Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750. By MARK PATTISON, B.D.
The thirty years of peace which succeeded the Peace of Utrecht (1714), 'was the most prosperous season that England had ever, experienced ; and the progression, though slow, being uniform, the reign of George II. might not disadvantageously be compared for the real happiness of the community with that more brilliant, but uncertain and oscillatory condition which has ensued. A labourer's wages have never for many ages commanded so large a portion of subsistence as in this part of the 18th century.' (Hallam, Const. Hist. ii. 464.)
This is the aspect which that period of history wears to the political philosopher. The historian of moral and religious progress, on the other hand, is under the necessity of depicting the same period as one of decay of religion, licentiousness of morals, public corruption, profaneness of language—a day of 'rebuke and blasphemy.' Even those who look with suspicion on the contemporary complaints from the Jacobite clergy of 'decay of religion' will not hesitate to say that it was an age destitute of depth or earnestness ; an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without insight, and whose public men were without character ; an age of 'light without love,' whose 'very merits were of the earth, earthy.' In this estimate the followers of Mill and Carlyle will agree with those of Dr. Newman.
The Stoical moralists of the second century who witnessed a similar coincidence of moral degradation and material welfare, had no difficulty in connecting them together as effect with cause. 'Bona rerum secundarum optabilia, adversarum mirabilia.' (Seneca, ad Lucil. 66.) But the famous theory which satisfied the political philosophers of antiquity, viz, that the degeneracy of nations is due to the inroads of luxury, is laughed to scorn by modern economists. It is at any rate a theory which can hardly be adopted by those who pour unmeasured contempt on the 18th, by way of contrast with the revival of higher principles by the 19th century. It is especially since the High Church movement commenced that the theology of the 18th century has become a by-word. The genuine Anglican omits that period from the history of the Church altogether. In constructing his Catenæ Patrum he closes his list with Waterland or Brett, and leaps at once to 1833, when the Tracts for the Times commenced—as Charles II. dated his reign from his father's death. Such a legal fiction may be harmless or useful for purposes of mere form, but the facts of history cannot be disposed of by forgetting them. Both the Church and the world of to-day are what they are as the result of the whole of their antecedents. The history of a party may be written on the theory of periodical occultation ; but be who wishes to trace the descent of religious thought, and the practical working of the religious ideas, must follow these through all the phases they have actually assumed. We have not yet learnt, in this country, to write our ecclesiastical history on any better footing than that of praising up the party, in or out of the Church, to which we happen to belong. Still further are we from any attempt to apply the laws of thought, and of the succession of opinion, to the course of English theology. The recognition of the fact, that the view of the eternal verities of religion which prevails in any given age is in part determined by the view taken in the age which preceded it, is incompatible with the hypothesis generally prevalent among us as to the mode in which we form our notions of religious truth. Upon none of the prevailing theories as to this mode is a deductive history of theology possible. 1. The Catholic theory, which is really that of Roman Catholics, and professedly that of Anglo-Catholics, withdraws Christianity altogether from human experience and the operation of the ordinary laws of thought. 2.The Protestant theory of free inquiry, which supposes that each mind takes a survey of the evidence, and strikes the balance of probability according to the best of its judgment—this theory defers, indeed to the abstract laws of logic, but overlooks the influences of education. If, without hypothesis, we are content to observe facts, we shall find that we cannot decline to study the opinions of any age only because they are not our own opinions. There is a law of continuity in the progress of theology, which whatever we may wish, is never broken off. In tracing the filiation of consecutive systems, we cannot afford to overlook any link in the chain, any age, except one in which religious opinion did not exist. Certainly we, in this our time, if we would understand our own position in the Church, and that of the Church in the age, if we would hold any clue through the maze of religious pretension which surrounds us, cannot neglect these immediate agencies in the production of the present, which had their origin towards the beginning of the 18th century.
Of these agencies there are three, the present influence of which cannot escape the most inattentive. 1. The formation and gradual growth of that compromise between Church and State, which is called Toleration, and which, believed by many to be a principle, is a mere arrangement between two principles. But such as it is, it is part of our heritage from the last age, and is the foundation, if foundation it can be called, upon which we still continue to build, as in the late act for the admission of Jews to Parliament. 2. The great rekindling of the religious consciousness of the people which, without the Established Church, became Methodism, and within its pale has obtained the name of the Evangelical movement. However decayed may be the Evangelical party as a party, it cannot be denied that its influence, both on our religious ideas, and on our church life, has penetrated far beyond those party limits. 3. The growth and gradual diffusion through all religious thinking of the supremacy of reason. This, which is rather a principle, a mode of thinking, than a doctrine, may be properly enough called Rationalism. This term is used in this country with so much laxity that it is impossible to define the sense in which it is generally intended. It is often taken to mean a system opposed to revealed religion, and imported into this country from Germany at the beginning of the present century. A person, however, who surveys the course of English theology during the eighteenth century will have no difficulty in recognising, that throughout all discussions, underneath all controversies, and common to all parties, lies the assumption of the supremacy of reason in matters of religion. The Kantian philosophy did but bring forward into light, and give scientific form and a recognised position to, a principle which had long unconsciously guided all treatment of religious topics both in Germany and in England. Rationalism was not an anti-Christian sect outside the Church making war against religion. It was a habit of thought ruling all minds, under the conditions of which all alike tried to make good the peculiar opinions they might happen to cherish. The Churchman differed from the Socinian, and the Socinian from the Deist, as to the number of articles in his creed ; but all alike consented to test their belief by the rational evidence for it. Whether, given doctrines or miracles were conformable to reason or not was disputed between the defence and the assault ; but that all doctrines were to stand or fall by that criterion was not questioned. The principles and the priority of natural religion formed the common hypothesis on the ground of which the disputants argued whether anything, and what, had been subsequently communicated to man in a supernatural way. The line between those who believed much and those who believed little cannot be sharply drawn. Some of the so-called Deists were, in fact, Socinians ; as Toland, who expressly admits all those parts of the New Testament revelation which are, or seem to him, comprehensible by reason. (Christianity not Mysterious.) Nor is there any ground for thinking that Toland was insincere in his profession of rational Christianity, as was insinuated by his opponents—e.g. Leland. (View of the Deistical Writers, vol. i. p. 49.) A more candid adversary, Leibnitz, who knew Toland personally, is 'glad to believe that the design of this author, a man of no common ability, and as I think, a well-disposed person, was to withdraw men from speculative theology to the practice of its precepts.' (Annotatiunculæ subitanæ.) Hardly one here and there, as Hume, professed Rationalism in the extent of Atheism ; the great majority of writers were employed in constructing a via media between Atheism and Athanasianism, while the most orthodox were diligently 'hewing and chiselling Christianity into an intelligible human system, which they then represented, as thus mutilated, as affording a remarkable evidence of the truth of the Bible.' (Tracts for the Times, vol. ii. No. 78.) The title of Locke's treatise, The Reasonableness of Christianity, may be said to have been the solitary thesis of Christian theology in England for great part of a century.
If we are to put chronological limits to this system of religions opinion in England, we might, for the sake of a convenient landmark, say that it came in with the Revolution of 1688, and began to decline in vigour with the reaction against the Reform movement about 1830. Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity would thus open, and the commencement of the Tracts for the Times mark the fall of Rationalism. Not that chronology can ever be exactly applied to the mutations of opinion. For there were Rationalists before Locke, e.g., Hales of Eton, and other Arminians, nor has the Church of England unanimously adopted the principles of the Tracts for the Times. But if we were to follow up Cave's nomenclature the appellation Seculum Rationalisticum might be affixed to the eighteenth century with greater precision than many of his names apply to the previous centuries. For it was not merely that Rationalism then obtruded itself as a heresy, or obtained a footing of toleration within the Church, but the rationalising method possessed itself absolutely of the whole field of theology. With some trifling exceptions, the whole of religious literature was drawn in to the endeavour to 'prove the truth' of Christianity. The essay and the sermon, the learned treatise and the philosophical disquisition, Addison the polite writer, and Bentley the classical philogian (Addison: Evidences of the Christian Religion, a posthumous publication. Bentley: Eight Sermons at Boyle's Lecture, 1692), the astronomer Newton (Four Letters, dc, Lond. 1756), no less than the theologians by profession, were all engaged upon the same task. To one book of A. Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, Lond: 1724, are counted no less than thirty-five answers. Dogmatic theology had ceased to exist ; the exhibition of religious truth for practical purposes was confined to a few obscure writers. Every one who had anything to say on sacred subjects drilled it into an array of argument against a supposed objector. Christianity appeared made for nothing else but to be 'proved;' what use to make of it when it was proved was not much thought about. Reason was at first offered as the basis of faith, but gradually became its substitute. The mind never advanced as far as the stage of belief, for it was unceasingly engaged in reasoning up to it. The only quality in Scripture which was dwelt upon was its 'credibility.' Even the 'Evangelical' school, which had its origin in reaction against the dominant Rationalism, and began in endeavours to kindle religious feeling, was obliged to succumb at last. It, too, drew out its rational 'scheme of Christianity' in which the atonement was made the central point of a system, and the death of Christ was accounted for as necessary to satisfy the Divine Justice.
This whole rationalist age must again be subdivided into two periods, the theology of which, though belonging to the common type, has distinct specific characters. These periods are of nearly equal length, and we may conveniently take the middle year of the century, 1760, as our terminus of division. Though both periods were engaged upon the proof of Christianity, the distinction between them is that the first period was chiefly devoted to the internal, the second to the external, attestations. In the first period the main endeavour was to show that there was nothing in the contents of the revelation which was not agreeable to reason. In the second, from 1750 onwards, the controversy was narrowed, to what are usually called the 'Evidences,' or the historical proof of the genuineness and authenticity of the Christian records. From this distinction of topic arises an important difference of value, between the theological produce of the two periods. A great injustice is done to the 18th century, when its whole speculative product is set down under the description of that Old Bailey theology in which, to use Johnson's illustration, the Apostles are being tried once a week for the capital crime of forgery. This evidential school—the school of Lardner, Paley, and Whately—belongs strictly to the latter half only of the period now under consideration. This school, which treated the exterior evidence, was the natural sequel and supplement of that which had preceded it, which dealt with the intrinsic credibility of the Christian revelation. This historical succession of the schools is the logical order of the argument. For when we have first shown that the facts of Christianity are not incredible, the whole burden of proof is shifted to the evidence that the facts did really occur. Neither branch of the argument can claim to be religious instruction at all, but the former does incidentally enter upon the substance of the Gospel. It may be philosophy rather than theology, but it raises in its course some of the most momentous problems which can engage the human mind. On the other hand, a mind which occupies itself with the 'external evidences' knows nothing of the spiritual intuition, of which it renounces at once the difficulties and the consolations. The supply of evidences in what for the sake of a name may be called the Georgian period (1750—1830), was not occasioned by any demands of controversy. The attacks through the press were nearly at an end ; the Deists had ceased to be. The clergy continued to manufacture evidence as an ingenious exercise, a literature which was avowedly professional, a study which might seem theology without being it, which could awaken none of the scepticism then dormant beneath the surface of society. Evidences are not edged tools ; they stir no feeling ; they were the proper theology of an age, whose literature consisted in writing Latin hexameters. The orthodox school no longer dared to scrutinize the contents of revelation. The preceding period had eliminated the religious experience, the Georgian had lost besides, the power of using the speculative reason.
The historical investigation, indeed, of the Origines of Christianity is a study scarcely second in importance to a philosophical arrangement of its doctrines. But for a genuine inquiry of this nature the English writers of the period had neither the taste nor the knowledge. Gibbon alone approached the true difficulties, but met only with opponents 'victory over whom was a sufficient humiliation.' (Autobiography.) No Englishman will refuse to join with Coleridge in 'the admiration,' he expresses 'for the head and heart' of Paley, 'the incomparable grace, propriety, and persuasive facility of his writings.' (Aids to Reflection, p. 401.) But Paley had unfortunately dedicated his powers to a factitious thesis; his demonstration, however perfect, is in unreal matter. The case, as the apologists of that day stated it, is wholly conventional. The breadth of their assumptions is out of all proportion to the narrow dimensions of the point they succeed in proving. Of an honest critical inquiry into the origin and composition of the canonical writings there is but one trace, Herbert Marsh's lectures at Cambridge, and that was suggested from a foreign source, and died away without exciting imitators. That investigation, introduced by a bishop and professor of divinity, has scarcely yet obtained a footing in the English Church. But it is excluded, not from a conviction of its barrenness, but from a fear that it might prove too fertile in results. This unwholesome state of theological feeling among us, is perhaps traceable in part to the falsetto of the evidential method of the last generation. We cannot justify, but we may perhaps make our predecessors bear part of the blame of that inconsistency, which while it professes that its religious belief rests on historical evidence, refuses to allow that evidence to be freely examined in open court.
It seems, indeed, a singular infelicity that the construction of the historical proof should have been the task which the course of events allotted to the latter half of the 18th century. The critical knowledge of antiquity had disappeared from the Universities. The past, discredited by a false conservatism, was regarded with aversion, and the minds of men directed habitually to the future, some with fear, others with hope. 'The disrespect in which history was held, by the French philosophes is notorious ; one of the soberest of them, D'Alembert, we believe, was the author of the wish that all record of past events could be blotted out.' (Mill, Dissertations, vol i. p. 420.) The same sentiment was prevalent, though not in the same degree, in this country. Hume, writing to an Englishman in 1756, speaks of 'your countrymen' as 'given over to barbarous and absurd faction.' Of his own history the publisher, Millar, told him he had only sold forty-five copies in a twelve-month. (My Own Life, p. 5.) Warburton had long before complained of the Chronicles published by Hearne that 'there is not one that is not a disgrace to letters ; most of them are so to common sense, and some even to human nature.' (Parr's Tracts, &c, p. 109.) . The oblivion into which the remains of Christian antiquity had sunk, till disinterred by the Tractarian movement, is well known. Having neither the critical tools to work with, nor the historical materials to work upon, it is no wonder if they failed in their art. Theology had almost died out when it received a new impulse and a new direction from Coleridge. The evidence makers ceased from their futile labours all at once, as beneath the spell of some magician. Englishmen heard with as much surprise as if the doctrine was new, that the Christian faith, the Athanasian Creed, of which they had come to wish that the Church was well rid, was 'the perfection of human intelligence;' that 'the compatibility of a document with the conclusions of self-evident reason, and with the laws of conscience, is a condition a priori of any evidence adequate to the proof of its having been revealed by God,' and that this 'is a principle clearly laid down by Moses and St. Paul;' lastly, that there are mysteries in Christianity, but that these mysteries are reason, reason in its highest form of self-affirmation.' (Aids to Reflection, pref. Lit. Remains, iii. 298.) In this position of Coleridge, the rationalist theology of England, which was in the last stage of decay and dotage, seemed to recover a second youth, and to revert at once to the point from which it had started a century before.
Should the religious historian then acknowledge the impatient contempt with which 'the last century' is now spoken of, is justifiable with respect to the later period, with its artificial monotone of proof that is no proof, he will by no means allow the same of the earlier period 1688—1750. The superiority which the theological writing of this period has over that which succeeded it, is to be referred in part to the superiority of the internal, over the external, proof of Christianity, as an object of thought.
Both methods alike, as methods of argumentative proof, place the mind in an unfavourable attitude for the consideration of religious truth. It is like removing ourselves for the purpose of examining an object to the furthest point from which the object is visible. Neither the external nor the internal evidences are properly theology at all. Theology, is—1st, and primarily, the contemplative, speculative habit, by means of which the mind places itself already in another world than this; a habit begun here, to be raised to perfect vision hereafter. 2ndly, and in an inferior degree, it is ethical and regulative of our conduct as men, in those relations which are temporal and transitory. Argumentative proof that such knowledge is possible can never be substituted for the knowledge without detriment to the mental habit. What is true of an individual is true of an age. When an age is found occupied in proving its creed, this is but a token that the age has ceased to have a proper belief in it. Nevertheless, there is a difference in this respect between the sources from which proof may be fetched. Where it is busied in establishing the 'genuineness and authenticity' of the books of Scripture, neglecting its religious lessons, and drawing out instead 'the undersigned coincidences,' Rationalism is seen in its dullest and least spiritual form. When, on the other hand, the contents of the Revelation are being freely examined, and reason, as it is called, but really the philosophy in vogue, is being applied to determine whether the voice be the voice of God or not, the reasoner is indeed approaching his subject from a false point of view, but he is still engaged with the eternal verities. The reason has prescribed itself an impossible task when it has undertaken to prove instead of evolve them ; to argue instead of appropriate them. But anyhow, it is handling them ; and by the contact is raised in some measure to the 'height of that great argument.'
This acknowledgment seems due to the period now referred to. It is, perhaps rather thinking of its pulpit eloquence than its controversies, that Professor Fraser does not hesitate to call this 'the golden age of English theology.' (Essays in Philosophy, p. 205.) Such language, as applied to our great preachers, was once a matter of course, but would now hardly, be used by any Anglican, and has to be sought for in the mouth of members of another communion. The names which once commanded universal homage among us—the Souths, Barrows, Tillotsons, Sherlocks,—excite, perhaps, only a smile of pity. Literary taste is proverbially inconstant ; but theological is still more so, for here we have no rule or chart to guide us but the taste of our age. Bossnet, Bourdaloue, and Massillon have survived a dozen political revolutions. We have no classical theology, though we have not had a political revolution since 1660. For in this subject matter the most of Englishmen have no other standard of merit than the prejudices of sect. Eminence only marks out a great man for more cordial hatred ; every flippant High Church reviewer has learnt to fling at Locke, the father of English Rationalism, and the greatest name among its worthies. Others are, perhaps, only less disliked because less known; 'qui n'a pas de lecteurs, n'a pas d'adversaires.' The principal writers in the Deistical Controversy, on either side of it, have expiated the attention they once engrossed by as universal an oblivion.
The Deistical Controversy, the all-absorbing topic of religious writers and preachers during the whole of this first period, has pretty well defined limits. Stillingfleet, who died Bishop of Worcester, in the last year (1699) of the seventeenth century, marks the transition from the old to the new argument. In the six folios of Stillingfleet's works may be found the latest echoes of the Romanist Controversy, and the first declaration of war against Locke. The Deistical Controversy attained its greatest intensity in the twenties (1720—1740), after the subsidence of the Bangorian controversy, which for a time had diverted attention to itself, and it gradually died out towards the middle of the century. The decay of interest in the topic is sufficiently marked by the fact that the opinions of Hume failed to stimulate curiosity or antagonism. His Treatise of Human Nature (1739) 'fell dead-born from the press,' and the only one of his philosophical writings which was received with favour on its first appearance was one on the new topic— Political Discourses (1752). Of this he says 'it was the only work of mine which was successful on the first publication, being well received both abroad and at home.' (My Own Life. Bolingbroke, who died in 1751, was the last of the professed Deists. When his works were brought out by his executor, Mallet, in 1754, the interest in them was already gone ; they found the public cold or indisposed. 'It was a rusty blunderbuss, which he need not have been afraid to have discharged himself, instead of leaving half-a-crown to a Scotchman to let it off after his death.' (Boswell, p. 88.) To talk Deism had ceased to be fashionable as soon as it ceased to attract attention.
The rationalism, which is the common character of all the writers of this time, is a method rather than a doctrine ; an unconscious assumption rather than a principle from which they reason. They would, however, all have consented in statements such as the following : Bp. Gibson, Second Pastoral Letter, 1730, 'Those among us who have laboured of late years to set up reason against revelation would make it pass for an established truth, that if you will embrace revelation you must of course quit your reason, which if it were true, would doubtless be a strong prejudice against revelation. But so far is this from being true, that it is universally acknowledged that revelation itself is to stand or fall by the test of reason, or, in other words, according as reason finds the evidences of its coming from God to be or not to be sufficient and conclusive, and the matter of it to contradict or not contradict the natural notions which reason gives us of the being and attributes of God.'
Prideaux (Humphrey, Dean of Norwich), Letter to the Deists, 1748. 'Let what is written in all the books of the New Testament be tried by that which is the touchstone of all religions, I mean that religion of nature and reason which God has written in the hearts of every one of us from the first creation ; and if it varies from it in any one particular, if it prescribes any one thing which may in the minutest circumstances thereof be contrary to its righteousness, I will then acknowledge this to be an argument against us, strong enough to overthrow the whole cause, and make all things else that can be said for it totally ineffectual for its support.'
Tillotson (Archbishop of Canterbury), Sermons, vol. iii. p. 485. 'All our reasonings about revelation are necessarily gathered by our natural notions about religion, and therefore he who sincerely desires to do the will of God is not apt to be imposed on by vain pretences of divine revelation ; but if any doctrine be proposed to him which is pretended to come from God, he measures it by those sure and steady notions which he has of the divine nature and perfections ; he will consider the nature and tendency of it, or whether it be a doctrine according to godliness, such as is agreeable to the divine nature and perfections, and tends to make us like unto God ; if it be not, though an angel should bring it, he would not receive it.'
Rogers (John, D.D.), Sermons at Boyles Lecture, 1727, p. 69. 'Our religion desires no other favour than a sober and dispassionate examination.' It submits its grounds and reasons to an unprejudiced trial, and hopes to approve itself to the conviction of any equitable inquirer.'
Butler (Jos., Bp. of Durham), Analogy, &c, pt. 2, ch. 1. 'Indeed, if in revelation there be found any passages the seeming meaning of which is contrary to natural religion, we may most certainly conclude such seeming meaning not to be the real one.' Ibid., ch. 8 : 'I have argued upon the principles of the fatalists, which I do not believe ; and have omitted a thing of the utmost importance which I do believe ; the moral fitness and unfitness of actions, prior to all will whatever, which I apprehend as certainly to determine the divine conduct, as speculative truth and falsehood necessarily determine the divine judgment.
To the same effect the leading preacher among the Dissenters, James Foster, Truth and Excellency of the Christian Revelation, 1731. 'The faculty of reason which God hath implanted in mankind, however it may have been abused and neglected in times past, will, whenever they begin to exercise it aright, enable them to judge of all these things. As by means of this they were capable of discovering at first the being and perfections of God, and that he governs the world with absolute wisdom, equity, and goodness, and what those duties are which they owe to him and to one another, they must be as capable, if they will divest themselves of prejudice, and reason impartially, of rectifying any mistakes they may have fallen into about these important points. It matters not whether they have hitherto thought right or wrong, nor indeed whether they have thought at all ; let them but begin to consider seriously and examine carefully and impartially, and they must be able to find out all those truths which as reasonable creatures they are capable of knowing, and which affect their duty and happiness.'
Finally, Warburton, displaying at once his disdain and his ignorance of catholic theology, affirms on his own authority, Works, iii. p. 620, that 'the image of God in which man was at first created, lay in the faculty of reason only.'
But it is needless to multiply quotations. The received theology of the day taught on this point the doctrine of Locke, as clearly stated by himself. (Essay, B. iv. ch. 19, § 4.) 'Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light and fountain of all knowledge communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties ; revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouches the truth of by the testimony and proofs it gives that they come from God. So that he that takes away reason to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both, and does much-what the same as if he would persuade a man to put out his eyes the better to receive the remote light of an invisible star by a telescope.'
According to this assumption, a man's religious belief is a result which issues at the end of an intellectual process. In arranging the steps of this process, they conceived natural religion to form the first stage of the journey. The stage theologians of all shades and parties travelled in company. It was only when they had reached the end of it that the Deists and the Christian apologists parted. The former found that the light of reason which had guided them so far indicated no road beyond. The Christian writers declared that the same natural powers enabled them to recognise the truth of revealed religion. The sufficiency of natural religion thus became the turning point of the dispute. The natural law of right and duty, argued the Deists, is so absolutely perfect that God could not add anything to it. It is commensurate with all the real relations in which man stands. To suppose that God has created artificial relations, and laid upon man positive precepts, is to take away the very notion of morality. The moral law is nothing but the conditions of our actual being, apparent alike to those of the meanest and of the highest capacity. It is inconsistent with this to suppose that God has gone on to enact arbitrary statutes, and to declare them to man in an obscure and uncertain light. This was the ground taken by the great champion of Deism—Tindal, and expressed in the title of the treatise which be published in 1782, when upwards of seventy, Christianity as old as the Creation : or, the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature. This was the point which the Christian defenders laboured most, to construct the bridge which should unite the revealed to the natural. They never demur to making the Natural the basis on which the Christian rests ; to considering the natural knowledge of a God as the starting point both of the individual mind and of the human race. This assumption is necessary to their scheme, in which revelation is an argument addressed to the reason. Christianity is a resume of the knowledge of God already attained by reason, and a disclosure of further truths. These further truths could not have been thought out by reason ; but when divinely communicated, they approve themselves to the same reason which has already put us in possession of so much. The new truths are not of another order of ideas, for 'Christianity is a particular scheme under the general plan of Providence' (Analogy, pt. 2, ch. 4), and the whole scheme is of a piece and uniform. ' If the dispensation be indeed from God, all the parts of it will be seen to be the correspondent members of one entire whole, which orderly diposition of things essential to a religious system will assure us of the true theory of the Christian faith.' (Warburton, Divine Legation, &c., B. ix. Introd. Works, vol. iii. p. 600.) 'How these relations are made known, whether by reason or revelation, makes no alteration in the case, because the duties arise out of the relations themselves, not of the manner in which we are informed of them.' (Analogy, pt. 2, ch. 1.) 'Those very articles of belief and duties of obedience, which were formerly natural with respect to their manner of promulgation are now in the declaration of them also supernatural.' (Ferguson, Reason in Religion, 1675, p. 29.) The relations to the Redeemer and the Sanctifier are not artificial, but as real as those to the Maker and Preserver, and the obligations arising out of one set of relations as natural as those arising out of the other.
The deference paid to natural religion is further seen in the attempts to establish a priori the necessity of a revelation. To make this out it was requisite to show that the knowledge with which reason could supply us was inadequate to the guide of life, yet reason must not be too much depressed, inasmuch as it was needed for the proof of Christianity. On the one hand, the moral state of the heathen world prior to the preaching of Christianity, and of Pagan and savage tribes in Africa and America now, the superstitions of the most civilised nations of antiquity, the intellectual follies of the wisest philosophers, are exhibited in great detail. The usual arguments of scepticism on the conscious weakness of reason are brought forward, but not pushed very far. Reason is to be humiliated so far as that supernatural light shall be seen to be necessary, but it must retain its competence to judge of the evidence of the supernatural message. Natural religion is insufficient as a light and a motive to show us our way, and to make us walk in it; it is sufficient as a light and a motive to lead us to revelation, and to induce us to embrace it. How much of religious truth was contained in natural knowledge, or how much was due to supernatural communication, was very variously estimated. Locke, especially, had warned against our liability to attribute to reason much of moral truth that had in fact been derived from revelation. But the uncertainty of the demarcation between the two is only additional proof of the identity of the scheme which they disclose between them. The whole of God's Government and dealings with man form one wide-spread and consistent scheme, of which natural reason apprehends a part, and of which Christianity was the manifestation of a further part. Consistently herewith they treated natural religion, not as an historical dispensation, but as an abstract demonstration. There never was a time when mankind had realised or established an actual system of natural religion, but it lies always potentially in his reason. It held the same place as the social contract in political history. The 'original contract' had never had historical existence, but it was a hypothesis necessary to explain the existing fact of society. No society had, in fact, arisen on that basis, yet it is the theoretical basis on which all society can be shown to rest. So there was no time or country where the religion of nature had been fully known, yet the natural knowledge of God is the only foundation in the human mind on which can be built a rational Christianity. Though not an original condition of any part of mankind, it is an ever-originating condition of every human mind, as soon as it begins to reason on the facts of religion, rendering all the moral phenomena available for the construction of a scientific theory of religion.
In accordance with this view they interpreted the passages in St. Paul which speak of the religion of the heathen ; e.g., Rom. ii. 14. Since the time of Augustine (De Spir, et Lit. § 27) the orthodox interpretation had applied this verse, either to the Gentile converts, or to the favoured few among the heathen who had extraordinary divine assistance. The Protestant expositors, to whom the words 'do by nature the things contained in the law,' could never bear their literal force, sedulously preserved the Augustinian explanation. Even the Pelagian Jeremy Taylor is obliged to gloss the phrase 'by nature,' thus : 'By fears and secret opinions which the spirit of God who is never wanting to men in things necessary was pleased to put into the hearts of men.' , (Duct. Dubit. B. ii. ch. 1, § 3.) The rationalists, however, find the expression 'by nature,' in its literal sense, exactly conformable to their own views (Wilkins, Of Nat. Rel. ii. c. 9), and have no difficulty even in supposing the acceptableness of these works, and the salvability of those who do them. Burnet on Art. xviii., in his usual confused style of eclecticism, suggests both opinions without seeming to see that they are incompatible relics of divergent schools of doctrine.
Consequent on such a theory of religion was their notion of its practical hearings. Christianity was a republication of the moral law—a republication rendered necessary by the helpless state of moral debasement into which the world was come by the practice of vice. The experience of ages had proved that, though our duty might be discoverable by the light of nature, yet virtue was not able to maintain itself in the world without additional sanctions. The disinterestedness of virtue was here a point much debated. The Deists, in general, argued from the notion of morality, that so far as any private regard to my own interest, whether present or future, influences my conduct, so far my actions hare no moral worth. From this they drew the inference that the rewards and punishments of Christianity—these additional sanctions—could not be a divine ordinance, inasmuch as they were subversive of morality. The orthodox writers had to maintain the theory of rewards and punishments in such a way as not to be inconsistent with the theory of the disinterestedness of virtue which they had made part of their theology. Even here no precise line can be drawn between the Deistical and the Christian moralists. For we find Shaftesbury placing in a very clear light the mode in which religious sanctions do, in fact, as society is constituted, support and strengthen virtue in the world, though he does not deny that the principle of virtue in the individual may suffer from the selfish passion being appealed to by the hope of reward or the fear of punishment. (Characteristicks, vol. ii. p. 66.) But with whatever variation in individual disputants, the tone of the discussions is unmistakable. When Collins was asked, 'Why he was careful to make his servants go to Church ? he is said to have answered, 'I do it that they may neither rob nor murder me.' This is but an exaggerated form of the practical religion of the age. Tillotson's Sermon (Works, vol. iii. p. 43) 'On the Advantages of Religion to Societies,' is like Collins's reply at fuller length. The Deists and their opponents alike assume that the purpose of the supernatural interference of the Deity in revelation must have been to secure the good behaviour of man in this world; that the future life and our knowledge of it may be a means to this great end ; that the next world, if it exist at all, bears that relation to the present. We are chiefly familiar with these views from their having been long the butt of the Evangelical pulpit, a chief topic in which was to decry the mere 'legal' preaching of a preceding age. To abstain from vice, to cultivate virtue, to fill our station in life with propriety, to bear the ills of life with resignation, and to use its pleasures moderately—these things are indeed not little; perhaps no one can name in his circle of friends a man whom he thinks equal to these demands. Yet the experience of the last age has shown us unmistakably that where this is our best ideal of life, whether, with the Deists, we establish the obligation of morality on independent grounds ; or, with the orthodox, add the religious sanction —in Mr. Mill's rather startling mode of putting it (Dissertations, vol. ii. p. 436), ' Because God is stronger than we, and able to damn us if we don't'—it argues a sleek and sordid epicurism, in which religion and a good conscience have their place among the means by which life is to be made comfortable. To accuse the divines of this age of a leaning to Arminianism is quite beside the mark. They did not intend to be other than orthodox. They did not take the Armenian side rather than the Calvinistic in the old conflict or concordat between Faith and Works, between Justification and Sanctification. They had dropt the terminology, and with it the mode of thinking, which the terms implied. They had adopted the language and ideas of the moralists. They spoke not of sin, but of vice, and of virtue, not of works. In the old Protestant theology actions had only a certain exterior relation to the justified man ; 'gute fromme Werke machen nimmermehr einen guten frommen Mann, sondern ein guter frommer Mann macht gute Werke.' (Luther.) Now, our conduct was thought of, not as a product or efflux of our character, but as regulated by our understanding ; by a perception of relations, or a calculation of consequences. This intellectual perception of regulative truth is religious Faith. Faith is no longer the devout condition of the entire inner man. Its dynamic nature, and interior working, are not denied, but they are unknown ; and religion is made to regulate life from without, through the logical proof of the being and attributes of God, upon which an obligation to obey him can be raised.
(To be continued.)
Empire 10 June 1861.
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