Chapter XIII (2)

He has much to say upon baptismal regeneration. In baptism, according to his teaching, we are admitted to the kingdom of Christ, we are presented unto Him, we are consigned with His sacrament, and we enter into His militia. It is also an adoption into the covenant, and a new birth. In it, all our sins are pardoned. “The catechumen descends,” he says,--following the words of Bede,--“into the font a sinner, he arises purified; he goes down the son of death, he comes up the son of the resurrection; he enters in, the son of folly and prevarication, he returns the son of reconciliation; he stoops down the child of wrath, and ascends the heir of mercy; he was the child of the devil, and now he is the servant and the son of God.” Baptism not only pardons past sins, but puts us into a state of pardon for time to come. It is a sanctification by the spirit of grace. It is the suppletory of original righteousness. Its effects are illumination, new life, and a holy resurrection. In short, by baptism we are saved. After having thus, in the most unqualified way, exhausted, one might suppose, all which imagination could conceive of the efficacy of the rite, Taylor says, there is less need to descend to temporal blessings, or rare contingencies, or miraculous events, or probable notices of things less certain; and then he speaks of miraculous cures effected by the baptismal water, and of the appointment of an angel guardian to each baptized person--which, indeed, he does not insist upon, although it seems to him “hugely probable.” Resuming a poetical theology, he adds, in patristic phraseology, that baptism is a new birth, “a chariot carrying us to God, the great circumcision, a circumcision made without hands, the key of the kingdom, the _paranymph_ of the kingdom, the earnest of our inheritance, the answer of a good conscience, the robe of light, the sacrament of a new life, and of eternal salvation, Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ.”[404] Perhaps no one ever hung so many wreaths of flowers around the font as Taylor did; and if we were to take the highly coloured words which he uses by themselves, we should say, that his teaching on the subject was calculated to lull his disciples, if they had been only baptized, into a state of most deceptive and fearful self-security. But then, we know that other parts of his writings are of the most pungent and heart-searching description, destructive of all self-delusion, and, in some respects, ministering to a spirit of bondage, rather than to a spirit of presumptuous hope. The truth is, that much of the air of the old economy is breathed over Taylor’s views of the new dispensation. At times it blows with a chilling gust. We lack, in the garden of his rhetoric, the genial warmth of an evangelical summer; and in his language respecting sacraments, he shows a fondness for what St. Paul calls, “beggarly elements.” It should be noticed, in connection with his doctrine of baptism, that, though, in his _Liberty of Prophesying_, he deals gently with Anabaptists, no one could hold more strongly than did he the doctrine of infant baptism.

The doctrine of the Lord’s Supper is expressed in less figurative terms, but with the same excess of description, and, as his admiring biographer admits, with some incautiousness in the use of terms. He says:--“The doctrine of the Church of England, and generally of the Protestants, in this article, is,--that after the minister of the holy mysteries hath rightly prayed, and blessed or consecrated the bread and the wine, the symbols become changed into the body and blood of Christ, after a sacramental, that is, in a spiritual real manner: so that all that worthily communicate, do by faith receive Christ really, effectually, to all the purposes of His passion: the wicked receive not Christ, but the bare symbols only; but yet to their hurt, because the offer of Christ is rejected, and they pollute the blood of the covenant, by using it as an unholy thing. The result of which doctrine is this: It is bread, and it is Christ’s body. It is bread in substance, Christ in the sacrament; and Christ is as really given to all that are truly disposed, as the symbols are; each as they can; Christ as Christ can be given; the bread and wine as they can; and to the same real purposes, to which they are designed; and Christ does as really nourish and sanctify the soul, as the elements do the body. It is here, as in the other sacraments: for as the natural water becomes the laver of regeneration; so here, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ; but, there and here too, the first substance is changed by grace, but remains the same in nature.”[405]

[Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--TAYLOR.]

Taylor is one of the last men to whom we are to look for cautious and qualified statements. He had a mind of that order which “moveth altogether if it move at all.” He could say nothing by halves;--and, no doubt, his glowing periods require qualification. But, when all possible allowance has been made, the passage just quoted conveys something which is very much like the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Yet, strange to say, the same author, who holds that there is a real change in the Lord’s Supper, interprets our Lord’s words, “This is my body”--to mean no more than this: “it figuratively represents my body:” and he denies that the passage in the sixth chapter of John, often urged in support of the doctrine of the real presence, has anything to do with the Lord’s Supper.[406]

In his notion of original sin, he deviates from Anglican as well as Puritan standards. The superiority of Adam before the fall, in Taylor’s opinion, consisted in certain superadded qualifications which he forfeited by the first sin--and he thought that men now come into the world, not with any evil taint or tendency, not with anything of corruption or degeneracy, but simply without those superadded qualifications. He says of human sinfulness, that “a great part is a natural impotency, and the other is brought in by our own folly.” He imputes it, in great part, to the “many _concurrent_ causes of evil which have influence upon communities of men; such as are evil examples, the similitude of Adam’s transgression, vices of princes, wars, impurity, ignorance, error, false principles, flattery, interest, fear, partiality, authority, evil laws, heresy, schism, spite and ambition, natural inclination, and other principiant causes, which proceeding from the natural weakness of human constitution, are the fountain and proper causes of many consequent evils.”[407] His doctrine has in it altogether a strong taint of Pelagianism; and what he says of “concurrent causes,” is pronounced by Bishop Heber--a mild critic and a moderate Divine--to be “neither good logic nor good divinity.”

No one can be more definite and precise than Jeremy Taylor in his doctrine of the sacraments, but he shows elsewhere a remarkable leaning to what is general and vague. What he means exactly by original sin--how he distinguished it from actual sin, and what effect he believed the sin of Adam to have upon his posterity, it is difficult to say; and the same and even greater indefiniteness is manifest in his views of the doctrine of justification. Indeed, here he avowedly eschews all precision of language. He differs from Thorndike and Bull, not only in not defining justification as they do, but in not defining it at all, and he speaks almost pettishly on the subject.

[Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--TAYLOR.]

“That no man should fool himself by disputing about the philosophy of justification, and what causality faith hath in it, and whether it be the act of faith that justifies, or the habit? Whether faith as a good work, or faith as an instrument? Whether faith as it is obedience, or faith as it is an access to Christ? Whether as a hand or as a heart? Whether by its own innate virtue, or by the efficacy of the object? Whether as a sign, or as a thing signified? Whether by introduction, or by perfection? Whether in the first beginnings, or in its last and best productions? Whether by inherent worthiness, or adventitious imputations? _Uberiùs ista quæso_ (that I may use the words of Cicero): _hæc enim spinosiora, prius, ut confitear me cogunt, quam ut assentiar_: these things are knotty, and too intricate to do any good; they may amuse us, but never instruct us; and they have already made men careless and confident, disputative and troublesome, proud and uncharitable, but neither wiser nor better. Let us, therefore, leave these weak ways of troubling ourselves or others, and directly look to the theology of it, the direct duty, the end of faith, and the work of faith, the conditions and the instruments of our salvation, the just foundation of our hopes, how our faith can destroy our sin, and how it can unite us unto God, how by it we can be made partakers of Christ’s death, and imitators of His life. For since it is evident, by the premises, that this article is not to be determined or relied upon by arguing from words of many significations, we must walk by a clearer light; by such plain sayings and dogmatical propositions of Scripture, which evidently teach us our duty, and place our hopes upon that which cannot deceive us, that is, which require obedience, which call upon us to glorify God, and to do good to men, and to keep all God’s commandments with diligence and sincerity.”[408]

This kind of teaching cuts away the ground entirely from under scientific theology, treating it as a work of supererogation, or as an utter impossibility, and at the same time reducing religion to the observance of certain commands. Yet this passionate protest against dogma has hardly escaped the writer’s pen, when he proceeds to construct that against which he protests, and lays down logically, “two propositions, a negative and an affirmative.” The negative is: By faith only a man is not justified; the affirmative, By works also a man is justified. He says “that obedience is the same thing with faith, and that all Christian graces are parts of its bulk and constitution, is also the doctrine of the Holy Ghost, and the grammar of Scripture, making faith and obedience to be terms coincident, and expressive of each other.”[409]

Having expressed this theological idea in a double form, he immediately abandons the theological element; and proceeds to declaim, with his accustomed vigour and variety, upon the common truth, which all Divines, Calvinist and Arminian, maintain--that no man enjoys the blessing of justification, apart from a life of Christian obedience. After a careful perusal of the whole discourse, the reader feels that the theological question of justification by faith, or by works, or by both, has really not been touched by the author, although much that is of practical value has been said on the necessity of holiness. The essential defect of the treatment is an omission to explain what justification means; hence the loose and ambiguous employment of the term throughout, and its application most frequently to the idea of salvation as a whole. In one place, after having repeatedly used the two words, as bearing different significations, Taylor says: “So that now we see that justification and sanctification cannot be distinguished, but as words of art, signifying the various steps of progression in the same course: they may be distinguished in notion and speculation, but never when they are to pass on to material events, for no man is justified but he that is also sanctified.”[410] It is very noticeable, by a critical reader who will take the trouble to analyze Taylor’s sentences, how much he is in the habit of playing fast and loose with the meaning of words.

[Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--TAYLOR.]

The same habit of thought--avoiding and even protesting against definite statements of certain doctrines--appears in the _Liberty of Prophesying_ and in the _Nature of Faith_. The duty of faith, he remarks, is complete in believing the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed,--“All other things are implicitly in the belief of the Articles of God’s veracity, and are not necessary in respect of the constitution of faith to be drawn out, but may there lie in the bowels of the great Articles, without danger to any thing or any person, unless some other accident or circumstance makes them necessary.”[411] “This is the great and entire complexion of a Christian’s faith, and since salvation is promised to the belief of this creed [I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God] either a snare is laid for us with a purpose to deceive us--or else nothing is of prime and original necessity to be believed but this Jesus Christ our Redeemer.”[412] Bearing in mind the distinction between religion and theology;--and it is to the former that Taylor seems to refer in his treatise on Faith,--the doctrine, in substance, may be accepted as sound. But turning to the _Liberty of Prophesying_ where also the standard raised is the Apostles’ Creed, the question, as his biographer remarks, “becomes much more difficult, if, as Taylor seems to have meant, and as is implied in the very title of his discourse, we extend this same principle to the admission of persons into the public ministry.”[413] In other words, to treat Theology, which ought to be thoroughly understood by Christian teachers, as if it were entirely comprehended within the first simple primitive creed,--as if that creed, regarded as seminally containing all Christian doctrine, and as actually drawn out by the study of Scripture, and devout reflection into theological particulars, were a sufficient standard of orthodoxy for those who are teachers of others,--betrays a manner of thinking in which scarcely a second Anglican teacher could be found to agree. There and elsewhere the Bishop would seem to have found his way within Latitudinarian lines.

Taylor is a strenuous advocate for an Episcopal Church--yet even here he breaks bounds, and has exposed himself to the correction, if not the censure, of Episcopalian critics. Departing from Hooker’s method in his _Ecclesiastical Polity_, he endorses the Puritan idea, that a precise form of government is laid down in Scripture; and then he proceeds to say, that “the government of the Church is in _immediate_ order to the good and benison of souls.” The first of these peculiar opinions, his biographer pronounces unwise, the second untrue, and both as going too far,--the one as proving too much, the other as an exaggerated conception of what is not to be ranked amongst things of the first importance,--for the sincere word and the means of grace are alone _immediately_ necessary to salvation.[414] Mere government, according to Hooker, rests amongst the non-essentials of Christianity; and any change therein is to change the way of safety, no otherwise than as “a path is changed by altering only the uppermost face thereof, which, be it laid with gravel, or set with grass, or paved with stone, remaineth still the same path.”[415] A further example of running to an extreme of strictness in reference to Church polity, after so much latitude, and even looseness in relation to Christian doctrine, is found in Taylor’s assumption of facts touching Episcopal orders. It is an assumption, says Heber, “in which he is neither borne out by antiquity, nor the tenor of the Gospel history, when he finds in the Apostles, during the abode of their Lord on earth, the first Bishops, and in the seventy-two disciples, whom Christ also selected from His followers, the first presbyters of His Church.”[416]

[Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--COSIN.]

Amongst Anglican theologians Cosin requires particular attention. The history of his opinions is somewhat peculiar. In early life, his sermons, and especially his devotional writings, betray a strong leaning towards Roman Catholicism. In later life it is otherwise. His second series of _Notes on the Prayer Book_, indicates a controversial tone opposing the Anglican to the Roman view, which does not appear in the first series. After his son became a Papist, the father assumed a more decided attitude towards the Papal Church; but it does not so much appear that Cosin’s own views of doctrine altered, as that, during the earlier part of his life, he dwelt on points of agreement, and during the latter, on points of difference, between himself and Rome.[417] Every one, however, must see that such a change was a very great one, and involved much more than at first sight is visible. Cosin’s two principal contributions to theological literature are his _Scholastic History of the Canon of the Holy Scriptures_ and his _History of Transubstantiation_. The former, which is a work of very great learning and ability is directed entirely against the decisions of the Council of Trent, as to the canonicity of Apocryphal Books; and the author patiently goes over the whole field of Church literature, from the Apostolic age to the Reformation, showing that the books in question were never accepted by the Church, as inspired authorities. The stores of learning displayed in this history are of great value to the general student; and in any revival of this old controversy with Romanist theologians, Cosin’s work will be of eminent service on the Protestant side. The _History of the Canon_ appeared in 1657, during Cosin’s exile. The _History of Transubstantiation_ was, about the same time, written in Latin, although not published until 1675. A year afterwards, an English translation came out, executed by Luke de Beaulieu. The origin of the book is a key to its character. When Charles II., in his wanderings, reached Cologne, and there “visited a neighbouring potent prince of the Empire of the Roman persuasion,” he met with certain Jesuits, who accused the English Church of heretical opinions touching the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. That Church, said they, “holds no real, but only a kind of imaginary presence of the body and blood of Christ;” whereas Rome holds the sacred mystery of all ages,--to wit, that the whole substance of the bread and wine is changed into the substance of Christ’s body and blood. Cosin, being asked to vindicate the Church “from the calumny,” and plainly to declare what is her doctrine of the real presence, complied with the request; and the result is, that throughout his book, he labours to establish the doctrine of a _real presence_ of the body and blood of the Redeemer in the bread and wine;--but at the same time, denies and demolishes the doctrine of a _transubstantiation_ of the elements. As to the latter point, what he says resolves itself into an argument for the continued presence, not merely of the material _accidents_, but of the material _substance_. The bent of the author’s mind, and the necessary conditions of the author’s argument, looked at from the Anglican point of view, may be seen in his copious citations from the Fathers and schoolmen; and the purpose of those citations is to show that the _real_ presence, as he expresses it, is the ancient doctrine of Christendom; and that the dogma of Transubstantiation is an invention of the twelfth century. Theologians of the Puritan stamp, if disposed to avail themselves of the distinctive reasoning of this distinguished scholar against Rome, would not follow the patristic and scholastic teaching on its positive side, to which he showed so much deference; but would rather represent very much of it--by its incautious phraseology, and its mystic sentiment--as preparing for the definite error which Cosin so earnestly denounced. Some of them would say, that the extreme doctrine of the spiritual presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine is as mischievous, in respect to superstition, as the doctrine of Transubstantiation itself. They would also say that Anglicans attach an undue importance to the continued existence and _presence_ of the material substance of bread and wine, an importance which is scarcely perceptible to others who differ from them; for if the bodily presence of Christ in the sacrament be admitted, arguments in support of the continued substantial presence of bread and wine as well, only issue in some consubstantial theory, between which and the transubstantial one, there is little to choose, in the estimation of most English Protestants. And further, they would allege that whilst the Roman dogma is in itself incredible and absurd, it is in its terms intelligible; but that the High Anglican dogma is unintelligible in terms and incredible in itself, so far as its import can be divined. To the Puritan mind, the distinction maintained by Cosin and others between a real presence and a transubstantiation is of little importance, and quite incomprehensible; but to the Anglican mind, it is perfectly clear, and of the highest moment.[418] That I distinctly perceive. Without entering into the controversy, I may be allowed to add, that the belief of the spiritual presence of Christ’s body in the elements is one thing, and the deep and devout belief of a real and a special presence of Christ Himself with His people in the Lord’s Supper, is another. There is nothing whatever to prevent a modern disciple of the Puritans from consistently maintaining the latter. For my own part, I would maintain it with the utmost earnestness.

[Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--MORLEY.]

Next to Cosin let us take Morley. Morley lived to a great age, and had a high reputation for theological learning before the Civil Wars, as well as after the re-establishment of Episcopacy, being well versed in the logic of the schools, and proving himself a formidable controversialist. That he was a Calvinist is distinctly stated by Wood and Burnet; but I cannot find that he published anything upon the subject. Besides his controversy with Baxter, which turns upon political and ecclesiastical questions, we possess certain treatises written by him before and since the Restoration, in which he undertakes fully to make known his judgment concerning the Church of Rome, and most of those doctrines which fall into controversy betwixt her and the Church of England. The reader is disappointed to find, that these Treatises consist only of _A short Conference with a Jesuit at Brussels_; An Argument against Transubstantiation; A Sermon preached at Whitehall; Correspondence with Father Cressey; A Letter to the Duchess of York; and two Latin Epistles, relating to Prayers for the Dead, and the Invocation of Saints. Three points alone in the Romanist controversy are discussed. The treatment of these, however, indicate deep learning and great skill. Morley plies with much success the argument against Transubstantiation, “drawn from the evidence and certainty of sense,”--maintaining his convincing argument with the dexterity of a practised logician, so as to parry most successfully all the objections of Roman Catholic antagonists. He decidedly opposes the Popish doctrine of purgatory,--but he vindicates prayers for the dead, in the way in which they were offered in the early Church, and as by modern Anglicans they are still encouraged to be offered; that is, for the rest of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and the plenitude of redemption at the last day.[419] Whatever may be the propriety of praying for the dead in such a qualified sense as this, Morley contends that there is no ground on which to rest the doctrine of the Invocation of Saints. That doctrine he overthrows by an appeal to Scripture; and then he proceeds, after the Anglican method, to examine the writings of the Fathers, and to show that they do not justify the Popish dogma and its associated practices.

The writings of so eminent a man as Archbishop Bramhall ought not to be wholly passed over, even in this limited and superficial sketch. He did not write any comprehensive treatise on theology in general, or on any doctrine in particular; but whilst the other Divines named, with one exception, guarded what they believed to be the citadel of truth, this learned prelate of Ireland defended what he regarded as some of the outworks of Anglican Christianity. He strove, in his _Just Vindication of the Church of England_ (1654), to repel the charge of schism, alleged by the Romanists; and, in his _Consecration and Succession of Protestant Bishops_, to rebut the Nag’s Head fable (1658). So far his battle was with Rome. He dealt blows of another kind in his treatises “Against the English Sectarie” (1643–1672), and included within his polemical tasks a “Defence of true liberty from antecedent and extrinsical necessity” (1655); “Castigations of Mr. Hobbes’ Animadversions” (1658); and “The Catching of Leviathan or the Great Whale” (1653). In the quaint pleasantry of the age, he spoke of using three harping irons, one for its heart, a second for its chine, and a third for its head,--meaning by these images, the religious, political, and rational aspects of the work. He further described this monster as neither fish nor flesh, but the combination of a man, with a whale--“not unlike Dagon, the idol of the Philistines.”[420] The Malmsbury philosopher was reckoned the most dangerous enemy of the day to the true interests of the Christian religion, and Bramhall, in writing against him, acted the part of one anxious to expose a covert and to crush a seminal infidelity.