p. 335. A.
But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.
If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on
some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a
supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the
sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in
the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something
extra-natural. But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a
mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and
in-herited defects — yet still our only mirror — to contemplate all we can
of God, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.
For if a man
first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself
as man
in genere
, we have to look into ourselves, and there we
shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the
first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence (
Greek:nous
)
from being
Greek:tò on
, with the will as an accompaniment, but not
from it as a cause, — in order, though not necessarily in time,
precedent. This is true filiation. The second is an act of the will and
the reason, in their purity strict identities, and therefore not
begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and
essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and
coeternally.
For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute
necessity is involved in the very idea of God, one of whose intellectual
definitions is, the
synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative,
etsi inclusive, quoad se,
of all conceivable
antitheses;
even
as the best moral definition — (and, O! how much more godlike to us in
this state of antithetic intellect is the moral beyond the
intellectual!) — is, God is love. This is to us the high prerogative of
the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of
intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and
cold deductions carries us towards the moral. For what is love? Union
with the desire of union. God therefore is the cohesion and the oneness
of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not
take oneness as the root of all virtue. Being, Mind, Love in action, are
ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of
distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in
essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action.
Now will is
the true principle of identity, of selfness, even in our common
language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the
possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion
expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one God. There are three
Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is totally all in
each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own minds, but can
understand by no analogy. For "the wind ministrant to divers at the same
moment" — thence, to aid the fancy — borrows or rather steals from the
mind the idea of 'total
in omni parte
,' which alone furnishes the
analogy; but that both it and by it a myriad of other material images do
enwrap themselves
in hac veste non sua,
and would be even no
objects of conception if they did not; yea, that even the very words,
'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in all languages that answer to
them, suppose this trans-impression from the mind, is an argument better
than all analogy.
Serm. XXXV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341.
Ib.
p. 342. B.
First then, for the first term, sin, we use to ask in the
school, whether any action of man's can have rationem demeriti;
whether it can be said to offend God, or to deserve ill of God? for
whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with God.
This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad
consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the
cui bono? cui
malo?
system of ethics, — that system which places the good and evil
of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or
passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself.
For, according to this system, God must be either a passible and
dependent being, — that is, not God, — or else he must have no interest,
arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice.
The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an
implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as
it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain
in genere
, evil has a true being in the order of things) is not
only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily
implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness, — that
is, of God. For to say that I believe in a God, but not that he is
omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in
terms as to say, I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from
its centre to its circumference are equal.
I cannot read the profound truth so clearly expressed by Donne in the
next paragraph — "it does not only want that rectitude, but it should
have that rectitude, and therefore hath a sinful want" — without an
uneasy wonder at its incongruity with the preceding dogmas.
Serm. LXXI. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 717.
Ib.
p.725. A.
But still consider, that they did but leave their nets, they did not
burn them. And consider, too, that they left but nets, those things
which might entangle them, and retard them in their following of
Christ, &c.
An excellent paragraph grounded on a mere pun. Such was the taste of the
age; and it is an awful joy to observe, that not great learning, great
wit, great talent, not even (as far as without great virtue that can be)
great genius, were effectual to preserve the man from the contagion, but
only the deep and wise enthusiasm of moral feeling. Compare in this
light Donne's theological prose even with that of the honest Knox; and,
above all, compare Cowley with Milton.
Serm. LXXII. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 726.
Ib.
p.727. A.-E.
It is amusing to see the use which the Christian divines make of the
very facts in favour of their own religion, with which they triumphantly
battered that of the heathens; namely, the gross and sinful
anthropomorphitism of their representations of the Deity; and yet the
heathen philosophers and priests — Plutarch for instance — tell us as
plainly as Donne or Aquinas can do, that these are only accommodations
to human modes of conception, — the divine nature being in itself
impassible; — how otherwise could it be the prime agent?
Paganism needs a true philosophical judge. Condemned it will be,
perhaps, more heavily than by the present judges, but not from the same
statutes, nor on the same evidence.
In fine.
If our old divines, in their homiletic expositions of Scripture,
wire-drew their text, in the anxiety to evolve out of the words the
fulness of the meaning expressed, implied, or suggested, our modern
preachers have erred more dangerously in the opposite extreme, by making
their text a mere theme, or
motto,
for their discourse. Both err
in degree; the old divines, especially the Puritans, by excess, the
modern by defect. But there is this difference to the disfavor of the
latter, that the defect in degree alters the kind. It was on God's holy
word that our Hookers, Donnes, Andrewses preached; it was Scripture
bread that they divided, according to the needs and seasons. The
preacher of our days expounds, or appears to expound, his own sentiments
and conclusions, and thinks himself evangelic enough if he can make the
Scripture seem in conformity with them.
Above all, there is something to my mind at once elevating and soothing
in the idea of an order of learned men reading the many works of the
wise and great, in many languages, for the purpose of making one book
contain the life and virtue of all others, for their brethren's use who
have but that one to read. What, then, if that one book be such, that
the increase of learning is shown by more and more enabling the mind to
find them all in it! But such, according to my experience — hard as I am
on threescore — the Bible is, as far as all moral, spiritual, and
prudential, — all private, domestic, yea, even political, truths arid
interests are concerned. The astronomer, chemist, mineralogist, must go
elsewhere; but the Bible is the book for the man.
The LXXX Sermons, fol. 1640. — Ed.
"Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians
was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei
Nicoenoe, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think,
he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a
Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by
an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England,
and in good humour with the Church of Rome."
Table Talk,
2d edit. p. 41. — Ed.
Rom.
vi.3, 4, 5. — Ed.
John
i 14.
Gal
. iv 4. Ed.
See the whole argument on the difference of the reason and
the understanding, in the
Aids to Reflection
, 3d edit. pp. 206-227.
Ed.
See the author's entire argument upon this subject in the
Church and State
. — Ed.
Galat
. ii 20. — Ed.
Compare
Hamlet
, Act V. sc. 1. This sermon was preached,
March 8, 1628-9. — Ed.
C. iii. 13, &c. — Ed.
See, however, the author's expressions at, I believe, a
rather later period.
"I now think, after many doubts, that the passage; I know that my
Redeemer liveth, &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of
determination, a quasi prophecy. I know not how this can be;
but in spite of all my difficulties, this I do know, that I shall be
recompensed!"
Table Talk
, 2d edit. p. 80. — Ed.
How so? Is it not admitted that Robert Stephens first
divided the New Testament into verses in 1551? See the testimony to that
effect of Henry Stephens, his son, in the Preface to his
Concordance
. — Ed.
Rom
. viii. 3. Mr. C. afterwards expressed himself to the
same effect:
"Christ's body, as mere body, or rather carcase (for body is an
associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than
mine or yours; that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from
its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How
could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced?"
Table Talk
, 2d edit. p. 261. — Ed.
See Hooker's admirable declaration of the doctrine: —
"These natures from the moment of their first combination have been
and are for ever inseparable. For even when his soul forsook the
tabernacle of his body, his Deity forsook neither body nor soul. If
it had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ
was buried, or that the person of Christ did raise up itself from the
dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be
termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God
in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not
both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulchre.
The like is also to be said of the soul, otherwise we are plainly and
inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ therefore for ever
one and the self-same, was only touching bodily substance concluded
within the grave, his soul only from thence severed, but by personal
union his Deity still unseparably joined with both."
E. P. V. 52. 4. —
Keble's edit
. Ed.
xix. 41. — Ed.
(C.) which should be (B.)
"The object of the preceding
discourse was to recommend the Bible as the end and centre
of our reading and meditation. I can truly affirm of myself,
that my studies have been profitable and availing to me only so
far, as I have endeavored to use all my other knowledge as a
glass enabling me to receive more light in a wider field of
vision from the Word of God."
Ed.
Ep
. 99. See Pearson,
Art
. v. — Ed.
Henry More's Theological Works1
There are three principal causes to which the imperfections and errors
in the theological schemes and works of our elder divines, the glories
of our Church, — men of almost unparalleled learning and genius, the rich
and robust intellects from the reign of Elizabeth to the death of
Charles II, — may, I think, be reasonably attributed. And striking,
unusually striking, instances of all three abound in this volume; and in
the works of no other divine are they more worthy of being regretted:
for hence has arisen a depreciation of Henry More's theological
writings, which yet contain more original, enlarged, and elevating views
of the Christian dispensation than I have met with in any other single
volume. For More had both the philosophic and the poetic genius,
supported by immense erudition. But unfortunately the two did not
amalgamate. It was not his good fortune to discover, as in the preceding
generation William Shakspeare discovered, a
mordaunt
or common
base of both, and in which both the poetic and the philosophical power
blended in one.
These causes are, —
First
, and foremost, — the want of that logical
Greek:propaidéia dokimastikàe
, that critique of the human intellect, which, previously
to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the
weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the
heaven-descended
nosce teipsum
, in respect to the intellective
part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by
Lord Bacon in his
Novum Organum
, and brought to a systematic
completion by Immanuel Kant in his
Kritik der reinen Vernunft, der
Urtheilskrajt, und der metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der
Naturwissenschaft
.
From the want of this searching logic, there is a perpetual confusion of
the subjective with the objective in the arguments of our divines,
together with a childish or anile overrating of human testimony, and an
ignorance in the art of sifting it, which necessarily engendered
credulity.
Second
, — the ignorance of natural science, their physiography scant in
fact, and stuffed out with fables; their physiology imbrangled with an
inapplicable logic and a misgrowth of
entia rationalia
, that is,
substantiated abstractions; and their physiogony a blank or dreams of
tradition, and such "intentional colours" as occupy space but cannot
fill it. Yet if Christianity is to be the religion of the world, if
Christ be that Logos or Word that
was in the beginning
, by whom
all things
became
; if it was the same Christ who said,
Let
there be light
; who in and by the creation commenced that great
redemptive process, the history of life which begins in its detachment
from nature, and is to end in its union with God; — if this be true, so
true must it be that the book of nature and the book of revelation, with
the whole history of man as the intermediate link, must be the integral
and coherent parts of one great work: and the conclusion is, that a
scheme of the Christian faith which does not arise out of, and shoot its
beams downward into, the scheme of nature, but stands aloof as an
insulated afterthought, must be false or distorted in all its
particulars. In confirmation of this position, I may challenge any
opponent to adduce a single instance in which the now exploded falsities
of physical science, through all its revolutions from the second to the
seventeenth century of the Christian æra, did not produce some
corresponding warps in the theological systems and dogmas of the several
periods.
The
third
and last cause, and especially operative in the writings of
this author, is the presence and regnancy of a false and fantastic
philosophy, yet shot through with refracted light from the not risen but
rising truth, — a scheme of physics and physiology compounded of
Cartesian mechanics and empiricism (for it was the credulous childhood
of experimentalism), and a corrupt, mystical, theurgical,
pseudo-Platonism, which infected the rarest minds under the Stuart
dynasty. The only not universal belief in witchcraft and apparitions,
and the vindication of such monster follies by such men as Sir M.Hale,
Glanville, Baxter, Henry More, and a host of others, are melancholy
proofs of my position. Hence, in the first chapters of this volume, the
most idle inventions of the ancients are sought to be made credible by
the most fantastic hypotheses and analogies.
To the man who has habitually contemplated Christianity as interesting
all rational finite beings, as the very
spirit of truth
, the
application of the prophecies as so many fortune-tellings and
soothsayings to particular events and persons, must needs be felt as
childish — like faces seen in the moon, or the sediments of a teacup. But
reverse this, and a Pope and a Buonaparte can never be wanting, — the
molehill becomes an Andes. On the other hand, there are few writers
whose works could be so easily defecated as More's. Mere omission would
suffice; and perhaps one half (an unusually large proportion) would come
forth from the furnace pure gold; if but a fourth, how great a gain!
Index p. 2
Dedication.
Servorum illius omnium indignissimus.
Servus indignissimus,
or
omnino indignus
, or any other
positive self-abasement before God, I can understand; but how an express
avowal of unworthiness, comparatively superlative, can consist with the
Job-like integrity and sincerity of profession especially required in a
solemn address to Him, to whom all hearts are open, this I do not
understand in the case of such men as Henry More, Jeremy Taylor, Richard
Baxter were, and by comparison at least with the multitude of evil
doers, must have believed themselves to be.
Ib.
V. c. 14. s. 3.
This makes me not so much wonder at that passage of Providence, which
allowed so much virtue to the bones of the martyr Babylas, once bishop
of Antioch, as to stop the mouth of Apollo Daphneus when Julian would
have enticed him to open it by many a fat sacrifice. To say nothing of
several other memorable miracles that were done by the reliques of
saints and martyrs in those times.
Strange lingering of childish credulity in the most learned and in many
respects enlightened divines of the Protestant episcopal church even to
the time of James II! The Popish controversy at that time made a great
clearance.
Ib.
s. 9.
At one time Professor Eichorn had persuaded me that the Apocalypse was
authentic; that is, a Danielitic dramatic poem written by the Apostle
and Evangelist John, and not merely under his name. But the repeated
perusal of the vision has sadly unsettled my conclusion. The entire
absence of all spirituality perplexes me, as forming so strong a
contrast with the Gospel and Epistles of John; and then the too great
appearance of an allusion to the fable of Nero's return to life and
empire, to Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana on the one hand (that is
the Eichornian hypothesis), and the insurmountable difficulties of
Joseph Mede and others on to Bicheno and Faber on the other. In short, I
feel just as both Luther and Calvin felt, — that is, I know not what to
make of it, and so leave it alone.
It is much to be regretted that we have no contemporary history of
Apollonius, or of the reports concerning him, and the popular notions in
his own time. For from the romance of Philostratus we cannot be sure as
to the fact of the lies themselves. It may be a lie, that there ever was
such or such a lie in circulation.
Ib.
c. 15. s. 2.
Fourthly. The little horn, Dan. vii, that rules for a time
and times and half a time, it is evident that it is not Antiochus
Epiphanes, because this little horn is part of the fourth
beast — namely, the Roman.
Is it quite clear that the Macedonian was not the fourth empire;
- the Assyrian;
- the Median;
- the Persian;
- the Macedonian?
However, what a strange prophecy, that,
e confesso
having been
fulfilled, remains as obscure as before!
Ib.
s. 6
And ye shall have the tribulation of ten days, — that is, the
utmost extent of tribulation; beyond which there is nothing further,
as there is no number beyond ten.
means, I think, the very contrary.
Decent dierum
is used even
in Terence for a very short time
. In the same way we say, a nine
days' wonder.
Ib.
c. 16. s. 1.
But for further conviction of the excellency of Mr. Mede's way above
that of Grotius, I shall compare some of their main interpretations.
Hard to say which of the two, Mede's or Grotius', is the more
improbable. Beyond doubt, however, the Cherubim are meant as the scenic
ornature borrowed from the Temple.
Ib.
s. 2.
That this rider of the white horse is Christ, they both agree
in.
The
white horse
is, I conceive, Victory or Triumph — that is, of
the Roman power — followed by Slaughter, Famine, and Pestilence. All this
is plain enough. The difficulty commences after the writer is deserted
by his historical facts, that is, after the sacking of Jerusalem.
Ib.