God forgive me, — or those who first set abroad this strange
Greek: metábasis eis allo génos,
this debtor and creditor scheme of expounding
the mystery of Redemption, or both! But I never can read the words, 'God
himself could not; and therefore took a body that could' — without being
reminded of the monkey that took the cat's paw to take the chestnuts out
of the fire, and claimed the merit of puss's sufferings. I am sure,
however, that the ludicrous images, under which this gloss of the
Calvinists embodies itself to my fancy, never disturb my recollections
of the adorable mystery itself. It is clear that a body, remaining a
body, can only suffer as a body: for no faith can enable us to believe
that the same thing can be at once A. and not A. Now that the body of
our Lord was not transelemented or transnatured by the
pleroma
indwelling, we are positively assured by Scripture. Therefore it would
follow from this most unscriptural doctrine, that the divine justice had
satisfaction made to it by the suffering of a body which had been
brought into existence for this special purpose, in lieu of the debt of
eternal misery due from, and leviable on, the bodies and souls of all
mankind! It is to this gross perversion of the sublime idea of the
Redemption by the cross, that we must attribute the rejection of the
doctrine of redemption by the Unitarian, and of the Gospel
in
toto
by the more consequent Deist.
Ib.
p. 2. C.
And yet, even this dwelling fullness, even in this person Christ
Jesus, by no title of merit in himself, but only quia
complacuit, because it pleased the Father it should be so.
This, in the intention of the preacher, may have been sound, but was it
safe, divinity? In order to the latter, methinks, a less equivocal word
than 'person' ought to have been adopted; as 'the body and soul of the
man Jesus, considered abstractedly from the divine Logos, who in it took
up humanity into deity, and was Christ Jesus.' Dare we say that there
was no self-subsistent, though we admit no self-originated, merit in the
Christ? It seems plain to me, that in this and sundry other passages of
St. Paul,
the Father
means the total triune Godhead.
It appears to me, that dividing the Church of England into two æras — the
first from Ridley to Field, or from Edward VI to the commencement of
the latter third of the reign of James I, and the second ending with
Bull and Stillingfleet, we might characterize their comparative
excellences thus: That the divines of the first æra had a deeper, more
genial, and a more practical insight into the mystery of Redemption, in
the relation of man toward both the act and the author, namely, in all
the inchoative states, the regeneration and the operations of saving
grace generally; — while those of the second æra possessed clearer and
distincter views concerning the nature and necessity of Redemption, in
the relation of God toward man, and concerning the connection of
Redemption with the article of Tri-unity; and above all, that they
surpassed their predecessors in a more safe and determinate scheme of
the divine economy of the three persons in the one undivided Godhead.
indeed, was mainly owing to Bishop Bull's masterly work
De Fide
Nicæna
,
which in the next generation Waterland so admirably
maintained, on the one hand, against the philosophy of the Arians, — the
combat ending in the death and burial of Arianism, and its descent and
metempsychosis
into Socinianism, and thence again into modern
Unitarianism, — and on the other extreme, against the oscillatory creed
of Sherlock, now swinging to Tritheism in the recoil from Sabellianism,
and again to Sabellianism in the recoil from Tritheism.
Ib.
First, we are to consider this fullness to have been in Christ, and
then, from this fullness arose his merits; we can consider no merit in
Christ himself before, whereby he should merit this fullness; for this
fullness was in him before he merited any thing; and but for this
fullness he had not so merited. Ille homo, ut in unitatem filii Dei
assumeretur, unde meruit? How did that man (says St. Augustine,
speaking of Christ, as of the son of man), how did that man merit to
be united in one person with the eternal Son of God? Quid egit
ante? Quid credidit? What had he done? Nay, what had he believed?
Had he either faith or works before that union of both natures?
Dr. Donne and St. Augustine said this without offence; but I much
question whether the same would be endured now. That it is, however, in
the spirit of Paul and of the Gospel, I doubt not to affirm, and that
this great truth is obscured by what in my judgment is the
post-Apostolic
Christopœdia
, I am inclined to think.
Ib.
What canst thou imagine he could foresee in thee? a propensness, a
disposition to goodness, when his grace should come? Either there is
no such propensness, no such disposition in thee, or, if there be,
even that propensness and disposition to the good use of grace, is
grace; it is an effect of former grace, and his grace wrought before
he saw any such propensness, any such disposition; grace was first,
and his grace is his, it is none of thine.
One of many instances in dogmatic theology, in which the half of a
divine truth has passed into a fearful error by being mistaken for the
whole truth.
Ib.
p. 6. D.
God's justice required blood, but that blood is not spilt, but poured
from that head to our hearts, into the veins and wounds of our own
souls: there was blood shed, but no blood lost.
It is affecting to observe how this great man's mind sways and
oscillates between his reason, which demands in the word 'blood' a
symbolic meaning, a spiritual interpretation, and the habitual awe for
the letter; so that he himself seems uncertain whether he means the
physical lymph,
serum,
and globules that trickled from the wounds
of the nails and thorns down the sides and face of Jesus, or the blood
of the Son of Man, which he who drinketh not cannot live. Yea, it is
most affecting to see the struggles of so great a mind to preserve its
inborn fealty to the reason under the servitude to an accepted article
of belief, which was, alas! confounded with the high obligations of
faith; — faith the co-adunation of the finite individual will with the
universal reason, by the submission of the former to the latter. To
reconcile redemption by the material blood of Jesus with the mind of the
spirit, he seeks to spiritualize the material blood itself in all men!
And a deep truth lies hidden even in this.
the whole is a
profound subject, the true solution of which may best, God's grace
assisting, be sought for in the collation of Paul with John, and
specially in St. Paul's assertion that we are baptized into the death of
Christ, that we may be partakers of his resurrection and
life
. It was not on the visible cross, it was not directing
attention to the blood-drops on his temples and sides, that our blessed
Redeemer said,
This is my body
, and
this is my blood
!
Ib.
p. 9. A.
But if we consider those who are in heaven, and have been so from the
first minute of their creation, angels, why have they, or how have
they any reconciliation? &c.
The history and successive meanings of the term 'angels' in the Old and
New Testaments, and the idea that shall reconcile all as so many several
forms, and as it were perspectives, of one and the same truth — this is
still a
desideratum
in Christian theology.
Ib.
C.
For, at the general resurrection, (which is rooted in the resurrection
of Christ, and so hath relation to him) the creature shall be
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of
the children of God; for which the whole creation groans, and travails
in pain yet. (Rom. viii. 21.) This deliverance then from this
bondage the whole creature hath by Christ, and that is their
reconciliation. And then are we reconciled by the blood of his cross,
when having crucified ourselves by a true repentance, we receive the
real reconciliation in his blood in the sacrament. But the most proper
and most literal sense of these words, is, that all things in heaven
and earth be reconciled to God (that is, to his glory, to a fitter
disposition to glorify him) by being reconciled to another in Christ;
that in him, as head of the church, they in heaven, and we upon earth,
be united together as one body in the communion of saints.
A very meagre and inadequate interpretation of this sublime text. The
philosophy of life, which will be the
corona et finis coronans
of
the sciences of comparative anatomy and zoology, will hereafter supply a
fuller and nobler comment.
Ib.
p. 9. A. and B.
The blood of the sacrifices was brought by the high priest in
sanctum sanctorum, into the place of greatest holiness; but it was
brought but once, in festo expiationis, in the feast of
expiation; but in the other parts of the temple it was sprinkled every
day. The blood of the cross of Christ Jesus hath had this effect in
sancto sanctorum, &c. ... (to) Christ Jesus.
A truly excellent and beautiful paragraph.
Ib.
C.
If you will mingle a true religion, and a false religion, there is no
reconciling of God and Belial in this text. For the adhering of
persons born within the Church of Rome to the Church of Rome, our law
says nothing to them if they come; but for reconciling to the Church
of Rome, for persons born within the allegiance of the king, or for
persuading of men to be so reconciled, our law hath called by an
infamous and capital name of treason, and yet every tavern and
ordinary is full of such traitors, &c.
A strange transition from the Gospel to the English statute-book! But I
may observe, that if this statement could be truly made under James I,
there was abundantly ampler ground for it in the following reign. And
yet with what bitter spleen does Heylyn, Laud's creature, arraign the
Parliamentarians for making the same complaint!
Serm. II. Isaiah vii. 14. p. 11.
The fear of giving offence, especially to good men, of whose faith in
all essential points we are partakers, may reasonably induce us to be
slow and cautious in making up our minds finally on a religious
question, and may, and ought to, influence us to submit our conviction
to repeated revisals and rehearings. But there may arrive a time of such
perfect clearness of view respecting the particular point, as to
supersede all fear of man by the higher duty of declaring the whole
truth in Jesus. Therefore, having now overpassed six-sevenths of the
ordinary period allotted to human life, — resting my whole and sole hope
of salvation and immortality on the divinity of Christ, and the
redemption by his cross and passion, and holding the doctrine of the
Triune God as the very ground and foundation of the Gospel faith, — I
feel myself enforced by conscience to declare and avow, that, in my
deliberate judgment, the
Christopædia
prefixed to the third
Gospel and concorporated with the first, but, according to my belief, in
its present form the latest of the four, was unknown to, or not
recognized by, the Apostles Paul and John; and that, instead of
supporting the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Filial Godhead of the
Incarnate Word, as set forth by John i 1, and by Paul, it, if not
altogether irreconcilable with this faith, doth yet greatly weaken and
bedim its evidence; and that, by the too palpable contradictions between
the narrative in the first Gospel and that in the third, it has been a
fruitful magazine of doubts respecting the historic character of the
Gospels themselves. I have read most of the criticisms on this text, and
my impression is, that no learned Jew can be expected to receive the
common interpretation as the true primary sense of the words. The
severely literal Aquila renders the Hebrew word
Greek: neanis
. But
were it asked of me: Do you then believe our Lord to have been the Son
of Mary by Joseph? I reply: It is a point of religion with me to have no
belief one way or the other.
am in this way like St. Paul, more than
content not to know Christ himself
Greek: katà sárka
. It is enough for
me to know that the Son of God
became flesh
,
Greek: sàrx egéneto genómenos ek gynaikòs
and more than this, it appears to me, was
unknown to the Apostles, or, if known, not taught by them as
appertaining to a saving faith in Christ.
October 1831.
Note the affinity in sound of
son
and
sun
,
Sohn
and
Sonne
, which is not confined to the Saxon and German, or the
Gothic dialects generally. And observe
conciliare
versöhnen=confiliare, facere esse cum filio
, one with the Son.
Ib.
p. 17. B.
It is a singular testimony, how acceptable to God that state of
virginity is. He does not dishonor physic that magnifies health; nor
does he dishonor marriage, that praises virginity; let them embrace
that state that can, &c.
One of the sad relics of Patristic super-moralization, aggravated by
Papal ambition, which clung to too many divines, especially to those of
the second or third generation after Luther. Luther himself was too
spiritual, of too heroic faith, to be thus blinded by the declamations
of the Fathers, whom, with the exception of Augustine, he held in very
low esteem.
Ib.
D.
And Helvidius said, she had children after.
Annon Scriptura ipsa
? And a 'heresy,' too! I think I might safely
put the question to any serious, spiritual-minded, Christian: What one
inference tending to edification, in the discipline of will, mind, or
affections, he can draw from the speculations of the last two or three
pages of this Sermon respecting Mary's pregnancy and parturition?
Can
— I write it emphatically —
can
such points appertain to
our faith as Christians, which every parent would decline speaking of
before a family, and which, if the questions were propounded by another
in the presence of my daughter, aye, or even of my, no less, in mind and
imagination, innocent wife, I should resent as an indecency?
Serm. III. Gal. iv. 4, 5. p. 20.
God sent forth his Son made of a woman.
I never can admit that
Greek: genómenon
and
Greek: egéneto
in St.
Paul and St. John are adequately, or even rightly, rendered by the
English 'made.'
Ib.
p. 21, A.
What miserable revolutions and changes, what downfalls, what
break-necks and precipitations may we justly think ourselves ordained
to, if we consider, that in our coming into this world out of our
mothers' womb, we do not make account that a child comes right, except
it come with the head forward, and thereby prefigure that headlong
falling into calamities which it must suffer after?
The taste for these forced and fantastic analogies, Donne, with the
greater number of the learned prelatic divines from James I. to the
Restoration, acquired from that too great partiality for the Fathers,
from Irenæus to Bernard, by which they sought to distinguish themselves
from the Puritans.
Ib.
C.
That now they (the Jews,) express a kind of conditional acknowledgment
of it, by this barbarous and inhuman custom of theirs, that they
always keep in readiness the blood of some Christian, with which they
anoint the body of any that dies amongst them, with these words; "If
Jesus Christ were the Messias, then may the blood of this Christian
avail thee to salvation!"
Is it possible that Donne could have given credit to this absurd legend!
It was, I am aware, not an age of critical
acumen
; grit, bran,
and flour, were swallowed in the unsifted mass of their erudition. Still
that a man like Donne should have imposed on himself such a set of idle
tales, as he has collected in the next paragraph for facts of history,
is scarcely credible; that he should have attempted to impose them on
others, is most melancholy.
Ib.
p. 22. D. E.
He takes the name of the son of a woman, and wanes the
miraculous name of the son of a virgin. — Christ waned the
glorious name of Son of God, and the miraculous name of Son of a
virgin too; which is not omitted to draw into doubt the perpetual
virginity of the blessed virgin, the mother of Christ, &c.
Very ingenious; but likewise very presumptuous, this arbitrary
attribution of St. Paul's silence, and presumable ignorance of the
virginity of Mary, to Christ's own determination to have the fact passed
over.
N. B. Is 'wane' a misprint for 'wave' or 'waive?' It occurs so often, as
to render its being an
erratum
improbable; yet I do not remember
to have met elsewhere 'wane' used for 'decline' as a verb active.
Ib.
p. 23. A.
If there were reason for it, it were no miracle.
The announcement of the first comet, that had ever been observed, might
excite doubt in the mind of an astronomer, to whom, from the place where
he lived, it had not been visible. But his reason could have been no
objection to it. Had God pleased, all women might have conceived,
Greek: aneu tou andròs
as many of the
polypi
and
planariæ
do.
Not on any such ground do I suspend myself on this as an article of
faith; but because I doubt the evidence.
Ib.
p. 25. A — E.
Though we may think thus in the law of reason, yet, &c.
It is, and has been, a misfortune, a grievous and manifold loss and
hindrance for the interests of moral and spiritual truth, that even our
best and most vigorous theologians and philosophers of the age from
Edward VI to James II so generally confound the terms, and so too
often confound the subjects themselves, reason and understanding; yet
the diversity, the difference in kind, was known to, and clearly
admitted by, many of them, — by Hooker for instance, and it is implied in
the whole of Bacon's
Novum Organum
. Instead of the 'law of reason,'
Donne meant, and ought to have said, 'judging according to the ordinary
presumptions of the understanding,' that is, the faculty which,
generalizing particular experiences, judges of the future by analogy to
the past.
Taking the words, however, in their vulgar sense, I most deliberately
protest against all the paragraphs in this page, from A to E, and should
cite them, with a host of others, as sad effects of the confusion of the
reason and the understanding, and of the consequent abdication of the
former, instead of the bounden submission of the latter to a higher
light. Faith itself is but an act of the will, assenting to the reason
on its own evidence without, and even against, the understanding.
indeed is, I fully agree, to be brought into captivity to the faith.
Ib.
p. 26. A. B.
And therefore to be under the Law, signifies here thus much; to
be a debtor to the law of nature, to have a testimony in our hearts
and consciences, that there lies a law upon us, which we have no power
in ourselves to perform, &c.
This exposition of the term
law
in the epistles of St. Paul is
most just and important. The whole should be adopted among the notes to
the epistle to the Romans, in every Bible printed with notes.
I
b.
p. 27. A.
And this was his first work, to redeem, to vindicate them from
the usurper, to deliver them from the intruder, to emancipate them
from the tyrant, to cancel the covenant between hell and them, and
restore them so far to their liberty, as that they might come to their
first master, if they would; this was redeeming.
There is an absurdity in the notion of a finite divided from, and
superaddible to, the infinite, — of a particular
quantum
of power
separated from, not included in, omnipotence, or all-power. But, alas!
we too generally use the terms that are meant to express the absolute,
as mere comparatives taken superlatively. In one thing only are we
permitted and bound to assert a diversity, namely, in God and
Hades
,
the good and the evil will. This awful mystery, this truth, at once
certain and incomprehensible, is at the bottom of all religion; and to
exhibit this truth free from the dark phantom of the Manicheans, or the
two co-eternal and co-ordinate principles of good and evil, is the glory
of the Christian religion.
But this mysterious dividuity of the good and the evil will, the will of
the spirit and the will of the flesh, must not be carried beyond the
terms 'good' and 'evil.' There can be but one good will — the spirit in
all; — and even so, all evil wills are one evil will, the devil or evil
spirit. But then the One exists for us as finite intelligences,
necessarily in a two-fold relation, universal and particular. The same
Spirit within us pleads to the Spirit as without us; and in like manner
is every evil mind in communion with the evil spirit. But, O comfort!
the good alone is the actual, the evil essentially potential. Hence the
devil is most appropriately named the 'tempter,' and the evil hath its
essence in the will: it cannot pass out of it. Deeds are called evil in
reference to the individual will expressed in them; but in the great
scheme of Providence they are, only as far as they are good, coerced
under the conditions of all true being; and the devil is the drudge of
the All-good.
Serm. IV Luke ii. 29, 30. p. 29.
Ib.
p. 30. B.
We shall consider that that preparation, and disposition, and
acquiescence, which Simeon had in his epiphany, in his visible seeing
of Christ then, is offered to us in this epiphany, in this
manifestation and application of Christ in the sacrament; and that
therefore every penitent, and devout, and reverent, and worthy
receiver hath had in that holy action his now; there are all things
accomplished to him; and his for, for his eyes have seen his
salvation; and so may be content, nay glad, to depart in peace.
O! would that Donne, or rather that Luther before him, had carried out
this just conception to its legitimate consequences; — that as the
sacrament of the Eucharist is the epiphany for as many as receive it in
faith, so the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ himself
in the flesh, were the epiphanies, the sacramental acts and
phænomena
of the
Deus patiens
, the visible words of the invisible Word that was
in the beginning, symbols in time and historic fact of the redemptive
functions, passions, and procedures of the Lamb crucified from the
foundation of the world; — the incarnation, cross, and passion, — in
short, the whole life of Christ in the flesh, dwelling a man among men,
being essential and substantive parts of the process, the total of which
they represented; and on this account proper symbols of the acts and
passions of the Christ dwelling in man, as the Spirit of truth, and for
as many as in faith have received him, in Seth and Abraham no less
effectually than in John and Paul! For this is the true definition of a
symbol, as distinguished from the thing, on the one hand, and from a
mere metaphor, or conventional exponent of a thing, on the other. Had
Luther mastered this great idea, this master-truth, he would never have
entangled himself in that most mischievous Sacramentary controversy, or
had to seek a murky hiding-hole in the figment of Consubstantiation.
Ib.
B. C.
In the first part, then ... More he asks not, less he takes not for
any man, upon any pretence of any unconditional decree.
A beautiful paragraph, well worth extracting, aye, and re-preaching.
Ib.
p. 34. E.
When thou comest to this seal of thy peace, the sacrament, pray that
God will give thee that light that may direct and establish thee in
necessary and fundamental things; that is, the light of faith to see
that the Body and Blood of Christ is applied to thee in that action;
but for the manner, how the Body and Blood of Christ is there, wait
his leisure, if he have not yet manifested that to thee: grieve not at
that, wonder not at that, press not for that; for he hath not
manifested that, not the way, not the manner of his presence in the
Sacrament to the Church.
O! I have ever felt, and for many years thought that this
rem
credimus, modum nescimus,
is but a poor evasion. It seems to me an
attempt so to admit an irrational proposition as to have the credit of
denying it, or to separate an irrational proposition from its
irrationality. I admit 2 + 2 = 5; how I do not pretend to know, but in
some way not in contradiction to the multiplication table. To spiritual
operations the very term 'mode' is perhaps inapplicable, for these are
immediate. To the linking of this with that, of A. with Z. by
intermedia,
the term 'mode,' — the question 'how?' is properly
applied. The assimilation of the spirit of a man to the Son of God, to
God as the Divine Humanity, — this spiritual transubstantiation, like
every other process of operative grace, is necessarily modeless. The
whole question is concerning the transmutation of the sensible elements.
Deny this, and to what does the
modum nescimus
refer? We cannot
ask how that is done, which we declare not done at all. Admit this
transmutation, and you necessarily admit by implication the Romish
dogma, of the separation of a sensible thing from the sensible accidents
which constitute all we ever meant by the thing. To rationalize this
figment of his church, Bossuet has recourse to Spinosism, and dares make
God the substance and sole
ens reale
of all body, and by this
very
hypothesis
baffles his own end, and does away all miracle in
the particular instance.
Ib.
p. 35. B.
When I pray in my chamber, I build a temple there that hour; and that
minute, when I cast out a prayer in the street, I build a temple
there; and when my soul prays without any voice, my very body is then
a temple.
Good; but it would be better to regard solitary, family, and templar
devotion as distinctions in sort, rather than differences in degree. All
three are necessary.
Ib.
E.
And that more fearful occasion of coming, when they came only to elude
the law, and proceeding in their treacherous and traitorous religion
in their heart, and yet communicating with us, draw God himself into
their conspiracies; and to mock us, make a mock of God, and his
religion too.
What, then, was their guilt, who by terror and legal penalties tempted
their fellow Christians to this treacherous mockery? Donne should have
asked himself that question.
Serm. V. Exod. iv. 13. p. 39.
Ib.
p. 39. C. D.
It hath been doubted, and disputed, and denied too, that this text,
O my Lord, send I pray thee by the hand of him whom thou wilt
send, hath any relation to the sending of the Messiah, to the
coming of Christ, to Christmas day; yet we forbear not to wait upon
the ancient Fathers, and as they said, to say, that Moses at
last determines all in this, O my Lord, &c. It is a work,
next to the great work of the redemption of the whole world, to redeem
Israel out of Egypt; and therefore do both works at once, put both
into one hand, and mitte quem missurus es, Send him whom I know
thou wilt send; him, whom, pursuing thine own decree, thou
shouldest send; send Christ, send him now, to redeem Israel from
Egypt.
This is one of the happier accommodations of the
gnosis
, that is,
the science of detecting the mysteries of faith in the simplest texts of
the Old Testament history, to the contempt or neglect of the literal and
contextual sense. It was, I conceive, in part at least, this
gnosis
, and not knowledge, as our translation has it, that St.
Paul warns against, and most wisely, as puffing up, inflating the heart
with self-conceit, and the head with idle fancies.
Ib.