Chapter XI: Part II: s. 74 (4)

I do not affirm this as an article of Christian faith; but I say that no candid writer ought to hide himself in double meanings. Either he should have used the term 'death' ('ex Adamo') as loss of body, or as change of mode of being and of its circumstances; and again this latter as either evil for all, or as evil or good according to the moral habits of each individual.

Observe, however, once for all, that I do not pretend to account for Original Sin. I declare it to be an unaccountable fact. How can we explain a 'species', when we are wholly in the dark as to the 'genus'? Now guilt itself, as well as all other immediate facts of free will, is absolutely inexplicable; of course original guilt. If we will perversely confound the intelligible with the sensible world, misapply the logic appropriate to _phænomena_ and the categories, or forms, which are empty except as substantialized in facts of experience, in order to use them as the Procrustes' bed of faith respecting noumena: if in short, we will strive to understand that of which we can only know [Greek: hoti estì], we may and must make as wild work with reason, will, conscience, guilt, and virtue, as with Original Sin and Redemption. On every subject first ask, Is it among the [Greek: aisthaetà], or the [Greek: noúmena]?

Ib. s. xxiii. p. 12.

It could not make us heirs of damnation. This I shall the less need to
insist upon, because, of itself, it seems so horrid to impute to the
goodness and justice of God to be author of so great calamity to
innocents, &c.

Never was there a more hazardous way of reasoning, or rather of placing human ignorance in the judgment seat over God's wisdom. The whole might be closely parodied in support of Atheism: rather, this is but a paraphrase of the old atheistic arguments. Either God could not, or would not, prevent the moral and physical evils of the universe, including the everlasting anguish of myriads of millions: therefore he is either not all-powerful or not all-good: but a being deficient in power or goodness is not God:--_Ergo, &c._

Ib. s. xxv. p. 13.

I deny not but all persons naturally are so, that they cannot arrive
at heaven; but unless some other principle be put into them, or some
great grace done for them, must for ever stand separate from seeing
the face of God.

But this is but accidentally occasioned by the sin of Adam. Just so might I say, that without the great grace of air done for them no living beings could live. If it mean more, pray where was the grace in creating a being, who without an especial grace must pass into utter misery? If Taylor reply; but the grace was added in Christ: why so say the Calvinists. According to Taylor there is no fall of man; but only an act and punishment of a man, which punishment consisted in his living in the kitchen garden, instead of the flower garden and orchard: and Cain was as likely to have murdered Abel before, as after, the eating of the forbidden fruit. But the very name of the fruit confutes Taylor. Adam altered his nature by it. Cain did not. What Adam did, I doubt not, we all do. Time is not with things of spirit.

Ib. s. xxvii. p. 14.

Is hell so easy a pain, or are the souls of children of so cheap, so
contemptible a price, that God should so easily throw them into hell?

This is an argument against the 'sine qua non' of Baptism, not against Original Sin.

Ib. s. lxvii. p. 49.

Origen said enough to be mistaken in the question. [Greek: Hharà tò
Adàm koinàe pánt'on esti. Kaì tà katà taes gynaikòs, ouk esti kath aes
ou légetai.] 'Adam's curse is common to all. And there is not a woman
on earth, to whom may not be said those things which were spoken to
this woman.'

Origen's words ought to have prevented all mistake, for he plainly enough overthrows the phantom of hereditary guilt; and as to guilt from a corruption of nature, it is just such guilt as the carnivorous appetites of a weaned lion, or the instinct of a brood of ducklings to run to water. What then is it? It is an evil, and therefore seated in the will; common to all men, the beginning of which no man can determine in himself or in others. How comes this? It is a mystery, as the will itself. Deeds are in time and space, therefore have a beginning. Pure action, that is, the will, is a 'noumenon', and irreferable to time. Thus Origen calls it neither hereditary nor original, but universal sin. The curse of Adam is common to all men, because what Adam did, we all do: and thus of Eve. You may substitute any woman in her place, and the same words apply. This is the true solution of this unfortunate question. The [Greek: pr'oton pseudos] is in the dividing the will from the acts of the will. The will is 'ego-agens'.

Ib. s. lxxxii. p. 52.

This paragraph, though very characteristic of the Author, is fitter for a comedy than for a grave discourse. It puts one in mind of the play--"More sacks in the mill! Heap, boys, heap!"

Ib. s. lxxxiv. p. 56.

'Præposterum est' (said Paulus the lawyer) 'ante nos locupletes dici
quam acquisiverimus'. We cannot be said to lose what we never had; and
our fathers' goods were not to descend upon us, unless they were his
at his death.

Take away from me the knowledge that he was my father, dear Bishop, and this will be true. But as it stands, the whole is, "says Paulus the Lawyer;" and, "Well said, Lawyer!" say I.

Ib. p. 57.

Which though it was natural, yet from Adam it began to be a curse;
just as the motion of a serpent upon his belly, which was concreated
with him, yet upon this story was changed into a malediction and an
evil adjunct.

How? I should really like to understand this.

Ib. ch. vii. p. 73 'in initio'.

In this most eloquent treatise we may detect sundry logical lapses, sometimes in the statement, sometimes in the instances, and once or twice in the conclusions. But the main and pervading error lies in the treatment of the subject 'in genere' by the forms and rules of conceptual logic; which deriving all its material from the senses, and borrowing its forms from the sense ([Greek: aisthaesis katharà]) or intuitive faculty, is necessarily inapplicable to spiritual mysteries, the very definition or contra-distinguishing character of which is that they transcend the sense, and therefore the understanding, the faculty, as Archbishop Leighton and Immanuel Kant excellently define it, which judges according to sense. In the Aids to Reflection, [12] I have shewn that the proper function of the understanding or mediate faculty is to collect individual or sensible concretes into kinds and sorts ('genera et species') by means of their common characters ('notæ communes'); and to fix and distinguish these conceptions (that is, generalized perceptions) by words. Words are the only immediate objects of the understanding. Spiritual verities, or truths of reason 'respective ad realia', and herein distinguished from the merely formal, or so called universal truths, are differenced from the conceptions of the understanding by the immediatcy of the knowledge, and from the immediate truths of sense,--that is, from both pure and mixed intuitions,--by not being sensible, that is, not representable by figure, measurement or weight; nor connected with any affection of our sensibility, such as color, taste, odors, and the like. And such knowledges we, when we speak correctly, name ideas.

Now Original Sin, that is, sin that has its origin in itself, or in the will of the sinner, but yet in a state or condition of the will not peculiar to the individual agent, but common to the human race, is an idea: and one diagnostic or contra-distinguishing mark appertaining to all ideas, is, that they are not adequately expressible by words. An idea can only be expressed (more correctly suggested) by two contradictory positions; as for example; the soul is all in every part;--nature is a sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, and its circumference no where, and the like.

Hence many of Bishop Taylor's objections, grounded on his expositions of the doctrine, prove nothing more than that the doctrine concerns an idea. But besides this, Taylor everywhere assumes the consequences of Original Sin as superinduced on a pre-existing nature, in no essential respect differing from our present nature;--for instance, on a material body, with its inherent appetites and its passivity to material agents;--in short, on an animal nature in man. But this very nature, as the antagonist of the spirit or supernatural principle in man, is in fact the Original Sin,--the product of the will indivisible from the act producing it; just as in pure geometry the mental construction is indivisible from the constructive act of the intuitive faculty. Original Sin, as the product, is a fact concerning which we know by the light of the idea itself, that it must originate in a self-determination of a will. That which we do not know is how it originates, and this we cannot explain; first, from the necessity of the subject, namely, the will; and secondly, because it is an idea, and all ideas are inconceivable. It is an idea, because it is not a conception.

Ib. s. ii. p. 74, 75.

And they are injurious to Christ, who think that from Adam we might
have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it;
'he brought life and immortality to light through the gospel'. It is a
singular benefit given by God to mankind through Jesus Christ.

And none inherit it but those who are born of Christ; 'ergo', bad men and infidels are not immortal. Immortality is one thing, a happy immortality another. St. Paul meant the latter: Taylor either the former, or his words have no meaning at all; for no man ever thought or dreamed that we inherited heaven from Adam, but that as sons of Adam, that is, as men, we have souls that do not perish with the body. I often suspect that Taylor, in 'abditis fidei' [Greek: es_oterikaes], inclined to the belief that there is no other immortality but heaven, and that hell is a 'pæna damni negativa, haud privativa'. I own myself strongly inclined to it;--but so many texts against it! I am confident that the doctrine would be a far stronger motive than the present; for no man will believe eternal misery of himself, but millions would admit, that if they did not amend their lives they would be undeserving of living for ever.

Ib. s. vi. p. 77.

[Greek: hina màe plaemmúra tòn en haemin katapontísae logismòn eis
tòn taes hamartiás buthón.]

"Lest the tumultuous crowd throw the reason within us over bridge into the gulf of sin." What a vivid figure! It is enough to make any man set to work to read Chrysostom.

Ib.

... 'peccantes mente sub una.'

Note Prudentius's use of 'mente sub una' for 'in one person.'

Ib. p. 78.

For even now we see, by a sad experience, that the afflicted and the
miserable are not only apt to anger and envy, but have many more
desires and more weaknesses, and consequently more aptnesses to sin in
many instances than those who are less troubled. And this is that
which was said by Arnobius; 'proni ad culpas, et ad libidinis varios
appetitos vitio sumus infirmitatis ingenitæ'.

No. Arnobius never said so good and wise a thing in his lifetime. His quoted words have no such profound meaning.

Ib. s. vii. p. 78.

That which remained was a reasonable soul, fitted for the actions of
life and reason, but not of anything that was supernatural.

What Taylor calls reason I call understanding, and give the name reason to that which Taylor would have called spirit.

Ib. s. xii. p. 84.

And all that evil which is upon us, being not by any positive
infliction, but by privative, or the taking away gifts, and blessings,
and graces from us, which God, not having promised to give, was
neither naturally, nor by covenant, obliged to give,--it is certain he
could not be obliged to continue that to the sons of a sinning father,
which to an innocent father he was not obliged to give.

Oh! certainly not, if hell were not attached to acts and omissions, which without these very graces it is morally impossible for men to avoid. Why will not Taylor speak out?

Ib. s. xiv. p. 85.

The doctrine of the ancient Fathers was that free will remained in us
after the Fall.

Yea! as the locomotive faculty in a man in a strait waistcoat. Neither St. Augustine nor Calvin denied the remanence of the will in the fallen spirit; but they, and Luther as well as they, objected to the flattering epithet 'free' will. In the only Scriptural sense, as concerning the unregenerate, it is implied in the word will, and in this sense, therefore, it is superfluous and tautologic; and, in any other sense, it is the fruit and final end of Redemption,--the glorious liberty of the Gospel.

Ib. s. xvi. p. 92.

For my part I believe this only as certain, that nature alone cannot
bring them to heaven, and that Adam left us in a state in which we
could not hope for it.

This is likewise my belief, and that man must have had a Christ, even if Adam had continued in Paradise--if indeed the history of Adam be not a 'mythos'; as, but for passages in St. Paul, we should most of us believe; the serpent speaking, the names of the trees, and so on; and the whole account of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis seems to me clearly to say:--"The literal fact you could not comprehend if it were related to you; but you may conceive of it as if it had taken place thus and thus."

Ib. s. 1. p. 166.

That in some things our nature is cross to the divine commandment, is
not always imputable to us, because our natures were before the
commandment.

This is what I most complain of in Jeremy Taylor's ethics; namely, that he constantly refers us to the deeds or 'phenomena' in time, the effluents from the source, or like the 'species' of Epicurus; while the corrupt nature is declared guiltless and irresponsible; and this too on the pretext that it was prior in time to the commandment, and therefore not against it. But time is no more predicable of eternal reason than of will; but not of will; for if a will be at all, it must be 'ens spirituale'; and this is the first negative definition of spiritual--whatever having true being is not contemplable in the forms of time and space. Now the necessary consequence of Taylor's scheme is a conscience-worrying, casuistical, monkish work-holiness. Deeply do I feel the difficulty and danger that besets the opposite scheme; and never would I preach it, except under such provisos as would render it perfectly compatible with the positions previously established by Taylor in this chapter, s. xliv. p. 158. 'Lastly; the regenerate not only hath received the Spirit of God, but is wholly led by him,' &c.

Ib.

If this Treatise of Repentance contain Bishop Taylor's habitual and final convictions, I am persuaded that in some form or other he believed in a Purgatory. In fact, dreams and apparitions may have been the pretexts, and the immense addition of power and wealth which the belief entailed on the priesthood, may have been their motives for patronizing it; but the efficient cause of its reception by the churches is to be found in the preceding Judaic legality and monk-moral of the Church, according to which the fewer only could hope for the peace of heaven as their next immediate state. The holiness that sufficed for this would evince itself (it was believed) by the power of working miracles.

Ib. s. lii. p. 208.

'It shall not be pardoned in this world nor in the world to come';
that is, neither to the Jews nor to the Gentiles. For 'sæculum hoc',
this world, in Scripture, is the period of the Jews' synagogue, and
[Greek: mellon aion], the world to come, is taken for the Gospel, or
the age of the Messias, frequently among the Jews.

This is, I think, a great and grievous mistake. The Rabbis of best name divide into two or three periods, the difference being wholly in the words; for the dividers by three meant the same as those by two.

The first was the 'dies expectationis', or 'hoc sæculum,' [Greek: en touto kairo]: the second 'dies Messiæ', the time of the Messiah, that is, the 'millenium': the third the 'sæculum futurum', or future state, which last was absolutely spiritual and celestial.

But many Rabbis made the 'dies Messiæ' part, that is, the consummation of this world, the conclusive Sabbath of the great week, in which they supposed the duration of the earth or world of the senses to be comprised; but all agreed that the 'dies', or thousand years, of the Messiah was a transitional state, during which the elect were gradually defecated of body, and ripened for the final or spiritual state.

During the 'millenium' the will of God will be done on earth, no less, though in a lower glory, than it will be done hereafter in heaven.

Now it is to be carefully observed that the Jewish doctors or Rabbis (all such at least as remained unconverted) had no conception or belief of a suffering Messiah, or of a period after the birth of the Messiah, previous to the kingdom, and of course included in the time of expectation.

The appearance of the Messiah and his assumption of the throne of David were to be contemporaneous. The Christian doctrine of a suffering Messiah, or of Christ as the high priest and intercessor, has of course introduced a modification of the Jewish scheme.

But though there is a seeming discrepance in different texts in the first three Gospels, yet the Lord's Prayer appears to determine the question in favour of the elder and present Rabbinical belief; that is, it does not date the 'dies Messiae,' or kingdom of the Lord, from his Incarnation, but from a second coming in power and glory, and hence we are taught to pray for it as an event yet future.

Nay, our Lord himself repeatedly speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, as yet to come. Assuredly our Lord ascended the throne and became a King on his final departure from his disciples. But it was the throne of his Father, and he an invisible King, the sovereign Providence to whom all power was committed.

And this celestial kingdom cannot be identified with that under which the divine will will be done on earth as it is in heaven; that is, when on this earth the Church militant shall be one in holiness with the triumphant Church.

The difficulties, I confess, are great; and for those who believe the first Gospel (and this in its present state) to have been composed by the Apostle Matthew, or at worst to be a literal and faithful translation from a Hebrew (Syro-Chaldaic) Gospel written by him, and who furthermore contend for its having been word by word dictated by an infallible Spirit, the necessary duty of reconciling the different passages in the first Gospel with each other, and with others in St. Luke's, is, 'me saltern judice', a most Herculean one.

The most consistent and rational scheme is, I am persuaded, that which is adopted in the Apocalypse. The new creation, commencing with our Lord's resurrection, and measured as the creation of this world ('hujus sæculi', [Greek: toutou ai_onos]) was by the doctors of the Jewish church--namely, as a week--divided into two principal epochs,--the six sevenths or working days, during which the Gospel was gradually to be preached in all the world, and the number of the elect filled up,--and the seventh, the Sabbath of the Messiah, or the kingdom of Christ on earth in a new Jerusalem.

But as the Jewish doctors made the day (or one thousand years) of Messiah, a part, because the consummation, of this world, [Greek: toutou aionos toutou kairou], so the first Christians reversely made the kingdom commence on the first (symbolical) day of the sacred week, the last or seventh day of which was to be the complete and glorious manifestation of this kingdom. If any one contends that the kingdom of the Son of Man, and the re-descent of our Lord with his angels in the clouds, are to be interpreted spiritually,

I have no objection; only you cannot pretend that this was the interpretation of the disciples. It may be the right, but it was not the Apostolic belief.

Ib. s. 1. p. 257.

For this was giving them pardon, by virtue of those words of Christ,
'Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted;' that is, if ye, who are the
stewards of my family, shall admit any one to the kingdom of Christ on
earth, they shall be admitted to the participation of Christ's kingdom
in heaven; and what ye bind here shall be bound there; that is, if
they be unworthy to partake of Christ here, they shall be accounted
unworthy to partake of Christ hereafter.

Then without such a gift of reading the hearts of men, as priests do not now pretend to, this text means almost nothing. A wicked shall not, but a good man shall, be admitted to heaven; for if you have with good reason rejected any one here, I will reject him hereafter, amounts to no more than the rejection or admission of men according to their moral fitness or unfitness, the truth or unsoundness of their faith and repentance. I rather think that the promise, like the miraculous insight which it implies, was given to the Apostles and first disciples exclusively, and that it referred almost wholly to the admission of professed converts to the Church of Christ.

'In fine'.

I have written but few marginal notes to this long Treatise, for the whole is to my feeling and apprehension so Romish, so anti-Pauline, so unctionless, that it makes my very heart as dry as the desert sands, when I read it. Instead of partial animadversions, I prescribe the chapter on the Law and the Gospel, in Luther's 'Table Talk', as the general antidote. [13]

VINDICATION OF THE GLORY OF THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL SIN.

Ib. Obj. iv. p. 346.

But if Original Sin be not a sin properly, why are children baptized?
And what benefit comes to them by Baptism? I answer, as much as they
need, and are capable of.

The eloquent man has plucked just prickles enough out of the dogma of Original Sin to make a thick and ample crown of thorns for his opponents; and yet left enough to tear his own clothes off his back, and pierce through the leather jerkin of his closeliest wrought logic. In this answer to this objection he reminds me of the renowned squire, who first scratched out his eyes in a quickset hedge, and then leaped back and scratched them in again. So Jeremy Taylor first pulls out the very eyes of the doctrine, leaves it blind and blank, and then leaps back into it and scratches them in again, but with a most opulent squint that looks a hundred ways at once, and no one can tell which it really looks at.

Ib.

By Baptism children are made partakers of the Holy Ghost and of the
grace of God; which I desire to be observed in opposition to the
Pelagian heresy, who did suppose nature to be so perfect, that the
grace of God was not necessary, and that by nature alone, they could
go to heaven; which because I affirm to be impossible, and that
Baptism is therefore necessary, because nature is insufficient and
Baptism is the great channel of grace, &c.

What then of the poor heathens, that is, of five-sixths of all mankind. Would more go to hell by nature alone? If so: where is God's justice in Taylor's plan more than in Calvin's?

Ib. Obj. v. p. 355.

Although I have shewn the great excess and abundance of grace by
Christ over the evil that did descend by Adam; yet the proportion and
comparison lies in the main emanation of death from one, and life from
the other.

Does Jeremy Taylor then believe that the sentence of death on Adam and his sons extended to the soul; that death was to be absolute cessation of being! Scarcely I hope. But if bodily only, where is the difference between 'ante' and 'post Christum?'

Ib. p. 356.

Not that God could be the author of a sin to any, but that he
appointed the evil which is the consequent of sin, to be upon their
heads who descended from the sinner.

Rare justice! and this too in a tract written to rescue God's justice from the Supra- and Sub-lapsarians! How quickly would Taylor have detected in an adversary the absurd realization contained in this and the following passages of the abstract notion, sin, from the sinner: as if sin were any thing but a man sinning, or a man who has sinned! As well might a sin committed in Sirius or the planet Saturn justify the infliction of conflagration on the earth and hell-fire on all its rational inhabitants. Sin! the word sin! for abstracted from the sinner it is no more: and if not abstracted from him, it remains separate from all others.

Ib. p. 358.

The consequent of this discourse must needs at least be this; that it
is impossible that the greatest part of mankind should be left in the
eternal bonds of hell by Adam; for then quite contrary to the
discourse of the Apostle, there had been abundance of sin, but a
scarcity of grace.

And yet Jeremy Taylor will not be called a Pelagian. Why? Because without grace superadded by Christ no man could be saved: that is, all men must go to hell, and this not for any sin, but from a calamity, the consequences of another man's sin, of which they were even ignorant. God would not condemn them the sons of Adam for sin, but only inflicted on them an evil, the necessary effect of which was that they should all troop to the devil! And this is Jeremy Taylor's defence of God's justice! The truth is Taylor was a Pelagian, believed that without Christ thousands, Jews and heathens, lived wisely and holily, and went to heaven; but this he did not dare say out, probably not even to himself; and hence it is that he flounders backward and forward, now upping and now downing.

In truth, this eloquent Treatise may be compared to a statue of Janus, with one face fixed on certain opponents, full of life and force, a witty scorn on the lip, a brow at once bright and weighty with satisfying reason: the other looking at the something instead of that which had been confuted, maimed, noseless, and weather-bitten into a sort of visionary confusion and indistinctness. [14] It looks like this--aye and very like that--but how like it is, too, such another thing!

AN ANSWER TO A LETTER WRITTEN BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF ROCHESTER, CONCERNING THE CHAPTER OF ORIGINAL SIN, IN THE "UNUM NECESSARIUM."

Ib. p. 367.

And they who are born eunuchs should be less infected by Adam's
pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of
desires.

The fact happens to be false: and then the vulgarity, most unworthy of our dear Jeremy Taylor, of taking the mode of the manifestation of the disobedience of the will to the reason, for the disobedience itself. St. James would have taught him that he who offendeth against one, offendeth against all; and that there is some truth in the Stoic paradox that all crimes are equal. Equal is indeed a false phrase; and therein consists the paradox, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is the same as the falsehood. The truth is they are all the same in kind; but unequal in degree. They are all alike, though not equally, against the conscience.

Ib. p. 369.

So that there is no necessity of a third place; but it concludes only
that in the state of separation from God's presence there is great
variety of degrees and kinds of evil, and every one is not the
extreme.

What is this? If hell be a state, and not a mere place, and a particular state, its meaning must in common sense be a state of the worst sort. If then there be a mere 'pæna damni', that is, the not being so blest as some others may be; this is a different state 'in genere' from the 'pæna sensus': 'ergo', not hell; 'ergo' rather a third state; or else heaven. For every angel must be in it, than whom another angel is happier; that is negatively damned, though positively very happy.

Ib. p. 370-1.

Just so it is in infants: hell was not made for man, but for devils;
and therefore it must be something besides mere nature that can bear
any man thither: mere nature goes neither to heaven or hell.

And how came the devils there? If it be hard to explain how Adam fell; how much more hard to solve how purely spiritual beings could fall? And nature! What? so much of nature, and no kind of attempt at a definition of the word? Pray what is nature?

Ib. p. 371.

I do not say that we, by that sin (original) deserved that death,
neither can death be properly a punishment of us, till we superadd
some evil of our own; yet Adam's sin deserved it, so that it was
justly left to fall upon us, we, as a consequent and punishment of his
sin, being reduced to our natural portion.

How? What is this but flying to the old Supra-lapsarian blasphemy of a right of property in God over all his creatures, and destroying that sacred distinction between person and thing which is the light and the life of all law human and divine? Mercy on us! Is not agony, is not the stone, is not blindness, is not ignorance, are not headstrong, inherent, innate, and connate, passions driving us to sin when reason is least able to withhold us,--are not all these punishments, grievous punishments, and are they not inflicted on the innocent babe? Is not this the result infused into the 'milk not mingled' of St. Peter; [15] spotting the immaculate begotten, souring and curdling the innocence 'without sin or malice'? [16] And if this be just, and compatible with God's goodness, why all this outcry against St. Austin and the Calvinists and the Lutherans, whose whole addition is a lame attempt to believe guilt, where they cannot find it, in order to justify a punishment which they do find?

Ib. p. 379.

But then for the evil of punishment, that may pass further than the
action. If it passes upon the innocent, it is not a punishment to
them, but an evil inflicted by right of dominion; but yet by reason of
the relation of the afflicted to him that sinned, to him it is a
punishment.

Here the snake peeps out, and now takes its tail into its mouth. Right of dominion! Nonsense! Things are not objects of right or wrong. Power of dominion I understand, and right of judgment I understand; but right of dominion can have no immediate, but only a relative, sense. I have a right of dominion over this estate, that is, relatively to all other persons. But if there be a 'jus dominandi' over rational and free agents, then why blame Calvin? For all attributes are then merged in blind power: and God and fate are the same:

[Greek: Zeùs kaì Moira kaì aeerophoitis Erinnús]

Strange Trinity! God, Necessity, and the Devil. But Taylor's scheme has far worse consequences than Calvin's: for it makes the whole scheme of Redemption a theatrical scenery. Just restore our bodies and corporeal passions to a perfect 'equilibrium' and fortunate instinct, and, there being no guilt or defect in the soul, the Son of God, the Logos, and Supreme Reason, might have remained unincarnate, uncrucified. In short, Socinianism is as inevitable a deduction from Taylor's scheme as Deism or Atheism is from Socinianism.

'In fine'.

The whole of Taylor's confusion originated in this;--first, that he and his adversaries confound original with hereditary sin; but chiefly that neither he nor his adversaries had considered that guilt must be a 'noumenon'; but that our images, remembrances, and consciousnesses of our actions are 'phænomena'. Now the 'phænomenon' is in time, and an effect: but the 'noumenon' is not in time any more than it is in space. The guilt has been before we are even conscious of the action; therefore an original sin (that is, a sin universal and essential to man as man, and yet guilt, and yet choice, and yet amenable to punishment), may be at once true and yet in direct contradiction to all our reasonings derived from 'phænomena', that is, facts of time and space. But we ought not to apply the categories of appearance to the [Greek: ontos onta] of the intelligible or causative world. This (I should say of Original Sin) is mystery! We do not so properly believe it, as we know it. What is actual must be possible. But if we will confound actuals with reals, and apply the rules of the latter to cases of the former, we must blame ourselves for the clouds and darkness and storms of opposing winds, which the error will not fail to raise. By the same process an Atheist may demonstrate the contradictory nature of eternity, of a being at once infinite and of resistless causality, and yet intelligent. Jeremy Taylor additionally puzzled himself with Adam, instead of looking into the fact in himself.

How came it that Taylor did not apply the same process to the congeneric question of the freedom of the will? In half a dozen syllogisms he must have gyved and hand-cuffed himself into blank necessity and mechanic motions. All hangs together. Deny Original Sin, and you will soon deny free will;--then virtue and vice;--and God becomes 'Abracadabra'; a sound, nothing else.

SECOND LETTER TO THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER.

Ib. p. 390-1.

To this it is answered as you see, there is a double guilt; a guilt of
person, and of nature. That is taken away, this is not: for sacraments
are given to persons, not to natures.

I need no other passage but this to convince me that Jeremy Taylor, the angle in which the two 'apices' of logic and rhetoric meet, consummate in both, was yet no metaphysician. Learning, fancy, discursive intellect, 'tria juncta in uno', and of each enough to have alone immortalized a man, he had; but yet [Greek: ouden metà physin]. Images, conceptions, notions, such as leave him but one rival, Shakspeare, there were; but no ideas. Taylor was a Gassendist. O! that he had but meditated in the silence of his spirit on the mystery of an 'I AM'! He would have seen that a person, 'quoad' person, can have nothing common or generic; and that where this finds place, the person is corrupted by introsusception of a nature, which becomes evil thereby, and on this relation only is an evil nature. The nature itself, like all other works of God, is good, and so is the person in a yet higher sense of the word, good, like all offsprings of the Most High. But the combination is evil, and this not the work of God; and one of the main ends and results of the doctrine of Original Sin is to silence and confute the blasphemy that makes God the author of sin, without avoiding it by fleeing to the almost equal blasphemy against the conscience, that sin in the sense of guilt does not exist.

THE REAL PRESENCE AND SPIRITUAL OF CHRIST IN THE BLESSED SACRAMENT, PROVED AGAINST THE DOCTRINE OF TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

Perhaps the most wonderful of all Taylor's works. He seems, if I may so say, to have transubstantiated his vast imagination and fancy into subtlety not to be evaded, acuteness to which nothing remains unpierceable, and indefatigable agility of argumentation. Add to these an exhaustive erudition, and that all these are employed in the service of reason and common sense; whereas in some of his Tracts he seems to wield all sorts of wisdom and wit in defence of all sorts of folly and stupidity. But these were 'ad popellum', and by virtue of the 'falsitas dispensativa', which he allowed himself.

Epist. dedicatory.

The question of transubstantiation.

I have no doubt that if the Pythagorean bond had successfully established itself, and become a powerful secular hierarchy, there would have been no lack of furious partizans to assert, yea, and to damn and burn such as dared deny, that one was the same as two; two being two in the same sense as one is one; that consequently 2+2=2 and 1+1=4. But I should most vehemently doubt that this was the intention of Pythagoras, or the sense in which the mysterious dogma was understood by the thinking part of his disciples, who nevertheless were its professed believers. I should be prepared to find that the true import and purport of the article was no more than this;--that the one in order to its manifestation must appear in and as two; that the act of re-union was simultaneous with that of the self-production, (in the geometrical use of the word 'produce,' as when a point produces, or evolves, itself on each side into a bipolar line), and that the Triad is therefore the necessary form of the Monad.

Even so is the dispute concerning Transubstantiation. I can easily believe that a thousand monks and friars would pretend, as Taylor says, to 'disbelieve their eyes and ears, and defy their own reason,' and to receive the dogma in the sense, or rather in the nonsense, here ascribed to it by him, namely, that the phenomenal bread and wine were the phenomenal flesh and blood. But I likewise know that the respectable Roman Catholic theologians state the article free from a contradiction in terms at least; namely, that in the consecrated elements the 'noumena' of the phenomenal bread and wine are the same with that which was the 'noumenon' of the phenomenal flesh and blood of Christ when on earth.

Let M represent a slab or plane of mahogany, and m its ordinary supporter or under-prop; and let S represent a slab or plane of silver, and s its supporter.

Now to affirm that M = S is a contradiction, or that m = s;

but it is no contradiction to say, that on certain occasions (S having been removed) s is substituted for m, and that what was M/m, is by the command of the common master changed into M/s.

It may be false in fact, but it is not a self-contradiction in the terms.

The mode in which s subsists in M/s may be inconceivable, but not more so than the mode in which m subsists in M/m, or that in which s subsisted in S/s.

I honestly confess that I should confine my grounds of opposition to the article thus stated to its unnecessariness, to the want of sufficient proofs from Scripture that I am bound to believe or trouble my head with it. I am sure that Bishop Bull, who really did believe the Trinity, without either Tritheism or Sabellianism, could not consistently have used the argument of Taylor or of Tillotson in proof of the absurdity of Transubstantiation.

Ib. p. ccccxvi.

But for our dear afflicted mother, she is under the portion of a child
in the state of discipline, her government indeed hindered, but her
worshippings the same, the articles as true, and those of the church
of Rome as false as ever.

O how much there is in these few words,--the sweet and comely sophistry, not of Taylor, but of human nature. Mother! child! state of discipline! government hindered! that is to say, in how many instances, scourgings hindered, dungeoning in dens foul as those of hell, mutilation of ears and noses, and flattering the King mad with assertions of his divine right to govern without a Parliament, hindered. The best apology for Laud, Sheldon, and their fellows will ever be that those whom they persecuted were as great persecutors as themselves, and much less excusable.

Ib. s. ii. p. 422.

'In Synaxi Transubstantiationem sero definivit Ecclesia; diu satis
erat credere, sive sub pane consecrate, sive quocunque modo adesse
verum corpus Christi;' so said the great Erasmus.

'Verum corpus,' that is, 'res ipsissima,' or the thing in its actual self, opposed [Greek: to phainomen'o].

Ib. s. vi. p. 425.

Now that the spiritual is also a real presence, and that they are
hugely consistent, is easily credible to them that believe the gifts
of the Holy Ghost are real graces, and a spirit is a proper substance.

But how the body of Christ, as opposed to his Spirit and to his Godhead, can be taken spiritually, 'hic labor, hoc opus est.' Plotinus says, [Greek: kai hae hylae as'ómatos]; so we must say here [Greek: kaì tò s'oma as'ómaton].

Ib. s. vii. p. 426.

So we may say of the blessed Sacrament; Christ is more truly and
really present in spiritual presence than in corporal; in the heavenly
effect than in the natural being.

But the presence of Christ is not in question, but the presence of Christ's body and blood. Now that Christ effected much for us by coming in the body, which could not or would not have been effected had he not assumed the body, we all, Socinians excepted, believe; but that his body effected it, other than as Christ in the body, where shall we find? how can we understand?

Ib. p. 427.

So when it is said, 'Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of
God,' that is, corruption shall not inherit; and in the resurrection,
our bodies are said to be spiritual, that is, not in substance, but in
effect and operation.

This is, in the first place, a wilful interpretation, and secondly, it is absurd; for what sort of flesh and blood would incorruptible flesh and blood be? As well might we speak of marble flesh and blood. But in Taylor's mind, as seen throughout, the logician was predominant over the philosopher, and the fancy outbustled the pure intuitive imagination. In the sense of St. Paul, as of Plato and all other dynamic philosophers, flesh and blood is 'ipso facto' corruption, that is, the spirit of life in the mid or balancing state between fixation and reviviscence. 'Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' is a Hebraism for 'this death which the body is.' For matter itself is but 'spiritus in coagulo,' and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being restored; it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital organ. In short, Taylor seems to fall into the very fault he reproves in Bellarmine, and with this additional evil, that his reasoning looks more like tricking or explaining away a mystery. For wherein does the Sacrament of the Eucharist differ from that of Baptism, nay, even of grace before meat, when performed fervently and in faith? Here too Christ is present in the hearts of the faithful by blessing and grace. I see at present no other way of interpreting the text so as not to make the Sacrament a mere arbitrary 'memento,' but by an implied negative. In propriety, the word is confined to no portion of corporality in particular. "This (the bread and wine) are as truly my flesh and blood as the 'phænomena' which you now behold and name as such."

Ib. s. ix. p. 429.

From this paragraph I conclude, though not without some perplexity, that by 'the body and blood verily and indeed taken,' we are not to understand body and blood in their limited sense, as contradistinguished from the soul or Godhead of Christ, but as a 'periphrasis' for Christ himself, or at least Christ's humanity. Taylor, however, has misconstrued Phavorinus' meaning though not his words. 'Spiritualia eterna quoad spiritum.' But this is the very depth of the purified Platonic philosophy.

Ib. s. x. p. 430.

But because the words do perfectly declare our sense, and are owned
publicly in our doctrine and manner of speaking, it will be in vain to
object against us those words of the Fathers, which use the same
expressions: for if by virtue of those words 'really,'
'substantially,' 'corporally,' 'verily and indeed,' and 'Christ's body
and blood,' the Fathers shall be supposed to speak for
Transubstantiation, they may as well suppose it to be our doctrine
too; for we use the same words, and therefore those authorities must
signify nothing against us, unless these words can be proved in them
to signify more than our sense of them does import; and by this truth,
many, very many of their pretences are evacuated.

A sophism, dearest Jeremy. We use the words because these early Fathers used them, and have forced our own definitions on them. But should we have chosen these words to express our opinion by, if there had been no controversy on the subject? But the Fathers chose and selected these words as the most obvious and natural.

Ib. s. xi. p. 431.

It is much insisted upou that it be inquired whether, when we say we
believe Christ's body to be really in the Sacrament, we mean 'that
body, that flesh, that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was
crucified, dead, and buried?' I answer, that I know none else that he
had or hath: there is but one body of Christ natural and glorified.

This may be true, or at least intelligible, of Christ's humanity or personal identity as [Greek: nóaeton ti], but applied to the phenomenal flesh and blood, it is nonsense. For if every atom of the human frame be changed by succession in eleven or twelve years, the body born of the Virgin could not be the body crucified, much less the body crucified be the body glorified, spiritual and incorruptible. I construe the words of Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Taylor below, [17] literally, and they perfectly express my opinion; namely, that Christ, both in the institution of the Eucharist and in the sixth chapter of John, spoke of his humanity as a 'noumenon,' not of the specific flesh and blood which were its 'phænomena' at the last supper and on the cross. But Jeremy Taylor was a semi-materialist, and though no man better managed the logic of substance and accidents, he seems to have formed no clear metaphysical notion of their actual meaning. Taken notionally, they are mere interchangeable relations, as in concentric circles the outmost circumference is the substance, the other circles its accidents; but if I begin with the second and exclude the first from my thoughts, then this is substance and the interior ones accidents, and so on; but taken really, we mean the complex action of co-agents on our senses, and accident as only an agent acting on us. Thus we say, the beer has turned sour: sour is the accident of the substance beer. But, in fact, a new agent, oxygen, has united itself with other agents in the joint composition, the essence of which new comer is to be sour: at all events, Taylor's construction is a mere assertion, meaning no more than 'in this sense only can I subscribe to the words of Bertram, Jerome, and Clement.'

If a re-union of the Lutheran and English Churches with the Roman were desirable and practicable, the best way, [Greek: h_os emoige dokei,] would be, that any remarkable number should offer union on a given profession of faith chiefly negative, as we protest against the authority of the Church in temporals; that the words agreed to by Beza and Espencoeus, on the part of the Reformers and Romanists respectively, at Poissy, used with implicit faith, shall suffice. 'Credimus in usu coentæ Dominicæ vere, reipsa, substantialiter, seu in substantia, verum corpus et sanguinem Christi spirituali et ineffabili modo esse, exhiberi, sumi a fidelibus communicantibus.'

Ib. s. in. p. 434.

The other Schoolman I am to reckon in this account, is Gabriel Biel.

Taylor should have informed the reader that Gabriel Biel is but the echo of Occam, and that both were ante-Lutheran Protestants in heart, and as far as they dared, in word likewise.

Ib. s. vi. p. 436.

So that if, according to the Casuists, especially of the Jesuits'
order, it be lawful to follow the opinion of any one probable doctor,
here we have five good men and true, besides Occam, Bassolis, and
Mechior Camus, to acquit us from our search after this question in
Scripture.

Taylor might have added Erasmus, who, in one of his letters, speaking of Oecolampadius's writings on the Eucharist, says '"ut seduci posse videantur etiam electi,"' and adds, that he should have embraced his interpretations, '"nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiæ;"' that is, Oecolampadius has convinced me, and I should avow my conviction, but for motives of personal prudence and regard for the public peace.

OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER OF ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL.

Ib. p. 436.

I cannot but think that the same mysterious truth, whatever it be, is referred to in the Eucharist and in this chapter of St. John; and I wonder that Taylor, who makes the Eucharist a spiritual sumption of Christ, should object to it. A = C and B = C, therefore A = B. [18]

Ib. s. iv. p. 440.

The error on both sides, Roman and Protestant, originates in the confusion of sign or figure with symbol, which latter is always an essential part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative. Not seeing this, and therefore seeing no 'medium' between the whole thing and the mere metaphor of the thing, the Romanists took the former or positive pole of the error, the Protestants the latter or negative pole. The Eucharist is a symbolic, or solemnizing and 'totum in parte' acting of an act, which in a true member of Christ's body is supposed to be perpetual. Thus the husband and wife exercise the duties of their marriage contract of love, protection, obedience, and the like, all the year long, and yet solemnize it by a more deliberate and reflecting act of the same love on the anniversary of their marriage.

Ib. s. ix p. 447-8.

That which neither can feel or be felt, see or be seen, move or be
moved, change or be changed, neither do or suffer corporally, cannot
certainly be eaten corporally; but so they affirm concerning the body
of our blessed Lord; it cannot do or suffer corporally in the
Sacrament, therefore it cannot be eaten corporally, any more than a
man can chew a spirit, or eat a meditation, or swallow a syllogism
into his belly.

Absurd as the doctrine of Transubstantiation may thus be made, yet Taylor here evidently confounds a spirit, 'ens realissimum,' with a mere notion or 'ens logicum.' On this ground of the spirituality of all powers [Greek: donámeis], it would not be difficult to evade many of Taylor's most plausible arguments. Enough, however, and more than enough would be left in their full force.

Ib. p. 448.

Besides this, I say this corporal union of our bodies to the body of
God incarnate, which these great and witty dreamers dream of, would
make man to be God.

But yet not God, nor absolutely. 'I am in my Father, even so ye are in me.'

Ib. s. xxii. p. 456.

By this time I hope I may conclude, that Transubstantiation is not
taught by our blessed Lord in the sixth chapter of St. John: 'Johannes
de tertia et Eucharistica cæna nihil quidem scribit, eo quod cæteri
tres Evangelistæ ante ilium eam plene descripsissent.' They are the
words of Stapleton and are good evidence against them.

I cannot satisfy my mind with this reason, though the one commonly assigned both before and since Stapleton: and yet ignorant, when, why, and for whom John wrote his Gospel, I cannot substitute a better or more probable one. That John believed the command of the Eucharist to have ceased with the destruction of the Jewish state, and the obligation of the cup of blessing among the Jews,--or that he wrote it for the Greeks, unacquainted with the Jewish custom,--would be not improbable, did we not know that the Eastern Church, that of Ephesus included, not only continued this Sacrament, but rivalled the Western Church in the superstition thereof.

Ib. s. i. p. 503.

Now I argue thus: if we eat Christ's natural body, we eat it either
naturally or spiritually: if it be eaten only spiritually, then it is
spiritually digested, &c.

What an absurdity in the word 'it' in this passage and throughout!

Vol. X. s. iii. p. 3.