Chapter XXVIII (2)

34. This later period of the seventeenth century was marked by an increasing boldness in religious inquiry; we find more disregard of authority, more disposition to question received tenets, a more suspicious criticism, both as to the genuineness and the credibility of ancient writings, a more ardent love of truth, that is, of perceiving and understanding what is true, instead of presuming that we possess it without any understanding at all. Much of this was associated, no doubt, with the other revolutions in literary opinion; with the philosophy of Bacon, Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Bayle, and Locke, with the spirit which a slightly learned, yet acute generation of men rather conversant with the world than with libraries, to whom the appeal in modern languages must be made, was sure to breathe, with that incessant reference to proof which the physical sciences taught mankind to demand. Hence, quotations are comparatively rare in the theological writings of this age; they are better reduced to their due office of testimony as to fact, sometimes of illustration or better statement of an argument, but not so much alledged as argument or authority in themselves. Even those who combated on the side of established doctrines were compelled to argue more from themselves, lest the public, their umpire, should reject, with an opposite prejudice, what had enslaved the prejudices of their fathers.

|Freedom of many writings.|

35. It is well known that a disbelief in Christianity became very frequent about this time. Several books more or less appear to indicate this spirit, but the charge has often been made with no sufficient reason. Of Hobbes, enough has been already said, and Spinosa’s place as a metaphysician will be in the next chapter. His Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously at Amsterdam, with the false date of Hamburg, in 1670, contains many observations on the Old Testament, which, though they do not really affect its general authenticity and truth, clashed with the commonly received opinion of its absolute inspiration. Some of these remarks were, if not borrowed, at least repeated in a book of more celebrity, Sentimens de quelques Theologiens d’Hollande sur l’Histoire Critique du Père Simon. This work is written by Le Clerc, but it has been doubted whether he is the author of some acute, but hardy, remarks on the inspiration of scripture which it contains. These, however, must be presumed to coincide for the most part with his own opinion; but he has afterwards declared his dissent from the hypothesis contained in these volumes, that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch. The Archæologia Philosophica of Thomas Burnet is intended to question the literal history of the creation and fall. But few will pretend that either Le Clerc or Burnet were disbelievers in revelation.

|Thoughts of Pascal.|

36. Among those who sustained the truth of Christianity by argument rather than authority, the first place both in order of time and of excellence is due to Pascal, though his Thoughts were not published till 1670, some years after his death, and, in the first edition, not without suppressions. They have been supposed to be fragments of a more systematic work that he had planned, or perhaps only reflections committed to paper, with no design of publication in their actual form. But, as is generally the case with works of genius we do not easily persuade ourselves that they could have been improved by any such alteration as would have destroyed their type. They are at present bound together by a real coherence through the predominant character of the reasonings and sentiments, and give us everything that we could desire in a more regular treatise without the tedious verbosity which regularity is apt to produce. The style is not so polished as in the Provincial Letters, and the sentences are sometimes ill constructed and elliptical. Passages almost transcribed from Montaigne have been published by careless editors as Pascal’s.

37. But the Thoughts of Pascal are to be ranked, as a monument of his genius, above the Provincial Letters, though some have asserted the contrary. They burn with an intense light; condensed in expression, sublime, energetic, rapid, they hurry away the reader till he is scarcely able or willing to distinguish the sophisms from the truth they contain. For that many of them are incapable of bearing a calm scrutiny is very manifest to those who apply such a test. The notes of Voltaire, though always intended to detract, are sometimes unanswerable; but the splendour of Pascal’s eloquence absolutely annihilates, in effect on the general reader, even this antagonist.

38. Pascal had probably not read very largely, which has given an ampler sweep to his genius. Except the Bible and the writings of Augustin, the book that seems most to have attracted him was the Essays of Montaigne. Yet no men could be more unlike in personal dispositions and in the cast of their intellect. But Pascal, though abhorring the religious and moral carelessness of Montaigne, found much that fell in with his own reflections in the contempt of human opinions, the perpetual humbling of human reason, which runs through the bold and original work of his predecessor. He quotes no book so frequently; and, indeed, except Epictetus, and once or twice Descartes, he hardly quotes any other at all. Pascal was too acute a geometer, and too sincere a lover of truth to countenance the sophisms of mere Pyrrhonism; but, like many theological writers, in exalting faith he does not always give reason her value, and furnishes weapons which the sceptic might employ against himself. It has been said that he denies the validity of the proofs of natural religion. This seems to be in some measure an error, founded on mistaking the objections he puts in the mouths of unbelievers for his own. But it must, I think, be admitted that his arguments for the being of a God are too often _à tutiori_, that it is the safer side to take.

39. The Thoughts of Pascal on miracles abound in proofs of his acuteness and originality; an originality much more striking when we recollect that the subject had not been discussed as it has since, but with an intermixture of some sophistical and questionable positions. Several of them have a secret reference to the famous cure of his niece, Mademoiselle Perier, by the holy thorn. But he is embarrassed with the difficult question whether miraculous events are sure tests of the doctrine they support, and is not wholly consistent in his reasoning, or satisfactory in his distinctions. I am unable to pronounce whether Pascal’s other observations on the rational proofs of Christianity are as original as they are frequently ingenious and powerful.

40. But the leading principle of Pascal’s theology, that from which he deduces the necessary truth of revelation, is the fallen nature of mankind; dwelling less upon scriptural proofs, which he takes for granted, than on the evidence which he supposes man himself to supply. Nothing, however, can be more dissimilar than his beautiful visions to the vulgar Calvinism of the pulpit. It is not the sordid, groveling, degraded, Caliban of that school, but the ruined archangel that he delights to paint. Man is so great, that his greatness is manifest, even in his knowledge of his own misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that to know we are miserable is misery; but still it is greatness to know it. All his misery proves his greatness; it is the misery of a great lord, of a king, dispossessed of their own. Man is the feeblest branch of nature, but it is a branch that thinks. He requires not the universe to crush him. He may be killed by a vapour, by a drop of water. But if the whole universe should crush him, he would be nobler than that which causes his death, because he knows that he is dying, and the universe would not know its power over him. This is very evidently sophistical and declamatory; but it is the sophistry of a fine imagination. It would be easy, however, to find better passages. The dominant idea recurs in almost every page of Pascal. His melancholy genius plays in wild and rapid flashes, like lightning round the scathed oak, about the fallen greatness of man. He perceives every characteristic quality of his nature under these conditions. They are the solution of every problem, the clearing up of every inconsistency that perplexes us. “Man,” he says very finely, “has a secret instinct that leads him to seek diversion and employment from without; which springs from the sense of his continual misery. And he has another secret instinct, remaining from the greatness of his original nature, which teaches him that happiness can only exist in repose. And from these two contrary instincts there arises in him an obscure propensity, concealed in his soul, which prompts him to seek repose through agitation, and even to fancy that the contentment he does not enjoy will be found, if by struggling yet a little longer he can open a door to rest.”[742]

[742] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 121.

41. It can hardly be conceived that any one would think the worse of human nature or of himself by reading these magnificent lamentations of Pascal. He adorns and ennobles the degeneracy he exaggerates. The ruined aqueduct, the broken column, the desolated city, suggest no ideas but of dignity and reverence. No one is ashamed of a misery which bears witness to his grandeur. If we should persuade a labourer that the blood of princes flows in his veins, we might spoil his contentment with the only lot he has drawn, but scarcely kill in him the seeds of pride.

42. Pascal, like many others who have dwelt on this alledged degeneracy of mankind, seems never to have disentangled his mind from the notion that what we call human nature has not merely an arbitrary and grammatical, but an intrinsic objective reality. The common and convenient forms of language, the analogies of sensible things, which the imagination readily supplies, conspire to delude us into this fallacy. Each man is born with certain powers and dispositions which constitute his own nature; and the resemblance of these in all his fellows produces a general idea, or a collective appellation, whichever we may prefer to say, called the nature of man; but few would in this age contend for the existence of this as a substance capable of qualities, and those qualities variable, or subject to mutation. The corruption of human nature is therefore a phrase which may convey an intelligible meaning, if it is acknowledged to be merely analogical and inexact, but will mislead those who do not keep this in mind. Man’s nature, as it now is, that which each man and all men possess, is the immediate workmanship of God, as much as at his creation; nor is any other hypothesis consistent with theism.

43. This notion of a real universal in human nature, presents to us in an exaggerated light those anomalies from which writers of Pascal’s school are apt to infer some vast change in our original constitution. Exaggerated, I say, for it cannot be denied, that we frequently perceive a sort of incoherence, as it appears at least to our defective vision, in the same individual; and, like threads of various hues shot through one web, the love of vice and of virtue, the strength and weakness of the heart, are wonderfully blended in self-contradictory and self-destroying conjunction. But even if we should fail altogether in solving the very first steps of this problem, there is no course for a reasonable being, except to acknowledge the limitations of his own faculties; and it seems rather unwarrantable, on the credit of this humble confession, that we do not comprehend the depths of what has been withheld from us, to substitute something far more incomprehensible and revolting to our moral and rational capacities in its place. “What,” says Pascal, “can be more contrary to the rules of our wretched justice, than to damn eternally an infant incapable of volition, for an offence wherein he seems to have had no share, and which was committed six thousand years before he was born? Certainly, nothing shocks us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. Man is more inconceivable without this mystery, than the mystery is inconceivable to man.”

44. It might be wandering from the proper subject of these volumes if we were to pause, even shortly, to inquire whether, while the creation of a world so full of evil must ever remain the most inscrutable of mysteries, we might not be led some way in tracing the connection of moral and physical evil in mankind with his place in that creation; and especially, whether the law of continuity, which it has not pleased his Maker to break with respect to his bodily structure, and which binds that, in the unity of one great type, to the lower forms of animal life by the common conditions of nourishment, reproduction, and self-defence, has not rendered necessary both the physical appetites and the propensities which terminate in self: whether, again, the superior endowments of his intellectual nature, his susceptibility of moral emotion, and of those disinterested affections which, if not exclusively, he far more intensely possesses than any inferior being; above all, the gifts of conscience, and a capacity to know God, might not be expected, even beforehand, by their conflict with the animal passions, to produce some partial inconsistencies, some anomalies at least, which he could not himself explain, in so compound a being. Every link in the long chain of creation does not pass by easy transition into the next. There are necessary chasms, and, as it were, leaps, from one creature to another, which, though not exceptions to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a new series of being. If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars, and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute, who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus, standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both! But these are things which it is difficult to touch; nor would they have been here introduced, but in order to weaken the force of positions so confidently asserted by many, and so eloquently by Pascal.

|Vindications of Christianity.|

45. Among the works immediately designed to confirm the truth of Christianity, a certain reputation was acquired, through the known erudition of its author, by the Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, bishop of Avranches. This is paraded with definitions, axioms, and propositions, in order to challenge the name it assumes. But the axioms, upon which so much is to rest, are often questionable or equivocal; as, for instance: Omnis prophetia est verax, quæ prædixit res eventu deinde completas--equivocal in the word _verax_. Huet also confirms his axioms by argument, which shows that they are not truly such. The whole book is full of learning; but he frequently loses sight of the points he would prove, and his quotations fall beside the mark. Yet he has furnished much to others, and possibly no earlier work on the same subject is so elaborate and comprehensive. The next place, if not a higher one, might be given to the treatise of Abbadie, a French refugee, published in 1684. His countrymen bestow on it the highest eulogies; but it was never so well known in England, and is now almost forgotten. The oral conferences of Limborch with Orobio, a Jew of considerable learning and ability, on the prophecies relating to the Messiah, were reduced into writing and published; they are still in some request. No book of this period among many that were written, reached so high a reputation in England as Leslie’s Short Method with the Deists, published in 1694: in which he has started an argument, pursued with more critical analysis by others, on the peculiarly distinctive marks of credibility that pertain to the scriptural miracles. The authenticity of this little treatise has been idly questioned on the Continent, for no better reason than that a translation of it has been published in a posthumous edition (1732) of the works of Saint Real, who died in 1692. But posthumous editions are never deemed of sufficient authority to establish a literary title against possession; and Prosper Marchand informs us, that several other tracts, in this edition of Saint Real, are erroneously ascribed to him. The internal evidence that the Short Method was written by a protestant should be conclusive.[743]

[743] The Biographie Universelle, art. Leslie, says: Cet ouvrage,
qui passe pour ce qu’il a fait de mieux, lui a été contesté. Le
Docteur Gleigh [sic] a fait de grands efforts pour prouver qu’il
appartenait à Leslie, quoiqu’il fût publié parmi les ouvrages de
l’Abbe de Saint Real, mort en 1692. It is melancholy to see this
petty spirit of cavil against an English writer in so respectable
a work as the Biographic Universelle. No _grands efforts_ could
be required from Dr. Gleig or anyone else, to prove that a book
was written by Leslie, which bore his name, which was addressed
to an English peer, and had gone through many editions; when
there is literally no claimant on the other side; for a
posthumous edition, forty years after an author’s death, without
attestation, is no literary evidence at all, even where a book is
published for the first time, much less where it has a known
_status_ as the production of a certain author. This is so
manifest to anyone who has the slightest tincture of critical
judgment, that we need not urge the palpable improbability of
ascribing to Saint Real, a Romish ecclesiastic, an argument which
turns peculiarly on the distinction between the scriptural
miracles and those alledged upon inferior evidence. I have lost,
or never made, the reference to Prosper Marchand; but the passage
will be found in his Dictionnaire Historique, which contains a
full article on Saint Real.

|Progress of tolerant principles.|

46. Every change in public opinion which this period witnessed, confirmed the principles of religious toleration, that had taken root in the earlier part of the century; the progress of a larger and more catholic theology, the weakening of bigotry in the minds of laymen, and the consequent disregard of ecclesiastical clamour, not only in England and Holland, but to a considerable extent in France; we might even add, the violent proceedings of the last government, in the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and the cruelties which attended it. Louis XIV., at a time when mankind were beginning to renounce the very theory of persecution, renewed the ancient enormities of its practice, and thus unconsciously gave the aid of moral sympathy and indignation to the adverse argument. The Protestant refugees of France, scattered among their brethren, brought home to all minds the great question of free conscience; not with the stupid and impudent limitation which even protestants had sometimes employed, that truth indeed might not be restrained, but that error might; a broader foundation was laid by the great advocates of toleration in this period, Bayle, Limborch, and Locke, as it had formerly been by Taylor and Episcopius.[744]

[744] The Dutch clergy, and a French minister in Holland, Jurieu,
of great polemical fame in his day, though now chiefly known by
means of his adversaries, Bayle and Le Clerc, strenuously
resisted both the theory of general toleration, and the moderate
or liberal principles in religion which were connected with it.
Le Clerc passed his life in fighting this battle, and many
articles in the Bibliothèque Universelle relate to it.

|Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary.|

47. Bayle, in 1686, while yet the smart of his banishment was keenly felt, published his Philosophical Commentary on the text in Scripture, “Compel them to come in;” a text which some of the advocates of persecution were accustomed to produce. He gives in the first part nine reasons against this literal meaning, among which none are philological. In the second part he replies to various objections. This work of Bayle does not seem to me as subtle and logical as he was wont to be, notwithstanding the formal syllogisms with which he commences each of his chapters. His argument against compulsory conversions, which the absurd interpretation of the text by his adversaries required, is indeed irresistible; but this is far from sufficiently establishing the right of toleration itself. It appears not very difficult for a skilful sophist, and none was more so than Bayle himself, to have met some of his reasoning with a specious reply. The sceptical argument of Taylor, that we can rarely be sure of knowing the truth ourselves, and consequently of condemning in others what is error, he touches but slightly; nor does he dwell on the political advantages which experience has shown a full toleration to possess. In the third part of the Philosophical Commentary, he refutes the apology of Augustin for persecution; and a few years afterwards he published a supplement answering a book of Jurieu, which had appeared in the mean time.

|Locke’s Letter on Toleration.|

48. Locke published anonymously his Letter on Toleration in 1689. The season was propitious; a legal tolerance of public worship had first been granted to the dissenters after the revolution, limited indeed to such as held most of the doctrines of the church, but preparing the nation for a more extensive application of its spirit. In the Liberty of Prophesying, Taylor had chiefly in view to deduce the justice of tolerating a diversity in religion from the difficulty of knowing the truth. He is not very consistent as to the political question, and limits too narrowly the province of tolerable opinions. Locke goes more expressly to the right of the civil magistrate, not omitting, but dwelling less forcibly on the latitudinarian scepticism of his predecessor. His own theory of government came to his aid. The clergy in general, and perhaps Taylor himself, had derived the magistrate’s jurisdiction from paternal power. And as they apparently assumed this power to extend over adult children, it was natural to give those who succeeded to it in political communities, a large sway over the moral and religious behaviour of subjects. Locke, adopting the opposite theory of compact, defines the commonwealth to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests. He denies altogether that the care of souls belongs to the civil magistrate, as it has never been committed to him. “All the power of civil government relates only to men’s civil interests, is confined to the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come.”

49. The admission of this principle would apparently decide the controversy, so far as it rests on religious grounds. But Locke has recourse to several other arguments independent of it. He proves, with no great difficulty, that the civil power cannot justly, or consistently with any true principle of religion, compel men to profess what they do not believe. This, however, is what very few would, at present, be inclined to maintain. The real question was as to the publicity of opinions deemed heterodox, and especially in social worship; and this is what those who held the magistrate to possess an authority patriarchal, universal, and arbitrary, and who were also rigidly tenacious of the necessity of an orthodox faith, and perfectly convinced that it was no other than their own, would hardly be persuaded to admit by any arguments that Locke has alledged. But the tendency of public opinion had begun to manifest itself against both these tenets of the high-church party, so that, in the eighteenth century, the principles of general tolerance became too popular to be disputed with any chance of attention. Locke was engaged in a controversy, through his first letter on toleration, which produced a second and a third; but it does not appear that these, though longer than the first, have considerably modified its leading positions.[745] It is to be observed that he pleads for the universal toleration of all modes of worship not immoral in their nature, or involving doctrines inimical to good government; placing in the latter category some tenets of the church of Rome.

[745] Warburton has fancied that Locke’s real sentiments are only
discoverable in his first Letter on Toleration, and that in the
two latter he “combats his intolerant adversary quite through the
controversy with his own principles, well foreseeing, that at
such a time of prejudice arguments built on received opinions
would have greatest weight, and make quickest impression on the
body of the people whom it was his business to gain.” Biogr.
Britannica, art. Locke.

|French Sermons.|

50. It is confessed by Goujet that, even in the middle of the seventeenth century, France could boast very little of pulpit eloquence. Frequent quotations from heathen writers and from the schoolmen, with little solid morality and less good reasoning, make up the sermons of that age.[746] But the revolution in this style, as in all others, though perhaps gradual, was complete in the reign of Louis XIV. A slight sprinkling of passages from the fathers, and still more frequently from the Scriptures, but always short, and seeming to rise out of the preacher’s heart, rather than to be sought for in his memory, replaced that intolerable parade of a theological common place book, which had been as customary in France as in England. The style was to be the perfection of French eloquence, the reasoning persuasive rather than dogmatic, the arrangement more methodical and distributive than at present, but without the excess we find in our old preachers. This is the general character of French sermons; but those who most adorned the pulpit, had of course their individual distinctions. Without delaying to mention those who are now not greatly remembered, such as La Rue, Hubert, Mascaron, we must confine ourselves to three of high reputation, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Fléchier.

[746] Bibliothèque Française, vol. ii., p. 283.

|Bourdaloue.|

51. Bourdaloue, a Jesuit, but as little of a Jesuit in the worst acceptation of the word, as the order has produced, is remarkably simple, earnest, practical: he convinces rather than commands; and by convincing he persuades; for his discourses tend always to some duty, to something that is to be done or avoided. His sentences are short, interrogative, full of plain and solid reasoning, unambitious in expression, and wholly without that care in the choice of words and cadences which we detect in Bossuet and Fléchier. No one would call Bourdaloue a rhetorician, and though he continually introduces the fathers, he has not caught their vices of language.[747]

[747] The public did justice to Bourdaloue, as they generally do
to a solid and impressive style of preaching. Je crois, says
Goujet, p. 300, que tout le monde convient qu’aucun autre ne lui
est supérieur. C’est le grand maître pour l’éloquence de la
chaire; c’est le prince des prédicateurs. Le public n’a jamais
été partagé sur son sujet; la ville et la cour l’ont également
estimé et admiré. C’est qu’il avoit réuni en sa personne tous les
grands caractères de la bonne éloquence; la simplicité du
discours Chrétien avec la majesté et la grandeur, le sublime avec
l’intelligible et le populaire, la force avec la douceur, la
véhémence avec l’onction, la liberté avec la justesse, et le plus
vive ardeur avec la plus pure lumière.

|Compared with Bossuet.|

52. Bourdaloue is almost in the same relation to Bossuet, as Patru to Le Maistre, though the two orators of the pulpit are far above those of the bar. As the one is short, condensed, plain, reasoning, and though never feeble, not often what is generally called eloquent, so the other is animated, figurative, rather diffuse and prodigal of ornament, addressing the imagination more than the judgment, rich and copious in cadence, elevating the hearer to the pitch of his own sublimity. Bossuet is sometimes too declamatory; and Bourdaloue perhaps sometimes borders on dryness. Much in the sermons of the former is true poetry; but he has less of satisfactory and persuasive reasoning than the latter. His tone is also, as in all his writings, too domineering and dogmatical for those who demand something beyond the speaker’s authority when they listen.

|Funeral discourses of Bossuet.|

53. The sermons, however, of Bossuet, taken generally, are not reckoned in the highest class of his numerous writings; perhaps scarcely justice has been done to them. His genius, on the other hand, by universal confession, never shone higher than in the six which bear the name of Oraisons Funèbres. They belong in substance so much more naturally to the province of eloquence than of theology, that I should have reserved them for another place, if the separation would not have seemed rather unexpected to the reader. Few works of genius perhaps in the French language are better known, or have been more prodigally extolled. In that style of eloquence which the ancients called demonstrative, or rather descriptive (επιδεικτικος [epideiktikos]), the style of panegyric or commemoration, they are doubtless superior to those justly celebrated productions of Thucydides and Plato that have descended to us from Greece; nor has Bossuet been equalled by any later writer. Those on the Queen of England, on her daughter the Duchess of Orleans, and on the Prince of Condé, outshine the rest; and if a difference is to be made among these, we might, perhaps, after some hesitation, confer the palm on the first. The range of topics is so various, the thoughts so just, the images so noble and poetical, the whole is in such perfect keeping, the tone of awful contemplation, is so uniform, that if it has not any passages of such extraordinary beauty as occur in the other two, its general effect on the mind is more irresistible.[748]

[748] An English preacher of conspicuous renown for eloquence was
called upon, within no great length of time, to emulate the
funeral discourse of Bossuet on the sudden death of Henrietta of
Orleans. He had before him a subject incomparably more deep in
interest, more fertile in great and touching associations--he had
to describe, not the false sorrow of courtiers, not the shriek of
sudden surprise that echoed by night in the halls of Versailles,
not the apocryphal penitence of one so tainted by the world’s
intercourse, but the manly grief of an entire nation in the
withering of those visions of hope which wait upon the untried
youth of royalty, in its sympathy with grandeur annihilated, with
beauty and innocence precipitated into the tomb. Nor did he sink
beneath this subject, except as compared with Bossuet. The sermon
to which my allusion will be understood, is esteemed by many the
finest effort of this preacher; but if read together with that of
its prototype, it will be laid aside as almost feeble and
unimpressive.

54. In this style, much more of ornament, more of what speaks in the spirit, and even the very phrase, of poetry, to the imagination and the heart, is permitted by a rigorous criticism, than in forensic or in deliberative eloquence. The beauties that rise before the author’s vision are not renounced; the brilliant colours of his fancy are not subdued; the periods assume a more rhythmical cadence, and emulate, like metre itself, the voluptuous harmony of musical intervals; the whole composition is more evidently formed to delight; but it will delight to little purpose, or even cease, in any strong sense of the word, to do so at all, unless it is ennobled by moral wisdom. In this Bossuet was pre-eminent; his thoughts are never subtle or far-fetched; they have a sort of breadth, a generality of application, which is peculiarly required in those who address a mixed assembly, and which many that aim at what is profound and original are apt to miss. It may be confessed, that these funeral discourses are not exempt from some defects, frequently inherent in panegyrical eloquence; they are sometimes too rhetorical, and do not appear to show so little effort as some have fancied; the amplifications are sometimes too unmeasured, the language sometimes borders too nearly on that of the stage; above all, there is a tone of adulation not quite pleasing to a calm posterity.

|Fléchier.|

55. Fléchier (the third name of the seventeenth century, for Massillon belongs only to the next), like Bossuet, has been more celebrated for his funeral sermons than for any others; but, in this line, it is unfortunate for him to enter into unavoidable competition with one whom he cannot rival. The French critics extol Fléchier for the arrangement and harmony of his periods; yet, even in this, according to La Harpe, he is not essentially superior to Bossuet; and, to an English ear, accustomed to the long swell of our own writers, and of the Ciceronian school in Latin, he will probably not give so much gratification. He does not want a moral dignity, or a certain elevation of thought, without which the funeral panegyric must be contemptible; but he has not the majestic tone of Bossuet; he does not, like him, raise the heroes and princes of the earth in order to abase them by paintings of mortality and weakness, or recall the hearer in every passage to something more awful than human power, and more magnificent than human grandeur. This religious solemnity, so characteristic in Bossuet, is hardly felt in the less emphatic sentences of Fléchier. Even where his exordium is almost worthy of comparison, as in the funeral discourse on Turenne, we find him degenerate into a trivial eulogy, and he flatters both more profusely and with less skill. His style is graceful, but not without affectation and false taste. La Harpe has not ill compared him to Isocrates among the orators of Greece, the place of Demosthenes being, of course, reserved for Bossuet.[749]

[749] The native critics ascribe a reform in the style of
preaching to Paolo Segneri, whom Corniani does not hesitate to
call, with the sanction, he says, of posterity, the father of
Italian eloquence. It is to be remembered, that in no country has
the pulpit been so much degraded by empty declamation, and even
by a stupid buffoonery. “The language of Segneri,” the same
writer observes, “is always full of dignity and harmony. He
inlaid it with splendid and elegant expressions, and has thus
obtained a place among the authors to whom authority has been
given by the Della Crusca dictionary. His periods are flowing,
natural, and intelligible, without the affectation of obsolete
Tuscanisms, which pass for graces of the language with many.”
Tiraboschi, with much commendation of Segneri, admits that we
find in him some vestiges of the false taste he endeavoured to
reform. The very little that I have seen of the sermons of
Segneri, gives no impression of any merit that can be reckoned
more than relative to the miserable tone of his predecessors. The
following specimen is from one of his most admired sermons:--E
Cristo non potrà ottenere da voi che gli rimettiate un torto, un
affronto, un aggravio, una parolina? Che vorreste da Christo?
Vorreste ch’egli vi si gettasse supplichevole a’ piedi a
chiedergli questa grazia? Io son quasi per dire ch’egli il
farebbe; perchè se non dubiti di prostrarsi a’ piedi di un
traditore, qual’era Guida, di lavarglieli, di asciugarglieli, di
baciarglieli, non si vergognerebbe, cred’io, di farsi vedere
ginocchioni a’ piè vostri. Ma vi fa bisogno di tanto per muovervi
a compiacerlo? Ah Cavalieri, Cavalieri, io non vorrei questa
volta farvi arrossire. Nel resto io so di certo, che se
altrettanto fosse a voi domandato da quella donna che chiamate la
vostra dama, da quella, di cui forsennati idolatrate il volto,
indovinate le voglie, ambite le grazie, non vi farete pregar
tanto a concederglielo. E poi vi fate pregar tanto da un Dio per
voi crocefisso? O confusione! O vitupero! O vergogna! Raccolta di
Prose Italiane (in Classici Italiani), vol. ii., p. 345.

This is certainly not the manner of Bossuet, and more like that
of a third-rate Methodist among us.

|English sermons--Barrow.|

56. The style of preaching in England was less ornamental, and spoke less to the imagination and affections, than these celebrated writers of the Gallican church; but in some of our chief divines it had its own excellencies. The sermons of Barrow display a strength of mind, a comprehensiveness and fertility, which have rarely been equalled. No better proof can be given than his eight sermons on the government of the tongue; copious and exhaustive without tautology or superfluous declamation, they are, in moral preaching, what the best parts of Aristotle are in ethical philosophy, with more of development and a more extensive observation. It would be said of these sermons, and indeed, with a few exceptions, of all those of Barrow, that they are not what is called evangelical; they indicate the ascendancy of an Arminian party, dwelling far more than is usual in the pulpit on moral and rational, or even temporal, inducements, and sometimes hardly abstaining from what would give a little offence in later times.[750] His quotations also from ancient philosophers, though not so numerous as in Taylor, are equally uncongenial to our ears. In his style, notwithstanding its richness and occasional vivacity, we may censure a redundancy and excess of apposition; it is not sufficient to avoid strict tautology; no second phrase (to lay down a general rule not without exception) should be so like the first, that the reader would naturally have understood it to be comprised therein. Barrow’s language is more antiquated and formal than that of his age; and he abounds too much in uncommon words of Latin derivation, frequently such as appear to have no authority but his own.

[750] Thus, in his sermon against evil speaking (xvi.), Barrow
treats it as fit “for rustic boors or men of coarsest education
and employment, who, having their minds debased by being
conversant in meanest affairs, do vent their sorry passions and
bicker about their petty concernments in such strains, who also,
not being capable of a fair reputation, or sensible of disgrace
to themselves, do little value the credit of others, or care for
aspersing it. But such language is unworthy of those persons, and
cannot easily be drawn from them, who are wont to exercise their
thoughts about nobler matters,” &c. No one would venture this now
from the pulpit.

|South.|

57. South’s sermons begin, in order of date, before the Restoration, and come down to nearly the end of the century. They were much celebrated at the time, and retain a portion of their renown. This is by no means surprising. South had great qualifications for that popularity which attends the pulpit, and his manner was at that time original. Not diffuse, not learned, not formal in argument like Barrow, with a more natural structure of sentences, a more pointed, though by no means a more fair and satisfactory turn of reasoning, with a style clear and English, free from all pedantry, but abounding with those colloquial novelties of idiom, which, though now become vulgar and offensive, the age of Charles II. affected, sparing no personal or temporary sarcasm, but, if he seems for a moment to tread on the verge of buffoonery, recovering himself by some stroke of vigorous sense and language; such was the witty Dr. South, whom the courtiers delighted to hear. His sermons want all that is called unction, and sometimes even earnestness, which is owing, in a great measure, to a perpetual tone of gibing at rebels and fanatics; but there is a masculine spirit about them, which, combined with their peculiar characteristics, would naturally fill the churches where he might be heard. South appears to bend towards the Arminian theology, without adopting so much of it as some of his contemporaries.

|Tillotson.|

59. The sermons of Tillotson were, for half a century, more read than any in our language. They are now bought almost as waste paper, and hardly read at all. Such is the fickleness of religious taste, as abundantly numerous instances would prove. Tillotson is reckoned verbose and languid. He has not the former defect in nearly so great a degree as some of his eminent predecessors; but there is certainly little vigour or vivacity in his style. Full of the Romish controversy, he is perpetually recurring to that “world’s debate;” and he is not much less hostile to all the Calvinistic tenets. What is most remarkable in the theology of Tillotson is his strong assertion, in almost all his sermons, of the principles of natural religion and morality, not only as the basis of all revelation, without a dependence on which it cannot be believed, but as nearly coincident with Christianity in its extent, a length to which few at present would be ready to follow him. Tillotson is always of a tolerant and catholic spirit, enforcing right actions rather than orthodox opinions, and obnoxious, for that and other reasons, to all the bigots of his own age.

|Expository Theology.|

60. It has become necessary to draw towards a conclusion of this chapter; the materials are far from being exhausted. In expository, or, as some call it, exegetical theology, the English divines had already taken a conspicuous station. Andrès, no partial estimator of Protestant writers, extols them with marked praise.[751] Those who belonged to the earlier part of the century form a portion of a vast collection, the Critici Sacri, published by one Bee, a bookseller, in 1660. This was in nine folio volumes; and in 1669, Matthew Pool, a nonconforming minister, produced his Synopsis Criticorum, in five volumes, being, in great measure, an abridgment and digest of the former. Bee complained of the infraction of his copyright, or rather his equitable interest; but such a dispute hardly pertains to our history.[752] The work of Pool was evidently a more original labour than the former. Hammond, Patrick, and other commentators, do honour to the Anglican church in the latter part of the century.

[751] I soli Inglesi, che ampio spazio non dovrebbono occupare in
questo capo dell’esegetica sacra, se l’istituto della nostr’opera
ci permettesse tener dietro a tutti i più degni della nostra
stima? Vol. xix., p. 253.

[752] Chalmers.

|Pearson on the Creed.|

61. Pearson’s Exposition of the Apostle’s Creed, published in 1659, is a standard book in English divinity. It expands beyond the literal purport of the creed itself to most articles of orthodox belief, and is a valuable summary of arguments and authorities on that side. The closeness of Pearson, and his judicious selection of proofs, distinguish him from many, especially the earlier, theologians. Some might surmise that his undeviating adherence to what he calls the church is hardly consistent with independence of thinking; but, considered as an advocate, he is one of much judgment and skill. Such men as Pearson and Stillingfleet, would have been conspicuous at the bar, which we could not quite affirm of Jeremy Taylor.

|Simon’s Critical Histories.|

62. Simon, a regular priest of the congregation called The Oratory, which has been rich in eminent men, owes much of his fame to his Critical History of the Old Testament. This work, bold in many of its positions, as it then seemed to both the Catholic and Protestant orthodox, after being nearly strangled by Bossuet in France, appeared at Rotterdam in 1685. Bossuet attacked it with extreme vivacity, but with a real inferiority to Simon, both in learning and candour.[753] Le Clerc on his side carped more at the Critical History than it seems to deserve. Many paradoxes, as they then were called, in his famous work are now received as truth, or at least pass without reproof. Simon may possibly be too prone to novelty, but a love of truth as well as great acuteness are visible throughout. His Critical History of the New Testament was published in 1689, and one or two more works of a similar description before the close of the century.

[753] Défense de la Tradition des Saints Pères. Œuvres de
Bossuet, vol. v., and Instructions sur la Version du N. T.,
imprimée à Trevoux, Id. vol. iv., 313. Bausset, Vie de Bossuet,
iv., 276.

63. I have, on a former occasion, adverted, in a corresponding chapter, to publications on witchcraft, and similar superstitions. Several might be mentioned at this time; the belief in such tales was assailed by a prevalent scepticism which called out their advocates. Of these, the most unworthy to have exhibited their great talents in such a cause were our own philosophers Henry More and Joseph Glanvil. The Sadducismus Triumphatus, or Treatise on Apparitions, by the latter, has passed through several editions, while his Scepsis Scientifica has hardly been seen, perhaps, by six living persons. A Dutch minister, by name Bekker, raised a great clamour against himself by a downright denial of all power to the devil, and consequently to his supposed instruments, the ancient beldams of Holland and other countries. His Monde Enchanté, originally published in Dutch, is in four volumes, written in a systematic manner and with tedious prolixity. There was no ground for imputing infidelity to the author, except the usual ground of calumniating everyone who quits the beaten path in theology; but his explanations of scripture in the case of the demoniacs and the like are, as usual with those who have taken the same line, rather forced. The fourth volume which contains several curious stories of imagined possession, and some which resemble what is now called magnetism, is the only part of Bekker’s once celebrated book that can be read with any pleasure. Bekker was a Cartesian, and his theory was built too much on Cartesian assumptions of the impossibility of spirit _acting_ on body, which are easily parried by denying his inference from them.