Chapter XIX (4)

68. England gradually took a prominent share in this branch of sacred literature. Among the divines of this period, comprehending the reigns of James and Charles, we may mention Usher, Gataker, Mede, Lightfoot, Jackson, Field, and Leigh.[127] Gataker stood, perhaps, next to Usher in general erudition. The fame of Mede has rested, for the most part, on his interpretations of the Apocalypse. This book had been little commented upon by the reformers; but in the beginning of the seventeenth century, several wild schemes of its application to present or expected events had been broached in Germany. England had also taken an active part, if it be true what Grotius tells us, that eighty books on the prophecies had been published here before 1640.[128] Those of Mede have been received with favour by later interpreters. Lightfoot, with extensive knowledge of the rabbinical writers, poured his copious stores on Jewish antiquities, preceded in this by a more obscure labourer in that region, Ainsworth. Jackson had a considerable name, but is little read, I suppose, in the present age. Field on the Church has been much praised by Coleridge; it is, as it seemed to me, a more temperate work in ecclesiastical theory than some have represented it to be, and written almost wholly against Rome. Leigh’s Critica Sacra can hardly be reckoned, nor does it claim to be, more than a compilation from earlier theologians: it is an alphabetical series of words from the Hebrew and Greek Testaments, the author candidly admitting that he was not very conversant with the latter language.

[127] “All confess,” says Selden, in the Table-talk, “there never
was a more learned clergy--no man taxes them with ignorance.” In
another place, indeed, he is represented to say, “The jesuits and
the lawyers of France, and the Low Country-men have engrossed all
learning; the rest of the world make nothing but homilies.” As
far as these sentences are not owing to difference of humour in
the time of speaking, he seems to have taken learning in a larger
sense the second time than the first. Of learning, not
theological the English clergy had no extraordinary portion.

[128] Si qua in re libera esse debet sententia, certè in
vaticiniis præsertim cum jam Protestantium libri prodierint fermè
centum (in his octoginta in Anglia sola, ut mihi Anglici legati
dixere,) super illis rebus, inter se plurimum discordes. Grot.
Epist. 895.

|Style of preaching.|

|English sermons.|

69. The style of preaching before the Reformation had been often little else than buffoonery, and seldom respectable. The German sermons of Tauler, in the fourteenth century, are alone remembered. For the most part, indeed, the clergy wrote in Latin what they delivered to the multitude in the native tongue. A better tone began with Luther. His language was sometimes rude and low, but persuasive, artless, powerful. He gave many useful precepts, as well as examples, for pulpit eloquence. Melanchthon and several others, both in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well in the Lutheran as the reformed church, endeavoured, by systematic treatises, to guide the composition of sermons. The former could not, however, withstand the formal, tasteless, and polemical spirit that overspread their theology. In the latter a superior tone is perceived. Of these, according to Eichhorn, the Swiss preachers were most simple and popular, the Dutch most learned and copious, the French had most taste and eloquence, the English most philosophy.[129] It is more than probable that in these characteristics he has meant to comprise the whole of the seventeenth century. Few continental writers, as far as I know, that belong to this its first moiety, have earned any remarkable reputation in this province of theology. In England several might be distinguished out of a large number. Sermons have been much more frequently published here than in any other country; and, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, form a large proportion of our theological literature. But it is of course not requisite to mention more than the very few which may be said to have a general reputation.

[129] Eichhorn, t. vi., part ii., p. 219, et post.

|Of Donne.|

70. The sermons of Donne have sometimes been praised in late times. They are undoubtedly the productions of a very ingenious and a very learned man; and two folio volumes by such a person may be expected to supply favourable specimens. In their general character, they will not appear, I think, much worthy of being rescued from oblivion. The subtlety of Donne, and his fondness for such inconclusive reasoning, as a subtle disputant is apt to fall into, runs through all of these sermons at which I have looked. His learning he seems to have perverted in order to cull every impertinence of the fathers and schoolmen, their remote analogies, their strained allegories, their technical distinctions; and to these he has added much of a similar kind from his own fanciful understanding. In his theology, Donne appears often to incline towards the Arminian hypotheses, which, in the last years of James and the first of his son, the period in which these sermons were chiefly preached, had begun to be accounted orthodox at court; but I will not vouch for his consistency in every discourse. Much, as usual in that age, is levelled against Rome: Donne was conspicuously learned in that controversy; and though he talks with great respect of antiquity, is not induced by it, like some of his Anglican contemporaries, to make any concession to the adversary.[130]

[130] Donne incurred some scandal by a book entitled Biathanatos,
and considered as a vindication of suicide. It was published long
after his death, in 1651. It is a very dull and pedantic
performance, without the ingenuity and acuteness of paradox;
distinctions, objections, and quotations from the rabble of bad
authors whom he used to read, fill up the whole of it. It is
impossible to find a less clear statement of argument on either
side. No one would be induced to kill himself by reading such a
book, unless he were threatened with another volume.

|Of Jeremy Taylor.|

71. The sermons of Jeremy Taylor are of much higher reputation; far indeed above any that had preceded them in the English church. An imagination essentially poetical, and sparing none of the decorations which, by critical rules, are deemed almost peculiar to verse; a warm tone of piety, sweetness, and charity; an accumulation of circumstantial accessories whenever he reasons, or persuades, or describes; an erudition pouring itself forth in quotation, till his sermons become in some places almost a garland of flowers from all other writers, and especially from those of classical antiquity, never before so redundantly scattered from the pulpit, distinguish Taylor from his contemporaries by their degree, as they do from most of his successors by their kind. His sermons on the Marriage Ring, on the House of Feasting, on the Apples of Sodom, may be named without disparagement to others, which perhaps ought to stand in equal place. But they are not without considerable faults, some of which have just been hinted. The eloquence of Taylor is great, but it is not eloquence of the highest class; it is far too Asiatic, too much in the style of Chrysostom and other declaimers of the fourth century, by the study of whom he had probably vitiated his taste; his learning is ill placed, and his arguments often as much so; not to mention that he has the common defect of alleging nugatory proofs; his vehemence loses its effect by the circuity of his pleonastic language; his sentences are of endless length, and hence not only altogether unmusical, but not always reducible to grammar. But he is still the greatest ornament of the English pulpit up to the middle of the seventeenth century; and we have no reason to believe, or rather much reason to disbelieve, that he had any competitor in other languages.

|Devotional writings of Taylor.|

|And Hall.|

72. The devotional writings of Taylor, several of which belong to the first part of the century, are by no means of less celebrity or less value than his sermons. Such are the life of Christ, the Holy Living and Dying, and the collections of meditations, called the Golden Grove. A writer as distinguished in works of practical piety was Hall. His Art of Divine Meditation, his Contemplations, and indeed many of his writings, remind us frequently of Taylor. Both had equally pious and devotional tempers; both were full of learning, both fertile of illustration; both may be said to have had strong imagination and poetical genius, though Taylor let his predominate a little more. Taylor is also rather more subtle and argumentive; his copiousness has more real variety. Hall keeps more closely to his subject, dilates upon it sometimes more tediously, but more appositely. In his sermons there is some excess of quotation and far-fetched illustration, but less than in those of Taylor. These two great divines resemble each other, on the whole, so much that we might for a short time not discover which we were reading. I do not know that any third writer comes close to either. The Contemplations of Hall are among his most celebrated works. They are prolix, and without much of that vivacity or striking novelty we meet with in the devotional writings of his contemporary, but are perhaps more practical and generally edifying.[131]

[131] Some of the moral writings of Hall were translated into
French by Chevreau in the seventeenth century, and had much
success. Niceron, xi. 348.

|In the Roman.|

73. The religious treatises of this class, even those which by their former popularity, or their merit, ought to be mentioned in a regular history of theological literature, are too numerous for these pages. A mystical and ascetic spirit diffused itself more over religion, struggling sometimes, as in the Lutherans of Germany, against the formal orthodoxy of the church, but more often in subordination to its authority, and cooperating with its functions. The writings of St. Francis de Sales, titular Bishop of Geneva, especially that on the Love of God, published in 1616, make a sort of epoch in the devotional theology of the church of Rome. Those of St. Teresa, in the Spanish language, followed some years afterwards; they are altogether full of a mystical theopathy. But De Sales included charity in his scheme of divine love; and it is to him, as well as others of his age, that not only a striking revival of religion in France, which had been absolutely perverted or disregarded in the sixteenth century, was due, but a reformation in the practices of monastic life, which became more active and beneficent, with less of useless penance and asceticism than before. New institutions sprung up with the spirit of association, and all other animating principles of conventual orders, but free from the formality and torpor of the old.[132]

[132] Ranke, ii. 430.

|And Lutheran church.|

74. Even in the German churches, rigid as they generally were in their adherence to the symbolical books, some voices from time to time were heard for a more spiritual and effective religion. Arndt’s Treatise of True Christianity, in 1605, written on ascetic and devotional principles, and with some deviation from the tenets of the very orthodox Lutherans may be reckoned one of the first protests against their barren forms of Faith[133]; and the mystical theologians, if they had not run into such extravagances as did dishonour to their names would have been accessions to the same side. The principal mystics or theosophists have generally been counted among philosophers, and will therefore find their place in the next chapter. The German nation is constitutionally disposed to receive those forms of religion which address themselves to the imagination and the heart. Much therefore of this character has always been written, and become popular, in that language. Few English writings of the practical class, except those already mentioned, can be said to retain much notoriety. Those of George Herbert are best known; his Country Parson, which seems properly to fall within this description, is on the whole a pleasing little book; but the precepts are sometimes so overstrained, as to give an air of affectation.

[133] Eichhorn, v. part i., p. 355. Biogr. Univ. Chalmers.

|Infidelity of some writers. Charron.|

75. The disbelief in revelation, of which several symptoms had appeared before the end of the sixteenth century, became more remarkable afterwards both in France and England, involving several names not obscure in literary history. The first of these, in point of date, is Charron. The religious scepticism of this writer has not been generally acknowledged, and indeed it seems repugnant to the fact of his having written an elaborate defence of Christianity; yet we can deduce no other conclusion from one chapter in his most celebrated book, the Treatise on Wisdom. Charron is so often little else than a transcriber, that we might suspect him in this instance also to have drawn from other sources; which however would leave the same inference as to his own tenets, and I think this chapter has an air of originality.

|Vanini.|

76. The name of Charron, however, has not been generally associated with the charge of irreligion. A more audacious, and consequently more unfortunate writer was Lucilio Vanini, a native of Italy, whose book De Admirandis Naturæ Reginæ Deæque Mortalium Arcanis, printed at Paris in 1616, caused him to be burned at the stake by a decree of the parliament of Toulouse in 1619. This treatise, as well as one that preceded it, Amphitheatrum Æternæ Providentiæ, Lyons, 1615, is of considerable rarity, so that there has been a question concerning the atheism of Vanini, which some have undertaken to deny.[134] In the Amphitheatrum I do not perceive anything which leads to such an imputation, though I will not pretend to have read the whole of a book full of the unintelligible metaphysics of the later Aristotelians. It professes at least to be a vindication of the being and providence of the Deity. But the later work, which is dedicated to Bassompierre, and published with a royal privilege of exclusive sale for six years, is of a very different complexion. It is in sixty dialogues, the interlocutors being styled Alexander and Julius Cæsar, the latter representing Vanini himself. The far greater part of these dialogues relate to physical, but a few to theological subjects. In the fiftieth, on the religion of the heathens, he avows his disbelief of all religion, except such as nature, which is God, being the principle of motion, has planted in the hearts of man; every other being the figment of kings to keep their subjects in obedience, and of priests for their own lucre and honour;[135] observing plainly of his own Amphitheatrum, which is a vindication of providence, that he had said many things in it which he did not believe.[136] Vanini was infatuated with presumption, and, if he resembled Jordano Bruno in this respect, fell very short of his acuteness and apparent integrity. His cruel death, and perhaps the scarcity of his works, has given more celebrity to his name in literary history than it would otherwise have obtained.

[134] Brucker, v. 678.

[135] In quanam religione verè et piè Deum coli vetusti
philosophi existimârunt? In unica Naturæ lege, quam ipsa Natura,
quæ Deus est (est enim principium motûs), in omnium gentium
animis inscripsit; cæteras vero leges non nisi figmenta et
illusiones esse asserebant, non a cacodæmone aliquo inductas,
fabulosum namque illorum genus dicitur a philosophis, sed a
principibus ad subditorum pædagogiam excogitatas, et a
sacrificulis ob honoris et auri aucupium confirmatas, non
miraculis, sed scriptura, cujus nec originale ullibi adinvenitur,
quæ miracula facta recitet, et bonarum ac malarum actionum
repromissiones polliceatur, in futura tamen vita, ne fraus detegi
possit, p. 366.

[136] Multa in eo libro scripta sunt, quibus a me nulla præstatur
fides. Così va il mondo.--ALEX. Non miror, nam ego crebris
vernaculis hoc usurpo sermonibus: Questo mondo è una gabbia de’
matti. Reges excipio et Pontifices. Nam de illis scriptum est:
Cor Regis in manu Domini, &c. Dial. LVI., p. 428.

The concluding pages are enough to show with what justice Buhle
and Tennemann have gravely recorded Vanini among philosophers.
Quæso, mi Juli, tuam de animæ immortalitate sententiam
explices.--J. C. Excusatum me habeas rogo.--AL. Cur ita?--J. C.
Vovi Deo meo quæstionem hanc me non pertractaturum, antequam
senex dives et germanus evasero.--AL. Dii tibi Nestoreos pro
literariæ reipublicæ emolumento dies impertiant: vix trigesimum
nunc attigisti annum et tot præclaræ eruditionis monumenta
admirabili cum laude edidisti.--J. C. Quid hæc mihi prosunt?--AL.
Celebrem tibi laudem comparârunt.--J. C. Omnes famæ rumusculos
cum uno amasiæ basiolo commutandos plerique philosophi
suadent.--AL. At alter ea perfrui potest.--J. C. Quid inde
adimit?...--AL. Uberrimos voluptaris fructus percepisti in Naturæ
arcanis investigandis.--J. C. Corpus mihi est studiis enervatum
exhaustumque; neque in hac humana caligine perfectam rerum
cognitionem assequi possumus; cum ipsummet Aristotelem
philosophorum Deum infinitis propemodum locis hallucinatum fuisse
adverto, cumque medicam facultatem præ reliquis certissimam adhuc
incertam et fallacem experior, subscribere cuperem Agrippæ
libello quem de scientiarum vanitate conscripsit.--AL. Laborum
tuorum præmium jam consecutus es; æternitati nomen jam
consecrâsti. Quid jucundius in extremo tuæ ætatis curriculo
accipere potes, quam hoc canticum? Et superest sine te nomen in
orbe tuum.--J. C. Si animus meus una cum corpore, ut Athei
fingunt, evanescat, quas ille ex fama post obitum delicias
nanscisci poterit? Forsitan gloriolæ voculis, et fidiculis ad
cadaveris domicilium pertrahatur? Si animus, ut credimus libenter
et speramus, interitui non est obnoxius, et ad superos evolabit,
tot ibi perfruetur cupediis et voluptatibus, ut illustres ac
splendidas mundi pompas et laudationes nec pili faciat. Si ad
purgatorias flammas descendet, gratior erit illi illius
orationis, Dies iræ, dies illa, mulierculis gratissima recitatio,
quam omnes Tulliani glossuli, dicendique lepores, quam
subtilissimæ et pene divinæ Aristotelis ratiocinationes: si
Tartareo, quod Deus avertat, perpetuo carceri emancipatur, nullum
ibi solatium, nullam redemptionam inveniet.--AL. O utinam in
adolescentiæ limine has rationas excepissem!--J. C. Prætorita
mala ne cogites, futura ne cures, præsentia fugias.--AL. Ah!--J.
C. Liberaliter inspiras.--AL. Illius versiculi recordor. Perduto
è tutto il tempo, che in amor non si spende.--J. C. Eja quoniam
inclinato jam die ad vesperam perducta est disputatio (cujus
singula verba divino Romanæ ecclesiæ oraculo, infallibilis cujus
interpres a Spiritu sancto modo constitutus est Paulus V.,
serenissimæ Burghesiæ familiæ soboles, subjecta esse volumus, ita
ut pro non dictis habeantur, si quæ forsitan sunt, quod vic
crediderim, quæ illius placitis ad amussim non consentiant),
laxemus paulisper animos, et a severitate ad hilaritatem risumque
traducamus. Heus pueri! lusorias tabulas huc adferte. The
wretched man, it seems, had not much reason to think himself a
gainer by his speculations; yet he knew not that the worst was
still behind.

|Lord Herbert of Cherbury.|

77. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in his Treatise de Veritate, and still more in that De Religione Gentilium, has been justly deemed inimical to every positive religion. He admits indeed the possibility of immediate revelation from heaven, but denies that any tradition from others can have sufficient certainty. Five fundamental truths of natural religion he holds to be such as all mankind are bound to acknowledge, and damns those heathens who do not receive them as summarily as any theologian.[137]

[137] These five articles are--1. Esse Deum summum.--2. Coli
debere.--3. Virtutem pietatemque esse præcipuas partes cultûs
divini.--4. Dolendum esse ob peccata, ab iisque resipiscendum.--
5. Dari ex bonitate justitiaque divina præmium vel pœnam tum in
hac vita, tum post hanc vitam.... Hisce quippe ubi superstitiones
figmentaque commiscuerint, vel animas suas criminibus quæ nulla
satis eluat pœnitentia, commaculaverint, a seipsis perditio
propria, Deo vero summo in æternum sit gloria. De Religione
Gentilium, cap. 1.

|Grotius de Veritate.|

78. The progress of infidelity in France did not fail to attract notice. It was popular in the court of Louis XIII., and, in a certain degree, in that of Charles I. But this does not belong to the history of literature. Among the writers who may have given some proofs of it we may reckon La Mothe le Vayer, Naudé, and Guy Patin.[138] The writings of Hobbes will be treated at length hereafter. It is probable that this sceptical spirit of the age gave rise to those vindications of revealed religion which were published in the present period. Among these the first place is due to the well-known and extensively circulated treatise of Grotius. This was originally sketched in Dutch verse, and intended for the lower classes of his countrymen. It was published in Latin in 1627.[139] Few, if any, books of the kind have been so frequently reprinted; but some parts being not quite so close and critical as the modern state of letters exacts, and the arguments against Jews and Mahometans seeming to occupy too much space, it is less read than formerly.

[138] La Mothe le Vayer has frequently been reckoned among those
who carried their general scepticism into religion. And this
seems a fair inference, unless the contrary can be shown; for
those who doubt of what is most evident, will naturally doubt of
what is less so. In La Mothe’s fourth dialogue, under the name of
Oratius Tubero, he pretends to speak of faith as a gift of God,
and not founded on evidence; which was probably but the usual
subterfuge. The Naudæana are full of broad intimations that the
author was, as he expresses it, _bien déniaisé_; and Guy Patin’s
letters, except those near the end of his life, lead to a similar
conclusion. One of them has certainly the appearance of
implicating Gassendi, and has been quoted as such by Sir James
Mackintosh, in his Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy. Patin
tells us, that Naudé, Gassendi, and he were to sup together the
following Sunday. Ce sera une débauche, mais philosophique, et
peut-être quelque chose d’avantage, pour être tous trois guéris
du loup-garou, et être délivrés du mal des scrupules qui est le
tyran des consciences, nous irons peut-être jusque fort près du
sanctuaire. Je fis l’an passé ce voyage de Gentilly avec M.
Naudé, moy seul avec luy, tête-à-tête; il n’y avoit point de
témoins, aussi n’y en falloit-il point; nous y parlâmes fort
librement de tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalizé, p.
32. I should not, nevertheless, lay much stress on this letter in
opposition to the many assertions of belief in religion which the
writings of Gassendi contain. One of them, indeed, quoted by
Dugald Stewart, in note Q. to his first Dissertation, is rather
suspicious, as going too far into a mystical strain for his
extremely cold temperament.

[139] Niceron, vol. xix. Biogr. Univ.

|English translation of the Bible.|

79. This is not a period in which many editions or versions of the Scriptures were published. The English translation of the Bible had been several times revised, or re-made, since the first edition by Tyndal and Coverdale. It finally assumed its present form under the authority of James I. Forty-seven persons, in six companies, meeting at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, distributed the labour among them; twenty-five being assigned to the Old Testament, fifteen to the New, seven to the Apocrypha. The rules imposed for their guidance by the king were designed, as far as possible, to secure the text against any novel interpretation; the translation, called the Bishop’s Bible, being established as the basis, as those still older had been in that; and the work of each person or company being subjected to the review of the rest. The translation, which was commenced in 1607, was published in 1611.[140]

[140] Fuller’s Church History.

|Its style.|

80. The style of this translation is in general so enthusiastically praised, that no one is permitted either to qualify or even explain the grounds of his approbation. It is held to be the perfection of our English language. I shall not dispute this proposition; but one remark as to a matter of fact cannot reasonably be censured, that, in consequence of the principle of adherence to the original versions which had been kept up ever since the time of Henry VIII., it is not the language of the reign of James I. It may, in the eyes of many, be a better English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Raleigh, or Bacon, as any one may easily perceive. It abounds, in fact, especially in the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and with single words long since abandoned, or retained only in provincial use. On the more important question, whether this translation is entirely, or with very trifling exceptions, conformable to the original text, it seems unfit to enter. It is one which is seldom discussed with all the temper and freedom from oblique views which the subject demands, and upon which, for this reason, it is not safe for those who have not had leisure or means to examine it for themselves, to take upon trust the testimony of the learned. A translation of the Old Testament was published at Douay in 1609, for the use of the English Catholics.