Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1

Now, on the other hand, amongst ourselves, every question, that is large enough to engage public interest, though it should begin as a mere comparison of strength with strength, almost immediately travels forward into a comparison of right with rights, or of duty with duty. A mere fiscal question of restraint upon importation from this or that particular quarter, passes into a question of colonial rights. Arrangements of convenience for the management of the pauper, or the debtor, or the criminal, or the war-captive, become the occasions of profound investigations into the rights of persons occupying those relations. Sanatory ordinances for the protection of public health; such as quarantine, fever hospitals, draining, vaccination, &c., connect themselves, in the earliest stages of their discussion, with the general consideration of the duties which the state owes to its subjects. If education is to be promoted by public counsels, every step of the inquiry applies itself to the consideration of the knowledge to be communicated, and of the limits within which any section of religious partisanship can be safely authorized to interfere. If coercion, beyond the warrant of the ordinary law, is to be applied as a remedy for local outrages, a tumult of opinions arises instantly, as to the original causes of the evil, as to the sufficiency of the subsisting laws to meet its pressure, and as to the modes of connecting enlarged powers in the magistrate with the minimum of offence to the general rights of the subject.

Everywhere, in short, some question of duty and responsibility arises to face us in any the smallest public interest that can become the subject of public opinion. Questions, in fact, that fall short of this dignity; questions that concern public convenience only, and do not wear any moral aspect, such as the bullion question, never do become subjects of public opinion. It cannot be said in which direction lies the bias of public opinion. In the very possibility of interesting the public judgment, is involved the certainty of wearing some relation to moral principles. Hence the ardor of our public disputes; for no man views, without concern, a great moral principle darkened by party motives, or placed in risk by accident: hence the dignity and benefit of our public disputes; hence, also, their ultimate relation to the Christian faith. We do not, indeed, in these days, as did our homely ancestors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cite texts of Scripture as themes for senatorial commentary or exegesis; but the virtual reference to scriptural principles is now a thousand times more frequent. The great principles of Christian morality are now so interwoven with our habits of thinking, that we appeal to them no longer as scriptural authorities, but as the natural suggestions of a sound judgment. For instance, in the case of any wrong offered to the Hindoo races, now so entirely dependent upon our wisdom and justice, we British [Footnote: It may be thought that, in the prosecution of Verres, the people of Rome acknowledged something of the same high responsibility. Not at all. The case came before Rome, not as a case of injury to a colonial child, whom the general mother was bound to protect and avenge; but as an appeal, by way of special petition, from Sicilian clients. It was no grand political movement, but simply judicial. Verres was an ill-used man and the victim of private intrigues. Or, whatever he might be, Rome certainly sate upon the cause, not in any character of maternal protectress, taking up voluntarily the support of the weak, but as a sheriff assessing damages in a case forced upon his court by the plaintiff.] immediately, by our solemnity of investigation, testify our sense of the deep responsibility to India with which our Indian supremacy has invested us. We make no mention of the Christian oracles. Yet where, then, have we learned this doctrine of far-stretching responsibility? In all pagan systems of morality, there is the vaguest and slightest appreciation of such relations as connect us with our colonies. But, from the profound philosophy of Scripture, we have learned that no relations whatever, not even those of property, can connect us with even a brute animal, but that we contract concurrent obligations of justice and mercy.

In this age, then, public interests move and prosper through conflicts of opinion. Secondly, as I have endeavored to show, public opinion cannot settle, powerfully, upon any question that is not essentially a moral question. And, thirdly, in all moral questions, we, of Christian nations, are compelled, by habit and training, as well as other causes, to derive our first principles, consciously or not, from the Scriptures. It is, therefore, through the doctrinality of our religion that we derive arms for all moral questions; and it is as moral questions that any political disputes much affect us, The daily conduct, therefore, of all great political interests, throws us unconsciously upon the first principles which we all derive from Christianity. And, in this respect, we are more advantageously placed, by a very noticeable distinction, than the professors of the two other doctrinal religions. The Koran having pirated many sentiments from the Jewish and the Christian systems, could not but offer some rudiments of moral judgment; yet, because so much of these rudiments is stolen, the whole is incoherent, and does not form a system of ethics. In Judaism, again, the special and insulated situation of the Jews has unavoidably impressed an exclusive bias upon its principles. In both codes the rules are often of restricted and narrow application. But, in the Christian Scriptures, the rules are so comprehensive and large as uniformly to furnish the major proposition of a syllogism; whilst the particular act under discussion, wearing, perhaps, some modern name, naturally is not directly mentioned: and to bring this, in the minor proposition, under the principle contained in the major, is a task left to the judgment of the inquirer in each particular case. Something is here intrusted to individual understanding; whereas in the Koran, from the circumstantiality of the rule, you are obliged mechanically to rest in the letter of the precept. The Christian Scriptures, therefore, not only teach, but train the mind to habits of self-teaching in all moral questions, by enforcing more or less of activity in applying the rule; that is, in subsuming the given case proposed under the scriptural principle.

Hence it is certain, and has been repeatedly illustrated, that whilst the Christian faith, in collision with others, would inevitably rouse to the most active fermentation of minds, the Mahometan (as also doctrinal but unsystematical) would have the same effect, in kind, but far feebler in degree; and an idolatrous religion would have no such effect at all. Agreeably to this scale, some years ago, a sect of reforming or fanatical Mahometans, in Bengal,[Footnote: At Baraset, if I remember rightly.] commenced a persecution of the surrounding Hindoos. At length, a reaction took place on the part of the idolaters, but in what temper? Bitter enough, and so far alarming as to call down a government interference with troops and artillery, but yet with no signs of religious retaliation. That was a principle of movement which the Hindoos could not understand: their retaliation was simply to the personal violence they had suffered. Such is the inertia of a mere cultus. And, in the other extreme, if we Christians, in our intercourse with both Hindoos and Mahometans, were not sternly reined up by the vigilance of the local governments, no long time would pass before all India would be incurably convulsed by disorganizing feuds.

PROTESTANTISM. [Footnote: A Vindication of Protestant Principles. By Phileleutheros Anglicanus. London: Parker. 1847.]

[1847.]

The work whose substance and theme are thus briefly abstracted is, at this moment, making a noise in the world. It is ascribed by report to two bishops—not jointly, but alternatively—in the sense that, if one did not write the book, the other did. The Bishops of Oxford and St. David's, Wilberforce and Thirlwall, are the two pointed at by the popular finger; and, in some quarters, a third is suggested, viz., Stanley, Bishop of Norwich. The betting, however, is altogether in favor of Oxford. So runs the current of public gossip. But the public is a bad guesser, 'stiff in opinion' it is, and almost 'always in the wrong.' Now let me guess. When I had read for ten minutes, I offered a bet of seven to one (no takers) that the author's name began with H. Not out of any love for that amphibious letter; on the contrary, being myself what Professor Wilson calls a hedonist, or philosophical voluptuary, and murmuring, with good reason, if a rose leaf lies doubled below me, naturally I murmur at a letter that puts one to the expense of an aspiration, forcing into the lungs an extra charge of raw air on frosty mornings. But truth is truth, in spite of frosty air. And yet, upon further reading, doubts gathered upon my mind. The H. that I mean is an Englishman; now it happens that here and there a word, or some peculiarity in using a word, indicates, in this author, a Scotchman; for instance, the expletive 'just,' which so much infests Scotch phraseology, written or spoken, at page 1; elsewhere the word 'short-comings,' which, being horridly tabernacular, and such that no gentleman could allow himself to touch it without gloves, it is to be wished that our Scottish brethren would resign, together with 'backslidings,' to the use of field preachers. But worse, by a great deal, and not even intelligible in England, is the word thereafter, used as an adverb of time, i.e., as the correlative of hereafter. Thereafter, in pure vernacular English, bears a totally different sense. In 'Paradise Lost,' for instance, having heard the character of a particular angel, you are told that he spoke thereafter, i.e., spoke agreeably to that character. 'How a score of sheep, Master Shallow?' The answer is, 'Thereafter as they be.' Again, 'Thereafter as a man sows shall he reap.' The objections are overwhelming to the Scottish use of the word; first, because already in Scotland it is a barbarism transplanted from the filthy vocabulary of attorneys, locally called writers; secondly, because in England it is not even intelligible, and, what is worse still, sure to be mis-intelligible. And yet, after all, these exotic forms may be a mere blind. The writer is, perhaps, purposely leading us astray with his 'thereafters,' and his horrid 'short-comings.' Or, because London newspapers, and Acts of Parliament, are beginning to be more and more polluted with these barbarisms, he may even have caught them unconsciously.

And, on looking again at one case of 'thereafter,' viz. at page 79, it seems impossible to determine whether he uses it in the classical English sense, or in the sense of leguleian barbarism. This question of authorship, meantime, may seem to the reader of little moment. Far from it! The weightier part of the interest depends upon that very point. If the author really is a bishop, or supposing the public rumor so far correct as that he is a man of distinction in the English church, then, and by that simple fact, this book, or this pamphlet, interesting at any rate for itself, becomes separately interesting through its authorship, so as to be the most remarkable phenomenon of the day; and why? Because the most remarkable expression of a movement, accomplished and proceeding in a quarter that, if any on this earth, might be thought sacred from change. Oh, fearful are the motions of time, when suddenly lighted up to a retrospect of thirty years! Pathetic are the ruins of time in its slowest advance! Solemn are the prospects, so new and so incredible, which time unfolds at every turn of its wheeling flight! Is it come to this? Could any man, one generation back, have anticipated that an English dignitary, and speaking on a very delicate religious question, should deliberately appeal to a writer confessedly infidel, and proud of being an infidel, as a 'triumphant' settler of Christian scruples? But if the infidel is right, a point which I do not here discuss—but if the infidel is a man of genius, a point which I do not deny—was it not open to cite him, even though the citer were a bishop? Why, yes—uneasily one answers, yes; but still the case records a strange alteration, and still one could have wished to hear such a doctrine, which ascribes human infirmity (nay, human criminality) to every book of the Bible, uttered by anybody rather than by a father of the Church, and guaranteed by anybody rather than by an infidel, in triumph. A boy may fire his pistol unnoticed; but a sentinel, mounting guard in the dark, must remember the trepidation that will follow any shot from him, and the certainty that it will cause all the stations within hearing to get under arms immediately. Yet why, if this bold opinion does come from a prelate, he being but one man, should it carry so alarming a sound? Is the whole bench of bishops bound and compromised by the audacity of any one amongst its members? Certainly not. But yet such an act, though it should be that of a rash precursor, marks the universal change of position; there is ever some sympathy between the van and the rear of the same body at the same time; and the boldest could not have dared to go ahead so rashly, if the rearmost was not known to be pressing forward to his support, far more closely than thirty years ago he could have done. There have been, it is true, heterodox professors of divinity and free-thinking bishops before now. England can show a considerable list of such people—even Rome has a smaller list. Rome, that weeds all libraries, and is continually burning books, in effigy, by means of her vast Index Expurgatorius,[Footnote: A question of some interest arises upon the casuistical construction of this Index. We, that are not by name included, may we consider ourselves indirectly licensed? Silence, I should think, gives consent. And if it wasn't that the present Pope, being a horrid Radical, would be sure to blackball me as an honest Tory, I would send him a copy of my Opera Omnia, requesting his Holiness to say, by return of post, whether I ranked amongst the chaff winnowed by St. Peter's flail, or had his gracious permission to hold myself amongst the pure wheat gathered into the Vatican garner.] which index, continually, she is enlarging by successive supplements, needs also an Index Expurgatorius for the catalogue of her prelates. Weeds there are in the very flower-garden and conservatory of the church. Fathers of the church are no more to be relied on, as safe authorities, than we rascally lay authors, that notoriously will say anything. And it is a striking proof of this amongst our English bishops, that the very man who, in the last generation, most of all won the public esteem as the champion of the Bible against Tom Paine, was privately known amongst us connoisseurs in heresy (that are always prying into ugly secrets) to be the least orthodox thinker, one or other, amongst the whole brigade of fifteen thousand contemporary clerks who had subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles. Saving your presence, reader, his lordship was no better than a bigoted Socinian, which, in a petty diocese that he never visited, and amongst South Welshmen, that are all incorrigible Methodists, mattered little, but would have been awkward had he come to be Archbishop of York; and that he did not, turned upon the accident of a few weeks too soon, by which the Fates cut short the thread of the Whig ministry in 1807. Certainly, for a Romish or an English bishop to be a Socinian is un peu fort. But I contend that it is quite possible to be far less heretical, and yet dangerously bold; yes, upon the free and spacious latitudes, purposely left open by the English Thirty-nine Articles (ay, or by any Protestant Confession), to plant novelties not less startling to religious ears than Socinianism itself. Besides (which adds to the shock), the dignitary now before us, whether bishop or no bishop, does not write in the tone of a conscious heretic; or, like Archdeacon Blackburne[Footnote: He was the author of The Confessional, which at one time made a memorable ferment amongst all those who loved as sons, or who hated as nonconformists, the English Establishment. This was his most popular work, but he wrote many others in the same temper, that fill six or seven octavos.] of old, in a spirit of hostility to his own fellow-churchmen; but, on the contrary, in the tone of one relying upon support from his clerical brethren, he stands forward as expositor and champion of views now prevailing amongst the elite of the English Church. So construed, the book is, indeed, a most extraordinary one, and exposes a history that almost shocks one of the strides made in religious speculation. Opinions change slowly and stealthily. The steps of the changes are generally continuous; but sometimes it happens that the notice of such steps, the publication of such changes, is not continuous, that it comes upon us per saltum, and, consequently, with the stunning effect of an apparent treachery. Every thoughtful man raises his hands with an involuntary gesture of awe at the revolutions of so revolutionary an age, when thus summoned to the spectacle of an English prelate serving a piece of artillery against what once were fancied to be main outworks of religion, and at a station sometimes considerably in advance of any occupied by Voltaire.[Footnote: Let not the reader misunderstand me; I do not mean that the clerical writer now before us (bishop or not bishop) is more hostile to religion than Voltaire, or is hostile at all. On the contrary, he is, perhaps, profoundly religious, and he writes with neither levity nor insincerity. But this conscientious spirit, and this piety, do but the more call into relief the audacity of his free-thinking—do but the more forcibly illustrate the prodigious changes wrought by time, and by the contagion from secular revolutions, in the spirit of religious philosophy.]

It is this audacity of speculation, I apprehend, this etalage of bold results, rather than any success in their development, which has fixed the public attention. Development, indeed, applied to philosophic problems, or research applied to questions of erudition, was hardly possible within so small a compass as one hundred and seventeen pages, for that is the extent of the work, except as regards the notes, which amount to seventy-four pages more. Such brevity, on such a subject, is unseasonable, and almost culpable. On such a subject as the Philosophy of Protestantism—'satius erat silere, quam parcius, dicere.' Better were absolute silence, more respectful as regards the theme, less tantalizing as regards the reader, than a style of discussion so fragmentary and so rapid.

But, before we go farther, what are we to call this bold man? One must have some name for a man that one is reviewing; and, as he comes abroad incognito, it is difficult to see what name could have any propriety. Let me consider: there are three bishops in the field, Mr. H., and the Scotchman—that makes five. But every one of these, you say, is represented equally by the name in the title—Phileleutheros Anglicanus. True, but that's as long as a team of horses. If it had but Esquire at the end, it would measure against a Latin Hendecasyllable verse. I'm afraid that we must come at last to Phil. I've been seeking to avoid it, for it's painful to say 'Jack' or 'Dick' either to or of an ecclesiastical great gun. But if such big wigs will come abroad in disguise, and with names as long as Fielding's Hononchrononthononthologus, they must submit to be hustled by pickpockets and critics, and to have their names docked as well as profane authors.

Phil, then, be it—that's settled. Now, let us inquire what it is that Phil. has been saying, to cause such a sensation amongst the Gnostics. And, to begin at the beginning, what is Phil.'s capital object? Phil. shall state it himself—these are his opening words:—

'In the following pages we propose to vindicate the fundamental and inherent principles of Protestantism.'

Good; but what are the fundamental principles of Protestantism? 'They are,' says Phil., 'the sole sufficiency of Scripture,'[Footnote: This is much too elliptical a way of expressing the Protestant meaning. Sufficiency for what? 'Sufficiency for salvation' is the phrase of many, and I think elsewhere of Phil. But that is objectionable on more grounds than one; it is redundant, and it is aberrant from the true point contemplated. Sufficiency for itself, without alien helps, is the thing contemplated. The Greek autarkeia, self-sufficiency, or, because that phrase, in English, has received a deflexion towards a bad meaning, the word self- ufficingness might answer; sufficiency for the exposition of its own most secret meaning, out of fountains within itself; needing, therefore, neither the supplementary aids of tradition, on the one hand, nor the complementary aids on the other, (in the event of unprovided cases, or of dilemmas arising,) from the infallibility of a living expounder.] the right of private judgment in its interpretation, and the authority of individual conscience in matters of religion.' Errors of logic show themselves more often in a man's terminology, and his antithesis, and his subdivisions, than anywhere else. Phil. goes on to make this distinction, which brings out his imperfect conception. 'We,' says he (and, by the way, if Phil. is we, then it must he my duty to call him they), 'we do not propose to defend the varieties of doctrine held by the different communities of Protestants.' Why, no; that would be a sad task for the most skilful of funambulists or theological tumblers, seeing that many of these varieties stand related to each other as categorical affirmative and categorical negative: it's heavy work to make yes and no pull together in the same proposition. But this, fortunately for himself, Phil. declines. You are to understand that he will not undertake the defence of Protestantism in its doctrines, but only in its principles. That won't do; that antithesis is as hollow as a drum; and, if the objection were verbal only, I would not make it. But the contradistinction fails to convey the real meaning. It is not that he has falsely expressed his meaning, but that he has falsely developed that meaning to his own consciousness. Not the word only is wrong; but the wrong word is put forward for the sake of hiding the imperfect idea. What he calls principles might almost as well be called doctrines; and what he calls doctrines as well be called principles. Out of these terms, apart from the rectifications suggested by the context, no man could collect his drift, which is simply this. Protestantism, we must recollect, is not an absolute and self-dependent idea; it stands in relation to something antecedent, against which it protests, viz., Papal Rome. And under what phasis does it protest against Rome? Not against the Christianity of Rome, because every Protestant Church, though disapproving a great deal of that, disaproves also a great deal in its own sister churches of the protesting household; and because every Protestant Church holds a great deal of Christian truth, in common with Rome. But what furnishes the matter of protest is—the deduction of the title upon which Rome plants the right to be church at all. This deduction is so managed by Rome as to make herself, not merely a true church (which many Protestants grant), but the exclusive church. Now, what Phil. in effect undertakes to defend is not principles by preference to doctrines (for they are pretty nearly the same thing), but the question of title to teach at all, in preference to the question of what is the thing taught. There is the distinction, as I apprehend it. All these terms—'principle,' 'doctrine,' 'system,' 'theory,' 'hypothesis'—are used nearly always most licentiously, and as arbitrarily as a Newmarket jockey selects the colors for his riding-dress. It is true that one shadow of justification offers itself for Phil.'s distinction. All principles are doctrines, but all doctrines are not principles; which, then, in particular? Why, those properly are principles which contain the principia, the beginnings, or starting-points of evolution, out of which any system of truth is evolved. Now, it may seem that the very starting-point of our Protestant pretensions is, first of all, to argue our title or right to be a church sui juris; apparently we must begin by making good our locus standi, before we can be heard upon our doctrines. And upon this mode of approach, the pleadings about the title, or right to teach at all, taking precedency of the pleadings about the particular things taught, would be the principia, or beginning of the whole process, and so far would be entitled by preference to the name of principles. But such a mode of approach is merely an accident, and contingent upon our being engaged in a polemical discussion of Protestantism in relation to Popery. That, however, is a pure matter of choice; Protestantism may be discussed, 'as though Rome were not, in relation to its own absolute merits; and this treatment is the logical treatment, applying itself to what is permanent in the nature of the object; whereas the other treatment applies itself to what is casual and vanishing in the history (or the origin) of Protestantism. For, after all, it would be no great triumph to Protestantism that she should prove her birthright to revolve as a primary planet in the solar system; that she had the same original right as Rome to wheel about the great central orb, undegraded to the rank of satellite or secondary projection—if, in the meantime, telescopes should reveal the fact that she was pretty nearly a sandy desert. What a church teaches is true or not true, without reference to her independent right of teaching; and eventually, when the irritations of earthly feuds and political schisms shall be soothed by time, the philosophy of this whole question will take an inverse order. The credentials of a church will not be put in first, and the quality of her doctrine discussed as a secondary question. On the contrary, her credentials will be sought in her doctrine. The Protesting Church will say, I have the right to stand separate, because I stand; and from my holy teaching I deduce my title to teach. Jus est ibi summum docendi, ubi est fons purissimus doctrinae. That inversion of the Protestant plea with Rome is even now valid with many; and, when it becomes universally current, then the principles, or great beginnings of the controversy, will be transplanted from the locus, or centre, where Phil. places them, to the very locus which he neglects.