. The truth is they are all the same in kind; but unequal
in degree. They are all alike, though not equally, against the
conscience.
Ib.
p. 369.
So that there is no necessity of a third place; but it concludes only
that in the state of separation from God's presence there is great
variety of degrees and kinds of evil, and every one is not the
extreme.
What is this? If hell be a state, and not a mere place, and a particular
state, its meaning must in common sense be a state of the worst sort. If
then there be a mere
pæna damni
, that is, the not being so blest
as some others may be; this is a different state
in genere
from
the
pæna sensus
:
ergo
, not hell;
ergo
rather a
third state; or else heaven. For every angel must be in it, than whom
another angel is happier; that is negatively damned, though positively
very happy.
Ib.
p. 370-1.
Just so it is in infants: hell was not made for man, but for devils;
and therefore it must be something besides mere nature that can bear
any man thither: mere nature goes neither to heaven or hell.
And how came the devils there? If it be hard to explain how Adam fell;
how much more hard to solve how purely spiritual beings could fall? And
nature! What? so much of nature, and no kind of attempt at a definition
of the word? Pray what is nature?
Ib.
p. 371.
I do not say that we, by that sin (original) deserved that death,
neither can death be properly a punishment of us, till we superadd
some evil of our own; yet Adam's sin deserved it, so that it was
justly left to fall upon us, we, as a consequent and punishment of his
sin, being reduced to our natural portion.
How? What is this but flying to the old Supra-lapsarian blasphemy of a
right of property in God over all his creatures, and destroying that
sacred distinction between person and thing which is the light and the
life of all law human and divine? Mercy on us! Is not agony, is not the
stone, is not blindness, is not ignorance, are not headstrong, inherent,
innate, and connate, passions driving us to sin when reason is least
able to withhold us, — are not all these punishments, grievous
punishments, and are they not inflicted on the innocent babe?
not
this the result infused into the
milk not mingled
of St. Peter;
spotting the immaculate begotten, souring and curdling the
innocence
without sin or malice
?
And if this be just, and
compatible with God's goodness, why all this outcry against St. Austin
and the Calvinists and the Lutherans, whose whole addition is a lame
attempt to believe guilt, where they cannot find it, in order to justify
a punishment which they do find?
Ib.
p. 379.
But then for the evil of punishment, that may pass further than the
action. If it passes upon the innocent, it is not a punishment to
them, but an evil inflicted by right of dominion; but yet by reason of
the relation of the afflicted to him that sinned, to him it is a
punishment.
Here the snake peeps out, and now takes its tail into its mouth. Right
of dominion! Nonsense! Things are not objects of right or wrong. Power
of dominion I understand, and right of judgment I understand; but right
of dominion can have no immediate, but only a relative, sense. I have a
right of dominion over this estate, that is, relatively to all other
persons. But if there be a
jus dominandi
over rational and free
agents, then why blame Calvin? For all attributes are then merged in
blind power: and God and fate are the same:
Greek: Zeùs kaì Moira kaì aeerophoitis Erinnús.
Strange Trinity! God, Necessity, and the Devil. But Taylor's scheme has
far worse consequences than Calvin's: for it makes the whole scheme of
Redemption a theatrical scenery. Just restore our bodies and corporeal
passions to a perfect
equilibrium
and fortunate instinct, and,
there being no guilt or defect in the soul, the Son of God, the Logos,
and Supreme Reason, might have remained unincarnate, uncrucified. In
short, Socinianism is as inevitable a deduction from Taylor's scheme as
Deism or Atheism is from Socinianism.
In fine
.
The whole of Taylor's confusion originated in this; — first, that he and
his adversaries confound original with hereditary sin; but chiefly that
neither he nor his adversaries had considered that guilt must be a
noumenon
; but that our images, remembrances, and consciousnesses
of our actions are
phænomena
. Now the
phænomenon
is in
time, and an effect: but the
noumenon
is not in time any more
than it is in space. The guilt has been before we are even conscious of
the action; therefore an original sin (that is, a sin universal and
essential to man as man, and yet guilt, and yet choice, and yet amenable
to punishment), may be at once true and yet in direct contradiction to
all our reasonings derived from
phænomena
, that is, facts of time
and space. But we ought not to apply the categories of appearance to the
Greek: ontos onta
of the intelligible or causative world. This (I
should say of Original Sin) is mystery! We do not so properly believe
it, as we know it. What is actual must be possible. But if we will
confound actuals with reals, and apply the rules of the latter to cases
of the former, we must blame ourselves for the clouds and darkness and
storms of opposing winds, which the error will not fail to raise. By the
same process an Atheist may demonstrate the contradictory nature of
eternity, of a being at once infinite and of resistless causality, and
yet intelligent. Jeremy Taylor additionally puzzled himself with Adam,
instead of looking into the fact in himself.
How came it that Taylor did not apply the same process to the congeneric
question of the freedom of the will? In half a dozen syllogisms he must
have gyved and hand-cuffed himself into blank necessity and mechanic
motions. All hangs together. Deny Original Sin, and you will soon deny
free will; — then virtue and vice; — and God becomes
Abracadabra
; a
sound, nothing else.
index p. 3
Ib.
p. 390-1.
To this it is answered as you see, there is a double guilt; a guilt of
person, and of nature. That is taken away, this is not: for sacraments
are given to persons, not to natures.
I need no other passage but this to convince me that Jeremy Taylor, the
angle in which the two
apices
of logic and rhetoric meet,
consummate in both, was yet no metaphysician. Learning, fancy,
discursive intellect,
tria juncta in uno
, and of each enough to
have alone immortalized a man, he had; but yet
Greek: ouden metà physin
. Images, conceptions, notions, such as leave him but one rival,
Shakspeare, there were; but no ideas. Taylor was a Gassendist. O! that
he had but meditated in the silence of his spirit on the mystery of an
I AM
! He would have seen that a person,
quoad
person, can
have nothing common or generic; and that where this finds place, the
person is corrupted by introsusception of a nature, which becomes evil
thereby, and on this relation only is an evil nature. The nature itself,
like all other works of God, is good, and so is the person in a yet
higher sense of the word, good, like all offsprings of the Most High.
But the combination is evil, and this not the work of God; and one of
the main ends and results of the doctrine of Original Sin is to silence
and confute the blasphemy that makes God the author of sin, without
avoiding it by fleeing to the almost equal blasphemy against the
conscience, that sin in the sense of guilt does not exist.
index p. 3
Perhaps the most wonderful of all Taylor's works. He seems, if I may so
say, to have transubstantiated his vast imagination and fancy into
subtlety not to be evaded, acuteness to which nothing remains
unpierceable, and indefatigable agility of argumentation. Add to these
an exhaustive erudition, and that all these are employed in the service
of reason and common sense; whereas in some of his Tracts he seems to
wield all sorts of wisdom and wit in defence of all sorts of folly and
stupidity. But these were
ad popellum
, and by virtue of the
falsitas dispensativa
, which he allowed himself.
Epist. dedicatory.
The question of transubstantiation.
I have no doubt that if the Pythagorean bond had successfully
established itself, and become a powerful secular hierarchy, there would
have been no lack of furious partizans to assert, yea, and to damn and
burn such as dared deny, that one was the same as two; two being two in
the same sense as one is one; that consequently 2 + 2 = 2 and 1 + 1 = 4. But I
should most vehemently doubt that this was the intention of Pythagoras,
or the sense in which the mysterious dogma was understood by the
thinking part of his disciples, who nevertheless were its professed
believers. I should be prepared to find that the true import and purport
of the article was no more than this; — that the one in order to its
manifestation must appear in and as two; that the act of re-union was
simultaneous with that of the self-production, (in the geometrical use
of the word 'produce,' as when a point produces, or evolves, itself on
each side into a bipolar line), and that the Triad is therefore the
necessary form of the Monad.
Even so is the dispute concerning Transubstantiation. I can easily
believe that a thousand monks and friars would pretend, as Taylor says, to 'disbelieve their eyes and ears, and defy their own reason,'
and to receive the dogma in the sense, or rather in the nonsense, here
ascribed to it by him, namely, that the phenomenal bread and wine were
the phenomenal flesh and blood. But I likewise know that the respectable
Roman Catholic theologians state the article free from a contradiction
in terms at least; namely, that in the consecrated elements the
noumena
of the phenomenal bread and wine are the same with that which
was the
noumenon
of the phenomenal flesh and blood of Christ when on
earth.
Let
M
represent a slab or plane of mahogany,
and
m
its ordinary supporter or under-prop; and
let
S
represent a slab or plane of silver,
and
s
its supporter.
Now to affirm that
M
=
S
is a contradiction,
or that
m
=
s
but it is no contradiction to say, that on certain occasions
(
S
having been removed)
s
is substituted for
m
and that what was
M
/
m
is by the command of the common master changed into
M
/
s
It may be false in fact, but it is not a self-contradiction in the
terms.
The mode in which
s
subsists in
M
/
s
may be inconceivable,
but not more so than the mode in which
m
subsists in
M
/
m
,
or that in which
s
subsisted in
S
/
s
I honestly confess that I should confine my grounds of opposition to the
article thus stated to its unnecessariness, to the want of sufficient
proofs from Scripture that I am bound to believe or trouble my head with
it. I am sure that Bishop Bull, who really did believe the Trinity,
without either Tritheism or Sabellianism, could not consistently have
used the argument of Taylor or of Tillotson in proof of the absurdity of
Transubstantiation.
Ib.
p. ccccxvi.
But for our dear afflicted mother, she is under the portion of a child
in the state of discipline, her government indeed hindered, but her
worshippings the same, the articles as true, and those of the church
of Rome as false as ever.
O how much there is in these few words, — the sweet and comely
sophistry, not of Taylor, but of human nature. Mother! child! state of
discipline! government hindered! that is to say, in how many instances,
scourgings hindered, dungeoning in dens foul as those of hell,
mutilation of ears and noses, and flattering the King mad with
assertions of his divine right to govern without a Parliament, hindered.
The best apology for Laud, Sheldon, and their fellows will ever be that
those whom they persecuted were as great persecutors as themselves, and
much less excusable.
Ib.
s. ii. p. 422.
In Synaxi Transubstantiationem sero definivit Ecclesia; diu satis
erat credere, sive sub pane consecrate, sive quocunque modo adesse
verum corpus Christi; so said the great Erasmus.
Verum corpus,
that is,
res ipsissima,
or the thing in its
actual self, opposed
Greek: to phainomen_o
.
Ib.
s. vi. p. 425.
Now that the spiritual is also a real presence, and that they are
hugely consistent, is easily credible to them that believe the gifts
of the Holy Ghost are real graces, and a spirit is a proper substance.
But how the body of Christ, as opposed to his Spirit and to his Godhead,
can be taken spiritually,
hic labor, hoc opus est.
Plotinus says,
Greek: kai hae hylae as_ómatos
; so we must say here
Greek: kaì tò s_oma as_ómaton
.
Ib.
s. vii. p. 426.
So we may say of the blessed Sacrament; Christ is more truly and
really present in spiritual presence than in corporal; in the heavenly
effect than in the natural being.
But the presence of Christ is not in question, but the presence of
Christ's body and blood. Now that Christ effected much for us by coming
in the body, which could not or would not have been effected had he not
assumed the body, we all, Socinians excepted, believe; but that his body
effected it, other than as Christ in the body, where shall we find? how
can we understand?
Ib.
p. 427.
So when it is said, Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom
of God, that is, corruption shall not inherit; and in the
resurrection, our bodies are said to be spiritual, that is, not in
substance, but in effect and operation.
This is, in the first place, a wilful interpretation, and secondly, it
is absurd; for what sort of flesh and blood would incorruptible flesh
and blood be? As well might we speak of marble flesh and blood. But in
Taylor's mind, as seen throughout, the logician was predominant over the
philosopher, and the fancy outbustled the pure intuitive imagination. In
the sense of St. Paul, as of Plato and all other dynamic philosophers,
flesh and blood is
ipso facto
corruption, that is, the spirit of
life in the mid or balancing state between fixation and reviviscence.
Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
is a Hebraism
for 'this death which the body is.' For matter itself is but
spiritus
in coagulo,
and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being
restored; it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as
matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital organ. In short,
Taylor seems to fall into the very fault he reproves in Bellarmine, and
with this additional evil, that his reasoning looks more like tricking
or explaining away a mystery. For wherein does the Sacrament of the
Eucharist differ from that of Baptism, nay, even of grace before meat,
when performed fervently and in faith? Here too Christ is present in the
hearts of the faithful by blessing and grace. I see at present no other
way of interpreting the text so as not to make the Sacrament a mere
arbitrary
memento,
but by an implied negative. In propriety, the
word is confined to no portion of corporality in particular. "This (the
bread and wine) are as truly my flesh and blood as the
phænomena
which you now behold and name as such."
Ib.
s. ix. p. 429.
From this paragraph I conclude, though not without some perplexity, that
by 'the body and blood verily and indeed taken,' we are not to
understand body and blood in their limited sense, as contradistinguished
from the soul or Godhead of Christ, but as a
periphrasis
for
Christ himself, or at least Christ's humanity. Taylor, however, has
misconstrued Phavorinus' meaning though not his words.
Spiritualia
eterna quoad spiritum.
But this is the very depth of the purified
Platonic philosophy.
Ib.
s. x. p. 430.
But because the words do perfectly declare our sense, and are owned
publicly in our doctrine and manner of speaking, it will be in vain to
object against us those words of the Fathers, which use the same
expressions: for if by virtue of those words 'really,'
'substantially,' 'corporally,' 'verily and indeed,' and 'Christ's body
and blood,' the Fathers shall be supposed to speak for
Transubstantiation, they may as well suppose it to be our doctrine
too; for we use the same words, and therefore those authorities must
signify nothing against us, unless these words can be proved in them
to signify more than our sense of them does import; and by this truth,
many, very many of their pretences are evacuated.
A sophism, dearest Jeremy. We use the words because these early Fathers
used them, and have forced our own definitions on them. But should we
have chosen these words to express our opinion by, if there had been no
controversy on the subject? But the Fathers chose and selected these
words as the most obvious and natural.
Ib.
s. xi. p. 431.
It is much insisted upou that it be inquired whether, when we say we
believe Christ's body to be really in the Sacrament, we mean 'that
body, that flesh, that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was
crucified, dead, and buried?' I answer, that I know none else that he
had or hath: there is but one body of Christ natural and glorified.