Chapter VI: Part II: ii. c. 2

Confutation of Grotius on the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse.

Has or has not Grotius been overrated? If Grotius applied these words ('magnus testis et historiarum diligentissimus inquisitor') to Epiphanius in honest earnest, and not ironically, he must have been greatly inferior in sound sense and critical tact both to Joseph Scaliger and to Rhenferd. Strange, that to Henry More, a poet and a man of fine imagination, it should never have occurred to ask himself, whether this scene, Patmos, with which the drama commences, was not a part of the poem, and, like all other parts, to be interpreted symbolically? That the poetic--and I see no reason for doubting the real--date of the Apocalypse is under Vespasian, is so evidently implied in the five kings preceding (for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, were abortive emperors) that it seems to me quite lawless to deny it. That [Greek: Lateinos] is the meaning of the 666, (c. xiii. 18.) and the treasonable character of this, are both shown by Irenæus's pretended rejection, and his proposal of the perfectly senseless 'Teitan' instead.

[Footnote 1: Folio. 1708.--Ed.]

[Footnote 2: 'Decem dierum vix mihi est familia'. Heaut. v. i.--Ed.]

[Footnote 3: Hendrick Nicholas and the Family of Love.--Ed.]

HEINRICHS'S COMMENTARY ON THE APOCALYPSE. [1]

P. 245.

It seems clear that Irenæus invented the unmeaning 'Teitan', in order to save himself from the charge of treason, to which the 'Lateinos' might have exposed him. See Rabelais 'passim'.

P.246.

'Nec magis blandiri poterit alterum illud nomen, Teitan, quod studiose
commendavit Irenoeus'.

No! 'non studiose, sed ironice commendavit Irenæus'. Indeed it is ridiculous to suppose that Irenæus was in earnest with 'Teitan'. His meaning evidently is:--if not 'Lateinos', which has a meaning, it is some one of the many names having the same numeral power, to which a meaning is to be found by the fulfillment of the prophecy. My own conviction is, that the whole is an ill-concerted conundrum, the secret of which died with the author. The general purpose only can be ascertained, namely, some test, partaking of religious obligation, of allegiance to the sovereignty of the Roman Emperor.

If I granted for a moment the truth of Heinrichs's supposition, namely, that, according to the belief of the Apocalypt, the line of the Emperors would cease in Titus the seventh or complete number (Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, being omitted) by the advent of the Messiah;--if I found my judgment more coerced by his arguments than it is,--then I should use this book as evidence of the great and early discrepance between the Jewish-Christian Church and the Pauline; and my present very serious doubts respecting the identity of John the Theologian and John the Evangelist would become fixed convictions of the contrary.

P. 91. Rev. xvii. 11.

Among other grounds for doubting this interpretation (that 'the eighth' in v.11. is Satan), I object, 1. that it almost necessitates the substitution of the Coptic [Greek: aggelos] for [Greek: ogdoos] against all the MSS., and without any Patristic hint. For it seems a play with words unworthy the writer, to make Satan, who possessed all the seven, himself an 'eighth', and still worse if 'the eighth': 2. that it is not only a great and causeless inconcinnity in style, but a wanton adding of obscurity to the obscure to have, first, so carefully distinguished (c. xiii. 1-11.) the [Greek: drák_on] from the two [Greek: tháeria], and the one [Greek: thaeríon] from the other, and then to make [Greek: thaeríon] the appellative of the [Greek: drák_on]: as if having in one place told of Nicholas 'senior', Dick and another Dick his cousin, I should soon after talk of Dick, meaning old Nicholas by that name; that is, having discriminated Nicholas from Dick, then to say Dick, meaning Nicholas!

Rev. xix. 9.

These words might well bear a more recondite interpretation; that is, [Greek: outoi] (these blessed ones) are the true [Greek: lógoi] or [Greek: tékna Theou], as the Logos is the [Greek: huiòs Theou].

Ib. 10.

According to the law of symbolic poetry this sociable angel (the Beatrice of the Hebrew Dante) ought to be, and I doubt not is, 'sensu symbolico', an angel; that is, the angel of the Church of Ephesus, John the Evangelist, according to the opinion of Eusebius.

P. 294. Rev. xx. 'Millennium'.

'Die vorzüglichsten Bekenner Jesu sollen auferstehen, die übrigen
Menschen sollen es nicht. Hiesse jenes, sie sollen noch nach ihrem
Tode fortwürken, so wäre das letztere falsch: denn auch die übrigen
würken nach ihrem Tode durch ihre schriften, ihre Andenken, ihre
Beispiel.'

'Euge! Heinrichi'. O, the sublime bathos of thy prosaism--the muddy eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only man to understand a poet!

I have too clearly before me the idea of a poet's genius to deem myself other than a very humble poet; but in the very possession of the idea, I know myself so far a poet as to feel assured that I can understand and interpret a poem in the spirit of poetry, and with the poet's spirit. Like the ostrich, I cannot fly, yet have I wings that give me the feeling of flight; and as I sweep along the plain, can look up toward the bird of Jove, and can follow him and say:

"Sovereign of the air,--who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the
inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and
halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right
above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that
shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts,--I pay thee
homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to the vulture, the falcon,
and all thy noble baronage; and no less to the lowly bird, the
sky-lark, whom thou permittest to visit thy court, and chant her matin
song within its cloudy curtains; yea the linnet, the thrush, the
swallow, are my brethren:--but still I am a bird, though but a bird of
the earth.

"Monarch of our kind, I am a bird, even as thou; and I have shed
plumes, which have added beauty to the beautiful, and grace to terror,
waving over the maiden's brow and on the helmed head of the war-chief;
and majesty to grief, drooping o'er the car of death!"

[Footnote 1: Göttingen, 1821. The few following notes are, something out of order, inserted here in consequence of their connection with the immediately preceding remarks in the text.--Ed.]

LIFE OF BISHOP HACKET. [1]

Ib. p. 8.

Yet he would often dispute the necessity of a country living for a
London minister to retire to in hot summer time, out of the sepulchral
air of a churchyard, where most of them are housed in the city, and
found for his own part that by Whitsuntide he did 'rus anhelare', and
unless he took fresh air in the vacation, he was stopt in his lungs
and could not speak clear after Michaelmas.

A plausible reason certainly why A. and B. should occasionally change posts, but a very weak one, methinks, for A.'s having both livings all the year through.

Ib. p. 42-3.

The Bishop was an enemy to all separation from the Church of England;
but their hypocrisy he thought superlative that allowed the doctrine,
and yet would separate for mislike of the discipline. ... And
therefore he wished that as of old all kings and other Christians
subscribed to the Conciliary Decrees, so now a law might pass that all
justices of peace should do so in England, and then they would be more
careful to punish the depravers of Church Orders.

The little or no effect of recent experience and sufferings still more recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal in those who did not think them indifferent,--how doubly criminal must the imposition have been, and how tenfold criminal the perseverance in occasioning separation; how guilty the imprisoning, impoverishing, driving into wildernesses their Christian brethren for admitted indifferentials in direct contempt of St. Paul's positive command to the contrary!

HACKET'S SERMONS.

Serm. I. Luke ii. 7.

Moreover as the woman Mary did bring forth the son who bruised the
serpent's head, which brought sin into the world by the woman Eve, so
the Virgin Mary was the occasion of grace as the Virgin Eve was the
cause of damnation. Eve had not known Adam as yet when she was
beguiled and seduced the man; so Mary, &c.

A Rabbinical fable or gloss on Gen. iii. 1. Hacket is offensively fond of these worse than silly vanities.

Ib. p. 5.

The more to illustrate this, you must know that there was a twofold
root or foundation of the children of Israel for their temporal being:
Abraham was the root of the people; the kingdom was rent from Saul,
and therefore David was the root of the kingdom; among all the kings
in the pedigree none but he hath the name; and Jesse begat David the
king, and David the king begat Solomon; and therefore so often as God
did profess to spare the people, though he were angry, he says he
would do it for Abraham's sake: so often as he professeth to spare the
kingdom of Judah, he says he would do it for his servant David's sake;
so that 'ratione radicis', as Abraham and David are roots of the
people and kingdom, especially Christ is called the Son of David, the
Son of Abraham.

A valuable remark, and confirmative of my convictions respecting the conversion of the Jews, namely, that whatever was ordained for them as 'Abrahamidæ' is not repealed by Christianity, but only what appertained to the republic, kingdom, or state. The modern conversions are, as it seems to me, in the face of God's commands.

Ib.

I come to the third strange condition of the birth; it was without
travel, or the pangs of woman, as I will shew you out of these words;
'fasciis involvit', that 'she wrapt him in swaddling clouts, and laid
him in a manger. Ipsa genitrix fuit obstetrix', says St. Cyprian. Mary
was both the mother and the midwife of the child; far be it from us to
think that the weak hand of the woman could facilitate the work which
was guided only by the miraculous hand of God. The Virgin conceived
our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, and therefore she had not the
pangs and travel of woman upon her, she brought him forth without the
curse of the flesh. These be the Fathers' comparisons. As bees draw
honey from the flower without offending it, as Eve was taken out of
Adam's side without any grief to him, as a sprig issues out of the
bark of a tree, as the sparkling light from the brightness of the
star, such ease was it to Mary to bring forth her first born son; and
therefore having no weakness in her body, feeling no want of vigor,
she did not deliver him to any profane hand to be drest, but by a
special ability, above all that are newly delivered, she wrapt him in
swaddling clouts. 'Gravida, sed non gravabatur'; she had a burden in
her womb, before she was delivered, and yet she was not burdened for
her journey which she took so instantly before the time of the child's
birth. From Nazareth to Bethlem was above forty miles, and yet she
suffered it without weariness or complaint, for such was the power of
the Babe, that rather he did support the Mother's weakness than was
supported; and as he lighted his Mother's travel by the way from
Nazareth to Bethlem that it was not tedious to her tender age, so he
took away all her dolour and imbecility from her travel in
child-birth, and therefore 'she wrapt him in swaddling clouts'.

A very different paragraph indeed, and quite on the cross road to Rome! It really makes me melancholy; but it is one of a thousand instances of the influence of Patristic learning, by which the Reformers of the Latin Church were distinguished from the renovators of the Christian religion.

Can we wonder that the strict Protestants were jealous of the backsliding of the Arminian prelatical clergy and of Laud their leader, when so strict a Calvinist as Bishop Hacket could trick himself up in such fantastic rags and lappets of Popish monkery!--could skewer such frippery patches, cribbed from the tyring room of Romish Parthenolatry, on the sober gown and cassock of a Reformed and Scriptural Church!

Ib. p. 7.

But to say the truth, was he not safer among the beasts than he could
be elsewhere in all the town of Bethlem? His enemies perchance would
say unto him, as Jael did to Sisera, 'Turn in, turn in, my Lord', when
she purposed to kill him; as the men of Keilah made a fair shew to
give David all courteous hospitality, but the issue would prove, if
God had not blessed him, that they meant to deliver him into the hands
of Saul that sought his blood. So there was no trusting of the
Bethlemites. Who knows, but that they would have prevented Judas, and
betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver unto Herod? More humanity is
to be expected from the beasts than from some men, and therefore she
laid him in a manger.

Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove otherwise, I should have inferred from these Sermons that Hacket from his first boyhood had been used to make themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on all the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had found abundant nourishment for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities in the study of the Fathers and glossers; and remained a 'junior soph' all his life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war!

Ib. Serm. II. Luke ii. 8.

Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the
great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the
other gods which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not
please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was
a god not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention.

Here, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and Suetonius--above all, of Tacitus and Pliny--outweigh in my mind the positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by Tertullian. [2]

Ib. Serm. III. Luke ii. 9.

But our bodies shall revive out of that dust into which they were
dissolved, and live for ever in the resurrection of the righteous.

I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant, 'Thou fool! not that, &c.' I have at times almost been tempted to conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists' [Greek: katà sárka] to the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens; for so Tarsus was called.

And was there no symptom of a commencing relapse to the errors of that Church which had equalled the traditions of men, yea, the dreams of phantasts with the revelations of God, when a chosen elder with the law of truth before him, and professing to divide and distribute the bread of life, could, paragraph after paragraph, place such unwholesome vanities as these before his flock, without even a hint which might apprize them that the gew-gaw comfits were not part of the manna from heaven? All this superstitious trash about angels, which the Jews learned from the Persian legends, asserted as confidently as if Hacket had translated it word for word from one of the four Gospels! Salmasius, if I mistake not, supposes the original word to have been bachelors, young unmarried men. Others interpret angels as meaning the bishop and elders of the Church. More probably it was a proverbial expression derived from the Cherubim in the Temple: something as the country folks used to say to children, Take care, the Fairies will hear you! It was a common notion among the Jews, in the time of St. Paul, that their angels were employed in carrying up their prayers to the throne of God. Of course they must have been in special attendance in a house of prayer.

After much search and much thought on the subject of angels as a diverse kind of finite beings, I find no sufficing reason to hold it for a revealed doctrine, and if not revealed it is assuredly no truth of philosophy, which, as I have elsewhere remarked, can conceive but three kinds; 1. the infinite reason; 2. the finite rational; and 3. the finite irrational--that is, God, man, and beast. What indeed, even for the vulgar, is or can an archangel be but a man with wings, better or worse than the wingless species according as the feathers are white or black? I would that the word had been translated instead of Anglicised in our English Bible.

The following paragraph is one of Hacket's sweetest passages. It is really a beautiful little hymn.

By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur
in the angels' message to set out the majesty of the Son of God: and I
beseech you observe,--all you that would keep a good Christmas as you
ought,--that the glory of God is the best celebration of his Son's
nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but
rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed, without riot,
without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride and vain
pomp, in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were
round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but
frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered
outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss
rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the
people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanctity
of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in
want! This is the glory of God shining round, and the most Christian
solemnizing of the birth of Jesus.

SERMONS ON THE TEMPTATION.

As the Temptation is found in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it must have formed part of the 'Prot-evangelion', or original Gospel;--from the Apostles, therefore, it must have come, and from some or all who had heard the account from our Lord himself. How, then, are we to understand it? To confute the whims and superstitious nugacities of these Sermons, and the hundred other comments and interpretations 'ejusdem farinæ', would be a sad waste of time. Yet some meaning, and that worthy of Christ, it must have had. The struggle with the suggestions of the evil principle, first, to force his way and compel belief by a succession of miracles, disjoined from moral and spiritual purpose,--miracles for miracles' sake;--second, doubts of his Messianic character and divinity, and temptations to try it by some ordeal at the risk of certain death;--third, to interpret his mission, as his countrymen generally did, to be one of conquest and royalty;--these perhaps--but I am lost in doubt.

SERMON ON THE TRANSFIGURATION.

Luke IX. 33.

'I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren,
my kinsmen according to the flesh'.

Rom. ix. 3.

St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a transient passion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse,--an impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and not completed by an act and confirmation of the will,--as a striking proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compassion for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!' Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine passage in Shakspeare--Hotspur's rapture-like reverie--so often ridiculed by shallow wits. In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden sense of the depth of its moral strength.

SERMON ON THE RESURRECTION.

Acts II. 4.

Thirdly, the necessity of it: 'for it was not possible that he should
be holden of death'.

One great error of textual divines is their inadvertence to the dates, occasion, object and circumstances, at and under which the words were written or spoken. Thus the simple assertion of one or two facts introductory to the teaching of the Christian religion is taken as comprising or constituting the Christian religion itself. Hence the disproportionate weight laid on the simple fact of the resurrection of Jesus, detached from the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption.

Ib.

St. Austin says, that Tully, in his '3 lib. de Republica', disputed
against the reuniting of soul and body. His argument was, To what end?
Where should they remain together? For a body cannot be assumed into
heaven. I believe God caused those famous monuments of his wit to
perish, because of such impious opinions wherewith they were farced.

I believe, however, that these books have recently themselves enjoyed a resurrection by the labor of Angelo Mai. [3]

Ib.

And let any equal auditor judge if Job were not an Anti-Socinian; Job
xix. 26. 'Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my
flesh shall I see God, whom I shall behold for myself, and mine eyes
shall see, and not another'.

This text rightly rendered is perhaps nothing to the purpose, but may refer to the dire cutaneous disease with which Job was afflicted. It may be merely an expression of Job's confidence of his being justified in the eyes of men, and in this life. [4]

In the whole wide range of theological 'mirabilia', I know none stranger than the general agreement of orthodox divines to forget to ask themselves what they precisely meant by the word 'body.' Our Lord's and St. Paul's meaning is evident enough, that is, the personality.

Ib.

St. Chrysostom's judgment upon it ('having loosed the pains of death')
is, that when Christ came out of the grave, death itself was delivered
from pain and anxiety--[Greek: _odike katéchon autòn thánatos, kaì tà
deinà epasche.] Death knew it held him captive whom it ought not to
have seized upon, and therefore it suffered torments like a woman in
travail till it had given him up again. Thus he. But the Scripture
elsewhere testifies, that death was put to sorrow because it had lost
its sting, rather than released from sorrow by our Saviour's
resurrection.

Most noticeable! See the influence of the surrounding myriotheism in the 'dea Mors!'

Ib.

Let any competent judge read Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, and then these Sermons, and so measure the stultifying, nugifying effect of a blind and uncritical study of the Fathers, and the exclusive prepossession in favor of their authority in the minds of many of our Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I.

HACKET'S LIFE OF LORD KEEPER WILLIAMS. [5]

Prudence installed as virtue, instead of being employed as one of her indispensable handmaids, and the products of this exemplified and illustrated in the life of Archbishop Williams, as a work, I could warmly recommend to my dearest Hartley. Williams was a man bred up to the determination of being righteous, both honorably striving and selfishly ambitious, but all within the bounds and permission of the law, the reigning system of casuistry; in short, an egotist in morals, and a worldling in impulses and motives. And yet by pride and by innate nobleness of nature munificent and benevolent, with all the negative virtues of temperance, chastity, and the like,--take this man on his road to his own worldly aggrandizement. Winding his way through a grove of powerful rogues, by flattery, professions of devoted attachment, and by actual and zealous as well as able services, and at length becoming in fact nearly as great a knave as the knaves (Duke of Buckingham for example) whose favor and support he had been conciliating,--till at last in some dilemma, some strait between conscience and fear, and increased confidence in his own political strength, he opposes or hesitates to further some too foolish or wicked project of his patron knave, or affronts his pride by counselling a different course (not a less wicked, but one more profitable and conducive to his Grace's elevation);-and then is 'floored' or crushed by him, and falls unknown and unpitied. Such was that truly wonderful scholar and statesman, Archbishop Williams.