Chapter V: Preface (5)

'No man cometh to Christ unless the' 'Father lead him'. The corrupt will cannot, without prevenient as well as auxiliary grace, be unitively subordinated to the reason, and again, without this union of the moral will, the reason itself is latent. Nevertheless, I see no advantage in not saying the 'will,' or in substituting the term 'faith' for it. But the sad non-distinction of the reason and the understanding throughout Donne, and the confusion of ideas and conceptions under the same term, painfully inturbidates his theology. Till this distinction of the [Greek: nous] and the [Greek: phrónaema sarkòs] be seen, nothing can be seen aright. Till this great truth be mastered, and with the sight that is insight, other truths may casually take possession of the mind, but the mind cannot possess them. If you know not this, you know nothing; for if you know not the diversity of reason from the understanding, you know not reason; and reason alone is knowledge.

All that follows in B. is admirable, worthy of a divine of the Church of England, the National and the Christian, and indeed proves that Donne was at least possessed by the truth which I have always labored to enforce, namely, that faith is the 'apotheosis' of the reason in man, the complement of reason, the will in the form of the reason. As the basin-water to the fountain shaft, such is will to reason in faith. The whole will shapes itself in the image of God wherein it had been created, and shoots on high toward, and in the glories of, Heaven!

Ib. D.

If we could have been in Paradise, and seen God take a clod of red
earth, and make that wretched clod of contemptible earth such a body
as should be fit to receive his breath, &c.

A sort of pun on the Hebrew word 'Adam' or red earth, common in Donne's age, but unworthy of Donne, who was worthy to have seen deeper into the Scriptural sense of the 'ground,' the Hades, the multeity, the many 'absque numero el infra numerum', that which is below, as God is that which transcends, intellect.

Ib. p. 179. B.

We place in the School, for the most part, the infinite merit of
Christ Jesus ... rather 'in pacto' than 'in persona', rather that this
contract was thus made between the Father and the Son, than that
whatsoever that person, thus consisting of God and Man, should do,
should, only in respect of the person, be of an infinite value and
extension to that purpose, &c.

O, this is sad misty divinity! far too scholastical for the pulpit, far too vague and unphilosophic for the study.

Ib. p. 180. A.

'Quis nisi infidelis negaverit apud inferos fuisse Christum?' says St.
Augustine.

Where? [16] Pearson expressly asserts and proves that the clause was in none of the ancient creeds or confessions. And even now the sense of these words, 'He descended into hell', is in no Reformed Church determined as an article of faith.

Ib. p. 182. D.

'Audacter dicam', says St. Hierome, 'cum omnia posset Deus, suscitare
virginem post ruinam non potest.'

One instance among hundreds of the wantonness of phrase and fancy in the Fathers. What did Jerome mean? 'quod Deus membranam hymenis luniformem reproducere nequit?' No; that were too absurd. What then?--that God cannot make what has been not to have been? Well then, why not say that, since that is all you can mean?

Serm. XIX. Rev. xx. 6. p. 183.

The exposition of the text in this sermon is a lively instance how much excellent good sense a wise man, like Donne, can bring forth on a passage which he does not understand. For to say that it may mean either X, or Y, or Z, is to confess he knows not what it means; but that if it be X. then, &c.; if Y. then, &c.; and lastly if it be Z. then, &c.; that is to say, that he understands X, Y, and Z; but does not understand the text itself.

Ib. p. 185. B.

Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons,
compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in
the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the
Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her
child, &c.

Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's assertion here would be extravagant.

Serra. XXXIV. Rom. viii. 16. p. 332. Ib. p. 335. A.

But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.

If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural.

But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects--yet still our only mirror--to contemplate all we can of God, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.

For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself as man 'in genere', we have to look into ourselves, and there we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence ([Greek: nous]) from being ([Greek:tò on]), with the will as an accompaniment, but not from it as a cause,--in order, though not necessarily in time, precedent. This is true filiation.

The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict identities, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and coeternally.

For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is involved in the very idea of God, one of whose intellectual definitions is, the 'synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi inclusive, quoad se,' of all conceivable 'antitheses;' even as the best moral definition--(and, O! how much more godlike to us in this state of antithetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!)--is, God is love.

This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards the moral.

For what is love? Union with the desire of union. God therefore is the cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue.

Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action.

Now will is the true principle of identity, of selfness, even in our common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one God.

There are three Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is totally all in each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own minds, but can understand by no analogy.

For "the wind ministrant to divers at the same moment"--thence, to aid the fancy--borrows or rather steals from the mind the idea of 'total 'in omni parte',' which alone furnishes the analogy; but that both it and by it a myriad of other material images do enwrap themselves 'in hac veste non sua,' and would be even no objects of conception if they did not; yea, that even the very words, 'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in all languages that answer to them, suppose this trans-impression from the mind, is an argument better than all analogy.

Serm. XXXV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341. Ib. p. 342. B.

First then, for the first term, 'sin,' we use to ask in the
school, whether any action of man's can have 'rationem demeriti;'
whether it can be said to offend God, or to deserve ill of God? for
whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with God.

This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the 'cui bono? cui malo?' system of ethics,--that system which places the good and evil of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself.

For, according to this system, God must be either a passible and dependent being,--that is, not God,--or else he must have no interest, arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice.

The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain 'in genere', evil has a true being in the order of things) is not only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness,--that is, of God.

For to say that I believe in a God, but not that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in terms as to say, I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from its centre to its circumference are equal.

I cannot read the profound truth so clearly expressed by Donne in the next paragraph--"it does not only want that rectitude, but it should have that rectitude, and therefore hath a sinful want"--without an uneasy wonder at its incongruity with the preceding dogmas.

Serm. LXXI. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 717. Ib. p.725. A.

But still consider, that they did but leave their nets, they did not
burn them. And consider, too, that they left but nets, those things
which might entangle them, and retard them in their following of
Christ, &c.

An excellent paragraph grounded on a mere pun. Such was the taste of the age; and it is an awful joy to observe, that not great learning, great wit, great talent, not even (as far as without great virtue that can be) great genius, were effectual to preserve the man from the contagion, but only the deep and wise enthusiasm of moral feeling. Compare in this light Donne's theological prose even with that of the honest Knox; and, above all, compare Cowley with Milton.

Serm. LXXII. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 726. Ib. p.727. A.-E.

It is amusing to see the use which the Christian divines make of the very facts in favour of their own religion, with which they triumphantly battered that of the heathens; namely, the gross and sinful anthropomorphitism of their representations of the Deity; and yet the heathen philosophers and priests--Plutarch for instance--tell us as plainly as Donne or Aquinas can do, that these are only accommodations to human modes of conception,--the divine nature being in itself impassible;--how otherwise could it be the prime agent?

Paganism needs a true philosophical judge. Condemned it will be, perhaps, more heavily than by the present judges, but not from the same statutes, nor on the same evidence.

'In fine.'

If our old divines, in their homiletic expositions of Scripture, wire-drew their text, in the anxiety to evolve out of the words the fulness of the meaning expressed, implied, or suggested, our modern preachers have erred more dangerously in the opposite extreme, by making their text a mere theme, or 'motto', for their discourse. Both err in degree; the old divines, especially the Puritans, by excess, the modern by defect. But there is this difference to the disfavor of the latter, that the defect in degree alters the kind. It was on God's holy word that our Hookers, Donnes, Andrewses preached; it was Scripture bread that they divided, according to the needs and seasons. The preacher of our days expounds, or appears to expound, his own sentiments and conclusions, and thinks himself evangelic enough if he can make the Scripture seem in conformity with them.

Above all, there is something to my mind at once elevating and soothing in the idea of an order of learned men reading the many works of the wise and great, in many languages, for the purpose of making one book contain the life and virtue of all others, for their brethren's use who have but that one to read. What, then, if that one book be such, that the increase of learning is shown by more and more enabling the mind to find them all in it! But such, according to my experience--hard as I am on threescore--the Bible is, as far as all moral, spiritual, and prudential,--all private, domestic, yea, even political, truths arid interests are concerned. The astronomer, chemist, mineralogist, must go elsewhere; but the Bible is the book for the man.

[Footnote 1: The LXXX Sermons, fol. 1640.--Ed.]

[Footnote 2:

"Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians
was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin 'Defensio Fidei
Nicoenoe', using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think,
he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a
Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by
an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England,
and in good humour with the Church of Rome."

'Table Talk,' 2d edit. p. 41.--Ed.]

[Footnote 3: Rom. vi. 3, 4, 5.--Ed.]

[Footnote 4: John i 14. Gal. iv 4. Ed.]

[Footnote 5: See the whole argument on the difference of the reason and the understanding, in the 'Aids to Reflection', 3d edit. pp. 206-227. Ed.]

[Footnote 6: See the author's entire argument upon this subject in the 'Church and State'.--Ed.]

[Footnote 7: Galat. ii 20.--Ed.]

[Footnote 8: Compare 'Hamlet', Act V. sc. 1. This sermon was preached, March 8, 1628-9.--Ed.]

[Footnote 9: C. iii. 13, &c.--Ed.]

[Footnote 10: See, however, the author's expressions at, I believe, a rather later period.

"I now think, after many doubts, that the passage; 'I know that my
Redeemer liveth', &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination,
a 'quasi' prophecy. I know not how this can be; but in spite of all my
difficulties, this I do know, that I shall be recompensed!"

'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 80.--Ed.]

[Footnote 11: How so? Is it not admitted that Robert Stephens first divided the New Testament into verses in 1551? See the testimony to that effect of Henry Stephens, his son, in the Preface to his Concordance.--Ed. ]

[Footnote 12: 'Rom'. viii. 3. Mr. C. afterwards expressed himself to the same effect:

"Christ's body, as mere body, or rather carcase (for body is an
associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than
mine or yours; that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from
its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How
could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced?"

'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 261.--Ed.]

[Footnote 13: See Hooker's admirable declaration of the doctrine:--

"These natures from the moment of their first combination have been
and are for ever inseparable. For even when his soul forsook the
tabernacle of his body, his Deity forsook neither body nor soul. If it
had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ was
buried, or that the person of Christ did raise up itself from the
dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be
termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God
in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not
both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulchre.
The like is also to be said of the soul, otherwise we are plainly and
inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ therefore for ever
one and the self-same, was only touching bodily substance concluded
within the grave, his soul only from thence severed, but by personal
union his Deity still unseparably joined with both."

E. P. V. 52. 4.--'Keble's edit'. Ed. ]

[Footnote 14: xix. 41.--Ed. ]

[Footnote 15: (C.) which should be (B.)

"The object of the preceding discourse was to recommend the Bible as
the end and centre of our reading and meditation. I can truly affirm
of myself, that my studies have been profitable and availing to me
only so far, as I have endeavored to use all my other knowledge as a
glass enabling me to receive more light in a wider field of vision
from the Word of God."

Ed.]

[Footnote 16: Ep. 99. See Pearson, Art. v.--Ed. ]

HENRY MORE'S THEOLOGICAL WORKS. [1]

There are three principal causes to which the imperfections and errors in the theological schemes and works of our elder divines, the glories of our Church,--men of almost unparalleled learning and genius, the rich and robust intellects from the reign of Elizabeth to the death of Charles II,--may, I think, be reasonably attributed. And striking, unusually striking, instances of all three abound in this volume; and in the works of no other divine are they more worthy of being regretted: for hence has arisen a depreciation of Henry More's theological writings, which yet contain more original, enlarged, and elevating views of the Christian dispensation than I have met with in any other single volume. For More had both the philosophic and the poetic genius, supported by immense erudition. But unfortunately the two did not amalgamate. It was not his good fortune to discover, as in the preceding generation William Shakspeare discovered, a mordaunt' or common base of both, and in which both the poetic and the philosophical power blended in one.

These causes are,--

First, and foremost,--the want of that logical [Greek: propaidéia dokimastikàe], that critique of the human intellect, which, previously to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the heaven-descended 'nosce teipsum', in respect to the intellective part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by Lord Bacon in his 'Novum Organum', and brought to a systematic completion by Immanuel Kant in his 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft, der Urtheilskrajt, und der metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft'.

From the want of this searching logic, there is a perpetual confusion of the subjective with the objective in the arguments of our divines, together with a childish or anile overrating of human testimony, and an ignorance in the art of sifting it, which necessarily engendered credulity.

Second,--the ignorance of natural science, their physiography scant in fact, and stuffed out with fables; their physiology imbrangled with an inapplicable logic and a misgrowth of 'entia rationalia', that is, substantiated abstractions; and their physiogony a blank or dreams of tradition, and such "intentional colours" as occupy space but cannot fill it. Yet if Christianity is to be the religion of the world, if Christ be that Logos or Word that 'was in the beginning', by whom all things 'became'; if it was the same Christ who said, 'Let there be light'; who in and by the creation commenced that great redemptive process, the history of life which begins in its detachment from nature, and is to end in its union with God;--if this be true, so true must it be that the book of nature and the book of revelation, with the whole history of man as the intermediate link, must be the integral and coherent parts of one great work: and the conclusion is, that a scheme of the Christian faith which does not arise out of, and shoot its beams downward into, the scheme of nature, but stands aloof as an insulated afterthought, must be false or distorted in all its particulars. In confirmation of this position, I may challenge any opponent to adduce a single instance in which the now exploded falsities of physical science, through all its revolutions from the second to the seventeenth century of the Christian æra, did not produce some corresponding warps in the theological systems and dogmas of the several periods.

The third and last cause, and especially operative in the writings of this author, is the presence and regnancy of a false and fantastic philosophy, yet shot through with refracted light from the not risen but rising truth,--a scheme of physics and physiology compounded of Cartesian mechanics and empiricism (for it was the credulous childhood of experimentalism), and a corrupt, mystical, theurgical, pseudo-Platonism, which infected the rarest minds under the Stuart dynasty. The only not universal belief in witchcraft and apparitions, and the vindication of such monster follies by such men as Sir M. Hale, Glanville, Baxter, Henry More, and a host of others, are melancholy proofs of my position. Hence, in the first chapters of this volume, the most idle inventions of the ancients are sought to be made credible by the most fantastic hypotheses and analogies.

To the man who has habitually contemplated Christianity as interesting all rational finite beings, as the very 'spirit of truth', the application of the prophecies as so many fortune-tellings and soothsayings to particular events and persons, must needs be felt as childish--like faces seen in the moon, or the sediments of a teacup. But reverse this, and a Pope and a Buonaparte can never be wanting,--the molehill becomes an Andes. On the other hand, there are few writers whose works could be so easily defecated as More's. Mere omission would suffice; and perhaps one half (an unusually large proportion) would come forth from the furnace pure gold; if but a fourth, how great a gain!

EXPLANATION OF THE GRAND MYSTERY OF GODLINESS.

Dedication. 'Servorum illius omnium indignissimus.'

'Servus indignissimus,' or 'omnino indignus', or any other positive self-abasement before God, I can understand; but how an express avowal of unworthiness, comparatively superlative, can consist with the Job-like integrity and sincerity of profession especially required in a solemn address to Him, to whom all hearts are open, this I do not understand in the case of such men as Henry More, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter were, and by comparison at least with the multitude of evil doers, must have believed themselves to be.

Ib. V. c.14. s.3.

This makes me not so much wonder at that passage of Providence, which
allowed so much virtue to the bones of the martyr Babylas, once bishop
of Antioch, as to stop the mouth of Apollo Daphneus when Julian would
have enticed him to open it by many a fat sacrifice. To say nothing of
several other memorable miracles that were done by the reliques of
saints and martyrs in those times.

Strange lingering of childish credulity in the most learned and in many respects enlightened divines of the Protestant episcopal church even to the time of James II! The Popish controversy at that time made a great clearance.

Ib. s. 9.

At one time Professor Eichorn had persuaded me that the Apocalypse was authentic; that is, a Danielitic dramatic poem written by the Apostle and Evangelist John, and not merely under his name. But the repeated perusal of the vision has sadly unsettled my conclusion. The entire absence of all spirituality perplexes me, as forming so strong a contrast with the Gospel and Epistles of John; and then the too great appearance of an allusion to the fable of Nero's return to life and empire, to Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana on the one hand (that is the Eichornian hypothesis), and the insurmountable difficulties of Joseph Mede and others on to Bicheno and Faber on the other. In short, I feel just as both Luther and Calvin felt,--that is, I know not what to make of it, and so leave it alone.

It is much to be regretted that we have no contemporary history of Apollonius, or of the reports concerning him, and the popular notions in his own time. For from the romance of Philostratus we cannot be sure as to the fact of the lies themselves. It may be a lie, that there ever was such or such a lie in circulation.

Ib. c. 15. s. 2.

Fourthly. The 'little horn', Dan. vii, that rules 'for a time and
times and half a time', it is evident that it is not Antiochus
Epiphanes, because this 'little horn' is part of the fourth
beast--namely, the Roman.

Is it quite clear that the Macedonian was not the fourth empire;

1. the Assyrian; 2. the Median; 3. the Persian; 4. the Macedonian?

However, what a strange prophecy, that, 'e confesso' having been fulfilled, remains as obscure as before!

Ib. s. 6

'And ye shall have the tribulation of ten days',--that is, the utmost
extent of tribulation; beyond which there is nothing further, as there
is no number beyond ten.

It means, I think, the very contrary. 'Decent dierum' is used even in Terence for a very short time. [2] In the same way we say, a nine days' wonder.

Ib. c. 16. s. 1.

But for further conviction of the excellency of Mr. Mede's way above
that of Grotius, I shall compare some of their main interpretations.

Hard to say which of the two, Mede's or Grotius', is the more improbable. Beyond doubt, however, the Cherubim are meant as the scenic ornature borrowed from the Temple.

Ib. s. 2.

That this 'rider of the white horse' is Christ, they both agree
in.

The 'white horse' is, I conceive, Victory or Triumph--that is, of the Roman power--followed by Slaughter, Famine, and Pestilence. All this is plain enough. The difficulty commences after the writer is deserted by his historical facts, that is, after the sacking of Jerusalem.

Ib. s. 5.

It would be no easy matter to decide, whether Mede plus More was at a greater distance from the meaning, or Grotius from the poetry, of this eleventh chapter of the Revelations; whether Mede was more wild, or Grotius more tame, flat, and prosaic.

Ib. c. 17. s. 8.

The Old and New Testament, which by a 'prosopopoeia' are here called
the 'two witnesses.'

Where is the probability of this so long before the existence of the collection since called the New Testament?

Ib. vi. c. l. s. 2.

We may draw from this passage (1 'Thess'. iv. 16, 17.) the strongest support of the fact of the ascension of Christ, or at least of St. Paul's (and of course of the first generation of Christians') belief of it. For had they not believed his ascent, whence could they have derived the universal expectation of his descent,--his bodily, personal descent? The only scruple is, that all these circumstances were parts of the Jewish 'cabala' or idea of the Messiah by the spiritualists before the Christian æra, and therefore taken for granted with respect to Jesus as soon as he was admitted to be the Messiah.

Ib. s. 6.

But light-minded men, whose hearts are made dark with infidelity, care
not what antic distortions they make in interpreting Scripture, so
they bring it to any show of compliance with their own fancy and
incredulity.

Why so very harsh a censure? What moral or spiritual, or even what physical, difference can be inferred from all men's dying, this of one thing, that of another, a third, like the martyrs, burnt alive, or all in the same way? In any case they all die, and all pass to judgment.

Ib. c. 15.

With his 'semi'-Cartesian, 'semi'-Platonic, 'semi'-Christian notions, Henry More makes a sad jumble in his assertion of chronochorhistorical Christianity. One decisive reference to the ascension of the visible and tangible Jesus from the surface of the earth upward through the clouds, pointed out in the writings of St. Paul or in the Gospel, beginning as it certainly did, and as in the copy according to Mark it now does, with the baptism of John, or in the writings of the Apostle John, would have been more effective in flooring Old Nic of Amsterdam [3] and his familiars, than volumes of such "maybe's," "perhapses," and "should be rendered," as these.

Ib. viii. c. 2. c. 6.

I must confess our Saviour compiled no books, it being a piece of
pedantry below so noble and divine a person, &c.

Alas! all this is woefully beneath the dignity of Henry More, and shockingly against the majesty of the High and Holy One, so very unnecessarily compared with Hendrick Nicholas, of Amsterdam, mercer!

Ib. x. c. 13. s. 5, 6.

A new sect naturally attracts to itself a portion of the madmen of the time, and sets another portion into activity as alarmists and oppugnants. I cannot therefore pretend to say what More might not have found in the writings, or heard from the mouth, of some lunatic who called himself a Quaker. But I do not recollect, in any work of an acknowledged Friend, a denial of the facts narrated by the Evangelists, as having really taken place in the same sense as any other facts of history. If they were symbols of spiritual acts and processes, as Fox and Penn contended, they must have been, or happened;--else how could they be symbols?

It is too true, however, that the positive creed of the Quakers is and ever has been extremely vague and misty. The deification of the conscience, under the name of the Spirit, seems the main article of their faith; and of the rest they form no opinion at all, considering it neither necessary nor desirable. I speak of Quakers in general. But what a lesson of experience does not this thirteenth chapter of so great and good a man as H. More afford to us, who know what the Quakers really are! Had the followers of George Fox, or any number of them collectively, acknowledged the mad notions of this Hendrick Nicholas? If not----

INQUIRY INTO THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY.