mi

m

¦^iili!

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

MASTEES IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY;

BEINa TBE

KING'S COLLEGE LECTUKES
FOE 1877.

EDITED, WITH A HISTOBICAL P.KEFACE,
By ALFEED BAEEY, D.D.,

NEW YORK:
B. P. BUTTON & CO., 713, BEOADWAY.

1877.

BZ73 \9U(o

CONTENTS.

Pass
HISTORICAL PREFACE  v
RICHARD HOOKER  1
By Alfred Barbt, D.D., Principal of King's College,
London, Canon of Worcester and Honorary Chaplain
to the Queen.
LANCELOT ANDRE WES  61
By Richard W. Church, D.C.L., Dean of St. Paul's.
WILLIAM CHILLING WORTH  U3
By E. H. PLrMPTBE, D.D., Prebendary of St. Paul's,
Vicar of Biokley, and Professor of the Exegesis of the
New Testament in King's College, London.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTB  147
By Brooke F. Westcott, D.D., Regius Professor of
Divinity in the University of Cambridge, Canon of
Peterborough, Rector of Somersham, and Honorary
Chaplain to the Queen.
JEREMY TAYLOR  175
By F. W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S., Canon of Westminster,
Rector of St. Margaret's, and Chaplain in Ordinary to
the Queen.
JOHN PEARSON  213
By S. Cbeetham, M.A., Chaplain of Dulwioh College,
and Professor of Pastoral Theology in King's College,
London.

a 2

HISTORICAL PREFACE.

The " Masters in Theology," who are the subjects of
the Lectures in this volume, belong to that period
(1558-1662) from the accession of Elizabeth to the
Restoration of Charles II., which may be said to have
gradually established the position — in some sense
unique in Christendom — of the Church of England.
They were originally selected, not simply for their
intrinsic greatness, but as being fairly represen
tative of different schools of thought. Each has
been treated by a different hand ; and, at the cost
of some occasional repetition, and some slight varia
tions of opinion, I have thought it better to present
the Lectures exactly as they came from the pens of
the various authors, hardly venturing to exercise
any editorial prerogative.
For this reason, however, it seems especially
necessary to prefix to the Lectures a short his
torical preface, to indicate (so far as may be) the
succession of the various phases of Theology, which
these great writers were designed to represent, iu

VI HISTORICAL PREFACE.
close connection with the varying fortunes of the
Church itself.
(I.) The settlement made in the early years of
Elizabeth may be rightly considered as the close
of the first section of the Reformation period. It
defined, so far as definition was thought necessary,
the position of the Church, in relation both to the
Eoman Communion, and to the various religious
bodies which had broken off from that Communion.
In the first place, the renewal of the Act of Supre
macy — with the significant change of the title
" Head of the Church," hitherto given to the Crown
(under a reservation not always recognised), to the
title of "Supreme Governor" — noted its resolute
protest against the two chief characteristics of the
Mediaeval system, viz. the absolute supremacy of
the clergy in the Church, and the universal alle
giance of all Christian churches to the Pope. For
in the Church of England itself it announced the
supremacy over all, clergy and laity alike, of Law,
passed by the Convocation and Parliament, and
enforced by the Crown ; and towards the world at
large it claimed a national independence, subject only
to appeal to a General Council freely chosen, involv
ing a right to determine its own faith and discipline,
under the guidance of Holy Scripture, and with due
deference to the traditions of the Primitive Church.
Iji the next place, the Prayer Book of 1559, im
posed by the Act of Uniformity, although modelled

HISTORICAL PREFACE. Vll
on the whole on the Second Prayer Book of
Edward VI., nevertheless indicated, in several well-
known and crucial particulars, a desire to compre
hend those who were attached to some points of
the Mediaeval system, without retaining their alle
giance to the Pope and determinately opposing the
work of reformation. It is certain that for a time
that object was in great degree accomplished, till,
in fact, the formal excommunication of Elizabeth
broke off all relations with Eome, and forced
Englishmen to take one side or the other. In this
respect it breathed more of the spirit of the first
Prayer Book of Edward VI., and reiterated — what
that Prayer Book had itself distinctly announced —
the resolution of the Church of England iO stand on
the old Catholic basis, and to preserve the continuity
of her ecclesiastical life from the primitive days.
Lastly, the Articles, although (as has been else
where noticed) they had originally a provisional
character, hardly aspiring to the theoretical com
pleteness of some of the Continental Confessions, yet,
considered in their main groups, indicate still more
clearly the position which the Church of England
then assumed. For they start with that group
(Art. I.-V.) which simply rehearses, with some
slight alterations and additions, the great articles
of the ancient creed of Christendom, and which
accordingly claims for the Church of England the
old Catholic groundwork of doctrine. They next

vm HISTORICAL PREFACE.
(Art. vl-viil), in defining "the Eule of Faith,"
boldly take up, in contradiction to the Council of
Trent, that appeal to Holy Scripture "as con
taining all things necessary to salvation," which
had struck the original key-note of the Eefor-
mation; and they assert the truth of the Three
Creeds as being accordant with this standard of
Holy Scripture. From this point they pass on
(Art. ix.-xvm.) to consider the two great abstract
doctrines of "Justification by Faith," and of indi
vidual Predestination and Election, which had in
spired the Lutheran and Calvinistic movements;
and with these they deal in a spirit of complete
independence, using the confessions and writings of
Continental Reformers, without for a moment follow
ing them absolutely ; on the whole, sympathizing with
the Lutheran doctrine, and on the whole diverging
from the Calvinistic, but in both cases taking up a
line of their own. StiU more distinctively Anglican
is the definition, in the groups which next follow,
first (Art. XIX.-XXXVI.), of the nature and authority
of the Church, of the sacredness of the Christian
Ministry, of the doctrine of the Sacraments, and
secondly (Art. xxxvii.-xxxix.), of the Royal Su
premacy, and the relation both of the Church and
the individual Christian to the civil power.
Of this position, complex in itself, appealing in
due measure and harmony to Scripture, to Church
tradition, and to Eeason, Hooker is the systematic

HISTORICAL PREFACE. IX
expounder and defender. In his writings, which
(strictly speaking) belong to no School, we have,
better perhaps than iu the work of any other
English divine, the representation of the new point
of departure, from which the Church of England
started on her career as a Reformed Branch of the
ancient Catholic Church.
n. The position so taken was assailed, of course,
from the side of the Church of Eome. It was
honoured by the special hostility of the great
coimter-Reformation movement, of which the soul
was in the Jesuit order, and the stereotyped declara
tion of principles in the decrees of the CouncU of
Trent. The champions of Rome attacked it by
various weapons — by the spiritual weapons of learn
ing, ability, and earnestness — by the ecclesiastical
weapons of excommunication and denunciation —
by the carnal weapons of conspiracy at home and
invasion from abroad. Against all alike the English
Church and realm, then in composition identical,
stood fast and triumphed.
But, as Hooker's writings show, it had to struggle
against the power, variously called Puritan, Pres
byterian, or Calvinistic, within its own bosom. The
essential principle of antagonism, however, of thit
power to the constitution of the English Church, a?
marked in the Elizabethan settlement, lay in its
Calvinistic doctrine, necessarily inconsistent with
the preservation of the ancient basis of Church

X HISTORICAL PREFACE.
Doctrine and Membership, necessarily impatient of
a Reformation, which must have seemed to a revo
lutionary party a timid and inconsistent compromise.
It boldly proclaimed itself the one true Scriptural
system, claiming a Divine Right, overriding all
other claims to authority. Meeting the excom
munication of Rome with an equally intolerant
rejoinder, it asserted itself as the only true bulwark
against Popery, and the only safeguard of that indi
vidual and personal religion, which the Papal system
would override.
Against Calvinism the first rebellion within the
ranks of the Reformed Churches was seen in Ar-
minianism. In its native countiy of Holland,
Arminianism took a latitudinarian and anti-dogmatic
form ; it aimed at the simplification of the basis of
faith and Church membership, and shrank from the
bold attempt to weld all Christian doctrine into an
iron, logical system, based upon God's election,
and ready to sacrifice to coherency all unmanageable
truth. In England, on the contrary, those who
(against their own protest) were called Arminians
assumed a distinctively Anglo-Catholic position.
They met Calvinism by the assertion of its incon
sistency with the ancient doctrine and constitution
of the primitive Church, as expressed in the decrees
of Councils and the writings of the Fathers. While
fully accepting the basis of faith in Holy Scripture,
they resolved to take the Bible as God gave it —

HISTORICAL PREFACE. Xl
*= the Bible in the Church " — and accordingly to allow
full weight to the interpretation of ancient Catholic
authority. They met the clpim of a Divine Right
for the Presbyterian polity by claiming a Divine
Right for Episcopacy, and emphasizing the doctrine
of the Apostolical Succession. They asserted against
the individualism of the Puritan theology and
worship, the reality of Sacramental grace, of the
power of Absolution, of the authoritative Ritual of
the Church. The position, thus taken up in opposi
tion to the Calvinistic party, they held staunchly
also against Rome, believing it, not without justifica
tion by results, to be the strongest permanent ground
of resistance to her claims. But they were often
accused of Romanizing, because they could not, and
would not, take the rough and ready way of retorting
her excommunication upon herself, by denouncing
her system as the system of Antichrist, and placing
her children out of the pale of salvation.
Of this School Andrewes may be called the chief
theologian, as Laud was the great champion in action.
Unhappily for itself, it entered into alliance more
and more closely under the Stuarts with the cause
of the absolutism of the Crown, though it never for
a moment approached an Erastian position of mere
subservience to the temporal power. In the Royal
authority — itself held to be of Divine Right —
the leaders of the Anglo-Catholic School believed
that they saw a breakwater against the waves of

XU HISTORICAL PREFACE.
revolution, and a means of enforcing against re
bellious opposition the Church Order and Ritual, on-
which they laid principal stress. Accordingly, they
threw themselves unreservedly into the cause of
advancing despotism. Mountague's ' Appello Csesa-
rem,' Mainwaring's 'Passive Obedience,' were but
overt declarations of a policy which ran through
the whole of Laud's ecclesiastical and political
career. The error was, for the time, fatal. With
the sudden collapse of the Royal Absolutism their
power also fell, as in a moment. The Calvinistic
or Puritan party, powerful especially in the middle
classes and in the House of Commons, formed
a bolder and happier alliance with the defenders
of political liberty, struck out in Scotland the first
spark of the conflagration which utterly consumed
the imposing fabric of the Stuart despotism, and
accordingly, triumphed over the High Church
School, with a triumph which seemed permanent
and complete. But yet it is not a little remarkable
that, while the great writers of the Anglo-Catholic
School have left an impress, both upon the English
Church and the English Theology, which has never
been lost, the Puritan School, great as were its
power and earnestness, has bequeathed no writing
which takes a permanent place in English theo
logical literature. The one name wh|ch lives in
transcendant greatness, the name of John Milton,
is far more truly representative of the cause of

HISTORICAL PREFACE. XlU
liberty, individual, political, social, than of the
Puritan theology. It is to his ' Areopagitica,' and
bis ' Defensio Populi Anglicani,' rather than to his
distinctively theological works, that the reader of
his prose writings instinctively turns.
III. Lying, so to speak, beyond the direct range
of the great conflict, there was a party, of which
Falkland was the public leader, and of which such
men as Hales and Chillingworth were the
literary representatives. For a time, indeed, Falk
land, and in some degree Hyde with hina, repre
sented in the Long Parliament the cause of Consti
tutionalism in Church as well as State. On the
great question of Episcopacy, for example, they
were equally opposed to the School of Laud,
asserting its Divine Right as absolute, and to the
Presbyterian party, who clamoured against it as
an anti-Christian usurpation. But in the fierceness
of the struggle they were soon swept away from
this independent position ; and it is significant
that in almost all cases they finally joined the
Royal cause, and shared the persecution which
fell on the defenders of the Anghcan Church
system. In theology they may be roughly described as
the first representatives of a Latitudinarian School.
Probably they found more protection or toleration
under the absolutism of Laud, than face to face with
the intense dogmatism of the Puritan party. It is

XlV HISTORICAL PREFACE.
significant enough that Chillingworth was brought
over to Rome by the Jesuit Fisher, Laud's an
tagonist in controversy, and reclaimed by Laud
himself ; that his ' Religion of Protestants ' was in
tended to strengthen the positions of Laud's ' Con
troversy with Fisher,' and was solemnly burnt over
his grave by a prominent Puritan divine. But at
the same time this support could hardly have been
other than a dangerous one, inspired as it was by
principles which must have weakened or dissolved
the strong cohesion of the High Church system.
The thoughts of this School (of which Chillingworth
is the best known though hardly the purest repre
sentative) were directed by the principles rather
of the Continental Arminians than of the English
Anglo-Catholic party. They would have laid down
a simple basis of Christianity, such as the ' Apostles'
Creed ' might supply, such as they believed that,
amidst all controversies on the subtler and deeper
teachings of Holy Scripture, every reader of the
Bible might discover for himself. Within the limits
so laid down, they pleaded for a very considerable
latitude of thought, even in the criticism of Holy
Scripture, both for individuals and for Churches, with
out breach of Church membership or communion,
and without imputation of heresy dangerous to
salvation. On forms of Church Government they
were so far indifferent, that they held none to be
of universal and necessary obligation ; though most

HISTORICAL PREFACE. XV
of them would in all probability have accepted a
modified and limited Episcopacy — such as was after
wards suggested by Ussher — as being the most vener
able, the soundest, and the freest form of government.
On Sacramental Doctrine and the Power of the Keys,
they were inclined at all times to protest against
over-dogmatic definition, occasionally to approach to
the merely Zuinglian theory. It is clear, therefore,
that they really symbolized with neither party in the
great struggle. They inclined to the High Church
side, simply because, in respect of dogmatic narrow
ness and of sacrifice of everything to coherency of
logical theory, the little finger of Puritanism in its
earlier developments was thicker than the loins of
the Laudian School. For the time their voice was
but little heard ; their principles were only to bear
fruits in later days. But they form a distinct and
characteristic School in English Theology ; and, as
such, deserve to be studied in some one representa
tive work.
IV. The immediate triumph of Calvinism was
marked at the Westminster Assembly (in 1643) by
the adoption of the Covenant and the new Con
fession of Faith, and by the partial establishment
of a Presbyterian system, moulded nearly on the
Scotch type. By no mere accident it coincided with
the wanton and vindictive execution of Laud, the life
long antagonist of its ascendancy. But the hour of
its triumph was apparently the first hour of its decay.

XVI HISTORICAL PREFACE.
The Calvinistic body was split into diverse and
antagonistic schools by the rise of " the Sectaries,"
especially the Independents; and by the concep
tion not only of religious toleration, but of recog
nised religious diversity — utterly hateful to the
true Presbyterian party — which the Congregational
theory brought with it. The Calvinistic theology,
as such, probably took no deep hold on the English
mind — now that it was dissociated from the struggle
for political liberty, and accordingly contemplated
in the ruthless severity of its dogmatic theory. For
Englishmen have always preferred the recognition of
all the facts of any case, however irreconcilable they
may seem, to the sacrifices which a perfect logical
system invariably demands, before it can square
to its required limits the complex variety of human
nature and human life.
The most notable rebellion against its predomi
nance arose in the celebrated school of the Cambridge
Platonists, of which Whichcote — himself a scholar
of the Puritan College of Emmanuel, and raised to the
Provostship of King's College by the Parliament in
1643 — was the father. How complete that rebellion
was will be seen by a glance at the sketch, given iu the
Fourth Lecture of this series, of the main positions
which be assumed, and which bis followers main
tained and enlarged. They remind us in essence of
the great principles of the First Book of the ' Eccle
siastical Polity.' But they are carried out with a

HISTORICAL PREFACE. Xvil
singular completeness, which " represents much that
is most generous and noblest in the ' moral divinity '
of to-day." The accordance of Reason and Faith,
and the harmony of the Natural and the Super
natural, which have seldom been more boldly an
nounced, must have sounded a note of defiance to
the Calvinistic dogmatism. The belief in a tme
Image of God, not obliterated by the Fall, placed
Whichcote in direct antagonism to the Puritanism,
discontented even with the "very far gone from
original righteousness " of our IXth Article, desiring
to substitute for it the uncomj)romising phrase,
" utterly deprived," and to add to the belief in an
" infection of nature " the conception of an imputa
tion of the guilt of Adam's sin to hia posterity. The
' large comprehensiveness, which held that "nothing
is desperate in the condition of good men," and con
ceived hopes even of " mere Naturahsts," could not
but stir suspicion and vehement opposition in every
champion of true Puritanism. The School, which he
may be said to have founded — itself hardly to be
described by so definite a phrase — stood between the
dominant Puritanism and the irreligious reaction
which it provoked, and of which the system of
Hobbes was the terrible representative. By both it
was denounced; on the one side because it recog
nised natural reason; on the other because it held
firmly to a supernatural faith. Its immediate in
fluence was probably not great. Whichcote " left no
[king's coll.] h

XVlll HISTORICAL PREFACE.
successors in a third generation." But it anticipated
thoughts and principles, which have lived on, and
started out into prominence again and again. It
well deserves to be represented, either by Whichcote
or some of his followers, in any series of Masters in
English Theology.
V. Meanwhile " Prelacy," or, in other words, the
old Church system of 1559, persecuted during the
supremacy of the Calvinistic Puritanism, excluded
from aU place in the Committee of Triers under the
Protectorate, virtually proscribed by the imposition
of " the Engagement " and by ejectment from bene
fices and even from chaplaincies and tutorships,
nevertheless preserved a quiet vitality, and bided its
time. Nothing is more remarkable than the com
pleteness of its restoration in 1662, without any
effort of reassertion ; the reaction against the dog
matic yoke of Calvinism and the ecclesiastical dis
integration of "the Sectaries," was so absolutely
irresistible, that Charles II., probably in his own
mind not disinclined to keep the promises of the
Declaration of Breda, yielded to it without a struggle.
But a lesson had been learnt by the failure and
sudden collcpse of the rigid Laudian system, not
lost even upon those who had grown up in that
School. A change came over the spirit of the High
Church Theology, not seriously affecting the positive
principles of the School of Andrewes, but inclining to
a larger comprehensiveness and toleration, in respect

HISTORICAL PREFACE. xix
both of enforcement by law, and of obligation inforo
conscientisB. This change is visible, not only in the "mo
derate Episcopacy," limited by synodical concur
rence, of Ussher, who belonged to a Puritan School
and actually supported, in 1609, the adoption of the
Lambeth Articles, or in the ' Irenicum ' of Stilling-
fleet, brought up at Cambridge at the time when
the influence of Whichcote was powerful, and in his
early days inclining to the Latitudinarian School.
It is itraceable even in such men as Bramhall, the
scholar of Laud, and the favourite of Strafford, when,
on the reconstruction in Ireland after 1661, he de
clined to pronounce the nullity of Presbyterian ordi
nation in that country and "much less in foreign
Churches." It is still more distinct in Sanderson,
professing himself a disciple of Hooker, and proving
himself in the 'De Obligatione ConscientisB' not
unworthy of the name, of whom it is notable that he
was named (though he never sat) as a member of
the Westminster Assembly, and yet was afterwards
a leader in the Savoy Conference on the dominant
side, and the author of the Preface to the Prayer
Book in 1662. But the most renowned representative
of this new phase of Theology is undoubtedly Jeremy
Taylor. In his exuberant fancy, his vast and in
discriminate learning, his extraordinary rhetorical
power, not untouched by the higher inspiration of
true poetry, his marvellous copiousness, pouring out

XX HISTORICAL PREFACE.
in one full tide, argument, illustration, exhortation,
devotion — he stands absolutely alone. But in his
Theology he bears the impress of his time; he
appears to be the first great specimen of a " Liberal
High Churchman."
He was one of those whose genius Laud discovered
and fostered ; for it is not a little remarkable that
the man, on whom many delight to heap the reproach
of utter narrowness and bigotry, should have been
the friend and protector of Hales, the reconverter
of Chillingworth, and the patron of Jeremy Taylor.
On such points as the assertion of Episcopacy and the
power of the Keys, high Sacramental doctrine and
appeal to Patristic antiquity, Taylor belonged to the
school of Andrewes and Laud. On Original Sin and
the Doctrine of Repentance he was so vehemently
anti-Calvinistic, as to be supposed to verge on
Pelagianism. But the 'Liberty of Prophesying'
strikes the key-note, both of comprehension and
toleration, with a power unequalled before, and
hardly equalled since, on all the cardinal points of
the subject — the simplification of the terms of
Communion for individuals and for churches — the
reference of true heresy, not to error of understand
ing but to sin of will — the duty of all but
unlimited toleration, both in State and in Church,
to speculative error, as such — the assertion of the
true province of reason, and the right of private
judgment in matters of religion. It is probably

HISTORICAL PREFACE. XXI
true that his own exuberant activity and copious
ness of ideas may have disinclined him to precise
dogmatic statement, and introduced some incon
sistencies into his various utterances. But the po
sition which seems to belong to him as a theologian,
although then absolutely new and at all times rare, is
a perfectly consistent and intelligible one — holdmg
firmly to the belief in an Absolute Truth, and a
continuity of supernatural life and grace in the
Church, yet so trusting to spiritual weapons, as to
refuse to guard Truth by persecution or anathema,
or to strengthen Church unity by the iron bonds of
external compulsion. Happily this principle may
fairly claim its place in any representation of the
chief characteristics of English Theology.
VI. In marked contrast with Jeremy Taylor, at
once in respect of individual character and genius,
and in the nature of his theological teaching, stands
John Pearson, nearly his contemporary in age,
but in thought more closely connected with the
later aspects of English Theology. He had passed,
like Taylor, through the experiences of the col
lapse of the Laudian rule, the dominance of the
Calvinistic system, the discord of the sects. He
had felt the attack on the old Anglican position
which he loved, from the old antagonism of Rome
and Geneva; he had seen the gradual advance of
the Baconian system of philosophy, and the startling
emergence of the brilliant theories of Descartes.

XXll HISTORICAL PREFACE.
As he was by nature pre-eminently a scholar and
a critic, and a close and systematic thinker, the
effect on his mind was, first, to drive him to examine
jealously the basis of Faith in Holy Scripture, and
in those ancient Church traditions which earlier
divines had accepted too much en masse, counting
rather than weighing authorities, and discriminating
too little between the true and the spurious, the
clear and the doubtful ; next, to teach him on that
basis to build up systematically a solid superstructure,
closely welded together by logical deduction, re
jecting all that could only be made to cohere
loosely with it, by uncertain inference, by fanciful
association, by supposed necessity of completeness of
idea; and lastly, to lead him to hold firmly and
fairly the position so occupied, without the impulse
either of strong antagonism or of large sympathy,
towards those who occupied ground, which seemed
to him less solid, on the right hand or on the left.
In all these characteristics, in solidity and com
pactness of thought, in learning — wide indeed, but
pre-eminently well digested and solid — in a true
scholarly instinct for clearness, accuracy, moderation
of statement, Pearson anticipates much of what is
best in the theology of the Restoration divines and'
those who succeeded them.
The ' Exposition of the Creed,' and the * Vindicise
Ignatianse ' are perfect in their own way. Without
one touch of Taylor's exuberant genius, Pearson

HISTORICAL PREFACE. XXlil
commands far more confidence as an abstract theo
logian; with no power to kindle enthusiasm or
sympathy, and with little capacity for bringing out
the relation of his own closely reasoned principles
to other forms of thought, theological or scientific,
his work stands in a hard characteristic insularity,
which at least gives a firm foothold amidst the
changing winds of speculation, and against the dis
integrating power of criticism., and enables the
mind to look out calmly and impartially, holding its
own, and never unnecessarily attacking the positions
of others.
Alike in his excellences and his defects, Pearson is
especially a representative of a distinctively Angli
can Theology, at a time when, by necessity, the
peculiarities of the Anglican position had to be
resolutely defined and maintained.

Such is a brief sketch of the historical relation in
which these " six Masters in Theology " stand, both
to one another, and to the general current of the
thought and history of the eventful century to which
they belong. It is designed to be, in the true sense,
a simple Preface, preparatory to the study of the
Lectures, which will bring out in fuller detail the
great salient points of the life and thought of each
writer, and by which some idea may be gained of
the variety of the phases of our English Theology

XXIV HISTORICAL PREFACE.
in its best days, and of the order of continuity
which runs through them all. It is hoped in some
future year to attempt another series, dealing with
the Theologians and Evidence-writers of the next
century.
A B.

EiNo's College, London,
Oddber 1877.

EICHAKD HOOKER.
Born a.d. 1553-4: Dud a.d. 1600.

Introduction. — 1. Brief reference to Hcoker's life and times. —
II. The character of the English Reformation (o) defined by the
Elizabethan settlement as against Rome ; (b) challenged by the
"Puritan" School — Puritan In Ritual, Presbyterian in Church
Government, Calvinistic in doctrine; (c) Hooker's answer to the
challenge, examining the fundamental fallacy of the Puritan
system, in the ' Ecclesiastical Politx.' — III. Its three Sections.
(A.) The First Section (Books I. to III.). Book I., on tlie
Unity of Law — the Harmony of the Natural and the Super
natural — the Mutability or Immutability of Law. Books II.
and III. polemical corollaries from it. — (B.) The Second Section
(Books IV. and V.) ; tlie Defence of Church Ritual (a) against
the charge of Romanizing; (t) on its own merits — Hooker's
Three Great Axioms examined — His method illustrated in re
lation to Sacramental Doctrine.— (C.) The Third Section (Books
VT.— VIII.): (a) Loss of Book VI., on Lay Eldership; (6) Tlie
historical treatment of Episcopacy iu Book VII., compared with the
method of subsequent Theologians ; (c) The Theory of Cliurch and
State in Book VIII., in part rendered obsolete by facts, in part
applicable mutatis mutandis. — IV. Conclusion : Hooker's place
in English Literature — Peculiar historical interest and perma
nent value of his work in English Tlieology.
The general purpose of the following Lectures is to
bring out, in the persons of six chief " Masters in
English Theology," the chief phases through which
our English theology passed, in the great period
intervening between the Elizabethan settlement at
[kino's coll.] B

2 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
the close of the Reformation and the end of the
Restoration epoch — a period which in great degree
determined the future Constitution of England, both
in Church and State.
They take for granted in their hearers or readers,
a sense first of the importance of Theology, as a
. form of true scientific thought, bearing upon reli
gious feeling and religious action ; and next of what
in these days is universally recognised — the value of
the historical method of investigation, as truer, and
therefore more fruitful, than any system of abstract
theory. But, while these things may be assumed in all who
are likely to read these Lectures, I believe that many
who talk of "oar old English Divines," although
(rightly enough) they speak of them with respect
and pride as of a noble school of writers, and perhaps
have a tolerably clear idea that theology was in those
days a leading and effective power in English opinion
and life, yet perhaps are too apt to think of them,
as if they were all more or less stamped with the
same general impress — ignorant at once of the rich
variety of the phases of thought which they severally
represent, and of the order of development clearly
traceable in our English theology, and corresponding
with the course of the history, which, under God's
Providence, has made our Chiirch and State what
they actually are. If this be so, I trust that the
study of such writers as Hooker, Andrewes, and Chil-

RICHARD HOOKER. 3
lingworth, belonging to the period before the gi-eat
Civil War, and of Whichcote, Jeremy Taylor, and
Pearson, belonging to that pej-iod and the Resto
ration period which followed it, may be useful in
helping us to gain a truer conception of the breadth,
freedom, and variety, which (within certain well-
defined limits) have cljaracterized our English
theology, and reflected themselves in the ritual
and the life of our English Church.
We start from the Reformation, not as forgetting
the great principle, which was throughout that Re
formation kept steadily in view — the continuity of
the life of the English Church from its original
foundation — but simply because the Reformation
determined for the Anglican Church a certain dis
tinctive and unique position, from which I can
hardly believe that it will ever recede ; and because
it also, by no mere accidental coincidence, marked
the beginning of our distinctively English literature.
Accordingly, I have to speak of Richard Hooker,
who is our fir^t great systematic English theologian,
as he is also one of the first and noblest writers of
English prose. I think I may rightly describe him
as the one great divine, in whose writings we trace —
drawn out in explicit perfection, and delended with
a massive strength of thought and learning — the prin
ciples implied in the Elizabethan settlement. For I
hold that this settlement, after the vague prepara
tory movements under Henry VIII., and the two
B 2

4 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
more decided but opposing currents of action and
reaction under Edward VI. and Mary, defined per
manently the position of the English Church, as at
once — I use a good old-fashioned phrase — " Catholic
and Protestant," connected indissolubly with the
system of the primitive Church, and yet resolved, at
whatever cost, to clear itself from the corruptions of
faith and practice which had gradually encrusted it.
(I.) It is as a theologian that I desire to regard
Hooker. Accordingly, in any case, it would be
needless here to dwell at any length on the story of
his life. But this is, as it happens, especially need
less ; first, because in itself that life was quiet and
uneventful, spent mainly in a studious retirement,
far from the glare of dignities and the turmoil of
political and social struggles ; next, because Izaak
Walton's 'Life of Hooker,' which is in all probability
as authentic in general fact as it is quaint and
beautiful in style, is in all men's hands. With Mr.
Keble, indeed, we may well doubt whether Walton
has not unconsciously infused into his biography of
Hooker too much of the tone and spirit of his own
character. The massive strength of thought, the
shrewd common sense, the singular power of grave
but most effective irony, which we trace in Hooker's
writings, seem hardly compatible with such meek
aqd all but childish simplicity as Walton attributes
to him ; or, at any rate, must argue the existence in
Hooker of certain elements of character, which his

mCHAED HOOKER.

biographer could not understand, and therefore could
not represent. But still we need no more than
Walton has given us for the main outline of Hooker's
history — * his early education, and his happy college
days (1567-1584), in their unwearied study and not
less unwearied devotion ; his passage (in 1584, after
his strange marriage), into " the corroding cares that
attend a married priest and a country parsonage ;"
the single period during which, as Master of the
Temple (1585-1591), he mingled with the busy life
and ecclesiastical controversies of London ; his glad
retirement to the quiet of Boscombe and Bishops-
borne (1591-1600), there to complete his great work,
of which only the foundations were laid at the Temple ;
there to devote himself to the simple, quiet duties of
a parish priest, although even there calumny of the
worst kind pursued him, till the exertions of his
friends and pupils dispelled it; there to die, only
desirous to complete his ' Ecclesiastical Polity,'
and then to cry, " Lord, let Thy servant depart in
peace ; " with those most characteristic words on
his lips, which told of the " blessed obedience and
order of the angels, without which peace could not
be in heaven, and, oh! that it might be so on

? Now and then there are
points which we should like to
know more about; as (for in
stance) the cause of the expul
sion of Reynolds and Hooker and
three other Fellows of Corpus in

1579, by Dr. Barfoote ; and the
grounds on which the calurjnious
accusation against Hooker is
attributed to "a dianunting
brother."

b MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
earth." " I could wish " (he added with his dying
breath), " to live to do the Church more service, but
cannot hope it." But " God hath heard my daily
petitions ; for I am at peace with all men, and He
with me." Walton's life is undoubtedly a panegyric ;
his portrait of Hooker suffers accordingly from
being drawn without shadows. But yet it is no
fanciful portrait. In depicting the sweetness, the
meekness, and the saintliness of Hooker's character,
it is clearly true to the life, as far as it goes,
although perhaps there are some stronger and
sterner features which it has missed.
Looking at Hooker, then, as a theologian, there are
certain points which it is of interest to note in this
narrative of his life. We observe that he was educated
in a Calvinistic school, under the tutorship of Dr.
Reynolds and the patronage of Bishop Jewel, the
great champion of the Reformation, inclining, in
spite of his great learning, to the more advanced
Protestant party ; so that he must have worked out
for himself, by simple force of thought and learning,
the grander and more Catholic principles which he
maintained. We observe that his life coincided
almost exactly with the great reign of Elizabeth in
England; with the Huguenot struggle in France
(ending with the abjuration of Henry IV. in 1593,
and the Edict of Nantes in 1598) ; with the rise of the
Jesuit power and the counter-Reformation on the
Continent ; with the long contest between Spain and

RICHARD HOOKER.

England, virtually ending with the execution of
Mary Queen of Scots, in 1587, and the defeat of the
Armada in 1588. We note that the last ten years
of the sixteenth century and of his lite, " saw besides
the five books of the 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' the publi
cation of the first works of Shakspeare, the first Essays
of Bacon, and the 'Faery Queene' of Spenser."*
Quiet as was his life, singularly original as was his
mind, it cannot be unimportant, in judging of his great
theological work, to estimate the influences of his
early education, of the spirit of so great and critical
an age, and of the intellectual impulse, which was then
giving birth to the unequalled development of English
literature at the close of the Elizabethan period.
Still few works stand so much alone as his. It is
said with truth that he founded no school. The
' Ecclesiastical Polity ' (like Butler's Analogy), stands
out in a magnificent isolation among the lesser
writings of the day. Such, perhaps, is the general
position of any work which is to be a /cr^fia e? del,
marking an epoch in religious or philosophical
thought. It belongs to no school: for that very
reason (like the Socratic teaching in the Greek
philosophy), it influences all.
II. His time was a critical one. The Refoimation,

* I quote from the admirable
Introduction of the Dean of St.
Paul's to that excellent edition
of the First Book of the ' Ecclesi-

asti'jal Polity' (Clarendon Press,
1868), to which all students of
Hooker are deeply indebted.

e MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
and especially the English Reformation, was on its
triaL That English Reformation, being emphatically
a reformation and not a formal reconstruction, had
naturally been gradual and unsystematic, guided by
no formal theory, dominated by no master-mind — its
principles slowly working themselves out, in the
directions suggested from time to time by the needs,
the aspirations, the possibilities of each generation.
It was at once its glory and its reproach that it was
essentially Conservative ; keeping, that is, to the old
historic Constitution at once of Faith and Polity,
altering it, indeed, with no want of boldness and
freedom, but never sweeping it away, in order to
plant a new systematic constitution in its place. It
was, in fact, a growth, not an artificial formation —
having all the irregularities and imperfections of a
natural development, but having also the secret of
permanence, in virtue of its adaptation to the cha
racter and the progress of the English people.*
(a.) Now the close of that Reformation movement,
as acknowledged and guided by authority, is marked
by the Elizabethan settlement.!
That settlement still preserved the character of
the movement itself. It was still very far from
systematic; it contented itself in the main with

* See a fuller description of
these oharacteristics in the
Second Lecture (on Bishop

t I speak of the movement it
self, not of its consequences, which
gradually worked themselves out

Andrewes), till the final settlement of 1661

RICHARD HOOKER.

9

asserting general principles, and meeting actual
needs. This will be seen at once by a glance at the
two great national Acts which defined it — the Act
of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity.
The Act of Supremacy was virtually the assertion
of two great principles. Towards those without, it
asserted the independence of a National Church ;
always conditioned in principle by obedience to the
law of Holy Scripture, as interpreted by the ancient
Church Catholic ; always subjected in practice to an
appeal to a General Council, freely chosen.* Towards
those within, it asserted the rights of the laity, as
well as the clergy, in the Church (both under rule
of the Sovereign) in the legislative determination
of truth, law, and ritual, and in the judicial and
executive enforcement of all that was determined
by such legislation.t

• Thr

Teat points of the

originv '

,t of 1532 (24 Henry

VIII.)

*hus drawn out by

Mr.C

¦e: —

1

( rtion of the ancient

int^ .larie of the lealm of

El„ -a-;

2. ^

.ision of the nation

in

oiritualty and

the

"-Ity.

¦>f the Crown

iu ..U s,'

./ o«V'-T over

both. 4. The authority, litn , ud
usage of the spiritualty to ad
minister the laws spiritual.

5. Its endowment for this very
end. 6. The parallel authority, fit
ness, and usage of the temporalty
to administer the laws temporal.
7. The alliance between these
jurisdictions. 'Remarks on the Royal Su
premacy,' p. 43 (1850).
t It is notable that in the
settlement of the Prayer Book
and the Articles, the Houses of
Parliament successfully asserted
their right to discuss them upon
their merits, when the Queen,
jealous of her prerogative, and

10

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

The Act of Uniformity defined the religious
standards of the Church, adopted in virtue of this
independence, in the Prayer Book and the Articles.
The Prayer Book — in its very construction exem
plifying at once a firm grasp of the old Catholic
truth and ritual, and a fearless claim of a right
to modify its form and development — was intended
to be, and has actually been, a standard, not only
of ritual, but of our national faith and national
tone of religion. But its very power to mould
thought and feeling lay in the fact that it was un
systematic, implying doctrine at every point, but
seldom or never drawing it out into explicit dogmatic
form. The Articles, moulded out of the Forty-two
Articles of Edward VI., closely connected with the
Lutheran Confessions, and so bearing a distinct im
press of the great controversies of the day, approach
(of course) far more closely to a systematic form.
Yet it is characteristic that even these were designed
to meet a present need. They are but certain
" Articles of Religion,"* drawn up with the prac-

dreading the Puritanizing ten
dencies of the House of Commons,
desired to base them simply on
the authority of the Crown,
acting by the advice of Convo
cation. * The Forty-two Articles are
entitled Articles " agreed on by

Bishops and other learned men
in S3mod of London in 1552, for
avoiding of controversy and
establishment of godly concord
on certain matters of Religion."
Our Thirty-nine Articles were
more formally agreed on in Con
vocation by the clergy of both

RICHARD HOOKER.

11

tical object of stilling or mitigating controversj',
far from claiming an exhaustive completeness, far
from anticipating the character of permanence, which
subsequent circumstances have given them, and for
which they have proved their extraordinary fitness.
So (I repeat) the new condition of things in the
Church of England had grown up gradually and
freely ; and, even where it defined itself, had shrunk,
as far as might be, from the task of elaborating an
ideal Church constitution or a complete theological
system. But it was now confronted on either hand
by systems of an altogether different type.
From the Roman Catholic system — compacted
every day into a more rigid and impregnable hard
ness by the growth of the Jesuit afceadancy — it was
definitely cut off, by the determinate hostility into
which, by degrees and after some vacillations, the
Papal policy settled down. Towards Rome, there
fore, there was as yet little variation from the
defiant attitude assumed by Jewel at Paul's Cross.*

provinces in 1562, " for the
avoiding of diversities of opinions
and the establishment of consent
touching true Religion." The
alterations which transformed
the former into the latter (e.g.
the insertion of Art. V.) were
evidently made with some view
to symmetry and permanence.
But the general character of the
old still remained.
• The terms of this celebrated

challenge are singularly cha
racteristic. It defies the Ro
manists to advance on fifteen
crucial points named, " any one
sufficient sentence out of any old
Catholic doctor or father, or out
of any old General Council — or
out of the Holy Scriptures of
God — or any one example of the
primitive Church." To the fif
teen points here named, twelve
others were subsequently added.

12 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
In fact, the haughty excommunication of Rome was
then met by an equally intolerant rejoinder. Hooker
had (it should be remembered) formally to defend
himself for asserting that Roman Catholics still held
the foundation ; that their Church, though corrupt,
was a true Church ; and that individal members of
it could claim a place in God's covenanted mercy.*
On this side there was as yet little call for any
change of theological position. The champions of
the Reformation still contented themselves with
the old threefold protest — intellectual against the
denial of all private judgment — national against
the despotism of a foreign usurpation — religious
against the corruptions, adding to, or taking from,
the true Scriptural standard.
There was not as yet any danger of a Romanist
reaction, and the chief attention of the Anglican
theologians was directed to a different quarter.

• See the attack of Travers
(in his " Supplication to the
Council") on Hooker's "Sermons
on Justification." The chief
points of exception were the
statements (a) that " the Church
of Rome is a tme Church of
Christ . . . though not a pure
or perfect Church;" (b) that
" They which are of the Church
of Rome may be saved by such a
faith as they have iu Christ and
a general repentance of their
sins;" and(e) that "The Church

of Borne . . . denies not the
foundation directly but only by
consequent ; and therefore may
be saved." We note that even
the Archbishop did not accept
Hooker's views unreservedly, but
(to use Izaak Walton's words)
"discreetly and warily did cor
rect and moderate between them
both." Travers' Supplication and
Hooker's Answer are given in
Eeble's 'Hooker,' vol. ill. pp.
548-596.

RICHARD HOOKER. 13
(b.) For, on the other hand, within the Church of
England itself, the position now assumed was ques
tioned in the name of a stern and thorough logical
system, demanding an absolute clearance of the
ancient ground, that upon it the polity in which it
delighted might be reared in all its symmetrical
perfection. It must never be forgotten that what we commonly
call the " Puritan movement," including, as it did,
very much of the political power and religious
earnestness of the land, was, before all and after all
else, Calvinistic.
It was, indeed, what men ordinarily term
" Puritan " in respect of Ritual. Tims it had a pas
sion for "simplicity," stripping off all ceremonial,
partly from a horror of all that seemed to be in the
slightest degree akin to the ritual of Rome ; partly
from an antipathy to all appeal to the imagination,
which it called foolery, and to all high sacramental
doctrine, which it branded as superstition. It had a
passion for individual freedom in worship, chafing
under all forms, as necessarily fettering and chilling
the spirit. Now these Ritual questions were very
practical, refusing to be ignored or postponed in an
age which allowed little to individual liberty. They
pressed for decision. But all Ritual questions in
themselves are but questions of degree. They can
never be matters of life and death, unless some
deeper questions underlie them.

14 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
There can be, again, no doubt that this same party
were Presbyterians as to Church government. They
held that a quasi-republican government — stern
enough in tone, and rigid even to hardness in adminis
tration — of mixed clerical and lay elders, was the dis
tinctly Scriptural polity of the Church. In some
cases they went further still, towards Congrega
tionalism or " Independency," asserting for each con
gregation so administered the right of almost abso
lute self-government.* In any case. Episcopacy was
odious to them, as an usurpation from within ; civil
authority was to them, almost as much as to Hilde-
brand himself, a tyranny from without — to be jealously
watched, and, on the first sign of intermeddling
with sacred things, resolutely defied. But, even
here, although this aspect of their principles brought
them into the most frequent practical conflict with
the powers of Church and State, the true secret of
antagonism is not yet found. A moderate Epi
scopacy (of the type suggested by Ussher) would
have satisfied many.
It was their Calvinistic system of doctrine, which
challenged the whole principle of the Church of
England, as established still on the ancient basis.
Perhaps at no time in Church history — certainly at
no time since the days of St. Augustine — had any
single mind so extensive and despotic a sway, as the

* The Brownists, the first Indepeudents, appeared in 1580.

RICHARD HOOKER.

15

keen, intrepid, logical, compiehensive mind of the
great French Reformer. His very opponents spoke
of him with bated breath.* With his Bible in his
hand, known in every line, and interpreted with a
force which has made him a prince among commen
tators — fastening on the mysterious predestination
and election of God, there shadowed out, as the key
stone of his system — he was prepared to substitute
for the visible Church of baptized Christians the
Church of the elect, and to sweep away utterly all
of the ancient historic Ciiristianity, wliich rested
on what seemed to him a false basis.
Here we come to a ground of fundamental oppo
sition. The Prayer Book, especially, could not pos
sibly be read under the narrow light of his system
without seeming to be full of inepfiw, hardly tolerahUes
— things beautiful, perhaps, but absolutely unsound.f

* Hooker says of liim, Prefaoo
to 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' ii. 8.
" Two things there are of prin
cipal moment, which have de
servedly procured his honour
throughout the world; the one
his exceeding pains in composing
the ' Institutes of Christian Re
ligion ; ' the other his no less
industrious travails for expo
sition of Holy Scripture.'' He
adds, " Of what account the
Master of the Sentencoa was in
the Church of Rome, the same
and more amongst the preachers
of reformed Churches Calvin had

purchased ; so that the per-
feotest divines were judged they
which were skilfuUest in Calvin's
writings. His books were almost
the Canon to judge doctrino
and discipline by." Mr. Keble
quotes a MS. note of Hooker on
the ' Christian Letter,' in which
'* tlie sense of Scripture which
Calvin allowcth" is eaiil to be
held of more force than if " ten
thousand Augustines, Jeromes,
Chrysostomes, Cyprians, were
brought forth.''
t That the fundamental objec
tion to the Prayer Book lay in

16

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

That the very Articles (by some thought to incline
towards his school) were to that school utterly un
satisfactory, is shown by the attempt to add to them
the celebrated Lambeth Articles — clear, uncom
promising, ruthless, in the enunciation of the most
terrible Calvinistic doctrines.* Abroad it was now

the simple fact that it starts, in
relation to the membership of
Christ, from Baptism, not from
Election or Conversion, and
insists on regarding all baptized
persons as members of Christ, is
obvious to any attentive reader
of the Hampton Court and Savoy
Conferences. Other objections
might have been met : but this
could not possibly have been
even entertained, without re
versal of fundamental principle.
See in Hooker's 'Ecclesiastical
Polity,' Book V. c. xlix., a serious
accusation urged against our
Prayer Book on the ground that
it teaches us to pray that "all
men may be saved '' 1
* To understand thoroughly
the question at issue, it is only
necessary to glance at the Lam
beth Articles, and to consider what
an unbearable yoke they would
have imposed on the Church, and
what a fatal wound they would
have inflicted on~~Christianity.
They are as follows : — " I. God
from all eternity has predesti
nated some persons to life and
others to death. 2. The moving
or efficient cause of predestina

tion to life is not foreseen faith,
or perseverance in good works,
or any other quality, in the
persons predestinated, but the
sole will and pleasure of God.
3. The number of the predesti
nated is predetermined and cer
tain, and cannot be increased or
diminished. 4. Those who are
not predestinated to salvation
are necessarily condemned on
account of their sins. 5. A tme,
lively, and justifying faith, and
the sanctifying influence of the
Spirit of God, is not extin
guished, neither does it fail, nor
does it vanish away in the elect,
either finally or totally. 6. A
man who is truly faithful, or
endowed with a justifying faith,
has a certain and full assurance
of the remission of his sins, and
of his everlasting salvation by
Christ. 7. Saving grace is not
afforded to all men; neither
have all men such a communi
cation of Divine Assistance that
they may be saved if they will.
8. No man can come to Christ,
unless it be granted to him and
the Father draw him; and all
men are not drawn by the Father

RICHARD HOOKER. 17
on the Calvinistic, not the Lutheran bodies, that the
great interest of the struggle with Rome turned.
At home, in the imminent danger which menaced
England both in Church and State, there was a loud
demand to substitute for what seemed an irregular
and inconsistent fabric, a squared and compacted for
tress on the well-drawn lines of the great French
system-builder. This demand was uttered or enter
tained, not simply by theologians and divines, but
by leaders in the Houses of Parliament, by men
high in the councils of the Crown.* It raised
clearly a most vital and practical question.
(e) Hov; was the demand to be met? In part,
perhaps, it could be met by the simple power of that
sturdy Conservatism of the old, which has been the
secret of the unbroken continuity of our English
Constitution. In part, again (chiefly through the
detennination of the Queen herself), by the strong
hand of the Law, the right of which to coerce, both in

that they may come to Christ.
9. It is not in the will and
power of every man to be saved."

parison of them with our XVIIth
Article is most instructive.
* Burghley employed Travers

(See Fuller's 'Church History,' t (Hooker's chief antagonist) as do-
Book IX.) The most extraor- mestic chaplain and tutor to his
dinary circumstance in their children. Walsingham founded
history is that Whitji;i(t, the i a Divinity Lecture of anti-

bitter opponent of the Puritans,
was prepared to accept them.
At the Hampton Court Confer
ence the spokesman of the
Puritans formally demanded
their acceptance; but this was
peremptorily refused. The com-
[king's coll.]

Romish controversy at Oxford.
and made Reynolds his first
lecturer. Leicester's tendency
to coquet with the Puritan party
is well known. (See Keble's
Preface to ' Hooker,' p. Ivii.)

18 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
Church and State, was questioned by none, although
they might greatly differ as to the direction in
which coercion should be exercised. But the mere
instinct of Conservatism, and the simple coercion
of law, can never adequately deal with any movement
which has a reason to give for itself — least of all,
with those religious movements which stir society to
its very depths. So men began to scan the Anglican
system, as by law established ; to consider what
were the great principles involved in its growth and
giving it vitality ; to seek for an answer to the
challenges so boldly advanced, which might stand
^the test of examination on its own merits. The
English divines rose to the emergency. Other
labourers there were in th- ¦ field. But the memory
of all has paled before the fame of Hooker. In
pis ' Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity,' we trace the
ideal embodied in the Elizabethan settlement; in
lit, accordingly, we find the first great systematic
(development of Anglican theology — involving (I
jbelieve) principles which, in aU its future develop-
'ments, have never been wholly lost.
It was still chara.cteristic of the English mind,
that this first great work was not an abstract treatise
on Christian truth —a body of " Institutes of the
Christian religion." It was an examination of the
' Ecclesiastical Polity ' ; it dealt with Christianity, as
concrete in individual and corporate Christian life.
But Hooker, like most great thinkers, well knew that

RICHARD HOOKER.

19

all society, and especially the spiritual society which
we call the Church, is based on certain laws, ex
pressive of the Creative Will in the physical and
moral constitution of men ; and that these laws are
manifestations, however veiled and imperfect, of the
nature of God Himself. Hence, before dealing with
questions of detail, he resolved to lay a foundation
of first principles. On this determination depends
all the real and permanent value of his great work.
He, like others, might have been content with
simply repelling the attack of the enemy, fighting
them on their own ground, proving them wrong, histo
rically or theoretically, on this or that point. If he
had done this, his work would have been probably
easier, possibly more popular at the moment, but
certainly merely ephemeral. So far, indeed, as he is
a mere polemic, though among polemics he stands
singularly high for gravity, dignity, and fairness,* he
is not free from mere argumenta ad hominem, and from
the sophistries of special pleading, f But, happily.

* Mr. Keble says in his Pre
face, " There is not (as the editor
believes after minute examina
tion) a single instance of unfair
citation " of the words of oppo
nents. Perhaps this is too un
reserved (see, for example, the
citation of Cartwright in Book V.
c.lxi. 4); but in general the state
ment is unquestionably true.
t Take (for example) his apo
logy (Book V. c. xliii.) for the ab

sence of Special Thanksgivings,
to correspond to the Prayers fur
special blessiiigs or for deliver
ance from special evils. The
defect itself was rightly removed
at a subsequent revision. Or
again, his apology for some
manifest defects in our transla
tion of the Bible, which it would
have been far better to acknow
ledge as spots on the sua (Book
V. 0. xix.)
0 2

20 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
he examined not merely the errors of his opponents,
but the grounds of those errors, and the truth which
they perverted.* He believed that the best defence
against attack is the deepening and strengthening
our own position, and the best remedy against the
rank weeds of falsehood is the cultivation of the
good seed of truth, so that it may draw to itself
the whole richness of the spiritual soil, and leave
them to pine away and die.
Now at the basis of the whole of his opponents'
system there lay a twofold fundamental fallacy, an
exaggeration of that great truth of the " sufficiency
of Holy Scripture to salvation," which is one of the
pivot Articles of the Church of England. It was
held that no law could be of permanent obligation
which was not expressed in Holy Scripture, and that
no law which was contained in any part of Holy
Scripture could fail to be of permanent obligation.
With the former fallacy, most of the characteristic
tenets of the party were closely connected. From it
resulted in Ritual their hatred of all ceremony not
formally enjoined in Holy Scripture, and their refusal
to recognise any authority in the Church to impose
such ceremony, and thereby (it was conceived) to
fetter the individual freedom. By it, undoubtedly,
they justified their refusal to acknowledge Episcopal
authority in the Church, the supreme government

* See Dean Ohoroh's Introduction, already quoted, p. zvi.

RICHARD HOOKER. 21
of th«^ Crown, and, ultimately, the existence of a
National Church as a body. On this they based the
Livine right of a system depending on the predesti
nation and election of God, revealed (as undoubtedly
they are revealed) in Holy Scripture ; and defended
their refusal to recognise any historical develop
ment of the Church not completed in the Apostolic
age. To the latter fallacy, probably less serious in
itself, we must trace very much of that spirit which,
as has been well said, especially of the Covenanters
of Scotland, made them "Christiars of the Old
Testament rather than of the New."
I do not know that Hooker would have found
it difiicult, without seriously examining these funda
mental principles, to have met his antagonists and
fought them, simply on their own ground. It needs
little sagacity to see how that work might have been
done, and how, in fact, it has been done, both in parts
of Hooker's writings and elsewhere. But this would
have been but sorry work after all. It would have
brought out no deep positive truth ; it would have
given no rationale of the Anglican position ; it would
have had no lesson of inspiring example to ourselves.
Hooker happily ventured on a bolder and a more
comprehensive task. He knew* that his argument
would seem " to a number, perhaps tedious, perhaps
obscure, dark, and intricate." To search into the

• See Book I. o. i. sects. 2 and 3.

22 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
tbundation of " the stateliness of houses," and the
root of " the goodliness of trees," is " a labour more
necessary than pleasant, both to them which undertake
it and to the lookers on." But it must be done.
" The laws of the Church were called in question."
The challenge could not be met except by " conside
ration of law in general, and of that law which
giveth life to the rest, namely, the law by which the
Eternal Himself doth work."
III. Accordingly his great work falls into three
chief sections. In the first book there is laid a
foundation of first principles, to which the second
and third books are polemic corollaries. In the
fourth and fifth books we have the detailed defence
of Church Discipline and Ritual, involving also
defence of much Church doctrine, as implied therein.
In the last three books is contained the defence of
its government and of its relation to the State. To
judge of Hooker's theology we must consider those
three sections in order.
(A.) In the first book Hooker strikes an all-
important keynote, which Anglican theology has
never at any time wholly lost. He lays down as his
fundamental principle the Unity of all Law, as the
expression of One supreme Will, which is but another
method of declaring the unity and final correlation
of all branches of trutL From this follows, to all
who believe in a Revelation, another principle of
transcendent importance, the harmony — not the dis-

RICHARD HOOKER.

23

cord, not the mere unison — of the Natural with the
Supernatural, both in truth and in grace. In virtue
of both these principles, theology asserts its relation
to all other forms of science, as Maier non noverca
scientiarum — emphasising its own truths, without
denying others which belong not to its sphere, and
content to wait patiently, not often in vain, whenever
their reconcilement with the revelation on which it
rests seems to linger.
No reader of Hooker's noble first book will forget
the magnificent comprehensiveness of his treatment.
He glances (in chap, ii.) first at that "First Law
Eternal" — "the law which God has set down with
Himself" — in the conception of which are involved
the belief in the essential righteousness of His
Almighty will, and the self-limitation (if we may so
speak) of that will for the sake of the fellow-working
of His creaitures.* Then, starting from this profound
conception, he surveys as a whole the " Second Law
Eternal, which God has set to His creatures." Like
one who, on a mountain height, gazes alternately on
the great plain of earth and the greater vault of
heaven, he takes his stand on the level of humanity ;
and thence, first turns his eyes downwards to the
physical world, to which man is bound by his bodily

* "'They err, therefore, who
think that of the will of God to
do this or that there is no reason
beeides His will" "His wisdom

hath stinted the efieots of His
power in such sort that it doth
not work infinitely."

24 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
nature, and sees the law of God in the regularity of
physical necessity, and the rudimentary developments
, of a higher power in animal instinct ; and next turns
his eyes upwards to the throne of God, and by the
flashes of revelation contemplates in the "Law of
Angels "i the law of the higher spiritual nature, to

which one day we shall be like. Then — with the
direct light of heaven from above, and its reflections
from below, playing (so to speak) on the intermediate
nature of man — he sees God's law revealing itself,
first in the " natural law " of the individual spirit
and of collective humanity ; then in the supernatural
law of His Revelation, alike to the individual soul and
to the whole body of the Church.* He holds that
the sufficiency of the supernatural light takes for
granted the natural, passes beyond it, but never
obscures or contradicts it. Wherever there is light,
it is the light of God, and to the believer in God it is
sacred. With what freshness of interest he glances

* His scheme may be exhibited thus : —
The Second Law Eternal.

The Law Physical.
I
Of Necessity. Of Jnatlnct.

The Law of Angels
(Intuition and
Love).

The Law of Hnmanity.

NaturaL Supernatural.
 I   ! 

Individual Corporate Individual Corporate
(Law of Conacience). (Human Law). (Law of '¦ Private (Law of Church).
Judgment").

RICHAED HOOKER.

25

at the manifestations of law and design in Nature !*
With what boldness of delight in man's freedom —
strange under the exuberant loyalty, often degene
rating into servility, of the Tudor period — he traces
out the foundations of human society and human
law 1 1 How earnestly he searches into man's own
nature — the method of human knowledge, the sacred
ness of conscience, the power of love, the freedom
of will !t
Hence he sees that, as in all other knowledge,
so in the knowledge of God, the actual process of
learning is a complex process. It has its individual
side of " private judgment," in which we must
seek it, through our own reason and conscience
imder the guidance of the Spirit of God, whether
we survey the law natural written on the heart, or
the law supernatural written in Holy Scripture.

"¦ See chap. III. sect. 4, where
he discusses the theories of indi
vidual design in each creature,
and of " exemplary draughts and
patterns "of classes — the "arche
typal forms " of modem theory.
t See the celebrated chapter
(ex.); in which he distinctly
anticipates *' the social com
pact ; " holds that " there is no
impossibility in nature consi
dered by itself, but that men
might have lived without any
public regiment;" and con
cludes that " for any prince or
potentate to exercise authority
of himself^ and not either by

express commission immediately
and personally, received from
God, or by authority derived at
the first from their consent upon
whose persons they impose laws, .
it is no better than mere ty
ranny." Whatever we may think
of the historical authority for
these statements, so singularly
anticipating the tenets of Locke,
we cannot but be struck by their
strong contrast with the theories
afterwards developed in the
school of Laud.
t See chaps, v.-viii,, where
again the well-known tabula rata
of the system of Locke is found.

26

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

It has its social side, in which we are led by
the authority of mankind, whether in the secular
or the spiritual society — in the one claiming to
declare by statute the rights of natural law, in
the other, to enforce by authorised interpretation
the truth of Holy Scripture. On the balance of the
two elements — the one securing individuality, and
the other unity — the well-being both of the natural
and the supernatural life in man depends. Hard
it may be to maintain the balance; but it must
be maintained. So again, the two laws themselves
imply, or presuppose each other. The law super
natural both reveals what is beyond reason, and
also sets its divine seal on many tiuths discovered by
reason, and on many duties of which conscience bears
witness. But the law natural is not contradicted;
it is not even superseded by the higher law super
natural. There are points in which it is still left to
speak, and to speak with an undiminished authority.*

• See his general "onclus jn,
c. xiv. sect 5. " There is in Scrip
ture therefore no defect, but that
any man, what place or calling
soever he hold in the Church of
God, may have thereby the light
of his natural understanding so
perfected, that the one being
relieved by the other, there can
want no part of needful instruc
tion unto any good work which
God himself requireth, be it
natural or snpematnial, belong

ing simply unto men as men, or
unto men as they are united in
whatsoever kind of society. It
sufSceth therefore that Nature
and Scripture do serve in such
full sort, that they both jointly,
.ind not severally either of them,
1)6 so complete, that unto ever
lasting felicity we need not the
knowledge of any thing more,
than these two may easily fur
nish our minds with on all
sides."

RICHARD HOOKER.

27

It is not true, therefore (he concludes), that no law
can be of permanent obligation, even in the things
of God, which is not written in the pages of His
Word. So Hooker deals with the first principle of his an
tagonists. So in different degrees all Anglican the
ology has since dealt with the principle of what has
been called " Bibliolatry," — exaggerating, and by
exaggeration ultimately tending to overthrow, the
supreme authority of Holy Scripture, as speaking to
the indi^'idual soul.* Far less easy and simple, no
doubt, is this complex exhibition of the- Divine law,
in which the individual and the social, the natural
and the supernatural, have to be carefully studied,
and subtly harmonized with each other, than the
single appeal, perhaps to an infallible inward light,
perhaps to an infallible society or person, perhaps
to the ifsissima verba of Holy Writ. Those who
make such appeals taunt us with compromise, in
consistency, ambiguity of utterance, if we question
them. But to the thoughtful mind the very absence
of a bare, naked simplicity is a prima facie evidence
of truth, because it is accordant with our own com
plex nature, with all the imperfections and apparent

• SeeBookILc.viii.7. "As
incredible praises given to men
do often abate and impair the
credit of their deserved com
mendation ; so we must likewise
take great heed, lest by attri

buting to Scripture more than
it can have, the incredibility of
that do cause even those things
which in' eed it hath abundantly
to be less reverently esteemed."

28 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
contradictions of human life. Never, perhaps, more
than now, is the question of this harmony of the
individual and the social, of the natural and the
supernatural, forced upon us in every field of
thought. In Hooker — more (I think) than in
many great theologians who succeeded him — we
find, under some archaism of form, the enun
ciation of the true principles, which must always
guide the believer ; whenever, with the beacon-
light of the revelation of Christ before his eyes,
he sees new cross-lights breaking in on every
side — lights which, if they be true, he will neither
quench nor ignore — lights of which, if they
be ever so true, yet none is sufficient to be his
guide. It is in the same large and thoughtful spirit that
Hooker examines the other question forced upon him,
of the permanence and immutability of this or that
law. Very tempting, again, the rough and ready
method, which cries out " To the law and the testi
mony ! " " It is written in Holy Scripture, it must
abide for ever." Very tempting, but utterly delu
sive. There is but one way of determining whether a
law, however spoken, or a revelation, however given
to man, is unchangeable — by determining whether
it belongs to man as man, in the nature which in
essence is unchangeable, and in the relations which
are primary and enduring, or whether it touches
only circumstances, customs, institutions, formb of

RICHARD HOOKER.

29

education, which have passed away.* Hard, no
doubt, this to determine. It needs careful study;
it is open to endless controversy; it is liable to
ambiguity or error. It is hard; but all things
worth having are hard in this world. The time of
intuition is not yet.
On us, no doubt, far more than even on Hooker, lies
this hard task — to distinguish between the transitory
and the permanent in Holy Scripture, to mark the
progressiveness of God's revelation in its actual
historical order, and not to confuse the grey of its

* Hooker expresses this truth
with singular clearness and
force in c. xv. sect. 3. " Where
fore to end with a general rule
concerning all the laws which
God hath tied men unto : those
laws divine that belong, whe
ther naturally or supematurally,
either to men as men, or to men
as they live in politic society, or
to men as they are of that politic
society which is the Church,
without any further respect had
unto any such variable accident
as the state of men and of socie
ties of men and of the Church
itself in this world is subject
unto; all laws that so belong
unto men, they belong for ever,
joa although they be Positive
Laws, unless being positive God
himself which made them alter
them. The reason is, because
the subject or matter of laws in
general is thus far forth con

stant : which matter is that for
the ordering whereof laws were
instituted, and being instituted
are not changeable without
cause; neither can they have
cause of change; when that
which gave them their first in
stitution remaineth for ever one
and the same. On the other
side, laws that were made for
men or societies or churches, in
regard of their being such as
they do not always continue,
but may perhaps be clean other
wise a while after, and so may
require to be otherwise ordered
than before; the laws of God
himself which are of this nature,
no ,man endued with common
sense will ever deny to be of a
diSereut constitution from the
former, in respect of the one's
constancy and the mutability of
the other."/

30

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

early dawn with the full noonday — to distinguish in
Church constitution between that which is essential
and therefore permanent, and that which is second
ary and therefore changeable. How constantly are
we tempted to cut the Gordian knot by some sharp,
narrow decision on this side or on that ! Yet to yield
to that temptation is simply fatal — purchasing victory
at the price of truth, and gaining rest as by some
spiritual suicide. When we pass from the pages of
some who have yielded to it to the writings of our
first great English tiieologian, we hail gladly the
work of a strong pioneer in the steep and rugged
way of truth ; and we trust tiiat the later ages of
our theology may never belie the noble promise
of its early morning.*

• We trace precisely the same
philosophical and candid spirit
in Hooker's method of dealing
with other questions subsidiary
to the main argument. Thus
(a) we note his careful distinc
tion between h priori and a
posteriori argument as to the
essential superiority of a written
Revelation over an unwritten
Tradition (c. xiii. sect. 2). " Now,
although we do not deny it to
be a matter merely accidental
unto the law of God to be
written; although writing be
not that which added authority
and strength thereunto ; finally,
though his laws do require at
our bonds the same obedience

howsoever they be delivered ;
his providence notwithstanding
which hath made principal
choice of this way to deliver
them, who seeth not what cause
we have to admire and magnify?"
(6) We observe, again, his wise
and thoughtful view of tradition
(o. xiv. sect. 5). " Tliat which is
of God, and may be evidently
proved to be so, we deny not but
it hath in his kind, although
unwritten, yet the self -same
force and authority with the
written laws of God. It is by
ours acknowledged, 'that the
Apostles did in every church
institute and ordain some rites
and customs serving for the

RICHARD HOOKER.

31

So it is that he lays the foundation. With his
foot firmly planted thereon, it is not hard for him to
strike in the next two books decisive blows against
the two fundamental positions of his antagonists —

seemliness of church-regiment,
which rites and customs they
have not committed unto writ
ing.' Those rites and customs
being known to be apostolical,
and having the nature of things
changeable, were no less to be
accounted of in the Churoii thun
other things of the like degree ;
that is to say, capable in like
sort of alteration, although set
down in the Apostles' writings.
For both being known to be
apostolical, it is not the manner
of delivering them unto the
Church, but the author from
whom they proceed, which doth
give tliem their force and credit."
' (e) We note, once more (in
c. xiii. 3), his admirable de
scription of the fulness of Holy
Scripture, and the sense in
which all its parts are "neces-
sarj'." " By Scripture it hath in
the wisdom of God seemed meet
to deliver unto the world much
but personally expedient to bo
practised of certain men ; many
deep and profound points of
doctrine, as being the main ori
ginal ground whereupon the
precepts of duty depend ; many
prophecies, the clear perfoi-m-
ance whereof might confiim the
world in belief of thmgs unseen ;

many histories to servo as look
ing-glasses to behold the mercy,
the truth, the righteousness of
God towards all that faithfully
serve, obey, and honour him ;
yea many entire meditations of
piety, to be as patterns and pre
cedents ill cases of like nature ;
many things needful for expli
cation, many for application
unto particular occasions, such
as the providence of God from
time to time hath taken to have
the several books of His holy
ordinance written. Be it then
that together with the principal
necessary laws of God there are
sundiy other things vmtten,
whereof wo might haply be
ignorant and yet be saved : what ?
shall we hereupon think them
needless? shall we esteem them
as riotous branches wherewith
we sometimes behold most plea
sant vines overgrown? Surely
no more than we judge our han^ls
or our eyes supertiuous, or what
part soever, which if our bodies
did want, we might notwith
standing any such defect retain
still tho complete being of men."
Each passage, while it, of
course, bears the impress of tho
time, is written for posterity.

32

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

the maxim that for the individual Christian life
" Scripture is the only rule of all things which in
this' life may be done of men ; " * and the maxim
that, for the corporate life of the Church, "there
must be in Scripture a form of Church polity, the laws
of which may not be altered." t On each, indeed,
he argues separately. He exai->ines the supposed
claims of Holy Scripture for itself. He enters (so
far as the knowledge of the day allowed |) into the
history and the writings of the early Church. He
discusses the abstract reasoning of his opponents.
He traverses, therefore, the time-honoured path of
investigation of Scripture, of Authority, of Reason.
Yet, after all, the argument of the first book is aU-
sufficient. It is not by mere accident that the
second and third books are but little read ; although
I think it would be well if the opening of the third
book on the nature of the Church § were in all cases
associated with the study of the fifth book. But it
is to my mind a fatal error to dwell on any part
of Hooker's great work without study of the deep
foundation laid in the first — more valuable (I ven
ture to think) in itself, more important in its effects

• See Book H.
t See Book IIL
} It will be noted, for instance,
how far more copiously he quotes
from the Latin than from the
Greek Fathers, and how (in Book
v.) he accepts unhesitatingly

the Athanasian authorship of
the " Athanasian Creed."
§ I mean Book III. chap. I, on
the distinction between the
visible and the invisible Church,
and the requirements for mem
bership of both.

RICHARD HOOKER. 33
on subsequent English theology, certainly fuller
of living instruction to us, than any part of the
more apologetic and polemic superstructure which
he has raised, upon it.
(B.) But I pass to the consideration of that super
structure itself in the fourtli and fifth books.*
In these books are contained the defence of our
Church worship and Ritual.
(a) The fourth book repels an attack on the
ground, not of abstract demerit, but of a want of
Apostolical simplicity t — of too great likeness to
the Church of Rome,| — of unlikeness to the system
of foreign Protestant Churches abroad,§ — of a de
rivation from the Judaic ceremonial of the Old
Testament || — of the retention of that which had
been hopelessly corrupted by idolatry. II
Of these points some have little more than a his
torical interest. It is simply curious to observe (for
example) the horror of isolation from foreign Pro
testant bodies, proceeding from a party which tended
distinctly to Congregationalism and even to mere
individualism in religion ; and the implied claim of
an authority for Calvin and his system, which was

? It is true that, as the first
four books were first published,
the fourth book might seem
more naturally connected with
the second and third. But
examination shows it to be rather
preparatory to the fifth hook—
the one defending our Church
[kino's coll.]

worship against charge of Po
pery — the other defending it on
its merits,
t See chap. ii.
I See chaps, iii.-x.
§ See chap. xiii.
II See chap. xi.
t See chap. xii.

34 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
denied to the Papacy, and even to Catholic usage
and law. But the two charges on which the main
stress is laid, and which are of permanent interest,
are the likeness to Rome, and the retention of what
had been corrupted by her.
Now on these there was a time — which I can re
collect — when Hooker's argument had for us its
usefulness and necessity. It was a time when, in
common parlance and in common thought, men
had forgotten to distinguish the term "Romish"
from the term " Catholic " — when they spoke as if
the necessarily negative word " Protestant " was a
full positive description of faith — when they under
stood but little the true principle of our English
Reformation — when they had studied but imper
fectly the origin, the growth, the distinguishing
characteristics, of our Prayer Book — when any sup
posed likeness to Rome, even in points not distinc
tively Romish, was at all hazards denounced and
condemned. But that time has gone by, not for one school
only, but in different degrees for all schools in the
Church. To argue against an almost obsolete lipe
of thought is simply to slay the slain.
Now, perhaps, it is rather in the caution and
moderation of Hooker's argument that we may find
our needful lesson. For unquestionably there is a
rash tendency to copy what is characteristically
Romish — forgetful that (thanks to the iron symmetry

RICHARD HOOKER. 35
of the Romish System) there is constantly involved,
even in minute and beautiful ceremonial, what is
distinctively and avowedly Romish in doctrine.
With that tendency, and in defence of it, men are
fond of quoting witli a flippant decisiveness the
proverb, "Abusus non tollit usum," not seeing that —
while human nature is what it is, governed so largely
by the power of even accidental association — it is
almost as great folly to apply that proverb with
absolute unreserve, as to fall into tlie opposite error
of denying it altogether. How can we doubt tliat,
as there are ideas, so inseparably connected with
ludicrous associations that they have lost their
intrinsic solemnity, so there are rites so impregnated
with associations of falsehood, that tliey cannot be
used without endangering truth ? Hooker, and onr
great divines of the more distinctively High Church
school which succeeded him, were far too wise to
adopt this rash and shallow argument. Living at a
time when men knew by recent painful experience
the corruption and the yoke of Rome, they treated
seriously, with careful discrimination, the charges
which some would now dispose of by an oasy sneer.
They dealt with each case (as the compilers of the
Prayer Book did) on its own merits. They retained
here ; they rejected there. For both maintenance and
rejection they knew how to give weighty reasons.
Even here, therefore, from Hooker and his successors
the nineteenth century may learn.
D 2

36 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
(b) But, undoubtedly, far more valuable, and
rightly far more carefully studied, is the defence in
the great Fifth book of the worship of our Church
upon its own merits.
I have neither time nor desire to examine that
book in the width of its scope — especially as on almost
every point it is singularly instructive and sugges
tive. In careful and exhaustive treatment, it leads
its readers from the consideration of the material
fabric of our Churches,* through the discussion of the
various forms of teaching God's Word ;t the examina
tion of the principle of a Liturgy, and then of all
the various parts and accessories of our Prayer-Book
worship ;{ the doctrine of the Sacraments and their
forms of ministration j § the principles of Fast and
Festival ; || the details of our Occasional Services ; IT
the three Orders, and even the accidents of our
ministry and parochial system.** No wonder that
from time immemorial it has been studied, as the
best commentary on our Prayer Book. Much of its
merely polemical work is dead ; some little deserved
to die. But, underlying polemics, there is a mass
of wliat is positive— thought and learning, nobleness
and spirituality of tone — ^which will live (I believe)
as long as the English language itself.
It is rather to the general character of Hooker's

• Chaps. xi.-xvii.
t Chaps, xviii.-xxii.
X Chaps, zziii.-xlix.
§ Chaps. l.-Iiviii.

II Chaps. Ixix.-lxxii.
t Chaps. Ixxiii.-lxxv.
** Chaps. Izzvi.-lzxxi.

RICHARD HOOKER.

37

theological treatment of this wide range of subjects
that I would direct attention.
The one leading characteristic — to my mind
simply invaluable — is the same determination as
before, to escape from bewildering contests of detail
to the freer, healthier atmosphere of general prin
ciples. How characteristic it is that, before he will begin
the discussion of that which is as the visible body
of the religious spirit, he arrests the attention of
all — not of theologians or scholars only, but of every
thinking man — by dwelling on the effects on human
society of Religion, Atheism, Superstition : the first
to inspire and ennoble; the second to deaden and
degrade; the third to distort and pervert!* He
knew well — what shallow thinkers are apt to forget —
that outward custom, ritual, phraseology must in
evitably involve principles ; and that there are no
principles which so powerfully affect society for
good or for evil, as religious principles. The whole
form, basis, tone of society are changed, according
as religion or irreligion rules, and according as the
religion which is dominant is false or true, sensuous
or spiritual. Probably on all sides that teaching is

• See chaps, i.-iii. Hooker's
toleration towards religious error
is large, singular for his time,
and hardly excelled since. But
(like Locke) he excludes atheists

from toleration, and against this
" execrable orew " of " forlorn
creatures" he cries out for " the
decree of Nabuchodonosor.''

88

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

accepted now. Christianity is honoured everywhere
— as by enthusiastic love, so by intense and undying
hatred. A glance at the whole history of our day will
tell us that the indifference, which looked upon all
religious controversies as on " the battles of kites
and crows," has long passed away.
But he passes to the discussion itself, and he will
not examine its details, before he has laid down his
great leading principles of Church Ritual and Order.
The first is substantially the great principle of
Symbolism.* Form, rite, ceremony there must be ;
they are as the outward body of religion. The great
question always must be, not " Are the limbs of
that body in themselves beautiful ? " but, " What is
the expression of the face?" "What is the soul
that looks through them?" All other questions are
questions of degree. They turn on the proper function
of the imagination, and on tlie characteristics of dif
ferent ages, different races, different standards of
education. But two questions are absolute — " What
idea does Ritual symbolize ? " " Is this idea true or
false?" Both are hard to answer. Perhaps the
greatest difficulty (which makes all decisions of doc
trine on questions of Ritual unsatisfactory) is to

• See chap. vi. "The first
thing is . . . when there ariseth
apparent reason competent to
show their oonveniency and fit
ness, in regard to the use for

which they should serve." " That
which inwardly each man should
be, the Church outwardly ought
to testify." " Signs mtut re*
semblo the things they signify "

RICHARD HOOKER.

39

answer the fonner question clearly. Who has a right
(for example) to say what the " Eastward position "
necessarily symbolizes?* But still in days of Ritual
controversy, petty as it may seem in itself, it seems to
me infinitely important to keep Hooker's principle in
mind. All Ritual symbolizes something ; its power
to steal on the mind through the imagination is
great. It cannot be matter of indifference or degree
whether we have that which symbolizes falsehood, or
that which symbolizes truth. Our Church of England
has obviously held this to be the case, by impos
ing a set form of Ritual and Avor.ship, which has told
powerfully on doctrine and spiritual tone. Hooker is
surely right in thinking that its maintenance against
all unauthorised infringements, on the right hand
and on the left, is a matter not of detail or of mere
order, but of principle. We certainly have had the
lesson which he taught forced upon our attention
with a greater clearness and gravity than even in
his critical days. His teaching should still have
a living meaning for us.
The second principle is that which lay at the very
root of the composition of the Prayer Book — that all
ritual and order, thus symbolizing truth, should
never unnecessarily depart from primitive custom.

• For example, the Etistward
position (as use at the Litany
and the Creed shows) is often a
position of worship. Tho barest

ZuingUaniam must recognise wor
ship in the Holy Communion, and
might adopt tho Eastward posi
tion accordingly.

40

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY I

and so should carry with it the authority of the
ancient undivided Church.* Where the standard
of truth is, there must the standard of ritual, as
symbolizing truth, should be. This principle is
' simply the historical principle, which is brought out
more fully in relation to Church government.
Clearly in respect of Ritual it can but apply to
the main lines of principle, as, for example, in rela
tion to the great Liturgies of early days. In lesser
matters it can hardly hold, except as a defence
against frivolous and wanton objections. Certainly
the compilers of our Prayer Book showed that they
would have thought it folly to apply it slavishly to
the details, which must vary in different ages. But
in regard of those main principles- it has an im
portant truth and value. In Ritual, more than even
in great theological writings, can we trace the actual
faith of the Primitive Church. In Ritual we trace
with singular clearness the gradual accretion of the
peculiarly Romish doctrines, which our Church has
rejected. In the distinction, therefore, between what

¦* See chap. vii. " Neither may
we in this case lightly esteem
what hath been allowed as fit by
the judgment of antiquity, and
by the long-continued practice of
the whole Church, from which
unnecessarily to swerve, experi-
enoe hath never as yet found it
safe." It is curious that Hooker
has fallen into the error of oom-
' paring the judgment of antiquity

to the judgment of old age,
whereas in this respect Bacon
warns us that " we are the true
ancients," and that the early
ages are the ages of the world's
youth. But the error does not
affect the argument. What has
stood the test of centuries is now
really "old" in his sense of the
word.

RICHARD HOOKER.

41

is Romish and what is Catholic, this principle of
general accordance with primitive Ritual must always
play a very considerable part.
And his third principle is one of paramount im
portance. It is the plea that there should be a
living authority in our own branch of the Church,
both to enact and to dispense, both to lay down
order and from time to time to modify it.* Other
wise, he forcibly urges, there cannot be any unity in
worship. For time must bring some changes, and
these changes must be sanctioned by some authority.
If this does not exist, or if it cannot act, what can
be our guide ? Whether a man listens to the voice of
his own conscience, or what he calls the " voice of
the Church," as interpreted by himself, the result
must equally be anarchy, confusion, disruption. It is
impossible to doubt the soundness of his principle,
^ther considered in the abstract, or illustrated by
oui'-xQwn experience of the evils resulting from its
long at/c'^ance.
¦ It is, ina. )ed, a marvel that in using a Ritual, almost

* Hooker divides this axiom
into two parts. In chap. viii. he
dwells on the former part, that
" the Church being a body that
dieth not, hath always power, as
occasion reqnireth, no less to
ordain that which never was,
than to ratify what hath been
before." In chap. ix. he urges
that it may not seem " hard, if in

cases of necessity, or for common
utility's sake, certain profitable
ordinances sometime be released,
rather than all men be strictly
bound to the general rigour
thereof." But the two clearly
hang together, and may, for the
sake of simplicity, be considered
as one.

42 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
unmodified by authority for two hundred years, our
Church should have felt so little burden. It is fair
to argue from this fact that great must have been
the wisdom with which it was framed, and large the
liberty and variety existent under it. But still
neglect of right principle will avenge itself. A
Church, for. its well-being, must have legislative,
as well as judicial and executive powers. If the
greatest of these — the legislative power — lies vir
tually in abeyance, its province will be usurped by
the lower powers on the one hand, or by individual
vagary of minister or congregation on the other.
There cannot ultimately be peace, or a reduction of
all controverted questions to their proper dimen
sions, unless Hooker's principle be n-ealized.
Here, as before, it is on Hooker's resolution to dig
down through superficial controversy to the solid
ground of first principles that the permanent value
of his great work depends. The Puritan controversy
itself passed by. But in the principles here laid
down he struck a keynote, taken up again and
again by Anglican theology. Nor is it hard to find
in them, mutatis mutandis, guidance for the ques
tions and difficulties of our own times.
It would not be difficult to trace in the various
details of his defence of Church order the same
firm grasp of far-reaching" and permanent principles.
But one example — the noblest of all — will suffice.
We turn to that celebrated section where, dealins

RICHARD HOOKER. 43
with the one most important point of Church ordi
nance — the doctrine and the ritual of the Sacra
ments — he bases the whole sacramental doctrine on
the deep fundamental truth of the Incarnation itself.
There we observe with what masterly precision he
first sketches out the great truth of " God in Christ,"
and the reunion of the two natures in Him, a\i;^w?,
reX^d)?, dStaipeTco<;, dcrvyxino)';, as the conception
was slowly wrought out through inquiry, controversy,
heresy, in the ancient Church.* We follow, with
the close attention which it needs, the depth and
subtlety of thought with which he works out, next,
the conception of a real presence of Christ, in the
perfect harmony of His twofold nature, both in His
Church and in His elect, to justify and to sanctify
the soul.t We see that then, and not till then, he
proceeds to* treat the Sacraments, in relation to the
general indwelling of Christ, and declares how " Sa
craments do serve to make us partakers of Him." %
Singularly instructive to the theologian is this pro
found unity of treatment, connecting sacramental
doctrine with the very foundation of our Christianity.
Not less instructive to the Church at large, in espe
cial reference to the second great Sacrament, is that
passage of earnest and impressive eloquence, which
urges that, among all who hold not that bare

• See chaps. li.-liv. t See chaps, Iv.-lvi.
J Chaps. Ivil-lviii,

44

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

Zuinglian theory which our Church expressly repu
diates, there are these great fundamental points of
agreement * — that it is a real participation of Christ —
that it is a real means of the grace of the Holy
Ghost — that in it there is accordingly a justification
through Christ's blood, and sanctification of the
soul — that all rests simply and solely on the or
dinance of the Lord Himself; and that — all this
being accepted — we should inquire and dispute no
farther, but meet as brethren in that Holy Com
munion which ought to be the very bond of peace.f

• See chap. Ixvii. sect. 2.
t See the close of chap. Ixvii.
sect. 12.
"Let it therefore be suffi
cient for me, presenting myself
at the Lord's Table, to know
what there I receive from him,
without searching or enquiring
of the manner how Christ per-
formeth his promise ; let disputes
and questions, enemies to piety,
abatements of true devotion, and
hitherto in this cause but over-
pat'ently heard, let them take
their rest ; let curious and sharp-
witted men beat their heads
about what questions themselves
will, the very letter of the word
of Christ giveth plain security
that these mysteries do as nails
fasten us to his very cross ; that
by them we draw out, as touching
efficacy,' force, and virtue, even
the blood of his gored side ; in |

the wounds of our Redeemer we
there dip our tongues; we are
dyed red both within and with
out ; our hunger is satisfied, and
our thirst for ever quenched.
They are things wonderful which
he feeleth, great which he seeth,
and unheard of whichheuttereth,
whose soul is possessed of this
Puschal Lamb, and made joyful
in the strength of this new wine ;
this bread hath in it more than
the substance which our eyes be
hold; this cup, hallowed with
solemn benediction, availeth to
the endless life and welfare both
of soul and body, in thatitserveth,
as well for a medicine to heal our
infirmities and purge our sins, as
for a sacrifice of thanksgiving;
with touching it sanotifieth, it
enUghteneth with belief, it truly
oonfonueth us into the image of
Jesus Ohiist; what these elements

RICHARD HOOKER.

45

Very notable to my mind are certain negative
points of detail in his treatment. It is surely notable
that, while stoutly defending the surplice against
the charge that it is a "rag of Popery," "a sacra
ment of idolatry " and the like, he never dreams of
any other vestments.* Notable that in all his treat
ment, while there is much of the Sacrament, there is
hardly any reference to Sacrifice, even in the sense,
which subsequent Anglican usage has sanctioned;
and (in dealing hereafter with the title of priest)
there is an express declaration that "sacrifice is
now no part of the Church ministry."! Notable
that of Elevation, of Adoration of a local Presence,
of Fasting Communion as a duty, there is not a
word.

are in themselves it skilleth not ;
it is enough that to me which take
them they are the body and blood
of Christ, his promise in witness
hereof sufficeth, his word he
knoweth which way to accom
plish ; why should any cogitation
possess the mind of a faithful
communicant but this, ' O, my
God, thou art true, O, my soul,
thou art happy ' T
Hooker's own viewis absolutely
clear (sect. 6): "The real pre
sence of Christ's most blessed
Body and Blood is not to be
sought in the Sacrament, but in
the worthy receiver of the Sacra
ment." But he is content to put
aside all discussions of theory,

and to meet on the basis of the
'O)ui\oyovjitva, which he gives
above. * See chap. xxix. It is true that
the reference is to public prayer ;
but there are quotations from
St. Jerome and St. Chrysostom
connecting the subject with the
administration of the Holy Com
munion, and it is clear that
Cartwright dealt with the sur
plice in that connection. If
other vestments had not been
practically obsolete, it seems
impossible that they should not
have been specially mentioned
for attack and defenoe.
t See chap, Ixxviii 2.

46 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
But it is rather on the great positive lines of his
argument that I would dweU.
In that reference of all to the Incarnation, it is
significantly implied that, when we can form a theory
of the method of the union of the two natures of our
Blessed Lord, then, and not till then, shall we be able
rightly to theorize as to the method of sacramental
efficacy, uniting the soul in Christ to God. In that
general exposition of a real presence of Christ in the
Church, I trace again an all-important truth — in the
refusal to restrict that real presence to the Holy
Communion, and to separate that great Sacrament
absolutely from all other means of His presence
with us, and therefore from that law of spiritual and
conditional reception, which in all others is acknow
ledged by all. In that noble plea for unity on the
basis of essential truth, and for reverent abstinence
from rash controversies of over-definition, I trace the
spirit which rules in our Prayer Book, and which
has been the guiding principle of our English Church.
In these things, again. Hooker speaks to us. It is
most unhappy, yet it may be inevitable, that, just as
in the English Reformation, so now — when its basis
is openly or virtually attacked — round what should
be the very shrine of peace and reverence there
should rage a strife of angry tongues, the precursor
(it may be) of schism and disruption. But through
that strife if we are to pass safely, I cannot but think
that Hooker's main principles will be our best guide.

RICHARD HOOKER.

47

(C.) But I pass, next, to the third great section of
his work, published in partial incompleteness after
his death, which deals with Church government.
Its object was to resist the imposition on the
Church of Presbyterian government, as of Divine
Scriptural right, to defend the principle of Episcopal
government, and the right function of the Royal
Supremacy. (a) The first section on the claim for Lay Elder
ship of Divine Right, contained in the sixth book,
has utterly perished. We can hardly doubt that
it has been wilfully destroyed ; for that it existed
and was carefully diiicussed with his friends we have
satisfactory proof.* After the Introduction, all else
is gone : a fragment is substituted, evidently from
Hooker's hand, on the administration of Church
discipline. Confession, and Absolution, directed in its
argument rather against Rome than against Geneva.

• This is incontrovertibly
established by Mr. Keble in his
Preface, first by examination of
the present sixth book itself,
next by comparison with a MS.
in the library of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, which contains
remarks and criticisms by Sandys
and George Cranmer on Hooker's
original draft. There seems no
sufficient reason to doubt the
account which Walton gives of a
confession by Hooker's widow to
the Bishop of London, that after

his death his MSS. were torn
and burnt by " Mr. Charke and
another minister that dwelt near
Canterbury." The sixth book
would certainly be the most
obnoxious to the adherents of
the Puritan party. Bishop An
drewes, in a letter written imme
diately on the news of Hooker's
death, expresses his fear that
they might be " embezelled and
come to nothing," or, if not, per
haps fall into bands which might
mutilate or suppress them.

48 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
It is hardly necessary to say that it stands up firmly,
and decisively against the assertion of Auricular
Confession and Private Absolution as a " Sacrament
of Penance," or that it meets the bold claim of
Catholic authority for such assertion, by investi
gating the well-known historical growth of the prac
tice in the Church. At that time no one, professing
to hold the Anglican position, would have dreamt of
using any other language. At that time no one
could possibly ignore or forget the fatal effect of the
imposition of the system, on Christian liberty, on
individual responsibility, on the true relation of
laity and clergy in the Church. This fragment
of Hooker will reward careful study. But I pass
it by with brief notice, because it lies outside the
great work, with which we are at present con
cerned. (b) The other two books remain, taken from
Hooker's rough drafts, and therefore imperfect in
some parts, and perhaps interpolated in others, but
in substantial preservation.*
Let us glance first at the argument for Episco
pacy, and at the treatment of Apostolical succes
sion, in the seventh book.
In the defence of Episcopacy it seems clear
enough that in Hooker, as in the authoritative

* On this, again, see Keble's I were not published till about
Preface. The last three books | fifty years after Hooker's death.

RICHARD HOOKER.

49

documents of the Church of England,* it is the
historical method of argument (in itself all but
unassailable) which is followed. Episcopacy was
attacked on two sides in the name of Divine right.
The Pope, as the Vicar of Christ, claimed to over
ride and to extenuate its authority.! The Puritan
party, on the plea of a Scriptural title for their own
Presbyterian government, denounced it utterly as
an usurpation. The time was to come, ere long,
from the day of Bancroft's celebrated Sermon at
Paul's Cross onwards, when both attacks were to be
not only met, but retorted, by the claim of a Divine
right for Episcopacy,! gradually (though with a
hesitation widely different from the sweeping asser
tions of later days) tending to " unchurch " non-
Episcopal bodies. But it had not come yet. Hooker
refers to a cognate form of this trenchant argument
as the shortest way against his antagonists, but ex
pressly refuses to take it.§ It seems, indeed, toler-

" Compare Art. xxiii., empha
sizing the mission and the autho
rity of tlie ministry in itself, as
called and sent by " those who
have publick authority given
them in the congregation," with
the statement in the Preface to
the Ordinal, " It is evident that
from the Apostles' time there
have been these orders of minis
ters in Christ's Church : Bishops,
Priests, and Deacons."
t See, for example, the struggle
[kiho's CX>Ui.]

on this subject in the Council of
Trent. I Heylin, when he entitles
Laud "Cyprianus Anglicanus,"
indicates by a true instinct the
position of the school which he
represents, in the assertion of
Kpiscopacy against both anta
gonists. § See Book in. chap. x. sect. 8.
His words are very strong. " The
very best way for us, and the
strongest against them, were to
£

50

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :

ably clear, that as he went on with his great work,
the claim of Episcopacy to a distinctiy Apostolic
derivation, strengthened itself by investigation in
his mind. Between the third and the seventh books,
there is surely considerable difference of tone.* But
the main character of his argument remains the
same. His principles are simply these. First, all
the promises and blessings of the Church belong
to it as a whole. Next, there being no formal
rule of Church polity laid down in Holy Scripture,
the form of government lay in the power of the
Church itself to determine. Thirdly, from the
beginning, even from Apostolic times, that form has
been Episcopal. "A thousand five hundred years
and upward the Church of Christ hath now con
tinued under the sacred regiment of Bishops.!

hold, even as they do, that in
Scripture there must needs be
found some particular form of
Church polity, which God hath
instituted, and which for that
very cause belongeth to all
Churches to all times. But with
any such partial eye to respect
ourselves, and by cunning to
make those things seem the
truest which are the fittest for
our purpose, is a thing which we
neither like nor mean to follow."
* Hooker seems to avow this
in Book VIII., chap, xi., sect. 8 :
" I did myself sometimes judge
it a great deal more probable

than I do now, merely that,
after the apostles were deceased,
churches did agree among them
selves, for preservation of peace
and order, to make one presbyter
in each city chief over the rest."
But it is sufficiently evident in
the whole tone of the book, See
Mr. Keble's Preface, and a pam
phlet by Bishop Wordsworth (of
St. Andrews) in controversy with
Principal TuUoch, "A Plea for
Justice to Presbyterian Students
of Theology, and the Episcopal
Church." t Book VH., chap, i., scot 4.

RICHARD HOOKER. 51
Hence, lastly, even taking the lower view of uni
versal Church custom, it is rash and presumptuous
to overthrow it ; but, taking " tlie generally received
persuasion, held from the first beginning, that the
Apostles themselves, left Bishops invested with
power," it may be " boldly and peremptorily " con
cluded that " if anything in the Church's govern
ment, surely the first constitution of Bishops was
from Heaven, was even of God ; the Holy Ghost
was the author of it." On these principles he
examines historically the existence and authority of
Bishops from the earliest times ; he distinguishes
(with a good sense and honesty, not always found in
champions of Episcopacy) the assertion of the Epi
scopal office from the criticism of the Scriptural
use of the name 'ETrtWoTro?, and the accessories of
the office, in dignity, in scope of administration,, in
degree of secular power, from the office itself. His
theoretical conclusion is that which all historical
investigation strengthens every day — "Episcopacy
has been, and is, and therefore, it ought to be rever-
en<:ed and preserved," rather than, " It ought to be
in the abstract, and therefore it lias been and it is,"
His practical conclusion is that which the Church of
England has drawn — to preserve that government
for herself, on the ground of an Apostolic origin,
yet never to declare that they who have it not are
by this cut off from the Church of Christ, and
thrown back simply on an individual Christianity.
£ 2

52 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
Since his day that question has been discussed
by various schools of thought. Historical criticism
has (I think) strengthened the claims of Episcopacy
to Apostolic derivation; experience in the Church
has cei-tainly shown its practical value as a system,
and its intimate connection with most important
elements of primitive Church ordinance and spirit.
But still it may be doubted whether we are not
on all sides coming back substantially to Hooker's
leading principles, asserting them boldly on the
ground of historical truth, and refusing to be
tempted by the apparent necessities of controversy
to assert more.
(c) But, lastly, I come to his exposition in the
eighth book of the principle of the Royal Supremacy,
— what it is, what it means.
In Hooker we find distinctly formulated the prin
ciple which guided our English Reformation — the
claim of a conditioned independence of National
Churches. I need not say that in his view it was
conditioned, not only by Holy Scripture, but by the
relation to the Church Catholic, of which it formed
a part — a relation binding it to certain great laws
of constitution, and submitting its actions to the
supremacy of a true General Council.
But what is a National Church ? He leaves us in
no doubt whatever. Considering the true historical
growth of the Church of England, rather than any
abstract definition of what, under different circum-

RICHARD HOOKER.

53

stances, it might have been, he lays down clearly
the principles implied again and again, alike in
the Statutes of the Realm, and the Constitution
of the Church. To speak of any relations between
Church and State as two separate bodies would
have seemed to him absurd. They were simply co
extensive. " There is not " (he says) " any member
of the commonwealth which is not also a member
of the Church."* True, that men were bom into
the one, baptized into the other. But in those
days to be unbaptized was a thing so monstrous as

* See Book VIII. chap. i. sect.
2. The whole of the well-known
passage deserves quotation : —
" With us therefore the name of a
church importeth only a society
of men, first united into some
public form of regiment, and
secondly distinguished from other
societies by the exercise of Chris
tian religion. With them on
the other side the name of the
Church in this present question
importeth not only a multitude
of men so united and so distin
guished, but also further the
same divided necessarily and
perpetually from the body of the
commonwealth ; so that even in
such a politic society as con-
sisteth of none but Christians,
yet the Church of Christ and the
commonwealth are two corpora
tions, independently each sub
sisting by itself.
" We hold, that seeing there is

not any man of the Church of
England but the same man is
also a member or the common
wealth ; nor any man a member
of the commonwealth which is
not also of the Church of Eng
land; therefore ns in a figure
triangular the base doth differ
from the sides thereof, and yet
one and the selfsame line is
both a base and also a side ; a
side simply, a base if it chance
to be the bottom and underlie
the rest : so, albeit properties
and actions of one kind do cause
the name of a commonwealth,
qualities and functions of an
other .sort the name of a Chtuch
to be given unto a multitude,
yet one and the selfsame multi
tude miy in such sort be both,
and is so with us, that no person
appertaining to the one can be
denied to be also of the other."

54

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :

to condemn to a virtual outlawry. True, that men
had civil duties to the whole community as a State,
spiritual duties to it as a Church. But in those
days to refuse the one was held as much a treason
as to refuse the other.
The Royal Supremacy* in the Church in itself
meant (as we have already said) what it did in the
State — ^the assertion of National Unity and In
dependence. As against the Papal Supremacy —
the culmination of sacerdotal pretension — it also
meant the distinct assertion of the authority of the
whole body over the clergy, as being only a part of
the Church.f But, in both Church and State the
Royal authority was meant to be a Constitutional
authority. Every attempt to make it despotic pro
ceeded pari passu in both ; the Star Chamber and

¦* Hooker is exceedingly care
ful to define and limit the Head
ship attached to the Crown, in
contradistinction to the Supreme
Headship of Christ. But it was
safer and wiser to exchange the
title altogether (as Elizabeth did)
for one which expressed clearly
that "in terming our princes
heads of the Church, we do but
testify that we acknowledge
them as Grovemors."
t See Book VIII. chap. ii. sect.
4. " Unto which supreme power
in kings two kinds of adversaries
there are that have opposed
themselves; one sect defending
that supreme power in

ecclesiastical throughout the
world appertaineth of divine
right to the Bishop of Eome;
in other sect that the said power
belonging in every national
Church unto the clergy thereof
essembled. We did defend as
well as against the one as against
the other." See also chap. vi.
sect. 8. " It is a thing most eon-
sonant with equity and reason
that no ecclesiastical law be
made in a Christian common
wealth, without consent as well
of the laity as of the clergy; but
least of all without consent of
the highest power,"

RICHARD HOOKER.

55

the High Commission Court were twin-bom instm-
ments of absolutism. All laws regulating the
Church were to be passed by the whole body, the
clergy in Convocation, the laity in Parliament, with
the assent of the Crown.* So passed, the supreme
judicial and executive authority, to ascertain and
enforce them, lay naturally in the Crown, as
" supreme in all causes, ecclesiastical as well as civil."
This was the system which Hooker contemplated
as existent, and determined to defend. No absolutist
was he. Whatever his respect for authority, there

"* Seechap.vii.sect.il. "The
Parliament of England, together
with the Convocation annexed
thereunto, is that whereupon the
very essence of all government
within this kingdom doth de
pend ; it is even the body of the
whole realm ; it consisteth of the
king, and of all that within the
land are subject unto him : for
they all are there present, either
in person or by such as they
voluntarily have derived their
very personal right unto. The
Parliament is a court not so
merely temporal as if it might
meddle with nothing but only
leather and wool. . . ."
"The most natural and reli
gious course in making of laws
is, that the matter. of them be
taken from the judgment of the
wisest in those things which
they are to concern. In matters
of God, to set down a form of '

public prayer, a solemn confes
sion of tlie articles of Christian
faith, rites and ceremonies meet
for the exercise of religion; it
were unnatural not to think the
pastors and bishops of our souls
a great deal more fit, than men
of secular trades and callings :
howbeit, when all which the
wisdom of all sorts can do is
done for devising of laws in the
Church, it is the general consent
of all that giveth them the form
and vigour of laws, without
which they could be no more
unto us than the counsels of
physicians to the sick: well
might they seem as wholesome
admonitions and instmctions,
but laws could they never be
without consent of the whole
Church, which is the only thing
that bindeth each member of
the Church, to be guided by
them."

56 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
is in him no shadow of that false inference from
the " Divine Right " of Kings, of absolutism in the
Crown and the duty of passive obedience in the sub
ject, which was the fatal error of the great divines
of the Stuart period. What he said as to authority
over civil society, he would have said, with equal
emphasis at least, in relation to the ecclesiastical.
" For any prince or potentate, without express com
mission from God, to exercise the same of himself
— ^it is no better than mere tyranny." For, un
doubtedly, he held that the action of the Church,
the clergy, and the laity alike, had the spiritual
authority derived from the blessing and the in
dwelling presence of Christ. It were worse than
tyranny to set this aside, or override it.
Such was Hooker's system, certainly in itself
plain, simple, and coherent, in relation to the state
of things which then existed. It was, indeed, but
the formulation of the principles on which Church
action in England, especially in the Reformation,
but even before the Reformation, had long proceeded.
It acknowledged (as our Article does) a limitation
of the Royal power, by the existence of a sacred
Ministry, which that power could neither exercise
nor confer. For conflict between the royal and the
ministerial power it saw no necessity, and laid down
no rule.
But I need hardly say that now the condition
of things then existing is of the past. From the

RICHARD HOOKER.

57

day that Nonconformity was first tolerated, then
gradually recognised, and relieved of all civil dis
ability, it passed away as a complete and coherent
system ; though traces of it remain still in our
laws. The Puritan contention (op^ ^ed by Hooker)
"•¦'that the Church and the commonwealth are two
societies, of which the one comprehendeth always
persons not belonging to the other," is now realised
unquestionably in fact.
Hooker's argument, as such, is made obsolete by this
change. But it has still a twofold interest. First it
illustrates to us, with an unmistakable precision and
completeness, what was the great principle involved
in the Royal Supremacy, as recognised at the Re
formation,* and warns us against common fallacies,
which strangely misunderstand its nature. Next, it
suggests to us that they are really pursuing the policy
which made the Church of England what it has been,
who endeavour, mutatis midandis, to secure now some
similar government for the Church — a government
which shall fully recognise the rights of the laity —
a government which shall claim the power to legis
late for the Church, with the same authority and
the same faith as in the days gone by, refusing to

• Of course, I do not mean
that there were in practice no
deviations from it. In the
conflict against the Papal autho
rity inen caught often very
rashly at the only authority

which could be set up against it,
and which in England — with
whatever theoretical inconsist
ency — had constantly defied and
limited it for centuries past.

58 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
believe that the Church of the nineteenth century is
inferior in that authority and in the grounds of that
faith to the Church of the sixteenth. No doubt there
is this important difference attaching to all religious
bodies, that in the ultimate resort, some supremacy
of a State, now larger than any religious body within
it, must be recognised over all; and that over an
Established Church there are special rights, in
virtue of Establishment, which the Church — unless
they make disestablishment a spiritual necessity —
must be content to acknowledge. But this difference
great as it is, touches not the main point. Self-
government, in some sense, has been, from the days
of the Reformation onwards, claimed for the Church
of England. On its right to self-government Hooker
(I repeat) speaks to us now.
IV. These are (as it seems to me) the great theo
logical principles of Hooker's ' Ecclesiastical Polity.'
It is as a theologian alone that I desire to regard
him. Therefore I do not think it necessary to dwell
at any length on the place which he occupies, by
consent of all, in our English literature. After the
English Bible and the English Prayer Book, his is
(be it remembered) almost the first great work of
English prose. No one can well fail to appreciate
the dignity and massive eloquence of his style;
stately, indeed, and at times intricate, but never
i obscure or cumbrous: now glowing with a grave
enthusiasm, now lighted up by a grave yet forcible

RICHARD HOOKER. 59
humour. No one, comparing him with other divines
of his own and the succeeding generation, can look
without wonder and admiration on the profound
learning, often implied rather than expressed, so
borne as to be free from all cumbrousness, always
strengthening, never overloading, his reasoning. No
one can be blind to the singular fairness of argument,
and the well-balanced comprehensiveness of idea,
which have won for him the title of " the judicious."
In all these points it is, indeed, marvellous to note
how the newborn English prose starts out in him
full armed, in some excellences, at least, afterwards
unsurpassed. But it is with his theological principles that we
have to do. Their importance lies first (as I have
said) in the fact that by him we see, brought out in
clear, explicit words, tlie chief principles which, im
plied and embodied in the Reformation, fixed our
Anglican position from the first, on a basis far
different from the artificial groundwork of the foreign
Protestantism, and the shifting foundations of the
Galilean system.
It lies next in the fact that Hooker, although he
founded — perhaps because he founded — no especial
school, has, perhaps more than any other single
writer, given to our Anglican theology a tone and a
direction which it has never lost.
But, most of all, to my mind, it lies in the fact
that his principles have a depth and breadth and

60 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
soundness, which enables them, in a very special
degree, to live still, so as, mutatis mutandis, to deal
even with present controversies, and to guide us
even in our present trials.
These results at any time might well reward care
ful study of his works. But at this time especially —
a time critical enough both of creeds and institutions
— ^but a time (thank God !) of much excitement of
religious thought, much revival of spiritual enthu
siasm, much quickening of practical activity —
perhaps our greatest want of aU is that of a deep
and true theology. Any study, whether of the past
or the present, which may contribute, even slightly,
to filling up that need, must tend in its measure
to the well-being of humanity, and therefore to the
glory of God.

LANCELOT ANDKEWES, D.D.,
BISHOP OF WINCHESTEK.
Born 1555; Died 1626.

Place of Andrewes in the history of tho English Church and
English theology. — Contemporary both with Hooker and Laud.
— Contrast with Hooker. — Influence .)f Andrewes from position
in society, public character, sermons, &c., friendships, connecticm
with events of James I.'s reign. — Carries on Hooker's resistance to
Puritanism and Calvinistic theology. — Returns to Primitive
Church as standard and model. — Consistency with ideas of the
Reformation.— Reformation not a single event or epoch, but a
long process of attempted improvement ; unsystematic, tentative,
progressive : tendency to combine and reconcile old and new. —
Dangers to religion in James I.'s reign : 1. Shock to authority.
2. Roman aggressiveness and strength. 3. Exclusive claims, theo
logical and ecclesiastical, of Puritanism. — Andrewes reverts to
Early Church theology, for larger and more primitive teaching. —
Effect on thought, and on controversy, of increased learning. —
Andrewes a controversialist, directly against Rome : character of
the Roman controversy in his hands. — Opposition of Puritanism,
indirect, in exhibition of positive, higher, more precise teaching. —
His sermons. — Andrew^es, in his inner and spiritual life. — His
"Devotions." — How they illustrate his preaching. — Difficulties of
his position. — What he did, and did not do. I. Failed to check
immediate victory of Puritanism : connection of his school with
Stuart political doctrines. 2. Permanently enlarged and elevated
theology of the English and Reformed Church : established its
true relations to the ancient and the imiversal Church.
Bishop Andrewes holds an important place in the
line of those English divines who have affected the

62 masters in ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
course of English theology. Only two years younger
than Hooker, his life and his influence were prolonged
for more than a quarter of a century after Hooker's
comparatively eariy death.* He had been Hooker's
contemporary, a student and labourer in the same
field, perhaps his friend, certainly his admirer, in the
later years of Elizabeth ; and when Elizabeth's world,
and Hooker's, closed with the sixteenth century,
Andrewes lived on, and won his fame in the new
world which opened with the seventeenth. His
mind and character were those of a man who had
come to middle age, and passed beyond it, under
the last of the Tudors.t With this training and
experience, the main work of his life coincided
nearly with the reign of the first of the Stuarts.^
Thus, though belonging to Hooker's generation,
he lived to see Charles I. on the throne, and
Laud in his first bishopric, and to be looked up
to and studied by the men of Laud's generation
as the greatest living theologian of the English
Church. He is the connecting link between Hooker
and Laud,§ and after Laud, Cosin and Jeremy
Taylor and Hammond, Ken and Bull, Beveridge and
Bishop Wilson. II

* Hooker, b. 1553 .. .. Andrewes, b. 1555.
Hooker, d. 1600 .. .. Andrewes, d. 1626.
t Eliz. d. 1603.
I James I. d. 1625; Andrewes d. 1626.
§ See Hallam, Ojnst Hist ii. 62. Literature, ii. S
U S«e footnote on opposite page.

LANCELOT ANDREWES.

63

Of Andrewes' long life there is not much to be said.
It was the life, during the first part of it, of a severe
and resolute student, unsparing of time and labour.
His moming hours of study were to the last
jealously guarded; the rare exceptions to his usual
sweetness and gentleness of temper were provoked
by those who disturbed these hours. " They were no
trae scholars," he used to say, " who came to speak
with him before noon." He became specially distin
guished as a " Catechetical " teacher, both at College
and in London, and he was " deeply seen in cases of

The following comparative dates may be convenient:-

Hooker.

Andrewes.

Bacon.

Field.

Donne.

Laud.

b. 1653 j

b. 1565;

b. 1560-1 ;

b. 1661 ;

M.A., 1577 ;

M.A., 1678;

Grays Inn,
15J7;

b. 1673 ;

b.l673i

Temple,

In Parlmt,
1584;
St. Paul's,
1584;
,.
At Linc.'«
Boscombe,
1589;
Inn, 1590 ;
1691;
E.P.I.— Iv.,
,,
Line's Inn,
With Essex.
1694;
1594;
1696;
E.P. v..
, ,
,,
M.A.,
1697;
1598;
d. leoo.
Peiin of
Westmr., 1601;
Bp. Cbidies.,
1606;
Sol.-Gen., 1607;
M. 1603,
or 1604 ;
Bishop Ely,
,,
,,
Ordained,
President
1609;
d. 1616.
1613 r
St. John's,
1611;
Bp.Winton.,
Choncellor,
, ,
,,
On. Gloue,
1619;
1618-19;
1615;
..
Sentenced,
..
Dn.St.Paul'8,
Bishop St.
1621;
1621;
David's, 1621 ;
d. Sept.,
d. April,
,,
,,
Bp.B.8£W.,
1626.
1626.
d. 1631.
1626;
Bp. I^nd,.
1628;
Abp. Cant,
1633.
64 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
conscience." At St. Paul's, where he was Canon, he
read the Divinity Lecture three times a week in term
time ; and he is described as walking about the aisle,
ready to give advice and spiritual counsel to any who
sought it. At Westminster, where he was Dean, he
took the greatest interest in the boys of the schooL
He would come into school and teach them himself,
during the absence of the master. Bishop Hacket,
a Westminster scholar under him, records his care
about their studies and the books they read, and
describes his walks to Chiswick " with a brace of his
young fry," and his "dexterity in that wayfaring
leisure, to fill these narrow vessels with a fun
nel."* When he was called into public employ
ment, he lived, as great Church officers did in those
days, through a round of sermons. Court attendances,
and judicial or ecclesiastical business, varied by
occasional controversies and sharp encounters, on
paper or face to face, with the numberless foes and
detractors of the English Church and State ; — from
great Cardinals, like Bellarmine and Duperron, to
obscure sectaries, like Barrow and Mr. Traske, the
reviver of a mongrel Judaism.t It was the life of
many men of that period. What is specially to be
noticed in his case, is the high standard which was
recognised both in his learning and his life. " Oui
* Henry Isaacson's Life, with Notes, in Mr. Bliss' edition of
Andrewes, vol. vii pp. vii., viii., xviii, xxzvi.
t Bliss' edition, vii pp. ix. 81.

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 65
oracle of learning ;" " the renowned Bishop of Win
chester;" " the matchless Bishop Andrewes ;'' "that
oracle of our present times" — these phrases of Bishop
Hall express the admiration and reverence of his
contemporaries. He was a man in whom scholars
like Grotius and Casaubon acknowledged an eradition
and an enthusiasm for v/ide and thorough knowledge
akin to their own. Bacon, remembering in his day
of trouble his " ancient and private acquaintance "
with Andrewes, who survived him by a few months,
submitted his writings to his friend's criticism,
and took pleasure in unfolding to him the great plan
of the ' Instauratio.' * Andrewes was himself an
observer and lover of Nature. "He would often
profess that to observe the grass, herbs, com, trees,
cattle, earth, waters, heavens, any of the creatures ;
and to contemplate their natures, orders, qualities,
virtues, uses, &c., were ever to him the greatest
mirth, content and recreation that could be, and this
he held till his dying day."t And he was not only
an observer, but in some departments an experimen
talist. He was one of the few to whose sympathetic
interest, as an observer of Nature, Bacon felt he
could confidently appeal in his physical investiga
tions, and in his daring attempt to put the knowledge
of Nature on a new and sound basis. Andrewes had

• Letters and Life of Bacon, Spedding, vii. 371-375.
t Isaacson, p. vi. ; Spedding, Bacon, iv. 24, 6SL
[king's COLIi.] F

66 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
also, in an eminent degree, what was the charac
teristic virtue of his time. He was always on
the watch to seek out the promise of ability and
worth in the poor and friendless, and to encourage
by a noble liberality the learning of others.
Loaded with preferment, after the custom of his
day, he turned his revenues to large and public
uses. He selected poor scholars and helped them.
He was attentive, in a degree which attracted notice,
for it was not common in the bishops of the time, to
the claims upon his purse of the churches, insti
tutions, or estates entrusted to his stewardship. He
put his houses in good repair. He discharged out of
his own income debts which he found hanging over a
school or a hospital. He largely increased their
permanent endowments, either by his gifts or his good
husbandry. Bacon's thoughts turned to him as one
likely to help towards the expense of costly re
searches and experiments. " He was single," Bacon
writes, " and he was rich." And he was one of those
large givers who prefer in their lifetime to incur
the suspicion of parsimony rather than fall in with
the mere conventional fashion of munificence ex
pected from the wealthy.* In an age of much
self-seeking, and many unscrupulous ways of getting
rich, he was acknowledged and honoured as an
example of genuine public spirit in his strict and

* Isaacson, p. xiv. note^.

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 67
conscientious method of administration, in his patron
age, and in an expenditure which, when the occasion
called, could be princely.
All evidence 'attests the loveableness of his nature.
The lives of scholars, especially of scholars in the days
of Andrewes, have not usually had much to attract
and interest those who do not share their aims and
employments. But in the pictures which have been
preserved to us of the relations between friends, there
are few things more charming than what is disclosed
of the effect produced by Andrewes' character and
converse on the illustrious scholar who had sought a
refuge in England from the intolerance and perse
cution, first of Geneva and then of Paris, Casaubon.
The graciousness, considerateness, sympathy, with
which Andrewes first welcomed Casaubon, growing, as
the two men came to know each other .better, into
an affectionate tenderness, a delight in one another's
company, not only among their books but in recrea
tion, in visiting sights, in the enjoyment of the open
air, are exhibited in Casaubon's letters. Casaubon's
able biographer, Mr. Pattison, no favourable judge of
Churchmen, or of those who spend their lives in the
pursuits to which Andrewes devoted his, is not insen
sible to the noble and beautiful friendship between
the two men, or to the attractions and sweetness
of Andrewes' character. " Of all those whose piety
was remarkable in that troubled age," says another
discriminating, though not more lenient or friendly
F 2

68 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
writer, Mr. Gardiner,* "there was none who could
bear comparison for spotlessness and purity of cha
racter with the good and gentle Andrewes. Going
in and out as he did amongst thfe frivolous and
grasping courtiers who gathered round the King, he
seemed to live in a peculiar atmosphere of holiness,
which prevented him from seeing the true nature of
the evil times in which his lot had fallen." Perhaps
in this he was not singular. It may be doubted
whether any of us fully understand the true nature
of either the good or the evil of the times in which
our lot is cast. We, looking back to the past, can
see much evil and much good, that the men of the
past could not distinguish or recognise when it was
near them and round them. But it would be well for
the men of any age if they loved the good and hated
the evil which they do recognise, with the sincerity
and single-mindedness of Andrewes.
But the best men are under the prejudices and
delusions of their time, and Andrewes was no excep
tion. He was under the prejudices and delusions
which surrounded the thrones and the persons of the
Tudors and the Stuarts, as all were who served them.
He is said to have been one of the bishops who
sanctioned the buming of the Arian Leggatf To us
this is rightly and naturally shocking. It was not

• History of England, 1603-1616, ii. 33.
t Pattison, Life of Casaubon, 331 ; and Gardiner, ii. 43-45,

LANCELOT ANDREWES. G9
shocking, but necessary and right, to the whole
religious world of the day — to Archbishop Abbot,
who pressed it on and canvassed the judges who
ordered it — to the great Puritan party. It was not
shocking to the Church historian. Fuller ; it was not
shocking to Neal, the historian of the persecutions of
the Puritans.* It is almost a greater surprise and
disappointment to find Andrewes one of the majority
in pronouncing for a divorce in the shameful Essex
case, in which the harsh and narrow-minded Abbot,
to his lasting honour, took the side of right and
truth, though with the feeblest reasons, against
wickedness and folly in high places. i' What blinded
the eyes of Andrewes in a case which to us seems so
clear, we cannot tell, for his reasons for his opinion
are not preserved. Yet he was not one who feared
the face of man, even of the King. But in those
troubled days, when men were reaping the penalties
of the sin of many generations, and when the rebound
from superstitious submission to the Pope had
created the superstitious faith in the Divine Eight
of Kings as the only counterpoise to it, there seemed
to be a fate which, in the course of a Churchman's
life, exacted, at one time or other, the tribute of some
unworthy compliance with the caprice or the passions
of power ; and the superstition must have been a

- Hook, Life of Abbot, pp. 267-70.
t Gardiner, ii. 92-96 ; Hook, Life of Abbot, p. 272.

70 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
strong one which could exact it from such a man as
Andrewes to such a man as James.
But Andrewes was an important person not so
much by what he did, — by a policy and an adminis
tration, — and not so much even by what he wrote, as
by what he was known to be, and what he was known
to think and hold on the questions of his day. Unlike
Hooker, who was a writer, and a man little seen in the
great world, Andrewes was by calling a preacher, and
one who moved much in society, and left his mark
on it by the qualities which tell on society, — quickness
and brightness of parts, a ready and perfect command
over large stores of knowledge, the strength of an
original and well-furnished mind acting through
rapid comprehension, play, and nimbleness of wit, and
with this a sharpness and force of expression which
made words remembered. It was this power which
gave him his influence with James : and it is seen in
his Sermons, of which the outward form is in curious
contrast with the substance. In matter, no sermons
like them had yet been preached in the English
Church. If the stupendous facts of the Christian
Creeds are true, no attention, no thought is too great
for them; and their greatness, their connections,
their harmony, their infinite relations to the system
of God's government and discipline of mankind, and
to the hopes and certainties of human life, fire here
set forth with a breadth, a subtlety, a firmness of
touch, a sense of their reality, a fervour and reverence

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 71
of conviction, which have made the Sermons worthy
and fruitful subjects of study to English theo
logians. They bear the marks of what we know they
had, the most careful meditation, the most unsparing
pains in arrangement and working out.* But to us
of this day, it no doubt does surprise us to be told
that — as was certainly the case — they were the most
popular and admired sermons of the time. We
hardly know how far in their present shape they are
skeletons, w hich were filled up and illustrated in actual
delivery. But a hearer of our day would be at once
overwhelmed by the profusion and rush of ideas, and
disconcerted, by the sparseness of expansion and
development. The majestic and connected eloquence
which made Hooker's style so remarkable, is abso
lutely wanting. There is depth of thought and
depth of feeling, fertility, energy — there are passages
which disclose the imaginative and poetic side of a
rich and beautiful mind. But the style is like the
notes of the unceremonious discourse of a very ani
mated and varied talker rather than the composition
of a preacher. In its quaintness, its perpetual and
unexpected allusions; its oddly treated quotations,
its abrupt and rapid transitions, its fashion of
tossing about single words, it is of the same
kind as the style of much of Bacon's writings,
especially his speeches. It belongs, in point of

* Isaacson, pp. xxv., xxxvi.

72 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
literary character, to the age before Hooker. It
abounds in those quips and puns which are the al
most invariable resource of early humour, playful
or grave ; in passages, too, of powerful irony, though
the form of it sometimes raises a smile. Bacon,
indeed, used to send his writings to Andrewes, " to
mark whatsoever should seem to him either not
current in the style, or harsh to credit and opinion, or
inconvenient for the person of the writer." * Such a
style satisfied and pleased the day, though it does
not satisfy or please us ; and we wonder, perhaps, that
after a different standard had been set by Hooker,
it could be endured. But students of English thought
and literature are not deterred by the harsh fashions
of Bacon's writings, and students of English theology
will find, under the quaint form of Andrewes' Sermons,
enough to justify his reputation as a divine, both in
his own day and since.
I am glad to recall some comments on Bishop
Andrewes' style, made long ago by a writer who has
since become famous, and whose remarkable gifts the
world learned in their full extent only at the moment
when illness has disabled for the time one of the
deepest and most original minds of our time. " An
drewes," wrote Dr. Mozley in 1842,t "has peculi
arities of style, partly belonging to his age and partly

* Spedding, Bacon, iv. 141.
t British Critio, Jan. 1842, pp. 173-17S.

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 73
his own, which considerably prejudice us against him
at first, and to which, accustomed as we are to so
much more flowing and regular a way of writing, we
can never quite reconcile ourselves ; but with these
peculiarities of his own, he has also felicities of his
own, which are displaying themselves at every step.
His theological explanations show the connection of
one great doctrine with another, the bearing of one
great fact of Christianity upon another, with admir
able decision and completeness. He is so quick and
varied, so dexterous and rich in his combinations ;
he brings facts, types, prophecies, and doctrines to
gether with such rapidity ; groups, arranges, system-
atises, sets and resets them with such readiness of
movement, that he seems to have a kind of ubiquity,
and to be everywhere and in every part of the system
at the same time. . . . He has everything in his head
at once ; not in the sense in which a puzzle-headed
person may be said to have, who has every idea con
fused in his mind because he has no one idea clear, but
like a man who is at once clear-headed and manifold,
— if we may be allowed the word — in his ideas, who
can do more than apprehend one point clearly or
many dimly — can apprehend, that is to say, many
keenly. And this peculiarity has a good deal to
do with the peculiarity of his style : it is obviously i
a natural one, and expresses the working of his own
mind. He is never longer in stating a thing than he
can possibly help, because his mind being always, as

74 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
it were, two or three steps ahead of his pen, he
lays down the point in passing on his way to some
thing else, and therefore does not apply himself
more to it than is necessary in the way of business ;
what he is going to say, occupies him; what he
is saying, he only says, and no more . . . His
sermons, in fact, have both the advantages and
disadvantages, whatever these may be, of being
more like very copious and connected notes for dis
courses than discourses themselves. They have
>the terseness, freshness, and condensation of ideas
first put together, together with their want of form
and polish ; though we gather from Andrewes' con
temporaries, that the delivery made up consider
ably for this deficiency." And the critic notices
especially two points: 1. Andrewes' method of
hammering the same idea into his hearers again
and again. "He is never tired of using the
same word. The idea, ever thus renewed, and
recreated, as it were, gains strength and power by
the mere act of repetition, and each successive blow
comes down with increased effect:" — And 2. the
animation of his discourse. "Whatever faults he
may have, he never sleeps — he is always on the
move in one direction or another. Incessant aim
and activity is the pervading characteristic of his
sermons ; his shortnesses, quaintnesses, his multiplied
divisions ; his texts wielded with such dexterity, and
ever at hand — ever, as it were, on service — all keep

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 75
up the stirring and business-like character of the
scene ; all are at work fulfilling their various tasks
and parts in- the construction of the discourse, and
occupying themselves like bees in their hive : —
" Et munire favos et dsedala fingere tecta." •
Merely, however, as a preacher, as a master, in
those early days, of the language and rhetoric of the
pulpit, Andrewes would claim less interest than
Donne ; for in Donne there is not only the matter,
but the not unsuccessful effort after form and art ,
which Andrewes entirely neglected. But Andrewes '
was primarily a theologian; and his theology has
permanently influenced the range and character of
theological thought in the English Church.
Andrewes' theological opinions were formed about
the same time, and under the same circumstances, as
Hooker's. The two men had much in common, both
in their strong recoil from the popular traditions
and systems which, under Elizabeth, had more and
more loudly claimed to interpret and represent
exclusively the English Eeformation ; and also in the
positive ground which each was disposed to take, as
the true and authentic basis of the teaching of tho
English Church. Both, too, had in common that
devotional temper, those keen and deep emotions
of awe, reverence and delight, which arise when

British Critic, Jan. 1842, pp. 193, 202.

76 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
the objects of theological thought and interest
are adequately realised, according to their great
ness, by the imagination and the heart. Hooker
made the first, at any rate the most conspicuous,
venture to cut across the grain of public prejudice.
But Hooker, great as he was — and the Englishmen
of Shakespeare and Bacon's age could not fail to
recognise his greatness — was yet but an obscure
country parson, who may be said to have failed in
London, and who certainly was not much seen in the
houses of the great. Andrewes not only followed
for a quarter of a century after Hooker's death in
the path which Hooker had opened, but Andrewes
was the companion and trusted counsellor of the
holders of power. He was one of the greatest and
most considered men in England, rising to the high
places, one after another, of the Church; in the
opinion of some of the wisest observers, the only fit
man for the highest.
In Andrewes, as in Hooker, we come on a wide
divergence from the language of the early theologians
of Elizabeth, and from the way in which they pre
sented the relative importance and proportion of
different parts of the doctrinal system of the Church.
Before it is said that this was a departure from the
spirit of the Eeformation, it ought to be brought
to mind what the Eeformation was. It was not a
thing in all its parts done, finished, completed for
good. Part of it was final — ^the independence of the

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 77
National Church, the repudiation of superstition
and corruption; part could not be accomplished
at once. It started as a progressive and tentative
effort to mend things which had been long and
deeply injured, to put straight things which the
custom of centuries and the ignorance of the day
had turned awry ; but it looked on this as a gradual
process, which it was too much to hope to see done
at a stroke, and which was to exercise the wisdom
and patience of years to come. It cannot be suffi
ciently remembered that in James I.'s time, and in
Charles II.'s time in 1662, the Eeformation was still
going on as truly as it was in the days of Edward
VI. and Elizabeth. The English Eeformation was,
theologically speaking, one of the most adventurous
and audacious — bravely audacious — of enterprises.
Its object was to revolutionise the practical system
of the English Church without breaking with history
and the past ; to give the Crown and the State vast
and new powers of correction and control, without
trenching on the inherited prerogatives of the spiri
tualty ; and to do this without the advantage of a
clear, solid, well-tested, consistent theory, or else,
as in Luther's case, of a strong exaggerated cry and
watchword. Smarting under the sting of monstrous
practical abuses, and quite conscious of the im
possibility of making sudden changes to be deep ones,
the English reformers adopted what their enemies
might well call a hand-to-mouth policy of experi-

78 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
ment in finding what they still hoped might be a
growing, improving, yet permanent settlement. The
Eoman theory of the Church, and of Church reform
as pursued at Trent, was compact and complete ;
the Calvinist theory of Church reform and Church
reconstruction was equally logical and complete ; in
each case all was linked' together, consistent, im
pregnable, till you came to the final question of the
authority on which all rested, and till you came to
square the theory with certain and important facts.
With a kind of gallant contempt for the protection
of a theory, we in England shaped our measures as
well as we could, to suit the emerge»cies which at
the moment most compelled the attention of the
steersman at the helm. The English Eeforma
tion ventured on its tremendous undertaking, the
attempt to make the Church theologically, politically,
socially different, while keeping it historically and
essentially the same — with what seems the most
slender outfit of appliances. Principles it had ; but
they were very partially explored, applied, followed
out to consequences, harmonised, limited. It spmng
from an idea, a great and solid one, even though dimly
comprehended, but not from a theory or a system,
such as that unfolded in Calvin's Institutes. Its
public and avowed purpose — I do not say that of all
its promoters — but its public purpose was, taking the
actual historical Church of Augustine and Ethelbert,
of Becket and Wolsey, of Warham and Pole, the

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 79
existing historical representative and descendant
of that supernatural Society which is traceable
through all the ages to Apostolic days, to assert its
rights, to release it from usurpation, to purge away
the evils which this usurpation had created and
fostered ; and accepting the Bible as the primitive
Church had accepted it, and trying to test every
thing by Scripture and history, to meet the im
mediate necessities of a crisis which called not only
for abolition, but for reconstruction and replacement.
What was done bore the marks of a clear and
definite purpose ;' but it also bore the unmistakable
marks of haste and pressure, as well as violence.
Laws, — all but the most indispensable ones, — canons,
synods, tribunals, the adjustment of the differing
elements of its constitution, were adjourned to a
more convenient season, which, in fact, has never
arrived. It began with arrangements avowedly pro
visional. On the great dogmatic controversies of
the moment it defined cautiously, its critics said,
imperfectly : it hardly had made up its own mind.
For the systematic confessions of the Continent, it
provided a makeshift in the Thirty-nine Articles, put
to a use for which they were not originally designed.
But it did four things :— :1. It maintained the Epis
copate and the Ordinal : 2. It put the English Bible
into the hands of the people : 3. It gave them the
English Book of Common Prayer ; and 4. To bind
all together with the necessary bond of authority, it

80 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
substituted boldly and confidently, in place of the
rejected authority of the Pope, the authority, equally
undefined, of the Crown, presumed to be loyally
Christian and profoundly religious, and always acting
in concert with the Church and its representatives.
It has been called a Via Media, a compromise. It is
more true to fact to say that what was in the thought
of those who guided it under Henry VIII. and
Elizabeth was an attempt, genuine though rude and
rough and not always successful, to look all round
the subject; to embrace in one compass as many
advantages as they could — perhaps incompatible
and inconsistent ones — without much regard to pro
ducible and harmonising theories: antiquity and
novelty, control and freedom, ecclesiastical and civil
authority, the staid order of a Church as old as the
nation and the vigour of a modern revolution of the
age of the Eenaissance, a very strong public govern
ment with an equally strong private fervour and
enthusiasm ; to stimulate conscience and the sense of
individual responsibility, and yet to keep them from
bursting all bounds; to overthrow a vast ancient
power, strong in its very abuses and intrenched
behind the prejudices as well as the great deeds of
centuries, and yet to save the sensitive, delicate
instincts of loyalty, reverence, and obedience; to
make room in the same system of teaching for the
venerable language of ancient Fathers, and also for
the- new learning of famous modern authorities.

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 81
The task was a difficult one, as it was unique
among the various projects opposed to it, or likened
to it, going on at the same time in Western Christen
dom. Abroad, the idea of the English Eeformation
appeared, as .it still appears abroad, an illogical
and incomprehensible attempt to unite incompatible
principles and elements. That government should
interfere with religion, should change it, should
impose it, was perfectly understood both by Protes
tants and Catholics. But that reformers in England,
having broken with the Pope, should not make a
clear sweep of the whole of the inherited system and
begin afresh ; that they should embarrass themselves
by maintaining the continuity and identity of the
existing Church with the historical Church of the
past ; that they should be so bold, yet so guarded
and reticent, — this was unintelligible, both at Eome,
Paris and Madrid, and at Wittenberg, Jena, Basle
and Geneva. It must have seemed to many, — not
merely to the worshippers of absolute hypotheses,
but to cool and practical judges of the probabilities of
human affairs — a very unpromismg, if not forlorn
and desperate venture. So daring a disregard of
obvious inconsequence and anomaly; so delicate a
balancing of conflicting tendencies; so apparently
artificial and arbitrary restraints on their natural
development ; all, too, depending on the chances of a
single life, and the personal influence of a character,
did not wear the look of permanence. It might have
[king's cou-.] G

82 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
been plausibly foretold that the English reformed
Church must soon choose its side ; must soon either
go backwards or forwards ; backwards to its old
allegiance ; forwards to the clear, definite position of
the great Swiss and French reformers. But that it
should go on strengthening itself in spite of its
double openness to attack, imfolding and developing
the energies of life in spite of its logical incomplete
ness; that it should long escape the dangers from
internal quarrels and outward hostility, might well
have seemed one of the most unlikely of supposi
tions. The hopes and forecasts of the prophets of
evil may be seen in the controversial literature of
the Eoman advocates, in the pamphlet literature
of the Puritan champions of the " Discipline."
The experience of three centuries has shown that
the apparently loose, ill-jointed, halting polity which
they so contemptuously criticised, had both a firmness
and an elasticity which more showy systems failed
in. It has borne the brunt of time and change. It
has never lost its original informing, animating idea.
It has shown a wonderful power of obstinate tenacity
against jars and shocks, a force of continuous growth,
and of vigorous recovery after disaster and stagna
tion. It has certainly vindicated its claim to life and
reality. But at starting, the dangers were indeed for
midable. In the first place, the principle of authority
had been most rudely shaken ; yet it was necessary
to invoke it at every turn. It is not easy for us to

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 83
realise the effect of the shattering, in an ignorant,
yet eager and excited age, of the religious authority
of the Pope. It seemed to leave a void in the
public control of belief and conscience which every
one might fill as he pleased. Yet the world had
been accustomed to authority, and the void could
not be left unoccupied. The Crown, its ministers
and its council ; the Bishops, its trusted advisers ; in
those days in a less prominent, but still important
degree, the Parliament and the Synod, slipped into
the vacant place. But though authority maintained
itself, it did not maintain itself easily. The subtle,
intangible, yet deep and mighty force of moral
authority which had existed of old, and which the
Popes had strained till it broke, had not been, could
not be, replaced. As a substitute for it, came in an
exaggerated idea of the divine and personal rights
of the Crown. It was partly a very real and natural
idea at the time ; it was partly a factitious and
scholastic one ; it partly expressed, vaguely and
imperfectly, the claims of public law. But it served
to consecrate the force which was judged necessary to
maintain what had been settled as the order of the
Church ; and the temptation to appeal to it, when
ever its countenance could be hoped for, became on
all hands, irresistible, where, as it seemed, time and
patience and argument, and the growth of reasonable
and sober opinion, could not be waited for or relied
upon. The result was the unquestionable harshness
G 2

84 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
of the Tudor and Stuart ecclesiastical government,
and the ever-renewed exasperation and bitterness
of its unruly subjects, whom we see to have been
self-willed and unreasonable, but who then thought,
not unnaturally, that its authority had no claim to
their respect nor binding force on their consciences.
And with this impaired sense of authority at
home the Enghsh Eeformation had to confront the
mightiest, the most imperious and exacting authority
outside, which ever claimed and bore a universal
sway over human conscience. It had to confront
the Eoman authority, now tumed into the most im
placable and aggi-essive of deadly enemies ; and this,
not simply on the ground of argument and influence,
but in the field of political action. The struggle
between England and Eome under Elizabeth, and in
the first years of James, was a struggle of life and
death. It was a struggle, begun in its desperate
and murderous fierceness by the Popes, in which no
.scruples were felt, no terms kept on either side.
Controversy, never silent, and always traculent and
unsparing, was but a light matter compared with
the terrible hostilities carried on, not by word, but
by deed; war and conspiracy and massacre, the
fanaticism of assassination and treason, met by san
guinary legislation, by cold and determined "exe
cution of justice." We may well be aghast at the
horrors of that struggle. The deep hatreds and
deep injuries of the political conflict gave to the

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 85
theological controversy — the necessary theological
controversy — an unfairness and a virulence from
which it has never recovered, and which have been
a disgrace to Christendom, and fatal, not merely to
unity, but in many ways to truth. But there was
something more on the Eoman side than the cruel
intrigues of Popes and Jesuits and the brutality
of pamphleteers. Since the age of Julius II. and
Leo X., and the first sittings of the Council of Trent,
Eoman controversy had become intellectually much
more formidable. The stress of the Reformation had
forced it to look narrowly into its own case and its
grounds. Against the learning of Erasmus and the
genius and thought of Calvin, it felt the necessity
of something more than the stock arguments and
quotations of its earlier defenders, Eck and Caietan.
And the result was remarkable. The order of the
Jesuits arose to place, not merely enthusiasm and
political unscrupulousness at the service of the Pope,
but learning, the spirit of research, intellectual acti
vity and literary skill. Vast scientific systems of
theology, like the great work of Suarez, unfolded and
established with philosophic calmness and strength
the Eoman doctrine. To match such works as these
there was nothing — I do not say in England, but even
in Germany and Switzerland. There was nothing
to match the subtlety and comprehensiveness of the
" Controversies " of Bellarmine. There was nothing
to match the imposing historical picture presented

86 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
in the annals of Baronius. Eome had much more
to say for itself than had appeared to Cranmer or
even to Jewell.
There was a third danger. The foreign Eeforma
tion, in its most vigorous and intellectual re
presentatives, undoubtedly the French and Swiss
reformers, started -with an imposing breadth and
simplicity of principle, absolute and sweeping, to
which the English laid no claim. Calvin and
Zwingli, both in what they destroyed and what they
built up, had no occasion for the qualifications, the
hesitations, the revisions and amendments and cor
rections, which abound in the course pursued in
England. But, as is according to the nature of
Englishmen, many Englishmen who were brought
into close contact with the keen and powerful minds
who swayed the Eeformation abroad, were deeply
impressed and attracted by them. Through them
the opinions of the foreigners, recommended by their
extreme and uncompromising logic, found a footing in
England. Geneva and Zurich became rival centres of
influence to Eome ; and a school was founded, strong
from the first, and always, either in the government
or in opposition to it, energetic and determined, whose
object was to carry change in the English Church,
both in doctrine, usages, and discipline, to a point
where all likeness was lost, not only to the unre-
formed but to the ancient Church. It became their
steady, persevering policy to impose the Calvinistic

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 87
theology in its severest form as regards the Divine
decrees as well as the doctrines of grace, both as an
authoritative and as a popular system of teaching,
on the documents and on the organs of the English
Church ; and to disparage and intimidate with the
note of disloyalty and treason any departure from
the definitions and phraseology of the great foreign
divines, who in those days were supposed to be in
exclusive and certain possession of the intei-pretation
of revealed truth. Calvinism, transplanted into the
serious and earnest nature of Englishmen and Scotch
men, flourished with a vigour of life which it rapidly
lost in its native seats. How nearly it succeeded in
making itself master in the English Church is seen
in the history and language of Hooker's books, and '
in Whitgift's 'Lambeth Articles' of 1595. And
with the imperious and exclusive demand of the
Calvinistic theology had also come other claims.
That early fraternisation with the foreign reformers
in the first stage of our own Eeformation, natural,
inevitable, excusable as under the difficulties of the
time it may have been, — that wholesale acceptance
of their authority, and that deference to the judgment
of their disciples, which gave even to John Knox a
part in the theological language of Edward's second
Prayer-Book,* furnished a ground for claiming that

• See Dr. Lorimer's 'John Knox and the Church of England,'
ohep. iii,

88 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
the English Eeformed Church should go on to full
conformity with the ecclesiastical doctrines of the
great foreign masters. The only safeguard for their
theology was the full acceptance of their Church
"platform:" the one was as much of Divine au
thority as the other. We have no right to wonder
that this party aimed high. They aimed at nothing
less than what they afterwards carried — not a mere
change in this or that point, but a substitution of an
entirely new polity and constitution for the existing
one, — of an entirely new idea of the Church for that
on which the Eeformation in England had been
based. Toleration was then on all sides not merely
unacknowledged but condemned. The demand of
the Puritan was that nothing should be allowed but
Puritanism. Through these trials the English Eeformation had
to make its way. In Bishop Andrewes, as in Hooker,
we see the pass to which things had come; — the
pressure of the hostile forces ; the vulnerable points
on which they bore heavily ; the awakening in the
Church of wider knowledge, of freedom and inde
pendence of thought, of calmer and steadier judg
ment ; and the effort of reviving intellectual power,
after the haste and hurried confusion of the early
practical struggles for reformation, not, indeed, to
construct a theory for it, but to put what it had
done, and what it aimed at doing, on a reasonable
and tenable ground. The later years of Elizabeth,

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 89
which, in spite of their troubles, were settled and
quiet compared with the beginning of the century,
cleared up much that had been confused and un
certain. The larger and richer and more powerful
minds had time to think, to learn, to balance, to
weigh and analyse arguments, to follow out conse
quences. The English Church, at its Eeformation,
had taken up its ground on the Scriptures and the
Primitive Church. It had avowed its object to be
a return, as far as was possible, to what the teaching
of the Apostles and their disciples had made the
Primitive Church to be. At the outset, aU that was
much insisted upon was that the Primitive Church
was certainly not like the modem unreformed Latin
Church. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, men had
found leisure to inquire carefully and honestly, with
less prejudice and heat, what that model was like,
which the English Church had declared its wish to
copy in all things essential. Arms were still needed,
as much as ever, against the never-ceasing hostility
of Eome : but something more was clearly necessary
than the mere negations of earlier controversy and
invectives against Eoman corruption and preten
sions ; some more positive ground on which to rest
the claim that England was better and more primi
tive than Eome. Such a ground it was not easy to
find in that narrow Calvinism which the Puritans
were trying to force on the Government, and to
make the popular religion of the country. Some-

90 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
thing was wanted broader, more intelligible, and
more refined than their mode of presenting the
ideas of justification and God's predestinating and
electing grace, and their fashion of summing up
loyalty to Christ and truth in petty scruples about
innocent and natural usages and ceremonies. Some
thing was wanted, as fervent, but more true, more
noble, more Catholic, than their devotion and self-
discipline. The higher spirits of the time wanted to
breathe more freely, and in a purer air. They found
what they wanted in the language, the ideas, the
tone and temper of the best early Christian litera
ture. That turned their thoughts from words to a
Person. It raised them from the disputes of local
cliques to the ideas which have made the Universal
Church. It recalled them from arguments that
revolved round a certain number of traditional
formulae about justification, free-will, and faith, to a
truer and worthier idea both of man and God, to the
overwhelming revelation of the Word Incarnate, and
the result of it on the moral standard and behaviour
of real and living men. It led them from a
theology which ended in cross-grained and perverse
conscientiousness, to a theology which ended in
adoration, self-surrender, and blessing, and in the awe
and joy of welcoming the Presence of the Eternal
Beauty, the Eternal Sanctity, and the Eternal Love,
the Sacrifice and Eeconciliation of the World.
Andrewes, by nature and choice, an indefatigable

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 91
student, a ready and accomplished teacher, a devout
and self-disciplined seeker after a life with God, was
only by necessity a polemic. There was abundance in
the world of his time to disquiet and offend him ; — to
offend his large knowledge, his idea of religion, his
convictions of the sacredness of morality, his balanced
reason ; to disquiet him, as to the result of the mis
chievous elements working round English religion.
But only in one direction did he throw himself
avowedly into controversy. He threw himself into
it as an Englishman, as a servant of his country and
King, as well as a Churchman. The great Eoman
rally, which dated from the institution of the Com
pany of Jesus, and which had been growing in
strength and uncompromising aggression through
the sixteenth century, had given a pressing and
menacing importance to the Eoman controversy in
England. For the Eoman claims called in question
not simply the foundations of the English Church,
but the foundations of the English State and society.
The prominence given to the revived doctrine of
the deposing power had received meaning not only
from -what had been attempted in England, but by
what had been accomplished, avowed, celebrated in
France. We sometimes speak as if the crimes of
the Eoman party culminated in the massacre of
St. Bartholomew and the cruelties of Alva. But
besides that these, unhappily, had a terrible balance
on the other side, they were not the worst. It is iu

92 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
the French wars of the League, in the principles
invented by their ecclesiastical leaders, proclaimed
in the pulpits of Paris, spread abroad by a thou
sand emissaries, put in practice by the assassins of
Henry III. and Henry IV., that we see the real
character of theories put forth by great and popular
champions of Eome, and their fatal bearing on the
primary conditions of human society. The murder
of Henry IV. drove the calm and impartial Casaubon
to say, " that he thought it now part of his religion
to make public profession of his belief in the Eoyal
Supremacy." The sense of these dangers, indignation
at the atrocious wickedness and profanations which
marked the policy now so highly in favour at Eome,
the wrath of a man of learning at the gross abuse of
learning for the support of sophistry, which in the
cause of reckless ambition ended in perjury and
murder, forced Andrewes reluctantly, but very reso
lutely, into this barren and dreary field. James
claimed the aid of his learning and keen wit against
the foremost leaders of the Eoman claims, Bellarmine
and Duperron. The gossips of the Court record that
controversy was neither to his liking nor according
to his supposed aptitudes ; but they also record with
what power he accomplished his task.* He met his
opponents on ground new to them. He met them as
a man at least as deeply learned in ecclesiastical

* Vide Note io Bliss' ed. of Andrewes, vii., pp. ix., x.

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 93
history and literature as themselves. One of the
triumphant devices of the later Eoman argument
had been to take the English Church at her word,
as a Church which avowedly aimed at making the
ancient Church her standard, and to contrast this
with the dogmas and the "platform" too hastily
adopted from Geneva by some of her divines in the
reaction against the intolerable abuses of the days
of Leo X. Andrewes gave a new turn to the con
troversy. He was not afraid of what was genuine
early language and early usage. When Cardinal
Duperron drew a detailed comparison between the
Church of St- Augustine and of the four first
Councils, and the Churches of his day, Eoman and
Eeformed, and asked which of the latter bore the
greater resemblance to the earlier type, Andrewes
fearlessly met the challenge, on behalf of the Church
of England. The challenge was, indeed, a fallacious
one, from the vast changes which had passed over
the world, and from the enormous differences be
tween the 5th and the 17th centuries, which one
side as much as the other had to take account of.
Yet there were times, doubtless, in the history of
the Eeformation when it would have been hazardous
to have met such a challenge before those acquainted
. with history. But Andrewes wrote with the advan
tage which enlarged knowledge and experience had
thrown on the aims and language of both sides in
the struggle ; and he did not shrink from claiming

94 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
for his Church as large and essential a conformity
with antiquity, even in outward things, as could be
pretended by Eome, and a far deeper agreement
in spirit.
With the Puritans he did not enter so much into
direct controversy as Hooker had done. With the
exception of some partial and incidental disputes
vrith individuals — such as his correspondence with
Du Moulin, — or a passing touch of rebuke, protest,
or humorous satire in his preaching, his resistance
to Puritanism was an indirect one. He looked for
producing his effect on the tone and course of reli
gious thought in England, not by arguing, but by
presenting uncontroversially the reasonableness and
the attractions of a larger, freer, nobler, more gene
rous, may I say, more imaginative, system of teach
ing. His administrative weight as a Bishop was,
of course, thrown on the side which resisted the
tyrannous narrowness of Puritanism, and aimed at
greater expansiveness and proportion in doctrine,
and dignity and solemnity in worship. But he did
not trust to administration and power as Laud did.
The weapon by which he attacked Puritanism, the
instrament by which he endeavoured to enlarge the
sympathies and refine the religious ideas of his day,
was his sermons. In those sermons — belonging as
they do in style and manner to their time —
there is a clear and strong contrast with the way
in which Christianity bad usually been presented

LANCELOT ANDRE-ffES. 95
in the preaching of the previous generation. This
preaching professed to represent the original creed
of Calvinism — stern, hard, positive, but thoroughly
earnest and very mighty — and with a gloomy
and savage grandeur and nobility, in its pas
sionate loyal assertions of the irresistible Sove
reignty of God, against the claims, the worthless-
ness, and the insignificance of man. But this stem
creed, for a short moment a living one, had, as was
sure to be the case, degenerated into a dry, unreal,
stereotyped scholasticism, to which the mediaeval
scholasticism was fruitful and interesting. In An
drewes you feel as if he had broken bounds. You
see at once a wider horizon, objects of faith and
contemplation at once more real, more personal,
more august ; you become aware of your relation to
a vaster and more diversified world, a world full of
mystery, yet touching you on every side. Doctrine
you have, dogmatic teaching as precise and emphatic
as anywhere : but it is doctrine as wide as the Scrip
ture in its comprehensiveness and variety, refiecting
at every turn the unutterable and overwhelming won
ders which rise before us when we think of what we
mean by the Creeds ; corresponding in its dignity, in
its versatile application, to the real liistory of man,
to the deep and manifold wants of the soul, its aspira
tions, its terrible sins, its cruel fears, its capacities
for hope and delight, the strange fortunes of the
race, and of the story of each individual life. He is

96

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

not a mere moralist, not simply a preacher of high
duties and elevated views of human nature and pros
pects.* He is, first and foremost, a theologian, whose
deepest belief is the importance of his theology,
and who profoundly reverences its truth. But his
theology is very different from that so long in vogue.
It approached man on his many sides. It was in
stinct with the awful consciousness of our immense
and hopeless ignorance of the ways and counsels of
God — with that shrinking from speculation on the
secret things of the Most High which he shared
with Hooker, and which as a professed law of divinity
was something new in the theological world of the
day. " For these sixteen years, since I was ordained
priest," he says, in his judgment on the ' Lambeth

* " Since the Revolution of
1688 onr Church has been chilled
and starved too generally by
preachers and reasoners, Stoic
or Epicurean : first, a sort of
pagan morality was substituted
for righteousness by faith; and
latterly prudence, or Paleyanism,
has been substituted even for
morality. A Christian preacher
ought to preach Christ alone, and
all things in Him and by Him.
If he find a dearth in this, if it
seem to him a circumscription,
he does not know Christ as the
pleroma, the fulness. It is not
possible that there should be
aught true, or seemly, or beau

tiful, in thought, will, or deed,
speculative or practical, which
may not, and which ought not,
to be evolved out of Christ and
the faith in Christ; no folly,
no error, no evil to be exposed,
or warned against, which may
not, and should not, be convicted
and denounced for its contrari-
ancy and enmity to Christ. To
the Christian preacher, Christ
should be in all things, and all
things in Christ : he should ab
jure every argument which is
not a link in the chain, of which
Christ is the staple and staple-
ring." (Coleridge, ' Notes on
English Divines: Donne,' 1 86.)

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 97
Articles,' " I have never publicly or privately dis
puted or preached on these mysteries of predestina
tion " — on which every one else was disputing ; " and
now I would much rather hear than speak of them."*
His aim was to give accuracy and breadth to dogma,
and to put life in its expression, as St. Augustine, St.
Chrysostom, and the great Greek Fathers had done :
not to plunge into the abysses of the unkno'wn, and of
that which it is impossible to know, but to fix thought
on the certainties and realities, passing all wonder,
that we believe are known, and to accompany their
contemplation with that encompassing train of Chris
tian affections and graces, without which they have
been revealed in vain — faith, and reverence, and
high hope, and the desire after holiness, and humble
patience, and the joy of God's love. The power of Puri
tanism was now no longer in its scheme of doctrine, j
but in its fierce Judaical hatreds, which, natural at
one time against intolerable superstitions, had passed
into a superstition as intolerable and mischievous.
How best to fight against the blind powers of igno
rance and prejudice, when they have been unloosened,
and aspire to govern churches and direct religion, is
always an anxious question. Andrewes conceived that
the most hopeful way was to spend his life and gifts
in presenting continually in the pulpit the counter-
attraction of a purer and nobler pattern of faith : a

¦* Andrewes, ' Minor Works,' 294.
[king's coll.]

90 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
religion with vaster prospects and wider sympathies ;
which claimed kindred with all that was ancient, and
all that was universal in Christianity ; which looked
above the controversies and misunderstandings of
the hour, to the larger thought, and livelier faith,
and sanctified genius of those in whom the Church
of Christ has recognised her most venerated teachers.
His efforts failed at the time. Probably they would
have failed equally, in spite of Clarendon's opinion
the other way, if he had been called to succeed
Abbot at Canterbuiy.* That unqualified idea of
Eoyal power, the ruin of Spain and France, in which
Churchmen of that day put their trust, and to which
their opponents would equally have trusted if they
could have got it on their side, was a doomed one in
England, and must have brought defeat for the time
on all who had identified themselves with it. Puri
tanism failing, first under Elizabeth and then under
James, to get hold of the government, as it once hoped
to do, had thrown itself into the struggle for English
liberty, and for the moment it was to reap the
reward of its courage. And it must, I fear, be added
that Andrewes or any one else would have been
greatly hampered by the badness of his own party.
There were sycophants and corrupt trucklers to
power among the bishops : there was ignorance ajid
there was sordid greed among the clergy. "Quis

¦ Clarendon, Hist, of the Rebellion, i. 157.

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 9^
custodiet ipsos custodes?" he asks, in his stern and
menacing Latin Sermon at St. Paul's, before the Con
vocation of 1593. The rulers of the Church did not
come with clean hands to repress the extravagances
of Puritan prophecyings and consistories, and the in
solence of Puritan pamphleteers. What Andrewes did
was less for his own generation than for those that
came after. In the course of a long and active life, he
broke the yoke of prejudice, and unloosed the tongue
of English theologians. Without departing from the
position or the lines of the original Eeformation, he
greatly enlarged its field of teaching. In the out
skirts and fringes of its system, where it had been
characteristically reticent, he was not afraid to sup
ply from the authorities, to which it had all along
appealed, what was wanting to complete the harmony
and fulness of its doctrine. Thus with respect to the
idea of the Christian Sacrifice in the Eucharist, on
which the language of the ancient Church was so
clear and strong, and on which, from the superstitions
and errors of the Mediaeval Church, the English
Prayer Book was so reserved, Andrewes, without
hesitation and as of full right, recurred, both in
controversy and in teaching, to tho language of the
Liturgies, familiar to the early writers from Irenaeus
to Augustine. So again, in respect of those forms
and offices for special occasions not provided for in
the general office-book of the Church, he threw
himself, as an ancient Bishop would have done, on
H 2

100 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
his inherent episcopal authority to supply the want.
It is mainly according to the model used by him that
our churches are even to this day consecrated. Full
of discrimination for what really had the authority
of the ancient Church, he was the most fearless of
English divines, when he had that authority. English
theology would be in danger of being much less
Catholic, much more disconnected with that of the
earlier ages, much more arbitrarily limited in all
directions, except towards Geneva or else towards
simple latitude, but that a man of Andrewes' cha
racter and weight had dared to break through the
prescription which the Puritans were trying to estab
lish against the doctrinal language, at once more
accurate and more free, of the ancient Church.
Without him and his school, we might perhaps have
had Hales of Eton, and Chillingworth and Tillotson,
great and weighty names ; and on the other hand,
John Newton and Toplady and Thomas Scott ; but
we could not have had Jeremy Taylor and Bull,
and hardly Waterland.
But Bishop Andrewes has left behind him some
thing which, even more than his preaching, explains
his infiuence; it is the evidence of that power of
character which has so strong, though so indirect and
subtle a hold on men. He is one of those who like St.
Augustine have left us, besides their writings, their
very secret selves, as they placed themselves in the
presence of their God and Saviour. In Bishop

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 101
Andrewes' case this was certainly without intending
it. After his death was found the book in which he
had consigned the words selected by him to express
the usual attitude of his soul in private, his usual feel
ings and emotions, his usual desires, when upon his
knees. The book has been long familiar as Bishop
Andrewes' ' Greek and Latin Devotions.' It has re
ceived in our own times one of those rare translations
which make an old book new.* It seems to me that
the key to the influence which Andrewes had in his
own day, and which recommended his theology, is to
be found in his ' Devotions.' For they show what was
the true meaning and reach of his theology, how un
speakably real and deep he felt its language to be, and
how naturally it allied itself and was interwoven with
the highest frames of thought and feeling in a mind
of wide range, and a soul of the keenest self-know
ledge and the strongest sympathies. There are books
which go deeper into the struggles, the questionings,
the temptations, the discipline, the strange spiritual
mysteries of the devout spirit. There are books
which perhaps rise higher in the elevations of devo
tion. But nowhere do we see more so original and
spontaneous a result of a man's habits of devotion ;
nowhere, that I know of, does the whole mind of the
student, the divine, and the preacher, reflect itself in
his prayers so simply and easily and harmoniously

By Dr. Nfewmin, in 1810.

102 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
as in this book. His knowledge, his tastes, his
systematic and methodical theology, the order and
articles of his creed, translate themselves into the
realities of worshif*. All his interests, all his custo
mary views of God, of man, of nature, of his relations
to his place and time — all that he has been reading
about or employed upon, suggest themselves when he
places himself in God's presence, and find their natural
and fit expression in the beautifully applied words of
Psalm or ancient Liturgy. Nothing can be more com
prehensive and more complete in their proportions
than his devotions for each day ; nothing more tender
and solemn ; nothing more compressed and ner'^ous
than their language. The full order of prayer and
all its parts is always there : the introductory con
templation, to sober, to elevate, to kindle ; the con
fession, the profession of faith, the intercession, the
praise and thanksgiving. There is equally there the
consciousness of individual singleness, and the sense
of great and wide corporate relations. His confes-
• sions show in severely restrained and precise language
the infinite acknowledgment of unworthiness and
want, and the infinite hope in God's mercy and love,
in one who searched and judged himself with keen
and unflinching truth. But he did not stop at him
self, his sins and hopes. He also felt himself, even
in private prayer, one of the great body of God's
creation and God's Church. He reminded himself of
it, as he did of the Object of his worship, in the profes-

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 103
sion of his faith. He acted on it in his detailed and
minute intercessions. And then he surrendered him
self to the impulses of exulting wonder and rejoicing
at the greatness of his Christian lot. The poetical and
imaginative side of his nature shows itself in the vivid
pictures which he calls up, with a few condensed and
powerful touches, of the glories of Nature, and the
wonders of God's kingdom, its history, its manifold
organisation. Thus, " the connection of every day,"
says a writer before quoted, Dr. Mozley,* " with the
great works which each day saw in the work of crea
tion, converts the several days of the week into beau
tiful mementos of the fact that we and all that we see
are God's creatures, as well as of the sanctity of the
week itself as a division of time ; and it evidences that
character of mind in the writer which realises the
facts of Scripture, sees mysteries in common things,
and feels itself still living amid visible traces of
a Divine dispensation. It is obvious how such a
method gives the beauty of natural objects a place
in his religion." The Apostles' Creed is no dry
recital, but expands day after day into petitions and
desires founded on its awful facts. And so again,
"man, human society, his country, as an object of
prayer, is not the mere human mass — a number of
individuals, but man and man in certain relations
to each other, high and low, rich and poor, king and

• British Critio, Jan. 1845, pp. 189-192.

104 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
subject, noble and dependent, all living together in
the system of God's ordinance," . . . . " actual trades
and states of life," definitely enumerated, as Homer
enumerates names of men and places ; not only " king
and queen, parliament and judicature, army and
police, commons and their leaders," but "farmers,
graziers, fishers, merchants, traders, and mechanics,
down to mean workmen and the poor." There is
no class of men, no condition, no relation of life,
no necessity or emergency of it, which does not at
one time or another rise up before his memory,
and claim his intercession : none for which he does
not see a place in the order of God's world, and find
a refuge under the shadow of His wing.
Into such devotions I think it would be impossible
to translate the Puritan theology of the time. It is too
narrow, too suspicious, too much enslaved to technical
forms and language. The piercing and rapid energy
, of Andrewes' devotions, their ordinary severe concise
ness, their nobleness and manliness, their felicitous
adaptations, their free and varied range, the way in
which they call up before the mind the whole of the
living realities of God's creation and God's revelations,
and, in the portion devoted to praise, their rhythmical
flow and music, incorporating bursts of adoration and
Eucharistic triumph for the Liturgies of St. James
or St. Chrysostom, recalling the most ancient Greek
hymns of the Church, the " Gloria in Excelsis " and
the Evening Hymn, preserved at the end of the

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 105
Alexandrian manuscript of the New Testament,* —
all this is in the strongest contrast to anything that
I know of in the private devotions of the time. It
was the reflection, in private prayer, of the tone and
language of the public Book of Common Prayer, its
Psalms, and its Offices : it supplemented the public
book, and carried on its spirit from the Church to the
closet. And this was the counterpart of what Andrewes
taught in the pulpit. To us it shows how real and
deeply held his theology was ; and it also explains
that persuasiveness of conviction, which has as much
to do as intellectual force and breadth, in making
men listen to their teachers and accept their words.
The reformed English Church had had its martyrs,
statesmen, doctors, champions ; in Andrewes it had a
saint — not called so, not canonised, but one in whom
men felt the irresistible |charm of real holiness. It
had some one in high place not only to admire, but
to love. And churches need saints, as much as
theologians and statesmen, and even martyrs.
In these ways, Andrewes marks a period and a
step in the unfolding of the theology of the Eeformed
Church of England and in the practical course of the
Eeformation. Hooker had vindicated on its behalf
the rights of Christian and religious reason, that
reason which is a reflection of the mind of God.

* ^us l\ap6y ; translated in the ' Lyra Apostolioa,' No. 62. See
Bingham, vol. iv. p. 411,

106 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
Andrewes vindicated on its behalf the rights of Chris
tian history. Hooker had maintained the claims of
reason, against a slavish bondage to narrow and
arbitrary interpretations of the letter of Scripture.
Andrewes claimed for the English Church its full
interest and membership in the Church universal,
from which Puritan and Eomanist alike would cut off
the island Church by a gulf as deep as the sea. The
spirit of historical investigation had awoke in England
as in the rest of Europe, against the passion for
abstract and metaphysical argument which had
marked and governed the earlier stages of the
Eeformation. It had converted Causaubon from
Calvinism, and at the same time made him the most
formidable critic of the magnificent, but unhisto-
rical picture presented in the annals of Baronius.
Widened knowledge had done as much for Andrewes
and the men of his school. Field and Donne and
Overall, may I not add, in this matter, Andrewes'
close friend. Lord Bacon? History had enlarged
their ideas of the Church universal. Its facts and
concrete lessons and actual words had overborne the
traditions and general assumptions in which the
necessities of an age of religious war had educated
them. They opened their eyes and saw that the
prerogatives which the Puritans confined to an in
visible Church, and which Eome confined to the
obedience of the Pope, belonged to the universal
historical Church, lasting on with varied fortunes

LANCELOT ANDREWES. 107
through all the centuries from the days of Pentecost ;
on earth " the habitation of God through the spirit."
Maintaining jealously and stoutly the inherent and
indefeasible rights of the national Church of England,
and resisting with uncompromising determination
the tyranny which absorbed in a single hand the
powers of the Catholic Church, they refused to forget,
even in England, what God's Spirit had done in
other portions of Christendom, perhaps far removed,
perhaps for the time bitterly hostile. They learned
to pray, as Andrewes did, " for the Catholic Church,
its establishment and increase ; for the Eastern, its
deliverance and union ; for the Western, its adjust
ment and peace ; for the British, the supply of what
is wanting in it, the strengthening of that which re
mains in it." They recognised the authority of its
great and unquestionable decisions. They were willing
to appeal to its authority, if it could be expressed
legitimately. They introduced, even into controversy,
at least to some extent, the habits of discrimination
and respect. Their teaching shows how, after the
first fever and excitement of the revolt against
Eoman usurpation had passed, the leaders of the
English Church felt that much natural mistatement
and exaggeration had to be qualified and corrected ;
it shows how anxious they were, in accordance with
the declared policy of the Eeformation, to keep
hold on the undivided and less cormpted Church of
the early centuries as their standard and guide : it

108 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
shows how much they found in their increased ac
quaintance with it, to enrich, to enlarge, to invi
gorate, to give beauty, proportion and force to their
theology. Still, as I said before, in this unique example of
Church polity, unique in its constitution, unique in
its strong permanence and its fruitfulness, they
hardly attempted a complete, consistent, systematic
theory. There was none agreed upon. There was
none put forward, as in the vast elaborate systems
in fashion on the Continent, where, in folio after
folio, everything is rigorously deduced from its
principles, and everything is in order and in its place.
To the -views and positions of Andrewes and his
school, broadly stated, there were obvious objec
tions which they did not care to probe, and to
which an answer might not have been easy. And
their appeal to the idea of Church authority grew
into shape, and the ecclesiastical administration based
on it was carried on and enforced, under the shield of
James I.'s interpretation of the Eoyal Supremacy,
which meant a right to meddle with everything, and
settle everything by his personal wisdom. But I
suppose the truth was, though they felt it only in a
partial way and without putting it into words, that
they saw that though the English Church, accord
ing to tbie current theories, was an- anomaly, it was
only an anomaly among anomalies, — amid universal
anomaly. The sins, the crimes, the misrule of cen«

LANCELOT ANDRR-WES. 109
turies had brought their inevitable, their irreme
diable consequences, and made claims and rules
inapplicable and impossible which belonged to
times when these evils were yet in the future.
It was a saying of a wise observer,* that " whoever
enters on the study of Church history must be
prepared for many surprises." And certainly the
course of Church history has not run, either for
good or for evil, in the course which theories would
have prescribed to it. Stern and terrible facts stand
up in it, not to be disguised by the most pretentious
of theories. And, happily on the other hand, mis
chiefs which seemed inevitable have found unthought-
of compensations or remedies. I doubt whether
Andrewes cared much for that intellectual complete
ness of theory which we make much of. He knew
that Eome in his day was unprimitive, tyrannical,
aggressive, unscrapulous : he knew that Puritanism
was narrow, uncatholic, cruelly intolerant; and he
would not be cheated out of the facts which he
saw, for want of a convenient theory. He fought
both Eomanist and Puritan with such weapons
as he found in his hand. But his governing rule
was a noble one — that expressed in the ancient
saying, "Zirdprav eX/i;^e?, ravrav K6a-/iei, " Sparta is
your portion, do your best for Sparta : " — noble, I
say, because so honest, and so unpretending ; for in

* Charles Marriott of Oriel.

110 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
religion, which means man's blindness and weakness
as well as his hope, it does not do to be ambitious,
or to claim great things for men or for systems.
England might have faults, mistakes, shortcomings,
inconsistencies ; let him do his best to bear their
discredit, or to mend their evils. But England and
its Church had lived on before he was born, and
would live on after he had done his part and passed
away. The feeling with which he laboured in his
work of life is, I conceive, expressed in the following
passage from Archbishop Bramhall :* —
i' No man can justly blame me for honouring my
spiritual mother, the Church of England, in whose
womb I was conceived, at whose breasts I was
nourished, and in whose bosom I hope to die. Bees
by the instinct of nature do love their hives, and birds
their nests. But God is my witness that I, accord
ing to my uttermost talent and poor understanding,
I have endeavoured to set down the naked truth im
partially, without either favour or prejudice, the two
capital enemies of right judgment. . . My desire
hath been to have Tmth for my chiefest friend, and
no enemy but error. If I have had any bias, it hath
been desire of peace, which our common Saviour
hath left as a legacy to His Church, that I might
live to see the reunion of Christendom, for which I

• Quoted in Newman's 'Prophetical Office of the Chnroh,'
p. vi.

LANCELOT ANDREWES. Ill
shall always bow the knees of my heart to the Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ ....
" Howsoever it be, I submit myself and my poor
endeavours, first to the judgment of the Catholic
CEcumenical essential Church, which, if some of late
days have endeavoured to hiss out of the school, I
cannot help it. From the beginning it was not so.
And if I should mistake the right Catholic Church
out of human frailty, or ignorance (which for my
part, I have no reason in the world to suspect ; yet
it is not impossible, when the Eomanists themselves
are divided into five or six several opinions, what
this Catholic Church, or what their Infallible
Judge is), I do implicitly, and in the preparation
of my mind, submit myself to the True Catholic
Church, the Spouse of Christ, the Mother of
the Saints, the Pillar of Truth. And seeing my
adherence is firmer to the Infallible Eule of Faith,
i. e. the Holy Scriptures interpreted by the Catholic
Church, than to mine own private judgment and
opinions; although I should unwittingly fall into
an error, yet this cordial submission is an implicit
retractation thereof, and I am confident will be so
accepted by the Father of Mercies, both from me
and from all others who seriously and sincerely do
seek after peace and truth.
" Likewise I submit myself to the Eepresentative
Church, that is, to a free General Council, or so
General as can be procured ; and until then, to the

112 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
Church of England, wherein I was baptised, or to a
National English Synod. To the determination of
all which, and of each of them respectively, according
to the distinct degree of their authority, 1 yield a
conformity and compliance, or at the least, and to
the lowest of them, an acquiescence."
For principles and convictions such as these,
Andrewes, pre-eminently among our Divines, made
a home in the Eeformed Church of England. It
was these principles and convictions which taught
English Churchmen of the next generation, amid
the direst ruin that ever fell on an' institution, in
exile abroad among mocking or pitying strangers,
in utter overthrow at home, not to despair of the
Church of England.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH.
BoBN A.D. 1602 ; Died a.d. 1644.

" The Bible the Religion of Protestants '' — Its defects as a defini
tion — Life of Chillingworth — The occasion and form of his
book — His merits and defects — His effective answers (1) to
Rome's boast of certainty ; (2) to her claim of infallibility ; (3)
to that of being the sole authoritative interpreter of Scripture
— The width of Chillingworth's tolerance — His book con
demned by Puritans — His own inconsistencies and lapse into
intolerance — The incompleteness of his method — His defects as
a student of Scripture and Church History — Defended against
Keble's charge of Arianism — His book more perilous than
useful for minds drifting Romewards — The more excellent way.
The wide fame of William Chillingworth may be
said, with scarcely an exaggeration, to rest almost,
if not altogether, on a single paragraph. It is, as
its popularity has proved, telling and effective
enough. He had been challenged to say what he
meant when lie said that the religion of Protestants
was a safe way of salvation, and he accepted the
challenge and replied, near the close of his great
argument : — " By the religion of Protestants I do
not understand the doctrine of Luther, or Calvin,
or Melanchthon; nor the confession of Augusta
(Augsburg), or Geneva ; nor the Catechism of Heidel-
[king's coll.] I

114 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
berg, nor the Articles of the Church of England ;
no, nor the harmony of Protestant confessions ; but
that wherein they ah agree, and which they all
subscribe with a greater harmony as a perfect rule
of their faith and actions, that is, the Bible. The
Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Pro
testants. Whatsoever else they believe beside it, and
the plain, irrefragable, indubitable consequences of
it, well may they hold it as a matter of opinion; but,
as matter of faith and religion, neither can they,
with coherence to their own grounds, believe it of
themselves, nor require the belief of it of others,
without most high and schismatical presumption.
I, for my part, after a long, and (as I verily believe
and hope) impartial search of 'the true way to
eternal happiness,' do profess plainly that I cannot
find any rest for the sole of my foot but upon this
rock only. I see plainly with mine own eyes that
there are Popes against Popes, Councils against
Councils, some Fathers against others, the same
Fathers against themselves, a consent of Fathers of
one age against a consent of Fathers of another age,
the Church of one age against the Church of another.
... In a word, there is no sufficient ceitainty but
of Scripture only for any considering man to build
upon. . . . Propose me anything out of this book,
and require whether I believe it or no,, and seem it
never so incomprehensible to human reason, I will
subscribe it with hand and heart, as knowing no

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 115
demonstration can be stronger than this — God hath
said so, and therefore it is true."*
" The Bible and the Bible only is the rehgion of
Protestants." There is the sentence which has
made Chillingworth more " ever-memorable" than
his friend John Hales. Trumpeted on platforms,
standing on title-pages as a motto, the cry of a party,
the watchword of controversialists who, agreeing ui
nothing else, agreed in that ; coming by the strange
irony of history to be blazoned on the banners, not of
the advocates of freedom and tolerance and un
restrained inquiry, but of the school that is most
narrow and jealous and bitter in its relations to such
freedom, — the sentence lives, and will continue, for
good or evil, to live among us for many a long day
as a word of power.
And yet there is, if I mistake not, something of
a false ring in it. I reserve for the present the
question how far it presents a satisfying ground of
faith, or a true method for the attainment of re
ligious truth. But, prior to that inquiry, it is obviously
inaccurate in its pointed terseness. Eeligion, in any
adequate sense of the word, includes faith and love,
and character and conduct. It is a life, and not a
book, however sacred the book may be. Other words,
which tell us what to think of as " pure and undefiled
religion,"! rise instinctively in our memories as a far

' Religion of Protestants,' I. -yrL 56. t James i. 27.
i2

116 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
better definition. What Chillingworth meant, as
he explains in the immediate context, is that the
Bible is a "perfect rule of faith and action," and
that a tme religion consists in following that rule.
But the sentence, taken by itself, tends, in its clap
trap form, to an unreasoning Bibliolatry. Men have
been led by it to think of the Bible as a book, and
not as a library of many books. They have resented
and resisted any inquiry into the claims of each
separate book, or any part of any book, to a place
in that library. They have clothed every part of
every book with an equally infallible authority, and
have refused to admit the thought of graduated and
varied teaching. " God has said so, and therefore it is
true," has been their answer to critics and historians
and men of science who pressed conclusions that
seemed adverse to the claims thus set up. I do not
say that Chillingworth foresaw these results. I
believe that the largeness of heart and the restless
spirit of discussion which placed him in advance of his
age in the seventeenth century would have kept him
in advance still, had he lived in the nineteenth ; but
it is clear that he is answerable for having supplied
those who wanted a "cry" with which to attack
others whose thoughts were wider than their own
with one so convenient for their purpose. The
"masters of those who know," men like Hooker
and Butler, would never have committed them
selves to so perilous an epigram.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 117
One passage in the paragraph just quoted leads
us to ask more as to the writer's life, and what we
learn, beyond all question, deepens our interest in
him. He speaks of his " long and impartial search
of the true way of eternal happiness." We find, on
turning to his life, what he thus refers to. Baptised
under the sponsorship of Laud, and brought up
under his influence ; entering Oxford as a scholar of
Trinity at the age of sixteen, and becoming a Fellow
at twenty-six ; taking to no professional or, as far as
we know, tutorial work ; gifted with a natural turn for
argumentative debate, his life was pre-eminently that
of a student and inquirer. Such a man, in that time
and in that place, could not fail to be drawn to the
great controversy, which then filled men's minds, as
to the claims of Eomanism on the one side, and of
Anglicanism and Protestantism (not as yet con
trasted terms, though tending to become so) on the
other. The Jesuit Fisher, memorable as Laud's
opponent in the controversy, found him in this
state, and plied him, only too effectually, with the
stock arguments in favour of the claims of the
Eomish Church to infallible authority. In the year
1629 he joined that Church, and passed from his
Fellowship at Trinity to a renewed pupillage in
the Jesuit seminary at Douay. His turn for asking
questions, and not resting content with evasive
answers, soon made him impatient of his life there.
He became a " doubting Papist," and, once again,

118 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
"of a doubting Papist a confirmed Protestant."
Laud had come to the rescue with his arguments for
Protestantism, and the bird escaped out of the snare
of the fowler. If he did not return at once to the ful
ness of his first love, and was content to remain as in
lay communion with the Church of England, while
he shrank from entering her ministry, it was because
she seemed to him to have retained (notably in the
damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed) some
what too much of the intolerance and anathema
tising spirit of the Church of Eome. Here also he
found (the phrase seems to have been a favourite one
with him) a " high and schismatical presumption." *
It is clear from the interesting " Apologia pro vita
sua" which forms part of the Preface to the ' Eeligion
of Protestants,' that he looked back upon these
oscillations with no shame or regret. It was not
discreditable to his intellect to have been dissatisfied
with the popular arguments for Protestantism, which
satisfied less acute minds, nor to have been dazzled'
for a time by the glamour of an alien system which
promised to solve his difficulties ; still less to have
detected the inadequacy of that solution, and to
have taken up a position, more or less apart from
others, of inquiry and suspense. It was not dis
creditable to his character, for in each case he had
made a real sacrifice for the love of truth, He

' Works ' (Oxford, 1838), I. p. xxvi

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 119
looked back with a serene complacency on these
changes as "the most satisfactory actions to him
self that ever he did, and the greatest victory tliat
he ever obtained over himself and his affections,"*
In joining the Church of Eome, he had forfeited his
fellowship. In refusing to sign the Thirty-nine
Articles, he shut himself out from all the natural
pathways to preferment for scholars and divines. He
was content to remain a scholar, and the friend of
scholars, and among those friends were Hales, and
Selden, and Falkhmd.t
Such was his position when, in 1638, he entered
on the work to which he owes his reputation. There
had been skirmishes before with Jesuits whom he
had known at Douay and elsewhere, Lewgar and
Floyd ; but the controversy assumed a wider aspect,
and he entered the list prepared to do battle with
more redoubtable foes. He was encouraged and
patronised in his work by Laud. It was submitted
to Prideaux and Fell, and the then Vice-Chancellor
of Oxford, for their approval. It was dedicated to
the King. It was in part written at Great Tew, the
family seat of Falkland, and not without the counsels
of the men who gathered there as Falkland's guests.
It was known that he was about to write, and
his opponents sought to deter him by a libellous
pamphlet, taunting him with the changes in his

¦? 'Religion of Protestants,' I. v. 103. t Preface, § 29.

120 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
religion, insinuating that he tuned his voice accord
ing to the time, and was in heart a Socinian ;
threatening him with the publication of papers that
he had written against Protestantism while he was
under Fisher's infiuence.
We naturally turn to a work by such a man,
written under such conditions, with very high expec
tations. I am constrained to say that I think that
in most cases those expectations are destined to a
very grievous disappointment. The book is essen
tially the work of a second-rate, not of a first-rate
thinker ; of a mind logical, acute, disputatious, but
not endowed with the "vision and the faculty di
vine " which gives width and equilibrium, and order
,and lucidity. The plan of the book is eminently
characteristic of a controversialist of the second
order. It is not a calm survey of the whole
question, but is the fourth in a series of pamphlet-
volumes, which have to be mastered before it can be
properly understood. A Jesuit writer named Knott,
with an alias of Wilson, had published, in 1630, a
book under the title of 'Charity Mistaken,' which
had for its object to show that the traest charity on
the part of Catholics was to declare that " Protestancy
unrepented destroys salvation," and that they were
" mistaken," i.e. misjudged, when they were charged
with want of charity for doing so. He was answered,
in 1633, by Dr. Potter, Provost of Queens' College,
Oxford, and replied in a volume of greater length

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 121
and considerable power, with the title of 'Mercy
and Truth, or Charity maintained by Catholics.' It
was to refute this reply that Chillingworth set to
work. He stood proof against Knott's unscruj5ulous
attempt to blacken his character before his book was
published. He had the courage to print the treatise
which he answered in extenso, and then dissect it,
chapter by chapter, section by section, almost
sentence by sentence. He exliibits in doing so a
singular readiness in applying the forms of logic,
such as led Locke to recommend the 'Eeligion of
Protestants' as a mental athletic exercise, apart from
the conclusions which it advocates. Few men are
more skilful in detecting the use of equivocal terms,
or an undistributed middle, or an illicit process of
the minor. But the result of this, carried through a
folio volume, is, as I think most readers must feel,
somewhat tedious, jarring, and eminently unsatis
fying. The controversy is involved in endless person
alities. Had Dr. Potter fairly represented ' Charity
Mistaken,' or adequately answered this or that
paragraph in it ? Had ' Charity Maintained ' fairly
represented or adequately answered this or that para
graph of Dr. Potter's ? I frankly confess that I
have not cared to read the books which are the first
two terms in the series, and I doubt whether any
man living has. I feel, with Pascal, that hfe is too
short and work too pressing to give much time to
these third-rate books. But, taking the last two

122 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
treatises, as they are printed together, the impression
which they leave on one's mind is that of two dispu
tants, not unfairly matched, holding an exercise, after
the old fashion, in the Divinity School of a Univer
sity ; of two eminent counsel in some cause celebre,
who come last in the hearing of the case, and whose
speeches are crammed with references to the argu
ments of those who have preceded them. It is clear, I
think, that a mind of the first order would have chosen
quite another method than this, and would have
risen to the height of the great argument. Hooker
¦ and Butler had definite opponents enough. There
is hardly a sentence in their great works which was
not meant to bear upon something that those oppo
nents had said ; but they had the generalship which
enabled them to plan a campaign, instead of wasting
their strength in hand-to-hand skirmishes. They
rose above the strife of tongues into a serener region,
and pursued, through years of patient thought, the
calm tenor of their way. It may sometimes seem
necessary, as in a recent polemic against the writer of
' Supernatural Eeligion,' * to follow one who attacks
what we hold dear, through a series of inaccuracies
and misstatements, when the object is to diminish
the authority of the vast emdition of which his book
appears to be the outcome ; but the work of the trae
apologist must be constructive as well as destractive.
* I refer, of course, to the masterly series of papers by Canon
Lightfoot in the ' Contemporary Review ' of the last two years.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH.

123

He does well to guard himself as far as he can, against
the cheap triumph of hitting a blot in the argument,
or a mistake in the alleged facts, of his antagonist.
Chillingworth was, it must be owned, no vulgar
Protestant controversialist. His book, dedicated,
as has been said, to Charles I., was avowedly a
defence of Laud's Conference with Fisher, and
planned therefore, in part, upon the same lines.*
The savour of the school of Laud was still so far on
him that he never presses the popular declamatory
arguments that Eome was Babylon, and that the
Pope was Antichrist and the Man of Sin. He is
more tolerant in his language as to her errors than
the Homilies or the Articles, and never speaks of
them as involving those who hold them in damna
tion. He loojjs with respect and affection on many
of the Eoman Catholic friends who held aloof from
him.f Still less is he a Protestant on the Puritan-
Calvinistic side of Protestantism. He shrinks from
its unloving and unlovely dogmatism; from the
Antinomian tendencies of its doctrine of justification
by faith, from the claims of its wilder followers to a
special illumination, from the tangled mazes of its
reasonings about the Divine decrees, from the bare
ness and meagreness of its outward forms of worship. J

'* Epistle Dedicatory to
Charles I.
t " My own particular obliga
tions to many of you, such and
so great that you cannot perish

without part of myself" ('Re
ligion of Protestants,' i. 5).
X ' Religion of Protestants,'
Pref. § 22,

124 MASTERS IN ESGIJSH THEOLOGY:
There were clearly many points of sympathy —
more than many of those who quote Chillingworth
imagine — between such a man and Laud. We cannot
wonder that the great representative of the Angli
canism of the Stuart period should have endeavoured
to secure so able a writer for the ministry of the
Church of England, and have persuaded him to sign
the Articles and to accept the Damnatory Clauses
under the cover of the wide latitude for open
questions offered by the King's declaration, written,
it is believed, by Laud himself, and prefixed to the
Articles, as if it were an authoritative expression of
the meaning of subscription. On the other hand,
his position in relation to the Church of Eome is not
that of the patristic Anglican. His charge against
her is not that she has sinned against the tradition
of the third or the fourth century, but that she has
' sinned against Scripture. His argument against her
claim to speak with infallibility is not — or at least
not prominently — that such and such Fathers are
witnesses against it, that this or that Pope has been
involved in acknowledged heresy, but that there is
no d priori ground for expecting the guidance of a
livilig infallible interpreter in addition to the infal
lible Word ; that there is no Scriptural proof of the
appointment of such an interpreter; and that if there
were, as the Church of Eome teaches that men only
know Scripture to be from God on her authority,
men would still be treading in the circle of a vicious

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 125
and inconclusive reasoning. It was to be expected
that a mind more than usually acute would make
some successful points in the conduct of such an
argument, and some of those which Chillingworth
makes are put with a masterly dexterity. We have,
it is true, to disinter the weapons from much that is as
the lumber of a bygone age ; but they have not alto
gether lost their edge, and may yet be useful in war
fare against the same foe.
(1.) Nothing, for example, can be more effective
than his retort on the Eomanist plea that Protes
tantism leaves the minds of men floating in un
certainty, and that those who adhere to it can never
have an assured certainty of faith or hope of
salvation. " You," he rejilies in substance, " involve
your followers in a far more . terrible uncertainty.
You teach that the validity of every sacrament but
baptism depends upon its administration by a priest ;
that without priestly absolution there is no assurance
of forgiveness; and you teach, further, that the
intention of the priest is essential when he celebrates
the Lord's Supper or pronounces absolution ; that
the intention of the Bishop is equally essential iu
imparting to him his priestly character. How is
any one to know whether that condition has been
fulfilled? How can any human intellect fathom
the secret intentions of those who, from the Apostles*
time to our own, have carried on the succession of
the priesthood ? How can the penitent know that

126 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
the individual priest from whom he hears the words
of pardon intends to convey that pardon. If the
priest turned atheist — and history showed it was not
an impossible hypothesis — what effect had the
sacraments so administered on the souls of those who
received them ? Was ever any doctrine more fuU
of horrible uncertainties than this ? Was the Pro
testant who trusted in the love of God revealed in
Christ worse off as regards assurance than the
Eomanist?"* (2.) Or again, there was the Eomish
argument that a Church left without an infallible'^
living voice to decide all questions as they arose
would not answer the Divine purpose in calling a
Church into existence; that Scripture, however
sacred and true, and in itself infallible, needed an
interpreter; that without such an interpreter the
wants of men would not be adequately met, and that
it was, therefore, a necessary consequence of our faith
in the -wisdom and goodness of God to believe that
he had provided one. Here his answer is, after the
manner of Butler, that aU such assumptions are, in
the nature of the case, shallow and gratuitous ; that
experience, and not expectation, must be the test of
what actually is ; that things are not always as we,
in our weakness and blindness, wish that they might
be, and therefore think they ought to be, and believe
that they must be. And as the Eoman theory

< Religion of Protestants,' I., ii §§ 62-68.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 127
implies that all written statements of truth, even
inspired statements, are in their nature ambiguous,
and therefore need interpretation, how can we know
that the infallible interpretation, when reduced to
writing, may not be equally ambiguous, and stand,
therefore, equally in need of being itself interpreted ?
What assurance of faith is there, on this assumption,
unless we extend the hypothesis of infallibility
somewhat more widely ? If what we think desirable
is therefore credible, and tlierefore true, why not
postulate an infallible Archbishop in every province,
an infallible Bishop in every diocese, an infallible
priest in every parish, so that every believer may thus
have the living, unerring voice of the Church which
alone can guide him ? Why, indeed, stop there, or
hesitate to claim, because we might wish it, a like
infallibility for every member of the Church ?* The
high argument which, wrapt in the mist of rhetoric,
had cast its spell in earlier days over his own
intellect, Chillingworth thus pushes, as with the
keenness of resentment, to a reductio ad ahsurdum,
and there he leaves it. (3.) Or, once more, there was
the claim of Eome to be the only guardian of the
true meaning of the oracles of God, on which she
professed, at least in theory, to found her teaching.
The difficulties of Scripture were ostentatiously pa
raded, the uncertainties which hang over the author
ship or canonicity of this or that book of Scripture,
* 'Religion of Protestants,' I. ii. § 128.

128 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
were pressed on the inquirer. What help was there
in going to translations which might be erroneous,
to commentaries which might be misleading ? How
was the Protestant believer, an " unlearned and igno
rant man," to find his way in this labyrinth of error?
What safety -was there but in submitting to the
Church; to the divinely-appointed head and ruler
of that Church, who sat in the seat of Peter, and
who could unfold the meaning of all dark and
ambiguous texts? To this the answer was brief and
telling enough. " If the Pope can do this, why does
he not write a Commentary ? Why not seat himself
in cathedra, and fall to writing expositions upon the
Bible for the direction of Christians to the true
sense of it ? " * Why hoard up the treasures com
mitted to him instead of giving them as alms to a
hungry and a thirsty world ? I do not know what
answer was given, or could be given, to this question.
Probably the outcome of the editorial work of the
Papacy in the manifold discrepancies of the Sixtine
and Clementine texts of the Vulgate had not en
couraged it to go further in that direction. The
blunders of a Commentary could not be quite so
easily transferred, as they had been, to the shoulders
of the printer, and it was thought safer to let even
the Ebemish and Douay versions go forth as private
adventures, rather than incur the risk of stamping

' Religion of Protestants,' I, iL § 95.

WILLIAM CHILLING WORTB. 129
them with the seal of the fisherman as infallible
representatives of the Divine originals.
It is obvious that one who could thus reason was on
the way to a wide and comprehensive tolerance ; and
in Chillingworth's nobler moods we find him giving
utterance to conclusions in which wisdom and charity
are alike conspicuous. Such passages have naturally
been often quoted before, but they are worth quoting
again. " When the Scriptures are not plain, then if
we, using diligence to find the truth, do yet miss of
it, and fall into error, there is no danger in it. They
that err and they that do not err may both be saved.
So that those places which contain things necessary,
and where no error was dangerous, need no infallible
interpreters, because they are plain ; and those that
are obscure need none, because they contain not things
necessary ; neither is error in them dangerous. . . .
To say that God will damn men for errors as to such
things, who are lovers of Him and lovers of truth, is
to rob man of his comfort and God of His good
ness; to make man desperate and God a tyrant.
... If men suffer themselves neither to be be
trayed into their errors nor kept in them by any sin
of their wills, if they do their best endeavours to
free themselves from all errors and yet fail of it
through human frailty, so well am I persuaded of the
goodness of God,, that if in me alone should meet a
confluence of all such errors of all the Protestants in
the world that were thus qualified, I should not be
[king's coll.] • K

130 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
SO much afraid of them all as I should to ask pardon
for them." • (1.) It is clear that language such as this
was a sword with two edges, and that it struck equally
at the Eoman and Protestant dogmatists. And
those of the latter school who were wise in their
generation, and saw the drift of things as well as
their immediate working, were, for that reason, even
more bitter in their hatred of ChiUingworth than
the controveisialists who were his direct antagonists.
To them he was an Arminian, a Socinian, and a
sceptic. The fact that he had taken Orders under
Laud's influence, and that he had joined the King's
army and, with a strange versatility of talent, had
actually suggested some new form of battering-ram
for use in the siege of Gloucester — possibly also the
rankling memory of old antagonism at Oxford — may
have sharpened Cheynell's bittemess against the
prisoner on whom he exercised his powers of mental
torture ; but he, and such as he, were not mistaken
when they felt that their craft also was in danger to
•be set at nought if this new doctrine should spread,
and the final anathema which he uttered, at Chilling^
worth's funeral, on the " cursed book — ^the corrupt and
rotten book " — which had " seduced so many precious
souls," has but too many parallels in the language
used by men of very opposite schools and parties, of
those who, in later times, have followed in Chilling-
• 'Religion of Protestants' — Answer to Preface of 'Charity
Maintained,' p. 26.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 131
worth's footsteps, and taught as he, in his best
moments, taught.*
It was a hard matter in that time of evil tongues
and evil days for a mind, even of the first order, to
attain to its full-orbed completeness. Men. had to
act, and could not remain in an attitude of calm
neutrality. They had to take their side, and to choose
what seemed to them the least of evils, even while
they felt painfully the faults and the perils of the
side which they had chosen. We dare not blame
such men as Falkland and Chillingworth for the
choice they actually made. We may even believe
that had we lived under the same conditions, we
should have done as they did. We cannot read,
without a pitying sadness, of Falkland's ingeminated
" Peace," or of Chillingworth's description of the con
tending parties as " publicans and sinners, on the one
side, against Scribes and Pharisees on the other ; "
" on the one side hypocrisy, on the other profaneness ;
no honesty or justice on the one side, and very little
piety on the other." t But also we cannot think,
without a sigh, of Falkland as joining the Council of
Charles precisely at the time when he made himself
an accessory after the fact to the King's most despotic
outrage on the liberties of England. We feel a pang
of regretful shame at the thought that the author
of the 'Eeligion of Protestants,' identified himself

» See TuUoch's ' Leaders of Religious Thought,' I. p. 297.
t Sermon I.
K 2

132 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
with the ecclesiastical policy of Laud at the very
time when men saw in it what was fatal at once to
the liberty and to the Protestantism of England.
Doubtless he felt that there was a hardness and
bitterness, such as bore its fruit in the Westminster
Confession, in the dogmatism of the Presbyterians,
which was worse than anything he found in the
Thirty-nine Articles or the Athanasian Creed. The
, tolerant latitude allowed to thought, if not to
teaching, in the Eoyal Declaration, gave him room
to breathe freely ; and to a mind such as his, not
indisposed to outward richness and comeliness in
worship, many of the questions at issue between
.Laud and his opponents — gestures and positions,
altars at the east end railed round, or open tables
in the body of the church — would seem, rightly,
to come under the category of " things indifferent,"
if not of the "infinitely little." As it was, the
change brought with it a certain want of consistency.
Traces of that failing are found even in his great
work itself, and yet more in the Sermons which he
preached after he accepted preferment. He had
taught, in his nobler mood, that no man should
condemn another who honestly seeks the truth;
and he pronounces his anathema on those who hold
doctrines which his Eomanist opponent charged him
with holding.* He looks on the doctrine that men

* Preface, § 28.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 133
may be saved in any other religion but that of Christ
as "impious and detestable."* He acknowledges
an Act of Parliament of the 1st of Elizabeth as a
rule of faith,t and pronounces all those who contra
vene it to be heretics. He had contended for freedom
of thought, and he wishes that men were restrained
by authority from preaching " Justification by
Faith" unless they taught also the necessity of
obedience; or even from reading the chapters of
St. Paul's Epistles that proclaim it, unless it were
balanced by reading at the same time the chapter
that dwells on the excellence of charityj. He had
been charged with tendencies to Socinianism, and he
vindicates himself by speaking of its theory of the
Atonement, not as a lamentable error, but as a
" blasphemous heresy ."§ He had led men to think
that all Scripture that touched on matters necessary
to salvation was plain and easy, and needed no
authoritative interpretation. And now it becomes
almost a formula with him to call on his hearers to
submit themselves, in tho vexed controversies of the
time, to the voice of " our Holy Mother the Church,
speaking in her Articles and other formularies^" |j .
He disparages Luther's doctrine of justification,
wishes that his Latin had never been Englished,ir
and ti-eats the popular illustrations of it, "faith

* ' Religion of Protestants,' L vii. § 8. t Preface, § 38.
J ' Religion of Protestants,' L vii. 32. § Sermon V. 29.
II Sermon VII. 8, 14 ; V. 58. "I Sermon V. 63.

134

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

the hand that lays hold of the righteousness of
Christ," and so on, as mere "flowers of rhetoric,
figures, and metaphors."* He speaks in language
which would startle many of those who use his name
and circulate his book, of the value of personal con
fession and the efficacy of priestly absolution, as
distinct from comfortable and quieting words of
counsel.t He had rightly urged that "nothing is
more against religion than to force religion ; that
human violence may make men counterfeit, but
cannot make them believe ;" and he comes to count
it as "a greater happiness than God had granted to
His chosen servants in the infancy of the Church,"
that " we have now the sword of the civil magistrate,
the power and enforcement of laws and statutes, to
maintain our precious faith against all heretical or
schismatical oppugners thereof." f The preacher of
an almost universal tolerance has become the advo*
cate of the policy of the Star Chamber, and could
not rightly cast a stone at that of the Inquisition.
Nor can it be said that his system of religious
thought, even in the treatise to which he owes his

* Sermon VIII. 40.
t "Come nrc to him (the
spiritual physician) only with
such a mind as you would go to
a learned man experienced in
the Scriptures, as one that can
speak comfortable and quieting
words to yon, but as to one that

hath authority delegated to him
from God Himself to absolve and
acquit you of your sins" (Sermon
VIL 14).
X Sermon II. 15. Compare
also ' Religion of Protestants,' I.
iL122.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 135
fame, is thorough and complete. He postulates at
once the sufficiency and the infallibility of Scripture.
If asked how he knows the books which are recognised
by Protestants to be Scripture, his answer is, by
universal tradition. If pressed with the fact that, as
regards some of them, the tradition is not universal,
his answer is that there can in that case be no great
harm or danger in the uncertainty, or that a single
book, such as the Gospel of St. Mark, contains all
things necessary to salvation ; or that men may have
a saving faith if they believe the fundamental truths
contained in Scripture, even though they have
never read a single book of Scripture, or, reading it,
have not accepted the book as of Divine authority.
He does not appear to have asked himself the
question, which must yet be faced, on what grounds
he held that Scripture was infallible,* or to what
subjects its infallibility extended ; how far the human
character of the writer is traceable in what he wrote ;
how far there are different aspects and phases of the
trath presented in it, according to the "sundry times
and divers manners " in which God spake unto the
Fathers. We do not find in him even the reverenti'al
caution that leads Hooker to protest against the
"incredible praises "t which the ultra-Protestant
party of his time lavished on the Scriptures as the
one certain guide and standard of belief and action

Preface, § 28. t ' Ecoles. Polity,' II. 8, § 7.

136 MASTERS IN -ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
in all matters, secular or religious, human or Divine.
To him the Bible is the Bible, and a text is a text,
wherever it may be found, to be quoted as the end of
controversy. We do not find in him, accordingly,
any trace of that method of free and thoughtful
study of book by book, and chapter by chapter, and
word by word, of which Erasmus and Grotius had al
ready set the example, and which even Hammond was
at the time carrying on, not without success ; or of that
more devout and meditative study which bore such
rich fruitage in the Sermons, and yet more in the
Prayers, of Andrewes. He is haunted at every step by
the controversies of the time, and far as he under
takes in his Sermons the work of an interpreter (and
I am far from questioning his endeavours to be true
and faithful in that work) his chief aim appears to
be that of freeing the favourite texts of his Puritan
opponents from the glosses which they had put
on them.* He is as one standing outside the goodly
edifice that had been reared, part by part, and with
varying materials, in successive ages. He is loud in
his praises of its strength and majesty. Its founda
tions are on the eternal rock; there is not a flaw
in any stone in the whole building ; it is an impreg
nable fortress ; he counts its towers and bulwarks
and is ready with his engines of defence ; but he
never seems to have studied its plan, or to have

* See, in partioular, Sermon VUL

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 137
entered into the thoughts of the master-builders who
were from time to time employed on it, still less to
have passed beyond the vestibule into the inner
chambers, so as to bring forth things both new
and old from the treasures of the house of the
interpreter. Nor can we assign higher praise to him as a student
of Church history. It would be idle to contend that
he had not read Fathers and Councils with consider
able care, and could quote as well as another on
occasion. But here also the spell of an age of con
troversy was on him. As he goes to his Bible for
texts, so he goes to the Fathers for dogmatic
authorities to quote, or dogmatic inconsistencies to
detect. It never seems to occur to him, or, indeed,
to the theologians of his time generally, that these
men also were of like passions with ourselves ; that
they had fathers and mothers, and were once little
children, and grew up among such and such sur
roundings; that there was action and re-action
between them and the age in which they lived, and
that each was more or less fashioned by the time
that lay behind him and helped to mould that which
came after him. Studied after Bacon's method,
Ecclesiastical History deserves Bacon's praise,*
"making men wiser than St. Augustine's or St.
Ambrose's works," "teaching learned men to be

* ' Advancement of Learning,' U. L § 2.

138 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
wise in the use and the administration of learning."
But it was not so with Chillingworth. The rich
eloquence and interpretative insight of John the
Golden-mouthed ; the wide hopes and sympathies
and indefatigable labours of the saintly Origen ;
the manifold activities of Jerome, as the translator,
the ascetic, the guide and director of the consciences
of women; the marvellous Confessions in which
Augustine lays bare the secret recesses of his soul, —
these seem to have had for him no meaning and no
attraction, except so far as they helped him with
a quotation to fling at the head of Puritan or
Papist. What then are we to learn from the life and works
of such an one as William Chillingworth ? One
lesson has been drawn from it by a teacher whose name
we all hold in honour, which, because he has drawn
it, at least deserves consideration. John Keble
quotes in full the passage which 1 have cited at the
commencement of this lecture, and adds, as his
comment on the words, " the Bible and the Bible
only, is the Eeligion of Protestants," and that which
foUows them, — " It is melancholy but instractive to
reflect that the writer of these sentences is credibly
reported to have been an Arian, or near it, before he
died."* It seems a somewhat strange task to have
to defend, as against the author of the * Christian

? Keble's ' Sermon on Primitive Traditions,' note H.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 139
Year,' the man who was the disciple of Laud, the '
friend of Falkland, the favoured child, if any ever
was, of the school of Anglo-Catholic Theology. In
justice, however, to the fair fame of William Chil
lingworth, I am constrained to say that there seems
to be very little foundation for the charge thus
brought. No evidence is given by Keble himself;
and, so far as I can gather from other sources, the
only proof alleged is an undated letter, belonging,
it seems obvious, like another undated fragment
against capital punishment,* to the unsettled, tran
sition period of his life, before he wrote the ' Eeligion
of Protestants,' in wliich he maintains "that the
doctrine of Arius is either a truth, or, at least, no
damnable heresy." t We have no reason, looking to
the character of the man, and the sacrifices he had
made for what he held to be the Truth, to question
the sincerity with which he accepted the Nicene
Greed, or even the substance of the Athanasian, and
his Sermons are surely as little open to the charge
of Arianism as those of Laud himself.
No ; the lesson of his life seems, I think, of quite
another character than that. It is " melancholy but
instructive " to note the evil influence of transitional
and troublous times on minds that gave promise of
noble work, and seemed called to take their place
among the leaders of religious thought. It is " melan-

'Works ' (Oxford, 1838), iii p. 435. t I^>*cl' i- P- *xiii.

140 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
choly but instructive," to watch the oscillations and
inconsistencies of a mind which, if not great, at least
appeared capable of greatness ; to see how the man
who had blown the trumpet, as with no uncertain
sound, shrank back, recoiling from the noise himself
had made ; how the seeker after truth at thirty be
came at forty the timid, tiTquerulous, or declamatory
defender of established formulae, vindicating his own
suspected orthodoxy by denouncing and anathematis
ing the heterodoxy of others. We feel a shock as we
unveil these infirmities of nature which we do not feel
as we read like language in the writuigs of Laud, or
Montague, or Sacheverell. Such men speak accord
ing to their nature ; but better things might have
been hoped from Chillingworth, and we may well
weep when we think that " Atticus is he " who has
thus left a name to point once more the moral of
human weakness. I, for one, must own that I cannot
place him among the master spirits of the Church
of England, or accept the judgment that " there are
few names, even in a history so fruitful in great
names as that of the Church of England, which
more excite our admiration, or which claim a higher
place in the development of religious thought."*
I turn lastly from the writer to the book. Was it
a master-piece of thought, a KTrum it del, such as the
world will not willingly let die ; a work to put into

* TuUoch's < Leaders of Beligious Thought,' I, p. 843.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 141
the hands of students of theology as a guide in
forming their convictions ? I confess that I cannot
bring myself to assign that character to it. Looking
to its structural defects, the absence of any other
plan than that of following, step by step, the tortuous
windings of his adversary's argument, it can claim to
be nothing more than an overgrown and enormous
pamphlet, with wellnigh all the faults incidental
to that form of controversial literature. It may be
true, as Locke has said, that it supplies an admirable
training for the logical powers of men ; but it may be
questioned whether, even from that point of view,
the exercises in which it practises the mental
muscles, like the old fashioned fencing of the period
in its action on the muscles of the body, do not tend
to a somewhat formal and artificial action. And the
man must have a steadier footing and a stronger
brain than fall to the lot of most young students who
can read the 'Eeligion of Protestants* as it ought
to be read, giving equal attention to the arguments
on either side, without feeling more or less puzzled
and bewildered. Physiologists teU us that there is
nothing that so rapidly brings on the symptoms of
intoxication as to take strong and fiery liquors, of
contrasted tastes and qualities, sip by sip, alternately.
Men lose their perception of the difference of flavour ;
they cease to distinguish good wine from bad. Before
long they stagger as a drunken man. And something
analoo'ous to these phenomena is not unlikely, I

142 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
fear, to be the result with unstable and weak minds
as they take the alternate doses of Eomanism and
Protestantism which Chillingworth's work presents
to them. It may even be doubted whether the
cause which we hold to be the stronger has not on
the whole, in spite of some telling and effective
passages, the less winning and persuasive advocate.
There is on the side of the author of ' Charity Main
tained,' as in many writings of the same school, a
confident assumption of certainty ; a thoroughgoing
consistency in maintaining that assumption ; a half-
threatening, half-pitying argument in terrorem, that
the Protestant who could not plead invincible igno
rance — and it was of course assumed that no one v?ho
read the argument could afterwards put in that
plea — would, without doubt, perish everlastingly,
which may prove as telling on an unsettled mind as
like arguments had proved on Chillingworth himself.
He is free from the embarrassments to which his
opponent is exposed by his want of thoroughness
and, not unfreouent inconsistencies. In his desire
to make a point, Chillingworth really underrates the
evidence which the New Testament itself supplies
to a wide-spread knowledge of our Lord's hfe and
teaching, to a well-defined system of faith and prac
tice and worship, before a single Gospel or Epistle
was in existence. He unduly disparages the weight
of the consensus of Christendom as to the main
outlines of the faith contained in Scripture as well

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH.

143

as to the authority of Scripture itself. He has
no wide and far-reaching hope to set against
the threats of his opponent. It is a terrible thing
for the Eomanist to say that Protestants cannot be
saved except by repenting of tlieir errors, but he
has not gone further than the Eomanists, if so far,
in extending the plea of ignorance, and therefore
the hope of salvation, to the Jew, the heretic, and
the heathen.
Young minds need, it seems to me, the guidance
of a calmer and more evenly balanced intellect than
that of one who is neither thorough nor consistent
nor complete — whose whole life was a series of
disputes, and oscillations ending in retrogression.
There is too much ground, I believe, to fear lest
one who was left to the impressions formed by his
books and by his life might grow bewildered and
perplexed with the din of endless controversies,
and that at last, weary of the strife of tongues, he
might be tempted, as nobler intellects than Chilling
worth have in our own time been tempted, to take
that fatal leap in the dark which has been well
described as a flight " on the -wings of an un
bounded scepticism into the depths of an unfa-
thomed superstition."*

• The sentence occurs in a
Charge delivered to Candidates
for Orders in 1846, by the late
Bishop Wilberforce, in reference

to the conversion of Dr. John
Henry Newman to the Church
of Rome.

144 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
No ; there is a more excellent way than these inter
minable debates, postulating infallibility on either
side, on the conflicting claims of Scripture and of the
Church. It is at once our right and our duty, find
ing ourselves in face of both as actual phenomena,
worthy, by the part which they have played in the
world's history, and by the influence they have exer
cised and are exercising now, of all serious considera
tion, to ask what Scripture really is, to trace what
the Church of Christ has actually done, what aspects
of truth have been presented to mankind by each,
through what stages of growth each has been de
veloped. If, as has been the case with most of us, we
have felt ourselves, or have seen in others, the power
of Scripture, or of fellowship in the Communion of
Saints, to purify and bless, to comfort and to calm,
that experience, though it is no bar to the full
freedom of inquiry, is yet an element of evidence
which we cannot rightly or wisely ignore. " Suffi
cient unto the day is the evil thereof," and the con
troversies of our own times are surely enough, and
more than enough, for us, without raking overmuch
into the dust and ashes, the moulderigg bones and rags,
of the controversies of the past. Our last words of
counsel for the student of religious thought, in rela
tion to Chillingworth and the writings with which
his name is identified, may well be, after the pattern
of those which were spoken of old to the waver
ing disciple, " Let the dead bury their dead ; but

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. 145
go thou and preach the Kingdom of God." Let
pamphleteer wrangle with pamphleteer; but go
thou, and study, faithfully and patiently, boldly
and yet reverentially, reverentially and yet boldly,
the Books which have made Christendom what
it is, and the Christendom which the Books have
made.

[kino's coll.]

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE.

BoBN 1609; Died 1683; Bdbied at St. La-weenoe Jewby.*

Whichcote's central principle, the essential unity of all truth and
its affinity to the constitution of man (1), opposed to contempo
rary English thought (2).
His historical position explains the stress which he laid upon action
(3). Traits of his life (4). His Remains (5).
The " truths of first inscription " witness to man's true destiny as
made for God (6). Sin is unnatural (7) : and cairies with it
consequences like itself (8).
Hence nature leaves us with a final conflict (9), which tlie " truths
of after revelation " solve (10).
At the same time ravelation appeals to reason (11) and completely
satisfies it (12). Hence comes the duty of personal inquiry (13)
and of gaining solid conviction in matters of religion (14) ; for
which work God has given us powers which we are bound to
use (15).

* The edition of the Sermons
to which reference is made is
that published at Aberdeen, in
1751, 4 vols. The references are
given by volume and page (e. g.
i. 371). The aphorisms and let
ters are quoted from the edition
published in London, 1753. The
references to the aphorisms are
given by the number (e.g. A.
916). It would have been easy
to multiply references, but I
do not think that one has been
given which will not amply re

pay the trouble of examina
tion. It may be added that there is a
characteristic portrait of Which
cote in the Hall of Emmanuel
College, Cambridge. His face,
tender and half-sad in expres
sion, has much of that refine
ment of feature which is con
spicuous in George Herbert.
The portrait offers a strange
contrast to those near which it is
hung. I have not been able to
learn anything of its history.
L 2

lis MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
In this way action and thought act and react (16) ; and character
is slowly formed (17) ; and the ground of our future is certainly
laid (18) botli as regards punishment (19) and happiness (20).
Whichcote deprecates exactness of dogmatic definition (21), His
judgment on ' mere naturalists ' (22).
His thoughts essentially modem (23) and more comprehensive
than those of succeeding schools (24); but his influence was
mainly confined to his contemporaries (25).
His defects (26) not inherent in his great principles (27) ; while he
accepted the teaching of the Holy Spirit in each age (28).

1. " The Spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." *
This phrase, " over-frequently quoted " by "Which
cote, as his opponents alleged, at once brings before
us the central characteristic of his teaching. For
him reason was "lighted by God and lighting
us to God, res illuminata, illuminans." 'f "What,"
he asks, " doth God speak to but my reason ? and
should not that which is spoken to hear? should
it not judge, discern, conceive, what is God's mean
ing ? "$ "I count it true sacrilege to take from God
to give to the creature, yet I look at it as a dis
honouring of God to nullify and make base His
works, and to think He made a sorry, worthless
piece, fit for no use, when He made man."§
"Truth is so near to the soul, so much the very
image and form of it, that it may be said of truth,
that as the soul is by derivation from God, so truth
by communication. No sooner doth the tiuth of

» Prov. XX. 27. I X Letters, p. 48.
tA. 916. Comp. i. 37L I § Letters, p. 112.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 149
God come into the soul's sight, but the soul knows
her to be her first and old acquaintance. Though
they have been by some accident unhappily parted
a great while, yet, having now through the Divine
Providence happily met, they greet one another
and renew their acquaintance as those that were
first and ancient friends. . . . Nothing is more
natural to man's soul than to receive truth. . . ."*
In this respect the grand articles of the Gospel
are as natural as the precepts of the moral law.
" When the revelation of faith comes, the inward
sense awakened to the entertainment thereof, saith
^vprjKa. It is, as I imagined : the thing expected
proves: Christ the desire of all nations; that is,
the desire of their state : at least the necessity of
their state." f
2. By this bold affirmation of the unity of Truth,
natural and revealed, which he held to differ only
" in way of descent to us," and to be equally " conna
tural " to man,J corresponding in various ways to his
complex and yet indivisible being, appealing alike
to the " testimony of the soul, naturally Christian,"
Whichcote traversed the one conclusion in which the
most powerful representatives of English thought in
his day were united. Bacon and Hobbes, Puritans
and Prelatists, agreed in treating philosophy and

• iii. 17 f. Comp. i. 353. I J iii. 20. A. 444. iii. 213,
t Letters, p. 102. I 388.

150 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
religion as things wholly different in kind. The ex
treme schools on each side concurred in " wounding
virtue," in " destroying" the belief of any immediate
good or happiness in it as a thing in any way suit
able to our make and constitution.* Against both
Whichcote stood forth, in the phrase of Lord Shaftes
bury, who appreciated one half of his teaching, as
" tlie preacher of good-nature ; " yet so that he never
contemplated man apart from God, " abhorring and
detesting," in his own vigorous words " all creature-
magnifying sell-sufficiency." t
3. Whichcote's historical position illustrates the
development of his principles ; and his life is a com
mentary on their power. The vigour of his manhood
was passed in a period of revolution in which every
opinion and institution which had been held sacred in
the past was questioned or overthrown. He saw the
rise of a new philosophy, of a new civil constitution,
of a new ecclesiastical organisation ; and in part he
saw the old restored. At Cambridge he was the con
temporary of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and again
of Barrow and Eay. The date of his ordination coin
cided with that of the imposition of the ship-money
(1636), and fell a year before the appearance of
Descartes' 'Discourse.' His controversy with Tuck-
ney coincided with the Battle of Worcester and the
publication of Hobbes' 'Leviathan' (1656). Hisdeath

* Sliaftesbury, Preface, pp. vii. f. f Letters, pp. 100, 58.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 151
coincided with the execution of Lord W. Eussell
and the Oxford declaration in favour of passive obe
dience (1683). In such an age a serious thinker,
removed from the turmoil of affairs, could not but
look earnestly for some stable foundation for life.
Controversy had issued in an anarchy of sects.
Authority had been invoked on opposite sides
with peremptory sternness. Enthusiasts had ven
tured to claim for their extravagances the title of
inspiration. Theology, systematised with logical
precision in the Westminster Confession, had failed
to cover or to meet the actual facts of daily
experience. It was not strange then that one whose
work was in the Eastern University should attempt
once more to look fairly at " all reasons," to co-ordi
nate the conflicting phenomena which he regarded
from afar ; not strange that he should find the test
of truth which he required in character and conduct.
For Whichcote truth was the soul of action. " I act,
therefore I am,"* was the memorable sentence ia
which he echoed and answered the cogito ergo sum of
Descartes. But I act not as my own maker, not as
my own sustainer, but as the creature and servant of
Him who is original of all and will be final to all ;
who is "to be adored as the chiefest beauty and
loved as the first and chiefest good," who hath
given us "a large capacity which He will fulfil,
* iii. 241.

152 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
and a special relation to Himself, which He will
answer."* 4. The life of Whichcote was, as I have said, a
happy commentary on his principles. Calm, firm,
large-hearted and loving, he passed through sharp
controversies without losing a friend ; he accepted
a dignity — the Provostship of King's College — of
which another was deprived, and was himself dis
placed from it, without diminishing his reputation.
Through all changes he held on his own way; a
thinker rather than a reader in an age pre-eminent
for leaming ; a believer in the present in a society
devoted to the past. Trained, as it appears, in a
Puritan family, entered at Cambridge in the
Puritan foundation of Emmanuel College, acknow
ledging with affection his obligations to his Puritan
tutor, he ventured to judge for himself, even as
a young man,t without affecting isolation in the
maturity of his power. " I have had experience,"
he answers Tuckney, " of that frame of spirit in
the former part of my life, and ... I can no more
look back than St. Paul, after Christ discovered
to him, could return into his former strain." J As a
College lecturer, he tumed aside from Protestant
Scholasticism " to Philosophy and Metaphysics." § As
Yice-Chancellor he deliberately justified his choice.

• ii. 61 ; 94. t Letters, p. 12. X Letters, p. 115.
§ Letters, p. 36.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 153
Yet even here he sought guidance within rather than
without. " Truly, I shame myself to tell," he writes,
" how little I have been acquainted with books. . . .
I have not read many books, but I have studied a few.
Meditation and invention hath been rather my life
than reading." * So it was that alone of his equals he
published nothing. His influence was in personal
intercourse, in preaching and conversation. Eeady
to learn even to the last, gladly confessing that no
man gains so much as by teaching,! he was able to
sympathise with the " young scholars " who flocked
to hear him, and with the " young divines," of whom
he was "a great encourager and kind director." J
In such traits the true teacher rises before us, tender
in his patience and strong in his wisdom, of whom
his greater pupil Smith could say that " he Hved
upon him."§
5. The only writings of Whichcote which have been
preserved in a complete form are four letters to his
old tutor. Dr. Tuckney, which deal with the main
points in which he was at issue with "orthodox"
Puritanism : " The use of reason in religion, the
differences of opinion among Christians, the recon
ciliation of sinners unto God, the studies and leaming
of a minister of the Gospel." A considerable number

* Letters, p. 54.
t iu. 90.
X Tillotson's ' Funeral Sermon,' pp. 32, 24, 33, 31.
§ Aphorisms, Pref. p. xviii.

154 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
of his Sermons were published after his death, partly
from notes of his hearers and partly from his own
notes ; and besides these, twelve centuries of " aphor
isms" were taken from his papers, of which the greater
part are found literally or substantially in his other
remains. But though these materials are frag
mentary and in part confused, it is not difficult to
gain a clear and connected view of his system. His
frequent repetitions, his bright epigrams, his earnest
simplicity, bring his main thoughts vividly before
the reader ; for when he spoke from the pulpit he
appears to have laid aside the technical forms which
sometimes on other occasionfi provoked the criticism
of his contemporaries.
6. The foundation of Whichcote's teaching is the
postulate or axiom that man was made by God to
know Him, and to become like Him. Of this trath
man, he affirms, is himself the witness. " God is the
centre of immortal souls." ... "If God had not
made man to know there is a God, there is nothing
that God could have demanded of him, nothing
wherein He might have challenged him, nothing that
He could have expected man should have received
of Him." * As it is " the traths of first inscription,"
as Whichcote calls them ; " the light of God's crea
tion ;" " the true issue of reason ;" the facts that God
is ; that every fellow-man, as man, claims our respect ;
* iii 144.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE.

155

that every man must reverence himself; or, in other
words, the three duties of godliness, righteousness,
and sobriety, are, he shows, such that you must
immake man if you deny them.* Truth and good
ness, right and justice, are a law with God, unchange
able as He is. The reasons of things are eternal ;
they are not subject to our power ; we practise not
upon them. " They are as much our rule as sense
is to sensitives, or the nature of things to inani
mates." It is our wisdom to observe them, and
our uprightness to comply with them. If we think
otherwise than they require, we live in a lie.t
7. So far we remain as we were created. For the
Fall has not altered the destination of man nor
obliterated his knowledge of it. "The idolatry
of the world," as Whichcote profoundly remarks,
"hath been about the medium of worship, not
about the object of worship."} The testimony of
conscience — our " home-God," as he calls it § — still
remains. Great hopes and great aspirations contend
in the human heart with the sense of weakness
and failure. Sin, however familar, is " unnatural,"
"contrary to the reason of the mind which is
our governor, and contrary to the reason of things
which is our law." Wrong-doing is evil, not only

• iii. 22 ff; 120 f. A. 630,
126,211,989. iii, 422.
t i. 68, 71. A. 258. Comp.
116,257,333,455,456. iii. 92;

i. 149, 386, 253. ii, 397. A. 157,
797. iii. 91, 872, 387 f.
X iii. 202.
§ i. 40. Comp. A. 1092.

156 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
because God has forbidden it, but by its intrinsic
malignity.* 8. These truths involve, as it is evident, conse
quences of infinite moment. The results of actions
are like the actions themselves. Sin carries with it
inevitably the seeds of misery ; virtue the seeds of
joy. For happiness and misery hereafter are not
simple effects of Divine power and pleasure ; they
have a foundation in nature.f It is impossible to
make a man happy by putting him into a happy
place unless he be first in a happy state. } " Heaven,"
)xs he tersely says, "is first a temper and then a
place." § " Heaven present is our resemblance to God,
and men deceive themselves grossly when they flatter
themselves with the hopes of a future heaven, and
yet do, by wickedness of heart and life, contradict
heaven present." || So far therefore as man has lost
the Divine image, happiness for him is inherently
impossible. 9. Here, then, by the contemplation of the original
facts of nature, we are brought face to face with the
great enigma of life. How can man, fallen, sin-
stained, estranged from God, gain his true end?
The " truths of first inscription " witness inexorably
against him. Whichcote points to the answer which

• 1.212; iv. 192. A. 212,523.
ii.397. A. 918.
t iL 198.

X A. 216.
§ A. 464.
11 ii. 196. Comp. ir. 235.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 157
lies in the " truths of after revelation." These are
" the soul's cure."* By them we are assured of for
giveness upon repentance and faith in Christ, and of
needful help iu the struggle of life ; things credible
indeed, yet such that nothing short of the Mission of
the Son of God could have established them solidly.
10. By this Mission, God has re-established His
loving purpose. The light of reason is supplemented
by the light of Scripturcf To use the former is to do
no disservice to grace, for God is acknowledged in
both; in the former, as laying the groundwork of
His creation ; in the latter, as restoring it.} And
this second gift is as universal and as real as the
first. " When God commands the sinner to repent,
this supposes either that he is able, or that God will
make him so." §
11 . It is unnecessary to examine Whichcote's views
on atonement, mediation, grace, repentance, faith,
justification, though they are full of striking points.
The characteristic features of his teaching are better
shown by the emphasis with which he claims to
bring these doctrines of Scripture to the test of
reason, and affirms their complete harmony with it
" We must be men," he writes, " before we can be
Christians." || " The reason is the only tool with which
we can do man's work.lT If God did not make my

* iii. 20.
t A. 109, 778, 920.
X i. 871.

§ A. 516. 811.
II A. 997.
H u. 407.

158 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGV:
faculties true, I am absolutely discharged from all
duty to Him.* For a man hath not a sovereignty
over his judgment; he must judge and believe where
he sees cause and reason.f The reason of a man's
mind must be satisfied ; no man can think against
it. t But they are greatly mistaken," he argues,
"who in religion oppose points of reason and
matters of faith ; as if nature went one way and
the Author of nature went another." § The facts
and the commands of the Gospel equally answer to
our constitution.
12. In virtue of this absolute correspondence be
tween Christianity and the soul, revealed truths are
seen to be transcendent, but not repugnant to the
nature of man. || " Though they be not of reason's
invention, yet they are of the prepared mind readily
entertained and received "IT ... " For men are dis
posed and qualified by reason for the entertaining
those matters of faith that are proposed by God." **
So false is it that the matter of our faith is un
accountable, or that there is anything unreasonable
in religion, that there is no such matter of credit in
the world as the matters of faith; nothing more
intelligible. tt " Nowhere is a man's reason so much
satisfied." tt If ^^ te " once in a true state of religion.

• i. 170. t iii. 216.
X iv. 201 ; ii. 29. A. 942.
§ A. 878. II iL 302.
^ Letters, p. 47.

¦*? A. 644. Comp. 99.
tt iiL 23 f. ; i. 71, 174.
XX A. 94S.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, 159
he cannot distinguish between religion and the
reason of his mind ; so that his religion is the reason
of his mind, and the reason of his mind is his re
ligion. . . . His reason is sanctified by his religion
and his religion helps and makes use of his reason.
Eeason and religion in the subject are but one
thing. ..." * " This I dare defend against the whole
world, that there is no one thing in all that religion
which is of God's making, that any sober man in
the true use of his reason would be released from,
though he might have it under the seal of heaven." f
The obligation to truth is perfect freedom. } The
vision of the Lord in glory to St. Paul was not more
convincing than the exhibition of the Gospel to the
soul. § On the other hand, no sign can warrant our
belief unless it be in conjunction with a doctrine
worthy of God. || " And to me it seems," Whichcote
says, with stern indignation, "to be one of the
greatest prodigies in the world that men that are
rational and intelligent should admit that for
religion, which for its shallowness, emptiness, and
insignificancy, falls under the just reproof and
conviction and condemnation of reason; religion
which makes us less men; religion unintelligible,
or not able to give satisfaction to the noble prin
ciples of God's creation." 1[

* iv. 147.
t iv. 193. Comp, ii. 140.
X iv.839. A. 205, 724, 725.

§ iii. 88.
II A. 1177.
V iiL 249.

160 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
13. Our reason, therefore, " is not laid aside nor
discharged, much less is it confounded by any of
the materials of religion; but awakened, excited,
employed, directed, and improved by it ; for the
. . . understanding is that faculty whereby man is
made capable of God and apprehensive of Him,
receptive from Him and able to make returns
upon Him.* . . ." Eeligion is the living sum of
these manifold activities. It is not " made up of
ignorant well-meanings or . . . slight imaginations,
credulous suspicion or fond conceit " ; that is
superstition ; " but of deliberate resolutions and
diligent searches into the reason of things, and into
the rational sense of Holy Scripture." f We must
then study it till the reason of our minds receives
satisfaction ; for till then we cannot count it our
own, nor has it security and settlement, t We must
have a reason for that which we believe above our
reason. § It is the peculiarity of human nature that
man, through the reason of his mind, can come to
understand the reason of things ; and there is no
coming to religion but this way. || The riches of
earth can be left and inherited ; the wealth of the
soul must be won.lT
14. Thus there is laid upon every one, according to

*

iv

139 £

§

A

771

t

iv.

151.

11
iv.
142
t
iv.
149. A.
1089.
iv.
292.
H
iv.
141.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 161
the measure of his opportunity, the duty of personal
inquiry. To neglect this is to incur the guilt of
superstition, or insincerity, or self-conceit.* The use
of private judgment requires, no doubt, far more
preparation and diligence than men commonly
suppose, a larger comprehension of facts, a more
patient weighing of deductions ; but it is a funda
mental duty.f "If you see not well," Whichcote
writes, " hear the better : if you see not far, hear the
more. The consequence of truth is great ; therefore
the judgment of it must not be negligent." | " He that
believes what God saith without evidence that God
says it, doth not believe God, while he believes the
thing which comes from God." § By a natural re
action, " he that is light of belief will bo as light
of unbelief ;" § and " of all impotencies in the world
credulity in religion is the greatest." IT "It doth
not, then, become a Christian to be credulous."**
He must make it his business to set up a throne
of judgment in his own soul ; for that is " not an act
of religion which is not an act of the understanding ;
that is not an act of religion which is not even
human." ft
15. In virtue of this continuous obligation we work
from first to last, and God also works. Belief and

• iL387; iv. 337 ff.
t u. S8. A. 622. iii. 416.
X A. 1090.
§ A. 977.

II A. 292.
t iv. 143.
•» iiL 114.
: tt L 151 f.

157.

[kino's coll.]

M

162 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
repentance are vital acts.* The selfsame thing that'
is in us called virtue, as it refers to God, is grace, f
It is far from true that man hath nothing to do upon
supposition that God hath done all. J Nay, rather
by the appropriation of His gifts our noblest powers
find their noblest exercise ; and it ill becomes us
to make our intellectual faculties " Gibeonites " — in
Whichcote's picturesque phrase — mere drudges for
the meanest services of the world. § The rule of their ¦
employment even now should be their future destiny :
the law of heaven should be the law of the world. ||
Can any man think, he asks, that God gave him
his immortal spirit as salt, only to keep his body from
decay ? IT Nay, he that is in a good state hath still
work to do.** " God, who hath made us what we are,
would have us employ and improve what we have.
Faculties without any acquired habits witness for
God and condemn us ;" ft and ii spiritual things the
paradox is true, that what is not used is not had. JJ
16. Such reflections serve to indicate the close rela- ,
tion between thought and action, on which Whichcote
lays great stress. " I have always found," he writes,
"such preaching of others hath most commanded
my heart which hath most illuminated my head." §§

* L 70. iii. 87.
t ii. 205.
: A. 179.
§ iii. 186, 220, 323.
II iv. 435.

t iii. 147.
** A. 564.
tt A. 1088.
XX A. 11 IL
5§ A. 393.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE, 163
Eeason and argument are transforming principles in
intellectual natures.* True knowledge involves of
necessity a right affection towards the things known ;
for knowledge unfulfilled is the most troublesome
guest that can be entertained.t Or, to take another
flgure: Truth is a seminal principle in the mind
which must bring forth fruit unless it be killed. {
Therefore, he says, to give one application, as
thou art a Christian, take up this resolution, that it
shall be better for every one with whom thou
hast to do, because Christ died for thee and for
him. § And to sum up all in one pregnant sen
tence : " When the doctrine of the Gospel becomes
the reason of our mind, it will be the principle of
our Ufe." II
17. So it is by action answering to knowledge that
character is slowly shaped according to an inevitable
law. That which is worldly in respect of the matter
can be made spiritual through the intention of the
agent.lT For religion is able to possess and affect the
whole man, and bring that unity to his conflicting
powers whereby he gains the chiefest of good things
that he is himself, his true self.** In this respect
" we have ourselves as we use ourselves." ff We are
not bom with habits, but only with faculties. " We

» iv. 175.

II A. 94. Comp. 132

t iu. 61.

H A. 520.

X iu. 211.

•? A. 956.

§ iv. 45.

tt A. 34L iiL 224.

M 2

164 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
are so in act as we are in habit, and so in habit as
we are in act."* Thoughts of God and things
divine mightily enlarge the parts of men ; on the
contrary, men's parts wither away if they be not
^excited and called forth to nobler acts by higher
objects. The mind, as a glass, receives all images ;
and the soul becomes that with which it is in con
junction, t
18. This law of correspondence is universal, and
of immediate efficacy ; but in our present state the
true issues of action are often obscured or hidden.
Hereafter, however, all will be made plain. Judg
ment is a revelation of character: punishment is
the unchecked stream of consequence. Every man
may estimate his future state by his present. He
will then be more of the same, or the same more
intensely. Therefore "there must be salvation of
grace as antecedent to that of glory. . . . otherwise
there is no salvation." " The unrighteous are con
demned by themselves before they are condemned of
God." A guilty conscience hath hell within itself, t
19. Such a line of argument throws light upon the
warnings of the Gospels. It shows that impenitence
in its very essence is not compassionable. Eepent-
ance is the moral correlative to forgiveness. An
impenitent sinner cannot be pardoned, because God

• in. 339 ; L 43 ; iv. 81T. 1 X A. 188. i. 321, 244. A. 232.
t iv. 318. A. 866. 1 iL 198.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 165
cannot contradict Himself.* He cannot be recon
ciled to unrighteousness; and the impenitent will
not be reconciled to righteousness.t " Though God
should tell me my sins were pardoned," Whichcote
boldly says, " I would not believe it, unless I repent
and deprecate His displeasure.''^ For this reason
he maintained with energetic distinctness that the
work of Christ must be " wrought not only fvr us
but in us." § " All the world," he writes, " will not
secure that man that is not in reconciliation with the
reason of his own mind." || " It is not possible we
should be made happy by God Himself if not
reconciled to Him. ... If we through the Spirit
of God be not naturalized to Him, we shall glory
but in an ineffectual Saviour." H
20. The application of the same moral law confirms
also man's expectations of future happiness. The
feeble strivings after God which have been made on
earth gain their consummation in heaven. When we
are born into time, that makes a great difference ;**
but borii out of time into eternity makes a far greater.
In our present state it is through the thought of God
that we come to know the powers of our souls. He,
their one proper object, calls them into activity.
The soul of man is to God as the flower to the sun :
it opens at His approach and shuts when He with-

• A. 840. t A. 1025. X iii- 40. § Letters, p. 13.
II i. 95. \ iL 263. •• ii. 120.

166 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
draws.* And " I am apt to think," Whichcote adds,
"that in the heavenly state hereafter, when God shall
otherwise declare Himself to us than now He doth,
those latent powers which now we have may open
and unfold themselves, and thereby we may be made
able to act in a far higher way. . . ." t The nearer
approach to God will give us more use of ourselves.
" Oh God," he exclaims elsewhere, with an uncon
scious recollection of Augustine, " Thou hast made
us for Thyself, our souls are unsatisfled and un
quiet in us, there is emptiness till Thou dost com
municate Thyself, till we return unto Thee. . . ."|
Self-denial, self-surrender, devotion are Thy injunc
tions upon us, not for Thy sake, but that we who
are empty, shallow, insufficient, may go out of
ourselves, and find in Thee fulness, satisfaction,
abundance. 21. It was a necessary consequence of Whichcote's
conception of the Gospel, that he regarded the moral
element in it as supreme. In spite of his power to
deal with the widest thoughts, he constantly checks
himself that he may come to the analysis of homely
duties. He regards the positive institutions of reli
gion as absolutely subservient to moral ends. Men
may not multiply them as binding. § " There is no
Shekinah," he says, with a noble figure, "but by

• iii. 104. t iv. 196- X iv- 314-
§ iv. 187. A. 835.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE.

167

¦Divine assignation." * In the same spirit he pleads,
again and again, against subtleties of definition, or
the imposition upon others of words not found in the
Bible.f "Where the doctrine," he says, "is necessary
and important, the Scripture is clear and full : " we
need not attempt to determine things more particu
larly than God hath determined them, t '' Such de- •
terminations," he adds, sadly, "have indeed enlarged '•
faith, but they have lessened charity and multiplied
divisions." For our greatest zeal is in things doubtful
and questionable, § We are more concerned for that
which is our own in religion than for that which is
God's. II But true teachers are not masters but helpers ;
they are not to make religion, but to show it.lT And
while men are what they are, different in constitution
and circumstances, there must be differences of
opinion ; but these, Whichcote argues, vanish in the
light of common allegiance to Christ, and contribute
to a fuller apprehension of the truth.** In things
rational as in things natural, motion is required to
avert the corruption of unbroken stillness. ft The
sun having broken through the thickest cloud, will
after that scatter the less ; nothing, he concludes, is
desperate in the condition of good men. ||

• A. 648. iii. 200.
t iL 390. A. 578.
X A. 1188; 152; 175. ii. 24L
§ A. 981 ; 1036 ; 1054.
II iL 261 ; A. 499.

f i. 178.
** iv. 204f;378f;330ffi A.
712. tt i. 84.
XX ii. 20 ; L 65.

168 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
22. Even this splendid hope does not exhaust the
measure of Whichcote's charity. His sympathy ex
tends beyond the limits of that one Church " which
grows not old." Some there are, he says, that
are mere naturalists. I do not blame them as the
world blames them. I do not blame them that they
are very slow of faith, that they will not believe
farther than they see reason. ... A man cannot
dishonour God and abuse himself more than to be
light of faith. Such persons one would compassionate
as soon as any men in the world. I would say to
them, You do well as far as you go ; you do well to
entertain all that God hath laid the foundation
for ; you do well to follow the light of reason ;
but do you think that God can do no more? do
you think that God did all at once ? Nay, rather,
your own experience, if you give heed to it, will
in due time reveal to you the wants which the
Gospel meets.*
23. Any one who has followed this outline of
Whichcote's teaching, which I have given as far as
possible in his own words, will, I think, have been
struck by its modem type. It represents much that
is most generous and noblest in the " moral divinity"
of to-day. It anticipates language which we hear now
on many sides. It affirms in the name of Christianity
much that is said to be in antagonism with it. It

*o^

ii. 313 f.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 169
brings faith into harmony with moral law, both in its
object and in its issues. It affirms the final identity
of the true conception and aims of philosophy, re
ligion and life.
24. The fragmentariness and informality of the
records of Whichcote's teaching obscure in some
degree its scientific value ; but it is not difficult to
see that he takes account of the manifold elements
which enter into the problems of morality with a
breadth of view which, as far as I know, is found
only in his pupil Smith, till it appears again, though
with more sombre effects, in Bishop Butler. As
compared with the abstract, intellectual school of
Clarke, he insists on the co-ordination of all human
faculties and endowments. He finds the expression
of humanity in action and not in thought. He
comes before God in the fulness of his complex
nature. In the picture which he draws of man's
moral constitution he has many points of correspon
dence with Shaftesbury, who "searched after and
published" a selection of his Sermons in 1698 ;* but
Whichcote does not, like Shaftesbury, dissemble the
darker aspects of life. He recognizes harmony as
the essential, divine law of the universe, but he never
fails to recognize that it has been disturbed. His

* It is an interesting fact that Clarke also published a volume
of his Sermons in 1707. This I have not seen,

170 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
hope, as far as he expresses it, lies in the efficacy of
the discipline of God, which, he seems to imply,
must sooner or later secure its end.
25. In spite of these characteristics of his line of
thought, which are doubly attractive in a teacher
singularly pure and lofty, Whichcote failed to influ
ence English speculation permanently. It would be
interesting to discover the origin of Shaftesbury's
admiration for him; for his power seems to have
been practically confined to those with whom he
came into personal contact. He inspired his hearers,
men of great and varied power. Smith and More,
Worthington and Cudworth, Patrick and Tillotson ;
but he foundejd no school, and left no successors in a
third generation,
26. The transitoriness of Whichcote's infiuence
may be due in some degree to political causes;
but it is not difficult I think, to indicate defects
in his teaching which contributed to this partial
failure. He had an imperfect conception of the cor
porate character of the Church, and of the Divine
life of the Christian Society. The abstractions of
Plotinus had begun to produce in his case the in
jurious effects which were more conspicuous in his
follower!' He had little or no sense of the historic
growth of the Church. His teaching on the Sacra
ments is vague and infrequent.
27. But these defects are not inherent in his

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 171
principles. On the contrary, the full recognition of
the Divine office of history, the full recognition of the
Divine gifts of the Sacraments, present Christianity
as most rational, most completely answering to the
reason of things, to the whole nature of humanity
and to the whole nature of man. Whichcote's
principles do not require to be modified at the
present day, but to be applied more widely. We
can easily imagine with what enthusiasm he would
have welcomed now "the infinite desire of know
ledge which has broken forth in the world," to
use the phrase of Patrick;* how he would again
have warned us "that it is not possible to free
religion from scorn and contempt if her priests be
not as well skilled in nature as her people, and her
champions furnished with as good artillery as her ad
versaries;"! how he would have reiterated the burden
of his lesson that " there is nothing true in divinity
which is false in philosophy, or the contrary;"! how
he would have called us back from our tithings of
cumin to the weightier matters of the law, judgment,
mercy, and faith ; how he would have constrained us
with loving persuasiveness- to take account of the
proportion of things by the measure of life. With
larger knowledge and on an ampler field we are then
called upon to exercise his faith, to claim for religion,

* Phenix, ii. p. 316. t Id. p. 317. X Id. I. c.

172 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
in the name of the Son of Man, all things graceful,
beautiful, and lovely ;* to show that there is nothing
in it but what is sincere and solid, consonant l^o reason
and issuing in freedom. f The one sure evidence
of Christianity is, that to which he appealed, the
power of the Christian life. If the Gospel were
a soul to believers, they would be miraculous in the
eyes of the world, and bring all men in to give their
testimony for religion, t
28. One remark must still be added which con
cerns us in our crisis of transition most nearly.
K Whichcote neglected to give due honour to the
past, he had that rarer and more elevating faith in the
present which is the support of generous effort. " I
give much," he writes, in answer to the charge of
innovation; "I give much to the Spirit of God
breathing in good men with whom I converse in the
present world . . , and think that, if I may leam
much by the writings of good men in former ages. . .
I may learn more by the actings of the Divine Spirit
in the minds of good men now alive ; and I must not
shut my eyes against any manifestations of God in
the times iu which I live. The times wherein I live
are more to me than any else ; the works of God in
them which I am to discern, direct in me both prin^
ciple, affection, and action; audi dare not blaspheme

L59. t iiL 253. tiii.45;25L

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE. 173
free and noble spirits in religion who seek after truth
with indifference and ingenuity." *
In that confidence lies our strength ; in those act
ings, manifested in many strange ways and in unex
pected quarters, lies our guidanct. The ages of faith
are not yet past. The last word of God has not yet
been spoken.

* Letters, p. 115.

JEREMY TAYLOR, D.D.,
BISHOP OF DOWN, CONNOR, AND DROMORE.
BoKN 1613; Died 1667.»

1, The bearings of biography on criticism. Few writers im
personal. — 2. Jeremy Taylor and his college contemporaries.
John Milton. — 3. Cambridge education of that day. — i. His
introduction to public life. Laud. All Souls. Uppingham. The
Civil War. Retirement in Wales. Lisburn. The Restoration.
Bishop of Pown and Connor. Domestic trials. Death. — 5.
Connection of his fortunes with liis writings. Leisure. Coutro-
versial exigencies. Influence of his circumstances upon liis
style. Martial images. Exquisite beauty and variety of his
references to external nature. — 6. " The Shakespeare of English
Prose." Transcendent merits of his style. Comparison of
Taylor with other eminent divines. Surpassed by Milton alone,
and that only in a few passages. — 7. Estimate of his defects and
weaknesses as a theologian and reasoner. — 8. His special merits
not theological. 'TheDuctorDubitantium.' Decay of scholastic
casuistry. — 9. The ' Liberty of Prophesyina; ' the most remarkable
defence of Toleration ever written. Taylor defended from the
• charge of abandoning his principles. — 10. He is greatest in his
devotional writings. Incomparable merits of his sermons. Their
vast superiority to those of the present day. Causes of this.
Their immense range of eradition. Their fertility of illustration.
Their unexampled opulence of language. Compared with otlier
devotional writings. The influence they have exercised. John
Wesley. The present age not likely to produce such a writer as
Taylor. The treasures which he has bequeathed to us.
1. There are but few men whose works, or whose
intellectual position, we can rightly understand.

? The references to Taylor's
works are made to the well-
known edition of Bishop Heber,
of whose ' Life of. Jeremy

Taylor,' as well as of the little
volume of the late Mr. R. A.
Willmott, I have made free
use.

176 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
unless we know something of the circumstances of
their lives. One or two indeed of the world's
greatest seem, like Shakspeare, to rise into an im
personal atmosphere, either from the keenness of
their sympathies or the intensity of their imagina
tion ; and a few others can be understood apart from
their biographies, either because their writings, like
those of Butler, deal with the abstractions of the
pure reason ; or because, as in the " Imitatio Christi,"
all earthly passions seem to die away in that clear
air of eternity wherein they live and move. But the
lives of most men throw a marvellous light on their
writings, and there are some whose writings cannot
even be understood at all without some knowledge
of their career and of their times.
2. Let us then, with all possible brevity, glance at
the biography of Bishop Jeremy Taylor — the most
eloquent certainly, if not the greatest, of English
preachers; the most popular of English devotional
writers ; and perhaps the most widely influential, if
not by any means the most profound or accurate,
of English divines.
The son of a Cambridge barber, but a descendant
of the holy martyr, Eowland Taylor of Hadleigh,
Jeremy was bom at his father's house in the year.
1613. As the little boy stood at the shop door, he
may often have noticed the stem and gloomy linea
ments of an undergraduate of Sidney Sussex College,
whose name was Oliver Cromwell, and may have

JEREMY TAYLOR.

177

admired the calmer, and more untroubled face of the
Pubhc Orator of the University, who was afterwards
« The Country Parson," George Herbert.* In 1626 he
entered Cains College as a sizar, and must often have
seen — " Familiarly, and in his scholar's dress.
Bounding before him, yet a stripling youth,
A boy, no better, with his rosy cheeks
Angelical, keen eye, courageous look.
And conscious step of purity and pride," — t
one whose course of life was destined to be utterly
opposite to his own ; who was fiercely to attack the
episcopacy of which he was the able defender, and
to justify the execution of the King whose devoted
chaplain he became ; who was to be elevated by the
triumph which sent Taylor to a prison, and ruined
by the Eestoration which raised him to a mitre ; but
who, nevertheless, was united to him by the immortal
affinities of genius ; who shared with him the great
combat for religious and intellectual liberty ; and who
stands alone with him in supremacy of eloquence —
the immortal poet of the " Paradise Lost." t

* George Herbert was ap
pointed Public Orator in 1619;
Milton entered Christ's College
in 1625; Henry More, John
Pearson, and Ralph Cudworth
matriculated in 1631.
. t Wordsworth, • The Prelude."
X Milton entered at Christ's
College in 1625. Taylor never
mentioned him, nor he Taylor;
but Milton is said to have ad-
[kinq's coll.]

inired greatly the 'Liberty of
Prophesying,' and is believed to
allude to him in the lines :
" Men whose life, learning, faith,
and pure intent.
Would have been held in high
esteem with Paul,
Must now be called and printed
heretics
By shallow Edwards and Scotch
what-d'ye.call " —
since in these same linns, 'Oti
N

178

MASTERS IN. ENGLISH THEOLOGY :

3. It takes many a long year to alter the habits
and traditions of education ; and though the
" Novum Organum " had now been written for
six years,* Cambridge was still teaching that narrow
and effete scholasticism which Milton, with his
usual impassioned sincerity, denounced as a mass
of "ragged notions and brabblements," and "an
asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles."t But
though, for all practical purposes and positive
results, such culture must have been to the young
intellect of that day a pure waste of time; and
though we trace to it not a few of Taylor's weak
nesses — his tedious fencing, his prolix minuteness,
his subtle and formalising casuistry — yet the stem
and patient attention which it demanded was no doubt
useful to him as a system of mental gymnastics. It
provided him with what a modern poet has called
" something craggy on which to break his intellect,"^

the New Forces of Conscience,'
he expressly names, and with
supreme contempt, Samuel Ru
therford, who in 1649 published,
by way of answer to Taylor, his
odious attack on the 'Principle
of Toleration.'
* It was published in 1620.
t As regards the Schoolmen,
Milton shared the opinion of
Luther, who spoke of their system
and writings with undisguised
contempt. In his 'Defensio Se-
ounda,' after gpealdng warmly
of the homaniatie onlture of his

boyhood, he simply says of Cam
bridge, "lUio disciplinis atque
artibus tradi solitis septennium
studui." Mr. Willmott refers to
Beaumont's Psyche. Some re
marks on the Cambridge studies
of that day may be found in
Wwd's 'Life of Henry More,'
pp. 6-10; Masson's < Life of Mil
ton,' vol. L See, too. Bacon's in-
structiTe remarks on their " nn-
profitable subtlety and curiosity "
('Advancement of Learning,'
bookL). X Lord Byron.

JEREMY TAYLOR. 179
and its aridity was happily relieved and supple
mented by the rich enthusiastic classical culture
which had been introduced by the Eenaissance.
These " Literse Humaniores " must have rescued an
imagination which might well have starved by
doting upon what Milton calls "immeasurable, in
numerable, and therefore unnecessary, and un
merciful volumes,"* and must have furnished the
mental refreshment which enabled him to turn with
out despair to Occam and Estius, Capreolas and
Suarez.t 4. Of the details, however, of Taylor's youth and
education, nothing is known. He became in due
time a Fellow of Caius College, and then came for
him that " deep nick in Time's restless wheel " which
determined his future. Young as he was, he was
appointed by a friend to preach for him at St.
Paul's, and he attracted immediate attention. He
was throughout life singularly handsome, with long
curling hair, and large eyes full of sweetness and
expression; and when he stood before his great
audience the glow of his rich and marvellous

* Of Reform in England, i.
t See his letter quoted in his
' Life,' by Bishop Heber, p. sc,
and the extraordinary list of
authors which he recommended
to clerical students, in which he
mentions Sixtus Senensis, Tena,
Laurentius e Villa Vincentio,
HyperiuB, Martinus Cantapra-

tensis. Arias Montanus, S^mctes
Paguine, Catharinus, Flacius
lUyricus, Lauretus, and others,
without so much as naming
Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin,
Erasmus, or any English divine I
(Second Sermon on the Minis
ter's Duty. Works, viii. 520.)
N 2

180 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
eloquence was enhanced by the beauty of his
appearance, and the—
" Gratior et pulcro veniens in corpore virtus."
With his " florid and youthful beauty, and sweet
and pleasant air, he seemed," says his friend and
successor. Bishop Eust, " like some young angel
newly descended from the visions of glory." It was'
not long before the fame of the youthful preacher
reached the ears of Archbishop Laud. Narrow,
superstitious, intolerant, obstinate. Laud had yet the
high merit of appreciating the promise of genius ;
and " thinking it more for the advantage of the
world that such mighty parts should be afforded
better opportunities of study and improvement than
a course of constant preaching would allow of," he
wisely and kindly saved the young orator from the
rainous snares of a premature popularity. He accord
ingly made Jeremy Taylor a Fellow of All Soulsj
and subsequently nominated him his chaplain, and,
in the year 1637, induced Bishop Juxon to collate
him to the rectory of Uppingham. There he
married, and the five years at Uppingham were pro
bably among the [happiest of his life. But while he
was living in this quiet home, the storm of civil war
burst over the unhappy kingdom. In 1640 Laud
was sent to the Tower, and in 1642 Taylor pub
lished, oy the King's command, his first work, the
' Episcopacy Asserted.' Then began years of trial

JEREMY TAYLOR.

181

and wandering. His home was pillaged, his family
driven out of doors. Joining the King, who had
made him his chaplain, he lived an unsettled life,
following the army from place to place. At the
siege of Cardigan Castle he was taken prisoner, and
when released supported himself for a time by
keeping a school at Llanvihangel Aberbythic. " In
the great storm," he says, " which dashed the vessel
of the Church all in pieces, I was cast on the
coast of Wales, and in a little boat tiiought to have
enjoyed that rest and quietness which in England I
could not hope for."* It was during this period
that he married his second wife, and lived in the
lovely neighbourhood of Golden Grove. His seclu
sion was protected by the noble patronage of Lord
and Lady Carbery,t and cheered by the active
friendship of the kind-hearted Evelyn. To this
retirement was due the leisure which enabled him,
in spite of want and poverty, to publish some of his
greatest works: 'The Liberty of Prophesying,'
'The Life of Christ,' the 'Sermons,' the 'Treatise
on the Eeal Presence,' and the 'Golden Grove.'

* Dedication to 'Liberty of
Prophesying.' f The scenery of the neigh
bourhood is described iu Dyer's
beautiful but now almost forgot
ten poem of ' Grongar Hill.' It
was the singular good fortune of
-Lord Carhery to be connected

with three very eminent poets.
Jeremy Taylor was his friend
and guest; his second wife, the
Lady Alice Egerton, was the
heroine of Milton's 'Comus;'
and Butler, the author of ' Hudi-
bras,' was afterwards his private
secretary.

182

MASTERS m ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

In 1658, after various trials and adversities, of which
we have only an obscure outline, he accepted a very
poor Lectureship at Lisbum in Ireland, which was,
however, rendered more tolerable by the friendship
of Lord Conway, and the exquisite scenery of
Lough Neagh, where an islet is still shown to which
he would often retire to pray and meditate. At the
Eestoration, Taylor, if any man, had a permanent
claim to be rewarded by the Eoyal Family, whom, to
the utter ruin of his own fortunes, he had so faith
fully served ; and whose fall had been consoled and
irradiated by the splendour of his genius and elo
quence. But while smaller and less worthy men
were elevated to the vacant English sees, Charles
was content to relegate Taylor to the Bishopric of
Down and Connor, to which was afterwards added,
on account of his " virtue, wisdom, and industry,"
the see of Dromore. His declining years were thus
.doomed to exile among people to whom his style
of eloquence was little suited, and to a sphere of
labour where his peace was disturbed by the furious
obloquy alike of Eoman Catholics and Dissenters.*

* Taylor, though his disposi
tion was eminently sunny and
contented (see the exquisitely
beautiful passage in ' Holy Liv
ing,' ii. § 6), yet felt ill at ease
and out of health in Ireland, and
more than once expressed a wish
to be removed to England. In a

letter to Archbishop Sheldon,
1664 (' Life,' p. cxix.), he says of
his bishopric : "I find myself
thrown into a place of torment;"
and he calls his position " an in
supportable burden." Letter to
Ormonde, 1660 (ib. oL), in which
he also says: "It were better

JEREMY TAYLOR.

183

His last days were darkened, too, by domestic trials.
His tender heart had been already torn by the loss
of several sweet children who died in early years ;*
but now he was destined to lose two sons in the
prime of youth, and both in ways that rendered
their deaths unspeakably shocking. The elder fell
in a duel; the younger died from the effects of
excesses which he had learnt in the dissolute com
pany of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Very'
shortly afterwards, in the fifty-fifth year of his age,
and the seventh of his episcopate, a fever seized
him which, after ten days, " untied the soul from its
chain, and let it go forth, first into liberty and then
to glory. "t So, prematurely, as he had himself pro-
gnosticated,^ ended the life of a man of rare good-

for me to be a poor curate in a
village church than bishop over
such intolerable persons."
* Letter to Evelyn, July 19,
1656 : " Deare Sir, I am in some
little disorder by reason of the
death of a little child of mine, a
boy that lately made us very
glad ; but now he rejoices in his
little orbe, while we think and
sigh and long to be as safe as he
is" ('Life,' i. liii.). Feb. 22,
165?: "It has pleased God to
send the small poxe and feavers
among my children ; and I have
since I received your last buried
two sweet hopeful boyes" (ii.
1x1.). "No man can tell, but
he that loves his children, how

many delicious accents make a
man's heart dance in the pretty
conversation of those dear
pledges ; their childishness, their
stammering, their little angers,
their innocence, their imperfec
tions, their necessities, are so
many little emanations of joy
and comfort to him that delights
in their person and society ; but
he that loves not his wife and
children feeds a lioness at home,
and broods a nest of sorrows." —
' The Marriiige Ring.'
t 'Holy Dying,' ii. 4.
X See letter to Sheldon, writ
ten in the foiirth year of his
episcopate : " I humbly desire
that your Gruce will not wholly

184

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

ness and sweetness, who owed in no small degree
to his own virtues his want of brilliant success in
earthly fortunes ; and who, if we cannot assign to him
as the flattering poet assigned to Bishop Berkeley,
"every virtue under heaven," was yet eminently
noble and unselfish, and presented no less than.
Berkeley did, "the happiest possible synthesis of
the Divine, the scholar, and the gentleman."
5. Even so cursory a glance as this may serve, I
hope, to illustrate how entirely it is the hand of God
that weaves the pattern which He requires in the
web of noble hves ; and that even by those dispensa
tions which seem most afflictive He is preparing us,
so that we best may do His work, which is and ought
to be our own. Throughout every change in Taylor's
career we can trace the way in which the Providence
that ordained his fortunes added essentially, at every
step, to his usefulness and his greatness. The strokes
which seemed most pitilessly to gash the quivering
reed were but shaping it into the potency of divinest
music. It was not only that his character gained
strength, and his words grace and variet)', from his
misfortunes, but one after another his works sprang
mainly from the exigencies of his position. * The

lay me aside, and cast off all
thoughts of removing me 
For the case is so that the coun
try does not agree with my health
. a . . and if your Graoe be not

willing I should die immaturely,
I shall still hope you will bring
me to or near yourself once
more " (' Life,' p. cxix.).

JEREMY TAYLOR.

185

Defence of Episcopacy,' ' The Liberty of Pro
phesying,' the 'Sermons,' 'The Dissuasive from
Popery,' ' The Ductor Dubitantium,' were all
evoked by the turbulent conditions which darkened
the peace of his days ; so that from his temporary
afflictions the Church has won a permanent inherit
ance of thought and leaming. In gentler and softer
times Taylor might have been reduced to the posi
tion of a mere popular preacher, constantly called
upon to utihse the crude thoughts, and perpetuate
the fleeting impressions of his mind, and condemned
to that superficial mediocrity of erudition which is
inevitable to one whose plain duties rob him of all
leisure for deep study. Had it not been for the
undisturbed peace and compulsory retirement of
Golden Grove and Portmore, he might have lacked
the opportunities which alone rendered possible his
greatest intellectual efforts. Even his immortal
Sermons gained, from his varied surroundings, no
little of that rich imagery which embroiders their
cloth of gold. Thus, to his terrible experiences of
the battle field * we owe, among many others, the
image of the bold trooper, fighting in the confusion
of a battle, and being worn with heat and rage,
receiving from the sword of his enemy wounds open
like the grave, but he felt them not ;t and of the

* This was first noticed by
Mr. Willmott ('Jeremy Taylor,'
p. IiL).

t ' Apples of Sodom,' Works,
V. 293,

186 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
poor soldier in a trench, standing in his arms and
wounds, pale and faint, weary and watchful, and at
night having a bullet pulled out of his fiesh, and
shivers from his bones, and enduring his mouth
to be sewn up from a horrible rent to his own
dimensions.* And it is to the umbrageous woods
and gardens which girdled the mansion of Lord
Carbery that we owe the pictures of the "faint
echoes from distant valleys;" "the fountain swell
ing over the green turf;" "the gentle wind shaking
the leaves into a refreshment and cooling shade ;"
"the little bee, feeding on dew or manna, and
living upon what falls every moming from the
storehouse of heaven, clouds, and Providence;"
" the rainbow, half made of the glory of light, and
half of the moisture of a cloud ;" " the breath of
heaven, not willing to disturb the softest stalk of
a violet ;" " the boisterous north wind, passing
through the yielding air, but when it hath been
checked with the united strength of a wood, grow
ing mighty, and dwelling there, and forcing the
highest branches to stoop and make a path for it,
on the summit of all its glories." Taylor was one of
those few immortal spirits in whom a massive erudi
tion has not cmshed an exquisite feehng for the
sights and sounds of nature. What can be happier

• 'Holy Dying,' iii. 4. This terribly vivid illustration is ol).
vlonsly due to personal experience.

JEREMY TAYLOR. 187
than his description of "the sun approaching to
wards the gates of the morning, first opening a little
eye of heaven, and sending away the spirits of dark
ness, and giving light to a cock, and calling up the
lark to matins, and by and by gilding the fringes of
a cloud, peeping over the Eastern hills, thrusting
out his golden horns like those which decked the
brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil,
because himself had seen the face of God "? What
wealth of fancy ; what poetry of expression ! After
reading such a passage as this, who will dispute his
pre-eminence of supremacy in the mastery of the
English tongue ? Take two of his best known and
loveliest passages : " For so liave I seen a lark
rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards,
singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and
climbs above the clouds ; but the poor bird was
beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern
wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant,
descending more at every breath of the tempest
than it could recover by the libration and frequent
weighing of its wings, till the little creature sat
;down to pant and stay till the storm was over ; and
then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and
sing as if it had learnt music from an angel, as he
passed sometimes through the air about his minister
ing here below ; — so is the prayer of a good man." *

* Second Sermon on the " Return of Prayers."

188 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
Did English prose ever combine a more playful
grace with a more lyric tenderness ? And when
speaking of the change wrought by death, he says :
" So have I seen a rose newly springing from the
clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the
moming, and full with the dew of heaven as a
lamb's fleece ; but, when a ruder breath had forced
open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too
youthful, and unripe retirements, it began to put on
darkness, and decline to softness and the symptoms
of a sickly age ; it bowed the head and broke its
stalk, and at night having lost some of its leaves,
and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds
and outworn faces."* What solemn music, what
delicate painting, what unrivalled aptitude of ex
pression! Has there been any preacher before or
since who could equal these incidental metaphors ?
Is there any living preacher who could write three
lines which could compare to any one of them ? Yet
these were mainly due to that delicious country life
in which ambition seemed over, and since the poet
preacher's days were being spent face to face with
Eternity, in homes where he could see the flowers
blow, and the dew fall, his soul, undevastated by
meaner cares, could "climb by these sunbeams to
the Father of Lights."
6. And these passages are alone sufficient to show

' Holy Dying,' i, § 2.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

189

why an English poet* has rightly called Jeremy
Taylor "the Shakspeare of English prose." No
language can be too warm for that wealth and
beauty of style which constitutes perhaps his chief
claim to our admiration, and which a living writer
has compared to " a deeply murmuring sea with the
sunlight on it."t It transcends criticism. It is
indeed easy to point out the multitudinousness and
confusion of images ; the occasional introduction of
mean expressions ;J the interchange with the beauti
ful of what is loathly and grotesque : § but, not to
say that this is sometimes but the perfect skill of
the musician "falling from concord or sweet accord
to discord or harsh accord," || the total effect is simply
inimitable, and we feel that we are in contact with
a mind that creates the laws of its own expres
sion, and beautifies even what is irregular and in
itself objectionable, by stamping it with tho sovran
impress of its own individuality. It is quite easy to
understand the havoc which ignorant, vulgar, and
conceited critics, who profess to lay down the

* Mason, in a letter to Gray.
t L« ^y. 'History of Tolera
tion.' X It should, however, be no
ticed that an expression may
sound mean now which was not
always so. Willmott ('Jeremy
Taylor,' p. 233) censures : " We
shall dishonour the sufferings of
our blessed Saviour if we think

them to be an umbrella to shelter
impious and ungodly living "
(' The Invalidity of a Deathbed
Repentance," ptii. ad fin.). But
the word would not convey to
Taylor so vulgar a notion as to
us. § See some remarks inTaine's
' English Literature,' i. 384.
11 Bacon.

190 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
universal laws of literature, would make of such
reckless autocrats of language as Taylor and Shak
speare ; and yet their very faults become almost
admirable because they are characteristic of them-
^ selves. It is quite true that Jeremy Taylor has not
the mde force of Latimer, the immense erudition of
Ussher, the balanced stateliness and perfect equi
librium of Hooker, the flashing wit of South, the
occasional intensity of Donne, the careful accuracy
of Pearson, the compressed forcefulness of Barrow,
the metaphysical profundity of Butler, the tender
unction of Wilson, the polished equanimity of
Tillotson, — and, after these, but few others are at all
"worth mentioning; but, as in unfeigned piety and
blameless purity of life he stands their equal, so in
the combination of genius with eloquence he towers
above the greatest of them all. In the fine expres
sion of Bishop Warburton he darts into all their
excellences a ray of lightning. And again, if he
has not the characteristic merit of each of these,
he is equally free from their characteristic defects ;
he has none of Latimer's indecorum, or of South's
vulgarity, or Donne's tediousness, or Butler's
aridity, or Tillotson's coldness, or Wilson's common
place. In English prose he has but one rival in
John Milton. But though not even Taylor can
equal the prose of Milton, when he " has his garland
and singing robes about him," yet it is only now and
then, at impassioned moments, that the poet puts

JEREMY TAYLOR. 191
on the glory which is the preacher's daily wear ; and
it was by no means the least acute, or qualified of
English critics, who said of Jeremy Taylor, " The
most eloquent of divines, I had almost said of men ;
and if I had, Demosthenes would nod approval and
Cicero express assent."*
7. I have dwelt thus at length on the great
Bishop's style, because it is his style which differen
tiates him from all who have preceded or followed
him ; but as it is the object of these Lectures to
sketch the place in English literature and theology
of the great men with whom they are occupied,
and not, by any means, to deal in indiscriminate
eulogy, I will now acknowledge frankly, but with
due respect and submission, the defects and weak
ness of this eminent prelate, whom it is impossible
to read without learning also to honour and to love.
I will say then at once, that it is net as & theo
logian, in the more narrow and technical sense of
the word, that Taylor is greatest. Some may set
this down to the account of his wisdom ; and fre
quently as he wrote on dogma, yet the absence of
precision is in accordance with his own express
views.! On any question of rigid dogmatic theology
his name would carry less weight than those of
Jewell, Hooker, Sanderson, Andrewes, Bull, or Water-

* Coleridge.
t "No man should fool him-
ielf by disputing about the philo

sophy of justification, and what
causality faith hath in it," &o.
(' Works,' i. coxxviiL).

192

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY I

land. The rigid scrupulosity of precisely accurate
reasoning and definition, for which we look to a
theologian proper, is hardly consistent with the
passion of the poetic orator, and the zeal of the
voluminous controversialist. That Taylor is some
times guilty of inconsistencies cannot be denied ; *
nor that his conclusions are often superior to the
reasoning by which he supports them ;t nor that he
occasionally resorts to arguments of which he else
where exposes the weakness ;t nor that he sometimes
relies on a mere illustration as though it had all the
cogency of a proof ;§ nor that he sometimes "over
looks the intrusion of ragged lacqueys among his
grand procession of magnates in all their splendid
paraphernalia ; " || nor that he, now and then, seems to
indulge in a subtlety which might almost be termed

• Compare his remarks on
Baptism, in 'Liberty of Pro
phesying,' and in his ' Discourse
of Confirmation;' 'Works,' v.
90, 438, et passim.
t See, for instance, the un
tenable arguments by which he
tries to prove the Divine origin
of Confirmation.
X See his treatise on Episco
pacy, § 48, where he draws a
distinction between things which
Bishops may not do as Bishops,
and may do as secular princes^
a disintegration of individuality
which he elsewhere utterly re

jects. This is less surprising
because it is one of the defects
of the ' Ductor Dubitantium ' that,
misled by Romish casuists, he
admits the use in controversy of
arguments known to be weak,
to an extent which Milton, for
instance, would have scorned.
(' Works,' ix. 93, eeq. ; Coleridge's
'Notes on English Divines,' p.
175; Hallam's 'Literature of
Europe,' iii. 268.
§ See ' Apology for Liturgies,"*'
Pref. § 6.
II See Coleridge's 'Notes on
English Divines,' L 195.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

193

Jesuitical;* nor that he is in some instances un
critical in the use of authorities,! and eminently
credulous in the admission of facts and anecdotes ; |
nor that, with all the just estimate which DailM
had taught him of the contradictions and defects
of the Fathers, he yet often allows himself to be
unduly overshadowed by their mere assertions ;§ nor
that he is sometimes misled by the impetuosity of

• Instances will be found in
his controversial works passim,
t See Heber's ' Life,' p. cxxvii.
X See ' Works,' ii. 18 ; iii. 241 ;
V. 292, &o.
§ But, as in so many instances,
his language on the untrust-
worthiness of the actual text of
the Fathers is unguarded and
exaggerated ('Liberty of Pro
phesying,' § viiL 4 ; ' Works,' v.
489). Readily as he sets tliem
aside as authorities in matters of
controversy, he yet elsewhere
quotes their barest assertions
with absolute credulity, and does
not seem to see that the giants
of the Reformation were, if " not
inferior to St. Augustine," as
Coleridge says, yet surely " worth
a brigade of the Cyprians, Fir-
milians, and the like." And
yet Taylor quotes Cyprian quite
incessantly, and Luther, I be
lieve, not once. Certainly his
arguments against the autho
rity of the Fathers are hardly
consistent with his professed
[king's coll.]

desire that " their great reputa
tion should be preserved as sacred
as it ought." How different is
this from the daring remarks of
Milton on the same subject :
"Redeo ad patrum commenta-
tiones, de quibus hoc summatim
accipe. Quicquid illi dixerint,
neque ex libris sacris, aut ratione
aliqufl, satis idonea confirmave-
runt, perinde mild eril ac si quis
alius e vulgo dixisset " (' Def.'
cap. 4 ; Of ' True Religion,' ad
init. ; ' Of Reform in England,'
passim'). It is in this manly
and dauntless forthrightness that
Milton towers so high above
Taylor. But Hallam has acutely
pointed out that Taylor's literary
method was not to soften any
thing which he had once said,
but to remove offence by "in
serting something else of an
opposite colour" (' Literature of
Europe,' ii. 848). This unfor
tunate method naturally detracts
from the weight of his isolated
sentiments.

194

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

polemic into confessedly untenable positions ; * nor
that for these reasons there are vulnerable joints in
the golden panoply of his eloquence ; nor that he is
far from successful in dealing with subtle meta
physical distinctions ; nor that he sometimes played
about the surface of a subject without going to the
very heart of it ; nor that his grasp of fundamental
principles is often defective ;t nor even, which is
the most serious blot of all, that it is difficult to
acquit some of his views of technical heresy — diffi
cult at any rate to acquit parts of his " Unum Ne-
cessarium " and " Letter on Original Sin," of Pela
gianism, or to reconcile them with the undoubted
doctrines of the Christian Church. Some of these
defects are due to the fact that he, like other gi'eat
thinkers, was entangled in the very spirit of system

• See his 'Treatise of Epi
scopacy,' in which the facts upon
which he builds are historically
untenable, and the importance
which he attaches to the ofBce is
exaggerated (see ' Life,' clxxxiii).
In both respects he contrasts un
favourably with Hooker in his
dealings with the same subject
(EocL Pol. iii. 3).
t Taylor's views of original
sin and of the unfruitfulness of
deathbed repentance are among
his least satisfactory contribu
tions to theology. The former
are diie to a violent reaction
against Calvinism, but he did

not seem to see that his own
scheme did but shift the diffi
culty, without in the smallest
degree removing it See the
admirable criticism of his views
in Coleridge's ' Aids to Reflec-'
tion.' The notion of Adam's
original paradisiacal perfection
is a Rabbinic fiction, which he
shared with South and many
other eminent divines, and which
survives to our own day in some
writers. Even Heber pronounces
his doctrine of original sin to be
"neither good logio nor good
divinity."

JEREMY TAYLOR.

195

of which he saw the peril ; and that driven into the
necessities of conflict on minute and mysterious
distinctions of dogma, he became in some degree
illogical by trying to map out, in the forms of the
Understanding, truths that can only be appre
hended by the Eeason; and sometimes verbally,
though not essentially heretical by attempting "to
soar into the secrets of the Deity on the waxen
wings of the senses." * He might have been more
accurate as a theologian if he had been less
supremely gifted as a poet and as an orator, and less
keenly sympathetic and appreciative as a man. " In
fact he would have been too great for man," says
Coleridge, " if he had not occasionally fallen below
himself." And indeed many of these weaknesses
were the inseparable concomitants of some of his
best sources of strength — the prodigious agility of
his intellect, the vivid power of his imagination, the
exceeding keenness of his sensibility, the boundless
wealth of his erudition, the multifarious variety of
his reading — above all, that oceanic tide of his lan-

* Bacon. It would be quite
easy to quote isolated sentences
of apparently the most opposite
tendency from Ills remarks on the
Two Sacraments. We must, in
fact, in quoting his authority,
consider always whether he is
speaking as a controversialist, or
as a rhetorician, or as a careful
and orthodox divine. We mubt

also bear in mind the dale of tho
work from which we quote. It
was inevitable that a mind so
susceptible as Taylor's should
be modified by its surroundings,
and to this is due the increase<l
tendency to give prominence to
High Church doctrines which is
observable in his later works.'
o 2

196

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY

guage, in which "words that convey feeling, and
words that flash images, and words that express
notions, flow together and whirl, and rush onward
like a stream at once rapid and full of eddies "* — a
stream which here and there has " islets of smooth
water " reflecting all that is lovely in earth and sky,
but which must inevitably sweep some impurities
upon its surface, and in which there must sometimes
be shallow backwaters, and stains of discoloration
from the many soils through which it flows.t
8. But, for these reasons, it is not in his theo
logical treatises, dazzling as is their eloquence and
amazing as is their ingenuity, that Taylor is seen
at his best.| His true position, his immortal sig-

• Coleridge's 'Apologetic Pre
face to Fire, Famine, and Slaugh
ter.' Elsewhere (' Notes on Eng
lish Divines,' i. 203) he talks of
the "costly gems that glitter,
loosely set, on the chain armour
of his polemic Pegasus, that ex
pands his wings chiefly to fly
off from the field of battle, the
stroke of whose hoof the very
rock cannot resist, but beneath
the stroke of which the opening
rock sends forth a Hippocrene."
t As specimens of the incau
tious breadth of statement into
which he is led by his power of
language and ardour of contro
versy, we may notice his exagge
rated views of the . nncertainty
of the meaning of Scripture in

the 'Liberty of Prophesying;'
and the extravagant importance
which he attached to confirma
tion (' Disc, of Confirm.'). In both
instances he carries a true prin
ciple much too far.
X I may be thought guilty
of some temerity in the above
passage by those who have read
the remarks of the late Bishop
Thirlwall ('Remains,' iL 352),
in which he seems to repudiate
the admission of such defects as
I have mentioned. Yet I can
hardly think that the great
Bishop would have been able to
deny the possibility of a fair
justification of all that I have
noticed, and most certainly he
would not involve me in the

JEREMY TAYLOR.

197

nificance for the history of the Church of God,
does not lie in his voluminous controversies, but in
his glorious eloquence and holy devotion. For the
subtler technicalities of school divinity he had, in
spite of his Cambridge training, no liking and no
speciality.* He felt a perfectly justifiable im
patience for what Milton calls " the subdichotomies
of petty schisms." He had indeed read the best
authorities about them, but he liad read tliem witli
no intense concentration, and by no means passes
them through the alembic of his own understand
ing. His ' Liberty of Prophesying,' and ' Dissuasive
against Popery,' show how extremely small was the
value which he set upon the esoteric arcana of
scholastic dogma ; how thoroughly convinced he was
(though he sometimes swerved from his own convic
tions) that in spite of thousands of treatises on
these subjects, "all that is solid religion, or clear
revelation about angels, about the immaculate con-

charge of "wantonly assailing
the illustrious dead."
* " The way to judge of religion
is by doing our duty; and theo
logy is rather a Divine life than
a Divine knowledge" (Sermon
before the University of Dublin,
and 'Liberty of Prophesying,'
passim). In more than one
passage he speaks with almost
angry contoinpt of all endeavours
to frame a systematic philosophy

out of the " scheme of salvation"
(see ' Works,' vi. 271). At the
same time there is vast exag
geration in Mr. Hunt's remark
that " there are but few doctrines
in which Taylor's views would
not exclude him from the com
mon pale of the orthodox in the
judgment of the majority of
Christians, of whatever sect or
party" ('Religious Thought in
England,' L 334).

198 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
ception, about original sin, could be compressed in
forty lines;"* how sincere was his advice to his
clergy to make every day a rosary or chaplet of
good works, to be presented to God at night, but
to " speak very little of the high and secret things
of God"! It is not by his purely theological
writings that he is best known, or because of them
that he is most valued; and indeed it was the
wise habit of his mind "to convert doctrines into
homilies, and speculations into prayers." But he
never could write otherwise than well, and even
the least accurate of his theological treatises is yet
of value for its digressions, its learning, its fancy, its
imagery, its tenderness, its insight. These are to
be found even in that great work, which, of all
others, he most carefully revised, and on which he
spent most time, because he rested on it his hope of
fame with posterity — although, in reality, posterity
cares less about it than about any of his other
writings — ^I mean the ' Ductor Dubitantium.' f This
book of casuistry was the direct fruit of his training
in scholastic methods and mediajval theology; and
the reason why it is now neglected is because
casuistry is but the Talmudism of Christianity, and
ceases to be valued when the robust conscience,
trained to personal communion with God, and feel-

* Ep. Ded. to ' Liberty of
Prophesying.' t See, for instance the incom

parable chapter on the Christian
Evidences ('Works,' ix. 158,
segj.)

JEREMY TAYLOR.

199

ing itself quite strong enough to walk alone, rejects
the interferences of auricular confession. In spite
of many redeeming excellences, and especially the
introductory chapters which occupy the first book
' On Conscience,' the ' Ductor Dubitantium ' ex
hibits Taylor's worst defects of prolixity, dubious
admissions, questionable opinions, haste and in
distinctness, want of depth and accuracy, and
accumulation of authorities and quotations in lieu
of a close grapple with principles.* Indeed, with
this elaborate treatise the science of casuistry, in its

¦* In spite of many merits, a,
moral treatise must stand con
demned, as founded on indistinct
and inadequate premisses, which
practically admits, as the 'Ductor
Dubitantium ' does, that what is
_ morally wrong may be politically
right : which sanctions the use
of arguments known to be un
tenable (ix. 95); which allows
the affrighting of children and
fools with mormos and bugbears
(ix. 101); which says (x. 304)
that the unlawful proclamations
of a true prince may be published
by the clergy, &c. It is grievous
to think that time-servers like
Sprat would liavo been able to
shelter themselves behind his
splendid authority in 1687. In
fact, as the 'Ductor Dubitantium '
had its main origin in the condi
tion of things created by a dan
gerous and evil sacerdotalism,
so whole sections of it (see x.

101-140) have (I fear it must
be said) a perceptibly Jesuitical
taint— due, I am confident, not
to Taylor's nature, but to the
over-importance which he at
tached to the endless and inju
rious cobweb-spinnings of Romish
and other casuists. He says, in
his 'Clerus Domini' ('Works,'
i. 21), "I believe there are not
so little as 5000 cases (of con
science) started up among the
casuists, and for aught I know
there may be five thousand
times five thousand." I cannot
at all accept the eulogy which
pronounced the ' Ductor Dubi
tantium' to be "tbe greatest
book on Moral Philosophy pro
duced by the English Church "
(Hunt, 'Religious Thought in
England') ; and even Dean Mil-
man's estimate of it ('Annals
of St. Paul's,' p. 344) seems too
favourable.

200

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

scholastic aspects, and with its economic manage
ments and accommodations of trath, may be said to
have died a natural death. The eloquence of Taylor
was the rich and illuminated colophon at the bottom
of a dreary and little profitable page. In the next
work which touched upon the subject, namely,
'Cumberland's Treatise on the Laws of Nature,'
" we find ourselves," says Hallam, " in a new world
of moral reasoning; schoolmen and Fathers, ca
nonists and casuists, have vanished like ghosts at
the first daylight." *
9. Among the theologic teachings of Taylor must,
however, be classed that magnificent appeal to
Christian charity, the immortal 'Liberty of Pro
phesying.' Had he never written any other book,
the Church of God would have owed him a debt
that can never be repaid. It achieved for the cause
jof toleration what Milton's splendid ' Areopagitica '
! Idid for the « Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." It
was published ten years after,t and was no doubt
more or less directly infiuenced by, Chillingworth's
'Eeh'gion of Protestants ;' but though Taylor
would have exulted in Chillingworth's passionate
exclamation, " Take away this persecuting, burning.

* Hallam's ' Literature of Eu
rope,' iii. 400. His remarks on
p. 392 are severe, but not so
severe as to be unjust.
t 'The Religion of Protes
tants' appeared in 1637 ; 'Halea

on Schism,' in 1642; 'Liberty
of Prophesying,' in 1647; Still-
ingfleefs 'Irenicum' (a far in
ferior performance), and MUton
on ' Civil Power in Ecclesiastioal
Causes,' in 1659.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

201

pursing, damning of men for not subscribing the
words of men as the words of God,"* he deals, far
more closely than either Chillingworth or Hales has
done, with the then-novel subject of religious to-
leration,t and his is the greatest work on this
immensely important topic ever written by an
ordained member of the Christian Church. Nor
do I see any reason to doubt his own express state
ment, which some writers have so rudely set aside,
that it was one of his aims to secure freedom of
thought, and therefore of worship, for the Church of
England ; and that, as against the Presbyterians, he

* 'Religion of Protestants,'
iv. § 17.
t That Taylor was not un
acquainted with the writings of
"the ever - memorable Hales"
appears from his borrowing the
legend of the gnomes men
tioned by Agricola (' Works,'
viii. 526). And when he calls
the term heresy a mere terricu-
lamentum, 'he may have remem
bered that Hales called heresy
and schism, "theological scare
crows." (Hales' 'Remains,'
Works, vi. 516. See TuUoch's
' Rational Theology in Eng
land,' L 372-416.) Erasmus
too, though not quoted in the
'Liberty of Prophesying,' had
yet distinctly fonuulated its
main principle. "Summa nos
tra religionis pax est et unani-
mitas. Ea vix constare poterit

nisi de qnam paucissimis defini-
amuB, et in multis relinquamus
suum cuique judicium" (0pp.
Ed. Bas., p. 1162). It does not
seem to have been Taylor's way
to refer frequently to modem
writers. He does indeed quote
Hooker not unfrequently, and
always in terms of warm admira
tion; but though he had evi
dently read the discourses of
John Smith, the Cambridge Plu-
tonist (' Works,' viii. 374-379),
and Henry Smith, "the silver-
tongued," yet he does not men
tion them by name. It is strange,
too, that he never onoa refers
to Spenser, of whom Milton so
boldly said, " Whom I dare be
known to think a better teacher
than Scotus and Aquinas" ('Are
opagitica').

202

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

found a favourable opportunity for doing so in the
rise of the Independents.* Nor is it quite fair to
say, as even some of his warmest admirers have
done, that in the hour of his Church's triumph — an
expression, indeed, which hardly represents the
state of Ireland in 1660 and the following years
— ^he abandoned the views which he had advo
cated with such courageous force. It is true that
in his later years his charity and toleration were
very sorely tried ; and in his 'Via Intelligentise,'
a famous sermon preached before the University
of Dublin in 1662, and still more in that preached
at the opening of the Irish Parliament in 1661,
he modifies rather than retracts his earlier prin-
oiples.t The needle might sometimes quiver and

* Hallam, ' Literature of Eu
rope,' ii. 353, accuses Taylor of
"some want of ingenuousness"
in Taylor's assertion, in tho
dedication of this work, that
he wrote the book to plead
for liberty of conscience on be
half of the Church of England
in time of persecution ; and
it is quite true that the class
of controversies with which
Taylor is mainly dealing is
not that which arose between
the Episcopal Church and her
enemies ; but Taylor might well
answer that if toleration were an
admitted principle in the cases
which he directly argued, it

would apply a fortiori to the
claims of the Church.
t ' Works,' viiL 367. The re
marks of Coleridge ('Notes on
English Divines,' L 209) are un
warrantably harsh. The sup*
posed inconsistency has been, to
say the least, grossly exaggerated.
Without further evidence I sim
ply disbelieve the story of his
buying up and burning as many
copies of the book as he could get.
The second edition was published
while he was Bishop (Heber's
' Life,' p. xxxiii.) ; and in his ' Dis
suasive from Popery,' published
as late as 1667, he reiterates sub
stantially the same views.

JEREMY TAYLOR. 203
be deflected, but, on the whole, it pointed true.
And the slight occasional deflection is no more
than we should have naturally expected in one
who, though eminently virtuous, was yet eminently
many-sided in intellect and flexible in disposition,
and who in all his controversies was so intensely
susceptible to the influences of the moment, as to be
swayed almost as powerfully by his feelings as by
his understanding. Nor must it be forgotten that, if
he seems to appeal to civil authority in matters of
opinion, he was living in a position where his very
life was in constant danger, and where his peace
was destroyed by incessant and virulent attacks.
But that, in his fundamental position, he was as
dauntless and sincere, as in personal conduct he was
conciliatory, courageous, and charitable ; that he did
hold most firmly to the last that heresy is not a
mere " error in intellectu " but a " contumacia in
voluntate" — "an act of the will," as Hales says,
" not of the reason " — a wicked opinion, not a mere
speculative mistake ; that the name " heretic " is
often a mere terriculamentum to frighten people
from their belief ; that half the questions which have
agitated and divided Churches are as superfluous as
the mutual hatreds which they have engendered
have been reprehensible ; that the Apostles' Creed
is for Christendom the sole necessary basis of unity,
and that nothing beyond it ought to be required of
others as a necessity of faith ; that it is wrong to

204

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

make the way to Heaven narrower than God has
made it; and that if God will not be angry with
men for being invincibly deceived, neither ought
men to be angry with each other — this, I think, is
demonstrable from his latest writings. It is little
short of a grave injustice to doubt that Jeremy
Taylor, in spite of a few vacillating expressions due
to his habit of realising both sides of an argument,
did embrace these traths with all the sincerity of
his heart as he had defended them with all the
splendour of his intellect.* And would to God that
the Church realised them as fully and deeply now,
as assuredly she ever needs the lesson ! Since the
want of a heartfelt charity has ever been a fatal
source of weakness and disunion ; since few of us are
proficients in the unselfishness which can respect the
position of an opponent, and the candour which can
admit that not one of us has a monopoly of truth ;
smce few of us display the love which can forgive
even a difference of opinion ; it is certain that the
"Liberty of Prophesying," though its concession of
civil toleration is less complete than experience has
shown to be desirable, will always be regarded as a

• How terribly Taylor's tolera
tion was tried may be seen from
his letters. The Presbyterians
of his diocese " appointed u
committee of Scotch spiders, to
see if they can gather or make

poison out of his books," " threat
ened to murder him," " dis
charged against him all their
ordnance of bitter words and
borrid threatenings," ** slandered
him," &o., &0. (' Life,' oiiL).

JEREMY TAYLOR. 205
book which rendered a courageous and immortal
service to the Church of God.*
10. Nevertheless, it is when Jeremy Taylor leaves
altogether the regions of scholasticism, controversy,
and rigid dogma; when he is appealing directly
to the imagination and to the religious emotion;
" when he escapes into the devotional, as into a
green meadowland with springs and rivulets and
sheltering groves, where he leads his flock like a
shepherd,"! that he is most incomparably great.
It is when he is writing on the duties of a holy life
— in his prayers, his sermons, his ' Golden Grove,'
his ' Holy Living and Dying,* his ' Life of Christ,'
that his lips are touched, as it were, by the seraphim
with coals of fire from the altar ; and that his very
faults, or what to the pedantries of formal criticism
might be so regarded, become like merits and
glories because they become parts of his dear
and inimitable self.J His imperfections, then, make

• Taylor must have known
that it would be distasteful to
the bigots of his party, and I
can easily believe that » book
which Milton must have ardently
admired would be disliked and
all but disavowed by Charles I.
See Heber's 'Life,' p. cclxii.,
quoting from Sir P. Warwick's
' Memoirs ' his account of an

analysis of the contents of this
great work, which, however,
may be found in Mr. Hunt's
' Religious Thought in England,'
L 334-341; and Principal Tul-
loch's ' Rational Theology.'
t Coleridge's ' Notes on Eng
lish Divines,' p. 256.
^ " I shall not be ashamed to
say that I am weary and toiled

interview with the king. Space i in rowing up and down the seas
forbids me to give any sketch or of questions which the interests

206

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

US feel for him a sort of human love, which we
could not feel for a writer of cold regularity, fault
less nullity, or colourless perfection. And these are
evidently the writings in which, to adopt his own
beautiful language, he can " slide towards his ocean of
God and infinity with a certain and silent motion ;" *
and in which, as Milton also loved to do, he can
contemplate the bright countenance of truth in the
mild and dewy air of delightful studies, so that in
these he is most happy and most at home. Take,
for instance, his Sermons.t We in this age of hurry,
excitement, pressure, fuss ; we whose bells are in
cessantly ringing ; whose leisure is never sacred from
the most frivolous interruptions; whose sympathies
are constantly upon the strain ; who are harassed by
the immense multiplicity of social and charitable
organisations ; we who, iu consequence, are but the
" pickers-up of Learning's crumbs ;" we who, in the
Church of the present day, can hardly count five
profoundly learned men ; stand incapably amazed
before the sermons of the 17th century, in their
inexhaustible knowledge, their prodigious fertility,
their " ladea vberfas." An ordinary sermon of the

of Christendom have commenced"
(Dedication to 'Great Exem
plar"). * Sermon on the death of
Lady Carbery.
t It is somewhat singular that

his Sermons contain so few spe
cific allusions to special feasts
and fasts, when we read his
Rule Ixi. of his 'Rules and
Advices to the Clergy.'

JEREMY TAYLOR. 207
present day, compared in point of splendour, variety,
and erudition, with a sermon of Jeremy Taylor's,
is like a squalid brick Bethesda in some poverty-
stricken Dissenting village in comparison with the
high-embowed roofs and storied windows of a Gothic
cathedral. What a range of reading — Hebraic, Hel
lenic, theological, literary — we encounter in these
discourses at Golden Grove! The historians, the
philosophers, the orators of Greece ; the poets, the
satirists, the epigrammatists of Rome; the Greek
Fathers, the Latin Fathers, the schoolmen, the ca
suists, the scholars ; the Italian poets ; the classicists
of the Eenaissance ; French romances, Arabic le
gends ; this /Mvpiovov} dvrjp seems to be familiar with
them all ! And what wealth of illustration ! Persian
kings glittering among the satraps of Asia ; Roman
banquets; Chian wines in purest crystal; Lamiae
that turn to serpents; Libyan lions; Pannonian
bears ; stags whose knees are frozen Ln icy streams ;
statues decapitated to make room for other hcEids ;
" poor Attilius Aviola " (as though every one knew
all atout him); the " condited bellies of the Scams ;"
"drinking of healths by the numeral letters of
Philenium's name ;" the golden and alabaster houses
of Egyptian Thebes ; the quaint, the pedantic, the
imaginative, the marvellous, the grotesque; — these
alternate with exquisitely natural images derived
from the green fields, and the violet, and the
thrush's song. In one single passage, speaking

208 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
of superstition, he refers to Diomedon and the
Battle of Arginusse, to Chabrias, to the Gregorian
Calendar, to the death of Aristodemus, to the eclipse
that frightened Nicias, to the sweating statues of
Eome, to the mass at Eheims during which Pope
Engenius spilled a few drops out of the chalice, and
the mass of requiem sung by Thomas a Becket on
the day of his reconciliation with Henry II.* In
another passage, to show us that fathers are often
unfortunate in their children, he refers in a breath
to Chabrias, Germanicus, M. Aurelius, Hortensius,
Q. Fab. Maximus, Scipio Afiicanus, Moses, and
Samuel ; and in yet another he illustrates frivolity of
occupation by Domitian catching flies ; Nero fiddling ;
Aeropus, King of Macedonia, making lanterns;
Harcatius, King of Parthia, catching moles ; Biantes,
King of Lydia, filing needles; and the patriarch
Theophylact spending his time in a stable of horseaf
Call these sermons Asiatic,! Ehodian, cumbrous,
pedantic, discursive, if you will: let every puny
critio take their measure with his yard wand^ and
fathom their ocean with his tape, — the fact remains
that in this and all other languages they continue to
be| in their own class, unparalleled. Let us even
admit that he is sometimes borne &way by the im
petuosity of his own rhetoric, and mistakes the
amplifications of fancy for the approximation to

• ' Sennon of Godly Fear,' pt. iii. + ' Holy Living,' L 9.
} Hallam's ' Literature of Europe,' u. S60.

JEREMY TAYLOR. 209
truth ; — let us, for instance, admit with Coleridge *
that he could never have paused to realise what was
meant by the Tartarean drench In which, in his
' Second Sermon on the Advent to Judgment,' f he
drowns his page; and that the agglomeration of
horrible torments in which he revels are but, in
reality, "mere bubbles, and flashes, and electrical-
apparitions from the magic caldron of a fervid and
ebullient fancy, constantly fuelled by an unexampled
opulence of language ; " — still, as a preacher, as a
devotional writer, none — not even Bishop Hall,
not even Bishop Andrewes, not even Archbishop
Leighton, not even Bishop W^ilson — at all equal
him. Only the 'Theologia Germanica,' the 'Imi
tatio Christi,' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' can
compare with his 'Holy Living and Dying,' in the
wide influence which they have exercised; and
while this treatise equals them in sweetness and
unction, in pathos and devotion, it far transcends
them in eloquence, imaginativeness and erudition.
Nor must we forget that it may reach some who feel
that even in the ' Imitatio Christi ' there is a lack
of some elements which they require, and the pre
sence of some which they could gladly relinquish.

•Apologetic Preface. Hap
pily the frightful passage on hell
torments, quoted by Dr. Newman,
and after him by Mr. Lecky and
Mr. MacOoll, is from the ' Consi
derations on the state of Man,'
[kdjo's coll.]

spuriously assigned to Taylor,
and really compiled from a Spa
nish book (see Eden's note to
Heber's ' Life,' p. viL
t Works, iv. 39, 42,

210 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
When John Wesley had laid aside the exquisite
manual of the Mediteval Mystic because it failed
to give him perfect satisfaction, it was the ' Holy.
Living and Dying ' which he took up ; and when he
had read the chapter on " Purity of Intention," " in-
stantiy," he says, " I resolved to dedicate all my life
¦ to God, all my thoughts, and words, and actions ;
being thoroughly convinced that there was no me
dium, but that every part of life must either be a
sacrifice to God or myself." And who can estimate
the Ir'jits of Taylor's influence, even had he achieved
nothing more than to kindle for the Church of
Christ that mighty breath of reviving inspiration
which is symbolised by the name of John Wesley ?
Although I have freely pointed out the defects
observable in the writings of this beloved bishop —
the true son of the English Church at one of its
stormiest epochs — yet I doubt whether we sliall not
as soon see another Shakspeare as another Jeremy
Taylor. To the acquisition of a learning such as
his, this age — hard, exacting, jealous ; without con
centration, without self-recollection, without leisure,
utilitarian; mistaking a superficial activity and a
worrying multiplicity of details for true deep pro
gress ; quite content with vapid shibboleths, archaic
ritualism, or emotional emptiness ; jealous of a
labour which, because it is retired, is mistaken for
idleness, and robbing every one whom it can of all
means for the exhaustive pursuit of learning — is

JEREMY TAYLOR. 211
wholly unfavourable. Two hundred years have
passed since the publication of the ' Liberty of Pro
phesying,' and we are still quarrelling about copes
and chasubles, and making it a matter of import
ance whether the Sacramental bread should be cut
round or square. When men are absorbed in such
controversies, and in the grinding littlenesses of
endless and elaborate agencies, often wholly dis
proportionate in number, and in the toil they
involve, to any possible good which they can
achieve, there is little possibility of a learned clergy
— there is indeed a fatal certainty that such will
not be produced. Let us be, at any rate, thankful
for an heritage which, in all probability, will never
be renewed ; let us profit by the holy writings, let
us do homage to the great and honoured name, of
this eloquent master in Israel ; and if we be some
times troubled with sad apprehensions that God is
removing the candlestick of our Church — " for why
should He not, when men themselves put the light
out, and pull the stars from their orbs, so hastening
the day of judgment ?" — let us remember that He
" deigned to put a portion of the holy fire into a
repository which might help to rekindle the incense,
when it shall please God religion shall return, and
all his servants shall sing, 'In convertendo eaptivi-
totem Sion ' with a voice of Eucharist." *

Dedication to ' The Great Exemplar.'
p 2

JOHN PEARSON.

Different classes of theologians — Pearson's Life — Systematic
theology — Scholasticism; effect of the Renaissance upon it,
and Pearson's relation to it — His advice to students of theology,
and statement of his own position — His opinion of the Reformed
Churches — Judgment on Descartes — Love of fixed principles
and methods — Exposition of the Cubed — Vindici^ Episto-
LABDM S. Ignatii — Other works — Conclusion.
In all the variety which theology presents, we may
recognise, I think, four main divisions. There are
great original thinkers, who have brought into pro
minence at a critical time some great and fertile
truth, which has had a large share in moulding the
views of succeeding generations. Of this class are,
in our own Church, Hooker and Butler. Then, again,
there are men who, without being exactly original,
have cast about the common truths of our most holy
faith the undying lustre of genius ; who have culled
from all fields of science and leaming flowers with
which to decorate the shrine of Christ. Such men
were Jeremy Taylor and Barrow. Then there is,
again, a third class — that of those who have suc
cessfully systematised the mass of theology existing
in their time ; and yet, again, a fourth, less showy,
but certainly not less useful, than any of the rest —
that of the scholars who devote themselves to theo-

214 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
logy; who give to the Sacred Scriptures, and to
the other records of the ancient Church, the same
care, the same accuracy, the same cultivated dis
cernment, by which many have won fame in other
fields. This class is, I say, certainly not less im
portant than any other ; for the Church is a society
having a continuous history and continuous records ;
our knowledge of the history depends upon the
records. If we accept false records for true, or
interpret true records falsely, our conceptions of the
Church are marred and distorted. Few things
strike us more in the history of the Middle Ages
than the mischief done by the absence of criticism
and exegesis, whether in relation to the Scriptures
or to other documents recognised as authorities ;
almost any text of any ancient book was held
sufiicient to defend an established usage. If it had
then been known, as it is now, that the supposed
Decretals of early Popes were forgeries, many con
troversies would have been much simplified and
shortened. It was one of the tasks of the seven
teenth century to apply a remedy to this state of
things ; the records were examined ; men began to
apply to Christian literature the critical and exege-
tic acumen which they had acquired in researches
among pagan authors; spurious works began to be
separated from genuine ; interpretations founded,
perhaps, on some defective Latin translation of a
Greek original, began to be discarded in favour of

JOHN PEARSON. 215
those of scholars familiar with the grammar and
usage of the original tongue. In short, that sifting
of the wheat from the chaff of ancient literature,
which has had so vast an influence on the progress of
Christian theology, was begun. Some of the soundest
intellect in Europe gave themselves to this work.
Among Englislimen of tlie seventeenth century
probably tlie ablest representative at once of sys
tematic theology and of scholarship was John
Pearson. Pearson was, lilve so many other distinguished
English scholars, the son of a country clergyman,
himself in his day a man of some distinction. He
was born in 1612, the birth-year of Jeremy Taylor;
he was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cam
bridge. It is worth notice that he, too, laid a poetic
leaf on the hearse of the beloved Edward King, the
Lycidas of Milton's well-known elegy. His verses
are, to say the truth, only the correct production of
a scholar who was no poet. But even if he had
been gifted with poetic fire, the storms of a few years
later might well have darkened the golden light of
fancy and imagination in their ominous clouds.
Pearson's early life just covers the period in which
the distinctive principles generally recognised as
Anglican were acquiring firmness and consistency.
Many, no doubt, among the leading Eeformers had
always clung to the precedents and authority of the
Primitive Church, but it was not until the days of

216 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
Hooker that the school can be said to have been
definitely formed which gave due weight to Scrip
ture, to primitive antiquity, to reason and to general
learning ; which opposed on the one hand the extra
vagance of individual interpretation regardless of
all precedent, however sacred and universal, and,
on the otiier, renounced the sole authority of
Eome ; the school which defended earnestly the
ancient doctrines of the Catholic Church asrainst
corrupters or innovators, and clung to the time-
honoured episcopal form of Church - government,
without condemning in one wide sentence all who
were unable to adopt their views.
How the storm which for a time overwhelmed the
old landmarks affected a man brought up in the best
traditions of the English Church, attached to her
not merely by the subtle bonds of social influence,
but by the firm convictions of a strong mind already
fortified by a wide knowledge of antiquity, we may
see in a Cambridge sermon of the year 1643,
preached just before the opening of the Westminster
Assembly, when the most cherished institutions of
the Church of England were in evident jeopardy;
when it became apparent that men who had little
respect for leaming and tradition were for a time to
have the upper hand, and that the venerable offices
of public worship were for a time to cease. Here
the zealous Churchman, still in the flush of early
manhood, gave vent to his indignation. "If the

JOHN PEARSON. 217
dominant party would rob the clergy of their learn
ing," he exclaims, "it hath been done before. Alas!
the apostate Julian would be their predecessor."
And " the innocent prayers, what have they done ?
Did the authors give their bodies to the fire that
their books should be burned ? Did' reverend Cran
mer, therefore, first sacrifice his hand, because it had
a part in the Liturgy ?" Indignation for once made
his words burn, but generally, in the midst of dis
turbance, he remains calm. When he mingles in the
strife of words, it is to reason and not to rail. In
that dusty atmosphere of combat he can still choose
the best weapons, and take his stand on defensible
ground. Pearson was not one of those headstrong persons
who, if they cannot do all that they would, will do
nothing at all. He could not restore in the churches
during the Commonwealth the use of the old prayers
which he so heartily loved, but what he could, he
did ; he became lecturer in one of the City churches,
and taught the truth in such a way as the times
permitted. The story is told of his contemporary.
Archbishop Leighton, that when he was asked by
some in authority, whether he preached to the times,
he replied, " that when so many preached to the
times, it might be permitted to one poor brother to
preach for eternity." Pearson was very unlike
Archbishop Leighton, but in this he seems to have
been like him, that in the midst of men who too

218

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

often allowed some speck or mote near at hand to
obscure their whole horizon, he gave all his energy
and learning to teach and enforce the great common
verities of Christianity. It needs some acquaint
ance with the theological literature of the time to
appreciate the clear-sightedness and force of cha
racter which led Pearson to expound to the congre
gation of St. Clement's, Eastcheap, the several articles
of the Apostles' Creed, and to illustrate them with a
more choice and exquisite learning than was then at
the command of any other Englishman. It is strange,
that a work which is, within its limits, the most
perfect and complete production of English theology,
should have been in its origin no more than a col
lection of parish lectures, published with the notes
of the author.
After the Restoration Pearson received the honours
in the Church of England which he had fairly
earned; he took a prominent part in the Savoy
Conference ; he was chosen to one of the Theological
Professorships at Cambridge, and appointed by the
Crown to the Mastership of Trinity College; he
ended his days as Bishop of Chester.* He has
been of late years commemorated by a beautiful

* The following are the prin
cipal dates in Bishop Pearson's
life:— Bom, Feb. 28, 16[§; Fel
low of King's College, Cam
bridge, 1634; Lecturer at St.
Clement's, Eastcheap, 1654 ;

Archdeacon of Surrey, 1660;
Master of Jesus College, 1660 ;
Margaret Professor, 1661 ; Mas
ter of Trinity, 1062 ; Bishop of
Chester, 1675 ; died, July 16,
1686.

JOHN PEARSON. 219
monument in his cathedral: but his greatest and
most lasting memorial is to be found in his works.
Let us then consider him as a tiieologian and
critic. We mean in common speech by theology the'
science which, accepting certain truths as of irrefra
gable authority, builds upon them methodically, by
logical inference, a system of teaching which covers
all the chief points in the region of spiritual things.
Theology of some kind there must be ; as soon as a
teacher passes beyond the bare words of Scripture;
as soon as he attempts to combine and harmonise
the statements of different passages ; as soon as lie
admits the authority of logical deductions from
revealed truth — he theologises. Christian theology
was at first occasional and unsystematic, as we find
it in the works of the ancient Fathers ; but in the
Middle Ages, it passed from the Church to the School,
from the comparatively popular and informal dis
course of the preacher to the eager but limited
disputation of the university, and the formal " read
ing" of the professor's chair. And during this
period there grew up a great body of systematic
theology, distinguished on the one hand by the
sharpest limitation, on the other by the greatest
speculative freedom. This theology was founded on
certain propositions which were held to admit of
no dispute ; texts of Scripture, decrees of Councils,
opinions of Fathers, supplied the " sentences" which

220 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
were accepted on all hands as absolute truth. But
an infinite ingenuity was bestowed on drawing
inferences from these acknowledged propositions
by the rules of the logic universally recognised,
so as to cover an ever wider field; for theology
in those days drew into itself what we now dis
tinguish as Ethics and Metaphysics, and attempted
to solve every problem which arose out of the
nature of the Deity, or from the relation of God
to man, or of man to his brother man. Every
such problem was thought to be soluble by the due
application of some recognised principle received
from authority, and the constant decision of new
problems by accredited doctors tended constantly
to increase the number of such admitted princi
ples, much as the range of the common law is con
stantly extended by the decisions of the judges.
It is scarcely necessary to say, that a large portion
of these disputations and decisions related to those
points on which we have least knowledge from
revelation ; those propositions which were most open
were of course most frequently mooted. Up to the
end of the fifteenth century the same authorities and
the same method were recognised in every school in
Europe, or were only questioned here and there
by independent thinkers like Wiclif, who were too
much in advance of their time to produce a per-<
manent eflect.
But with the revived study of the ancient classical

JOHN PEARSON. 221
literature in the fifteenth century there came a vast
change over the mind of Europe. Men awoke to
the consciousness that there was a world of thought
and feeling altogether outside the limits of scholastic
philosophy; tiiat there was a natural grace and
charm in writers who were wholly uninfluenced
by the acute systematising of the Middle Ages;
that there was even much wisdom to be found in the
works of men who were simply seekers after truth
with no infallible method to guide *hem. The
critical spirit arose ; men came to see that every
sentence handed down from antiquity, every judg
ment of an irrefragable doctor, was not worthy of
equal veneration ; and further, that some documents
which passed under the shadow of great names had
in fact no claim to such authority at all. The
absolute accuracy and sufBciency of the Vulgate
version of the Scriptures were brought into question ;
the study of the Greek and Hebrew was recom
mended; the earnest and unsystematic teaching of
a Chrysostom was preferred to that of the mediaeval
doctors ; the study of secular literature was recom
mended as a preparation for that of theology ; the
scholastic method was thought by many to minister
to over-subtlety and vain jangling rather than to
edification ; the great edifice of scholastic theology
was to many a Tower of Babel which would never
reach to heaven. This tendency to philology, to
criticism, and to the rejection of the scholastic

222

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :

method in favour of one more simple and natural,
appears very strongly in Erasmus ; * and the philo
sophic rebellion against the mere dead-weight of
authority and scholasticism was immensely promoted
in the succeeding century by the influence of Bacon
and Descartes.t But many theologians even among
the Reformers adhered still to the old method ; and
no one among the Anglican divines of the se^en-
teenth century, I think, defines his position in this
respect more clearly and explicitly than John Pear
son. If I were to give him a distinctive name, like
those which in the Middle Ages marked this as the
Subtle, that as the Irrefragable Doctor, I should
be disposed to call him the Scholar Doctor. In his
theological method he is a schoolman ; in his scholar
ship he belongs to the Renaissance.
There is perhaps no more clear index of Pearson's
position with regard to the standard of Christian

• See particularly his ' Ratio
seu Methodus compendio per-
veniendi ad veram Theologiara'
(' 0pp.' V. 75 ff. ed. Leyden,
1703), a tract which J. S. Scmler
tiiought worth reprinting in the
last century.
t It is perhaps worth notice
that the Jesuits, with their cha
racteristic readiness to adapt
themselves' to circumstances,
early rejected the scholastic
method. A distinguished mem

ber of the Company, Petavius,
speaks (' De Theol. Dogra.,'
Prol. i. I) with a certain con
tempt of that " theologia conten-
tiosa ac subtilis quas aliquot
abhinc orta seculis jam scholas
occupavit," and proposes to draw
" elegantiorem et uberiorem al
teram" from the genuine study
of antiquity. Compare viii. 4:
" Scholasticas istas lites alienas
a proposito nostro neo valdo
necessarias omittam,''

JOHN PEARSON. 223
doctrine and practice than is to be found in a Concio
ad Clerum preached at Cambridge soon after the
Restoration.* His advice to students of theology is
— "Have done with the morbid restlessness of the
present day ; sliun all attempts at novelty ; enquire
what was from the beginning, consult the sources,
have recourse to antiquity, go back to the Fathers,
look to tiie Primitive Church." Here, he thinks,
are to be found the arms with which papal and
puritan eriors are alike to be put down. In the vast
forest of Scripture all forms of errors may find
lurking-places,t and of ingenious arguments there
is no end ; let tlie ortliodox be as diligent as they.
may, they will find it hard to outdo their opponents.
The one authority by which all can be alike crushed
is that of the ancient Church. We must learn the
truth, as Irenaeus says, in those churches which
derive their tradition from the apostles. As to tliat
detestable invention of Calvin's, which for a time
superseded all the most sacred traditions of our
ancient Church — unroll the ecclesiastical annals,
read the works of the most ancient Fathers; you
will find episcopacy everywhere, presbytery nowhere.
Are the Romanists scandalised that in our public
prayers we invoke neither saint nor angel ? Let us
take the Apostolic Churches as the interpreters of
the Apostolic letters, and we have a complete and

' Opera Minora,' Ed. Churton, ii. 6. f Ibid. iL 10.

224 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
ready vindication. Do the modem innovators object
to many things in our form of Common Prayer ?
They are exactly the portions which have the fullest
consent of antiquity. From whichever side it may
be attacked, the surest defence of the Church
of England is its agreement with the Primitive
Church. Pearson deliberately and avowedly adhered to
the scholastic method in theology. He announced,
as soon as he took his place in a professor's chair, " It
is theology that I profess, and that the scholastic."*
And then he further defines what he understands
by theology. " When I speak of theology," he says,
" I mean the science which is concerned with God
and things divine ; and when I apply that term to
it as one apart and separate from other sciences,
I take for its subject-matter the revelation made
by God, and the truths through that revelation to
us made known; further, as the latest and fullest
manifestation of the wiU of God is that*made by
Christ, I Understand by theology — to limit the
term still further — the doctrine of the Christian
religion." And he prefers the scholastic method
of stating and dealing with things divine so
revealed to us by God through His Son. For
as the revelation of God contains teaching varied
and multiform, the Church was made aware that

' Opera Minora,' Ed. Churton, L 1.

JOHN PEARSON. 225
this scholastic theology was, if not absolutely
necessary, at least of very great utility. It is well
that the varied truths of revelation should be
treated in some kind of order and method, and
the clearer the method, the more readily are errors
and fallacies detected. " This, then, is the task of
the scholastic theology; to set forth clearly and
succinctly the Christian doctrine which is according
to the faith; to state it with fit arrangement and
precise method from theological sources ; to inves
tigate, prove, confirm, defend it by means of right
reason, well informed by the ordinary human arts
and sciences." That he had a sincere and very
natural admiration for the order, method and in
genuity of the great schoolmen is evident ; but he
was not blind to some at least of their faults. He
begs his hearers not to fancy that he is intending
to take them back from the purity of the Renais
sance * to the barbarisms of the Middle Ages. No
such thing ; the schoolmen had their defects, of
which the first is, that they did not know how to
criticise authorities. They take propositions from
Scripture; but they make no distinction between
Canonical and Apocryphal books, and they use the
Vulgate as if it were the original text. They quote
Councils, but they make no distinction between
ancient and modern, between the greatest and the

* " A puritate renascentium literarum" (' Opp. Min.' L 3).
[kino's coll.] Q

226 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
most contemptible assemblies. They allege the^
consent of the Fathers; but they quote spurious
as well as genuine works, many works known to
us they never saw, and of Greek books they knew
only Latin translations. They rely upon decrees of
Popes ; but while no Pope is more than a respect
able patristic authority, some Popes are much ,
less. We Anglicans, on the other hand, set in the
highest place of authority the Canonical books of
Scripture, speaking their own tongues wherein
they were written; we receive Councils, chiefly
General Councils, which really speak the mind of
the ancient Church ; we think much of the consent
of the Fathers, but then by " Fathers " we mean
ancient writers of admitted weight, to the exclusion
of all spurious or apocryphal writings ; as to the
Popes, we recognise the best of them in any case
simply as Fathers. With these allowances, Pearson.
proceeds to adopt as the basis of his theology the ;
greatest of medieeval systems, the ' Summa Theo-
logiae' of Thomas Aquinas. Pearson is, in short, a
schoolman, with the scholarship of the Renaissance. .
Of the Reformed Churches he speaks with the
utmost respect; yet he feels that if the Roman
Church has erred by an undiscriminating acceptance
of authority, the Eeformed Churches have no less
erred by an undiscriminating rejection.* They have .

•Opp. Min.,' L 434.

JOHN PEARSON. 227
abandoned idolatry, embraced Christian doctrine in
its purity, rejected traditions of men, shaken off
the grievous burden of ceremonies, extirpated papal
tyranny, corrected everything according to the
exact standard of the Word of God. Still, we must
admit that their intentions were better than the
results which they attained; the reaction from
the old state of things was too violent. Hence, in
extirpating idolatry they hasdly retained reverence ;
in rejecting the traditions of men they hardly
spared those of the apostles ; in ridding themselves
of ceremonies they stripped the Church almost
bare ; and in rejecting human authority in matters
of faith they preferred their own opinions to the
undisputed dogmas of Fathers and decrees of
Councils. And the revolutionary spirit was suc
ceeded by an unreasoning conservatism ; institutions
first set up as temporary expedients in a time of
war and tumult they now refuse to amend ; they
fear lest the whole edifice should fall if a stone is
touched. Happier far was the Anglican Reforma
tion, which- retained the ancient episcopal order,
and acknowledged the authority of Creeds and
Fathers, as well as that of Scripture.
With Pearson's views on theology, he was, as we
might anticipate, no Cartesian. The champion of
authority and precedent had no sympathy with the
ardent and" self-reliant spirit who was ready to
destroy the existing fabric of thought and build it
q2 ¦

228 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
up again by his own unaided skill.* His God is
the God of Revelation, and has nothing in common
with the metaphysical deity of Descartes.f That
gentleman may, he admits, be an ingenious philo
sopher, but in theology he can by no means be
permitted to make a clean sweep of all that has
gone before, and start afresh from the mere fact
of consciousness. With Pearson, discussion has its
limits as well as its laws ; the questioning and
the cavilling of the age in which he found himself
was evidently in the highest degree distasteful to
him. A man cannot propound. the question, he
complains,t whether God is omnipresent, but up
starts one who objects, that it is not yet agreed
that there is a God. If we set up the thesis, that
obedience is due to a king, men must first assure
themselves that there ought to be a king; nay,
whether a Christian can be a king. The age is
in trutli infected, he hints, with Cartesianism run
mad. And this disposition to reject all authority,
as such, and start in quest of trath without
assumptions, is perhaps at least as common in
the nineteeenth as it was in the seventeenth
century. With his firm and fixed principles he ha^s no
more hesitation in giving a decision on a point of
theology than Lord Coke had in deciding a point

' Opp. Min.' L 272. f Ibid. i. 28. J Ibid, i 271 £

JOHN PEARSON. 229
of common law. He " speaks resolvedly as a divine,
to whom it properly appertains to speak of theo
logical doctrines."* His authorities are definite,
and he has perfect confidence in his methods. He
quite naturally ends a dissertation with the con
clusive words, oTrep eSei Set^ai, Quod erai demon
strandum; the proposition is proved, and there is
an end.f A greater contrast to the questioning
and hesitating tone of much of our modern theology
could scarcely be imagined. But Pearson had
also, what many very confident disputants have not,
the tolerance which arises from a consciousness
of strength. His calmness and candour were as
conspicuous as his logic and learning in the
Savoy Conference, where he won the admiration of
foemen who were able to estimate his worth.
" Dr. Pearson," says Richard Baxter, " was their
true logician and disputant. He disputed accurately,
soberly, and calmly, being but once in any passion,
breeding in us a great respect for him, and a per
suasion that if he had been independent he would
have been for peace, and that if all were in his power
it would have gone well. He was the strength and
honour of that cause which we doubted whether
he heartily maintained." The last sentence shows
that the Nonconformists failed to understand a
man who could be at once calm and earnest. That

? ' Opp, Min.' ii. 168. t Itid. ii. 162.

280 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:
Pearson loved peace is true enough, and he would
doubtiess have conceded more than some of his
colleagues ; but the whole tenor of his life shows
that he would not have bought peace by the sacri
fice of one jot of that which he regarded as essential
to the doctrine or discipline of the Church. That he
would not have given up episcopacy is certain, and
I much doubt whether he would have accepted
such a compromise as Ussher's "moderate episco
pacy." The absence of passion made him, as
Burnet says, "more instructive than affective" as
a preacher, but it was a most valuable quality for a
disputtvnt and controversialist.
His preference for the scholastic method in
theology appears in his famous ' Exposition of the
Creed.' That book is indeed on the surface some
what more popular than the formal treatises of the
schoolmen, as one founded on parish lectures could
scarcely fail to be; but it is evidently the work
of one accustomed to rigorous definition and exact
deduction, and might easily be thrown into a form
similar to that in which Thomas Aquinas and other
great schoolmen have treated the same subjects.
The style is singularly unambitious ; it seems to aim
at nothing beyond the careful and accurate state
ment of propositions and arguments. The truth is,
it is the style of a scientific treatise, and not of au
oration or declamation. Nothing is further from
Pearson's thought than to recommend the traths of

JOHN PEARSON. 281
Christianity by the arts of rhetoric ; an ornate
treatise on geometry would probably have been
quite as much to his taste as an ornate treatise on
the Creed. He regards the propositions which he
takes for the foundation of his reasoning as being
just as iiTcfragable, and almost as precise, as those of
Euclid. The propositions which he takes for granted
are those which, he is sure, no good man would
deny ; and he probably regarded those who did deny
them much in the same way that the men of real
science in our time look upon the ingenious persons
who pester them with proofs that Copernicus and
Newton were altogether mistaken. And this dry
scientific way of treating theology explains the de
fect, which has been often noted, in his concep
tion of Faith ; such a conception of Faith as tliat
set forth (for instan'^e) in Julius Hare's ' Victory
of Faith' is beside his purpose; for the present
he is not concerned v;ith faith as a power, but
only with the assent of the intellect to truths re
vealed. For his purpose, to introduce the concep
tion of faith which is most familiar to the practical
teacher would be superfluous and inconvenient.
As it stands, his discussion corresponds to his
definition. The notes to the ' Exposition ' are at least as re
markable as the text. He explains in his address
to the reader that the text " containeth fully what
can be delivered and made intelligible in the Eng-

232

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY:

lish tongue " for the use of the unlearned ; while he
has " placed in the margin . . . whatever is neces
sary for the illustration of any part of the Creed "
for the benefit of scholars; the result is a work
exactiy in the form of a modem 'Handbook,' in
which a simple text is supplemented by learned notes.
And the notes are admirable of their kind. The
works of most of the great writers of the seventeenth
century are more remarkable for the number and
variety than for the appositeness of their citations :
Pearson's are choice and apposite ; they are almost
always the best for their purpose and almost always
fairly interpreted ; he will cite .Slschylus for a point
of scholarship and Augustine for a point of doctrine ;
and, both in one case and the other, he will take
infinite pains to illustrate a subordinate point of
interpretation with curious learning. The more we
study his work, the more we are led to admire the
extent of his reading, the accuracy of his scholarship,
and the soundness of his judgment.
Pearson had a great veneration for the primitive
and catholic institution of episcopacy, which he had
seen with pain and grief abolished for a time in
his native land. Part of his quarrel with the Pope
was that he had absorbed many functions which
properly belonged to the episcopate generally.* And

* " Essors unius pontificis
potestas reliquorum omnium
tmtiatitnm jog eripuit, absorpsit"

('Opp. Min.,' L 434; compare
274, 286). What would he say
if he were living now ?

JOHN PEARSON.

233

it was probably this love for episcopacy which led
him to join in the Ignatian controversy. The
genuineness of the collection of letters attributed
to Ignatius of Antioch was very keenly discussed,
for it was felt that if they were the genuine work
of one who sufiered martyrdom at an advanced
age in the year 115, episcopacy must have been
a venerated institution of the Church in the age
immediately succeeding that of the apostles; the
letters everywhere recognise it, and recognise it as
an institution essential to the completeness of a
church. After the publications of Ussher (1644)
and Vossius (1646), it was generally admitted that
only seven, out of the larger number which bore
the name of Ignatius, were genuine ; but even these
were assigned by the veteran Daille to a date not
much before the reign of Constantino. It was with
Daill^ that Pearson joined issue in the 'Vindiciae
Ignatianse.' On the main point victory was easy;
the date assigned by Daille is destitute of all pro
bability, and Pearson had no difficulty in refuting
his arguments ; whether he proved the seven epistles
to be the work of the martyred bishop of Antioch
admits of more doubt ; * but the work has a value

* The whole aspect of the
question has been materially
changed in recent times by the
discovery (1836) in the Nitrian
desert of a Syriao translation
of three epistles, which are

now regarded by many as the
only genuine portion (Cureton,
' Corpus Ignatianum'). R, A.
Lipsius (' Die Aechtheit d.
Syrisch. Recension der Ignatian.
Briefe,' in Illgen'a ' Zeitsohrift

:284

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :

independent of its professed end ; it is full of ad
mirable discussions of collateral points which the
author found it necessary to establish in the course
of his argument. Probably even to this day there
is no more complete statement of the evidences for
primitive episcopacy than is to be found in the
' Vindicife.' When the question turns up incident
ally of the genuineness of a treatise of Origen, he
investigates the matter with the most exhaustive
care. Similarly he discusses the age of the Pseudo-
Dionysius. The obscure point of the date of Valen-
tinus the heresiarch is made the subject of most
patient research. And in these investigations, and
in other incidental discussions, he shows the true
scholar's instinct : he always recurs to original au
thorities, he is careful and exact in his interpreta
tions, and he illustrates the passage in question by
similar usages elsewhere. If proof were wanting of
the care and scholarlike skill with which Pearson
read his books, it would be supplied by the ' Margi
nalia ' — the notes and jottings from the margins
of his books — which have been published in recent
times. The works by which Pearson is chiefly known

fur hist. TheoL' 1856, L), ad
mitting the genuineness of the
Syriac, holds the Greek version
of the seven epistles to be a
work of the middle of the second
century; but many distinguished

scholars (as, for instance. Bishops
Christopher Wordsworth and
Hefele) still maintain, as Pear
son did, the seven Greek epistles
to be the genuine work of Igna

tius.

JOHN PEARSON.

235

are the 'Exposition of the Creed,' and the 'Vin-
dicia3 Ignatianse;' on these his reputation might
safely rest. But the complete list of his writings
shows great literary activity, extending, if not
literally to the end of his days, to the end of
his intellectual life ; for his mind fell into ruin
before his bodily powers utterly failed. From
the days when, a young man, he published the
"Sermon preached before the University of Cam
bridge," to the days when his failing hand left
unfinished the ' Dissertations on the early Popes of
Rome,' he seems never to have been idle ; sermons,
lectures, letters, and prefaces indicate his activity in
the intervals of more solid work; and everytliing
that he published contains something solid and
weighty.*

* Tho following list of Bishop
Pearson's writings is taken from
Archdeacon CImrton's edition of
the ' Minor Works,' p. cxxxv. : —
1. A Sermon preached before
the University of Cambridge, at
St. Mary's, on St. Luke xi. 2.
A.D. 1643.
2. Christ's Birth not mistimed.
London, 1649.
3. Preface to Lord Falkland's
Discourse. London, 1651.
4. Prolegomena in Hieroclem.
London, 16S5.
5. Papers in ' Schism Un
masked.' Paris, 1658.
6. The Patriarchal Funeral.

Seimon on the death of George
Lord Berkeley. London, 1658.
7. Preface to Slokes's Expli
cation of tho Minor Prophets.
London, 1659.
8. Preface to Hales's Remains.
London, 1659.
9. Exposition of the Apostles'
Creed. London, 1659.
10. No Necessity of Reforma
tion of the Public Doctrine of
the Church of England. London,
16(i0. 11. Answer to Dr. Burges.
London, 1660.
12. Prasfatio ad Criticos Sa-
cros. London, 1660. [13.

236

MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY;

Bishop Pearson has not the great renown which
waits on genius and eloquence; his works have
never been, and never can be, popular; but no
English scholar and theologian is more perfect in
his kind. He knew his powers, and undertook no
thing that he could not perfectly carry out. Pro
bably no other Englishman, few of any nation, had
the same accurate knowledge of antiquity which

IS. Dedicatio et Priefatio ad
Diogenem Laertium Menagii.
London, 1664.
14. Preefatio Parssnetica ad
Vetus Testamentum. Cantabr.,
1665. 15. Oratio ad Exsequias
Matthffii Wrenn, Episc. EUensis.
1667. 16. Letter against promiscuous
Ordinations. London, 1668,
17. Lectiones de Deo et Attri-
butis. 1661 sqq. [In 'Opera
Minora,' ed. Chiuton, vol. L]
18. Orationes in 0>mitiis Can
tabr. 1661-1671. [' Opp. Min.,'
L397ff.] 19. Condones ad Clerum,
I66I-1671. ['Opp. Min.,' ii.
Iff.] 20. Determinationes Theolo-
giaeSex. ['Opp. Min.,' L 269 ff.]
21. Vindicise Epistolarum S.
Ignatii. Cantab., 1672.
22. Sennon preached at West-
mmster Abbey, Nov. 5, 1673.
London, 1673.
23. Annates CyprianioL Ozon,
1682.

)

O eS 00
.£3 fl CO
P4 O^

24. Annates Pau- "^
lini. 25. Lectiones in
Acta Apost.
26. Dissertationes
de Serie et succes-
sione Primorum Ro
ma Episooporum.
27. Various Letters, Frag
ments, &c., collected by Arch
deacon Churton.
28. Notes on Hesychius. MSS.
Trin. Coll., Cantabr.
29. Notes on Ignatius, in
Smith's edition of Ignatius.
Oxon, 1709.
30. Notes on Justin, in Thirl-
by's edition of Justin, London,
1722. 31. Notes on .Slschylus. MS.
Bodl. Rawl. 193.
To these should be added the
'Marginalia' from certain of
Pearson's books preserved in
Trinity College Library, pub
lished by Mr. Hort in the
'Journal of Classical and Sa>
ored Philology,' voL i. pp. 98 ff,
399 ff.

JOHN PEARSON. 237
Pearson possessed, and the same power of using it
with skill and judgment. If he had not been a
theologian, he might have been known simply as
the best English scholar before Bentley ; he was a
theologian, but he was none the less a great scholar.
And there is a singleness and consistency in Pearson's
character which wins an admiration not always given
to more brilliant parts. In times of great trial and
difficulty he maintained his principles with a stead
fast calmness which deserves the highest praise ; in
adversity he was not cowardly, in prosperity he was
not arrogant ; rarely has a prominent man so kept
the even tenor of his way in the midst of storms
such as those of the seventeenth century.
Pearson occupies a place apart among English
theologians. No one, probably, of the whole band
has less claim to originality or imagination ; he pro
ceeds always upon authorities, and his distinctive
skill is in the discrimination and use of authorities.
He was altogether incapable of the Platonic sweep of
thought which led Hooker from Puritanic contro
versy to his noble contemplation of the laws which
govern the universe. He is equally removed from
the poetic fancy of Jeremy Taylor and the. brilliant
invective of South. Perhaps among English divines
the one who most resembles him is Bull ; but Bull
is inferior to him both in scholarship and in the nice
use of authorities ; his ' Defence of the Ante-Nicene
Faith' — doubtless an admirable work — has never

238 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY :
taken its place beside Pearson's ' Exposition of the
Creed.' The theologian whom we may best compare
and contrast with Pearson is his successor in the
Mastership of Trinity College, Isaac Barrow. He
too, expounded the Creed, but in how difierent a
spirit! With Barrow, even when he treats what
would be to many bare scientific propositions, the
ethical interest is dominant. Contrast Pearson's
definition of faith or belief as "an assent to that
which is credible, as credible" — good as it is for
his own purpose — with Barrow's contention that
" infidelity is a sinful distemper of heart," and
his eloquent picture of the "many gallant feats
that have been achieved by faith," and its "ex-,
ploits of spiritual prowess ; " of the " heroical acts
of fortitude and patience " which " the bright sun-*
shine of grace and glory upon the minds of our
aposties and primitive saints did produce," when
" a little troop of them marched out with resolu
tion to attack all the powers of hell and to beat-
down the kingdom of darkness ; to despatch all
the prejudices and errors of mankind, and to subdue
the world to the obedience of Christ." Or compare
Pearson's dry, though clear and sound, defence of
the Divinity of Christ, with the dignified eloquence
in which Barrow sets forth the " excellency of the
Christian Religion," and proves that Jesus is the
true Messias, the Son of God, and our Lord. In
those parts of the subject where Barrow goes over

JOHN PEARSON. 239
the same ground as Pearson, he is less succinct and
accurate, less scholarlike than Pearson ; but he ,
evidently feels much more strongly tiian Pearson
the impulse to contemplate the great truths of
religion in their bearing upon actual human life;
he is, perhaps, hardly less a theologian than
Pearson, but he is much more a preacher. There
is need of both in the great House of God. The
theologian without the preacher dwells apart, and
the rays of his light fall upon few hearts; the
preacher without the theologian is too apt to sub
stitute popular declamation for the careful teaching
of the truth. Pearson was not, so far as we know,
a great preacher; but probably few writers have
had a larger influence on those who have filled the
pulpits of the Church of England for the last two
centuries. There are few to whom that Church
is more indebted for the gi-ave and calm tone,
removed equally from blind submissiveness on the
one hand and restless innovation on the other,
which has been its strength. And never, perhaps,
was the example and influence of a man like
Pearson, who, in days of infinite disputation, de
fended the great cardinal truths of the Christian
faith, regardless of the perpetual skirmishes about
him, more needed than it is at the present time,
when the highest truths seem in danger of being
thrust into the background by matters of mere
speculation or mere ceremony. The more we have

240 MASTERS IN ENGLISH THEOLOGY.
oi his really sound learning, of his clearnees and
dispassionate accuracy in debate, the more conscious
shall we become of the infinite importance of the
Faith once for all delivered to the saints, and of the
comparative nothingness of many of the objects for
which men less learned and more passionate main
tain an eager straggle.

THE END.

YALE UNIVERSITY

339002 oo2685T97b

$•¦' ¦I. i:

!'-i, ^

, )

" ' i-t>; .',i'j'

J^ ;' tj I !5'^

' »(>h^ 'St'
V i
¦L- "¦^*