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YALE
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Preparing for Ptiblication,
NEW EDITIONS OF
1.
LEADERS OF THE REFORMATION,
Revised and Enlarged.
II.
ENGLISH PURITANISM AND ITS LEADERS,
Carefully Revised.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

RATIONAL THEOLOGY

AUD

CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

ElKcinf fiev yap 0eou AtJyoy 6e7os KoL jSacri\t/cbs, . . . eiKwv Se cIkSvos
6.vSp(iinvus Noiij — " The image of God is the divine and royal Logos,
and the image of the image is the human Reason." — Clem. Alex.,
Strom., lib. v. c. 14.
Bis W3S3 ttin"> "15 — "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.''
TT - ; . T : '• J^
("The lamp of the Lord is the Soul of Man.")— Prov. xx. 27.

RATIONAL THEOLOGY
AND
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
IN ENGLAND
IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

BY
JOHN TULLOCH, D.D.
PKINCIPAL OF ST MARy'S COLLEGE IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF ST ANDREWS
ONE OF HER MAJESTY'S CHAPLAINS FOR SCOTLAND
Author of ' Leaders of the Reformation and ' Bnglisli Puritanism
and its Leaders'

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. XL
THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXII

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

I. HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
SCHOOL — PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY, I
IL BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE — REASON AND RELI
GION,  45
IIL JOHN SMITH — FOUNDATIONS OF A CHRISTIAN
PHILOSOPHY,  117
IV. RALPH CUDWORTH — CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM, . -193
V. HENRY MORE — CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND
MYSTICISM,  303
VL MINOR MEMBERS OF THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL:
CULVERWEL, WORTHINGTON, RUST, PAT^
RICK, FOWLER — GLANVILL, NORRIS, . . 4IO
VII. GENERAL ESTIMATE — RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY, 456

CORRIGENDA.
-Motlo, _^/- EiKtuj" . . yap . . fiaalXiKhs . . uKav" read " EUiiy . . yap.
^atrtMiihs . . . eiKcbi'."
Page 75, for ' ' Remonstratium " raid ' ' Remonstrantium. "
ci2,/or "neminen" read "neminem."
<j\,for " @eo(t>opovfi4i'a Aoyfiara" read " &£o<popovit.ei'a Aoyiiara."
126, note, /or " xp^'^Tf" read " Kpvirrf."
1^6, /or " maindraw back " read " main drawback."
141, note, for " 7rpoA^i|/6is " read " TrpoX^tf/eis.''
IS9, /or "fiere" read "fieri."
160, note, /or "Toairas " read "toibutos," and y^r " avvrjKSovaai^'
read "iTvve\6ov<xai.''
l5l, note, /or " natur " read "natura."
199, note, /or ** HapaduaSos elxhs " read " llapa(t>vdSos e//c(is."
200, note, /or " rov vor\Tov " read " rov votitou."
232, note, yi^r *' ayaTrf} " read "ayaTT?;, "
2^1, /or " vKij" read "BAtj."
283, /or " TheEetsetus " read " Theaetetus, " and /or " Thrasymacus "
read " Thrasymachus."
288, note, /or " finge " read " fingi," /or " effecundum " read " efficien-
dum,"/or "no " read "non," and/or "nullamvi" read " nullamve."
343, note,/or " adversis " read " adversus."
345, note, /or " transcendalis " read " transcendental! s."
352, notQf/or " drdpLuv ^' read " drtJ/itwi','' and ^^TpaiKQiv " read "Tpw-
Xkuv, "
358, note, /or " fit " read " sit. "
370, note, yiw "isti soptime" read "istis optime. "
382, y&r " generalier " read " generalior,"
431, yor " intimancy '' read "intimacy."
450, and note p. 451 and 4.^2, /or "ante-fanatical " read "anti-fanatical."
456, note,yor " Houghton's," &c,, read " Stoughton's,'' &c.

The iQcdb ui reugious autnonty, and the constitu
tion of the Church, were the centres round which
the preceding movement revolved. What makes
the Church ? — or, in other words, what are the
essential terms of Christian communion and the
VOL. II. A

RATIONAL THEOLOGY
AND
CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
IN ENGLAND.

HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL
—PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY.
With the advance of the seventeenth century, the
rational spirit broadened and took to itself larger
intellectual elements. It extended beyond the
sphere of the Church, into the whole region of spiri
tual thought and philosophy. There remains to us,
in this volume, the task of sketching this further
stage in the intellectual and theological development
of the English mind.
The ideas of religious authority, and the constitu
tion of the Church, were the centres round which
the preceding movement revolved. What makes
the Church ? — or, in other words, what are the
essential terms of Christian communion and the
VOL. II. A

2 HISTORICAL position OF THE CAMBRIDGE
conditions of national Christian organisation ? — were
the great questions of the time to which the spirit
of religious inquiry sought an answer. All other
questions were subordinate, even those arising out
of the Synod of Dort and the progress of Armin-
ianism. These helped to quicken the national con
sciousness, but the mainsprings of its action were
the stirring ecclesiastical difficulties. Two parties
stood opposed, each professing a theory of the Church
which admitted of no compromise. Inheriting alike
the medieval idea of theological and ritual uni
formity — which the Reformation had failed to de
stroy — they interpreted this idea in diverse direc
tions, and so stood face to face in hopeless discord.
Equally exclusive, and claiming each to absorb the
national life, it was inevitable that they should clash
in a violent trial of strength. The intensity of the
conflict was proportioned to the intensity of the divi
sion betwixt parties, sundered, not only by political
differences, but by rival ideals of religious govern
ment and worship, which they interpreted respec
tively as of divine authority.
It was the merit of Hales and Chillingworth and
Taylor, attached as they were personally to one side
in this struggle, that they penetrated beneath the
theoretical narrowness which enslaved both sides,
and grasped the idea of the Church more pro
foundly and comprehensively. They saw the
inconsistency of a formal jus divhium with the
essential spirit of Protestantism, imperfectly as this
spirit had been developed in England, or, in
deed, elsewhere. According to this spirit the true

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPPIY AND CHRISTIANITY. 3
idea of the Church is moral, and not ritual. It
consists in certain verities of faith and worship,
rather than in any formal unities of creed or order.
The gfenuine basis of Christian communion is to be
found in a common recognition of the great realities
of Christian thought and life, and not in any outward
adhesion to a definite ecclesiastical or theological
system. All who profess the Apostles' Creed are >
members of the Church, and the national worship/
should be so ordered as to admit of all who makej
this profession. The purpose of these Churchmen,!
in short, was comprehension, and not exclusion.,'
While they held that no single type of Church gov
ernment and worship was absolutely divine, they
acknowledged in different forms of Church order an
expression more or less of the divine ideas which lie
at the root of all Christian society, and which — and
not any accident of external form — give to that
society Its essential character. In a word, the
Church appeared to them the more divine, the more
ample the spiritual activities it embraced, and the
less the circle of heresy or dissent it cut off. This
breadth and toleration separated them alike from
Prelatists and Puritans.
Whatever we may think of the position and char
acter of these men otherwise, they were the true
authors of our modern religious liberty. To the
Puritans we owe much. They vindicated the dignity
of popular rights and the independence due to the
religious conscience. Save for the stern stand which
they made in the seventeenth century, many of the
elements which have grown into our national great-

HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

ness, and given robustness to our common national
life, would not have had free scope. But it argues a
singular ignorance of the avowed aims of the Pres
byterian party and the notorious principles of the
Puritan theology, to attribute to them the origin of
the idea of religious liberty. As a party, the Pres
byterians expressly repudiated this idea. Their
dogmatism was Inflexible. The Church, according
to them, was absolutely authoritative over religious
opinion no less than religious practice. It could
tolerate no differences of creed. The distinction of
fundamental and non-fundamental articles of belief,
elaborately maintained by Chillingworth and Taylor,
was held to be dangerous heresy ; and the prin
ciple of latitude, with all the essential ideas of
free thought which have sprung out of it, was
esteemed unchristian. These Ideas are to be found
in the writings of the liberal Churchmen of the
seventeenth century, and nowhere else in England
at that time — at least, nowhere else broadly and
systematically expounded.
It is necessary to vindicate the distinction of these
men, because history hitherto has hardly done justice
to them. They have been forgotten amidst the
more noisy parties of their time, between whom they
sought to mediate. As they fell aside personally
unsupported by either Prelatists or Puritans, so their
influence has passed out of notice and remained
unhonoured in the pages of our popular historians.
What they really did for the cause of religious
thought has never been adequately appreciated.
They worked with too little combination and con-

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. S
sistency. But it is impossible in any real study of
the age not to recognise the significance of their
labours, or to fail to see how much the higher move
ment of the national mind was due to them, while
others carried the religious and civil struggle forward
to its sterner issues.
But before this line of ecclesiastical liberalism had
expended itself there had begun a new and deeper
movement of religious thought In England — a move
ment, like the former, initiated and carried on by
divines of the Church of England, but distinguished
from It by certain interesting contrasts. The inquir
ing spirit awakened by the religious contentions of
the time took a bolder and broader turn as these
contentions became more radical and sweeping.
From Church politics it passed into the general
sphere of religious and philosophical discussion.
Whereas the former movement was mainly ecclesi
astical, aiming at a wider extension of the Anglican
Church system, this movement was mainly philo
sophical, and had directly in view the Interests of
rational religion. To vindicate for the Church a
more liberal constitution, and a certain " liberty of
prophesying," was the special problem with liberal
thinkers in the first half of the seventeenth century.
With the progress of the century this problem had
by no means disappeared. On the contrary, it
emerged again in a distinctive political shape in
the end of the century. But other and higher
problems had in the mean time arisen. Questions'
affecting the nature of religion itself, the limits of

6 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

theological dogmatism and the consequent value of
" orthodoxy," and, more than all, questions touching
the very essence of religious and moral principles
in the face of a new spirit of speculation, had come
to the front. It is with such questions we shall find
that our next group of divines deals. Starting with
many of the same thoughts as Hales and Chilling
worth, their liberalism takes a higher flight. They
aim, not only nor chiefly, at ecclesiastical compre
hension, but to find a higher organon of Christian
thought than any religious school had yet attempted,
and to vindicate the essential principles of Chris
tian philosophy both against dogmatic excesses
within the Church and philosophical extravagances
without it.
The superficial contrasts betwixt the two move
ments are curious, and in one respect highly signifi
cant. While the former was mainly connected with
Oxford, and drew from this university Its primary
and special inspiration,^ the second is almost exclu
sively connected with Cambridge. It is represented
throughout by a succession of well-known Cambridge
divines, sometimes spoken of as " Latitudinarlans,"
and sometimes as " Cambridge Platonlsts." The
chief names in this illustrious succession are Ben
jamin Whichcote, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, and
Henry More. Apart from the affinities of thought,
which bind these men together into one of the most
' It will be remembered that 1636— just at the time that Chil-
even Taylor, although educated lingworth was engaged in his
at Cambridge, was appointed very great work, which appeared at
early by Laud to a Fellowship at the close of 1637.
Oxford — namely, to All Souls',

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 7
characteristic groups In the history of religious and
philosophical thought In England, they were all
closely united by personal and academic associations.
In this respect they stand much more distinctively
by themselves than our former group. They consti
tute a school of opinion in a far more real and effec
tive sense.
Another point of contrast Is more noteworthy.
While Hales and Chillingworth ¦ and Taylor came
forth from the High Church and Royalist side in the
great struggle of the century, and were all of them
personal friends of Laud, the Cambridge divines, on
the contrary, sprang from the Puritan side. They
were successors of the men displaced by the Puritan
authorities in 1644. They owed their position first'
of all to the triumphant Parliament, and they were
secured and encouraged In It by the great Protector.
Moreover, with a single exception,^ they were all
educated at the famous Puritan College, Emmanuel.
This serves to throw light at once on their personal
concert, and the common springs of thought which
moved them. It is far from accidental that in trac
ing the course of liberal religious thought in the
seventeenth century — a comparatively narrow stream
running betwixt high banks of authoritative dogma
tism—we should have to turn, in the progress of our
research, from one side to the other — from the sacer
dotalism of Laud to the orthodoxy of the Westmin
ster Assembly. The change is only a natural one
arising out of the altered position of parties, and the
new balance of forces affecting the national mind.
1 More.

8 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
The spirit of inquiry in every age springs, by way
of reaction, from the prevailing dogmatism with
which it comes in contact. Reason is aroused in the
face of the authority that is most urgent and dom
inant. It Is only, therefore, what we might expect
when we find the Cambridge movement connected
in its beginning with certain discussions betwixt
Whichcote and Tuckney, who was his old tutor at
Emmanuel, and afterwards associated with him in
the university.
But we shall be better able to understand the
effect of this spirit of reaction, and also the special
philosophical character of the movement, by taking
a glance at the religious circumstances which meet
us about the middle of the century, and the new
speculative influences which had begun to move the
higher minds of the time. The Cambridge Platon-
ists, like every other group of thinkers, stand closely
in connection with their age, at once interpreting Its
greater thoughts and carrying them onwards to new
developments. They can only be understood as the
product of the most active intellectual elements of
the generation which they so prominently repre
sented and adorned.
I. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century
an obvious turn can be traced in the religious spirit
of England. The question of the Church was no
longer pressing. While far from being settled, it
seemed for the time Indefinitely postponed under the
strong rule of the military power which had risen to
pre-eminence on the ruins of every other authority.
But if ecclesiastical disputes no longer vexed the

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 9
national temper in the same degree, theological
polemics raged more fiercely than ever. Numerous
sects had sprung up, each claiming to represent the
divine mind, and to expound a universal truth to a
distracted people. These sects were obnoxious alike
to both the old parties, to the Puritans even more
than to the Prelatists. They are spoken of as*
"^nti-Scrlpturlsts, Famillsts, Antinomians, Anti-
Trinitarians, Arians, Anabaptists." ^ The tenets of
many of them were no doubt at variance with all the
theologies hitherto accepted, even should we receive
with abatement the Puritan description that they
were " the very dregs and spawn of old accursed
heresies which had been already condemned, dead,
buried, and rotten in their graves long ago."^ But
they served to raise fundamental questions which
had not hitherto been discussed. If they revolted
the sober-minded, they were yet promulgated by
enthusiasts as truths from heaven, and received by
man-ivas such. Their authors broached them ex-
pressly as " new lights — new truths ;" and In doing
so they alleged the same divine authority which the
Puritans had been the first to evoke against the
Church. All classes of sectaries put themselves for^
ward with the same pertinacity as the children of the
Reformation and the true Interpreters of a renovated
Christianity. In the face of such conflicting pretenj
sions, it was inevitable that religious inquiry should
1 "A testimony of the ministers don, against the errors, heresies,
inthe province ofEssex;" also, "A and blasphemies of these times.
testimony subscribed by the min- London." 1647 and 1648.
isters within the province of Lon- " Ibid.

10 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
go deeper and take a more comprehensive range
than hitherto. What was the real nature of religion
thus diversely represented ? How was religious
truth to be discriminated ? And what was the use
of reason in relation to it ? Such were the ques
tions more or less directly suggested by the very
atmosphere of discussion In which these sects lived,
and which they propagated far beyond their own
circle. It may seem strange that so many wild opinions
should have begun to spread during the very years
that the Westminster Assembly was sitting. Within
the Assembly itself it is well known there were little
or no differences of doctrinal opinion. Its theology
bears the special stamp of rigorous dogmatic unifor
mity. But the wave of religious excitement, In the flow
of which Presbyterian Calvinism had triumphed and
the Assembly had been convened, passed far beyond
the bounds of its control. The enthusiasm which
had been so powerfully called forth was not*'^p be
restrained on Its spiritual any more than on its polit
ical side. In both respects it outran all calculation,
and proved too strong for the authority which had
enlisted it. If the Westminster divines had pos
sessed the power, they would have put a speedy
check upon the upspringing fanaticisms which
grieved and alarmed them.^ Their wish to do so is
beyond dispute. They saw nothing but the devil's
handiwork in the sectarian growths which appeared
' " Abominable errors, dam- already quoted say, " to be la-
nable heresies, and horrid bias- mented if it were possible with
phemies," the Puritan testimonies tears of blood."

SCHOOL: PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. ir
profusely around them. It was as If the enemy had
come by night and sown tares among the fair wheat
which they had planted. But the civil power began
to fail them In the very hour of their triumph. And
while able to carry through their dogmatic decrees
with a singular unanimity, and even to obtain Par
liamentary sanction for them, they yet had no
means of enforcing them. The decrees remained
a great monument of legislative theology ; but the
legislature did not venture to impose them by ex
ternal authority. They were left to tell by the
weight of their own Intrinsic credibility. And the
times were too insurrectionary to defer to such an
authority as this.
There is even good reason to conclude that the
ultra-dogmatic character of the Westminster Con
fession of Faith was itself among the chief reasons
of the reaction to a more liberal theology. It was not
merely that the theological mind, which had been so
rigidly bent in one direction, had a natural ten
dency to swing back to a laxer curve ; but there was
evidently a strong necessity felt by some of the
younger clergy, trained in the traditions of the Puritan^
school, to turn men's thoughts from the polemical
details which had so much engrossed them, to other,
and as they supposed higher, aspects of religious |
truth. Two things seem especially to have im
pressed them — the need of some broader and more
conciliatory principles of theology to act as solvents
of the interminable disputes which raged around
them, and the need of bringing into more direct pro
minence the practical and moral side of religion.

12 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

These two things, it will be seen, became closely
connected in their minds.
The Puritan theology in the seventeenth century,
with all Its noble attainments, was both intolerant
and theoretical in a high degree. It would admit of
no rival near Its throne; It was impatient of even the
least variation from the language of orthodoxy. It
emphasised all the transcendental and divine aspects
of Christian truth, rendering them into theories
highly definite and consistent, but in their very con
sistency disregardful of moral facts and the com
plexities of practical life. Younger theologians, of
a reflective turn, looked on the one hand at this
compact mass of doctrinal divinity, measuring the
whole circle of religious thought, and carefully articu
lated In all its parts ; and, on the other hand, at the
state of the religious world and the Church around
them. The sense of schism between theory and
practice — between divinity and morals — was pain
fully brought home to them. It was no wonder if
they began to ask themselves whether there was not
a more excellent way, and whether reason and
morality were not essential elements of all religious
dogma. Their minds were almost necessarily driven
towards what was termed in reproach by the older
Puritans " a kind of moral divinity."^ Longing for
peace and a higher and more beneficent action of
Christian brotherhood, they naturally- turned in a
different direction from that which had been so little
fruitful of either. They sought to soften down in
stead of sharpening doctrinal distinctions, to bring
} A phrase of Tuckney's in his second letter to Whichcote.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 13
out points of agreement instead of points of differ
ence in the prevailing medley of religious opinions.
Especially they tried to find a common centre of
thought and action in certain universal principles of
religious sentiment rather than in the more abstruse
conclusions of polemical theology. They became, in
short, eclectics against the theological dogmatism and
narrowness of their time, very much as Hales and
Chillingworth became advocates of comprehension
against the ecclesiastical dogmatism and narrowness
of theirs.2. But there were other, higher, and perhaps more
direct, causes which contributed to the rise of the
Cambridge movement, and imparted to it Its peculiar
character. It was the outcome not merely of a new
growth of religious sentiment, but of a determinate
series of speculative influences which distinguish the
century not less than its religious agitations. It Is
this double feature which gives to the movement its
chief significance, and its best claims to historical
commemoration. It not only carried forward the
tide of religious liberality, but it took up and moulded
into a definite form of its own all the nobler in
tellectual tendencies of the time. Without excep
tion the Cambridge latltudinarlan divines may be
termed religious philosophers. Some deserve this
epithet more conspicuously than others ; but all
deserve it more or less. In their writings we pass
into a higher, if not more bracing, atmosphere than
that in which we have been dwelling In the pages of
Hales and Chillingworth. They discussed larger
questions and principles of a more fundamental and

14 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

far-reaching character. They sought, in a word, to
marry philosophy to religion, and to confirm the
' union on the indestructible basis of reason and the
, essential elements of our higher humanity. This was
their special ambition ; and it was a grand ambition,
whatever we may think of Its success. It was the
, first elaborate attempt to wed Christianity and philo
sophy made by any Protestant school ; and it may
be even said to have been the first true attempt of
the kind since the days of the great Alexandrine
__^teachers.^ For the Christian philosophies of the
middle ages, noble as many of them were, did not
originate In a free Interchange of philosophic and
religious affection. Philosophy, even in the hands
of so vigorous and independent a thinker as Anselm
— still more In the hands of his successors, the great
schoolmen of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
— was the servitor rather than the handmaid of faith.
It had no life of its own apart from the Church, and
therefore could not enter into any free voluntary
union with it. But with the revival of a new specu
lative spirit in Europe In the seventeenth century,
the question of the relations of philosophy and reli
gion once more became a vital interest, fruitful of
good or evil to human progress. It is the glory of
the Cambridge divines that they welcomed this Hew
spirit of speculation — gave it frank entertainment In
^ The Florentine movement in although animated by a profound
the latter part of the fifteenth theological instinct. The Aca-
century is hardly an exception, demy of the Medici, of which they
Marsilius Ficinus and the two were the ornaments, was, in part
Pici of Mirandola— uncle and at least, literary and humanistic
nephew— were not theologians, in its tendencies.

SCHOOL: PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. IJ
their halls of learning ; and, while enriching it with a
culture all their own, sought to fuse it by the sponta
neous action of their own thoughtfulness into a philo
sophy of religion at once free and conservative. In
which the rights of faith and the claims of the specu
lative intellect should each have free scope, and blend
together for mutual elevation and strength.
It is not easy to trace the distinct steps by which
the new speculative spirit, which marks the rise of
modern philosophy in the first half of the seventeenth
century, passed to Cambridge ; nor is It easy to deter
mine the share which each of the great representa
tives of this spirit had in evoking our school of
thought. The writings both of Bacon and Descartes
exercised a definite Influence in the university by the
middle of the century ; but we cannot clearly trace
the growth of this influence, nor mark how far the
one and how far the other contributed to awaken the
speculative life of its teachers. As the ' Novum
Organon' had appeared as early as 1620, it might
be supposed that the Baconian philosophy would
have been the first to operate upon the academic
mind of England, and to give to it its special
caste of philosophical culture. But the facts do not
answer to this expectation. There are no indica
tions that the writings of Bacon, for many years
after their appearance, exercised aTiy influence on the
studies of either of the universities. On the con
trary, we possess the most clear and satisfactory
evidence that the old scholasticism held its ground
at Cambridge for at least twenty years after the
publication of the ' Novum Organon,' as If no breath

l6 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
whatever of new life had stirred the speculative
atmosphere. Not to speak of other sources, this Is
amply proved by all we know of Cambridge Univer
sity studies in the interval. Jeremy Taylor, for ex
ample, was a student during the years 1626-33 ; and
although imaginary pictures have been drawn of the
stimulating effect of the new philosophy upon a
richly susceptible mind like his, it is clear that he
really knew nothing of this philosophy, as he was
certainly In no degree Influenced by it. In the
whole caste of his thought, and his mode of treating
moral and semi-speculative questions, Taylor be
longs to the old medieval school. But we possess
more definite evidence than this. During almost
the same course of years as Taylor studied at
Cambridge, there was a still greater student there
— John Milton ; and Milton's college exercises
are preserved and have been published.-' They are
a curious picture of the frivolities of the scholastic
system, and serve to show how entirely this system
still dominated in the university. They discuss such
questions as the " music of the spheres ; " " whether
day or night is the more excellent ? " " whether there
are not partial forms in an animal In addition to the
whole ? " The very statement of such questions
carries the mind beyond Bacon to that study of
words rather than' of things against which he pro
tested. Students of Milton will also remember the
poem written by him as a vacation exercise in the
nineteenth year of his age, or in the year 1627, in
which Ens, " as Father of the Predicaments," along
' Masson's Life of Milton, vol. i.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. l^
with Substance, Quantity, Quality, and Relation,
" his sons," is represented as speaking. It is clear
that the scholastic spirit, if degenerate In strength,
had yet during these years lost nothing of its hold
upon the plan of Cambridge education. The aca
demic mind remained unmoved by anything higher ;
and there is little doubt that the poet was think
ing of his own philosophic nurture in those years,
when he afterwards denounced the traditionary
education as " an asinine feast of sow-thistles and
brambles."^ It was not till fully ten years later, when both
Jeremy Taylor and Milton were actively engaged
in the religious struggle of their age, that Bacon
and Descartes began to be studied at Cambridge.
The latter appears then as the more powerful in
fluence ; at least, his influence can be traced more
directly. Henry More carried on an elaborate
correspondence in Latin with Descartes in the years
j_64^_49, in which he expresses himself as an admir
ing student, and implies that the Cartesian philosophy
had already obtained a recognised footing in Cam
bridge in opposition to the expiring scholasticism.^
It is easy to understand More's enthusiasm for a
philosophy which, as he says, was " not only delight
ful to read, but especially useful in its bearing on
that which is the highest end of all philosophy —
namely, religion."^ Descartes not only furnished a
^ Tractate on Education, 1644. ° More's Letter to Claudius Cler-
^ Descartes' ' Discourse on seller, introductory to his Corre-
Method ' appeared in 1637, his spondence with Descartes — ' Col-
' Meditations' in 1641, and ' Prin- lection of More's Philosophical'
ciples of Philosophy' in 1644. Writings,' p. 59. London. 1662.
VOL II. B

l8 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
new method to the awakening speculative spirit, but
he addressed himself to the same great questions
concerning the existence of God and the nature of
spirit and matter, which formed the philosophic
summit, to which all the lower Inquiries of the Cam
bridge divines led up. It was only natural, there
fore, that his writings should have called forth
responsive enthusiasm at Cambridge. They did
not awaken the speculative spirit there ; it had
already begun to stir under native impulses ; but
they met it, and so far directed it. The Cambridge
teachers — most of all, perhaps, Henry More him
self — were men very different from Descartes.
Their mode of thought presents a striking con
trast to that of the calmly sceptical, direct, and geo
metric French thinker. In no special sense can
they be called his pupils or followers. But they
move with him under the same common force ;
they are so far inspired by the same common
aim. Both sought to ground the highest truth on
a clear and immutable basis of reason^ — Descartes
working towards this end from the philosophical,
Cudworth and More from the theological side. The
main thought of both was the same, although they
approached it differently. For it is a mistake to
represent Descartes as, no less than Bacon, se
parating philosophy from religion, and desiring to
keep them asunder. He only separated the one
as well as the other from tradition, in order that
he might reunite them in the great centre of
reason, and plant them together there on a sure
foundation. And this, too, was the very aim of

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. IQ
the Cambridge Platonlsts ; — only they contemplated
the problem as Christian theologians. Descartes
contemplated it as a pure thinker and speculative
enthusiast. The spirit of the Baconian philosophy has much
less affinity with any of the writers of the Cambridge
school. For, first of all. Bacon openly proclaims a
divorce betwixt philosophy and Christian theology.
While the one is supposed by him to follow " the
light of nature," " the other," he says, " Is grounded
only upon the Word and Oracle of God."^ He
shrinks, therefore, from applying any of the tests
of his philosophical method to the Investigation of
Christian truth. Should he " step out of the bark of
human reason and pass into the ship of the Church,"
it is only the " divine compass " which can " rightly
direct his course." " Neither," he adds, " will the
stars of philosophy which have hitherto conspicu
ously shone on us any more give their light, so that
on this subject it will be as well to keep silence." ^
He speaks also timidly and vaguely, although in
some respects finely, of the use of reason in religion.
It has nothing to do with the primary principles or
articles of religious truth. These are exempted
from its examination, and given upon authority not
to be questioned. They are not only posita, but
'Advancement of Learning, quse solaacu nauticadivina poUet
b. ii. See also lib. non. ' De Aug- ad cursum recte dirigendum.
mentis Scientiarum.' Neque enim sufficient amplius
2 " Veruntamen si eam tractare Stellas philosophise, quse hactenus
pergamus exeundum nobis foret prjecipue nobis affulserunt : itaque
e navicula rationis humanas at par foret, silentium quoque in hac
transeundum in Ecclesias navem, re colere." — De Augmentis, 1. n.

20 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

placita} It is scarcely possible to avoid the sus
picion that on such subjects Bacon does not speak
his whole mind, or, at any rate, that his mind was
not directed to them with any clear and consistent
energy. We seem to catch the tone of the courtier ^
and politician rather than of the courageous and en
lightened thinker.
The Cambridge Platonlsts were not likely to bor
row directly from such a scheme of thought as this,
nor to feel much sympathy with the spirit of
Baconian reserve and caution. Their temper and
drift of mind were entirely different. Nor can it be
said that there Is any trace of the special study of

' " The use of human reason
in religion is of two sorts : the
former, in the conception and
apprehension of the mysteries of
God to us revealed ; the other,
in the inferring and deriving of
doctrine and direction thereupon.
The former extendeth to the
mysteries themselves ; but how ?
By way of illustration, and not by
way of argument. The latter
consisteth indeed of probation
and argument. In the former, we
see, God vouchsafeth to descend
to our capacity, in the expression
of his mysteries in sort as may be
sensible unto us ; and doth graft
his revelations and holy doctrine
upon the notions of our reason,
and applyeth his inspirations to
open our understanding, as the
form of the key to the ward of the
lock. For the latter, there is al
lowed us a use of reason and
argument, secondary and respec
tive although not original and

absolute. For after the articles
and principles of religion are
placed and exempted from exami
nation of reason, it is then per
mitted unto us to make deriva
tions and inferences from and
according to the analogy of them,
for our better direction. In
nature this holdeth not, for both
the principles are examinable by
induction, though not by a medium
of syllogism ; and besides, those
principles or first positions have
not discordance with that reason
which draweth down and deduc-
eth the inferior positions. But yet
it holdeth not in religion alone,
but in many knowledges, both
of greater and smaller nature,
namely, wherein there are not
only posita but placita" — Ad
vancement of Learning, b. ii.
^ The Books of the ' De Aug
mentis' are severally dedicated
Ad Regem suum.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 21
Bacon in their writings — certainly not In the most
characteristic of them. Yet Baconianism was not
without its influence upon the rising school of liberal
divines, as it was undoubtedly a powerful element of
culture at Cambridge from about the middle of the
century. J[saac— Barrow, who took his degree of
Bachelor of Arts in 1648, studied Bacon closely as
well as Descartes; and- j£>hii Ray, the celebrated
naturalist, was the companion of his studies. These
men are the direct and genuine representatives of
the experimental philosophy. They adopted its
method, and carried forward the course of scientific
research which, half a century later, reached such
grand results in the labours of Sir Isaac Newton,
Barrow's illustrious successor in the mathematical
chair. But Baconianism, like every other great
movement of thought, extended far beyond Its
direct followers. It diffused itself as a general
intellectual influence, and became a part — in some
respects the most conspicuous part — of the higher
spirit of the age in which all active and forward
minds shared. There was no school of thought in
the second half of the century which can be said to
have been independent of it ; and, as the most pro
minent opponent of the old scholastic system, it was
apt to receive the credit of the whole movement
against it, and to be taken as the type of the freer
intellectual life which had everywhere begun to
prevail. There can be no doubt that at the time of the
Restoration the Cambridge divines were identified
in public estimation with the progress of a new

22 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

philosophy In opposition to that of Aristotle and the
traditionary methods of inquiry. In a curious
pamphlet^ of 1662, which professes to give a brief
account of them, under the name of " the new sect
of Latitude-men," the point chiefly emphasised is
their supposed connection with this new or " mechan
ical philosophy." The pamphlet is throughout a
spirited composition, not without lively touches of
description, which may afterwards engage us ; but
its chief interest for our present purpose is the
attempt which it makes to depict, under a sort of
allegory, the philosophical position of the Latl
tudinarlan school. Religion or the Church is re
presented under the figure of an "ancient clock,
the property of a certain husbandman in an old
mansion-house, which had been a long while out of
kelter " (order), and needed to be repaired. A succes
sion of persons, supposed to denote the diverse sects of
philosophy, essay to mend it : "a certain peripatetic
artificer, something above the degree of a tinker ; "
" a clock-maker from the next town, who thought
himself well read In clock philosophy ; " the farmer's
' The pamphlet purports to be Queen's College, Oxford — a pre
written by S. P., of Cambridge, face admirable both in point of
S. P. has been supposed to be thought and composition. The
S.impnJPatrick, afterwards Bishop full title of the pamphlet is, ' A
of Ely, a fi-iend of Tillotson, and, Brief Account of the New Sect of
along with him, a pupil of the Latitude-men : together with some
Cambridge divines ; but the evi- Reflections upon the New Phil-
dence connecting him with its osophy.' In its original form it
authorship is not conclusive. See 1 is extremely rare, but it may be
preface to a new edition of Pat- I found in a Collection of Tracts
rick's works. University Press, Ox- | well known under the name of
ford, 1858, by the Rev. Alexander , ' The Phenix ' to all students of
Taylor, M.A., Michel Fellow of the seventeenth century.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. ?3
son "newly come from the university," "inept at
understanding things, but apt, parrot-like, to catch at
words." All, however, fail to do the clock any good,
till the landlord of the farmer, " an ingenious gentle
man who had used to take in pieces his own watch
and set it together again," takes the matter In hand,
impatient of all the jargon he has heard, and ex
plains to the owner the simple mechanical construc
tion of the Instrument, and what was needed to put
it right. There Is a want of clearness and consist
ency in the representation. It is by no means evi
dent what special systems beyond the scholastic
the writer intends to ridicule. But there can be
no doubt of his intention to exalt the new or me
chanical philosophy, and that the philosophy he has
chiefly in view under this name Is that of Descartes,
" who hath proceeded farthest " In attempts to ex
plain " thatjv^^Machilie — the Universe," " To them
that have once tasted of the mech_anical_philosophy,
forms and qualities are likely to give as little satisfac
tion as the clock-maker did to the intelligent gentle
man In the story." So far from being inimical to a
sound divinity, the philosophy will prove its best sup
port. It will be faithful to Christianity " no less
against the open violence of atheism than the secret
treachery of enthusiasm and superstition." " Nor will
it be possible," the author concludes, " otherwise to
free religion from scorn and contempt, if her priests
be not as well skilled In nature as the people, and
her champions furnished with as good artillery as her
enemies." All this plainly implies that the " Latitude-
men" were at least no enemies to naturalistic studies.

24 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

It implies more than this. It is evident that the
school of Cambridge theologians were in active sym
pathy with all that was really progressive and liberal
in the scientific spirit of the time — that they had
given a cordial welcome to the aspirations of the
experimental philosophy and the new study of nature
which had begun to inspire many, and impart a new
life and reality to their thoughts. They were so far
in hearty affinity with this and all other forward
tendencies of the time, although their own specula
tive impulse came from a different quarter and fol
lowed a different method.
When we turn to their own writings, there is no
difficulty in determining the main source of their
speculative inspiration. As a philosophical school
they were formed by the study of the Platonic writings ;
the writings, that is to say, not only of Plato himself,
but of those Alexandrine teachers who followed out
in a theological direction the Platonic course of
thought. This was the positive influence which,
more than any other, moulded the minds of all the
men we have mentioned, and gave consistency and
character, as it has given a name, to their speculative
position. They brought the Church back to " her
old loving nurse the Platonick philosophy,"^ and
sought to raise the level of her thought again to that
region of higher ideas in which she had once de
lighted to dwell. Within the bosom of Protestant
ism they kindled for the first time the love of this
nobler speculation, and endeavoured to carry up its
dogmatic problems into an atmosphere of rational
^ A Brief Account of the New Sect, &c.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 2$
thinking which should explain and verify them.
Platonists by nature, they were drawn to the study
of " Plato and his scholars above others." -^ To the
great classics of idealism they abandoned themselves
with an enthusiasm which tinctures all their writings,
and the constant outbreak of which, while It colours
and emphasises their style, also sometimes oppresses
the freedom and mars the strength of their own
thoughts. This Platonic revival was highly important for the
interests of philosophy in England in the seven
teenth century. It not only deepened in many
minds the superficial tendencies of the Baconian
system, and served to link together for them the
spheres of spiritual law and material fact ; but it
evoked the only force adequate to meet the develop
ment of naturalism in a direction which threatened
the distinctive principles of religion and the Church.
Bacon had made natural science the basis of all
other science. All real knowledge or philosophy,
according to him, came from the Investigation and
classification of outward facts. Hobbes took up the
method and applied it to the study, not of nature,
but of society and the whole moral and spiritual
order in which man finds himself here. He sought
the basis of this order in certain obvious facts of
human nature, and built up an elaborate hypothesis
of social and political morality on the analysis and
co-ordination of these facts. The hypothesis was
one directly in the face of the Cambridge movement
of thought, and it served to call forth all the energies
1 Corn between Tuckney and Whichcote, p. 38.

26 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

vof the movement and give decision to them. While
, Platonism, then, may be said to have originated the
movement, Hobbism was the means of concentrating
its thought and giving dogmatic direction to it.
While the one was the positive the other was the
negative influence which formed the school.
It had been the aim of the higher thought of the
century to depreciate the principle of mere arbitrary
rule both in politics and religion — to carry men's
minds away from traditional canons and dogmas to
the true sphere of authority in reason and conscience.
The movement had been in search of some rational
principle of certitude amidst the decay of ancient
systems and of mere institutional and personal safe
guards. It remained for the great genius of Hobbes
to try and arrest this progress, and reinstate on a
philosophic basis the principle of arbitrary authority.
To this task he brought rare powers and the most
independent spirit of speculation. For Hobbes was
a genuine child of his age in everything save the
conclusions of his philosophy. He was a radical in
the service of reaction. His miild was revolutionary
in its vigour and directness, its hardihood and self-
assertion, its freedom from pedantry, and contempt
for the wisdom of the ancients. There is no one of
all the thinkers of the century who has dealt to the
old scholasticism such hearty and fatal blows. His
clear and subtle, if sometimes coarse analysis, may
be said to have laid the foundation of psychological
science which has been so fruitful since his day ; and
to his organising conception political philosophy
owes its creation, whatever we may think of the

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 2/
character of the creation in his hands. But behind
all his great gifts there was no spiritual insight — no
eye for any truths deeper than those of the sense or
the intellect. Not only had he no appreciation of
such truths, but apparently he had no perception
of their existence. He was honestly ignorant of
them. In the compass of his own keen and power
ful mind he found no trace of them. Accordingly
he judged human nature and human society as If
they were not. All that he saw he saw with a rare
clearness ; but there was a side of human life which
he did not see at all — to which he turned an eye
wholly blind. So it was that the civil and religious
distractions of his age presented to him nothing but
their obvious aspect of quarrelsomeness and misery.
He detected nothing of the deeper spiritual and
political influences which were moving the age, and
amidst all its confusion moving It towards a higher
organisation both of religious and civil wellbeing, —
nothing of the underlying moral forces which were
painfully growing into a better order — a higher form
of commonwealth. * There were to him no such
moral forces. " Nothing," he says, " Is In Itself
either bad or good, ugly or beautiful." Everything
gets its quality from without, and is stamped by
external authority. As words are merely the coun
ters of wise men,^ so actions are in themselves en
tirely indifferent. They get all their value or mean
ing from a sanction outside of them. Moral duties
have their elementary basis in human nature, but
they derive all their social or organic effect from
' Leviathan, i. 4.

28 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

the supreme political power. In this sense, if not
primarily and absolutely, morality is the creature of
the State. So also is religion, which has a natural
foundation in human fear, but the truths of which
can only be defined and guaranteed by the supreme
authority " residing in the sovereign, who only has
the legislative power." ^
It was impossible, in fact, for Hobbes, starting as
he did from a mere external view of human nature,
as a collection of selfish instincts at necessary war
with one another, to find any regulative principle
within, — any law of the mind which could subdue
the lower conflict of the passions. There was to
him no sphere of human nature corresponding to
" the law of the mind ; " and the principle of control,
therefore, must come from without and not from
within. Similarly he could find no rallying-point
for human society save in external law, backed by a
supreme power capable of enforcing it. This was to
him at once the highest ethical and the highest
political conception ; and within the control of this
sovereign power, whose verdicts admitted of no
challenge and no division, he sought to reduce all
the movements of life, of society, and the Church.
Never were nobler powers consecrated to lower
service. Never was a bolder attempt made to con
tradict the very idea of moral progress and of
rational liberty in religion, and to enthrone in their
stead a gigantic naturalism which might conserve
society, but only^' the expense of the nobler
aspirations, for the excitement and development
' Leviathan, iii. 33.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 29
of which society is to be valued. The essentially
unchristian character of Hobbes's speculations shine
through all the disguise of Scriptural language and
the framework of Biblical conceptions which he
delights to employ. He is not the more, but the
less, a Christian for all his parade of Christian
phraseology. His professions of respect for super-
naturalism, and his descriptive analysis of a Chris
tian commonwealth, may be honest or not. This
does not alter the essential character of his thought,
which leaves no rational basis in human nature for
either morality or religion.
A system such as this was In every respect
antagonistic to the Platonic School at Cambridge.
They had no doubts from the first of its meaning.
They saw in it a living and formidable opponent to
their most cherished convictions. They disliked
both its political and speculative spirit, and armed
themselves to encounter it. Even before the publi
cation of the 'Leviathan,' in 1651, when the first
sketch of the Hobbian philosophy had only been
privately printed at Paris and circulated,^ Cudworth
would seem to have discerned its purport, and entered
the lists against it in the Theses which he delivered
for his degree of B.D. at Cambridge in 1644.^ The
great labours of his life were more or less directed
by the same antagonism. Everywhere the principles
1 Elementa Philosophica de seternffi et indispensabiles." II.
Give 1642. " Dantur substantiae incorpores
2 This at least, is probable, sua nature immortales."— Birch's
See subsequent page. The title Account of Life and Writings
of the Theses are significant : I. of Cudworth.
" Dantur boni et mail rationes

30 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
of the ' Leviathan ' crop out in the line of his thought ;
and they influence no less conspicuously the argu
mentation of his colleague, Henry _More. Both
writers are only to be understood in the light of
Hobbes's theories. The Platonic background of
their speculations only comes Into full prominence
against the atomistic materialism, which they
believed It to be the essential aim of his writings
to propagate. It was the special merit of the
school that they were able to meet this materialistic
tendency, not merely, as some others,^ by polemical
criticism and clever exposure, but by a well-ordered
scheme of thought, whose principles had been already
worked Into unison with Christian philosophy. This
was the glory of the school ; it was also its weakness.
It gave a systematic and elaborate plan to their
arguments ; but it tempted them, also, not infre
quently, to substitute mere learning for reasoning,
and to call in ancient verdicts instead of working
out difficulties by their own enkindled and living
thoughtfulness. As mere writers, the Cambridge
men were less original and advanced than Hobbes.
They served the cause of progress, but with
weapons of less novelty and precision than those
with which he opposed it. Their meaning was
infinitely Jilgher ; their form by no means so perfect.
While they led the cause of rational liberty and
independent speculation in the highest subjects,
they remained fettered by a literary traditionalism
and bondage to the mere verbalism of ancient
^ Such as Clarendon and others. Survey of the " Leviathan " ' and
Clarendon wrote in his exile 'A dedicated it to Charles II.'

SCHOOL: PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 31
opinion, which greatly impaired the value of their
labours, and have given them a far less living
influence than they deserved in the history of
opinion. There are but few contemporary notices of the
Cambridge Latitudinarlans, and such as they are
they do not greatly help us to a full or enlightened
conception of their position and objects. Burnet
alludes to them in a well-known passage, charac
terising them, after his manner, in a few graphic
touches ; but he does not give any detailed descrip
tion of their relation to the parties of the time.
The passage, though well known, is too significant
to be omitted. Speaking generally of the clergy of
the Restoration, he says that " They generally
took more care of themselves than of the Church.
The men of merit and service were loaded with
many livings and many dignities. With this great
accession of wealth, there broke in upon the Church
a great deal of luxury and high living on the pre
tence of hospitality ; while others made purchases,
and left great estates, most of which we have seen
melt away. And with this overset of wealth and
pomp that came on men in the decline of their
parts and age, they, who were now growing into old
age, became lazy and negligent in all the true con
cerns of the Church ; they left preaching and writing
to others, while they gave themselves up to ease and
sloth. In all which sad representation some few
exceptions are to be made ; but so few, that if a new
set of men had not appeared of another stamp, the

32 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

Church had quite lost her esteem over the nation.
These were generally of Cambridge, formed under
some divines, the chief of whom were Drs Which-
cot, Cudworth, Wilkins, More, and Worthlngton.
Whichcot was a man of a rare temper, very mild and
obliging. He had great credit with some that had
been eminent in the late times ; but made all the
use he could of it to protect good men of all per
suasions. He was much for liberty of conscience;
and being disgusted with the dry systematical way
of those times, he studied to raise those who con
versed with him to a nobler set of thoughts, and to
consider religion as a seed of a deiform nature (to
use one of his own phrases). In order to this, he
set young students much on reading the ancient
philosophers, chiefly Plato, Tully, and Plotin, and on
considering the Christian religion as a doctrine sent
from God, both to elevate and sweeten human
nature, in which he was a great example, as well as
a wise and kind instructor. Cudworth carried this
on with a great strength of geniur'and a vast com
pass of learning. He was a man of great conduct
and prudence ; upon which his enemies did very
falsely accuse him of craft and dissimulation.
Wilkins was of Oxford, but removed to Cambridge.
His first rise was in the Elector- Palatine's family,
when he was in England. Afterwards he married
Cromwell's sister ; but made no other use of that
alliance but to do good offices, and to cover the
university from the sourness of Owen and Goodwin.
At Cambridge he joined with those who studied to
propagate better thoughts, to take men off from

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 33
being in parties, or from narrow notions, from super
stitious conceits, and a fierceness about opinions.
He was also a great observer and promoter of
experimental philosophy, which was then a new
thing, and much looked after. He was naturally
ambitious, but was the wisest clergyman I ever
knew. He was a lover of mankind, and had a
delight in doing good. More was an open-hearted
and sincere Christian philosopher, who studied to
establish men in the great principles of religion
against atheism, that was then beginning to gain
ground, chiefly by reason of the hypocrisy of some,
and the fantastical conceits of the more sincere
enthusiasts." Interposing a brief description of the philosophy
of Hobbes, he proceeds : " He " (Hobbes) " thought
interest and fear were the chief principles of society ;
and he put all morality in the following that which
was our own private will or advantage. He thought
religion had no other foundation than the laws of the
land. And he put all the law in the will of the prince
or of the people ; for he writ his book at first in
favour of absolute monarchy, but turned it after
wards to gratify the republican party. These were
his true principles, though he had disguised them for
deceiving unwary readers. And this set of motions
came to spread much. The novelty and boldness of
them set many on reading them. The impiety of
them was acceptable to men of corrupt minds, which
were but too much prepared to receive them by the
extravagances of the late times. So this set of men
at Cambridge studied to assert and examine the
VOL. 1 1. C

34 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
principles of religion and morality on clear grounds,
and in a philosophical method. In this way More
led the way to many that came after him. Worth
lngton was a man of eminent piety and great hu
mility, and practised a most sublime way of self-
denial and devotion. All these, and those who
were formed under them, studied to examine further
into the nature of things than had been done for
merly. They declared against superstition on the
one hand and enthusiasm on the other. They loved
the constitution of the Church, and the liturgy, and
could well live under them ; but they did not think
it unlawful to live under another form. They wished
that things might have been carried with more
moderation. And they continued to keep a good
correspondence with those who had differed from
them In opinion, and allowed a great freedom both
in philosophy and in divinity ; from whence they
were called men of latitude. And upon this, men of
narrower thoughts and fiercer tempers fastened upon
them the name of Latitudinarians. They read Epis-
copius much. And the making out the reasons of
things being a main part of their studies, their
enemies called them Socinians. They were all very
zealous against Popery. And so, they becoming
soon very considerable, the Papists set themselves
against them to decry them as atheists, deists, or at
best Socinians." ^
In addition to Burnet, there are two contempor
ary writers who give us a general description of the
Cambridge Platonists or Latitudinarians— S. P. of
' Burnet's History of his own Times, i. 339-342.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 35
Cambridge, to whose pamphlet we have already al
luded, and Edward Fowler, who was subsequently
Bishop of Gloucester. Fowler's publication is en
titled, ' Principles and Practices of certain Moderate
Divines of the Church of England, abusively called
Latitudinarians, &c., in a Free Discourse between
Two Intimate Friends.' The ' Free Discourse ' was
published anonymously, probably in 1670; the se
cond edition bears the date of 1671 ; but it is well
understood to have been the production of Fjowler,
who is somewhat better known as the author of a
treatise on ' The Design of Christianity,' by which
he sought to follow up the reasoning of the ' Dis
course,' and the spirit and principles of which were
vigorously attacked by Bunyan. Fowler is a clever
and ingenious writer, not without some degree of
thoughtfulness ; but his sketch of the opinions he so
much admires is very desultory, with a constant ten
dency to run into tedious and aimless discussion.
We can gather, however, from his description, gen
eral as it is, and from the pamphlet of S. P., certain
features which it may be worth selecting and setting
before the reader.^
^ There is also a pamphlet by plainly no affinity. His pamphlet,
Samuel Parker, A.M. (afterwards however, contains no direct allu-
Bishop of Oxford), entitled 'A sions to the school, and its some-
Free andJmgartialCensure of what abstract polemics barely
the Platonick Philosophic' (1665.) touch it. If somewhat free and
TPaAer-lve have already encoun- coarse in its handling, Parker's
tered as Hales's critic ; and it is pamphlet is yet written with
probable that he may have intend- clearness, point, and vigour, and^
ed in his general criticism of the is, in brief, a very fair defence
Platonic philosophy an indirect of Baconian or inductive philo-
censure of the Cambridge school, sophy against Platonic or other
with whose tendencies he had idealism.

36 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

Both writers witness strongly to the recognised
position of the Cambridge divines, as a distinct
school of religious thought in the decade follow
ing the Restoration. In this respect they were
objects of popular criticism — everywhere spoken
about with the ignorant and vague apprehension
with which new movements are apt to be regarded
by the vulgar : " I can come into no company of
late," says the Oxford correspondent of S. P., " but I
find the chief discourse to be about a certain new sect
of men called Latitude-men ; but though the name
be in every man's mouth, yet the explicit meaning of
it, or the heresy which they hold, or the individual
persons that are of it, are as unknown (for aught I
can learn) as the order of the Rosicrucians. On the
one side I hear them represented as a party very
dangerous to the King and Church, as seeking to
undermine them both ; on the other side I cannot
hear what their particular opinions or practices -are
that bear any such dangerous aspect." " The name
of Latitude-men,"^S, P. admits in reply, " is dally
exagitated amongst us, both in taverns and pulpits,
and verj7___tragical representations made of them.
A Latitude-man, therefore (according to the best
definition I can collect), is an image of Clouts, that
men set up to encounter with for want of a real
enemy ; it Is a convenient name to reproach a man
that you owe a spite to ; 'tis what you will, and you
may affix it upon whom you will ; 'tis something will
serve to talk of, when all other discourse fails."
In the ' Discourse ' our divines appear much in
the same light : " I have often observed," says one

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 37
of the " two intimate friends " who carry on the
dialogue, " that the fierce men (as much at odds as
they are among themselves) can too well agree in
heaping calumnies on these gentlemen, and in giving
them the worst of characters. I have heard them
represented as a generation of people that have re
vived the abominable principles of the old Gnosticks ;
as a company of men that are prepared for the em
bracing of any religion, and to renounce or subscribe
to any doctrine, rather than incur the hazard of per
secution ; and that they esteem him the only heretick
that refuseth to be of that religion the King or State
professeth ; or at least the most dangerous heretick,
that suffering is to be preferred before sinning. They
are characterised as people whose only religion it is
to temporise, and transform themselves into any shape
for their secular interests ; and that judge no doc
trine so saving as that which obligeth to so comply
ing and condescending a humour, as to become all
things to all men, that so by any means they may
gain something ; as I heard one once jear a most
worthy person, as he thought, no doubt, very
wittily." Again, says one of the friends : " Have you not
heard the cholerick gentlemen distinguish these
persons by a long nickname, which they have taught
their tongues to pronounce as roundly as if it were
shorter than it is by four or five syllables ? " " Yes,"
is the reply, " oftener, I presume, than you have ; for
though we are both countrymen, and wonted more
than most to a solitary life, yet my occasions call me
abroad, and into varieties of companies, more fre-

^8 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

quently than yours do you ; where I hear, ever and
anon, the word of a foot and half long sounded out
with a great grace, and that not only at fires and
tables, but sometimes from pulpits too. Nay, and it
accompanied good store of other bumbasts, and little
witticisms, in seasoning, not long since, the stately
Oxonian theatre."
The general position of the Cambridge Platonists
is sufficiently evident from these remarks. They
enjoyed the vague repute of thinkers in a frivolous
and ignorant age. They were misunderstood alike
by the fanatics of the Church and of Nonconfor
mity. To both they were objects of dislike, and yet,
dn some degree, of fear. To the rising generation,
half- fanatical and half - epicurean — the generation
which gave ten pounds for the ' Paradise Lost,' and
left its author to die in obscurity and poverty — they
seem mainly to have been objects of ridicule. The
character of the age may be judged from the char
acter of its jokes. It seemed to it a piece of humour
to speak of a Latltudinarlan as " a gentleman of a
wide swallow." ^
We do not learn anything very definite from the
' Discourse,' any more than from the tractate of
S. P., as to the philosophical principles of the Cam
bridge divines, beyond the fact that they set them
selves with zeal to oppose the Hobbian philosophy,
which is described by the author of the ' Discourse '
as consisting in such doctrines as the following — viz. :
" That all moral righteousness is founded in the law
of the civil magistrate ; that the Holy Scriptures are
^ Free Discourse, p. lo.

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 39

obliging by vertue onely of a civil sanction ; that
whatsoever magistrates command, their subjects are
bound to submit to, notwithstanding contrary to
divine moral laws." Had they taught such doc
trines, the author of the ' Discourse ' argues, they
might have deserved the censures which so many
lavished upon them ; but, on the contrary, he says,
such " accursed principles (for I can give them no
better epithet) were never more solidly confuted than
by these men."
Both writers speak with more distinctness and
detail of the ecclesiastical and theological position of
our divines. S. P. particularly vindicates their honest
and devout attachment to the Church of England, and
their high approval of its " virtuous mediocrity," as
distinguished alike from " the meretrlciaus gaadlness
of the Church of Rome, and the squalid sluttery of
fanatic conventicles." They were earnestly in favour
of a liturgy, and preferred that of the Church of
England to all others, " admiring the solemnity,
gravity, and primitive simplicity of it, its freedom
from affected phrases, or mixture of vain and doubt
ful opinions." In a word, they thought it so good,
that they were " loth to adventure the mending of
it, for fear of marring it." In like manner, they are
said to have had "a deep veneration" for the govern
ment of the Anglican Church, which they esteemed
.to be at once the best in itself and the most con
formable to the apostolic times.
" They did always abhor," continues S. P., " both
the usurpation of Scottish Presbytery and the con
fusion of Independent anarchy; and do esteem it one

40 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE
of the methods which the Prince of Darkness useth to
overthrow the Church and religion, by bringing the
clergy into contempt, which experience tells us will
necessarily follow upon the removing the several
dignities and pre-eminence among them ; for when
the bishops are once levelled with ordinary presby
ters, the presbyters will soon be trampled on by the
meanest of the laity ; and when every preacher would
needs be a bishop, every rustic and mechanic took
upon him to be a preacher."
Fowler does not emphasise so much*thelr attach
ment to the Anglican form of Church government,
but he says that they greatly preferred Episcopacy,
esteeming it to be in its essentials the best type of
Church government, as well as that which is found
prevailing " presently after the apostles' times."
He identifies their views with the rational and
moderate opinions of Chillingworth in his well-
known statement on the subject.
As to their theological views, both writers dwell
upon the hearty subscription which the Cambridge
divines gave to the Thirty-nine Articles. " Nor is
there any article of doctrine," continues S. P., " held
by the Church which they can justly be accused to
depart from, unless absolute reprobation be one,
which they do not think themselves bound to be
lieve." Heartily, however, as they are said to sub
scribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church, it.
is expressly stated by the author of the ' Discourse,'
that in doing so they took " that liberty in the inter
pretation of them that is allowed by the Church her
self" Subscription was held merely to imply the

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 41
acceptance of the Articles as "instruments of peace;"
and In favour of this view Fowler quotes the autho
rity of Archbishop Usher. The most significant
passage cited by him is the following, from Usher's
' Schism Guarded : ' " We do not suffer any «ian to
reject the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of
England at his pleasure ; yet neither do we look
upon them as essentials of saving faith, or legacies of
Christ and his apostles ; but In a mean, as pious
opinions fitted for the preservation of unity : neither
do we oblige any man to believe them, but only not to
contradict them." This was plainly the principle on
which the Cambridge divines adhered to the doctrines
of the Church of England — a principle which they
believed to be embodied in its constitution, and of
the highest value in itself They were characteris
tically rational theologians. They sought to bring
every truth or doctrine to the test of the Christian
reason, and to estimate it by a moral standard — in
other words, by its tendency to exalt or degrade ourjr
conceptions of the divine.^ It was absurd, argues.|
S. P., to accuse them " of hearkening too much to
their own reason." " For reason," he adds, " is that
faculty whereby a man must judge of everything ;
nor can a man believe anything except he have some
reason for it, whether that reason be a deduction
from the light of nature, and those principles which
are the candle_of..the X^rd, set up in the soul. of
every man that hath not wilfully extinguished it ; or
a branch of divine revelation in the oracles of Holy
Scripture ; or the general interpretation of genuine
1 Discourse, p. 192.

42 HISTORICAL POSITION OF THE CAMBRIDGE

antiquity, or the proposal of our own Church con
sentaneous thereto ; or, lastly, the result of some or
all of these ; for he that will rightly make use of his
reason, must take all that is reasonable into considera
tion. And It is admirable to consider how the same
conclusions do naturally flow from all these seve
ral principles. . . . Nor is there any point in
divinity where that which is most ancient doth not
prove the most rational, and the most rational the
ancientest ; for there is an eternal consanguinity
between all verity ; and nothing is trueJn divinity
which. Is false in philosophy, or on the contrary; and
therefore what God hath joined together, let no man
put asunder."
The author of the ' Discourse ' ventures more
definitely to define their theological position as " a
middle one betwixt the Calvinists and Remonstrants."
On the one hand, he says, they maintained " that
there is such a thing as distinguishing grace, where
by some persons are absolutely elected, by virtue
whereof they shall be (having potent and infallible
means prepared for them) irresistibly saved." But,
on the other hand, they hold " that others not of the
number of this special elect, are not at all in a des
perate condition, but have sufficient means appointed
for them to qualifie them for greater or less of happi
ness, and have sufficient grace offered to them some
way or other, and some time or other, and are in a
capacity of salvation either greater or less through
the mercies of Jesus Christ; and that none of them
are damned but those that wilfully refuse to co
operate with that grace of God, and will not act in

SCHOOL : PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 43
some moral suitableness to that power they have re- ¦
ceived." This medium theology appeared to Fowler \
to present all the advantages of Calvinism, without
any of the disadvantages of Arminianism. It em
braced at once an absolute decree and a universal sal-
vability. " Whatsoever good Arminianism pretends
to concerning all men, is exhibited to the part not
absolutely elected ; and to the other part the good
ness of God is greater than is allotted by Armlnlus :
and whatsoever good is pretended in Calvinism to
that part that is absolutely elected, the same good
ness is here exhibited ; and besides that direful
vizard pulled off, that ignorance and melancholy had
put upon Divine Providence and the lovely face of
the Gospel."
He is at a loss to conceive why either Calvinist or
Remonstrant should "mislike" so comprehensive and
beautiful a system ! He can only account for this
by an obstinate idea on their part that there cannot
be any improvements in theology. But to such an
idea he himself strongly objects. " Every age, sure
enough," he says, " improveth in knowledge, having
the help still of those foregoing : and as this is seen
in other sciences, so especially is it discernible in
that of divinity, as all but ignorant and extremely
prejudiced persons must needs acknowledge."
Such are the main features of interest to be gather
ed from the contemporary notices of the Cambridge
divines which have come down to us. They are
neither very copious nor very intelligent. They do
not penetrate much below the surface, nor help us to

44 PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY.
get close to the heart or higher meaning of the move
ment. But, so far, they are lively, interesting, and
characteristic ; and If they do not go deep, they
suggest a clear enough surface-picture. It is seldom,
perhaps, that the highest side of any religious move
ment is presented to contemporary on-lookers and
critics ; but even the hasty Impressions of contem
poraries are always well worthy the attention of the
historian. They serve to give life and reality to the
aspects of a movement, even where they fail to
recognise all its meaning, or to describe it in its
fulness.

4S

II.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE— REASON AND RELIGION.
The name of Whichcote is barely known in the
history of English theology. Burnet's notice^ is
quoted occasionally; but beyond this, little is under-'
stood either of the character or writings of one who
was among the most influential preachers and theo
logians of his age — an age in which both preaching
and theology still exercised a real Influence on all
the affairs of national life. Whichcote not only pos-|
sessed great credit with the most eminent statesmen
of the Commonwealth,^ but he was probably, during
this important period, the teacher who, more than
any other at Cambridge, impressed his own mode of
thought both upon his colleagues in the university
and the rising generation of students. Tillotson,
Patrick, and Burnet all look back to him as a truly
memorable man, whose whole life and studies were
devoted to the most elevating objects, and who set
the thoughts of the young in a new and higher
direction. In a true sense he may be said to have
founded the new school of philosophical theology,
although it is chiefly known by the more elaborate
writings of others. Like many eminent teachers, his
1 Hist, of his own Times, i. 339, 340. ' Ibid.

46 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
personality and the general force of his mental char
acter were obviously greater than his intellectual
productiveness. A few volumes of sermons are
nearly all that survive of his labours to help us to
understand them. Yet his sermons, comparatively
neglected as they have been, are amongst the most
thoughtful in the English language, pregnant with
meaning, not only for his own, but for all time. It
is strange that he should have been so little known
and studied ; but the obscurity which has overtaken
him is not without some relation to his very great
ness, and the silent way in which he passed out of
sight at the Restoration after he had done his work
at Cambridge. There are some kinds of influence
which perish in their very fruitfulness, as the seed
dies and wastes away at the root of the ripening
grain. Whichcote's influence was of this kind. He
was careless of his own name, providing the higher
thoughts for which he cared were found bearing fruit.
He possessed that highest magnanimity of all — ^a
magnanimity extremely rare — of forgetting himself
in the cause which he loved, and rejoicing that
others entered into the results for which he laboured.
It is all the more necessary, therefore, that we should
endeavour to do some degree of justice to his name
and opinions — to bringbefore us as complete an image
as we can of the man, and of his academic and theo
logical activity. Standing as he does at the foun
tain-head of our school of thinkers, it is especially
important to catch the spirit of his teaching, and to
present it In its full historical and intellectual relations.
Benjamin Whichcote was born of " an ancient and

REASON AND RELIGION. 47
honourable family" in the county of Shropshire In
the spring ofj.6a9-io. The exact date of his birth
is given as March 11. His father was apparently a
country squire, the owner of Whichcote Hall. His
mother was of the same rank of life, being the
" daughter of Edward Fox, Esq. of Greet, in the
same county."^ He was sent to Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, in 1626. Of his previous life, or the
training of his boyhood, we know nothing. His
tutor at Emmanuel was Mr Antony Tuckney, the
correspondent of his later years, of whom we shall
learn more immediately. Tuckney was about ten
years older than himself, and had passed a very dis
tinguished academic career. He had been chosen
fellow of his college when only twenty years of age,
and after a brief interval of residence in a noble
family, had returned to Cambridge, and acquired
special distinction as a tutor at Emmanuel. This
well-known college owed its foundation to Sir Walter
Mildmay, in the reign of Elizabeth (1584), and was
designed for the special encouragement of Calvlnistic
theology. Sir Walter was Elizabeth's Chancellor of
the Exchequer for a lengthened period (from 1566
to 1589). He is described by Fuller as a statesman
of rare integrity, zealous " to advance the Queen's
1 Preface by Dr Salter, Preben- Tillotson preached Whichcote's
dary of Norwich, to Whichcote funeral sermon in 1683. I do not
and Tuckney's ' Correspondence,' know of any other sources of in-
published in 1753. To this preface formation beyond the biographical
and to Whichcote's own letters, dictionaries. There is a story as
and, of course, Tillotson's and to Whichcote's MSS., and how
Burnet's notices, we are indebted they came into Dr Salter's hands,
for the facts of his life and the which will be told in the sequel.
course of formation of hisopinions.

48 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE

treasure," and yet " consclonably without wronging
the subject," as a man of learning and deep and
earnest convictions. Sympathising with the more
decided Protestantism of the time, on which his
mistress looked coldly, he devoted his means to its
encouragement. The conversation betwixt the
Queen and him on the subject related by Fuller is
in all respects creditable to the Chancellor — to his
wise tact no less than to his zeal. The Queen is
said to have addressed him one day, " Sir Walter, I
hear you have erected a Puritan foundation." " No,
madam," was his reply, " far be it from me to counte
nance anything contrary to your established laws ; but
I have set an acorn which, when it becomes an oak,
God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof" ^
Whichcote took his degree of B.A. in 1629, and
of M.A. in 1633, and in the latter year became
fellow of his college. In 1636 he was ordained both
deacon and priest by Williams, Bishop of Lincoln,
an irregularity for which his biographer ^ is unable to
account. During the eventful years which followed,
he appears to have busied himself with pupils at the
university till 1643, when he was presented by his
college to the living of North Cadbury, in Somerset
shire. There he is supposed to have married and
begun to settle himself, when in the following year
he was recalled to Cambridge to succeed Dr Collins,
who had been ejected by the Parliament from the
provostship of King's College. It appears to have
1 Hist, of University of Cam- wich, who edited his ' Aphor-
bridge, 1655, p. 146, 147. isms,' 1753.
^ Dr Salter, Prebendary of Nor-

REASON AND RELIGION. 49
been a grave perplexity to Whichcote whether or
not he should accept this preferment. The idea of
superseding a man whom he greatly respected, and
whom he must have held to be wrongfully deprived
of his office, was distasteful to his mind. He weighed
anxiously the whole business, and the reasons for
and against it, and even drew them out in writing
for his guidance ; but at length consented to accept
the office, under condition of continuing to Dr Collins
one half of the salary payable to the provost from
the college revenues.^ He acted wisely ; but the
step was one which he was not allowed to forget at
the Restoration, and even Tillotson remembers it
apologetically in his funeral sermon. Tillotson adds
at the same time that Whichcote " did not stoop to
do anything unworthy to obtain the place, for he
never took the Covenant." Not only so, but by the
friendship and interest he had with some of the chief
visitors, " he prevailed to have the greatest part of
the fellows of King's College exempted from that
imposition, and preserved them in their places."
It may be inferred from this promotion, as also
from his training at Emmanuel College, that Which
cote had grown up amongst Puritans, and that his
relatives and friends belonged to that party. Whe
ther he himself had ever professed Puritan tenets it
is impossible to say. In his early years he probably
fell in with the tone of his college. Nor is there
any reason to believe that up to this time he had
' Salter, Biographical Preface, con, was found amongst his papers
p. xviii. A schedule giving the after his death.
heads of such reasons, pro and
VOL. II. D

50 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :

attracted notice by any singularity of opinion. In
his first letter to Tuckney, in 1651, he says, — " I do
not, I cannot, forget my four first years' education
In the university under you ; and I think I have
principles by me I then received from you." ^ In
the same letter, however, he also indicates that some
of the opinions to which Tuckney objected had
been long entertained by him ; so long back as when
he disputed In the college chapel.^ The fact appears
to be that Whichcote was from the first a thoughtful
and independent student in religious matters. What
ever may have been his early associations or up
bringing, his mind sought its own path. He was
but little indebted to books, he distinctly asserts,
when accused by Tuckney of borrowing his views
from the Dutch Arminians, and other special
sources. " You say you find me largely In their
' Apologia ; '—-to my knowledge I never saw nor
heard of the book before " ^— a singular enough
confession. " I shame myself to tell you how little
I have been acquainted with books. While fellow
of Emmanuel College, employment with pupils took
my time from me. I have not read many books ;
but I have studied a few. Meditation and invention
hath been rather my life than reading." * Slowly
forming his opinions in this manner, and carefully
testing them, rejecting whatever was not " under-
propt by convincing reason or satisfactory Scrip
ture," he would not be ready to break the ties of
circumstance which bound him. The most thought-
1 Letters, p. 7. ^ Ibid., p. 53.
2 Ibid., p. 12. * Ibid., p. 54.

REASON AND RELIGION. 51
ful and meditative minds are often the most reluc
tant to separate from old associations and surround
ings. Hales remained strongly attached to the
High Church side in the civil struggle, and Chilling
worth also, long after they had unlearned every
dogmatic principle on which High Churchism rests.
And Whichcote doubtless remained among the
Puritans, and was reckoned on their side fromj
similar accidents of personal connection and train- j
Ing, although he never imbibed their spirit, and
seems from the first to have rejected their doctrinal
narrowness. The quick eye of Tuckney had seen
the growing independence of his pupil, and his
tendency to freedom and originality. " I loved
you," he says, ^ in allusion to their early connection
at Emmanuel, " as finding you then studious and
pious, and very loving and observant of me ; " but
" I remember I then thought you somewhat cloudy
and obscure in your expressions." The mind of the
pupil, notwithstanding his affectionate respect for his
teacher, was evidently, even in these years, on a
different track. He seems to have taken a larger
and more philosophic view of religious questions,
and given them different turns of expression. And
dogmatic Puritanism has always been jealous of
new modes of expression. It tolerates fundamental
opposition almost as readily as phraseological differ
ences. " Cloudiness and obscurity " are to this day
the favourite terms by which it designates all attempts
to freshen or remould the language of theology.
The date of Whichcote's appointment as Provost
1 Ibid., p. 56.

52 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
of King^, 1644, may be said to mark the rise of the
new philosophical and religious movement at Cam
bridge. Not for some while after this, indeed, did
it attain significance and general intellectual interest.
But from the time that he was placed in this position
of authority, Whichcote seems to have become a
power in the university, and gradually it was felt
that there was a new life, other than Puritan or
Anglo- Catholic, moving the academic mind. "A
nobler, freer, and more generous set of opinions,"
began to prevail, especially among the young
Masters of Art, to the no small alarm of the older
authorities, who remained fixed in their dogmatic
opinions. The chief instrument of this new move
ment, as of the older religious spirit which had so
stirred and changed the country, was preaching.
It was as Afternoon Lecturer in Trinity Church
that Whichcote spread his views and' kindled
that fervour for a rational Christianity which was
destined to have such enduring effects. The corre
spondence with Tuckney^ helps us in some degree
to understand the growth of the movement. We
could have wished further information ; but at least
we can trace in these letters the diverse forces at
work, and the odd mingling of personal and theo
logical influences with the deeper currents of thought,
which were to leave their impression upon the mind
of future generations.
The aim of the Puritan authorities in 1644 was,
of course, to promote the cause so dear to them, and
* This correspondence, as will published in 1753, edited by Dr
be afterwards explained, was first Salter, Prebendary of Norwich.

REASON AND RELIGION, S3
to remodel the universities after their own mind.
Whichcote's appointment to be Provost of King's
was only one of numerous appointments which
they made at the time with the same intention ; and
his position, and the movement which he initiated,
will be best understood in relation to the men
who surrounded him, and with whom it was no doubt
expected he would cordially co-operate. There are
three names especially associated with his own :
Tuckney, formerly his tutor, who was made Master
of Emmanuel ; and Arrowsmith and Hill, who were
placed respectively at the head of St John's and of
Trinity. " Thus," says Dr Salter, " four very
intimate friends, after a separation of some years,
save that the three last met in the Assembly of
Divines at Westminster, saw each other again in
the several most honourable stations of the univer
sity to which their learning and piety had deservedly
recommended them."
Tuckney, the oldest of the four, had already
acquired distinction as a tutor at Emmanuel, where
he had " many persons of rank and quality admitted
under him." He was "a man of great reading
and much knowledge, a ready and elegant Latinist,
but narrow, stiff, and dogmatical ; no enemy to
the royal or episcopal power as it should seem ;
but above measure zealous for Church power and
ecclesiastical discipline."^ He was, in short, a
doctrinal Puritan, as his letters fully show, of a
somewhat extreme type, equally opposed to Papists,
Arminians, and Independents, all of whom he
1 Dr Salter's Preface, p. xii.

54 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
attacks vigorously " in the same breath." Some
idea of his dogmatic fierceness may be gathered
from his strong denunciation of Milton on the
subject of divorce, whom he calls infamis et non una
laqtieo dignus. He is said to have taken an active
part in the dogmatic work of the Westminster
Assembly of Divines, and " particularly to have
drawn the exposition of the Commandments in the
larger Catechism." ^ Of his ability there seems no
question, as he was unanimously chosen — invito et
pczne coacttis, he himself says — to fill the chair of
Regius Professor of Divinity on the resignation of
Arrowsmith in 1655. While stoutly dogmatical
in his own views, he seems to have been by no
means a bigot practically. He voted In the As
sembly " against subserving or swearing to the Con
fession." And in his elections at St John's, to
which he was promoted from Emmanuel, " when
the President, according to the cant of the times,
would call upon him to have regard to the godly,"
he would answer, " no one should have a greater
regard to the godly than himself ; but he was deter
mined to choose none but scholars — adding very
wisely, they may deceive me in their godliness, they
cannot in their scholarship." " This story of him,
so much to his honour, Is still upon record In the
college." So says Dr Salter in 1753; and the
story is one eminently characteristic, and deserving
of preservation. Tuckney was plainly a man of
shrewdness and insight as well as learning and zeal,
and no unworthy antagonist of his distinguished
' Ibid., p. XV.

REASON AND RELIGION. 55
pupil. His letters reveal very much the same qualities
that Salter describes. They are narrow and defi
cient in sympathy and elevation, but they are terse,
well reasoned, and keep closely to the subject from
his own point of view.
Hill was also a student at Emmanuel, where he
was admitted in 1618, about the same time as
Tuckney. Like him he had worked for some time
with the famous Mr John Cotton, " Vicar of Boston,
a very zealous Nonconformist," who afterwards emi
grated to New England. He " spent some good
time with this Puritan worthy," as many other zeal
ous young men of the time seem to have done, " for
his further perfecting, and the more happy seasoning.
of his spirit." He appears to have excelled as a
preacher, having been appointed during the sitting
of the Westminster Assembly to preach "often before
the House of Commons on solemn occasions, as
public fast-days, and also chosen one of their morn
ing week-day preachers at the Abbey." On his pro
motion to the headship of Trinity College he " set
up two lectures in the town of Cambridge, one of
which he supplied himself altogether, and was much
resorted to." " He printed only a few sermons, which
are now little known or inquired after ; " and at the
time of his death, in 1653, "he had made fair pro
gress," says Tuckney, who preached his funeral ser
mon, " in a learned confutation of the great daring
champion of the Arminian errors, whom the abusive
wits of the university, with an impudent boldness,
would say none there durst adventure upon." The
" great daring champion of the Arminian errors" was

56 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
John Goodwin, who had dedicated, two years before,
his volume entitled ' Redemption Redeemed ' to
Whichcote, as Vice-Chancellor, along with the other
heads of houses at Cambridge.
John Arrowsmith was the only one of the four not
educated at Emmanuel. He was "admitted" at St
John's College in 1616. Afterwards he was chosen
fellow of Catherine Hall, but seems to have retired
early from the university, and settled at Lynn in
Norfolk, where he continued, " very much esteemed,
some ten or twelve years." He preceded Tuckney
in the Regius Professorship of Divinity, the duties of
which he discharged with ability ; but he seems to
have been chiefly remembered for his sweet and
admirable temper. He was, says Salter,^ "like his
friends Tuckney and Hill, a very learned and able,
but a stiff and narrow divine; was, like them, offend
ed with the popularity and credit of Dr Whichcote ;
for, though they all respected and loved his person,
they could none of them bear with his freedom."
But Arrowsmith's natural temper was superior to
all his prejudices ; and he is represented by both
sides as a man of a most sweet and engaging dis
position. This appears through all the sourness
and severity of his opinions in his ' Tactica Sacra,'
a book " written in a clear style and with a lively
fancy, in which is displayed at once much weakness
and stiffness, but withal great reading, and a very
amiable candour to the persons and characters of
those from whom he found himself obliged to differ."
Whichcote speaks of him in his first letter as " a
^ Preface, p. xxxiii, xxxiv.

REASON AND RELIGION. 57
later acquaintance" — later, that is to say, than
Tuckney and Hill, both of whom had stood in the
relation of tutor to him at Emmanuel — "but my
friend of choice, a companion of my special delight,
whom in my former years I have acquainted with
all my heart. I have told him all my thoughts, and
I have scarcely ever spoken or thought better of a
man, in respect of the sweetness of his spirit and the
amiableness of his conversation."^
Such were the four friends, " very dear to each
other," now in 1644 settled together at Cambridge.
Whichcote was younger by about ten years than any
of them ; and while the others had been consolidat
ing their early principles in the labours and ambitions
of the Westminster Assembly, he had been spending
his time in comparative quietness and meditation,
either at the university or in Somersetshire, where
for a short while he held the living given him by his
college. His studies had been of a very different
nature from theirs ; and gradually there had been
forming in his mind trains of thought of which they
knew nothing, and, as it turned out, were little able
to comprehend. We have seen already that Tuckney
professed to have early detected in him the bud
ding of new opinions, or, at least, the use of a new
language ; and in the same passage he says to his
former pupil, — " I have heard that when you came to
be a lecturer in the college, you in a great measure
for the year laid aside other studies, and betook
yourself to philosophy and metaphysics, which some
think you were then so immersed in that ever since
ip. 7.

58 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE f
you have been cast into that mould both in your
private discourses and preaching."^ Still, not even
Tuckney could appreciate the divergency of thought
and feeling which had been growing up in Which
cote's mind from the Westminster theological stand
ard. To men of the class of the Westminster Divines,
in whom the spirit of dogmatic affirmation Is strong,
and the spirit of speculative Insight weak, if not
utterly wanting, few things are more difficult to
understand than a theological stand-point different
from their own, and, indeed, not only different, but
incommensurate — stretching widely beyond their
doctrinal particularism, and taking it up into a higher
synthesis as of little or no account. They are out
of their reckoning before the advance of a new line
of thought, which overlooks rather than crosses or
opposes their favourite dogmas, and starts on a fresh
career. On the other hand, a mind like Whichcote's,
meditative rather than polemical, speculative rather
than dogmatic, does not court notice for its growing
light, but adapts itself as far as possible to the theo
logical atmosphere and associations surrounding it
He was far too wise and broad-minded to be intent
merely on the assertion of his own views, and not to
feel that all changes of opinion which are really worth
promoting must be gradual, and spring organically
from the natural decay of pre-existing modes of
thought. There is no evidence, therefore, that at first the
four divines did not work cordially together, and
seem to themselves to be pursuing the same objects,
' Letters, p. 36, 37.

REASON AND RELIGION. 59
But gradually the change in Whichcote made itself
felt. The new tone of his preaching began to stir
the university mind, and to awaken distrust amongst
his colleagues and old friends. How long the fire
smouldered before it burst forth we cannot tell ; but
at length a Commencement Sermon, preached by
Whichcote as Vice-Chancellor, In the autumn of
165 1, drew from Tuckney, acting evidently not only
for himself but also for his friends Hill and Arrow-
smith, and probably others, the vigorous remonstrance
contained in his first letter. The background of
personal feeling is very noticeable In the letters; and
the air of the old tutor gives here and there a curious
piquancy to the tone of discussion.
Tuckney opens with an allusion to the gossip
and discussion which Whichcote's teaching had for
some time excited. It had been said that he and
his friends dealt " disingenuously" with the Provost
of King's in speaking against his opinion without
privately remonstrating with him. " Though I do
not fancy," he says, " as some others, that affected
word ingenuous ; and I wish the thing itself were
not Idolised, to the prejudice of saving grace;
yet, if I must use the word, truly. Sir, I desire
to be so ingenuous with you, as out of that an
cient and still continued love I bear you, to have
leave to tell you that my heart hath been much
exercised about you ; and that especially since your
being Vice-Chancellor I have seldom heard you
preach, but that something hath been delivered by
you, and that so authoritatively, and with the big
words — sometimes of 'divinest reason' and some-

6o BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
times of ' more than mathematical demonstration ' —
that hath very much grieved me, and I believe others
with me ; and yesterday as much as any time. I
pass by many things in your sermon, and crave leave
to note three or four.
" I. Your second position — ' That all those things
wherein good men differ may not be determined from
Scripture; and that it in some places seems to be for
the one part, and in some places for the other' — I
take to be unsafe and unsound.
" II. Your first advice — ' That we would be con
fined to Scripture words and expressions — in which
all parties agree — and not press other forms of words
which are from fallible men ; and this would be for
the peace of Christendom ' — I look at as more dan
gerous, and verily believe that Christ by His blood
never intended to purchase such a peace, in which
the most orthodox (for that word I must use, though
it be nowadays stomached), with Papists, Arians,
Socinians, and all the worst of heretiques, must be
all put into a bag together ; and let them hold and
maintain their own, though never so damnable here
sies ; yet as long as they agree with us in Scripture
expressions they must be accorded with. — And yet,
" III. Your second advice gives your ingenuous
man liberty to propound his own different concep
tions ; and it may be to brand the contrary opinion
with the black mark of ' divinity taught in hell,'
which will take away as much peace as the former
advice promised to give us. The libertas prophet-
andi, in most that ever pressed it, did semper aliquid
monstri alere ; and when I discerne whose footsteps

REASON AND RELIGION. 6l
appear In these two advices, I am very sorry to see
Dr Whichcote, whom I so much love and honour, to
tread in them. Of both these advices what ground
there was from the text, I leave indifferent men to
judge. Sir, your heart I believe was full of them ;
and that was the reason of that so importune pro
pounding of them.
" IV. Your discourse about reconciliation — that it
does not operate on God but on us, ' that e nobis
nascittir,' &c. — is divinity which my heart riseth
against. ... To say that the ground of God's
reconciliation is from anything in us, and not from
His free grace, freely justifying the ungodly, is to
deny one of the fundamental truths of our Gospel
that derives from Heaven, which I bless God lyeth
near to my heart. It is dearer to me than my life ;
and therefore you will pardon me in this my bolder
Trapprjo-ta and freeness, in which if I have exceeded
you will easily impute an oversight to the straytes
of an hour, which I had to write this letter —
'and a copy of it. And, Sir, although your speech
and answers the last Commencement were in the
judgment of abler men than myself against my Com
mencement position the former year ; and your first
yesterday advice directly against my Commencement
sermon, and what you delivered yesterday about
reconciliation, if I mistake not, flatly against what I
have preached for you in Trinity pulpit ; yet in holy
reverence I call God to witness that all this I have
laid aside, nor hath it put any quickness into my
pen. But zeal for God's glory and truth, desire that
young ones may not be tainted, and that your name

62 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE

and repute may not be blemished, and that myself
with your other friends may not be grieved, but com
forted and edified by your ministry, and so may
have more encouragement to attend upon It, have
been the weights upon my spirit that thus set the
wheel agoing."
There is something delightful in the whiff of per
sonal feeling that mingles with Tuckney's orthodox
zeal. No doubt he was honestly distressed by
Whichcote's opinions ; the " footsteps " which appear
In them are too marked not to have alarmed a less
sensitive Calvlnistic conscience. But, moreover, it
is plain that he was personally aggrieved. Which
cote's utterances had been " flatly " in contradiction
of his own, arrdr^Is was more than the most tolerant
orthodoxy could stand. One who had assisted
at the Westminster Assembly, and who had pro
bably given his earliest theological instructions to
the Intrepid preacher, could not be expected to bear
such an interference. The human impatience of con
tradiction beyond question helps wonderfully at all'
times the divine sense of orthodoxy.
Whichcote's reply is marked by humility, and yet
he keeps to his point with dignity and force. He
thanks Tuckney for his " plain dealing," but he feels
bound to examine the question betwixt them. He
has always had his former tutor " in very high
esteem. I have borne you reverence beyond what
you do or can imagine, having in me a loving and
gentle sense of my first relation to you ; and of all
men alive, I have least affected to differ from you, or
to call In question either what you have done, or

REASON AND RELIGION. 63
said, or thought; but your judgment I have re
garded with reverence and respect. I do not, I can
not, forget my four first years' education in the uni
versity under you, and I think I have principles by
me I then received from you." He then acknow
ledges that lately he had been sensible " of an abate
ment of former familiarity and openness." He had
attempted " to make a discovery of the matter," but
he had been met " with reservedness ;" and therefore
he had been content that time should " lead into a
good understanding." But now he was heartily glad
that " the cordolium " had been discovered, and he
was willing to be reproved if he was really in error.
" Blessed be the man, whosoever he be, that confutes
that error. I heartily pray that no man may receive
an opinion from me, but only abide in the truth."
First he defends the matter of his Commencement
speech, as having been In his mind and duly con
sidered long before Tuckney delivered his speech.
" Seven years before," he says — that is, at his very
first settling at Cambridge — he had preached the
same views " concerning natural light, or the use of
reason ;" and therefore he had no intention of merely
saying anything in opposition to Tuckney. " In
deed," he added, " I took not offence at your ques
tion, but was well enough satisfied in your replication
and defence of it — thinking, if we differed in some
expression, yet we agreed in sense and meaning."
As to his sermon — he explains fully the positions
he had maintained, as he finds them written In his
notes. He is persuaded that truly all good men
substantially agree " in all things saving," and that

64 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
there are indeterminate questions, in reference to
which Scripture seems to countenance the different
views that may be taken of them. All that is
" ultra et citra Scripturam," he says, must be pro
nounced fallible. This is to him " the foundation of
Protestancy." All who " agree In Scripture forms of
words, acknowledging that the meaning of the Holy
Ghost in them is true," should " forbear one another,
and not impose their own either sense or phrase."
All Protestants hold, he maintains, " that cuilibet
Christiano conceditur judiciumr discretionis, against
the Pope's usurpation of jfudex Infallibilis, visibilis
in rebus ffdei." He admits that his heart was full of
these truths, for his head had been possessed with
them many years, even so long back as when he had
disputed in the college chapel at Emmanuel.
On the subject of reconciliation he enters at length,
the effect of his explanation being to show that he
had no intention of undervaluing the free grace of
God, but only sought to bring out the necessity of
Christ's work being recognised as not only something
without us but also within us. For reconciliation
betwixt God and us is not usually as betwixt parties
mutually incensed, where secret enmity may still re
main ; but real, to the effect of taking away all our
enmity and making us godlike. " For God's acts
are not false, overiy, imperfect ; God cannot make a
vain show, God being perfectly under the power of
goodness cannot denie Himself — because, if He
should, He would depart from goodness, which is
impossible to God. Therefore we must yield — be
subdued to the rules of goodness, receiving stamps

REASON AND RELIGION. 65
and impressions from God, and God cannot be fur
ther pleased than when goodness takes place. They
therefore deceive and flatter themselves extremely,
who think of reconciliation with God by means of
a Saviour acting upon God in their behalf, and not
also working in or upon them to make them god
like." In reply, Tuckney sends a lengthened letter,
entering into all the points betwixt them. Recip
rocating the affection expressed towards him by
his old pupil, he yet returns to the concern enter
tained by himself and others as to the general
tone of Whichcote's preaching. They are grieved,
he says, significantly, " by a vein of doctrine which
runs up and down in many of your discourses,
and in those of some others of very great worth,
whom we very much honour, and whom you head,
some think." Taking up once more the Commence
ment speech, he expresses more fully his dislike
of the manner in which the speaker, like so many
others lately, had " cried up " reason, and made use
of the saying, " the ^piriL^of man. is^the candle of the
Lord, &c.," — a favourite expression of Whichcote's.
'^tTris saying, he holds, has no relation to the truths
of supernatural or evangelical theology ; nor is the
Protestant principle of private judgment, while true
against the Pope's pretended claims, to be held as
superior to the rule of Scripture, but in subordi
nation to it. A true believer should have " some
thing above a collier!sJaith,"^— a proverbial phrase
1 " Fides carbonaria." — The cote, and by Arrowsmith in his
phrase is used also by Which- ' Tactica Sacra.'
VOL. II, E

66 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
which seems to have been current amongst the
theological disputants of the time. Yet faith is
not to be resolved into reason, but held dis
tinct, directed to its proper object, and governed
by its proper authority — the divine mind in Scrip
ture. The question of good men agreeing on funda
mentals, In " all ¦ things saving," Is redlscussed; but
without any further light being thrown upon it.
Tuckney could of course urge from his point of view
that the value of such an agreement depended en
tirely upon the questions which it included ; and it
was easy to add with ironical effect, " I believe those
fundamental saving things are in some men's judg
ments but very few." He cannot admit that men
" agreeing in Scripture forms of words " really do
or can agree to any purpose so long as they hold
contradictory assertions. He even goes the length
of saying that men's Christianity must be judged by
their opinions rather than by their lives ; " when here
tiques of old and divers of late times have been sober
and temperate, nee sine larva sum,m<z pietatis, — I
think that we should look rather to their doctrines
than their persons." ^
In conclusion, Tuckney makes a fuller confession
of all the uneasiness he and others have been under
as to Whichcote's mode of preaching — the philoso
phical rational style which he had introduced in
contrast to the " spiritual, plain, powerful ministry "
for which Cambridge had been distinguished. " Some
are readie to think," he adds, " that your great
1 P. 27.

REASON AND RELIGION. 6^

authors you steer your course by are Dr Field,
Dr Jackson,^ Dr Hammond— all three very learned
men; the middle sufficiently obscure, and both he
and the last, I must needs think, too corrupt. Whilst
you were fellow here, you were cast into the com
pany of very learned and ingenious men ; who, I
fear, at least some of them, studied other authors
more than the Scriptures — and Plato and his scholars
above others — in whom, I must needs acknow
ledge, from the little Insight I have into them, I find
many excellent and divine expressions : and as we
are wont more to listen to and wonder at a parrot
speaking a few words than a man that speaks many
more and more plainly, and all intelligibly, so whilst
we find such gems in such dunghills, where we less
expected them, we have been too much drawn away
with admiration of them. And hence in part hath
runne a vein of doctrine, which divers very able and
^ Dr Thomas Jackson, who was tise on Justifying Faith : from my
for some 'time Vicar of St Nich- Studie in Corpus Christi Colledge,
olas', Newcastle, then President April 1615,' and 'A Treatise of
of Corpus Christi College, Ox- the Divine Essence and Attri-
ford, and who died Dean of Peter- butes, in two parts : from my
borough in 1638, is a significant Study in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
name in the history of English November 20, 1627.'
theology. Coleridge classifies) Field and his valuable work, 'Of
him with the latitudmarian divines the Church' (1606-1610), are com-
of the seventeenth century. But paratively well known. Field is
he had no connection with the in many respects a liberal Church-
Cambridge school, and cannot be man. His definitions of heresy
said to have definitely influenced (b. iii. c. 3), and of schism (ibid., c.
any of its members, notwithstand- s), are not greatly dissimilar from
ing Tuckney's statements. There thoseof Hales and Jeremy Taylor;
is, at the same time, much of the but he is of an earlier school of
same mode of thought in Jackson, thought, and does not seem to
and his writings are well deserving have influenced any of our di-
of attention, especially 'A Trea- vines.

68 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
worthy men — whom from my heart I much honour
— are, I fear, too much known by. The power of
nature in morals too much advanced. Reason hath
too much given to it in the mysteries of faith — a
recta ratio much talked of, which I cannot tell where
to find. — Mind and understanding is all ; heart and
will little spoken of — The decrees of God questioned
and quarrelled, because, according to our reason, we
cannot comprehend how they can stand with His
goodness, which, according to your phrase. He is
under the power of. — Those our philosophers, and
other heathens, much fairer candidates for heaven
than the Scriptures seem to allow of; and they,
in their virtues, preferred before Christians over
taken with weaknesses. — A kind of moral divi
nity minted, only with a little tincture of Christ
added. Nay, a_ Platonic faith unites to God. —
Inherent righteousness so preached, as if not with
the prejudice of Imputed righteousness, which hath
sometimes very unseemly language given it; yet
much said of the one, and very little or nothing
of the other. This was not Paul's manner of
preaching." We have quoted so far because we could not
have, from the Puritan view, a better and in some
respects more vivid account of Whichcote's theo
logical position, and the points where it separated
from the Westminster standard. We shall after
wards more fully consider this position, but it de
serves to be noticed in the mean time how entirely
new, or, as would be now said, neological, it is con
sidered by Tuckney. It is not merely special dif-

REASON AND RELIGION. 69
ferences which he feels to separate him from some
of his old friends at Cambridge; but the plane of
thought is obviously different in the two cases. The
whole view of the nature of religion and of its rela
tion to philosophy and morals is in question betwixt
the Platonic party and himself The Puritan divine
sees this, and at the same time is unable to see any
good In the forward movement of thought. He
feels the theological ground on which he has been
long standing failing him, and he has no courage to
try the new ground. It offers to him no prospect of
security. The old forms of the truth are to him the
only possible " truth of God." And therefore, he
says In conclusion, he and his friends " cannot desert
it, though we are but little able to maintain it" He
mourns over the growth of opinions which he cannot
share, and which appear to him to have interrupted
the good work to which he looked forward with
encouragement when he settled at Cambridge.
Great as was his hope of help from " the company
and assistance of friends whom he so much hon
oured and loved," so great, on the contrary, has
been his " trouble of spirit in such an unhappy dis
appointment." It is unnecessary to dwell minutely upon the
mere controversial details of the correspondence,
save in so far as they bring out real points of theo
logical or personal significance. The course of argu
ment on the several topics used by both writers, has
lost much of its interest, and becomes on Which
cote's part here and there very technical. We can
see traces in it of that tendency to " school language "

70 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
of which Tuckney accuses him ^ — far more so than
in his Sermons or Aphorisms. With all Tuckney's
narrowness of thought and the occasional slovenli
ness of his style, there is a homely vigour and ex
pressiveness in his language which compare very
well with the more elaborate but less pointed letter-
writing of Whichcote.
In his second letter the latter defends at length
his views as to the relation of reason to religion.
Reason, he maintains, is not merely the source and
instrument of natural theology, but, mor«6ver, has a
true function in regard to sacred and' evangelical
theology. The contents of revelation .transcend
reason, but in no respect contradict it. They lie; in,
amplitudine et plenitudine objecti non in contradic-
tione rationis. " Quicquid recepitur, ad modum re-
cepientis recipltur — the bucket most filled in the sea
yet least contains the ocean." ^ Or, as he elsewhere
puts what seems to have been a favourite thought
with him, " The ocean can but fill the vessel, which
a much less quantity of water can do." Divine
truth, by virtue of its self-illuminating power, satis
fies the mind. " It speaks for itself; it recommends
itself to its subject ; it satisfies the reason of the
mind ; procures its own entertainment by its own
excellency." " I receive the truth of Christian rell-
1 There is a story illustrative of on Hist, of Mor. Phil, in England.
Whichcote's tendency to the use 1852. P. 45). The story is very
of school language. It is said good, and may be true ; but Which-
that one day, seeing two boys cote's language in his Sermons
fighting in the street, he went up and Aphorisms is, upon the
and parted them, exclaiming, whole, simple and idiomatic for
" What ! moral entities, and yet his time.
pugnacious ! " (Whewell's Lect. ^ P. 46.

REASON AND RELIGION. 71

gion In way of illumination, affection, and choice ; I
myself am taken with it as understanding and know
ing it. I retain it as a welcome guest ; it Is not
forced into me, but I let it in — yet so as taught of
God. Do I dishonour my faith, or do any wrong to
it to tell the world that my reason and understand
ing are satisfied in it ? I have no reason against it ;
yea, the highest and purest reason Is for it." ^
He is somewhat indignant at Tuckney's insinua
tion that he had been indebted to Arminian sources
for his opinions. Non sum Christianus alicujus
nominis, he exclaims : " I may as well be called
a Papist or Mahometan, Pagan or Atheist. And
truly. Sir, you are wholly mistaken as to the whole
course of my studies. You say you found me
largely in their ' Apologia ; ' ^ to my knowledge I
never saw nor heard of the work before, much less
have I read a tittle of it. I should lay open my
weakness if I should tell you how little I have read
of the books and authors you have mentioned — of
ten years past nothing at all. I know not who
should have been your Informer; but truly, in a
thousand guesses you could not have been further
off from the truth of the thing. And for schoolmen,
I do not think I have spent four-and-twenty hours
in them divisim these fourteen years. Dr Field on
the Church I read over eighteen years ago ; but
have not looked into him, I believe, these ten years.
Jackson and Hammond I have a little looked into
here and there a good while since, but have not read
the hundredth part of either of them. Truly I
1 P. 48. ^ Apologia pro Confess. Remon.

72 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
shame myself to tell you how little I have been
acquainted with books, but for your satisfaction I
do. While Fellow at Emmanuel College, employ
ment with pupils took my time from me. I have
not read many books, but I have studied a few ;
meditation and invention hath been rather my life
than reading ; and, truly, I have more read Calvine
and Perkins and Beza than all the books, authors, or
names you mention. I have always expected reason
for what men say, less valuing persons or authority
in the stating and resolving of truth ; and therefore
have read them most where I have found it. I
have not looked at anything as more than an opinion
which hath not been underpropt by convincing rea
son or plain or satisfactory Scripture. ... I rather
affect to speak with them who differ from, me
than those who I think agree with me (I speak of
matter of opinions, for about fundamentals I am
satisfied), that I may be rid of my misapprehensions,
wherein I daily suspect myself, and see cause to
think that I may be in some errors, as well as I have
been, whereof I have had experience. But this is
vanity to use such a irepiavToXoyCa. I am ashamed
to think what I have done, and could blot it out
again ; but to satisfy you wherein you have me in
suspicion, though it be folly in me to do it, I let it
go. You seem in your letter to anatomise my life ;
but the description does not characterise me; you
could hardly have shot further from the mark.''^ After
this significant piece of autobiography, Whichcote
returns to criticise Tuckney's denunciation of " So-
' P- S3-SS-

REASON AND RELIGION. 73
cinians, Arminians, coluries of Sectaries," &c. " Do
we not agree even with Papists," he argues, " in
what they hold as true ? . . . Truth is truth,
whosoever hath spoken it, or howsoever It hath
been abused." " Every Christian must think and
believe as he finds cause. If this liberty be not
allowed to the university, wherefore do we study ?
we have nothing to do but to get good memories
and to learn by heart." He winds up, in conclusion,
with a further bit of self-portraiture. Tuckney had
accused him of affecting " school phrases and learn
ing in preaching," and making use of "philosophy
and metaphysics." He resents this imputation as
affecting the success of his ministry, of which he was
not unreasonably jealous. Preaching was his strong
point, and the chief means of his influence. " I have
to my best," he says, " endeavoured to confirm truth,
and convince the understanding of men therein, and
to that purpose, as I have been able, have made use
of all those principles that derive from God and
speak Him in the world. I am sure I have all
along been well understood by persons of honest
hearts, but of mean place and education ; and I have
had the blessing of the souls of such at their depar
ture out of the world. I thank God my conscience
tells me that I have not herein affected worldly
show, but the real service of truth. And I have
always found In myself that such preaching of others
hath most commanded my heart which hath most
illuminated my head. The time I have spent on
philosophers I have no cause to repent, and the use
I have made of them I dare not disown. I heartily

74 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
thank God for what I have found in them ; neither
have I upon this occasion one jot less loved the
old Scriptures. I have found the philosophers that
I have read good so far as they go ; and it makes
me secretly blush before God when I find either my
head, heart, or life challenged by theirs, which I
must confess I have often found. I think St Au-
gustin saith of St Paul, Non destruit verum quod
invenit in latere Paganorum ; and our Saviour re
proves the Jews by Tyre and Sidon. I have
thought it profitable to provoke to jealousy lazy and
loose Christians by philosophers."^
Tuckney's third letter is in a milder and less
grieved tone. He has evidently been touched by
the personal feeling and modesty shown by Which
cote In defence of himself ; and he tries to make the
most of their points of agreement rather to em
phasise further their differences. Reciprocare serram
would be, he says, but a poor and " unthrifty "
business for two old friends. He would be satisfied
if Whichcote and his friends would only so far deny
themselves " as to forbear the insisting on arguments
of the power of nature and reason " in their ser
mons, " which in Scripture are rather abased than
exalted." " It would prevent heat and opposition,
which at all times are uncomfortable, and especially
in these crazy times may prove of very ill conse
quence to the university." As to the Westminster
standards, heartily as he approved of them, he
would be far from imposing them upon others.
" In the Assembly I gave my vote with others
' p. 60, 61.

REASON AND RELIGION. 75
that the Confession of Faith, put out by authority,
should not be required to be either sworn or sub
scribed to, we having been burnt in the hand in
that kind before."^ At the same time he cannot
go the length of that " liberty of prophesying which
some so call for." " Let truth be truth," he says.
" This libertas prophetandi I take to be no such
truth ; and I do not the more like it, but rather the
more suspect it, because Socinians and Arminians
do so much plead for it, and that, as it is apparent,
out of design, that they might not be hindered in
diffusing their poison, in their other corrupt tenets,
which they are more commonly known by, though
the world is not now so ignorant of Socinlanism and
Arminianism as to confine the one to the denial of
Christ's divinity and satisfaction, or the other to the
five controverted articles." ^
He apologises in some degree for his alleged
anatomy of Whichcote's life. " God help me," he
says, " more to search into my own heart, that I
be not so much mistaken in the one as It seemeth
I am in the other ! God knows I am not wont to
look very much into others who have so much to
look after in myself What I did herein I entreat
you to think was not from an ill-minded or busy
curiosity, but out of love and faithfulness ; and if
you will please to do as much for me, such ' balm
shall not break my head.' " ^
He naturally expresses astonishment at Which
cote saying that he had never read the ' Apologia
Remonstratium,' " which, when it came out, we so
1 p. 76. 2 p. 84. ' P. 82.

^6 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
greedily bought and read." And he adds, in a very
significant clause, that amongst the English authors
which he formerly ^ named as having influenced his
friend, he should have included Chillingworth and
Hooker. In the first book of the ' Ecclesiastical
Polity,' " though it be many years since I read it,"
he continues, " and I have it not now by me, if I
forget not there be divers things which divers dis
courses nowadays m-uch symbolise with." This Is
an interesting guess, the truth and force of which
will afterwards more fully appear.
Whichcote, in his reply, confines himself mainly
to a reiteration of the positions which he has already
maintained, and rather seems to warm as Tuckney
has cooled. The softness and apparent satisfaction
of Tuckney's language kindles him more than his re
bukes had done. He had, he says, " well considered
the matter objected to, and when he found it had
given offence, re-examined it all over again et tandem
confirmatior evade ; and I am fully settled in my
thoughts that the matter is unexceptionable, and
that which must be stood to, highly tending to
God's honour and worthy the Gospel ; and there is
nothing of reality against it but mistakes, misappre
hensions, jealousies, and misprisions. Sir, this I would
not write to you did I not think the honour of God
and truth engaged, the interest of souls concerned ;
and were not I myself so assured as that thereto, if
called to it, I must give attestation with my life.
Therefore, Sir, though I dearly love you in my
relation to you, and highly honour you for your own
' Field, Jackson, and Hammond.

REASON AND RELIGION. "jy
worth, yet cannot I, out of respect to you, give up
so noble, so choice a truth, so antidotical against
temptation, so satisfactory, so convlctive, so quietive,
in so full confirmation to my mind of the truth of the
Christian religion " — the truth, namely, of the ration
ality of Christian doctrine, and its fitness to fill and
satisfy the human mind. It was impossible for him,
he argues, to dwell too much on a great truth like
this, and all the blessed moral consequences which
it involves ; " which, if settled in the hearts and
lives of men, would make this world resemble
heaven, whereas now, the contrary speak hell
broken loose." And, warming as he writes, he
exclaims somewhat wildly — " Too much and too
often on these points ! The Scripture full of such
truths, and I handle them too much and too often !
and not discourse of them, rationally ! Sir, I op
pose not rational to- spiritual — for spiritual is most
rational. But I contradistinguish rational to con
ceited, impotent, affected canting, as I may call it,
when the ear receives words which offer no matter
to the understanding — make no impression on the
inward sense." ¦*¦
Again, in the same vein : " ' Exalting the power
of nature' — to me a strange imputation! I have
indeed called upon men — supposing, as I ought,
God to be with them, to use and employ all gifts,
both of grace and nature, the neglect of which I am
sure will prove matter of self-conviction." ^
Then, as if he felt it necessary to speak his mind
frankly, and bring to the light the full differences of
1 P. io8. ^ P. 114-

78 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
thought betwixt himself and his old friends : —
" Permit me animam liberare — to deal freely and
clearly — and I pray It may be without offence. Let
the matter of difference be discovered in order to
a removal and a more inward closing. I cannot
return to that frame of spirit in the judging and
discerning the things of God you here and there, in
my apprehension, seem to advise me to. I have
had, in the former part of my life, experience thereof,
and have freely and fully delivered myself up to
God to be taught and led into truth ; my mind is so
framed and fashioned by him that I can no more
look back than St Paul, after Christ discovered to
him, could return into his former strain. ... If
I learn much by the writings of good men in former
ages, which you advise me to, by the actings of the
Divine Spirit in the minds of good men now alive
I may learn more. 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
principle, affection, and action. And I dare not
blaspheme free and noble spirits in religion who
search after truth with indifference and ingenuity ;
lest in so doing I should degenerate into a spirit of
persecution in the reality of the thing, though in
another guise. For a mistaken spirit may conceit
itself to be acted by the zeal of God. ... I pray
God our zeal in these times may be so kindled with
pure fire from God's altar that it may rather warm
than burn, enliven rather than inflame, and that the
spirits of good men may truly be qualified with
Gospel principles, true fruits of the Divine Spirit.

REASON AND RELIGION. 79
And, truly, I think that the members of the Church,
if not the leaders — notwithstanding all the perfec
tions of times before us, so much pictured or ap
plauded — on this point have very much yet to learn.
For I am persuaded that Christian love and affec
tion is a point of such importance that it is not to
be prejudiced by supposals of difference in points
of religion in any ways disputable, though thought
weighty as determined by the parties on either side ;
or by particular determinations beyond Scripture,
which, as some have observed, have enlarged
divinity, but have lessened charity and multi
plied divisions. For the m,aintenance of truth is
rather God's charge, and the continuance of charity
ours!' -^
The correspondence winds up with two further
brief letters. Both writers felt that they had
delivered their souls, and that if they were not
nearer to each other as the result, they at least
understood each other somewhat more fully, and
were not likely to make more progress by further
argument. Tuckney professes himself satisfied in
the main, though in divers things he remains un
satisfied. In any case, he is convinced from the
tone of Whichcote's last letter that it is better for
the present to forbear. At some future time he
may put down in writing a reply to certain things
which still dissatisfy him. Whichcote, in a few
words, says, that he is sure of his own honesty as
a thinker. " If I know myself at all, I know that in discover-
1 p. 115, 116, 118.

8o BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
ing of truth I do not dally nor have any worldly
design, but with all indifferency of mind do receive
from God what I have assurance is from him. I
cannot practise upon my judgment, nor use any
force to command my understanding into other
apprehensions. . . . It is not in my power to fall
off from mine own persuasions, conceptions, and
thoughts so grounded. Wherefore," he concludes,
" if in this point of discerning we differ, there is no
help for it. We must forbear one another. And
nothing is to be done, unless so far mutually to
value each other's judgments, as to think that for
such difference there is occasion given to each of us
to examine our own spirits, whether we retain. that
indifference and Ingenuity In discerning we ought
always to be clothed withal." -^ 4
These details, from the correspondence betwixt
Whichcote and Tuckney, serve sufficiently to bring
before us the commencement of the new Cambridge
movement. So far, it is seen to concern Itself with
the same questions already discussed so amply by
Hales and Chillingworth — questions as to the non-
importance of many of the dogmatic differences
amongst Christians, and the fundamental basis of
Christian communion in the bonds of common sym
pathy and charity, rather than in doctrinal agree
ment. All, In short, that was vital in the liberal
thoughtfulness of the earlier movement is taken up
and carried forward by the Cambridge school, al
though there is no evidence of genetic connection
betwixt the two. To the charge of being indebted
1 p. 132, 133.

REASON AND RELIGION. 8 1
to Chillingworth, as well as to Hooker, Whichcote
makes no reply. He probably felt that in what he
had formerly said as to the slight degree in which
he was indebted to books at all, he had sufficiently
answered, such a charge. His own thoughtfulness,
rather than the writings of others, had been the
source of his inspiration, and the nurse of his opinions.
He had borrowed nothing, strange as it may seem,
from the Dutch Arminians. The truth is, that such
thoughts as to the vitality of dogmatic controversies,
and the necessity of a new catholic basis of Christian
communion, were a natural growth of the time in
many minds. The theological atmosphere had been
so vexed, and the polemical spirit had raged with
such bitterness, and such little good effect, that the
more thoughtful of the younger clergy instinctively
turned away from dogmatic discussions, disgusted
and wearied, towards some higher and purer atmo
sphere of Christian truth. They had had, as Which
cote hints,-' in the early part of their life, " experience
thereof," and the result was to make them seek a
" more excellent way." It is unnecessary, therefore,
to try to make out points of connection betwixt the
Cambridge divines and our earlier series of " liberal
Churchmen." Hales and Chillingworth may, or may
not, have been studied by them ; the liberal sen
timents which they had sown were germinating,
more or less, by the middle of the century, in all
generous, open, and rational minds.
But it is easy to detect in Whichcote from the
first something far more searching in the shape of
1 p. IIS.
VOL. II. F

82 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
liberal thought than anything to be found in Chilling
worth. Chlllingworth's principles are sufficiently
rational in a definite direction ; he emphasises with
great significance the rights of the Christian reason.
But he nowhere takes up the gener^ thought
pervading Whichcote's mind — the " vein,"* as Tuck
ney says, " running up and down " all his discourses
and letters — of the relation betwixt natural and
revealed truth. In what respects are natural and
revealed truth allied ? and in what do they differ ?
or, in other words, what is the essence of the
Divine, and how is It brought near to us, alike in
philosophy and In religion, in nature and revelation ?
These are but different forms of the same problem,
and the problem is the one plainly which, more than
any other, runs through Whichcote's letters, and, as
we shall see, still more clearly through his discourses.
The only writer who had hitherto touched this pro
blem with a true and bold hand was Hooker, as
Tuckney clearly enough surmised. But Hooker,
strangely, founded no school. His great work stands
by itself at the very opening of the century, a pillar
of light to which the national mind had given little
heed. It was either too much in advance of the
time, or the spirit of controversy had been already
kindled too intensely to permit of conciliation.
Certainly it Is remarkable how little the Immediately
succeeding generations were affected by Hooker's
magnificent labours. While they have continued a
source of inspiration to many thinkers of a later
time, there are scarcely any signs of their having
affected the thought of his own or the next age,

REASON AND RELIGION. 83
much as the name of the writer was held in respect
As we formerly observed, no succession of thinkers
sprang up in connection with him.
It was reserved to the later half of the seventeenth
century to* propagate the seed of religious culture
first sown by the Books of Ecclesiastical Polity.
Whether or not directly transplanted, undoubtedly
the quality of thought Is the same. And what is
really remarkable is that now, after the lapse of half
a century, and in the hands of one who is compara
tively unknown In the history of theological opinion,
this seed of noble thought is found taking root and
springing up into a powerful influence — a school of
opinion which was to guide and change many minds.
Of this there Is abundant evidence in these letters,
although half the result was not before the mind of
Tuckney, nor could he foresee all that was to grow
from the views which so alarmed him. Yet he felt
clearly that there was a party behind Whichcote.
His main apprehension from the teaching of his friend
was that it was representative. Whichcote spoke
not only for himself, but for others, of whom he was
reputed the. head. His preaching would have been
of little account if it had not uttered the thoughts of
many as well as his own, or at least revealed their
thoughts to them. All the enthusiasm of young
Cambridge was evidently turned in a liberal direc
tion by the eloquent Provost of King's, and "so
young ones in the university tainted."
It is difficult to say what peculiar combination of
qualities sometimes gives a man the position of leader
of thought in a university. The greatest ability

84 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
and the most profound learning may fall In securing
it ; distinction as a writer has often no effect. In
the case of Whichcote there were none of these
qualities prominently present. But there was that
which Is more than all — a certain attractiveness
and glow of feeling, a persuasive enthusiasm, an
" aptness to teach," which goes right to the hearts of
the young, and constitutes a power far more effec
tive than any mere literary or intellectual capacity.
The Puritan doctors who settled at Cambridge in
1644, were all men of mark. Tuckney's letters, in
mere literary and argumentative force, are certainly
not inferior to those of Whichcote. Hill was distin
guished as a preacher, and Arrowsmith known and
loved for his personal amiability. Yet it is evident
that the young thought of the university had gone
after Whichcote and his friends. The men who had
sat at Westminster and assisted in the composition
of the " Confession of Faith " were left compara
tively without followers. The very name of " Ortho
dox," Tuckney complains, was "stomached;" while
a species of " moral divinity," which sought to ally
natural and revealed truth, and bring them to a
unity, carried all before it.
, The great instrument of Whichcote's influence
was evidently the pulpit. He possessed great
powers as a preacher, and his regular Sunday after
noon lecture in Trinity Church drew crowds, Til
lotson tells us, " not only of the young scholars,
but of those of greater standing and best repute
for learning in the university." ^ He contributed
^ Funeral Sermon.

REASON AND RELIGION. 85

thus, according to the same authority, " more to the
forming of the students of that university in a
sober sense of religion than any man in that age."
He was the great university preacher of the Com
monwealth ; and to his afternoon sermons, probably
more than to any single means of influence, Is the
progress of the new movement to be attributed.
Both from his own language and the language of his
opponents, it is clear that he aimed by his sermons
to give a new tone to contemporary thought, and to
turn men's minds away from polemical argumenta
tion to the great moral and spiritual realities lying at
the basis of all religion, — from the " forms of words,"
as he himself says, to the " Inwards of things," and
the " reason of them." ^
We will consider immediately what appears most
striking and original in Whichcote's discourses.
They are all, or nearly all, that remains to attest
his power as a preacher, and the novelty and
force of the truth which he preached. But, In try
ing to estimate the value of his living eloquence,
we must remember the very imperfect form In
which these discourses have been preserved. Like
Frederick Robertson's sermons, in our own day, they
seem to have been printed merely from notes — his
own or others'. We are told that in the pulpit he
used "no other than very short notes, not very legible,"
— specimens of which he has himself presented in
his letters to Dr Tuckney, and which are evidently
the mere bones which he clothed with a living shape
in the course of delivery. He had the temperament
' Letters, p. 108.

86 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
of the orator, which yields, like a flexible, glowing
medium, to the inspiration of the moment. For
when Tuckney accuses him of using in one of his
sermons, in reference to certain views, the very
strong expression, " divinity taught In hell," he
answers, " The phrase ' divinity minted or taught
In hell ' I find not In my notes ; but it was suddenly
spoken." It can be easily imagined, therefore, that,
animated and vigorous as many of Whichcote's ser
mons are in comparison with most of the sermons of
his age, they give us only an imperfect idea of the
life and impulse of thought which moved him in the
pulpit, and which made him such a power as after
noon lecturer in Trinity Church. All the more
was he likely to be such a power that his whole
activity was apparently given to his university
work. He had no worldly ambition ; no schemes
of authorship, like More and Cudworth. He was
a born teacher — one whose highest qualities were
stimulated by contact with young minds, and that
play of speech which seems to be necessary to the
finest development of certain intellectual natures,
from Socrates downwards. Such men are teachers
divinely called. Their proper place is in the aca
demic chair or the pulpit. Surrounded by question
ing spirits and eager looks, there they are great, as
the life of thought grows warm within them and
overflows In copious and impressive utterance. It
by no means follows that they will be equally great
as writers. Often they are not. Oftener still they
want the impulse to authorship. Their thoughts
only rise freely — their words only come fitly — in the

REASON AND RELIGION. 87
face of a listening audience. Whichcote appears
to have been a man of this stamp. And hence
his peculiar position and fate." He stood at the
head of the Cambridge thought of his time ; he
moved the university youth with a force which
Tuckney and Hill and others failed to imitate. He
inspired and formed the highest intellect which it
was destined to produce for thirty years. Men like
Smith and Cudworth, and More and Tillotson,
looked back to him as their intellectual master. Yet
he himself never appeared as an author. His ser
mons were only published some time after his death.
They have been prized by all who have fallen in
with them ; they cannot be prized too highly ; but
they have not served, as they scarcely could, to
preserve his name from partial oblivion. He was
infinitely greater in life than he appears in history.
One of the powers of his age, his name may be
sought for in vain in a biographical dictionary.
His life may be said to be summed up in his
academic career, which he continued till the Restora
tion. So far as can be gathered from scanty hints,
he was a warm admirer of the great Protector, whose
death, in 1658, he lamented in a copy of Latin verses,
commemorative of his government and congratulatory
of Richard's succession. This may be supposed to
indicate his political position and sympathies. But
he was not a partisan in politics or anything else.
He was " of too great and noble a spirit," his bio
grapher says, " to follow a party servilely, and was
never so attached to any as not to see and own, and
seek to serve, real merit wherever it was to be

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :

found." And in evidence of this is mentioned his
anxiety to assist Isaac Barrow in his application for
the Greek professorship (about 1654), which was
refused to him on account of his Royalist and sup
posed Arminian leanings. Barrow is almost the only
great name in Cambridge at this time that remained
uninfluenced, or nearly so, by the new movement
Comparatively young (having only taken his degree
in 1648), his genius was of that bold, original, self-
concentrated type which strikes out its own orbit.
It is pleasant to note Whichcote's appreciation of
him, and to be told that Barrow " ever acknowledged
his good offices and readiness to serve hlm,"^ unsuc
cessful as they then were. All testimonies unite in
attributing to Whichcote, as Provost of King's, a
happy breadth and equity of temper, and a genuine
love of fair play. He was no bigot for his own
opinions, deeply as he valued and resolutely as he
maintained the characteristic principles which lay at
their root. We have seen how widely he differed
from Dr Tuckney, and what reason he might have
had to be offended by the latter's freedom ; yet some
years afterwards he was one of the six electors who
raised Tuckney to the chair of divinity. He felt, no
doubt, according to his views, that they agreed in far
more than they differed, and that they were more at
one, even when they differed, than their modes of
language would allow them to seem to be.
It might have been supposed that such a man
would have been spared in his post at the Restora
tion ; but, separated as he was in thought from the
^ Salter's Preface, p. xxv.

REASON AND RELIGION. 89

Puritan leaders who had been sent with him to
Cambridge in 1644, he shared their fate when the
time came for the king and the king's friends to
have their own again. He was " removed from the
provostship by especial order of the king, and Dr
James Fleetwood was put into it." This is the
statement of his biographer. He adds : " But
though removed, he was not disgraced nor frowned
upon." When the Act of Uniformity was passed,
he adhered, as might have been expected, to the
Church ; and in the end of 1662 (November) he was
appointed to the cure of St Anne's, Blackfriars, Lon
don. When this church was burned down In the
Great Fire of 1666, he retired for a while to Milton,
in Cambridgeshire, a country rectory sine cura, his
biographer says — a piece of preferment to which he
had succeeded by the favour of his college on the
death of Dr Collins, whom he had displaced in the
provostship. He had taken the precaution after the
Restoration to have his presentation to this living
renewed, and he continued to keep it as long as he
lived. Here he spent some years in comparative
retirement, till the promotion of his friend, Dr John
Wilkins, to the bishopric of Chester in 1668, by
whose interest and recommendation he was present
ed to the vicarage of St Laurence Jewry, which
Wilkins had vacated.
" This was his last stage." Here he continued in
high and general esteem, preaching twice every week
to " a very considerable and judicious auditory, but
not very numerous, by reason of the weakness of
his voice in his declining age." He was about sixty

90 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
when thus finally settled in London. The days of
his activity were passed ; he had done his work, or
nearly so ; and although he survived about fifteen
years, we hear no more of him beyond what we
have now quoted. He had his own circle, — his
" auditory judicious, but not very numerous," — who
delighted In his preaching, and who loved and re
spected his person. He kept up his old Cambridge
friendships, although he had been severed from all
official connection with the university. We find
Worthlngton writing to him there, at Dr Cudworth's
in Christ's College. He may, through his friends
there, have continued to exercise some of his old
influence ; but, upon the whole, he was content to live
in the background during those unhappy times. He
died on one of his visits to Cambridge, in the house
of " his ancient and learned friend, Dr Cudworth."
Having gone down there a little before Easter, In
1683, " he caught a cold, and fell into a distemper,
which in a few days terminated his life." It Is added
that " he died with uncommon sentiments of piety
and devotion. He expressed great doubts of the
principles of separation " — (this Is extremely natural,
and consistent with all his principles) — " and said
that he was the more desirous to receive the sacra
ment, that he might declare his full communion with
the Church all the world over. H e disclaimed Popery,
and, as things of near affinity with it, or rather parts
of it, all superstition and usurpation upon the con
sciences of men."
Tillotson preached his funeral sermon, and draws
his character after the manner of the time — adding

REASON AND RELIGION. 91
trait after trait, without much subtlety of insight or
of combination, without much glow or enthusiasm of
feeling, but so that we can read in his cautious sen
tences many indications of a high and fine nature.
" A godlike temper and disposition (as he was
wont to call it) was," Tillotson says, " what he
chiefly valued and aspired after, — that universal
charity and goodness which he did continually
preach and practise. His conversation was ex
ceeding kind and affable, grave and winning,
prudent and profitable. He was slow to declare
his judgment, and modest In delivering it. Never
passionate, never peremptory — so far from Imposing
upon others that he was rather apt to yield. And
although he had a most profound and well-poised
judgment, yet he was of all men I ever knew the
most patient to hear others differ from him, and the
most easy to be convinced when good reason was
offered ; and, which is seldom seen, more apt to be
favourable to another man's reason than his own.
Studious and inquisitive men," he adds, " at such an
age (at forty or fifty, at the utmost) have fixed and
settled their judgments on most points, and, as it
were, made their last understanding — supposing that
they have thought, or read, or heard what can be
said on all sides of things ; and after that they grow
positive and impatient of contradiction. But our
deceased friend was so wise as to be willing to learn
to the last, knowing that no man can grow wise
without some change of his mind — without gaining
some knowledge which he had not, or correcting
some error which he had before. He had attained

92 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
so perfect a mastery of his passions that for the
latter and greater part of his life he was hardly ever
seen to be transported with anger, and, as he was
extremely careful not to provoke any man, so not to
be provoked by any ; using to say, ' If I provoke a
man, he is the worse for my company ; and if I
suffer myself to be provoked by him, I shall be the
worse for his.' He was a great encourager and
kind director of young divines, and one of the most
candid hearers of sermons, I think, that ever was ;
so that though all men did mightily reverence his
judgment, yet no man had reason to fear his censure.
He never spake well of himself nor ill of others,
making good that saying of Pansa or Tully,
neminen alterius, qui sues consideret virtuti, invidere,
that no man is apt to envy the worth and virtues of
another that hath any of his own to trust to. In a
word, he had all those virtues, and in a high degree,
which an excellent temper, great condescension, long
care and watchfulness over himself, together with
the assistance of God's grace (which he continually
implored and mightily relied upon), are apt to pro
duce. Particularly he excelled in the virtues of
conversation, humanity and gentleness and humility,
a prudent and peaceable and reconciling temper."
The portrait is an engaging one, and leaves a
pleasant Impression upon the mind. It is easy to
see the elements at once of intellectual strength and
moral beauty which made Whichcote a leader of
minds, and gave him so much influence at Cam
bridge. As he was well-born he appears to have
been wealthy throughout his life, and this, no doubt,

REASON AND RELIGION. 93
helped his influence. He was " frugal in expense
upon himself," but very liberal and charitable
towards the necessities of others ; more than " was
well known to many," says Tillotson, " because in
the disposal of his charity he very much affected
secrecy." He bequeathed valuable legacies to the
University of Cambridge and King's College and
Ernmanuel College, with which he had been con
nected, and also to the poor of the several places
" where his estate lay, and where he had been
minister." " He was married, but I cannot learn to
whom," says the author of the preface to his corre
spondence with Tuckney.^ This event in his life
is supposed to have taken place when he left the
university for a brief period in 1643, and went to
reside at his living of North Cadbury, in Somerset
shire. He is believed not to have had any children,
and he certainly left none — his nephews, sons of Sir
Jeremy Whichcote, of the Inner Temple, and
Deputy-Lieutenant of Middlesex, being appointed
his executors.
It will now be our aim to exhibit somewhat more
fully the substance of Whichcote's teaching. Its main
tendencies have already appeared in the correspon-
^ Dr Salter — from whom we of Tuckney's sermons at Trinity,
have already so often quoted, preached for him, he says that
We have learned nowhere else all he knew of it was, that " my
anything of Whichcote's mar- wife told me how much she was
riage. But there is a pleasant moved by your excellent pains,
and characteristic allusion to his as I think, upon, 'We as ambas-
wife in his first letter to Tuckney, sadors beseech you to be re-
where, in excusing himself for conciled.'"
not having been able to hear one

94 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
dence with Tuckney ; but it is necessary to draw
them out in greater fulness and detail as presented
in his Discourses and Aphorisms. Four volumes of
" Discourses " and a series of Moral and Religious
Aphorisms collected from his MSS., and forming
the first portion of one volume containing the cor
respondence from which we have quoted so largely,
comprise all his works. They give probably but an
Inadequate picture of his intellectual and religious
activity ; he was so obviously greater, according to
our estimate, as a living teacher than as an author ;
but they are all that survive from his pen or that
help us to understand the character of his influence.
Unhappily they are imperfect in some degree, both
in substance and in form. None of them were
published during his lifetime, nor even left by him
In a state for publication. Their history is, in fact,
a curious one, and of itself deserves attention.
Two years after his death appeared a small
8vo of eight sheets, under the title ' ©eo^opov/AO'a
Aoy/Aara : or, some Select Notions of that learned
and reverend Divine, Dr B. Whichcote. Faithfully
collected by a pupil and particular friend of his.' The
volume consists of notes on a few texts of Scripture,
and a series of what the editor calls "Apostolical
Apothegms." Of the editor nothing is known, and
the volume -itself seems to have gone out of sight
entirely. Then in 1697 there was published a
' Treatise of Devotion, with Morning and Evening
Prayer for all the Days of the Week,' attributed to
our author, and which has also disappeared. In the
following year his ' Select Sermons ' were printed in

REASON AND RELIGION. 95
two parts, with a preface which has been universally
ascribed to the Earl of Shaftesbury, author of * The
Characteristics.' The preface bears Internal evi
dence of its authorship, and is a very interesting
and characteristic document both in relation to
Whichcote and Shaftesbury. It contains no indi
cation, however, of the manner in which either the
publisher or the writer of the preface became pos
sessed of the sermons. They are held forth as the
genuine productions of the author beyond question,
ill contrast to " some things " which had been lately
" set out in his name, which his best friends dis
owned to be his " — in allusion, it is supposed, to the
' Treatise of Devotion,' printed in the preceding
year, or possibly to the imperfect Notes collected by
a pupil shortly after his death. A very unnecessary
apology is made for the unpolished style and phrase
of the author, as " being more used to school learn
ing and the language of an university than to the
conversation of the fashionable world." It is further
stated that none of the Discourses were ever
designed for publication, and that the publisher has
sometimes " supplied " the author " out of himself,"
by transferring to a defective place that which he
found in some other discourse, where the same
subject was treated ; yet it is added, " so great a
regard was had to the very text and letter of the
.author that he (the editor) would not alter the least
word ; and wheresoever he had added anything he
has taken care to mark it in different characters."
This edition was reprinted at Edinburgh about the
middle of last century (In 1742) by Dr Wishart,

96 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
Principal of the University, with a dedication to
young ministers and students in divinity. Wishart
was himself a remarkable man, of great learning and
liberality of spirit. He also edited and prefixed a
recommendatory preface to ' Scougal's Life of God
in the Soul of Man,' a well-known work of the
small school of Scottish meditative divines, who
have some analogy to the great Cambridge school in
the seventeenth century. '^ Wishart was prosecuted
for heresy by the Presbytery of Edinburgh in 1 738,
among other things for wishing to "remove con
fessions and freeing persons from subscription
thereto," and for " licentiously extending the Hberty
of Christian subjects." But the prosecution was
unsuccessful. Both the Synod and the General
Assembly acquitted him, and he afterwards rose
to great Influence in the Church, and became
Moderator in the year of the Rebellion, 1745.
Principal Wishart, no doubt, appreciated the full
significance of Whichcote's sermons, and sought to
extend their influence in Scotland. It is difficuk
to say how far he may have succeeded in this, or
what traces may be found of them in the religious
literature of the time, which was then assuming, in
the northern part of the island, that somewhat
extreme phase of rationality which has been stig
matised under the name of Moderatism. One
curious testimony to their widespread circulation
is to be found in the fact, that an edition, not only
' Scougal was born in 1650, year minister of a country parish,
and died in 1678, only twenty- and four years Divinity Professor
eight years of age. He was one in King's College, Aberdeen.

REASON AND RELIGION. 97
of the sermons edited by Shaftesbury, but of the
others subsequently published by Whichcote's own
friends, appeared at Aberdeen from the press of " J.
Chalmers " in 1751. To this day this edition Is the
most common and easily accessible to the ordinary
student. It may have been Shaftesbury's edition in 1698,
and the language of his preface, which seems in some
respects to have been displeasing to Whichcote's
friends, or the mere knowledge that there were many
unauthorised copies of his sermons in circulation,
which led them in the beginning of the eighteenth
century to entertain the idea of issuing an edition,
as far as possible, from his own MSS. His nephew
intrusted his papers to Dr Jeffery, " who had the
highest veneration for the deceased author, and every
talent beside that could qualify him to be a diligent,
faithful, and judicious editor." ^ The result of Dr
Jeffery's labours was the publication, in the three
first years of the eighteenth century, of three octavo
volumes of Whichcote's sermons, to which a fourth
volume was afterwards added under the care of Dr
Samuel Clarke. To the same editor we owe the ori
ginal publication of the ' Moral and Religious Aphor
isms,' which were revised and re-edited In 1753 by
Dr Salter, Jeffery's grandson, who " felicitates him
self most unaffectedly that he lives in an age (a hap
piness which his reverend grandfather Jeffery could
not boast!) in which such a generous freedom of
1 Jeffery was Archdeacon of of Man,' London, 1689. He also
Norwich, and author of a volume edited Sir Thomas Browne's
entitled 'Religion the Perfection 'Christian Morals.'
VOL. II. G

98 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
thinking, chastened and tempered by the genuine
spirit of true piety, and a most exalted devotion, and
by the most sound and exact judgment in religion
and all learning ' cleared from froth and grounds,' as
the ever memorable Mr John Hales, of Eton, ex-
presseth it, meets with the esteem and applause it so
well deserves." " Such men as Whichcote," the
same complacent and somewhat indiscriminating ad
mirer adds, " do indeed recommend religion by their
lives and by their writings, proving its influence on
themselves, and show well-grounded persuasion of
its truth by the whole tenor of their conduct, and
making such and only such representations of it in
their works as demonstrate its entire agreeableness to
the best improved reason of man, as show it to be
worthy of God to institute and of man to believe
and to obey — placing It In Its fairest and truest light
as the highest perfection of the human nature, and
greatest Improvement of the human powers ; while
the narrow systematical pretenders to religion, before
and since his time, do all they can to expose and
disgrace what they cannot extinguish and destroy.
These men (to anticipate the masculine sense and
words of the 'Aphorisms') fancy ' they advance re
ligion, while they but draw it down to bodily acts, or
carry it up into I know not what of mystical, symbol
ical, emblematical ; whereas the Christian religion is
not mystical, symbolical, enigmatical, but unclothed,
unbodied, intellectual, rational, spiritual.' " ^
It is somewhat difficult to group Whichcote's
views and opinions scattered throughout his Ser-
^ Dr Salter's Preface.

REASON AND RELIGION. 99
 _^_^  • 
mons and Aphorisms, and yet it would be of little
use to present to the reader an unclassified series of
extracts. We will make the best attempt we can to
bring together the main points of his teaching under
several heads. We begin with that which may be
said to be the centre and most distinctive principle
of all his thought —
I. The Use of Reason in Religion.
The following are some of his most characteristic
sayings on this subject : —
" I find that some men take offence to have rea
son spoken of out of a pulpit, or to hear those great
words of natural light or principles of reason and
conscience. They are doubtless in a mighty mistake.
. . . There is no inconsistency between the grace
of God and the calling upon men carefully to use,
improve, and employ the principles of God's crea
tion. . . . Indeed, this is a very profitable work
to call upon men to answer the principles of their
creation, to fulfil natural light, to answer natural con
science, to be throughout rational in what they do ;
for these things have a divine foundation. The spirit
in man is the candle of the Lord, lighted by God, and
lighting man to God. . . . Therefore, to speak of
natural light, of the use of reason In religion, is to do
no disservice at all to grace; for God is acknow
ledged in both, — in the former as laying the ground
work of His creation, in the latter as reviving and
restoring it." ^
1 Sermon on the Exercise and Progress of a Christian (Aberdeen
ed.), i. 370, 371-

100 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
" A man has as much right to use his own under
standing in judging of truth, as he has a righttp use
his own eyes to see his way." ^ ^ji
" The written word of God is not the JrSt^ or only
discovery of the duty of man. It doth gather, and
repeat, and reinforce, and charge upon us the scat
tered and neglected principles of God's creation, that
has suffered prejudice and damnation by the defec
tion and apostasy of man." ^
" Those that differ upon reason may come together
by reason." ^
"He that gives reason for what he saith, has done
what is fit to be done, and the most that can be done.
He that gives no reason speaks nothing, though he
saith never so much." *
" There Is nothing proper and peculiar to
man but the use of reason and the exercise of
virtue." ^
" To go against reason is to go against God ; it Is.
the self-same to do that which the reason of the case
doth require, and that which God Himself doth ap
point. Reason is the Divine Governor of man's
life ; It Is the very voice of God." ^
" Religion consists in things that are good in them
selves, or that are for the recovery in us of what are
good in themselves." ''
" Nothing in religion is a burthen, but a remedy
or a pleasure. When the doctrine of the Gospel
becomes the reason of our mind, it will be the prin
ciple of our life." ^
' 40, cent. i. The aphorisms are arranged in centuries. ^ 46.
'58. ''60. ^-ji. ^ye. '89. 891,92.

REASON AND RELIGION. lOI
" Reason discovers what Is natural, and reason
receives what is supernatural." ^
II. Differences of Opinion among Christians.
" By the way I will observe how little there is in
many controversies, if wise and temperate men had
the managing of them ; but when once there is
suspicion and jealousy, these make and increase dif
ferences." ^
" All artists differ in their notions ; there are dif
ferent opinions on several points of philosophy ;
what is one man's meat is another's medicine, and
another's poison. We differ In age, In stature, in
feature, in gait, in complexion, in constitution of life,
in profession. These varieties and differences, as
well as harmonies and proportions, explain the in
finite wisdom of the Creator. Yet all agreeing in
human nature are fit companions one for another,
can take delight in each other's company. Why
should not they who meet in the regenerate nature,
who agree on the great articles of faith and principles
of good life, overlook subordinate differences ? If
there be love and goodwill we come to be more
rational, better grounded in our resolution from our
different apprehensions. Discourse Is as soon ended
as begun where all say the same. Whereas he that
speaks after, and says a new thing, searcheth the
former (Prov. xviii. 1 7), so no truth will be lost for
want of being offered to consideration." . . .
" We may meet in the rule of truth, though we
1 99. ' i- 372.

I02 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
differ in the particular application. If there were no
contradiction in the several apprehensions of men,
we might never be awakened to search into things,
and so If we were once In a mistake we should never
come out of It."^
" The points of Christian faith are as clearly intel
ligible to all capacities, as they are clearly necessary
to be believed by all men. God accepts alike the
faith that results from the dark mists of the ignorant,
and from the clearest Intelligence of the learned.
The Holy Scriptures are so written that they are
sooner understood by an unlearned man that is pious
and modest, than by a philosopher who is arrogant
and proud." 2
" Why should not consent in the main be more
available to concord and union, than difference
when powerful matters prevail to distance and
separation ? " ^
" Every man hath a right of judging. If he be
capable ; yea, can a man, ought a man to believe
otherwise than he sees cause ? Is it in a man's
power to believe as he would, or only as the reason
of the thing appears to him." * He that is light of
faith, by the same reason will be light of unbelief
He will as easily disbelieve truth as believe error ? " ^
" By discourse men accommodate things ; in con
ference they render a reason. There is gratia vultus,
the light of one's countenance, presence is winning ;
the presence of men conciliates favour and accep-
' ii. 27. * Ibid., p. 29.
» Ibid., p. 28. 5 jbid., p. 3.
' Ibid., p. 29.

REASON AND RELIGION. 103
tance. When persons at difference talk together,
they often find that they stand not at that distance
they did imagine. Distance gives tale-bearers op
portunity and advantage." ^
" 'Tis neither of our fault that our understandings
are not cast in the same mould ; or that our organs
or bodily constitutions which occasion variety are
not aHke. It may be, also, our apprehensions are
nearer than our expressions. Two who think they
say not the same may think the same as to God." ^
" Nothing is desperate in the condition of good men ;
they will not live and die in any dangerous error." ^
" God, who will not lose anything that Is good,
will finally save what Is capable of salvation, will not
reject malign dispositions which will not be altered
and subdued to the temper of heaven. Jerome and
Rufinus charged each other with heresy. Chrysos-
tom and Epiphanlus refused to join In prayers, the
former wishing the latter might not return alive, the
latter that the former might not die a bishop ; both
which came to pass. 'Tis a great mistake in quest
for truth to let it run out on some smaller matters
which have scarce been thought of by the whole
series of Christians of all ages, but only of late." *
" They who have rashly augmented the materials
of faith, have thereby weakened and diminished
charity." ^
" Two things a man may easily perceive, whether
he be a hypocrite, whether an heretic. Not the
1 Ibid., p. 30. ' I''''*- P- 34-
» Ibid., p. 32. . ' lb''!- P- 35-
3 Ibid., p. 20.

104 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
former If he means well ; not the latter if he be not
wilful, but patient to be informed." ^
" It becomes the modesty of particular persons
when their sentiments are singular to ask themselves
this sober question, How went the Spirit of God
from the generality of His worshippers, and deter
mined itself to me ? "^
All these passages are taken from two sermons in
the beginning of the second volume on the " Traits
of the Church Maintained by Sincere Christians."
They might be increased indefinitely. Many of the
noble descriptions by our author of the essence and
character of true religion also well deserve quota
tion ; but the following extracts, with those already
given, must suffice to bring something like a picture
of Whichcote's mind before our readers.
III. The Character of True Religion.
" A true Gospel spirit doth excel in meekness,
gentleness, modesty, humility, patience, forbearance;
and these are eminent endowments, and mightily
qualify men to live In the world. This is that which
makes men bear universal love and goodwill, and
overcomes evil with good, teacheth men to return
courtesies for Injuries. This I dare say, had we a
man among us that we could produce, that did live
an exact Gospel life ; had we a man that was really
gospelised ; were the Gospel a life, a soul, and a
spirit to him, as principles upon moral considerations
' Ibid., p. 36. " Ibid., p. 37.

REASON AND RELIGION. 105

are — he would be the most lovely, useful person
under heaven. This man, for everything that Is
excellent, and worthy, and useful, would be miracu
lous and extraordinary in the eyes of all men in the
world : Christianity would be recommended to the
world by his spirit and conversation. For the life
of the heavenly state, so far as it can be expressed
to us, is delivered in the Gospel law and rule, and is
put into an act in a Gospel spirit and life. The
fruit of the spirit in us is in all goodness, righteous
ness, and truth. Were a man sincere, honest, and
true In the way of his religion, he would not be
grievous, intolerable, or unsufferable to anybody ;
but he would command due honour, and draw unto
• himself love and esteem. For the true Gospel
spirit is transcendently and eminently remarkable
every way for those things that are lovely in the
eyes of men — for ingenuity, modesty, humility;
gravity, patience, meekness, charity, kindness, &c. ;
and so far as any one is Christian in spirit and
power, so far he is refined and reformed by these
graces. . . . Such is the nature of religion, that
It keeps the mind in a good frame and temper ; It
establishes a healthful complexion and constitution
of soul, and makes It to discharge itself duly in all
its offices towards God, with itself, and with men ;
whereas the mind of a wicked and profane man is a
very wilderness, where lust and exorbitant passions
bear down all before them, and are more fierce and
cruel than wolves, bears, and tigers. The heavenly
state consists in the mind's freedom from these kind
of things. It doth clear the mind from all impotent

I06 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
and unsatiable desires, which do abuse and toss a
man's soul, and make it restless and unquiet. It
sets a man free from eager and impetuous loves, and
by these men are torn in pieces ; from vain and dis
appointing hopes, which sink men into melancholy ;
from lawless and exorbitant appetites ; from frothy
and empty joys ; from dismal, presaging fears, and
anxious, self-devouring cares ; from inward heart
burnings ; from self- eating envy; from swelling
pride and ambition; from dull and black melancholy;
from boiling anger and raging fury ; from a gnawing,
aching conscience ; from an arbitrary presumption ;
from rigid sourness and severity of spirit ; — for these
make the man that is not biassed and principled
with religion to seethe like a pot, inwardly to boil
with the fire and pitchy fumes of hell, and as out
rageous as when the great leviathan doth cause the
waves of the sea to cast out mire and dirt" ^
" The first thing in religion is to refine a man's
temper ; and the second, to govern his practice. If
a man's religion do not this, his religion Is a poor
slender thing, and of little consideration : 'tis then
only a naked profession, and fit to give him a deno
mination. I say, such a man's religion is but of
little value : for it hath no efficacy, but falls short of
the v&cy principles of nature." ^
" Religion is intelligible, rational,' and accountable ;
it is not our burthen, but our privilege. The moral
part of religion never alters. Moral laws are laws
of themselves, without sanction by will ; and the
necessity of them arises from the things themselves.
^ iii. 45-47- " iv. 243.

REASON AND RELIGION. 107
All other things in religion are in order to these. The
moral part of religion does sanctify the soul ; and is
final both to what is instrumental and instituted." ^
" There is nothing so intrinsically rational as reli
gion is ; nothing that can so justify itself; nothing
that hath so pure reason to recommend itself, as reli
gion hath."^
" The more false any one is in his religion ; the
more fierce and furious In maintaining it ; the more
mistaken, the more imposing."^
" There are but two things In religion : morals
and institutions. Morals may be known by the
reason of the thing. Morals are owned as soon as
spoken, and they are nineteen parts In twenty of all
religion. Institutions depend upon Scripture ; and
no one institution depends upon one text of Scrip
ture only; that institution which has but one text
for it has never a one." *
" All the differences in Christendom are about
institutions, not about morals. He that produceth
the best reason in morals, and he that produceth the
best Scripture in institutions, is to be closed with.
Protestants follow the law of God's creation accord
ing to the law of God's institution. Theirs is rea
sonable service." ^
" Religion is the being as much like God as man
can be like Him." ^
" Religion, which is a bond of union, ought not to
' Aphorisms, 220, 221. ° Ibid., 588, 589.
2 Ibid., 457. ^ Ibid., 591. t\s 6ixoia<ns 6eov,
3 Ibid., 499. t"™ 1"° St^'a"" avdpinrov.
* Ibid., 586.

I08 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
be a ground of division ; but it is in an unnatural
use when it doth disunite. Men cannot differ by true
religion, because it is true religion to agree. The
spirit of religion Is a reconciling spirit." ^
" The state of religion lies in a good mind, and a
good life ; all else is about religion ; and men must
not put the instrumental part of religion for the state
of religion." ^
" Religion doth possess and affect the whole man ;
In the understanding it is knowledge ; In the life It
is obedience ; In the affections it is delight in God ;
in our carriage and behaviour It is modesty, calm
ness, gentleness, quietness, candour. Ingenuity; in
our dealings it is uprightness, integrity, correspon
dence with the rule of righteousness : religion makes
men virtuous In all instances.
" Religion has different denominations and names,
from different actions and circumstances, but it Is
one thing — viz., universal righteousness : accord
ingly it had place at all times, before the law of
Moses, under it, and since." ^
" Religion Is not a hearsay, a presumption, a sup
position ; Is not a customary pretension and profes
sion ; is not an affectation of any mode ; is not a
piety of particular fancy, consisting of some pathetic
devotions, vehement expressions, bodily severities,
affected anomalies and aversions from the innocent
usages of others ; but consisteth in a profound
humility, and an universal charity.
" Truth lies in a little compass, and narrow room.
Vitals in religion are few." *
1 Ibid., 712. Mbid., 83J. = Ibid., 956, 957. * Ibid., 1007, 1008.

REASON AND RELIGION. 109

" The moral part of religion consists of things
good in themselves, necessary and indispensable;
the instituted part of religion consists of things made
necessary only by the determinations of the divine
will. He that denies the former is atheistical ; he
that denies the latter is infidel." ^
IV. Prayer, and Forms of Prayer.
" In the Reformed Church there is both use of
forms of prayers and allowance for conceived prayer ;
and they are both justified. As to forms of prayer,
they are great helps to our wandering mind, and
then they are proper and succinct ; whereas prayers
suddenly conceived are not so, are not always purely
prayer matter, which is of four sorts : matter of con
fession of sin ; thankfulness to God for His good
ness ; acknowledging Him in His greatness, and our
dependence upon Him, and petitioning Him for
grace. That that refers not to these four. Is ex
travagance in prayer. I do observe a great deal
in conceived prayer is very good, but may do better
in the sermon. Now this advantage a form of
prayer hath, that things are proper and succinct.
The true excellency of prayer is a sincere intention
of mind in presenting our thoughts to God." ^
V. Popery.
" An implicit faith in men, or in the Church, this
is Popery."
1 Ibid., 1084. ^ Discourses, ii. 327.

no BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
" There are three great designs in Popery : i.
To keep the civil magistrate in awe. 2. To
maintain the clergy in state and honour. 3. To
keep the people in ignorance, and so to enslave
them."i " The Romanists adulterate what Is true in religion,
and superadd what is false." ^
VI. Miscellaneous Aphorisms.
"He that is light of belief will be as light of un
belief If he has a mind to it ; by the same reason, he
will as easily believe an error as a truth, and as easily
disbelieve a truth as an error." ^
" I have always found that such preaching of others
hath most commanded my heart which hath most
illuminated my head."*
" The reason of our mind is the best Instrument
we have to work withal.
" Reason is not a shallow thing : it is the first
participation from God ; therefore, he that observes
reason, observes God."^
" Heaven is first a temper, and then a place."^
" The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most
voices, are false measures of truth."''
" No man is to make religion for himself, but to
receive it from God ; and the teachers of the Church
are not to make religion for their hearers, but to show
it only, as received from God.
^ Aphorisms, 502. ^ Ibid., 459, 460.
^ Ibid., 698. 8 Ibid., 464.
' Ibid., 292. ' Ibid., 500.
* Ibid., 393.

REASON AND RELIGION. Ill
" Curious determinations beyond Scripture are
thought to be the improvement of faith ; and in
considerate dulness, to be the denial of our religion;
fierceness in a sect, to be zeal for religion ; and speak
ing without sense, to be the simplicity of the spirit."^
" Determinations beyond Scripture have Indeed
enlarged faith, but lessened charity, and multiplied
divisions. "2
" It is better for us that there should be difference
of judgment, if we keep charity : but it is most un
manly to quarrel because we differ.
" Let him that is assured that he errs in nothing,
take upon him to condemn every man that errs in
anything."^ "In doctrines of supernatural revelation we shall
do well to direct our apprehensions, and to regulate
our expressions, by .words of Scripture."*
" It is not necessary, to the satisfaction of him who
is offended, that a perfect recompense should be made
by the offender, but the offended is master of his
own right, and may accept of ingenuous acknow
ledgment only from the offender, as satisfaction, if
he pleases ; and expiation is then made, when that
which is displeasing is taken away by something
which is pleasing."^
" Lord Verulam. — Every one almost worships
Idolum Fori, the idol of general imagination : fools
and conceited persons worship Idolum Specus, the
idol of particular fancy. It is less to worship Idolum
1 Ibid., 504, 505. * Ibid., 578.
2 Ibid., 981. ^ Ibid., 580.
3 Ibid., 569, 570.

112 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE :
Fori than Idolum Speeds, though best to worship
neither." 1
" If I have not a friend, God send me an enemy,
that I may hear of my faults. To be admonished of
an enemy is next to having a friend.
" There is nothing more unnatural to religion than
contentions about it."^
" Nothing Is more specific to man than capacity of
religion, and sense of God." ^
" Among politicians the esteem of religion is profit
able : the principles of it are troublesome."*
" Platonists' principle of creation, 'Epws and Eewa,
the activity of divine love ; the nonentity of all
creatures. The grossest errors are but abuses of
some noble truths." ^
" We are all of us at times in a fool's paradise,
more or less, as If all were our own, all as we would
have it."^
" Enthusiastic doctrines — good things strained out
of their wits. Among Christians those that pretend
to be inspired seem to be mad : among the Turks
those that are mad are thought to be inspired."'
" It is Inconsistent with any kind of honesty and
virtue to neglect and despise all kind of religion."^
" It is not good to live in jest, since we must die
in earnest."^
It is unnecessary to add to our quotations, much
Ubid., 607. « Ibid., 1 170.
2 Ibid., 7S5, 756. Hbid., 1182.
Mbid., 791. 8 Ibid., 1185.
•Ibid., 1081. »Ibid., 1185, 1186.
^ Ibid., 1131.

REASON AND RELIGION, 1 13

as we feel that they give only an imperfect idea of
the substance of Whichcote's thought Its temper and
quality are sufficiently apparent. His conceptions
of human nature, of religion, and of the Church,
all stand forth in distinct contrast to the prevailing
modes of thought. A new, broader, and more
philosophical element enters into them. It may be
difficult to sum up in definite detail the distinctive
points of difference ; but there is no difficulty in
catching everywhere the breath of a new spirit, and
in recognising that he looks at the same subjects
in a more comprehensive and intellectual manner.
Traditionalism, whether of dogma or institution,
affects him little. He moves in an ideal and open
atmosphere, unfamiliar to the school - theologian.
Truth is not embodied to him in this or that form
of divine assumption, standing apart from the
ordinary cycle of human knowledge and experi
ence. Religion does not displace, or supersede,
or make an extraneous addition to other truths.
It is apprehended as the summit and ideal of all
others. Man's knowledge does not lie in incom
municable spheres — the secular and the spiritual ;
but in different planes of elevation, the lower tending
towards the higher, and the higher sending down its
light to the lower levels of intellectual aspiration.
" I cannot," he says, " distinguish truth in itself ;
but in way of descent to us ; truth either of first
inscription (in reason) or of after-revelation from
God." 1 " God hath set up two lights to enlighten
us in our way : the light of reason, which is the
1 Sermons, iii. 20.
VOL. II. ' H

114 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE ;
light of his creation; and the light of Scripture,
which is after-revelation from him. Let us make
use of these two lights ; and suffer neither to be
put out." 1
This is a higher range of thought than that
hitherto reached by any Protestant theologian in
England, with the exception of Hooker, who, as we
have already said, struck into the same vein in a
special direction. He saw distinctly in connection
with his subject of Ecclesiastical Polity how the
lines of spiritual truth in reason and revelation con
verge ; but he did not see with equal clearness, or
at least he did not interpret with equally consistent
comprehension, their intermingling and co-ordination
in all directions, so as to irradiate the whole theo
logical sphere with the light of rational Inquiry.
Hales and Chillingworth boldly adventured in the
same path, but under limitations arising out of the
nature of their subjects and the special religious
controversies of their time. The necessities of con
troversy still embarrass Whichcote ; but it takes
with him, from the first, a wider sweep and elevation.
A higher philosophic manner marks even his cor
respondence with Tuckney, which is directly polemi
cal In form. And in his sermons there is scarcely a
trace of the theological polemic. He is by turns
the religious philosopher, the moralist, the evan
gelical expositor, scarcely ever the dogmatist or
controversialist. In passing to these sermons from
either the High Church or the Puritan literature of
the time, we feel ourselves surrounded with " an
' Aphorisms, cent. ii. 109.

REASON AND RELIGION. 1 15
ampler ether — a diviner air." Points of doctrine
and duty are discussed in their broadest rational
relations, and not merely as parts or data of an
inherited system. Human nature is conceived and
depicted not as set forth in the creeds, but in the
totality of its spiritual powers and functions as a
rational constitution in a rational universe. Religion
is not a mere section of knowledge supernaturally
communicated, nor a side of life supernaturally
imparted, but a culture and discipline of the whole
man — an education and consecration of all his higher
activities. And so religion is not only not in
dependent of morality, but its necessary complement
— not only not an enemy of philosophy, but its
highest fulfilment. Christianity binds the broken
lines of human aspiration into a well-orbed power,
which embraces and completes them all. The sim
plicity and grandeur of religious truth, and Its in
dependence of the special dogmas which divide
Christians, had been well exhibited in the ' Liberty
of Prophesying ; ' but Taylor was himself — as some
of his subsequent writings show — only partially
emancipated from the crudities and formalities of
scholastic tradition. He could not maintain, and
indeed he probably never realised — in relation to
thought and life as a whole^ — the same rational and
enlightened elevation which necessity compelled
him to occupy on the subject of the Church. It
remained to Whichcote as a preacher to take up the
idea of religion in its full breadth, — moral and
philosophical, — and, like the Alexandrine teachers
of old, and the Platonic temper always, to bring it

1X6 BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE.
into affinity with all the varied energies of humanity.
True thought and true power everywhere ; all pure
and high ideas, all pure and healthy activities, all
genuine expressions of reason and aspirations of
nature are so far religion. Christianity is distinct
and supreme — not in rejecting and casting aside,
but in interpreting and completing what is other
wise good and true in man. Morality, even in
its most obscure forms, is its shadow; Philosophy
its summit. Reason is not only not opposed to
faith, but there can be no faith without reason ; nor
yet any higher reason without faith. In other
words, the spiritual life of our race Is a unity ; all
our aspirations are alike divine, whether they are
kindled within us by the " candle of the Lord " set
up in our hearts, or by the light of the Divine Word
communicated to us from without.
To initiate once more such a phase of thought as
this — to penetrate to the deeper relations and har
monies of spiritual truth, and so to the unity of all
the moral forces which govern civilisation — was a
great gain for the seventeenth century. It was
something more than merely to expand and moralise
the conception of the Church. It was to expand,
elevate, and universalise the whole conception of
religion, and of the moral rights of human nature ;
and so to prepare the way for the triumph of those
principles of civil and religious liberty which we
derive — although not directly — from the conflicts of
the century.

117

IIL
JOHN SMITH— FOUNDATIONS OF A CHRISTIAN
PHILOSOPHY.
In the life and opinions of Whichcote the new move
ment of thought in Cambridge takes its rise. It is
seen springing partly out of a fresh activity of the
philosophical spirit wearied with the aridities of the
exhausted scholasticism, and quickened by the revived
study of Plato, and partly out of a reaction against the
religious bigotries of the time, which in their vio
lence and intolerance had disgusted the higher minds
at the universities. The religious aspect of the
movement is, in the first instance, more conspicu
ous than Its philosophical character and affiliation.
Whichcote's relations to the religious parties of his
time come Into more direct view than his relation to
the speculative influences, which, beyond doubt, he
also greatly modified. In other words, he is more
prominently the rational religious thinker than the
Platonic philosopher.
The explanation of this is easy. Religion masked
every other interest in the seventeenth century.
Both politics and philosophy, although they had
broken the ecclesiastical yoke, and were seeking
emancipation, had not yet accomplished it. In

Il8 JOHN SMITH: FOUNDATIONS OF
order to get a hearing for themselves, they had
studiously to court theology, and assume a religious
side ; or at least to pay deference — if it were only, as
with Bacon, the deference of respectful distance — to
what was still held to be the queen of the sciences.
The philosophical attitude of Bacon is the least
involved with religion. Even Descartes is more
theological, and professes to hold his theories only
with the approval of the Church. ^ But the most
striking illustration of the dominance of the religious
spirit Is Hobbes himself Essentially hostile as his
writings are to the foundations of religious belief,
they are everywhere pervaded with a religious tone
and colouring. The ' Leviathan ' in many of its
chapters Is a perfect mosaic of Scriptural quotations.
The very title itself, and the titles of its several
books, are Biblical. It cheats the ear with religious
phrases, and the solemnity of a religious purpose,
which it breaks to the intelligence with Its merciless
logic. The difference in this respect between Bacon
and Hobbes is curious and interesting. Bacon, in
acknowledging the supremacy of theology, excludes
It from the circle of rational knowledge and inquiry.
He treats it with an assumed humility — a grand air
of respect, which has a touch of condescending mock
ery in It. He bows it out of the court of th e sciences as
sacredly transcending all nature and reason. Hobbes,
on the other hand, mixes his politics, philosophy, and
religion inextricably together. We cannot get at
the one without the other, or separate them without
destroying his whole intellectual system. In this
1 Dedication of his 'Meditations' to the Sorbonne, &c.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. II9
respect Hobbes was the truer child of his age.
How men were to live together at all ? — how society
was to be formed and the state constituted ? — were
in the seventeenth century still identical with the
questions how men were to live together as religious
beings ? what dogmas they were to profess ? what
mode of worship they were to observe ? And so
religion naturally took the front In every new move
ment of thought.
It is to be remembered that Whichcote him
self, with his friends and followers, were all clergy
men of the Church of England. They were fel
lows or heads of colleges ; they were preachers
in the university. All their teaching, accordingly,
took a religious turn. They were philosophers in
the interests of Christianity. It was their instincts
of rational Christian defence at once against the
bigotries and the atheisms — as they believed them
to be — of their time, which drove them in search of
a deeper, more comprehensive, and more inspiriting
philosophy. There are sufficient traces of such a philosophy
in Whichcote, although they lie behind other
phenomena more prominently marked. His general
view of religion as " a seed of a deiform nature " —
implanting and strengthening within us all lofty and
pure aspirations, and rationally elevating and sweet
ening the whole nature in communion with God — is
essentially Platonic. So also is the whole turn of
his thought in its diffusive ideality, his love of the
abstract rather than the concrete, and even his
nicety of verbal and argumentative definition. We

120 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
are told that " he set young students much on read
ing the ancient philosophers, chiefly Plato, and
Tully, and Plotinus." ^ Tuckney accuses him, after
he came to be a lecturer at Emmanuel, of laying
aside in a great measure all other studies, and
betaking himself to " philosophy and metaphysics."
The chief objection to his preaching was its moral
and philosophical character in contrast to that
doctrinal style which Puritans have curiously
always considered to be more identical with the
simplicity of Scriptural truth. He, in his turn, con
fesses his obligations to " philosophers," and the
good which he had got from them in the " use of
all those principles that derive from God and speak
Him in the world." He defends with some warmth
and jealousy his favourite studies ; but at the same
time it never occurs to him to put them in front of,
or in place of, religion. The chief point in his
vindication is the consistency which he has found
between them and the main points of Christianity.
" I have sometimes publicly declared," he says,
"what points of religion I have found excellently
held forth by them ; and I never found them ene
mies to the faith of the Gospel." The religious
interest is first with him, and the philosophical only
second. The speculative character of the movement becomes
more prominent with its advance. The younger minds
that Whichcote led and influenced are less affected
by the accidental relations of religious party, and the
conflicts of religious dogma amidst which he himself
^ Burnet's History of his own Time, i. 340.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 121

moved, and which gave the primary bias to his
teaching. They take up the same questions in their
broader spiritual aspects — their more generalised
and philosophical shape. John Smith is a Platonist,
not only, like his master, because he has found in
the study of the Platonic writings certain principles
coincident with his own enlarged Christian thought
fulness, by the light of which he is able to rebuke
the narrowness or expose the falsehood of those
whom he designates "lazy and loose Christians;"
but because from the beginning he has more or less
taken up his line of thought from Plato, or the
writings of the Neo- Platonic school. Moreover, the
questions which occupy him are more directly philo
sophical. They touch those general principles or re
lations of thought out of which all philosophy comes,
whether it takes a religious or irreligious form. The
essence of divine knowledge — in what it consists —
the ultimate springs of our rational and spiritual life,
out of which arise respectively Superstition, Atheism,
Theism, — the nature of Revelation, and the true
idea of Righteousness ; — such are the questions to
which his Discourses are devoted. Religious in the
highest sense, they yet involve in their mere state
ment the primary data of all philosophy ; and Smith,
we shall find, handles them as a preacher Indeed —
for the Discourses were intended for oral delivery
— yet with a freedom, elevation, and amplitude of
grasp, which stamps him pre-eminently as a Chris
tian philosopher.
Of Smith's life unhappily we know little or no
thing. In some respects the most remarkable of all

122 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
the Cambridge school — the richest and most beauti
ful mind, and certainly by far the best writer of them
all ^ — he died at the early age of thirty-four. There
was nothing to tell of a career so brief, and which
never seems to have passed beyond the precincts of
the university. He is a thinker without a bio
graphy. Two friends — ^John Worthlngton, who
edited his ' Discourses,' and Simon Patrick, who
preached his funeral sermon in the chapel of Queen's
College, where he himself had discoursed with such
marvellous eloquence — have given us some sketch
of his character, but left much to be desired even in
this respect. There is elevation and beauty, but also
a good deal of indistinctness, in the picture which
they draw. The lines are grand but wavering, and
lose themselves, after the manner of the time, in vague
ness and generality; yet here and there there are
touches of affectionate felicity, which, in the case of
Patrick In particular, break Into downright bursts of
tearful tenderness over the loss of so much genius
and goodness. Quando ullum invenient parem, is
the key-note of all he says, and the pressure of the
painful thought interrupts the flow of his panegyric
with the most honest exclamations of grief " Who
can think of his gracious lips, his profitable and
delightful converse, his cordial love, without a
sigh and a tear, without saying, ' Ah ! my father ;
ah ! his glory ? '" A recent writer ^ has said that in
all the literature of the period with which he is
^ With the exception of Culver- entitled ' Cambridge Character-
well, afterwards mentioned. istics in the Seventeenth Century,'
2 Mr Mullinger, of St John's has touched, but only very slight-
College, who, in a small volume ly, upon our subject.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 123

acquainted, he has " not met with a more pathetic
production than this funeral sermon. The artistic
skill is not great, but there is an expression of gen
uine feeling throughout, with an occasional outbreak
of honest grief which produces an effect above all
art." This is quite true, and the fact Is equally cred
itable to Patrick and the friend whom he and the
university so deeply mourned.
John Smith was a native of Northamptonshire,
where his father seems to have been a small farmer.
He was born at Achurch, near Oundle, in that
county, in the year 16 18. Before his birth, Patrick
says, " his parents had been long childless, and were
grown aged." He was sent to Cambridge in 1636,
and entered, as Whichcote had before him, at Em
manuel College. We would infer from this that his
father, like many of his class, especially In the mid
land districts of England, had Puritan leanings, and
sent him to the well-known Puritan Foundation to
be trained In the true gospel of Protestantism. At
this time Whichcote was a Fellow and Tutor in the
College ; and he is supposed also to have commenced
his influence as a preacher. He was nine years
older than Smith ; and It is expressly stated by
Worthlngton that he became tutor to the young and
probably somewhat friendless undergraduate from
Northamptonshire. This is one of the few facts
embodied in Worthington's rhetorical " Address to
the Reader," prefixed to the original edition of the
' Discourses.' It is also implied in his statement,
that the tutor's comparative wealth was freely given
to assist his pupil. His words are : " I knew him

124 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
(the author of the ' Discourses ') for many years, not
only when he was Fellow of Queen's College, but
when a student In Emmanuel College, where his
early piety, and the remembering his Creator in
those days pf his youth, as also his excellent im
provements In the choicest parts of learning, en
deared him to many, particularly to his careful tutor,
the Fellow of Emmanuel College, afterwards Pro
vost of King's College, Dr Whichcote ; to whom,
for his directions and encouragements of him In his
studies, his seasonable provision for his support
and maintenance when he was a young scholar,
as also upon other obliging considerations, our
author did ever express a great and singular re
gard." 1
Smith took his Bachelor's degree in 1640, and his
Master's four years later ; and in the same year In
which he became Master, or in 1644, he was chosen
a Fellow of Queen's College. The explanation
given of his not having received a Fellowship in his
own college is, that by the statutes no more than
one Fellow could be admitted from any one county,
and that the Fellowship open to a Northampton
shire graduate was filled up at the time Smith be
came eligible. It was at this time, our readers will
remember, that Whichcote returned to Cambridge,
after a brief absence, and was appointed Provost of
King's College. We have no trace of further per
sonal relations betwixt the former tutor and his pupil ;
but they, no doubt, renewed their old intercourse,
and it Is easy to imagine the enthusiasm with which
^ Address to the Reader.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 125
a mind like Smith's would regard Whichcote's grow
ing influence over the youth of the university.
Smith's success, again, could scarcely have been less
acceptable to his former teacher ; while the dis
courses which he delivered In the chapel of Queen's
must have been among the most powerful stimulants
of the higher and more expansive thoughtfulness
which was rapidly springing up to the alarm of
Tuckney and his friends. They " contributed," ac- '
cording to Tillotson's biographer,^ " to raise new
thoughts and a sublime style in the members of the
university." Smith is said to have discharged his
duties as tutor with great faithfulness, and to have
had great aptitude and ease of expression in the
communication of knowledge. Particular mention
is made of his distinction as a mathematical lecturer
in the public schools. His health seems to have been
weak from the first, and his illness was borne with
singular sweetness and patience. He died on the
7th of Aup-ust 1652, a few months after Whichcote
closed his correspondence with Tuckney, and the
new movement may be said to have attained definite
recognition and significance.
Worthington's description of his friend throws but
little light upon his character. He tells us that he
might " fill much paper " in recounting particularly
" his many excellences ; yet, after all, he gives us but
a very vague and indefinite impression In such sen
tences as the following : " I might truly say that
he was both a righteous and truly honest man, and
also a good man. He was a follower and imitator
1 Birch's Life of Archbishop Tillotson, p. 6, 7.

126 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
of God in purity and holiness, in benignity, good
ness, and love ; a love enlarged as God's love Is,
whose goodness overflows and spreads itself to all,
and His tender mercies are over all His works.
He was a ' lover of our Lord Jesus Christ in sin
cerity,' a lover of His spirit and of His life, a lover
of His excellent laws and rules of holy life, a serious
practlser of His Sermon on the Mount, the best
sermon that ever was preached, and yet none more
generally neglected by those that call themselves
Christians. . . . To be short, he was a Chris
tian, more than a little, even wholly and altogether
such :^ a Christian inwardly and in good earnest:^
religious he was, but without any vainglorlousness
and ostentation ; not so much a talking or a dis
puting, as a living, a doing, and an obeying Chris
tian ; one inwardly acquainted with the simplicity
and power of godliness, but no admirer of the Phari
saic forms and sanctimonious shows, though never
so goodly and specious."
Besides being thus " a truly Godlike man," he was
possessed of " those other perfections and accom
plishments of the mind, which rendered him a
very rational and learned man : and, withal, in the
midst of all these great accomplishments, as eminent
and exemplary In unaffected humility and true low
liness of mind. To conclude," he says, " he was a
plain -hearted friend and Christian one In whose
spirit and mouth there was no guile ; a profitable
companion ; nothing of vanity and triflingness In
him, as there was nothing of sourness and stoi-
' Not e'v oKiya, but cv ttoXXw. ' 'Ev xpvirTa.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 127
cism. I can very well remember, when I have had
private converse with him, how pertinent and
freely he would speak to any matter proposed ; how
weighty, substantial, and clearly expressive of his
sense his private discourses would be, and both for
matter and language muchwhat of the same import
ance and value with such exercises as he studied for,
and performed In public."
Such are the most characteristic passages of
Worthington's description in his "Address to the
Reader." They are hearty but featureless, and
fail to bring before us any familiar image of his
friend. He might have added more, he says, but
in the view of " the fair and lively character "
drawn by Patrick, he thinks this unnecessary. " If
some part of that character," he adds, " should
seem to have in it anything of hyperbolism and
strangeness, it must seem so to such only who either
were unacquainted with him and strangers to his
worth, or else find it a hard thing not to be envious,
and a difficulty to be humble. But those that had a
more inward converse with him knew him to be one
of those ' of whom the world was not worthy,' one of
the ' excellent ones in the earth ; ' a person truly ex
emplary in the temper and constitution of his spirit,
and in the well-ordered course of his life ; a life, as
I remember Seneca doth express it somewhere In his
epistles, ' all of one colour, everywhere like itself ; ' ^
and eminent in those things that are worthy of praise
and imitation."
The character drawn by Patrick, amid all its ela-
1 Unius quasi coloris sine actionum dissensione.

128 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
borate eulogy, gives a more lively picture ; yet, even
in it, there are touches of mere declamation, which
leave us. very unsatisfied. The tone throughout is
that of the preacher moved to an unwonted height of
emotion, and giving too ready a flow to exaggerations
of language, as he recalls the virtues of his friend.
"Let us first look upon him," he says, " in his eminency,
dignity, and worth. A very glorious star he was,
and shone brighter in our eyes than any that he ever
looked upon when he took his view of the heavenly
bodies ; and now he shines as the brightness of the
firmament, and as the stars for ever and ever, being
wise, and having turned many, I believe, unto right
eousness. . . . He had such a huge, wide
capacity of soul, such a sharp and piercing under
standing, such a deep - reaching mind, that he set
himself about nothing but he soon grasped it, and
made himself a full possessor of it. . . . He was
a most laborious searcher after wisdom. ' A living
library,' better than that which he hath given to our
college, and 'a walking study,' ^ that carried his
learning about with him. I never got so much good
among all my books by a whole day's plodding in a
study, as by an hour's discourse I have got with him.
For he was not a library locked up, nor a book
clasped, but stood open for any to converse withal
that had a mind to learn. Yea, he was a fountain
running over, labouring to do good to those who,
perhaps, had no mind to receive it. None more free
and communicative than he was to such as desired to
1 B«(3Xtofli7(ci7 Ttf cijii/a/xoy, (cm jrept- of Longinus. Patrick quotes, as
TTuTovK U.0VUUOV, as Euuapius says usual, the original in his text.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 129
discourse with him, nor would he grudge to be taken
off from his studies upon such an occasion. It may
be truly said of him, that a man might always come
better from him ; and his mouth could drop sentences
as easily as an ordinary man's could speak sense.
And he was no less happy in expressing his mind
than in conceiving. He had such a copia verborum,
a plenty of words, and those so full, pregnant, and
significant, joined with such an active fancy, as is
very rarely to be found in the company of such a
deep understanding and judgment as dwelt in him."^
Whichcote's pupil, it is clear, had something of his
own marvellous gifts as a teacher. He loved to
discourse. His mind craved sympathy, and to un
burden itself of its teeming thoughts. This was, no
doubt, the secret of the enthusiasm with which his
friends regarded him, and of the extraordinary in
terest which his death excited. They felt that not
only a great student and thinker, but a great teacher
was gone — one whose qualities pre-eminently fitted
him to adorn the university, and to influence its
higher studies. " His learning," as Patrick phrases
It, " was so concocted, that it lay not as an idle notion
in his head, but made him fit for any employment.
He was very full and clear in all his resolutions at
any debates, a most wise councillor in any difficulties
and straits, dexterous in untying any knot, of great
judgment In satisfying any scruple or doubt, even In
matters of religion. He was one that soon saw into
the depth of any business that was before him, and
1 Funeral Sermon preached by Patrick, printed along with ' Select
Discourses.' VOL. II. I

130 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
looked it quite through,- — that would presently turn it
over and over in his mind, and see It on all sides." ^
— Evidently a well - balanced, noble, intellectual
nature, fitted to rule in the halls of learning, and
to diffuse a quickening and powerful influence.
Nor were Smith's moral qualities less remarkable.
" He had incorporated," continues his eulogist, "'or
insouled' all principles oi justice and righteousness,
and made them one with himself So that I may
say of him in Antoninus's phrase, he was ' dipped
into justice as it were over head and ears;'^
he had not a slight superficial tincture, but was
dyed and coloured quite through with it; so that
wheresoever he had a soul, — there was justice and
righteousness. They who knew him, very well
know the truth of all this. And I am persuaded
he did as heartily and cordially, as eagerly and
earnestly do what appeared to be just and right,
without any self-respect or particular reflections, as
any man living. Methinks I see how earnest he
would be in a good matter which appeared to be
reasonable and just, as though justice herself had
been in him, looking out at his eyes, and speaking
at his mouth. It was a virtue Indeed that he had a
great affection unto, and which he was very jealous
to maintain ; in whose quarrel he was in danger to
be angry, and sometimes to break forth Into a short
passion."^ Here we have a genuine bit of nature. Smith was
¦^ Ibid. 3 Funeral Sermon preached by
" SiKatoavpTj Pe^cpfihos ds ^a- Patrick, printed along with ' Se-
6ot, lect Discourses.'

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 131

evidently a high-souled, eager, and somewhat im
petuous man, easily warmed into emotion for what
he felt to be a just cause, and ready to give vent to
his feelings with something of passionate earnestness.
He had the quick temperament which kindles at
wrong-doing or folly of any kind, and which goes
straight at its object without management or guile.
The spirit which reveals Itself by the eyes and mouth
may not be a great spirit, and certainly may not
always be right, but at least It is never crafty or
deceitful. And in his case the diffusive expressive
ness of the face was plainly the symbol of a large,
liberal, and sensitively truthful soul.
If is this generous aspect of his friend's character
that melts Patrick, as he proceeds In his description,
and makes him exclaim: "And now what word shall
I use ? What shall I say of his love ? None that
knew him well but might see in him love bubbling ^
and springing up in his soul, and flowing out to all ;
and that love unfeigned, without guile, hypocrisy, or
dissimulation. I cannot tell you how his soul uni-
versalised, how tenderly he embraced all God's
creatures in his arms, more especially men, and
principally those in whom he beheld the image of his
heavenly Father. He would even have emptied his
soul into theirs. Let any that were thoroughly
acquainted with him say if I He. And truly my
happiness is that I have such a subject to exercise
my young and weak oratory upon, as will admit of
little hyperbole. Was patience was no less admirable
1 "Tn/yafovo-ai/ ayaTn/r, as Nazianzen I think speaks," Patrick adds
in the text.

132 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
than his love, under a lingering and tedious disease,
wherein he never murmured or complained, but
rested quietly satisfied in the infinite unbounded
goodness and tenderness of his Father, and the
commiserations of Jesus Christ. . . . He told
me in his sickness that he hoped he had learned that
for which God sent it, and that he thought God kept
him so long in such a case, under such burdens and
pressures, that ' patience might have its perfect work
in him.' And really in his sickness he showed what
Christianity and true religion is able to do ; what
might, power, and virtue there is In it to bear up a
soul under the greatest loads."
His " humility and faith, his ingenuity, courtesy,
gentleness and sweetness," are all commended in
similar language. He was absorbed by religious
earnestness, and resolved (so he said), " s^If it had
pleased the Lord of life to prolong his days very
much, to lay aside other studies and to travel In the
salvation of men's souls;' but at the same time he
was free from all ' devouring zeal.' ... He
called for no fire to descend from heaven upon men
but the fire of divine love, that might burn up all
their hatreds, roughness, and cruelty to each other.
But as for benignity of mind and Christian kindness,
everybody that knew him will remember that he
ever had their names in his mouth, and I assure
them they were no less in his heart and life; as
knowing that without these truth itself is in a faction,
and Christ is drawn into a party. And this gracious-
ness of spirit was the more remarkable in him, be
cause he was of a temper naturally hot and choleric,

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 133
as the greatest minds most commonly are. He was
wiser than to let any anger rest In his bosom ; much
less did he suffer it to burn and boil till it was turned
into gall and bitterness. . . . If he was at any
time moved unto anger, it was but a sudden flushing
in the face, and It did as soon vanish as arise." ^
Having thus described all his "worth and emi
nency," and alluded to the last days of his friend's
life, which passed away in " a kind of sleep," Patrick's
feelings seem to give way altogether, as he breaks
forth : " Have we not reason to be so sad, as you
see our faces tell you that we are ? But, alas ! half
of that is not told you which your eyes might have
seen, had you been acquainted with him. I want
thoughts and words to make a lively portraiture of
him : my young experience hath not yet seen to the
height or the depth of these things which I have
here given you a rude draught of ; and so my con
ceits and expressions must needs fall far below that
excellent degree of beauty wherein they dwelt in
him. . . . There is not one but will cry out
with Elisha, ' O the chariot of this place, and the
horseman thereof . . . O thou who wast both my
safeguard and my ornament ! who wast a society by
thyself, a college In brief, what a loss have we sus
tained by thy departure ? ... To which of us
was not he dear ? Who is there that was not en
gaged to him ? Who can think himself as wise as
he was when we had him ? " *
The picture of mind and character raised by these
grandiloquent touches is of so lofty a kind that we
^ Patrick's Funeral Sermon. ,^ Ibid.

134 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
might be disposed to attribute it in some degree to
that enthusiasm of personal friendship which often
binds young university men together, and makes
them exalt above criticism the parts and influences
of some favourite tutor or companion-student. This
is so common that we are apt to smile at youthful
eulogy, knowing well that the only test of what a
man is really worth, and what he is capable of doing
for any branch of knowledge. Is not the intense and
frequently narrow judgment of a university, but the
broad and well-sifted judgment of the intellectual
world. Many a university marvel has come to little
and done little for the world's good ; whilst some
who excited no special interest among their fellow-
students have afterwards taken the lead, and left
their stamp upon their generation in many Impresses
of noble and advancing thought. Accordingly, we
turn to Smith's ' Discourses ' with some anxiety.
They are all that survive to represent his genius.
They first appeared in 1660, under the editorship of
Worthlngton ; and although it was then stated by
him that there were " other pieces of the author's "
which would " make another considerable volume,"
no additional remains have ever been published.
It is the highest testimony to the genius of the
author that the estimate of his friends is found fully
sustained by these discourses. Written so long ago,
and marked, like all the writings of the time, with
many unaccustomed forms of language, they are yet
instinct with a free, bright, and copious life of thought,
which runs as freshly, or neariy as freshly, as it did
to his contemporaries. The expression of Worthing-

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 135

ton, that his mind was " a bountiful and ever-bub
bling fountain," Is exactly the expression suggested
by their full, rich, and plentiful thoughtfulness. It
is not mere eloquence and ability — the easy and
large grasp of Intellect, as in Chillingworth, or Bar
row, or Cudworth — which distinguish them ; but an
ineffable light of spiritual genius shines In them all.
They are " clothed," as the Chaldee oracle,^ quoted
by Patrick, says, " with a great deal of mind," and
deeply " impregnated with divine notions." Power
ful and massive in argument, they are everywhere
informed by a divine insight which transcends
argument. Calmly and closely reasoned, they are
at the same time inspired. The breath of a higher,
diviner reason animates them all. The force of
a logic -nearly as direct and penetrating as that of
Chillingworth directs an imagination as opulent as
Jeremy Taylor's. The result is a delightful admix
ture of Christian philosophy and poetry. Profound
glimpses of spiritual truth everywhere open to the
reader as he advances, charmed with the rich un-
foldings of an exuberant intelligence, rejoicing In the
amplitude of its powers and the sweep and glory of
its flight. The poetic richness of the style seldom
or never, as with Taylor, overbalances the weight of
the thought. It is ornate and picturesque, without
being florid or tawdry. It is living, even through
all the trappings and encumbrances of Neo-Platoni-
cal or other allusion. The rhetorical and rational,
the imaginative and spiritual, are fused and blended
into a common Intellectual action which enlightens
^  TToKvv e(r(rdpievat vovv.

136 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
while it penetrates, and touches with beauty and
colour the eminences of truth which it reveals.
The maindraw back of the Discourses to the mo
dern reader is the incessant recurrence of quotations.
The free course of the author's thought Is constantly
interrupted by confirmatory statements and Illustra
tions from the treasures of ancient opinion ; and
sometimes. Indeed, as in the third discourse on
Atheism, his line of exposition runs almost entirely
along an ancient track. The effect is now and then
to give an additional richness and interest to the
exposition, but more frequently to mar its flow and
originality. The narive texture of the author's com
position is here and there so overlaid and patched,
that it is barely distinguishable. It Is like a rich
garment covered with richer gems, which, while
they give a new wealth to the original, yet hide Its
natural hue and folds. To the scholar and antiqua
rian student there is a special charm in this literary
mosaic. They like the page studded with Greek and
Latin quotations, and the reverent caution which
seeks to fortify its steps as it advances by sen
tences from the ancient masters,^ — which carries the
spolia opima of past thought with It as It ventures
into new regions of inquiry. But our more direct
habits of mind have made us impatient of such
traditional ornaments of literature. The modern
reader wishes to know what a man thinks himself,
or has got to say for himself, rather than what Plato,
or Plutarch, or Plotinus, or Tully, or Lucretius, may
have said ages ago. There is no indisposition to
listen to these ancient sages. On the contrary.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 137
it may be said, that there never was a time when
any critical exposition of them was likely to be re
ceived with more interest or appreciation. But it
is no longer accepted as a part of literary art to be
able to weave their sayings into the texture of a
theological or philosophical treatise ; and still less is
it supposed that any modern writer necessarily adds
to the weight of his own opinions, by fixing them
with even the most ingenious and pregnant quota
tions from ancient authorities.
The Cambridge Platonists carried the system of
quotation to great excess. It was not merely a
feature of their style, but a characteristic, so to speak,
of their mode of thought. They leant too fondly
on the past, and made too much of ancient wisdom.
They were never able to throw off the weight of
Neo-Platonic tradition, or to rise superior to what
appeared to them a sacred lore. The shadow of
Plotinus haunts their highest conceptions, and they
escape too seldom into the clear daylight, the
open heaven, of speculation. Smith is, perhaps,
less an offender in this respect than Cudworth and
More. Whichcote, in his sermons, offends least
of all. He moves with a comparatively free and
unembarrassed step. He had been more in the
world than the others, and, as he himself tells us,
owed less to reading than to his own thought and
" invention." All the younger men of the school
were more exclusively scholars and students. They
gathered their thought more entirely from books,
and, like all men who do so, they bear the trace
of the library dust. They like to show the rare

138 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
treasure dug from the ancient quarries, in which
they have worked with so much love and interest.
The Discourses are ten in all. The first six are
closely connected, and form, in fact, successive parts
of a scheme of thought designed by the author in
vindication of the "main heads and principles of
religion." Starting with the important question of
" the true way or method of obtaining divine know
ledge," he passes, after the polemical' manner of the
time, to discuss first the counterfeits or oppositions
to divine knowledge in the forms of Superstition
and of Atheism. He then enumerates the main
principles or articles of religious truth to be — (i.)
The Immortality of the Soul ; (2.) The Existence
and Nature of God ; and (3.) The Communication of
God to Mankind through Christ. He considers the
first two subjects somewhat elaborately in successive
discourses ; but he did not live to enter upon the
special treatment of the third. The discourse " Of
Prophecy," which is the last of the connected series,
was meant merely to be an introduction to this part
of his subject ; but so many inquiries " offered them
selves to his thovights" in discoursing upon Pro
phecy, that he had only finished this topic when his
term of office as " Dean and Catechist " in the Col
lege expired. He died in the following summer;
and thus, says Worthlngton, "he who designed to
speak of God's communication of Himself to mankind
through Christ, was taken up by God into a more
inward and immediate participation of Himself in
blessedness. Had he lived, and had health to have
finished the remaining part of his designed method,

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 139
the reader may easily conceive what a valuable piece
that discourse would have been."
Yet, he adds, that the reader " may not altogether
want the author's labours upon such an argument, I
thought good, in the next place, to adjoin a dis
course of the like Importance and nature delivered
heretofore by the author in some chapel exercises."
In point of fact there are four discourses appended
to that upon Prophecy. The volume, therefore,
consists of two parts — the first part representing in
some desrree a connected treatise, and the second
composed of such additional discourses as seemed to
Worthlngton so far fitted to carry out the author's
design, and to illustrate the special principles which
he had intended to unfold In the sequel.
In expounding our author's religious philosophy,
we shall follow his own ourilne of thought. The
same ideas recur frequently, and the necessities of
his argument and strict sequence of its various parts
are not very carefully preserved.^ The following
may be said to be the particulars to which our atten
tion is invited in succession : I. Method of attain
ing divine knowledge. II. Opposltes of the divine
— Supersritlon and Atheism. III. Main principles
1 The following are the special V. Ofthe Existence and Nature
titles of the several Discourses,- in of God.
the order in which they stand :— VI. Of Prophecy.
VII. Of Legal and Evangelical
I. Of the true Way or Method Righteousness.
of attaining to Divine Know- VIII. Of the Shortness of Pha-
ledge. risaical Righteousness.
II. Of Atheism. IX. Of the Excellency and
III. Of Superstition. Nobleness of True Religion.
IV. Of the Immortalitv of the X. Of a Christian's Conflicts
ggyj_ with, and Conquests over, Satan.

140 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
of the divine — Immortality, God, Revelation. IV.,
and finally. The true character of the divine revealed
in Christ. On all these points the discourses throw
some true, and for the time, original, light. None
of them Is more significant or deserves more atten
tion than the first, which unfolds in a manner the
whole line of Smith's thought.
I. This discourse, " Of the true Way or Method
of attaining to Divine Knowledge," is, in some
respects, the finest of the series. It gives, as we
have said, nearly the key-note of all his system
of thought — as indeed to know the method of any
thinker is more or less to know the substance of his
thought, or the conclusions which he will reach. Are
we to begin from without or from within ? Are we
to start with the senses or the soul, and advance
along the line of sensation or the line of reason ?
The alternative is as old as philosophy itself Ac
cording as it takes the one path or the other — the
subjective or the objective method — it falls Into two
great sections, and sets up rival theories. [jTo say
that Smith was a Platonist, is enough to settle the
general character of his method. All knowledge to
him, especially all higher divine knowledge, springs
from the soul within. It is the reflection of our
own souls- — the Interpretation of our own spiritual
life. This will be found to be the pervading thought
of the discourses — the central principle to which
they all lead back. In Its general philosophical
aspect this is known as the old doctrine of innate
notions, which Smith accepted without hesitation.
This may be inferred from many of his expressions.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 141

But it is not in its general meaning so much as In
its special theological application that he makes use
of the principle. The kind of knowledge which he
has everywhere in view is divine knowledge; the
knowledge of God, and of a sphere of truth beyond
that of sensible experience. The idea that there
may be no such knowledge at all ; that the sphere of
sensible experience exhausts the circle of knowledge
— an Idea now so familiar — is not polemically pre
sent to his mind. There is no trace of Hobbes in
any of the discourses. The ' Leviathan ' was in fact!
only published the year before Smith's death ; and
if he knew It at all, he makes no allusion to it.
There is none of that consciousness of a living pre
sence of atheistic speculation, or an antagonistic
system of corporealism, which meets us everywhere
in the pages of Cudworth and More. The atheism
which he describes Is the atheism of Epicurus and
LucretjuLS, without any hint of its revival In his own
day. Accordingly Smith does not think It necessary
to vindicate the general philosophic basis on which he
stands. He takes that more or less for granted, and
sets out confidently on the spiritual foundation from
which all his thought rises.
The beginning of divine truth is a vital sense
or faculty within us which lays hold of its appro
priate objects, f" Every art and science," he says,
" must start from certain ' praecognlta ' ^ and theo
logy involves in its very nature the supposition of
a power within us answering to, and apprehensive
of, a Power above us. This power or faculty must
^ Or TrpoKrjyjfeis.

142 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
be vital — of the nature of a higher sense. For
' divinity,' " he explains, " is something rather to be
understood by a spiritual sensation than by any verbal
description, as all things of sense and life are best
known by sentient and vital faculties ; as the Greek
philosopher hath well observed, everything is best
known by that which bears a just resemblance and
analogy with It ; ^ and therefore the Scripture Is wont
to set forth a good life as the prolepsis and funda
mental principle of divine science ; ' wisdom hath
builded her house, and hewn out her seven pillars,'
but ' the fear of the Lord Is the beginning of wis
dom,' the foundation of the whole fabric. . . .
They are not always the best skilled In divinity that
are the most studied In those pandects into which It Is
sometimes digested, or that have erected the greatest
monopolies of art and science. He that is most
practical in divine things hath the purest and sh
eerest knowledge of them, and not he that Is most
dogmatical. Divinity, indeed, is a true efflux from
the eternal light, which, like the sunbeams, does not
only enlighten, but heat and enliven, and therefore
our Saviour hath In His beatitudes connected purity
of heart with the beatifical vision : and as the eye
cannot behold the sun unless It be sun-like,^ and
hath the form and resemblance of the sun drawn In
it ; so neither can the soul of man behold God unless
it be God-like,^ hath God formed in It, and be made
partaker of the divine nature. And the apostle St
Paul, when he would lay open the right way of at-
^ yva<ns iKacrrav di ofx,oi6TT)Tos ^ fjXioeiS^s pr] yivopievos.
yiverat. " deoeiSfis fifj yivofnivrj.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 143
talnlng to divine truth, saith, that ' knowledge puf-
feth up,' but it Is ' love that edifieth.' The know
ledge of divinity that appears In systems and models
is but a poor wan light ; but the powerful energy
of divine knowledge displays itself in purified souls :
here we shall find the true, as the ancient philosophy
speaks, ' the land of truth.' ^ To seek our divinity
merely in books and writings, is to seek the living
among the dead ; we do but in vain seek God many
times in these, where His truth too often Is not so
much enshrined as entombed : no, intra te qucsre
Deum, seek for God within thine own soul ; he is best
discerned, as Plotinus phraseth it, by an intellectual
touch of Him :^ we must ' see with our eyes, and hear
with our ears, and our hands must handle the Word
of life,' that I may express it in St John's words.
The soul itself hath its sense, as well as the body ;^
and therefore David, when he would teach us how to
know what the divine goodness is, calls not for
speculation but sensation, ' Taste and see how
good the Lord is.' That is not the best and truest
knowledge of God which is wrought out by the
labour and sweat of the brain, but that which is
kindled within us by a heavenly warmth In our
hearts. ... It is but a thin, airy knowledge that
is got by mere speculation which is ushered In by syl
logisms and demonstrations ; but that which springs
forth from true goodness is as Orlgen speaks, it
brings such a divine light into the soul, as is more
clear and convincing than any demonstration.*
1 TTcSioi/ oKrjdeLas. ^"Ea-Ti Kal fvx^s aiaBrjais tis.
^ voepd iiracbfj. * 6udrep6v tI Trdcrrjs dn-oSei'^eoiy.

144 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
The reason why, notwithstanding all our acute
reasons and subtle disputes, truth prevails no more
in the world, is, we so often disjoin truth and true
goodness, which in themselves can never be dis
united ; they grow both from the same root, and live
in one another. We may, like those In Plato's deep
pit, with their faces bended downwards, converse
with sounds and shadows ; but not with the life and
substance of truth, while our souls remain defiled
with any vice or lusts." ^
Again : " Such as men themselves are, such will
God Himself seem to be. It is the maxim of most
wicked men, that the deity is some way or other like
themselves : their souls do more than whisper It,
though their lips speak it not ; and though their
tongues be silent, yet their lives cry it upon the
house-tops, and in the public streets. That Idea
which men generally have of God Is nothing else
but the picture of their own complexion : that arche
typal notion of Him which hath the supremacy in
their minds, Is none else but such a one as hath been
shaped out according to some pattern of themselves ;
though they may so clothe and disguise this Idol of
their own, when they carry it about in a pompous
procession to expose it to the view of the world, that
it may seem very beautiful, and Indeed anything else
rather than what it Is. . . . Jejune and barren
speculations may be hovering and fluttering up and
down about divinity, but they cannot settle or fix
themselves upon it ; they unfold the pllcatures of
truth's garment, but they cannot behold the lovely
^ Discourse I., p. 3-6. — RiVingtons' ed. 1821.

A CHRISTIAN PPIILOSOPHY. 145
face of It. There are hidden mysteries in divine
truth, wrapt up one within another, which cannot be
discerned but only by divine Epoptlsts. We must
not think we have then attained to the right know
ledge of truth, when we have broken through the
outward shell of words and phrases that house it up ;
or when by a logical analysis we have found out the
dependencies and coherences of them one with an
other ; or when, like stout champions of It, having
well guarded it with the invincible strength of our
demonstration, we dare stand out in the face of the
world, and challenge the field of all those that would
pretend to be our rivals. We have many brave and
reverend idolaters that worship truth only in the
image of their own wits ; that could never adore It
so much as they may seem to do, were it anything
else but such a form of belief as their own wander
ing speculations had at last met together In, were It
not that they find their own image and superscrip
tion upon it There is a ' knowing of the truth as It
is in Jesus,' as It is in a Christ-like nature, as it is in
that sweet, mild, humble, and loving spirit of Jesus,
which spreads itself like a morning sun upon the
souls of good men, full of light and life." ^
Still again in the same vein : '" Divine truth is
better understood, as It unfolds itself in the purity
of men's hearts and lives, than in all those subtle
niceties into which curious wits may lay it forth.
And therefore our Saviour, who is the Great Master
of it, would not, while He was here on earth, draw
it up into any system or body, nor would His dis-
^ Discourse I., p. 8-1 1.
VOL. II. ^

146 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
ciples after Him ; He would not lay it out to us in
any canons or articles of belief, not being indeed so
careful to stock and enrich the world with opinions
and notions as with true piety, and a godlike pat
tern of purity, as the best way to thrive In all spirit
ual understanding. His main scope was to promote a
holy life, as the best and most compendious way to
a right belief He hangs all true acquaintance with
divinity upon the doing God's will, ' If any man do
His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether It be
of God.^
Then returning to his original thought, from which
indeed he has never escaped, he once more sums it
up in a definite sentence with the help of Plotinus :
" Divinity is not so well perceived by a subtile
wit 'as by a purified sense,' as Plotinus phraseth
it." 2
The ancients, he says, were not unacquainted with
this method of attaining to the knowledge of divine
things. Aristotle thought young men, with their
youthful affections as yet uncooled, unfit to enter
upon ethical studies. Pythagoras tested the sedate-
ness and moral temper of his scholars, " before he
would Intrust them with the sublimer mysteries of
his philosophy. The Platonists were herein so wary
and solicitous that they thought the minds of men
could never be purged enough from those earthly
dregs of sense and passion, in which they were so
much steeped, before they could be capable of their
divine metaphysics : and therefore they so much
solicit ' a separation from the body ' in all those that
^ Discourse I., p. 11, 12. ^ Ibid., p. 12 — aa-irep alaS^a-ei Kanadapiiivn.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 147

would ' sincerely understand divine truth ; ' ^ for that
was the scope of their philosophy." ^
As the attainment of divine truth Involves a
moral culture, we should seek it without dogma
tism — neither committing ourselves to others' opin
ions nor too zealously opposing them, r We should
not, like rigid censurers, arraign and condemn the
creeds of other men which we comply not with,
before a full and mature understanding of them,
ripened not only by the natural sagacity of our own
reason, but by the benign influence of holy and mor
tified affection : so neither should we over-hastily
subscribe to the symbols and articles of other men.^
They are not always the best men that blot most
paper. A bitter juice of corrupt affections may some
times be strained into the ink of our greatest scholars ;
their doctrines may taste too sour of the cask they
come through. We are not always happy in meet
ing with that wholesome food (as some are wont to
call the doctrinal part of religion) which hath been
dressed out by the cleanest hands. Some men have
too bad hearts to have good heads : they cannot be
good at theory who have been so bad at the practice,
as we may justly fear too many of those, from whom
we are too apt to take the articles of our belief, have
been. Whilst we plead so much our right to the
patrimony of our fathers, we may take too fast a
possession of their errors as well as of their sober
opinions. There are idola specHs, innate prejudices,
and deceitful hypotheses, that many times wander
1 Ka^apSs cjiiKo(ro(j>i'tv, as Socrates ^ Discourse I., p. ij.
speaks. ^ Credere in/idem alienam.

148 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
up and down in the minds of good men, that may
fly out from them with their graver determinations.
We can never be well assured what our traditional
divinity Is ; nor can we securely enough addict
ourselves to any sect of men. That which was the
philosopher's motto,^ we may a little enlarge, and so
fit it for an ingenious pursuer after divine truth : he
that will find truth must seek it with a free judg
ment, and a sanctified mind : he that thus seeks
shall find ; he shall live in truth, and that shall live
in him ; it shall be like a stream of living waters
issuing out of his own soul ; he shall drink of the
waters of his own cistern, and be satisfied ; he shall
every morning find this heavenly manna lying upon
the top of his own soul, and be fed with it to eternal
life ; he will find satisfaction within, feeling himself
in conjunction with truth, though all the world should
dispute against him." ^
Divine truth is therefore the analogue of the
divine spirit In man. It is to be sought neither In
books nor traditions of any kind, but in the light In
which the pure soul looks forth upon reality. The
science of the Divine originates In a divine intuition
which guarantees its own contents. Of the nature
of a sense, this Intuition is yet rational in the highest
degree. It Is "the light of all our seeing." It is
the spiritual eye with which we look out upon the
spiritual world, and by the culture and enlargement
of which we see always more clearly the great
objects of faith and hope and love. There is
' 'E\(vdepov eivai bfi TV yvaipij tov peWovra (^tXo(ro(^eiv.
' Discourse I., p. 14, ij.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 149
nothing imaginary in the truths thus made known
to us.
'{The common notions of God and virtue im
pressed upon the souls of men are more clear and
perspicuous than any else ; and if they have not
more certainty, yet have they more evidence,
and display themselves with less difficulty to our
reflective faculty than any geometrical demonstra
tions : and these are both available to prescribe out
ways of virtue to men's own souls, and to force an
acknowledgment of truth from those that oppose,
when they are well guided by a skilful hand. Truth
needs not at any time fly from reason, there being
an eternal amity between them. They are only
some private dogmas that may well be suspected as
spurious and adulterate, that dare not abide the trial
thereof . . . We must open the eye of the
soul, ' which indeed all have, but few make use of
This is the way to see clearly ; the light of the
divine world will then begin to fall upon us, and
those sacred iWdixxpeis, those pure coruscations of
immortal and ever-living truth, will shine into us, and
in God's own light shall we behold Him." ^ A
He describes. In conclusion, the various degrees
in which, in different orders of men, this spiritual
faculty is cultivated. There Is, first of all, what he
calls the " complex and multifarious man, in whom
sense and reason are so intermixed and ' twisted up
together' that his knowledge cannot be 'laid out
into its first principles.' " And so he becomes the
victim of custom and vulgar opinion. In such a man
1 Discourse I., p. 17. I9-

150 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
the higher notions of God and religion are " so
entangled with the bird-lime of fleshly passions and
mundane vanity, that he cannot rise to any but
earthly conception of heavenly things." Such souls,
as Plato says, " are ' heavy behind,' ^ and are continu
ally pressing down to this world's centre : and though,
like the spider, they may appear sometime moving up
and down aloft In the air, yet they do but sit in the
loom, and move In that web of their own gross fancies,
which they fasten and pin to some earthly thing or
other." 2 There Is, secondly, the Rationalist, or the
man who " thinks not fit to view his own face in any
other glass but that of reason and understanding."
" In such a one the com,munes notitics, or common
principles of virtue and goodness, are. more clear and
steady." But being unfed and unfilled "with the
practice of true virtue," they " may be but poor,
empty, and hungry things of themselves." Thirdly,
there is the mystic, who has an " inward sense of
virtue and moral goodness far transcendent to all
mere speculative opinions ; but whose soul is apt
too much to heave and swell with the sense of his
own virtue and knowledge." " An 111 ferment of
self-love lying at the bottom " frequently puffs up
such a soul with pride, arrogance, and self-conceit
Lastly, there is " the true metaphysical and con
templative man,^ who, running and shooting up
above his own logical or self-rational life, pierceth
into the highest life. Such a one, by universal love
and holy affection, abstracting himself from him-
' 'OwKrOoPapfU. ^ Discourse I., p. 21. ' AvSpanros BeaprjTiKiis.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 151

self, endeavours the nearest union with the divine
essence that may be — knitting his own centre unto
the centre of divine being. To such a one the
Platonlsts are wont to attribute ' a true divine
wisdom,' ^ powerfully displaying itself In an ' intel
lectual life,' 2 as they phrase it Such a knowledge,
they say, is always pregnant with divine virtue,
which ariseth out of a happy union of souls with
God, and is nothing else but a living imitation
of a godlike perfection drawn out by a strong
fervent love of it. This divine knowledge, as
Plotinus says, makes us amorous of divine beauty,
beautiful and lovely ; and this divine love and
purity reciprocally exalts divine knowledge. . . .
Such a life and knowledge as this is, peculiarly
belongs to the true and sober Christian, who lives in
Him who is life itself, and is enlightened by Him who
is the truth itself, and is made partaker of the divine
unction, and knoweth all things, as St John speaks.
This life is nothing else but God's own breath within
him, and an infant-Christ (if I may use the expres
sion) formed in his soul." ^
II. Superstition and Atheism are the two great
antitheses of divine knowledge, or, as Smith calls
them, the "anti-deities that are set up against It."
The former is the darkening of the divine intelli
gence in man. " Its true cause and rise Is nothing
else but a false opinion of the Deity that renders
Him dreadful and terrible, austere and apt to be
angry, yet impotent and easy to be appeased again
1 Qilav emaTTifiriv. ' 'Ev voepa ^afi. ' Discourse I., p. 24.

152 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
by some flattering devotions, especially if performed
with sanctimonious shows and a solemn sadness of
mind." The picture of God which some Christians
have drawn, " wherein sourness and arbitrariness
appear so much," too much resembles this. "Though
I should not dislike," says our author, " thoughts of
future torment, which I doubt even good men may
have cause to press home upon their spirits ; yet I
think it little commends God, and as little benefits
us, to fetch all this horror and astonishment from the
contemplations of a Deity, which should always be
the most serene and lovely. Our apprehensions
of the Deity should be such as might ennoble our
spirits and not debase them. A right knowledge of
God would beget a freedom and liberty of soul
within us, and not servility."^ It is strangely those
who picture God as an angry Deity, or mere power
of vengeance, who are at the same time most ready
to imagine Him so " impotently mutable," that His
favour may be won again by " uncouth devotions
and formal praises." This composition of " fear and
flattery " in the superstitious mind especially Im
pressed Smith. It is born, he says, of our guilty
and selfish apprehensions. As the pure and enlight
ened soul beholds in God an image of all moral per
fection, so the unhallowed mind interprets its own
fears and waywardness into a Deity of terror and
caprice. Wherever God is apprehended as a mere
power to be pleased, rather than as a living source
of light and blessing to all who trust in Him, super
stition is more or less present. And worship, when
' Discourse II., p. 32.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 153
directed to the " outward vesture of religion," rather
than its inward spirit, is of the nature of superstition.
We by no means get rid of it, as some imagine, when
we have expelled It out of our churches, or expunged
It out of our books. " No, for all this, superstition
may enter into our chambers, and creep Into our
closets ; it may twine about our secret devotions, and
actuate our forms of belief and orthodox opinions,
when it hath no place else to shroud itself, or hide
Its head in ; we may think to flatter the Deity by
these, and to bribe it with them, when we are grown
weary of more pompous solemnities : nay, it may
mix itself with a seeming faith In Christ ; as I doubt
it doth now in too many, who, laying aside all sober
and serious care of true piety, think it sufficient to
offer up the active and passive righteousness of their
Saviour to a severe and rigid justice, to make ex
piation for those sins they can be willing to allow
themselves in."^
Atheism is closely akin to superstition — so much
so " that It may seem to have the same father with
it." " Superstition could be well content if there
were no God to trouble or disquiet it, and atheism
thinks there is none." And as the former " is en
gendered by a base opinion of the Deity as cruel and
tyrannical," so the latter arises where the same " sour
and ghastly apprehension of God " comes in contact
with " more stout and surly natures," and provokes
them to negation and defiance. Such a false con
ception of the Divine either subdues men to fear, or
exasperates them, and stirs them up to " contend with
' Discourse II., p. 42.

154 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
that Being which they cannot bear, and to destroy that
which would deprive them of their own liberty.
Atheism could never have so easily crept into the
world, had not superstition made way and opened a
backdoor for it ; it could not so easily have banished
the belief of a Deity, had not that first accused and
condemned It as destructive to the peace of mankind;
and therefore it hath always justified and defended
itself by superstition. . . . If the superstitious
man thinks that God is altogether like himself, which
indeed Is a character most proper to such, the atheist
will soon say in his heart, ' there is no God ; ' and
will judge it, not without some appearance of reason,
to be better there were none."^
The character of atheism may be gathered from
" the confessions of the Epicureans, who, though
they seemed to acknowledge a Deity, yet I doubt not
but those that search into their writings will soon em
brace Tully's censure of them."^ Their great maxim
was to rid the world of superstition by getting quit
of all objects of superstitious dread. Observing the
apprehensions of men in the view of "the stupendous
events and effects of nature," Lucretius, following
the steps of his great master, "undertakes so to solve
all those knots into which superstition was tied up,
by unfolding the secrets of nature, as that men might
find themselves loosened from those scevi domini and
crudeles tyranni, as he calls the vulgar creeds of the
Deity." ^ But, rightly viewed, there is no inconsist
ency betwixt the widest knowledge of natural causes
^ Discourse III., p. 46, 47. ponunt, reipsa toUunt deos.
° Ibid., p. 49. — Verbis quidem ' Ibid., p. 50.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 155
and true religion. While such a knowledge would
indeed disperse superstition, it would only confirm a
just and wise view of divine agency. " Herein all
the Epicureans (who are not the true, but foster-
fathers of that natural philosophy they brag of, and
of which indeed Democritus was the first author)
do miserably blunder themselves. For though a
lawful acquaintance with all the events and pheno
mena that show themselves upon this mundane stage
would contribute much to free men's minds from the
slavery of dull superstition ; yet would it also breed
a sober and amiable belief of the Deity, as it did in
all the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and other sects of
philosophers, if we may believe themselves ; and an
ingenuous knowledge hereof would be as fertile with
religion as the ignorance thereof in affrighted and
base minds is with superstition."^
The Epicurean theory of nature being a congeries
of " atoms moving to and fro in empty space " —
even if accepted — furnishes no explanation of the
origin of things. For it takes for granted the chief
thing to be explained — namely, the principle of
motion underlying all phenomena. Cicero,^ says
Smith, pointed this out long ago, and so " stopped
the wheel of this over-hasty philosophy." Granting
the primordials of Lucretius—" atoms and the void "
 the original movement of the atoms still requires
to be explained. And supposing " we allow this
power of motion to be seated in nature," we should
still inquire how such a force and power could " sub
sist in nature," and further, "how these movable
I Discourse IIL, p. 51- ' Lib. i., De Finibus. '

156 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
and rambling atoms come to place themselves so
orderly in the universe, and observe that absolute
harmony and decorum In all their motions, as If they
kept time with the musical laws of some almighty
mind that composed all their lessons, and measured
out their dances up and down in the universe." To
suppose all this marvellous conservation of force and
beauty and order of movement without an intelligent
first Cause originating and controlling all. Is, accord
ing to Smith, " as if one that undertakes to analyse
any learned book should tell us how so many letters,
meeting together in several combinations, should
beget all that sense that Is contained therein, without
minding that wit that cast them all into their several
ranks." 1
The secret of atheistic thought is frequently to
be found In a sort of half - knowledge — when
men, attracted by the course of scientific dis
covery and the " outside of nature," unlearn their
original and inbred notions of religion without
rising to any higher or more luminous concepdons
of the Divine. But the study of nature in itself
Is highly religious. It may modify and enlarge
our thoughts, but It has no tendency to shut out
from us the presence of the Deity. On the contrary,
all sober and wise minds feel the necessity of this
nobler spiritual Presence to illuminate nature and
elevate human life. The Idea of God not only an
swers to our rational Instincts, but harmonises better
than anything else with all our experience, and fits
in, so to speak, as the natural crown of all our
' Discourse III., p. 52.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 157
meditations, perplexities, and hopes. " It Is not
possible for anything well to bear up the spirit of
that man that shall calmly meditate with himself on
the true state and condition of this world, should
that mind and wisdom be taken away from it,
which governs every part of it, and overrules all
those disorders that at any time begin to break
forth in it. Were there not an omniscient skill to
temper, and fitly to rank In their due places, all
those quarrelsome and extravagant spirits that are in
the world, It would soon prove an uninhabitable place,
and sink under the heavy weight of its own confu
sion. . . . Remove God and providence out of
the world, and then we have nothing to depend upon
but chance and fortune, the humours and passions
of men ; and he that could then live In It had need
to be as blind as these lords would be, that he might
not see his own misery always staring upon him." ^
III. Having thus defined the mode of attaining
the Divine, and marked off its true character, Smith
proceeds to expound Its main principles — " Immor
tality," and " God." There can be no religion with
out these " two fundamentals ;" to which he added
the " communication of God to mankind through
Christ;" although he was only able to treat of the
preliminary aspect of this subject under the name of
" Prophecy." I, Immortality may be said to be the primary
datum of religious belief Without this, man sinks
back Into the mere order of nature, and whatever
higher elements his life may embrace, there is no
^ Discourse III., p. 59-

158 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
permanent spring of elevation or religious interest
In It. Indeed, without a Soul, or substantive reality
of divine life transcending the common life of nature
which he shares with other beings, man cannot be
said to have any true knowledge of God. For it Is
only " by a contemplation of our own souls that we
can climb up to the understanding of the Deity." ^
Three preliminary considerations must be kept
in view in reference to the question of immor
tality, — first, the natural belief which men com
monly have that their souls are immortal ; se
condly, the immediate relation of the truth to our
spiritual experience ; and, thirdly, the principle
that " no substantive and indivisible thing ever
perlsheth." There may be said to be a consensus
gentium in favour of the idea of Immortality ; and
although this consensus in some things may be no
proof of their truth, yet " we cannot easily conceive
how any prime notion, that hath no dependency on
any other antecedent to it, should be generally enter
tained, did not the common dictate of nature or rea
son, acting alike in all men, move them to conspire
together in the embracing of it." Again, It is only
possible for us to know what our souls really are
by self-reflection. We " can only steal from them
their own secrets" by direct converse with them
selves. [ " All those discourses which have been writ
ten of the soul's heraldry, will not blazon it so well
to us as itself will do. When we turn our own eyes
In upon it, it will soon tell us Its own royal pedigree
and noble extraction, by those sacred hieroglyphics
' Discourse III., p. 66.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 159
which it bears upon itself" ^ Finally, the Imperish-
ableness of every true substance is a direct corollary
from one of the first principles of the atheistic philo
sophy itself — -" ex nihilo fiere nil, et in nihilum nil
posse reverti." " And indeed, if we collate all our
own observations and experience with such as the
history of former times hath delivered to us, we shall
not find that ever any substance was quite lost." ^
According to " the common distinction, all substantial
being is either body, and so divisible, and of three
dimensions ; or else It is something which is not
properly a body or matter, and so hath no such di
mensions, . . . and this is nothing else but what
is commonly called spirit. Though yet we will not
be too critical in depriving everything which is not
grossly corporeal of all kind of extension." ^
In conducting his argument. Smith, after the man
ner of his time, fails to keep quite distinct his various
lines of thought. But the following may be enu
merated as the main grounds on which he rests the
proof of the soul's immortality — {a) its incorporeity ;
{b) Its spontaneity ; {c) its power of forming abstract
and necessary truths ; and lastly [d), the indestructi
bility of its moral attributes.
[a) He views the question of the soul's incor
poreity, first, ab absurdo. For, let us make the sup
position that the " substance of the soul is nothing
else but body " in however subtle a form, then of
course it is infinitely divisible as all bodies are. It
' Discourse IIL, p. 70. ous anticipation of More's favour-
' Ibid. p. 71. ite idea about the applicability of
' Ibid., p. 72, 73. Thisisacuri- extension to spiritual being.

l60 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
Is composed of the particles of other bodies, and
" must receive its augmentation from that food-nour
ishment which Is taken in as the body doth. So that
the very grass we walk over in the fields, the dust
and mire in the streets that we tread upon, may, ac
cording to the true meaning of this dull philosophy,
after many refinlngs, macerations, and maturations,
which nature performs by the help of motion, spring
up into so many rational souls, and prove as wise as
any Epicurean, and discourse as subtily of what It
once was, when it lay drooping in a senseless passive-
ness." ^ The conceit is so gross. In his opinion, as
not to deserve any serious answer. A " witty sar
casm" of Plutarch Is enough to confute it^ He
enters, at the same time, into a detailed exposure of
the Lucretlan doctrine of the genesis of the soul from
the finest and most minute atoms — atoms of " such
perfect spherical and small figures " as may be
capable of the swiftest movement. Admitting such
atoms, the question arises. Whence their movement ?
And admitting the power of motion to be originally
inherent in them, he farther asks, " How shall we force
up these particles of matter into any true and real
perceptions, and make them perceive their own or
others' motions — motus sensiferi" ^ as Lucretius him
self calls them. The power of sensation can no more
spring from any such combination of atoms, he says,
than " vision can rise out of a glass, whereby It
should be able to perceive these idola that paint
1 Discourse IV., C. iii. p. 75- ^ "'iTfj Toairas, otai crvvrjkBovaai
''The following is the "witty a-o(f>6v av eyevvria-av.
sarcasm " which he quotes in ^ Ibid., p. yy.
his text : — 17 prjTrjp dropovs ?(r;^ev

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. l6l

themselves upon it, though it were never so exactly
polished, and they much finer than they are or can
be." ^ A cause can never " rise in its production
above the height of its own nature and virtue ;" and
the smallest corpuscida in the shape of atoms, which
have no power of sense in themselves, can never
produce it by " any kind of concourse or motion."
Lucretius virtually admits this, by calling In the
aid of a mobilis vis — something of the nature of
an efflux of matter, rather than matter itself — to
account for the primary motions of sense. ^ He may
not allow this to be called anything else but matter,
— yet he cannot explain what kind of matter It
is. By it he understands, not merely an active
power of motion, but a more subtle energy, whereby
the force and nature of any motion Is perceived and
insinuated by its own strength in the bodies moved ;
as if these sorry bodies by their Impetuous justling
together could awaken one another out of their
drowsy lethargy, and make each other hear their
mutual impetuous knocks : which is as absurd as
to think a musical Instrument should hear its own
^ Discourse IV., c. iii. p. 77, Nam penitus prorsum latet hsec natur
-0 sub^stque ;
Nee magis hac infra quidquam est in
^ The following is the passage corpore nostro ;
to which he refers from the Third Atque anima'st animse proporr6 totius
Book : — ipsa.
Quod genus in nostris membris et cor-
" Sic calor, atque aer, et venti caeca pore toto
potestas Misti latens animi vis est, animasque
Mista creant unam naturam, et mobilis potestas
iUa Corporibus quia de parvis paucisque
Vis, initium motfis abs se quse dividit creata est,
oUis . Sic tibi nominis haec expers vis, facta
Sensifer unde oritur primiim per viscera minutis
fnotus. Corporibus, latet."
VOL. II. L

l62 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
sounds, and take pleasure in those harmonious airs
that are played upon it. For that which we call
sensation Is not the motion or impression which one
body makes upon another, but a recognition of that
motion ; and therefore to attribute that to a body, is
to make a body privy to its own acts and passions,
to act upon itself, and to have a true and proper self-
feeling virtue." ^
Advancing in his attack on the Lucretlan doc
trine. Smith contends that even if it could explain
the origin of sense, there is a higher principle of
knowledge in man which it is wholly unable to
explain. Lucretius, it is true, does not allow any
such higher principle. All our knowledge Is based
by him on the senses. But according to our author,
he Is refuted by his own arguments against the
sceptics, In reply to whose assertion, that nothing can
be known, he maintains that in such a case we can
not know so much as that we know nothing, or
recognise any distinction betwixt knowledge and
ignorance.^ The senses themselves cannot yield us
this distinction. For they have no power of dis
crimination or judgment, and report merely their
own affections — which they always do faithfully,
whether sound or unsound. In the senses them
selves there is and can be no mistake. " When the
eye finds the sun's circle represented within itself of
no greater bigness than a foot diameter, it is not
at all herein mistaken ; nor a distempered palate,
' Discourse IV., c. iii. p. 8i.
^ Quaeram, quum in rebus veri nil viderit ante ;
Unde sciat, quid sit scire, et nescire vicissim
Notitiam veri quae res falsique crearit.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 163
when it tastes a bitterness in the sweetest honey."
All is true qua the mere sense. But a higher
principle of reflection or reason comes in to modify
and correct our sensations ; and without this prin
ciple we could not make a beginning of knowledge
at all. We could never get beyond the confused
and indeterminate mass of our own sensations,
nor realise ourselves as rational unities, capable of
science. And this higher rational consciousness or
cognitive power " whereby we judge and discern
things is so far from being a body, that," according
to our author, " It must retract and withdraw itself
from all bodily operation whensoever it will nakedly
discern truth. For should our souls always mould
their judgment of things according to those im
pressions '^ which seem to be framed thereof in
the body, they must then do nothing else but
chain up errors and delusions, one with another
instead of truth ; as should the judgments of our
understandings wholly depend upon the sight of
our eyes, we should then conclude that our mere
accesses from any visible object have such a magical
power to change the magnitudes of visible objects,
and to transform them into all varieties of figures
and fashions ; and so attribute all that variety to
them which we find in our corporeal perceptions.
Or, should we judge of gustables by our taste, we
should attribute to one and the self-same thing all
that variety which we find in our own palates ; which
is an unquestionable argument that that power
whereby we discern of things, and make judgments
of them different and sometimes contrary to those per-
'^ iTa6r]paTa.

l64 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
ceptions that are the necessary results of all organlcal
functions. Is something distinct from the body ; and
therefore, though the soul, as Plato hath well ob
served, be various and divisible accidentally In
these sensations and motions wherein It extends and
spreads Itself, as it were, upon the body,^ and so,
according to the nature and measure thereof, per
ceives its Impressions — yet it is indivisible, returning
into itself 2 Whensoever it will speculate truth itself
it will not then listen to the several clamours and
votes of these rude senses which always speak with
divided tongues, but It consults some clearer oracle
within itself; and therefore Plotinus hath well con
cluded concerning the body — ' Should a man make
use of his body in his speculations. It will entangle his
mind with so many contradictions that It will be Impos
sible to attain to any true knowledge of things.' ^ We
shall conclude this, therefore, as Tully doth his contem
plation of the soul's operations about the frame of
nature, the fabric of the heavens, and motions of the
stars : ' The mind which understands these things
is like to that in the heavens which made them." ^
Smith dwells particularly on the unifying power
of the soul — its capacity of collecting all its percep
tions, and bringing them to a centre — and again
on its capacity of " looking before and after," and
holding alike the future and the past before it in
a living thread of consciousness — as evidences of
' pepuTTTi TTfpX TO crapoTa. ^ " Animus qui hcec intelligit
^ iv eavT-fi dpepltTTT). similis est ejus qui ea fabricatus
' (ptrodtov TovTo, et ns avT<f iv in ccelo est!' — Discourse IV., c. iii.
Toif uKe^iiyi, trpoaxpaiTO. — Enn. iv., p. 86, 87.
lib. iii.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 165
-its Immortality. " I cannot think," he concludes,
" Epicurus could In his cool thoughts be so unreason
able as to persuade himself that all the shuffling
and cutting of atoms could produce such a divine
piece of wisdom as this is. What matter can thus
bind up past, present, and future time together ?
which, while the soul of man doth, it seems to imitate
(as far as its own finite nature will permit it to strive
after an Imitation of) God's eternity ; and grasping
and gathering together a long series of duration Into
itself, makes an essay to free itself from the rigid
laws of it, and to purchase to itself the freedom
of a true eternity. . . . Though it seems to
be continually sliding from itself in those several
vicissitudes and changes which it runs through
in the constant variety of Its own effluxes and
emanations; yet it is always returning back again
to its first original, by a swift remembrance of
all those motions and multiplicity of operations
which have begot in it the first sense of this
constant efflux. As if we should see a sunbeam per
petually flowing forth from the bright body of the
sun, and yet ever returning back to it again; it
never loseth any part of its being, because it never
forgets what itself was ; and though it may number
out never so vast a length of its duration, yet it
never comes nearer to its old age, but carrieth a
lively sense of its youth and infancy along with it,
which it can at pleasure lay a fast hold on. . . .
Such a jewel as this is too precious to be found in a
dunghill ; mere matter could never thus stretch forth
its feeble force, and spread itself over all its own

l66 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
former pre-existences. We may as well suppose
this dull and heavy earth we tread upon to know
how long it hath dwelt in this part of the universe
that now it doth, and what variety of creatures have
in all past ages sprung forth from it, and all those
occurrences and events which have during all this
time happened upon It." ^
{b) Having thus vindicated the distinction of the
soul from matter in those relations which bring it
most in contact with matter. Smith dwells with com
parative brevity on those special properties charac
teristic of Its essence which appear to him still more
plainly to attest Its high descent and destiny. Is
not the soul clearly distinguished from the body by
Its power of self-action ? Many of our actions. It is
true, are automatic, and some even unconscious ; but
there are others which spring directly from the soul
itself, and are done solely " at the dictate and by the
commission of our own wills." It may be argued
whether the first spring of such actions Is In the under
standing or the will ; but in either case their spring
is within the soul itself, and not In anything ab extra.
The soul has " Innate force to stir up such thoughts
and motions within itself as it finds itself most free
to."^ How entirely distinct is such a force or
power from any property of matter! " A fatal
determination sits In all the wheels of corporeal
motion." * But here the movement is from within,
and as entirely free as reason can conceive. The
soul finds itself non vi aliend sed sud moveri. And
surely a being thus conscious of a freedom which
1 Discourse IV., c. iii. p. 88, 89, 91. ^ Ibid., c. iv. p. 96. ' Ibid., p. 97,

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPPIY. 167
" absolves It from the rigid laws of matter " cannot
be legitimately confounded with matter, or supposed
subject to its decay and dissolution ?
(c) And this is still more evident in the view of
the necessary and immutable truths — mathematical
and moral — which the soul is capable of forming
and holding clearly before it. To such truths there
is nothing exactly corresponding in the world of
experience. They are more true, — "transcend
ently more certain than any sensible thing can
be." " The apodictical principles of geometry are
altogether inimitable in the purest matter that fancy
can imagine." They must "needs therefore depend
upon something infinitely more pure than matter,
which hath all that stability and certainty within
itself which it gives to those infallible demonstra
tions." ^ Nor are our higher moral axioms less
" badges of an eternal nature." I'^Such are the
archetypal Ideas of justice, wisdom, goodness, truth,
eternity, omnipotency, and all those either moral,
physical, or metaphysical notions, which are either
the first principles of science, or the ultimate com
plement and final perfection of it. These we always
find to be the same, and know that no exorcism of
material mutations have any power over them: though
we ourselves are but of yesterday, and mutable every
moment, yet these are eternal, and depend not upon
any mundane vicissitudes ; neither could we ever
gather them from our observation of any material
thing where they were never sown." ^ Underived
from external experience, these ideas are the cate-
1 Discourse IV., c. v. p. loi. ^ Ibid., c. vi. p. 104, 105.

l68 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
gories or affirmations of the soul Itself, which must
be held to share in their eternity and immutability.
[d) But the highest of all proofs of the soul's
immortality is the Indestructibility of true virtue.
In this there is a divine force which unites us to
God Himself, and makes us feel " partakers of the
divine nature." Our higher speculations may be
get within us a sufficient conviction of our higher
destiny ; " but It Is only true goodness and virtue
in the souls of men that can make them both know
and love, believe and delight themselves in their own
immortality. Though every good man Is not so
logically subtile as to be able by fit mediums to
demonstrate his own immortality, yet he sees it in a
higher light His soul being purged and enlightened
by true sanctity, is more capable of those divine
Irradiations whereby it feels itself In conjunction with
God. ... It knows it shall never be deserted
of that free goodness that always embraceth it : it
knows that Almighty love which It lives by to be
stronger than death, and more powerful than the
grave ; It will not suffer these holy ones that are
partakers of it to live In hell, or their souls to see
corruption ; and though worms may devour their
flesh, and putrefaction enter into those bones that
fence it, yet it knows that its Redeemer lives, and
that it shall at last see Him with a pure intellectual
eye, which will then be clear and bright, when all
that earthly dust, which converse with this mortal
body filled it with, shall be removed : it knows that
God will never forsake His own life which He hath
quickened in it. He will never deny those ardent
desires of a blissful fruition of Himself, which the

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 169
lively sense of His own goodness hath excited
within it : those breathings and gasplngs after an
eternal participation of Him are but the energy of
His own breath within us." ^
2. In passing to " the other cardinal principle of
all religion," Smith does not attempt any formal
proof of the divine Existence. He gives no hint of
an acquaintance with Descartes' recent arguments
on the subject — so familiar to both Cudworth and
More; nor does he bring into view the old argument
from Design which must have been so well known
to him in the pages of Cicero, whom he quotes
frequently. He starts with the Divine as already
given in that spiritual side of humanity which he
advocates so strongly — adopting the language of
Plotinus, that " he who reflects upon himself reflects
upon his own original," ^ and " finds the clearest
impression of some eternal nature and perfect being
stamped upon his own soul." r^God," he says,
" has so copied forth Himself into the whole life and
energy of man's soul, and that the lovely characters
of Divinity may be most easily seen and read of all
men within themselves : as they say Phidias the
famous statuary, after he had made the statue of
Minerva with the greatest exqulsiteness of art to be
set up in the Acropolis at Athens, afterwards im
pressed his own image so deeply in her buckler, " that
no one could delete or efface it without destroying
the whole statue."^ ' And if we would know what the
impress of souls is, it is nothing but God Himself, who
^ Discourse IV., c.vii. p. 109, no. ' Ut nemo delere possit aut di-
2 El's iavTov iiniiTpi^av (Is dpxfiv vellere, qui totam statuam no7i
iwicTTpetjiei. imminueret.

170 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
could not write His own name, so as that it might
be read, but only In rational natures. Neither could
He make such without imparting such an imitation of
His own eternal understanding to them as might
be a perpetual memorial of Himself within them.
And whenever we look upon our own soul In a
right manner, we shall find an Urim and Thummlm
there, by which we may ask counsel of God Himself,
who will have this always borne upon its breast
plate. . . . For though God hath copied forth
His own perfections in this consplcable and sen
sible world, according as it Is capable of entertain
ing them ; yet the most clear and distinct copy of
Himself could be imparted to none else but to
intelligible and inconsplcable natures ; and though
the whole fabric of this visible universe be whisper
ing out the notions of a Deity, and always inculcates
this lesson [of its divine origin]- to the contempla-
tors of it;^ yet we cannot understand it without
some interpreter within. ' The heavens,' indeed,
' declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows
His handiwork,' and ' that which may be known of
God,' 2 even ' His eternal power and Godhead,' as
St Paul tells us, is to be seen in these external
appearances : yet It must be something within that
must Instruct us In all these mysteries, and we shall
then best understand them, when we compare that
copy which we find of them within ourselves with
that which we see without us. The schoolmen
have well compared sensible and intelligent beings in
' 'Of ffie neirolrjm 6 6(hs, as Plo- ^ To yvacrTov tov 6eov.
tinus expresseth it.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 171
reference to the Deity, when they tell us that the
one do only represent vestigia Deiy the other facicm
Dei."Jl According to this view, the divine Existence is
regarded as a postulate of our spiritual reason.
Intuition at once reveals and guarantees it. The
Soul and God are correlative facts — the latter
plainly involved in the former, and attested thereby.
Given the one, we have the other. Blot out the
spiritual reason or soul as a distinctive element in
humanity, and the divine Existence, or at least any
valid authentication of it, disappears. If we have no
souls, we can never find God. If we have, it is un
necessary to search for His shadow in nature, when
His presence is clearly revealed within ourselves.f
The soul, according to our author, not only
witnesses to the fact of the divine Existence, but
moreover, to the divine character and attributes.
Its affirmation of the Divine is no mere blank
assertion of a first principle,^ but a reveladon of a
living God, one in being, and infinite in power,
freedom, and love. (MVhen we reflect upon our
own Idea of pure and perfect reason, we know that
our own souls are not it, but only partake of it."
" Neither we nor any finite thing contain the source
of reason within ourselves." ^ And this very con
tingency and imperfection of our own rational con
sciousness forces us to recognise an absolute and
perfect reason. The idea within us, In its very suc
cessiveness and growth, will not suffer us to rest in
1 Discourse V., c. i. p. 134-136. ' Discourse V., c. ii. p. 137.
" Or dpxr]-

172 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
any reality short of the Infinite — an original and un
created unity,^ the fountain of all special and partial
being. " As time lies in the basis of all finite life,
whereby it is enabled by degrees to display all the
virtue of its own essence, which it cannot do at once;
so eternity lies at the foundation of Divinity, where
by it becomes one ' without any shadow of turning,'
as St James speaks, — without any variety or multi
plicity within itself, — of which all created beings that
are carried down in the current of time partake." ^
In a similar manner, as we find within ourselves
a will — the executive of our own reason and judg
ment — so we infer along with the divine reason an
almighty Will. " The purest mind must also needs
be the most almighty life and spirit ; and as it com
prehends all things, and sums them up together In
its infinite knowledge, so it must also comprehend
them all in its own life and power." ^ Such a will,
being without limitations, is absolutely free. There
are no bounds to it. Yet, " we must not conceive
God to be the freest agent, because He can do and
prescribe what He pleaseth, and so set up an
absolute will which shall make both law and reason,
as some imagine. For as God cannot know Him
self to be any other than what indeed He is; so
neither can He will Himself to be anything else
than what He is, or that anything else should swerve
from those laws which His own eternal nature and
understanding prescribes to it."* There is nothing
therefore arbitrary or without reason in the divine
' Or p6ms. ' Ibid., p. 139.
^ Discourse V., c. ii. p. 142. ' Ibid., p. 144.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 173

Will. Moving with the most perfect freedom, " yet
it is never bereft of eternal light and truth to act
by ; " and although we may not be able to see a
reason for all the divine actions, we may be sure
" they were neither done against it nor without it."
From the same principles we may conclude the
perfection of the divine love, which in Its very
nature rises superior to all the passions and disturb
ances " whereby our love is wont to explicate and
unfold its affection towards its object." As it Is
" infinitely ardent and potent, so it is always calm
and serene, unchangeable, having no such ebbings
and flowlngs, no such diversity of stations and
retrogradations as love hath in us which ariseth from
the weakness of our understandings, that do not
present things to us always in the same orient lustre
and beauty." ^
The divine nature is thus, according to our
author, the reflex perfection of all the higher faculties
of the human soul. It is, their ideal realised. And
the very dimness of the Ideal in us only suggests
the more strongly the necessity of its realisation In
the Divine. There it is, — a power within us,- — a
presence haunting us. How should we have it at
all unless there is some divine reality corresponding
to it ? He emphasises in this respect our restless
longing after Supreme Good. This unsatisfied
ideal is of itself enough to lead us to the knowledge
of God, unless our life be an Illusion. For what is its
meaning ? Does it not point us beyond ourselves to
Another in whom alone we can find satisfaction ? The
1 Discourse V., c. ii. p. 140-

174 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
very earnestness with which men pursue an unattain
able happiness — search for it " through all the vast
wilderness of this world," and find It not — does this
not indicate a source of happiness above them ?
And thus the heart as well as the reason of man
witnesses to a living God. He is the Supreme
Reality In which all our aspirations orb and com
plete themselves — " not only the eternal Reason
and almighty Mind which our understandings con
verse with, but also that unstained Beauty and
Supreme Good after which our wills are perpetually
aspiring." ^
Having thus explained and vindicated the idea
of God, Smith draws various deductions or In
ferences, with which we need not occupy our
selves. Their main effect is to show, on the one
hand, that communication Is, so to speak, the na
tural expression of the fulness of the divine be
nignity, and, on the other hand, that assimilation to
the Divine is the true intention and destiny of man.
He thus prepares the way for the further Idea or
"main principle" of religion — revelation — which
emerges as the complementary truth to God and
immortality. 3. He proposed to consider the chief contents
of revelation, or " those pieces of revealed truth
which tend most of all to foment and cherish true
and real piety." But he was only able to enter
upon the preliminary aspect of the subject — the idea
or mode of revelation — " how, and in what manner,
this kind of truth is manifested unto mankind" The
¦' Discourse V., c. iii. p. 148.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 175
discourse upon " Prophecy" is all that survives to us
of his more extended plan. It is full, however, of
valuable thoughts, which go near to the heart of the
whole subject. The following is a rapid summary
of them.
Smith penetrates directly to the true idea of
revelation as a " free influx of the divine mind upon
our minds and understandings." All our primary
and higher knowledge may in a sense be called
revelation. It is a manifestation of truth to us
through appropriate organs or faculties — of the truth
of material things through our senses, and of the
truth of higher spiritual things through our reason
and conscience. The truth communicated In either
way may very well be called " truth of revelation ;"
and in so far as we reach divine knowledge at any
time through a direct and steady illumination of our
spiritual faculties, we are all more or less prophets.
The spiritual attitude always partakes more or less
of prophetic enthusiasm. But revelation in a special
sense implies the selection of a special race of pro
phets — of a class of minds peculiarly trained and
qualified, not only to be the recipients of divine
knowledge, but to be the organs of its communica
tion to others. And this Is exactly the aspect under
which it Is presented in Scripture. — " God, who at
sundry times and in divers manners spake In time
past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these
last days spoken unto us by His Son."^ The
Scripture revelation is nothing else than the divine
thought communicated to the succession of the
1 Heb. i. I, 2.

176 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
Hebrew prophets from Abraham to Christ, and
through them imparted to the world. Prophecy and
revelation are essentially correlative. The former
is " the only way whereby this kind of truth can be
dispensed to us."
Our author traces with interest, but also with
too many Involvements of rabbinical learning, the
character and development of Hebrew prophecy.
He points out how rational and Imaginative elements
united to form the prophetic spirit, and how diverse
prophetic ranks are to be reckoned according to the
degree in which these elements respectively com
bined. The Imagination was the sphere in which
the prophetic Imagery arranged and pictured itself,
while the reason Is conceived as looking forth upon
the scene and interpreting Its spiritual meaning or
" intelligible mysteries." The degree of prophetical
illumination was In proportion to the predominance
of the rational over the imaginative element ; but
only In one case was the former deemed to be ex
clusive, and the truth presented nakedly to the
prophetic mind without the Interposition of " any
schemes or pictures." This was supposed to be the
special privilege of Moses, founded on the statements
that the Lord knew him " face to face,"^ and spoke
with him " mouth to mouth ; " ^ and accordingly,
Moses was placed by the Jewish doctors in a rank
by himself, spoken of as the gradus Mosaicus. From
this highest grade of the prophetic spirit, three
descending grades were reckoned : one in which the
rational power, although no longer exclusive, yet
' Deut. xxxiv. 10. ''¦ Num. xii. 8.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 177

prevails, penetrating directly through the imaginative
or material form to the naked essence of the truth ;
another less perfect. In which the Imaginative and
rational powers equally balance each other ; and a
third, lowest of all, in which the imaginative power
predominates, " so that the impressions made upon it
are too busy, and the scene becomes too turbulent
for the rational faculty to discern the true mystical
and anagogical sense of them clearly." "In this
case the enthusiasms spend themselves extremely In
parables, similitudes, and allegories, in a dark and
obscure manner, as is very manifest in Zechariah's
and many of Ezekiel's prophecies, as also those of
Daniel."^ There are two ways in which the prophetic spirit
was ordinarily conveyed^elther in a dream or a
vision.^ The difference betwixt the two was In
circumstantials rather than in anything essential —
" as Indeed there is no dream properly without a
vision." A voice was more usually heard In the
former; yet the Jews, our author says, were wont to
make a vision superior to a dream, as " representing
things more to the life," and more suddenly sur
prising and seizing the senses of the prophets. All
dreams spoken of in Scripture as " sent by God "
are by no means to be taken for prophetical. Many
of them were merely " nouthetlcal or monitory ; "
and these were much weaker in their energy upon
the Imagination. They had nothing of the ecstatlcal
rapture whereby the prophets in the moments of the
divine afflatus were "snatched from themselves,"
1 Discourse VL, p. 192. " Num. xii. 6.
VOL. II. M

178 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
and made to realise the divine presence. A care
ful distinction is also to be made betwixt the real
enthusiasm characteristic of the prophetic spirit,
and mistaken enthusiasm. The latter is a mere
play of imagination, or a vulgar assumption. It
is never able to rise above the " low and dark
region of sense," and the more obtrusive it is, the
further It wanders from the truth. But the genuine
prophetical enthusiasm, however intense, " never
alienates the mind — seeing it seats itself as well in
the rational as In the sensitive powers — but always
maintains a consistency and clearness of reason,
strength, and solidity of judgment, where it comes.
It doth not ravish the mind, but inform and en
lighten It."i
Our author discusses at length many other aspects
of the subject, such as the ministration or agency of
angels in the conduct of prophecy — the symbolic
actions attributed to the prophets — the schools of
the prophets — -and, finally, their style as recorded In
Scripture. On all these points, his views are char
acterised by largeness and depth of comprehension ;
but he runs into too many details, and borrows too
much from the "Jewish doctors," for us to quote or
even to summarise. He is at particular pains to
explain how entirely " scenlcal and Imaginary" many
of the prophetic actions must be regarded as nar
rated In Hosea,^ Jeremiah,^ and Ezekiel.* What
the prophets are represented as saying and doing in
such cases Is only to be supposed as said and done
^ Discourse VI,, c. iv. p. 211. ' Jer. xiii., xviii.
2 Hos. i., iii. * Ezek. iii., v.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 179
in a vision. Their acts especially are not " really
or sensibly performed, but only represented to the
fancy." For we must remember " that the prophet
ical scene or stage upon which all apparitions were
made to the prophet was his imagination ; and that
there all those things which God would have re
vealed unto him were acted over symbolically, as in
a masque, in which diverse persons are brought In,
amongst which the prophet himself bears a part :
and therefore he, according to the exigency of
this dramatical apparatus, must, as the other actors,
perform his part." The same enlightenment and
breadth of criticism characterise his remarks on the
prophetic style. In which he everywhere sees the
peculiar expression of the prophetic mind, and not
any fixed or direct form of divine language. The
idea of verbal inspiration appears to him wholly un
necessary to guarantee the accuracy of the prophetic
representations. This was secured in the mere fact
that they were men of knowledge who " could speak
sense as wise men, and tell their own thoughts and
experiences truly." " And indeed it seems most
agreeable to the nature of all prophetical visions
and dreams, wherein the nature of the enthusiasm
consisted in a symbolical and hieroglyphical shaping
forth of intelligible things in their imaginations, and
enlightening the understanding of the prophets to
discern the scope and meaning of these visa or
phantasmata, that those words and phrases In which
they were audibly expressed to the hearers after
wards, or penned down, should be the prophet's
own ; for the matter was not, as seems evident from

l8o JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
what has been said, represented always by words,
but by things."
III. Smith's remaining discourses are occupied
with various aspects of Christian truth ; and, in so far
as they have a common aim, may be said to unfold
the distinctive character of Christianity as a living
power of righteousness and sanctification in human
life. The picture which he draws, both of the Gospel
and Its effects. Is in the main correspondent to that
drawn by Whichcote — with here and there a yet
fuller insight and comprehension, greater wealth of
spiritual allusion, and a deeper grasp, so to speak, of
evangelical principles. Where Whichcote sketches
rather the ethical and outwardly harmonious relations
of the divine life. Smith gets more to the root and
vitalising centre. His mind was both more creative
In conception and more largely philosophic in sur
vey. In speaking, for example, of legal and evan
gelical righteousness, he discriminates the latter on
all sides thoroughly. It is not only spiritual instead
of formal, according to the Jewish point of view, but
it is a principle of life brought to the soul, and not
any mere spontaneous growth out of it, or " new
mould and shape in a pedagogical kind of way" in
which the soul trains itself. It is, in short, a divine
gift, and not any mere moral process. On the
theological side Smith brings out more decisively
than his teacher the distinctive divinity of Chris
tianity ; while on the other or practical side he em
phasises with equal force the vital union of religion
and morality. Divinely given, evangelical righteous
ness yet never merely lies alongside the soul, for-

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. l8l
mally imputed to it as an addendum securing Its ac
ceptance with God ; but it " spreads Itself over all
the "powers of the soul, quickening It into a divine
life." It is not a " doctrine wrapt up in ink and
paper, but a vitalis scientia, a living impression, made
upon soul and spirit."^ " The Gospel does not so
much consist in verbis as in virtute ; neither doth
evangelical dispensation therefore please God so
much more than the legal did, because, as a finer
contrivance of His infinite understanding, it more
clearly discovers the way of salvation to the minds
of men ; but chiefly because it is a more powerful
efflux of His divine goodness upon them, as being
the true seed of a happy immortality continually
thriving and growing on to perfection. It does not
hold forth such a transcendent privilege and advan
tage above what the law did, only because it acquaints
us that Christ, our true High Priest, is ascended up
into the holy of holies, and there, instead of the
blood of bulls and goats, hath sprinkled the ark and
mercy-seat above with His own blood ; but also
because it conveys that blood of sprinkling Into our
defiled consciences, to purge them from dead works.
Far be it from me to disparage in the least the merit
of Christ's blood. His becoming obedient unto death,
whereby we are justified. But I doubt sometimes
some of our dogmata and notions about justification
may puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits of
ourselves than God hath of us ; and that we pro
fanely make the unspotted righteousness of Christ
to serve only as a covering wherein to wrap up our
^ Discourse VII., c. iv. p. 349-

l82 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
foul deformities and filthy vices ; and when we have
done, think ourselves in as good credit and repute
with God as we are with ourselves, and that we
are become heaven's darlings as much as we are
our own."^
Again : r By so much the more acceptable any
one is to God, by how much the more he comes to
resemble God. It was a common notion in the old
Pythagorean and Platonic theology,^ that the divinity
transformed into love, and enamoured with its own
unlimited perfections and spotless beauty, delighted
to copy forth and shadow out Itself as It were In
created beings, which are perpetually embraced In
the warm bosom of the same love, from which they
can never swerve nor apostatise till they also prove
apostate to the estate of their creation.- And cer
tainly it is true in our Christian divinity, that that
divine light and goodness which flows forth from
God, the original of all, upon the souls of men, never
goes solitary and destitute of love, complacency, and
acceptation, which Is always lodged together with It
in the divine essence. And as the divine com
placency thus dearly and tenderly entertains all those
which bear a similitude of true goodness upon them,
so it always abandons from its embraces all evil,
which never doth nor can mix itself with it The
Holy Spirit can never suffer any unhallowed or de
filed thing to enter Into it, or to unite itself with it
Therefore, in a sober sense, I hope I may truly say,
there is no perfect reconciliation wrought between
^ Discourse VII., c. iv. p. 350. tov epaTa, &c., as Proclus phraseth
2 " Tov Ala peTaoxripanadivra els it." Smith adds this in the text.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 183
God and the souls of men while any defiled and
impure thing dwells within the soul, which cannot
truly close with God, nor God with that."^ i
Unpolemical as Smith is in a polemical age —
dweUIng for the most part In a region of religious
meditation far above the strife of tongues — It is yet
evident here and there. In the larger movement of
his thoughts, that he is striking at prevalent bigot
ries and dogmatic pretensions unwelcome to his
school ; as in the passage already quoted about
justification, and In other passages such as the fol
lowing :" It is not because our brains swim with
a strong conceit of God's eternal love to us, or be
cause we grow big and swell into a mighty bulk with
airy fancies and presumptions of our acceptance with
God, that makes us the more acceptable to Him : It
is not all our strong dreams of being in favour with
heaven that fills our hungry souls the more with it :
it is not a pertinacious imagination of our names
being enrolled in the book of life, or of the debt-
books of heaven being crossed, or of Christ being
ours, while we find Him not living within us, or of
the washing away of our sins In His blood, while the
foul and filthy stains thereof are deeply sunk In our
own souls. . . . No, It must be a true compliance
with the divine will, which must render us such as
the Divinity may take pleasure in. ' In Christ Jesus
neither circumcision nor unclrcumclslon availeth any
thing,' nor any fancy built upon any other external
privilege, ' but the keeping of the commandments
of God.' "2"^
1 Discourse VII., c. v. p. 352, 353. ^ Ibid., p. 354.

l84 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
/ " We have learned to distinguish too subtily, I
doiibt, in our lives and conversations inter sacrum
et profanum, our religious approaches to God and
our worldly affairs. . . . We must not think
that religion serves to paint our faces, to reform our
looks, or only to inform our heads, or Instruct and
tune our tongues ; no, not only to tie our hands, and
make our outward man more demure, and bring our
bodies and bodily actions into a better decorum; but
its main business Is to purge and reform our hearts,
and all the Illicit actions and motions thereof"^
" There are such who persuade themselves they
are well affected to God, yet they can sometimes
beat down the price of other men's religion to en
hance the value of their own ; or it may be by a
burning and fiery zeal against the opinions and de
portments of others that are not of their own sect,
they lose the sense of all their own guiltiness.
A religion that runs out only in particu
larities is but a dead carcase, and not indeed
that true living religion which comes down from
heaven." M
We have now presented nearly all that is char
acteristic In the substance and mode of Smith's re
ligious thought ; yet many passages remain in these
concluding discourses, eloquent with such a high and
pregnant meaning, that we have difficulty in omit
ting them. The following, however, must sum up
our quotations :/' It is a fond imagination that re
ligion should extinguish reason, whereas religion
makes It more illustrious and vigorous ; and they
' Discourse VIII., c. iii. p. 389, 390. "^ Ibid., c. ii. p. 383, 385.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 185
that live most In the exercise of religion shall find
their reason most enlarged."^
" True religion is no piece of artifice ; It is no
boiling up of our imaginative powers, nor the glow
ing heats of passion ; though these are too often
mistaken for it, when in our juggllngs In religion we
cast a mist before our own eyes : but It is a new
nature Informing the souls of men ; It is a godlike
frame of spirit, discovering itself most of all in serene
and clear minds, in deep humility, meekness, self-
denial, universal love of God, and all true goodness,
without partiality and without hypocrisy ; whereby
we are taught to know God, and knowing Him to
love Him, and conform ourselves, as much as may
be, to all that perfection which shines forth In
Him."2 " True religion never finds itself out of the in
finite sphere of the Divinity; and wherever It finds
beauty, harmony, goodness, love, ingenuity, wisdom,
holiness, justice, and the like, it is ready to say,
here and there is God : wheresoever any such per
fections shine out, a holy mind climbs up by these
sunbeams, and raises itself up to God."^
" Religion Is no such austere, sour, and rigid thing,
as to affright men away from it : no, but those that
are acquainted with the power of It, find It to be
altogether sweet and amiable. . . . It is no
sullen Stoicism — no sour Pharisaism ; it does not
consist in a few melancholy passions, in some de
jected looks or depressions of mind : but it consists
' Discourse IX., c. ii. p. 417- " Discourse VIII., cv. p. 401. 402.
2 Discourse IX., c. viii. p. 467.

l86 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
in freedom, love, peace, life, and power ; the more It
comes to be digested into our fives, the more sweet
and lovely we shall find it to be."^ ^
Enough has been presented to show how solid,
fine, and rich a thinker Smith is. Of all the pro
ducts of the Cambridge School, the ' Select Dis
courses ' are perhaps the highest, as they are the
most accessible and the most widely appreciated.
Many for whom the other members of the Platonic
group possess comparatively little interest, and who
have barely heard of Smith's teacher, Whichcote,
have read with admiration these Discourses. And
indeed no spiritually thoughtful mind can read them
unmoved. They carry us so directly into an atmo
sphere of divine philosophy, luminous with the
richest lights of meditative genius. Philosophic
elevation is their pervading characteristic. We see a
mind religious to the core — tremulous in Its inmost
cords with pious aspiration — not only free from all
pletistic weakness and dogmatic narrowness, but
poising itself naturally at an altitude out of sight of
them. Smith is not only no controversialist, but the
dust of controversy has never touched him. His
mind bears no scores of party conflict, but is fresh
as a new-born life, with open eyes of poetic wonder
and divine speculation. H e has not painfully reached
the serene heights on which his thoughts dwell ; but
these heights are the natural level of his lofty and
abounding spiritual nature.
This elevation marks in our author both a certain
' ^ Discourse IX., c. ii. p. 486, 487.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 187
intellectual and spiritual advance. The breadth and
freedom of mind which we traced in Whichcote still
lies. In some degree, on a polemical and scholastic
background. He has worked himself out of tech
nical subtleties, and obtained a firm, rational footing ;
but many of the trappings of the scholastic spirit
still clung to him, as his correspondence with Tuck
ney plainly shows. He made a clear advance upon
the theological spirit of his age, having pushed the
lines of his religious thought manfully forward, till
they touched all the diverse aspects of speculative
and moral culture. He thus redeemed religion from
the dogmatism and faction which were alike preying
upon it, and taught men to see in it something
higher than any mere profession of opinions or
attachment to a side. He well conceived and drew
its ideal as the spiritual education of all our faculties.
But this, which may be said to form the summit of
Whichcote's thought, attained through meditative
struggle and prolonged converse with Platonic specu
lation, was the starting-point of Smith. He began
easily on this level, and never needed to work out
for himself the rational conception of religion. Re
ligion was inconceivable to him under any other
form than the idealisation and crown of our spiritual
nature. The Divine represented to him from the
first the complement of the Human — the perfect orb
which rounds and completes all its aspirations and
activities. The assimilation of man to God was
consequendy the one comprehensive function of
Christianity ; and whatever contributes to this spirit
ual transformadon, is more or less of the nature of

l88 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
religion. Wherever there is, as he says, " beauty,
harmony, goodness, love, ingenuity, wisdom, holiness,
justice, and the like, — there is God."
But Smith did more than merely develop this
comprehensive ideal of religion. He not only mor
alised and broadened the conception of the Divine,
but he entered directly into its whole meaning, and
inquired what It was as a phase of human know
ledge as well as of human attainment That reli
gion cannot be separated from reason, nor morals
from piety, was of the nature of an axiomatic truth
to him. His special thought was, how does reason
authenticate religion, and the divine idea in its
totality rise into a valid element of human know
ledge ? He was, in short, from the beginning, and
by right of mental birth, a Christian philosopher.
Divinity presented itself to him in the shape of a
science. Even if the answers given by him to the
questions which he thus raised had been less satis
factory than they are, it was yet a definite advance
in the thought of the seventeenth century to ask
such questions — to conceive the Idea of a philosophy
of the Divine. Theology had been hitherto viewed
as a product of the schools, or, at the best, as a
series of deductions drawn from a supposed infallible
oracle. It was tradition, or dogma, resting on a
verbal basis. And Smith, no doubt, had been
taught It as a system of inherited formulse ready to
hand for the soludon of all quesdons. But what
ever traditionary impressions had thus been made
upon him had sunk into the large depths of his
spiritual nature, and become merely food for its

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 189
richer nurture, rather than left any formal trace
behind. The great Ideas of Theology were taken
up by him from the first as vital elements within the
sphere of the soul Itself Whatever they are, he
felt that they must have a real conformity to man's
higher reason and life ; and that the only valid
science of them Is to be sought in the ascertainment
of this conformity. A science of the Divine may
embrace many things — elements of communicated
and derived, as well as of primary knowledge ; but
its basis must lie on the primary affirmations of the
soul, and all its structure be traced back to the great
question of man's essential character in the scale of
being. What then is this ? Is man essentially a
spiritual being ? And if so, what are the true con
tents of his spiritual reason or consciousness ? These
— the eternal problems of religious philosophy —
were the problems to which Smith directly ad
dressed himself with clear-sighted and admirable
perspicacity. And his answers, upon the whole, go as nearly to
the heart of their solution as any that have been
given. He vindicated the distinctive reality of the
human soul with clear effect, if not with any special
resources of argument. All arguments on such a
subject, from those of the Phaedo downwards, are,
indeed, more or less of the same nature ; and It may
be safely said that no man, not already convinced. Is
likely to be convinced by them. Smith's argumen
tative details are not more conclusive than others.
But he unfolds all the spiritual qualides of humanity
with such a rich depth of insight, that we feel, as it

190 JOHN SMITH : FOUNDATIONS OF
were, the fact of the soul to realise itself before us.
The sense of the Divine grows quick within us at
the touch of his living analysis ; and it witnesses
itself, not as the result of any elaborate Inference,
but as the primary being which we are — the original
ground of all our life. And this is really the most
that any thinker can accomplish on the subject
For the question of spirit versus matter — of im
mortality versus epicureanism — comes In the end to
a rational assumption on the one side or the other.
We must start spiritualist or materialist — from
within or from without. Or we may start from the
meeting-point of both — the eternal doubleness which
seems to lie at the basis of being. The one cannot
be logically deduced from the other, but the one
may be found in the other ; an essential antithesis —
subject-object — with the subjective or spiritual side
in front. And the thinker who brings out most
vividly, and helps us to understand most fully, this
spiritual side of human thought and life, does most,
after all, to attest its reality.
The manner in which Smith attaches the belief in
God to the belief in Immortality was also a special
service rendered to the cause of religious philosophy.
He saw clearly what has since his time been so often
declared authoritatively by the highest thinkers, that
the only basis for the recognition of the Divine in
the world was the recognition of the spiritual In
man. Both the fact and the character of Deity
must be primarily read in the human soul ; and,
without " this interpreter within," all life and nature

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 191
would be really void to us of divine meaning. If
we do not find God within ourselves, " the whole
fabric of the visible universe may whisper to us of
Him," but the whisper will be unintelligible, for —
" We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does iSfature live.''
All questions concerning God and religion thus
really cluster round one root — the root of an original
divine principle In man. Revelation itself Is nothing
else than the historical Illumination of this fontal
source of the Divine ; while practical religion is its
growth or development on the volitional and moral
side. Smith saw all this plainly and expounded it
luminously. He saw also, what perhaps Whichcote
has not made so apparent, that the Divine, while
thus linked to human reason, and finding its first
and essential utterance in it. Is yet as a living power
something which human nature itself could never
elaborate. No mere philosophy or moralism can
ever transmute itself into evangelical righteousness.
This has Its rise within the heart, no doubt, but not
as a spontaneous product. It can only come from
the . original fount of Divinity — a new divine force
within us springing up into eternal life.
While Smith therefore broadened, and in a sense
humanised, the conception of religion, he at the same
time, with admirable balance of mind, vindicated it
as a distinctive divine power revealed in man — a
righteousness not self-evolved, but divinely given
"through the faith of Christ, the righteousness

192 JOHN SMITH.

which is of God by faith." ^ He was one of those
rare thinkers in whom largeness of view, and depth,
and wealth of poetic and speculative insight, only
served to evoke more fully the religious spirit;
and while he drew the mould of his thought from
Plotinus, he vivified the substance of it from St
Paul.
1 Phil. iii. 9.

193

IV.
RALPH CUDWORTH — CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY IN
CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM.
I. Cudworth is the most celebrated of the Cam
bridge school, and at the same time its most sys
tematic and formal writer. The movement takes in
him its most elaborate and complete expression. He
was born a year before John Smith, and entered
Emmanuel College a few years earlier. The son of
a clergyman of some distinction and learning, he
enjoyed advantages which the son of a " small
farmer" in Northamptonshire could scarcely have
done, and had thus the start of his contemporary at
the university and all along his academic course.
He attained his Master's degree five years earlier,
and immediately after became fellow and tutor
of his college, with a large circle of pupils, as
many as eight-and-twenty — " an instance scarce ever
known before even in the largest colleges of the
university." ^ It is very probable, therefore, that
Smith was one of Cudworth's pupils, although the
^. An Account of the Life and prefixed to the editions of Cud-
Writings of Ralph Cudworth, worth's ' Intellectual System,' &c.,
D.D., by Thomas Birch, M.A., we are indebted for almost all we
F.R.S. To this very fragmentary know of his life.
and imperfect account, commonly
VOL. II. N

194 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
fact Is not mentioned in any scanty notices we have
of the life of either. Between them may be traced
not merely the common type of mind belonging to
the members of the school, but certain special affini
ties and ways of looking at the religious questions
of their time. This is especially true of the earlier
and more generalised phase of Cudworth's thought,
which may be said to represent the period of his con
nection with Emmanuel College. A special bond of
association between these illustrious students is all
the more likely when we remember that Whichcote,
the lifelong friend of Cudworth, was the patron and
friend of the young student from Northamptonshire.
Ralph Cudworth was born at AUer, In Somerset
shire, in i6i 7. His father, like himself, had been bred
at Emmanuel College, and afterwards became minis
ter of St Andrew's Church In Cambridge. He was
finally rector of Aller, and appears to have died
young. His widow, whose family name was Machell,
and who had been nurse to Prince Henry, eldest son
of King James, married a second time Dr Stough-
ton, who educated his son-in-law, the subject of our
notice, with great care. To this careful training he
owed his early advantages and the rapid progress
which he made at Cambridge. When admitted in
1630 a pensioner in Emmanuel College he was only
thirteen years of age, and his father-in-law gave him
" this testimony, that he was as well grounded In
school learning as any boy of his age that went to
the university." ^ Entered thus early on the books
of Emmanuel, he did not matriculate till two years
1 Birch.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 19S
afterwards — in 1632 — when he commenced his aca
demic career with great enthusiasm, and " appHed
himself to all parts of literature with such vigour "
that he became Master of Arts at the age of twenty-
two "with great applause."^ His distinguished
career as a tutor immediately followed. Among
his pupils was the well-known Sir William Temple,
whose subsequent reputation as an ambassador,
politician, and writer, has Impressed this fact upon
his biographer. There is no evidence, however, that
Temple was any credit to his tutor. On the con
trary, his university course seems to have been
rather idle, and he left Cambridge after two years
without taking a degree. While tutor in his col
lege, Cudworth was presented to the rectory of
North Cadbury, in Somersetshire. This living was
in the gift of Emmanuel College, and we find
Whichcote presented to it in 1643. Cudworth
appears to have been his immediate predecessor for
about two years. He is said to have been appointed
in 1641 ; but there is some doubt whether he ever
left the university and settled In the country.
His first authorship belongs to this period. In
1642 he published ' A Discourse concerning the true
nature of the Lord's Supper.' It does not appear
whether this discourse was ever delivered. It could
scarcely have been a sermon, from the elaborate and
highly scholastic manner In which it is constructed.
It is composed of an introduction and six chapters,
in which the author expounds, with learned discur
siveness, the relation of the Lord's Supper to the
1 Birch.

196 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
sacrificial customs of the Jews and heathens, and
tries to discriminate its true meaning as illustrated
by these customs. Like most of his subsequent
writings, it is overlaid by masses of rabbinical, pat
ristic, and classical quotation, which often carry him
away from the subject instead of serving to explain
it. Bochart, Spencer,^ and Selden are said to have
greatly admired it ; and Warburton, " my most in
genious and learned friend," says Birch, styled it in
a letter to him " a masterpiece of its kind." It was
published, along with another kindred production of
his pen at this time, with only his Initials, R. C.
The Idea or true notion of the Lord's Supper, ac
cording to Cudworth, is that it is a Feast upon sacri
fice — an Epulum sacrificiale or Epulum ex oblatis,
analogous to the feasts which followed upon the
^ Spencer was devoted to the the Nonconformists after the Re-
same kind of erudition. He was storation, as well as in many of his
the author of a once celebrated rational explanations of the Jewish
work, ' De legibus Hebrsorum rites and customs, entitle him to be
ritualibus et earum rationibus, rememberedinconnectionwiththe
libri tres.' Like Cudworth, he Cambridge school. But he does
was educated at Cambridge (1645- ^'^^ seem to have entered much,
1655), and was for a brief space if at all, into its philosophical
Master of Corpus, in the chapel aims ; and his writings are now
of which he is interred. He was forgotten. Taylor had no connec-
afterwards Dean of Ely. tion with Cambridge in the latter
Sir William Hamilton (Note A., part of the seventeenth century,
ed. of Reid, p. 782) mentions Spen- nor, apparently, after leaving it,
cer along with Smith, Cudworth, so early as 1636.
More, and Taylor (.?) as forming Bochart was a Protestant pas-
" the illustrious and congenial tor at Caen, where he died sud-
band by which the University of denly in 1667. His extensive eru-
Cambridgewas illustrated during dition in Biblical antiquities, geo-
the last half of the seventeenth graphy, and natural history, was
century." Spencer's breadth of the wonder of his age.
mind, displayed in his conduct to

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 197
legal sacrifices among the Jews. The legal sacri
fices, being only types and shadows, were often " re
peated and renewed, as well as the feasts which were
made upon them ; but now the true Christian Sacri
fice being come, and offered up once for all never to
be repeated, we have therefore no more typical sac
rifices left among us, but only the feasts upon the
true Sacrifice still symbolically continued, and often
repeated, in reference to that one great Sacrifice,
which is always as present in God's sight, and effi
cacious, as if it were but now offered up for us." In
this view he sees a solution of the controversy as to
whether the Lord's Supper itself be a sacrifice. It
is not sacrificium, but, in Tertullian's language, /«r-
ticipatio sacrificii ; " not the offering of something up
to God upon an altar, but the eating of something
which comes from God's altar, and is set upon our
tables." This is the key to the aposde's meaning in
the passage, i Cor. x. 21, — " Ye cannot drink the cup
of the Lord and the cup of devils ; ye cannot be par
takers of the Lord's table and of the table of
devils." The things which the Gentiles sacrificed,
they sacrificed to devils ; and so the feasts which
followed were called the feasts of devils, and to
share in those feasts was really to be partakers of
the idol sacrifices. No Christian could consistendy
join in those feasts. In like manner, they who par
took of the legal sacrifices were sharers of those
sacrifices. It is the same analogy which gives us the
true explanation of the Lord's Supper. They who
join in it participate in the sacrifice of the cross.
The rite itself is not sacrificial ; but it derives all its

198 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
special meaning and virtue from the great Sacrifice
which it commemorates. The communion-table is not
an altar, but it points back to one. It is wrong to call
it an altar, because this implies a place upon which God
Himself, so to speak, " eats, consuming the sacrifice
by His holy fire ;" whereas the true idea is, that God
in the Holy Supper gives us meat to eat of In short,
there may be said to be "a sacrifice in the Lord's Sup
per symbolically, but not there as offered up to God,
but feasted on by us; and so not a sacrifice but a sacrific
ial feast; which began too soon to be misunderstood."
This bare abstract of Cudworth's argument is suf
ficient to show the breadth and compass both of his
religious and philosophical conceptions at this early
age. He was as yet only twenty- three. It indi
cates, moreover, his capacity of carrying controversy
back to its first principles, and disentangling the
truth and error generally to be found on both sides
of a great question. This eclectic healthfulness of
spirit is particularly noticeable in the introduction.
The Discourse itself, and the profusion of erudite
illustrations from Maimonides, Kimchi, and other
Jewish writers, which illustrate it, are more like his
time and a theological manner which was beginning
to disappear. The following may be taken as a
specimen of its higher thoughtfulness.
" All great errors have ever been intermingled
with some truth. And indeed, if falsehood should ap
pear alone Into the world, in her own true shape and
native deformity, she would be so black and horrid
that no man would look upon her; and therefore
she hath always had an art to wrap up herself in a

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 199
garment of light, by which means she passed freely
¦ disguised and undiscerned. This was elegantly
signified in the fable thus : Truth at first presented
herself to the world, and went about to seek enter
tainment ; but when she found none, being of a
generous nature, that loves not to obtrude herself
upon unworthy spirits, she resolved to leave earth,
and take her flight for heaven : but as she was going
up, she chanced, Elijah-like, to let her mantle fall ;
and Falsehood, waiting by for such an opportunity,
snatched it up presently, and ever since goes about
disguised in Truth's attire. Pure falsehood Is pure
nonentity, and could not subsist alone by Itself;
therefore it always twines up together about some
truth, as Athenagoras, the Christian philosopher,
speaks, like an ivy that grows upon some wall,^ twin
ing herself into it with wanton and flattering em
braces, till it have at length destroyed and pulled
down that which held It up. There is always some
truth which gives being to every error. ' There is
ever some soul of truth, which doth secretly spirit
and enliven the dead and unwieldy lump of all errors,
without which it could not move or stir.' ^ Though
sometimes it would require a very curious artist, In the
midst of all Error's deformities to descry the defaced
lineaments of that Truth which first it did resemble."
There is the same mixture of learning and
thoughtfulness in the other publication which belongs
to this period of Cudworth's life, with less substance,
however, in the thought, and more irrelevancy in
1 HapaSvdSos elxos. qua corpus omnium errorum
'¦' Est quadam veritatis anima, agitat et informat.

200 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
the erudition. It is entitled, ' The Union of Christ
and the Church ; in a Shadow,' — and may have been
originally a sermon. As in the former production
his aim is to vindicate the true idea of sacrifice in
relation to the Lord's Supper, so here it is his aim
to restore what he believes to be an important truth
from the corruptions with which the Romanists had
overlaid It. In the eagerness with which men pass
from one extreme to another, the Protestants appear
to him to have lost sight of the higher meaning of
marriage — " that mystical notion which is contained
in it." Quoting St Paul,^ he argues that the apostle
plainly regards the union of man and wife as not
only a "bare similitude" of the mystical union of
Christ and His Church, in the same manner as the
grain of mustard-seed, for example, in the Gospels, is
a similitude ofthe kingdom of heaven. The apostle's
thought, and the true thought, is deeper than this.
" He makes one to be a real type of the other, and
the other an archetypal copy, according to which
that was limned and drawn out. As the Platonists
use to say concerning spiritual and material things.
' That material things are but ectypal resemblances
and imitations of spiritual things, which were the first,
primitive, and archetypal beings.'"^ And following
out this Platonic conception, he conceives that " God
having framed that excellent plot of the Gospel, and
therein continued the mystical union between Christ
and the Church, delighted to draw some shadowings
and adumbrations of it here below, and left the seal
of that truth upon these material things, that so it
^ Eph, V. 22, 33. '^ Ta aladriTa tov vcrjTov pipripaTa,

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 201
might print the same stamp and idea, though upon
baser matter." Hence, according to him, the institu
tion of man and wife, wherein we see, not only an
accidental likeness, but a true picture of the relation
betwixt Christ and His Church. The lower relation
not merely serves to illustrate the higher, but is its
divinely constituted Image or copy ; Christ and the
Church being sponsus et sponsa archetypi, man and
wife being sponsus et sponsa ectypi. He expounds
this thought under several heads, and heaps around
it a multiplicity of quotations from diverse mystical
authorities, amongst others from the " masters of the
Cabala" — "a kind of secret and mystical divinity,"
he says, "remaining in part yet amongst the Jews."
It is unnecessary to follow his details, curious as
some of them are. They add little or nothing to
the sum of his thought expressed in the opening of
the tract, much as they serve to show the unusual
range of his speculation and reading.
Even at this early age Cudworth had evidently
mastered all the main sources of philosophy, medi
eval as well as classical. Like Smith, he quotes
freely, not only from the Neo - Platonists and the
Jewish schools, but also from such modern re
vivers of the Platonic spirit as Pico of Mirandola
and Ludovicus Vives.^ His own thought is in fact
burled amidst the mass of philosophical antiquarian-
ijohn Louis, commonly called the reign of Henry VIII. He
Ludovicus Vives, was born at was the author of various philo-
Valencia 1492. He was an inti- sophical works, all more or less
mate friend of Erasmus, and spent directed against the Scholastic
a considerable portion of his life Philosophy, which attracted much
as his friend did, in England in attention in their day.

202 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
Ism In which he sets it. He draws at will from
the most various and recondite authorities. We
are pleased also to light upon an allusion to
Bacon, " our late noble Viscount of St Albans,"
showing that the most recent, no less than the most
ancient, philosophical writings were known to so
omnivorous a student In all there is observed an
ardent mind Insatiably in search of higher know
ledge — ¦ marvellously elevated and powerful In Its
range, but moving along a transcendental road apt
to terminate in cloudland. We see. In short, some
thing of the strength and weakness of the school
In its Infancy ; its spiritual rationality verging on
fantastic mysticism ; its noble culture, with its un
critical and clumsy deference to authority.
The subjects handled in both these early tracts
are directly religious ; but it is their philosophical
more than their religious tendency which inter
ests us. Rather It is the manner in which they
apply a philosophical spirit to religious questions.
From the first Cudworth is more or less of a re
ligious philosopher. His mind instinctively seeks
the root of religion and morality — their ultimate
basis In the laws and principles of human nature.
There is some reason for thinking that already,
before he had quitted the shades of Emmanuel as
tutor, he had turned his attention to the great topics
which were afterwards so much to occupy him.
This may be inferred from the theses he maintained
two years later (1644), on taking his degree of
bachelor of divinity, in which he discussed the
nature of good and evil and the existence of incor-

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 203
poreal substances.^ The natural affinity of his mind
was towards such discussions, and they may have
been the fruit of his own reflectiveness in those
studious years. But they may have also been sug
gested by signs which his eager thoughtfulness dis
cerned in the philosophical atmosphere. Hobbes
had printed his ' Elementa Philosophica de Cive' at
Paris in 1642 ; and a stray copy may have reached
Cambridge. So inquisitive and philosophically sensi
tive a mind as Cudworth's would readily catch any
breath of new philosophy, especially of a character
so alien as that of Hobbes, and so opposed to his
deepest convictions.
In the same year In which he took his degree of
bachelor of divinity, Cudworth was appointed master
of Clare Hall by the Parliamentary Visitors in the
room of Dr Paske, whom they had ejected. The
Puritan authorities confided in Cudworth as they
did in Whichcote, on what precise grounds it would
be difficult to say. He had certainly not been active
as a religious partisan. His theological spirit was
very unlike that of the Westminster Assembly. But
along with Whichcote he had been bred at Em
manuel, and to have been a student there seems to
have formed a sufficient passport to promotion In
the eyes of Parliament. It is not said that Cud
worth, like his friend, had any scruples in accepting
^ See page 29. These theses degree of doctor of divinity. Can
in iMtin verse are found printed he have discussed the same sub-
in a pamphlet on ' Free Will,' jects twice over ? Birch's affirma-
published from Cudworth's MSS. tion is positive in favour of the
in 1837. They are there dated not former date.
1644 but 1651, when he took his

204 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
the enforced vacancy. He moves amongst all the
contentions of his time with a singular freedom of
conscience ; and, in turn, all its changes seem to have
dealt gently with him. While Whichcote at the
Restoration was compelled to retire from the uni
versity by special command of the king, he remained
in quiet possession of his post. The comparatively
active character of the former as a leader of opinion
may account for this; or it may have been that Cud
worth was protected by some special influence. He
was shortly afterwards presented by Sheldon to a
living. Yet during all the time of the Common
wealth he was in some respects peculiarly associated
with Cromwell and his friends.
In the year succeeding his appointment to Clare
Hall, he was further made Regius Professor of
Hebrew, and from this time he is said to have
chiefly given himself to academical work. He had
an especial knowledge of Jewish literature, and
great Interest in Jewish antiquities. The duties
of such a position were therefore thoroughly con
genial to him. He lectured or " read every Wed
nesday"^ — his subject being the Temple of Jeru
salem. Worthlngton, who communicates this In
formation, was himself an adept at such studies ; and
when Cudworth was obliged to be absent he seems
to have taken his place as Professor of Hebrew,
and lectured in his stead. ^
1 MS. letter quoted by Birch. thington, Master of Jesus College,
2 "Feb. 13, 165J, Feb. 20-27. Cambridge, &c., printed for the
I read Hebrew lectures in the Chetham Society, chiefly from
schools for Dr Cudworth." Diary the Baker MSS. in the British
and Correspondence of Dr Wor- Museum, under the editorship

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 205
But while thus mainly occupied with his duties as
a teacher in the university, he does not seem to
have abandoned, as Birch says he did, " the func
tions of a minister." He may no longer have had
any duty as a preacher ; yet it was two years after
his appointment as Professor that he preached his
great sermon before the House of Commons. We
shall afterwards examine this sermon, which is one
of the most remarkable productions of Cudworth's
genius, and along with the companion sermon which
follows out the subject, by far his finest composition.
If he had never written anything else, these sermons
would have given him a position among our rational
theologians. Their strain could hardly have been
relished by the leaders, either of the army or of the
Presbyterian majority in Parliament, then pausing
in face of one another, jealous and uncertain as to
their real movements. But it is not the less, but all
the more, noble on that account ; and the picture of
catholic Christianity which he draws was not with
out its effect on the greatest minds that listened to
him. He continued in these academical functions for
ten years, but apparently not without distraction.
" Though the places which he held in the univer
sity were very honourable," says Birch, "yet he
found the revenue of them not sufficient to sup
port him." This is a curious statement, and
illustrates either the singular poverty of two im-
of James Crossley, Esq. Mr and his notes are full of valuable
Crossley is an enthusiastic ad- matter regarding them.
mirer of the Cambridge divines,

206 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
portant positions in the University of Cambridge,
or some tendency to unreasonable extravagance in
their occupant. The latter seems an unlikely sup
position. The true explanation, in the light of what
follows, probably Is, that while as master of Clare
Hall and Professor of Hebrew, Cudworth may have
had enough to support him as a bachelor, he had
not enough to enable him to marry and settle with
comfort. He evidently desired to do this, and
even contemplated leaving the university — an event
spoken of with apprehension by Worthlngton in his
letters.^ Apparently he had left for a time, but
whether to undertake any duty elsewhere is not
stated. The misfortune of his academical loss was
averted by the mastership of Christ's College
becoming vacant In 1654, and Cudworth's appoint
ment to the succession. " After many tosslngs,"
says Worthlngton, " Dr Cudworth Is, through God's
providence, returned to Cambridge, and settled in
Christ's College, and by his marriage more settled
and fixed." Of his wife we learn nothing. Neither
Birch nor Worthlngton tells us anything ; but we
shall afterwards hear of one of his daughters, illus
trious in herself, and as the special friend of
Locke. Three years previous to his marriage and
settlement in Christ's College, Cudworth had taken
his degree of doctor of divinity.
There is little to be told of his life from this

^ Jan. 1651. "If through want accomplished with what is noble
of maintenance he (R. C.) should and exemplarily academical, it
be forced to leave Cambridge, for would be an ill omen."
which place he is so eminently

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 207
period till the Restoration. His mind was fully
occupied in the work of his college, and of the
Hebrew Chair which he continued to hold, and also
in the quiet satisfactions of domestic life. Occa
sionally we catch a glimpse of him in connec
tion with the outward political world. In the year
1657 there appears to have been an intention to
submit what Is known as the authorised version of
Scripture, issued In the reign of James, to further
revision and correction. The business was intrusted
to the Lord Commissioner Whitelocke and a "grand
Committee " of Parliament This Committee in
turn nominated a sub-committee to send for and
advise with certain divines, amongst whom we find
the names of Walton and Cudworth, as to the
several " translations and Impressions of the Bible."
The Committee, Whitelocke himself tells us, often
held their conferences with these and the other
" most learned men in the Oriental tongues " at his
house. " Diverse, excellent, and learned observa
tions " were made as to some mistakes In the
authorised version ; " which yet was agreed to be
the best of any translation in the world." " I took
pains In it," he adds, " but it became fruitless by the
Parliament's dissolution." It may well be doubted
whether the time was favourable for meddfing with
King James's version, or whether Cudworth and
Walton, with all their learning, were men to whom it
would have been safe to intrust any remodelling of
its grand English.
Cudworth's appointment to consult with the Com
mittee of the House of Commons on this important

208 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
subject is a sufficient evidence of his connection with
the party in power. But there are indications of
closer and more confidential intercourse betwixt him
and the Commonwealth authorities. John Thurloe
was Secretary of State both for Cromwell and his
son Richard. He was a busy, earnest man, devoted
to the great Protector and the interests of his
Government. He had a keen eye for ability in
all the services of the State, like his master ; and
is said afterwards to have refused Charles II.'s
office of employment on the plea that he despaired
of serving him as he had served Cromwell, " whose
rule was to seek out men for places, and not places
for men." Thurloe and Cudworth were confidential
correspondents. In reply to an application as to
men belonging to the university fitted for political
and civil employment, we have a long reply from
Cudworth ^ — a second letter unavoidably delayed,
he says — in which he recommends various persons
to Thurloe's notice, as fitted for political and civil
employments ; among others, Mr George Rust, a
fellow of his college, of whom we have already
heard in connection with Taylor,^ and who will
come before us again. He Is described in the
letter to Thurloe as "an understanding, pious,
discreet man, of exceeding good parts, and a
generall scholar, but one that seems not so willing
to divert himselfe from preaching and divin
ity, which he hath of late intended; otherwise
his parts are such as would enable him for any
' The reply is without date in Birch's Account, &c.
* See p. 350, 351, vol. i.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 209
employment." On another occasion Cudworth is
found recommending to the Secretary of State, as
chaplain to the English merchants at Lisbon, Mr
Zachary Cradock, "afterwards provost of Eton
College, and famous for his uncommon learning and
abilities as a preacher."
Such communications betoken cordial relations
betwixt Cudworth and the Commonwealth govern
ment. In themselves they may not come to much ;
but they mean more than at first they seem to
do. For to Cromwell and his officials the ap
pointment of a Protestant chaplain to the English
residents at Lisbon was a serious affair, with some
international significance. How far our divine came
in contact with the great Protector himself there is
no means of clearly determining. , But the language
of a subsequent letter to Thurloe, written in the
beginning of 1659, after the accession of Richard,
leaves it to be Inferred that Cromwell had person
ally known and appreciated him. The letter has
a special interest in reference to the writer's liter
ary employments. " Now I have this opportunity I
shall use the freedom to acquaint you with another
business. I am persuaded by friends to publish
some discourses which I have prepared in Latine,
that will be of a polemicall nature, in defence of
Christianity against Judaisme, explaining some chief
places of Scripture, controverted between the J ewes
and us (as Daniel's prophecy of the Seventy
Weekes, never yet sufficiently cleared and im
proved), and withall, extricating many difficulties
of chronologie. Which taske I the rather under-
VOL. II. o

210 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
take, not onely because it is suitable to my Hebrew
profession, and because I have lighted on some
Jewish writings upon the argument as have scarcely
been ever seen by any Christians, which would the
beter enable me fully to confute them ; but also
because I conceive it a worke proper and suitable to
this present age. However, though I should not
be able myselfe to be any way instrumental to these
great transactions of Providence (not without cause
hoped for of many) amongst the Jews ; yet I per-
swade myselfe my pains may not be alltogether
unprofitable for the setting and establishing of
Christians ; or, at least, I shall give an account of
my spending such vacant hours as I could redeeme
from my preaching and other occasions, and the
perpetual distractions of the bursarship, which the
statutes of this colledge impose upon me. It was
my purpose to dedicate these fruits of my studies to
his Highnes (to whose noble father I was much
obliged), if I may have leave, or presume so to doe ;
which I cannot better understand by any than your-
selfe, If you shall think it convenient, when you have
an opportunity to Insinuate any such thing, which I
permltte wholly to your prudence. I intend, God wil
ling, to be in London some time in March ; and then
I shall walte upon you to receve your information."
The Discourse concerning Daniel's prophecy of
the Seventy Weeks, mentioned in this letter as ready
for publication, was never published. It is said still
to exist in manuscript. It is highly commended by
Dr Henry More in his preface to his explanation
of the " Grand Mystery of Godliness," published in

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 211
1660. According to his statement, it was read in the
public schools of the university with great applause
and admiration — demonstrating to the satisfaction of
the hearers and the confusion of Joseph Scaliger,
whose " over-great opinion " had too long misled the
world, that the manifestation of the Messiah had
" fallen out at the end of the sixty-ninth week, and
His passion in the midst of the last in the most
proper and natural sense thereof ; " " which demon
stration," adds Cudworth's admiring friend, " is of
as much price and worth in theology, as either the
circulation of the blood in physic, or the motion of
the earth in natural philosophy." Such panegyric Is
unhappily its own refutation. It Is somewhat diffi
cult now to understand it, and the fascination which
such subjects had for men like Cudworth and More.
The higher speculations which already had interested
our author, were certainly ill exchanged for the com
position of a polemical treatise against the Jews as
to the Interpretation of Daniel's prophecy. But such
prophetical studies, it is to be remembered, were
directly suggested by his Hebrew professorship,
and those Jewish antiquarian researches which so
powerfully attracted him. They were, moreover. In
tensely exciting to his age, and even, thirty years later,
to Newton and his age. It is curious to reflect that
the only bond of connection between these two great
names should be across the barren line of studies,
which most wise men have now agreed to set aside.
In writing to Locke, in the beginning of 169 1, New
ton explains his idea of the apocalyptic vision in
Daniel (c. vil.) as identical with that of St John

212 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
(Rev. xii.) ; and in the same letter sends his
" service " to Mrs Cudworth, then resident with her
daughter. Lady Masham, with whom the author of
the ' Essay on the Human Understanding' was at
the same time domiciled, and continued to be so till
the close of his life in 1703. Cudworth, Newton,
and Locke, all concentrating their interest upon
a literal Interpretation of an obscure vision in
Daniel, is a phenomenon hardly intelligible to our
age, and the new eyes with which it has learned to
look upon Scripture and interpret its prophetical
mysteries. The Restoration left Cudworth in undisturbed
possession of his academical position. He is said
even to have written a copy of verses In congratula
tion of the event ^ We have no other means of
ascertaining his feelings regarding it. Probably he
felt, as many did, that Charles's return was the only
means of saving the country from prolonged anarchy.
It is very unlikely that the friend of Cromwell and
the correspondent of Thurloe cherished any enthusi
astic emotions of loyalty. He had cordially accepted
the Commonwealth while it lasted ; and his wish to
dedicate the fruits of his prophetic studies to Richard
Cromwell, in the beginning of 1659, do not indicate
any doubts of its permanence. If he hailed the
Restoration, therefore, in a congratulatory ode, he no
doubt did so in the spirit of official compliment which
was then so common. As he had served Cromwell
and his son— so when the country turned from
¦¦ Published in "Academias Cantabrigiensis 2QSTPA, sive ad
Carolum II., reducem, &c., gratulatio."

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 213
Cromwell to Charles, and the return of royalty
seemed an absolute necessity to the establishment
of civil order and peace, he was equally ready to
serve the new Government. There is much to be
said from Cudworth's point of view for such an ac
commodating spirit. He was not, and had never
been, a party man. He was, in fact, singularly free
from party or political enthusiasm, deeply interested
as he was in the great principles lying at the founda
tion of civil and social order. It was not for him, he
may have thought, to interfere with political changes,
or to quarrel with the government desired by the
country. He had not adapted his theological prin
ciples to the Puritan authorities — he did not now
change them to please the Caroline bishops. But as
he had accepted the Parliament and the appointment
which it offered him, so now he joined with the
national feeling in welcoming the king ; and when
Sheldon presented him to a living, he saw no reason
for refusing it. We do not wish that he should have
done so ; but we cannot help regretting that men
like Cudworth were so passive in this great crisis.
It may have been their duty, as It was their conveni
ence, to acknowledge quietly the new order of things ;
but it was certainly also their duty to raise their voice
on behalf of an equitable and liberal settlement of
Church affairs. This they shrank from doing ; and,
so far as we know, fell in, however reluctantly, with
the tide of tyrannous reaction. We cannot wish
that Cudworth had repelled Sheldon's kindness ; but
it was certainly no credit to him, or to any of the
Cambridge school, that they did not protest against

214 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
Sheldon's policy. '^ More than once in the course of
our history we have had occasion to point out this
fatal practical timidity on the part of men who yet
did so much intellectually to advance the cause of
liberty — -who, in fact, first enunciated in England Its
true principles. Thinkers as they were, with a com
prehensive Insight Into the genuine principles both
of social and religious order, they lacked courage,
and the adventurous enthusiasm which carries for
ward a great cause. And this is why History has
hitherto done so little justice to them. Men of
thought who do not venture to stand boldly forward
in defence of their principles, — who in fact deliberately
fall behind the men of action in the gravest turns of
the State, — must be content to be forgotten — com
paratively, at least — when the story of the State
comes to be told.
From this time forwards there can barely be traced
any outline of circumstance in Cudworth's life. The
living to which he was appointed, two years after the
Restoration, was the vicarage of Ashwell in Hert
fordshire ; but it does not appear whether he ever
settled there. Birch's ' Account,' sufficiently Im
perfect up to this point, now passes into mere desul
tory confusion, out of which it is impossible to extort
any sequence of narrative. We are told that he was
formally admitted to his living in the end of 1662 ;
' In severely characterising, as more than the bishops, that led
we have more than once done in the reaction. This does not alter
the course of these volumes, Shel- our judgment, however, either
don's conduct at the Restoration, of the bishops or of our divines
we do not overlook the fact that in so far as they did not raise
itwas the House of Commons,even their voices for a wiser policy.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 215
but we get no further trace of him till the beginning
of 1665. Then we have a series of letters, one from
Cudworth himself to Worthlngton, and others from
More to Worthlngton, which serve to throw some
light on his Intellectual plans and labours. He
had reverted to his former speculations, and was
busy with his treatise on " Moral Good and Evil."
Probably the course of thought since the Restora
tion had alarmed him, and reawakened all his anxiety
to clear up the essential idea of morality, and place
its fundamental principles on a rational basis. But he
seems to have worked slowly, and halted frequently
in his progress. In the mean time the subject was
taken up by More, at the earnest entreaty of certain
friends; and our author seemed likely to be forestal
led in the great design of his life. His anxiety on
this score is the subject of his letter to Worthlngton,
which. bears the date of January 1665. Natural as
his feelings may have been, there is something un
dignified In their mode of expression, and the curious
jealousy which he betrays lest More should really
anticipate him. " You know, I have had this deslgne
concerning Good and Evil, or Natural Ethicks, a
great while; which I begun above a year agoe (when
I made the first sermon in the chapel about the
argument) to study over anew, and dispatch a dis
course about it. No man had so frequently exhorted
me to it, and so earnestly, as this friend. But, about
three months since, unexpectedly, he told me on a
suddain, he had begun a discourse on the same
argument. The next day, in writing, I imparted
my mind more fully and plainly to him. Whereupon

2l6 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
he came to me, and told me he would speak with
me about It after a day or two. So he did, and then
excused the business ; that he could not tell whether
I would dispatch and finish it or no, because I had
been so long about it ; that Mr FuUwood and Mr
Jenks had sollicited him to do this, and that you
were very glad that he would undertake it But
now he understood I was resolved to go through
with it, he was very glad of it ; that he would desist
and throw his into a corner. All this I impart to
you privately, because a common friend. I have
not spoken to anybody else but Mr Standlsh, and
something to Mr Jenks and Fullwood."
More certainly appears in the higher light in this
correspondence. He seems unaffectedly anxious that
Cudworth should do the work rather than himself
His reluctance to enter upon it, and his deference to
the claims of his friend, are frank and genuine. In
his second letter he gives a detailed account of all
the circumstances which led to his writing himself an
ethical treatise — how little at first he relished the
idea, but how gradually his mind was attracted by
it, as well as his conscience moved by the impor
tunity of his friends.^ Nothing would content them
but his " setting upon the work, as it was uncertain
when Dr Cudworth's would come out ; " and the
effect of so much earnestness was, that he awoke one
morning with all the subject on his mind, and began
seriously to think of a task thus providentially pre-
^ He repeats the same account dion Ethicum ' published in 1667.
virtually in his address ad lee- — See subsequent page.
torem, prefixed to his ' Enchiri-

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 217
sented to him, crossing as it did the " order of his
studies " and " other great and innocent pleasures,"
which he had promised himself in following out this
order. We do not learn the special causes which retarded
the publication of Cudworth's work. There may
have been some difficulty regarding the publication, as
in the case of his later great work — a difficulty which
More's work may have escaped, as being In Latin ; or
the size of the work, as was the fashion of all his writ
ing, may have so grown upon him as to impede its
progress. There is a Discourse by him on Moral
Good and Evil existing in manuscript, and extend
ing in several folios to nearly a thousand pages.
There is further a manuscript containing the " heads
of another book of morality," which seems to have
been especially intended in refutation of Hobbes. '^
And, lastly, there is his well-known ' Treatise con
cerning Eternal and Immutable Morality,' which
was not given to the public till almost half a century
after his death — in 1731 — when It was edited from
papers in possession of his grandson. Sir Francis
Cudworth Masham, by Dr Chandler, then Bishop of
Durham. It is difficult to say to which of these
treatises the correspondence with Worthlngton refers.
1 These MSS., with others, in- extracted from the ' Biographia
eluding a Discourse on Liberty Brittanica,' will be found by the
and Necessity, probably the same reader in the "Advertisement"
since published under the title of prefixed to the brief Treatise of
• A Treatise of Free Will ;' and Free Will (1837), which is merely
the 'Treatise on Daniel's Seventy a definite expansion of thoughts
Weeks,' already referred to, are on this subject more or less found
preserved in the British Museum, in his larger and better known
The story of Cudworth's MSS., works.

2l8 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
The ' Immutable Morality' Is generally assumed, in
accordance with Dr Chandler's statements in the
preface, to have been composed after the publication
of ' The Intellectual System ; ' and in this case the
larger Discourse, still in manuscript, on Moral Good
and Evil — the title of which more strictly corre
sponds to his own language In writing to Worth
lngton — would probably be the work on which he
was occupied in 1665. The ' Heads of another
Book of Morality,' so far as they are given in detail
by Birch, do not necessarily indicate a separate
treatise. But the question is of little importance.
Cudworth's position as a moralist is abundantly
apparent in his two great works ; and it Is hardly
possible that any further light would be thrown upon it
by the publication of any of his manuscripts. Valuable
as all his intellectual work Is In a certain sense, he Is
not one of those authors whose writings are to be
prized merely for themselves. His voluminousness
was a literary habit. It did not arise from the
growth or expansiveness of his thought, but from
the discursiveness of his mind and the curious stores
of learning at his command. The reader for the
most part can gather the substance of his argu
ment or the pith of his meaning In comparatively
short compass. The ' Immutable Morality,' there
fore, may certainly be held, in conjunction with his
larger work, to give us a complete view of his moral
system. The brief ' Treatise of Free Will,' recently
published,^ adds nothing to its essential meaning.
The publication of ' The True Intellectual System
^ 1837 — see preceding note.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 219
of the Universe ' fills up for the reader what remains
of Cudworth's life. This great work, so far as it
was ever finished (for it remained an Immense frag
ment), was finished and ready to be published in
1 67 1. The imprimatur, by Dr Samuel Parker,
chaplain to Sheldon, now promoted to be archbishop,
bears the date of May 29 In that year. But its
publication was delayed till 1678, on account of
" great opposition from some of the courtiers of
King Charles II., who endeavoured to destroy the
reputation of it when It was first published." Birch,
who gives us this information, adds in characteristic
style, " Irreligion began now to lift up Its head, and
the progress of It was opposed by no person with
greater force and learning than by our author."
The course of thought, as well as the tone of
society, had greatly altered since the days of the
Commonwealth. Tendencies which were then only
beginning to show themselves had grown to maturity.
Hobbes's great work, published in 1651, reflects the
course of change in the .public mind, as it helped
greatly to advance it. The reader of the ' Levi
athan ' now is apt to be struck mainly by the vigour
and life of its speculative delineations ; and no philo
sophical work was ever written with more power
and liveliness. But, after all, nothing Is more re
markable in it than its political spirit and design.
It aimed to set up a new order of things — or, rather,
an old order In a new form. The age had become
sick of theological controversy, and of the struggles
after a higher development of religious and political
liberty. Many had never shared in Its religious

220 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
aspirations, and the very intensity of those aspira
tions, and the fierce conflicts which they provoked,
had served to exhaust them. Thus at length there
was not only a lull, but a resurgence in the tide
of spiritual and political emotion. Men's minds
turned from the chaotic picture of warring sects, a di
lapidated Church, and a Commonwealth which, how
ever strong in the strong hands which ruled it, had
failed to work Itself into any constitutional form to the
old Ideas of authority which had once bound the na
tional life In firm cords of unity, and controlled the
action of both Church and State. Hobbes is one of
the most significant expressions of the spirit of reac
tion in the higher mind of England In the second half
of the seventeenth century. There is nothing deeper
in him than disgust of religious zeal and contentious
ness, and the assertion of an Inviolable rule binding
the whole sphere of religion and morality as well as
politics. But the reaction, as might have been expected,
ran to excess. The ruin of dreams inspired by reli
gious enthusiasm proved fatal not only to religious
ambition, but in many respects to moral and spiritual
life. Men began to doubt of the reality of that
which had promised so much and done so little.
They despaired of a religious philosophy, or of any
theory fitted to organise and bind into one the
higher and lower facts of human life. This Is
always the danger of such a period of national sub
sidence. Not only are religious ideals shattered —
broken in their very attempt to accomplish too
much — but religion itself suffers and becomes dis-

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 221
credited by the absurdities and failures which mark
its course. Never was this more signally illustrated
than after the Restoration. The disgust with which
men turned from the religious controversies of the
preceding period, not only vented itself in weariness
and ridicule of what had gone before, but in a wide
spread distrust of spiritual verities altogether. To
higher minds, who preserved alive their power of
faith as well as of thought, this was the ominous
feature of the times, and excited their chief anxiety.
They could see below the superficial drifts of opinion,
with all their tendency towards some new form of
external authority, deep springs of unbelief They
saw such tendencies in Hobbes, with all his avowed
conservatism in Church and State. Reactionary
and authoritative in the design of his speculations,
it was evident to them that their real drift was to
undermine the foundations of religious truth, and
under a show of respect for it to leave no rational
basis for religion at all. They were not deceived,
as some modern critics have been, by the religious
form and phraseology of his writings. They looked
beyond the surface of his dogmatisms to their
radical spirit and meaning, and drew the unhesitat
ing conclusion that a philosophy which left no divine
capacity in human nature was essentially unchris
tian, and could only be met by a counter-philosophy
which went to the depths of human thought and
belief This was the great task now essayed by Cudworth,
as it had been long pondered by him. No one,
there is reason to believe, had seen earlier, as no

222 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
one estimated more clearly and fully, the force of the
irreligious movement. Further, no one had studied
more closely the dogmatic and formal enthusiasms
which had so long dominated the religious mind of
England, or recognised more the inevitable ten
dency to reaction which lay In them. His broad
and keen rational Insight, and deep though quiet
seriousness, discerned the full nature of the crisis,
and had long done so. Slowly and heavily, but
surely, his mind had been working for years at the
special problems raised by the penetrating and bold
genius of Hobbes, so fitly corresponding to the
spirit of an age at once reactionary and sceptical.
The publication of his great work, ' The Intellectual
System of the Universe,' in 1678, was the outcome
of his long-gathered and laboriously-pondered specu
lation on the subject.
The reception of the work was such as might
have been expected In the evil times on which It had
fallen. Delayed in Its issue by courtier intrigues,
it was assailed almost as soon as made public by
superficial and unthinking religionists. First, a
Roman Catholic student, " with leave of superiors,"
attacked its views of the pagan philosophy and
mythology, which no doubt raised many questions.
Then " a Protestant divine, Mr John Turner," ac
cused the author of being a " Tritheistic,"- — a sect for
which he supposes the author " may have a kindness,
because he loves hard words." He Is certain that
Cudworth, If not a " Tritheistic," is " something else
without either stick or trick," and " that the most
charity itself can allow the doctor, if it were to step

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 223
forth and speak his most favourable character to the
world. Is, that he is an Arian, a Socinlan, a Deist."
Even Dryden, whose easy indifference and professed
conversion to Romanism very well represent the
spirit of the time, had a hit at the author of the
' Intellectual System' as having "raised such strong
objections against the being of a God and Provi
dence, that many think he has not answered them."
There Is never anybody so unthinkingly orthodox
as the clever man of the world, when he thinks it
necessary to interest himself in religion. The broad
open-eyed candour and large -mindedness of Cud
worth were unintelligible to the definite, facile, and
sharply moulding intellect of the author of the
' Religio Laid' and 'The Hind and the Panther.'
Cudworth's fate as a Christian thinker was dis
couraging, and he felt it to be so ; but it was, as
Shaftesbury '^ said, " only the common fate of those
who dare to appear fair authors." The religious
world welcomes decision rather than frankness, and
is still capable of accusing an author " of giving the
upper hand to the atheists, for having only stated
their reasons and those of their adversaries fairly
together." Fifty years later, Warburton, who greatly
admired and appreciated the author of ' The Intel
lectual System,'^ speaks ^ with some bitterness of
the treatment which he received, and Its effects.
Although few, he says, were able to follow his pro
found arguments, yet " the . very slowest were able
to unravel his secret purpose — to tell the world that
1 Characteristics, ii. 262. Lond. ^ Preface to second vol. of his
1737. Divine Legation of Moses.

224 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
he was an atheist in his heart and an Arian in his
book ! Would the reader know the consequence ?
- — why the zealots inflamed the bigots ? —
' 'Twas the time's plague, when madmen led the blind.'
The silly calumny was believed ; the much-injured
author grew disgusted ; his ardour slackened ; and
the rest, and far greatest part, of the defence never
appeared." In course of time, however, the great power and
learning of the ' Intellectual System ' secured it a
worthy reception with all thoughtful and scholarly
readers both at home and abroad. Le Clerc, when
he commenced his ' Bibliotheque Cholsie ' In 1 703,
gave large extracts from It, which engaged him in a
controversy with Bayle. He expressed, at the same
time, a desire that the work should be translated
into Latin for the benefit of Continental students.
Several attempts were made to do this, but the task
was not accomplished till thirty years later, when
Mosheim, so well known for his labours in Church
history, published his translation, with many valu
able notes and illustrations, which have been again
translated into English, and are found in one of the
most common editions of the ' Intellectual System.'^
A translation was also begun into French in the be
ginning of last century, but never completed. In the
mean time the work was abridged In English by Mr
Wise, a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, under the
title of ' A Confutation of the Reason and Philoso
phy of Atheism.' This abridgment was published
' London, printed for Thomas Tegg, 1845.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 225
at London in 1706, and prefaced by an elaborate
introduction, in which Cudworth's views regarding
the Trinity and the resurrection of the body are
examined at length.
With the publication of his great work Cudworth's
life may be said to terminate, although he survived
ten years later. Whether or not it be altogether
true, as Warburton says, that the reception of his
work disgusted him, there Is reason to think that his
intellectual activity was not prolonged beyond the
date of its appearance. In the same year he was
made a prebendary of Gloucester. Probably the
same influence which had befriended him at the
Restoration, secured for him this final promotion.
He died at Cambridge on the 26th of June 1688, in
the seventy-first year of his age, and was interred in
the chapel of the college in which he had so long
lived as master.
Of his personal character and manners we have
no description ; nor Is it easy to discern the familiar
lineaments of the man, as he lived and moved
among his friends, through all the meagre and de
sultory vagueness of Birch's ' Account,' or any other
notices of his life which have come down to us.
In his correspondence with Worthlngton, we have
seen some trace of a slight narrowness and jealousy
of temper; but this is a mere transitory ebullition,
which after all may mean very little. More's more
agile and discursive spirit had outstripped him in his
favourite intellectual ambition of writing a book on
" Natural Ethics," and some soreness of feeling was
excusable in the circumstances. Such indications as
VOL. II. P

226 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
we can gather point upon the whole to an elevated
and noble character — a spirit not only free from the
vulgar sectarianisms of the time, but intent upon
high objects, and generous as it was lofty. His
portrait conveys the same impression. If some
what heavily lined, like that of Whichcote, and
even touched with austerity In its massive and
long - drawn features. It is also full of sweetness.
The face is that of a severe and powerful, but
also a gentle - minded and tolerantly meditative,
student. We have already alluded to Cudworth's daughter,
and our notice of the father would not be complete
without adding a few words concerning her. She
inherited his metaphysical genius, and may be said
by herself to deserve a niche in the history of Eng
lish philosophy ; but she Is chiefly known as the fast
and cordial friend of Locke, who died at her house
in 1 704, where he had resided in retirement some
years before. She became the second wife of Sir
Francis Masham of Oates, in the county of Essex ;
and her son rose to some distinction as a master in
the Court of Chancery. Her chief writing was, ' A
Discourse Concerning the Love of God,' published
at London in 1696. She introduces this tract with
observing that " whatever reproaches have been
made by the Romanists on the one hand, of the
want of books of devotion in the Church of England,
or by the Dissenters on the other, of a dead and
lifeless way of preaching, it may be affirmed that
there cannot any where be found so good a collec
tion of discourses on moral subjects as might be

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 227
made of English sermons, and other treatises of
that nature, written by the divines of our Church.
Which books are certainly of themselves the greatest
and most general use of any ; and do most conduce
to that which is the chief aim of Christianity, a
good life." She then " animadverts upon those who
undervalue morality, and others who strain the
duties of it to an impracticable pitch, and pretend to
ascend by it to something beyond or above it ;" and
afterwards proceeds to consider the conduct of those
who build their practical and devotional discourses
upon principles which will not bear the test, but
which oblige them to lay down such assertions of
morality as sober and well - disposed Christians
cannot understand to be practicable. And here she
applies herself to the examination of Mr John Nor-
ris's^ scheme in his ' Practical Discourses' and other
treatises, wherein he maintains that " mankind are
obliged strictly, as their duty, to love, with desire,
nothing but God only, every degree of desire of any
creature whatsoever being sinful. Which assertion
Mr Norris defends upon this ground that God, not
the creature, is the immediate efficient cause of our
sensations ; for whatsoever gives us pleasure has a
right to our love : but God only gives us pleasure ;
therefore he only has a right to our love. This
hypothesis is considered with great accuracy and
ingenuity by Lady Masham, and the bad conse
quences of it represented in a strong light. Her
^ Norris, the famous idealist, tonic movement will afterwards
rector of Bemerton, whose con- appear.
nection with More and the Pla-

228 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
discourse was translated into French by Mr Peter
Coste, and printed at Amsterdam in 1 705."^
Lady Masham was plainly a genuine disciple of
her father's rational theology, distinguished like him
by breadth of insight, candour, and love of truth, as
well as by unusual learning, sagacity, and penetra
tion. It is interesting to connect through her the
names of Cudworth, Newton, and Locke. The his
tory of philosophy Is lightened, and even its higher
significance brought into relief, by any episode which,
like this, unveils its diffusive influence, and the
pleasant friendships which underlie and unite its
great movements.
II. In now turning to examine Cudworth's work as
a Christian teacher and thinker, there are three main
aspects in which he may be regarded : ist. As a
preacher; 2d, As a theistic thinker; and, 3d, As a
moralist. The same lines of thought more or less
appear in all his writings, and there is a specially
intimate relation betwixt his higher philosophy, un
folded in the ' Intellectual System,' and his views as
a moralist ; but it will conduce to clearness, and
help to bring out more fully both the value of his
labours and his position in connection with his time
and the school to which he belongs, to consider him
in these successive points of view.
I. Our knowledge of Cudworth as a preacher
rests upon two sermons, one of which, as already
mentioned, he delivered before the House of Com
mons on the 31st of March 1647. This sermon of
itself places him in the highest rank as a preacher.
^ Birch, xxvi., xxvii., preface to Tegg's ed.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 229
Large in thought and eloquent in expression, it is
instinct throughout with a glow of feeling and har
mony and grace of composition which are too rare
with him. It Is a pleasing surprise, after his earlier
writings, published, with only his Initials, In 1642.
These serve to show the bent of his mind and the in
struments of his early culture — the recondite sources
from which he fed his great intellectual appetite ;
but he is hardly as yet in them thinking for himself
With great acuteness, Ingenuity, and learning, they
have something also of the rawness and pedantic
parade of acquired learning which belong to a young
writer. But in his sermon before the House of Com
mons his mind moves with power, ease, and felicity.
There is everywhere the inspiration of a living and
noble sense of truth — a perception of its divine catho
licity and grandeur — which raises him far above the
sectarian contests waged in Its name ; while the cir
cumstances in which he speaks— the great crisis and
the great audience before him — give an unwonted
wing to his thoughts, and an unwonted rapidity and
symmetry to their form. We give a few extracts : —
" Ink and paper can never make us Christians ;
can never beget a new nature, a living principle in
us ; can never form Christ, or any true notions of
spiritual things, in our hearts. The Gospel, that
new law which Christ delivered to the world. Is not
merely a dead letter without us, but a quickening
spirit within us. Cold theorems and maxims, dry
and jejune disputes, lean syllogistical reasonings,
could never yet of themselves beget the least glimpse
of true heavenly light, the least sap of saving know-

230 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
ledge In any heart. All this Is but the groping of
the poor dark spirit of man after truth, to find it out
with his own endeavours, and feel it with his own
cold and benumbed hands. Words and syllables,
which are but dead things, cannot possibly convey
the living notions of heavenly truths to us. The
secret mysteries of a divine life, of a new nature, of
Christ formed in our hearts, they cannot be written
or spoken, language and expressions cannot reach
them ; neither can they be ever truly understood,
except the soul itself be kindled from within, and
awakened into the life of them. A painter that
would draw a rose, though he may flourish some
likeness of it in figure and colour, yet he can never
paint the scent and fragrancy ; or if he would draw
a flame, he cannot put a constant heat into his
colours ; he cannot make his pencil drop a sound, as
the echo in the epigram mocks at him. All the
skill of cunning artisans and mechanicks cannot put a
principle of life into a statue of their own making.
Neither are we able to enclose in words and letters
the life, soul, and essence of any spiritual truths,
and, as it were, to incorporate it in them."
Again : " The best assurance that any one can
have of his interest in God is doubtless the con
formity of his soul to Him. Those divine purposes,
whatsoever they be, are altogether unsearchable and
unknowable by us ; they lie wrapt up in everlasting
darkness, and covered in a deep abyss. Who is
able to fathom the bottom of them ? Let us not,
therefore, make this our first attempt towards God
and religion, to persuade ourselves strongly of these

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 23 1
everlasting decrees ; for if at our first flight we aim
so high, we shall haply but scorch our wings, and
be struck back with lightning as those giants of old
were, that would needs attempt to assault heaven.
And it Is indeed a most gigantick essay to thrust
ourselves so boldly into the lap of heaven ; it is a
prank of Nimrod, of a mighty hunter, thus rudely to
deal with God, and to force heaven and happiness
before His face, whether He will or no. The way to
obtain a good assurance, Indeed, of our title to heaven,
is not to clamber up to it by a ladder of our own
ungrounded persuasions, but to dig as low as hell by
humility and self-denial in our own hearts. And
though this may seem to be the farthest way about,
yet it is indeed the nearest and safest way to it.
We must, as the Greek epigram speaks, ascend
downzvard and descend upward, if we would indeed
come to heaven, or get any true persuasion of our
title to it.
" O divine love ! the sweet harmony of souls ! the
musick of angels ! the joy of God's own heart ! the
very darling of His bosom ! the source of true hap
piness ! the pure quintessence of heaven ! that
which reconciles the jarring principles of the world,
and makes them all chime together! that which
melts men's hearts into one another! Let us en
deavour to promote the Gospel of peace, the dove-
like Gospel, with a dove-like spirit. This was the
way by which the Gospel at first was propagated in
the world : Christ did not cry, nor lift up His voice
in the streets ; a bruised reed He did not break, and
the smoking fiax He did not quench ; and yet He

232 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
brought forth judgment unto victory. He whispered
the Gospel to us from Mount Zion in a still voice;
and yet the sound thereof went out quickly through
out all the earth. The Gospel at first came down
upon the world gently and softly, like the dew upon
Gideon's fleece ; and yet it quickly soaked quite
through It ; and doubtless this is the most effectual
way to promote it further. Sweetness and Inge
nuity will more command men's minds than passion,
sourness, and severity ; as the soft pillow sooner
breaks the flint than the hardest marble. Let us
follow truth in love ;'^ and of the two, indeed, be con
tented rather to miss of the conveying of a specula
tive truth than to part with love. When we would
convince men of any error by the strength of truth,
let us withal pour the sweet balm of love upon their
heads. Truth and love are the two most powerful
things in the world ; and when they both go together
they cannot easily be withstood. The golden beams
of truth and the silken cords of love twisted together
will draw men on with a sweet violence, whether
they will or no. Let us take heed we do not some
times call that zeal for God and His Gospel which
is nothing else but our own tempestuous and stormy
passion. True zeal is a sweet, heavenly, and gentle
flame, which maketh us active for God, but always
within the sphere of love. It never calls for fire
from heaven to consume those who differ a little
from us In their apprehensions. It is like that kind
of lightning (which the philosophers speak of) that
melts the sword within, but singeth not the scab-
' He gives the Greek, of course, in the text—" dKr/eevetv iv dyajny."

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 233
bard ; it strives to save the soul, but hurteth not the
body. True zeal is a loving thing, and makes us
always active to edification, and not to destruction."
The spirit of Cudworth's sermons represents the
earlier and less systematic phase of the Cambridge
movement, as we see it in Whichcote. The attitude
of the two preachers towards the religious questions
and features of the time is very much alike. There
is the same condemnation of its dogmatic and for
mal extravagances, of its assumptions of peculiar
knowledge and zeal, and generally of its love of
religious agitation rather than of religious practice ;
while, in opposition, there appear the same leading
ideas, — of the co-ordinate relation of all knowledge,
the complementary character of philosophy and reli
gion, and the essential connection of religion with
life and morality.
[a) He is eloquent in favour of all true know
ledge, " which of itself naturally tends to God, who
is the fountain of It ; and would ever be raising our
souls up upon its wings thither, did not we detain it,
and hold it down, in unrighteousness. All philo
sophy to a wise man, to a truly sanctified mind, is
but matter for divinity ^ to work upon. Religion is
the queen of all those inward endowments of the
soul ; and all pure natural knowledge, all virgin and
undeflowered arts and sciences, are her handmaids,
that rise up and call her blessed."
There is no thought more frequently reproduced
in all the Cambridge writings than this of the har
monious relation of philosophy and religion, of cul-
^ "YXij t^s Qeokoylas.

234 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
ture and piety, of reason and faith. The thought
takes various expression, and was considered of vital
importance for the time. It would be far from true
to say that Puritanism was unfavourable to learn
ing. In its higher representatives it was eminently
learned. It was none the less Its tendency in all Its
extreme forms to depreciate natural knowledge, and
separate the provinces of rational inquiry and reli
gion. The very name of Reason excited suspicion,
and was supposed to carry with It the taint of
heresy.^ This tone was all the more fatal in the
seventeenth century that philosophy was then be
ginning Its independent career, and ready from its
side to isolate and exalt the spirit of rational thought
discredited by the prevailing religionism. It was
therefore a real service to bring forward the har
monious relations of philosophy and religion, and to
emphasise the spiritual as the higher side of human
nature, and not a factitious addition to it made by
some process of religious magic. To separate reli
gion from thought is to convert it into a superstition.
To separate thought and philosophy from religion Is
to take from them their highest inspiration. No ade
quate philosophy can ignore the great problems of
life, or turn aside from those spiritual realities which
are the crown of all our " Inward endowments," and
move with such force human history. Division of
labour need not imply contradiction of interpretation.
A philosophy which is true to facts should find its
complement rather than its antagonist in a religion
which Is also true to facts. A faith which is real,
' Culverwell's Light of Nature, chap. I. — See subsequent page.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 235
and a reason which is right, support and do not dis
place one another.
This was the confident idea of the Cambridge
divines : and their instinct was right even where
their own practice failed. They were by no means
free from irrationalities of their own ; but at least
they kept aloof from that mass of traditionary and
scholastic theory which overlaid the Puritan theo
logy, and which has been so little able to withstand
the sifting processes of modern inquiry. They gave
their chief Interest and study to the moral side of
Christianity and the divine power which it reveals
in the life and sacrifice of divine love. They cer
tainly never show any jealousy of the progress of
thought. They know of no conflicts betwixt reason
and faith to be soldered up by theological or other de
vices. Their Ideal devotion to reason Is unbounded.
It is the sovereign of the harmonlcal or rightly-ad
justed soul, to which, " re-enthroned In her majestick
seat, and reinvested with her ancient power," all
lower faculties and interests must give an account of
themselves.^ {b) But If Cudworth strongly maintained the ulti
mate harmony of knowledge and faith, he still more
strongly maintained the unity of faith and life, of re
ligious principle and morality. This Is his favourite
thought as a preacher. The passages already quoted
show this. But he repeats the truth with frequent
felicities of expression. The object of religion, he
insists, is not to propagate opinions, however right
or orthodox, still less " to contend for this or that
1 Second Sermon, p. 79, 80 — Works, vol. ii.

236 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
opinion, but only to persuade men to the life of
Christ." This is " the pith and kernel of all religion ;
without which all its several forms are but so many
several dreams." " Christ was vitcs Magister, not
scholce : and he is the best Christian whose heart
beats with the truest pulse towards heaven ; not he
whose head splnneth out the finest cobwebs. He
that endeavours really to mortify his lusts, and to
comply with that truth in his life which his con
fidence Is convinced of is nearer a Christian, though
he never heard of Christ, than he that believes all
the vulgar articles of the Christian faith, and plainly
denleth Christ in his life. The way to heaven is
plain and easy. If we have but honest hearts ; we
need not many criticisms, or school -distinctions.
Christ came not to ensnare us and entangle us with
captious niceties, or to puzzle our heads with deep
speculations, and lead us through hard and craggy
notions Into the kingdom of heaven. No man shall
ever be kept out of heaven for not comprehending
mysteries, if he had but an honest and good heart
that was ready to comply with Christ's command
ments." It was the distemper of the times to invert all
this, — " to scare and fright men only with opinions,
and make them solicitous about the entertaining of this
and that speculation ; whilst, in the mean time, there
is no such care taken about keeping of Christ's com
mandments. We say, Lo, here is Christ, and Lo,
there is Christ, In these and these opinions ; whereas,
in truth, Christ is neither here nor there, nor any
where but where the spirit of Christ, where the life

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 237
of Christ, is." For men " to spend all their zeal
upon a violent obtruding of their own opinions and
apprehensions upon others which cannot give enter
tainment to them," is repugnant both to the doctrine
and example of Christ, and an endless source of
" discord and contention In Christian common
wealths ; whilst, in the mean time, these hungry and
starved opinions devour all the life and substance of
religion, as the lean kine in Pharaoh's dream did eat
up the fat." A violent opposition to " other men's
superstitions," without any inward " principle of
spirit and life in their own souls," was common with
the noisy religionists of the age. " Many that pull
down Idols in churches set them up In our hearts ;
and whilst they quarrel with painted glass, make no
scruple at all of entertaining many foul lusts, and
committing continual idolatry with them."
It required some courage to address the British
House of Commons in this style in 1647 ; and some
of those addressed can hardly fail to have been
pricked in their conscience at the faithful words.
There were many Puritan preachers ready to handle
" school- distinctions " and the "captious niceties"
of orthodoxy ; but there were few who ventured
to speak such words of truth and soberness, and
to set forth so distinctly the essence and meaning
of all religion. At the close of a religious re
volution which had excited the most hostile pas
sions, and in which the most sacred subjects had
passed into shibboleths of party warfare, it was a
great thing to hold up before those who had been
champions alike in the theological and civil strife,

238 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
a picture of religion which transcended all their
wrangling, and had nothing to do with their most
cherished watchwords. The very air had become
infected with religious contentiousness. Many a grim
senator and warrior before the preacher had spent
their lives, and were willing to have spent their blood,
for " this or that opinion;" and their hearts must have
moved within them to hear from one who was ani
mated by as strong a love of spiritual liberty as any
of them, that religion in its vital essence had no con
nection with their favourite speculations and fancies
— that an enthusiasm which boasted of its peculiar
privilege was no more religion than a sacerdotalism
which had prated of ceremonial blessing, and that
the only true religion was loving God and keeping
His commandments — the being good and doing
good. In the same spirit Cudworth deals with the special
question ofthe relation of justification and sanctifica
tion, so much spoken of in the religious language of
the day. His views here, in fact, are nothing else
than a theological application of his general view of
the nature of religion. He does not object to dis
criminate betwixt justification and sanctification, or
even to speak of an " imputative righteousness." It
is not his intention " to quarrel about words and
phrases, as if Christ's meritorious satisfaction might
not be said to be imputed to those that repent and
believe the Gospel for remission of sins ; much less
to deny what the Holy Scripture plainly asserts, true
and living faith that worketh by love, which Is the
very essence of the new creature or regenerate

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 239
nature, to be imputed or accounted for righteousness."
But he strongly repudiates the idea of ever conceiv
ing salvation apart from its essential moral meaning,
and cautions against the " Antinomian error, too
often insinuated under the notion of imputed right
eousness, as if there were no necessity of inherent
righteousness, and a real victory over sin, in order
to salvation."
In the second sermon there are many references
to the religious parties of the time, which Cudworth
sketches, upon the whole, with some degree of fair
ness and Insight, but without adequate discrimina
tion. True criticism, even of phenomena before their
eyes, is not to be expected in the writers of the
seventeenth century. Their descriptions are inex^
tricably mingled up with their own prejudices and
fancies. Cudworth is free from prejudice ; but his
portraiture is clumsily moulded by his own pre
conceptions, and the habits of a meditative rather
than a critical Intellect. Yet It is easy to trace under
his somewhat vague epithets ^ certain obvious diver
gencies of religious opinion, and still more easy to
recognise the variety and violence of the religious
agitations which moved the century. It was well for
the country as well as for religion that there were
minds which stood firm amidst the commotion, and
which could conceive and embody such a picture of
genuine Christianity as Cudworth's sermons both
present. It is comparatively rare in every age to
1 Ceremonial righteousness, ing philosophy, Antinomian lib-
opinionative zeal, high-flown en- erty, &c.— Second Sermon, p. 84.
thusiasm, seraphicism, epicuris- Birch's ed., vol. ii.

240 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
find earnestness combined with sense, and a pro
found depth of religious feeling with a comprehensive
realisation of the facts of life. Intensity is the cheap
product of excitement ; and repeated experience
proves that there is no force of mere genius which
may not be caught by the rising gale of religious
enthusiasm, and wafted to the wildest heights of
absurdity. " Ceremonial righteousness," or sacerdo
talism in all its forms ; " opinlonative zeal," or evan
gelical dogmatism In its many varieties ; an " epicur-
islng philosophy," and an " Antinomian liberty,"
seemed destined to perpetual resurrection with the
wavering advance of religious history. But it re
mains nevertheless true, that the chief hope for
human progress and the perfection of the individual
lies In a rational Christian thoughtfulness which is
at once true to the divine and the human ; and which,
while it bows before the mysteries of the Unseen,
acknowledges the claims of those natural verities
which religion should elevate and purify, but which
it can never supersede.
2. We now turn to consider Cudworth in his
chief aspect of a religious thinker, as presented in
his great work, ' The true Intellectual System of the
Universe.' Large as this work now is, extending
in the original folio edition to about 900 pages, it
was designed to be larger. It expanded uncon
sciously in the hands of its author till it outgrew all
proportion. Some of the digressions run entirely
away from the main argument, and make the book
rather a series of treatises than a definite and co
ordinated treatise. If it never loses altogether

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 241
sight of the subject, which reappears luminously
at the close as at the beginning, it has yet, in the
mean time, taken up and explored correlative
topics at such length that the reader loses all
thread of continuous advance, or at least fails to
hold in his mind the windings and divergencies
of its semi -speculative and semi-historical discus
sions. The massive build of thought is unrelieved
by any graces of style or felicities of literary outline.
Yet there is often a marvellous expressiveness in
special phrases and passages ; and the general effect
Is highly definite and significant. Taken as a whole,
it is a marvellous magazine of thought and learning,
and remains one of the most undoubted monu
ments of the philosophical and theological genius of
the seventeenth century.
At first, Cudworth seems to have intended merely
a treatise on Liberty and Necessity. But after
wards, as he himself explains, he saw that the ques
tion betwixt him and the Hobbean philosophy was
really one as to the rational interpretation, or true
intellectual system, of the universe — what is the
true position of man therein, and what is first and
what Is last in the order of being? He defines In
the outset the various forms of fatalism which appear
to him inconsistent with the true order of the uni
verse. There is ist, — Material necessity, or what he
calls the Democrltic fate, which leaves no room for
the idea of God or spiritual existence at all, but
explains all phenomena, even those of thought, by
mechanical laws, and the formation of being by the
fortuitous concourse or aggregation of atoms. 2d,
VOL. II. Q

242 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN .

Theological or religious fatalism, taught by many
scholastic philosophers and modern theologians,
which regards all actions as equally necessitated, and
refers the ideas of good and evil to the arbitrary will
of God. This he calls the " divine Fate immoral."
3d, A fatalism like the ancient stoicism, which, with
out denying the reality of moral ideas, or a supreme
moral Being, Identifies this Being with the invari
able order of nature, and leaves no room for free-will
in men ; or, in his own words, takes away from men
"all such liberty as might make them capable of praise
and dispraise, rewards and punishments." This he
calls the " divine Fate moral." All these forms of
fate or necessity are essentially inconsistent with a
true theory of religion. The first destroys the
divine idea altogether : the second and third mu
tilate the idea so as to leave It without force or
value. Against these views he sets forth three great
principles, which, on the other hand, appear to him
to sum up religious and moral truth, — viz., ist. The
reality of a supreme divine Intelligence and a spiri
tual world, against the atomistic materialism of De- j
mocrltus and Epicurus ; 2d, The eternal reality of/
moral Ideas against the Nominalists of the middle;
ages, and modern divines imbued with their prin
ciples ; and, 3d, The reality of moral freedom and
responsibility in man against all pantheistic natural
ism and stoicism. The work which we have, under
the name of ' The True Intellectual System of the
Universe,' deals formally only with the first of these
principles and its correlative antagonism, although

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 243
the author often falls into trains of argument more
appropriate to the second or third stage of his de
signed plan. The treatise on ' Immutable Morality '
may be taken as the accomplishment of the second
part. Cudworth thus describes his complete conception
or philosophy of religion in his own language : —
" These three things are the fundamentals or
essentials of true religion — namely, that all things
do not float without a head and governor, but
there is an omnipotent understanding Being pre
siding over all ; that God hath an essential good
ness and justice ; and that the differences of good
and evil moral, honest and dishonest, are not by
mere will and law only, but by nature ; and conse
quently, that the Deity cannot act, influence, and
necessitate men to such things as are in their own
nature evil : and lastly, that necessity is not in-
trinsical to the nature of everything, but that men
have such a liberty or power over their own actions
as may render them accountable for the same, and
blameworthy when they do amiss ; and, consequently,
that there is a justice distributive of rewards and
punishments running through the world." These
three things " taken altogether, make up the whole
ness and entireness of that which is here called
' The True Intellectual System of the Universe,'
in such a sense as Atheism may be called a false
system thereof; the word ' Intellectual' being added
to distinguish it from the other vulgariy so-called
' systems of the worid ' (that Is, the visible and cor
poreal worid), the Ptolemaic, Tychonic, and Coper-

244 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
nlcan ; the two former of which are now commonly
accounted false, the latter true."
It is important to notice the moral interest which
lies at the root of all Cudworth's speculation, al
though, in point of fact, the special ethical question
with which he started was not embraced in his ex
tended scheme of argument. Like all his school, he
not only maintained zealously the essential connec
tion of religion and morality in life, but he is unable
to understand any basis for an adequate theory or
philosophy of religion which does not rest on the
conception of man as a free moral subject capable
of choosing for himself good or evil. As religion
cannot exist without morality, so morality cannot
exist without liberty; and thus the divine idea comes
In the end to sustain itself on the fact of free-will as
an essential attribute or characteristic of humanity.
This co-ordination of thought will be found to under
lie all his system of philosophy. Throughout he is
not only, in modern language, an intuitional moralist,
but one who never loses sight of the great idea of
free-will as the core and life of both religion and
morality. The treatise " Of Free Will " shows this
more fully, but not more plainly, than It was pre
viously indicated in his writings.
The break-down of his complete plan makes Cud
worth doubt whether he should not have "spared"
the general tide. His hope had been to embrace
within the compass of a single volume three several
books — " each book having its own particular title ;
as (I.) against Atheism ; (II.) for natural Justice and
Morality founded in the Deity; (III.) for Liberty

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 245
from Necessity and a distributive Justice of Rewards
and Punishments in the world." He makes an
apology for his shortcoming ; but at the same time
maintains the completeness and unity of his work so
far as it had been accomplished. It contained, he
says, " all that belonged to its own particular title
and subject, and was in that respect no piece but a
whole." Cudworth's readers are not likely to find
fault with him for having abbreviated the original
extent of his design, especially as he has In several
places — in the beginning of his fourth chapter, for
example, and elsewhere — really comprised many of
the considerations that would have entered Into the
special treatment of the subjects of the second and
third books proposed by him. His real fault every
where is not abbreviation, but diffusion ; and, as we
have already observed, he Is eminently one of those
writers who carry with them into all special details of
argument the full significance and flavour of the gen
eral principles which lie at the basis of their thought
It is difficult to do justice to a work like Cud
worth's, and yet keep our remarks within any such
compass and unity as would interest the modern
reader, or deserve to interest him. And this dif
ficulty arises not merely from the vast and unorgan
ised materials of the book, but perhaps in a still
greater degree from the constant repetition of its
main ideas. The author constantly returns on the
same strain, and even the same modes of expression,
in meeting the atheistic objections with which he
deals. He lays over and over again Jils theistic
platform in the face of the sub versiv# planes of

246 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
thought which appear before him ; but he often adds
little as he advances to the substance of his argu
ment. He does not dig its foundations deeper nor
raise its structure higher.
The pervading polemical character of the work
adds to its confusion and desultorlness. It is, as
he himself says, an argument " against atheism"
rather than In favour of theism. The first three
chapters are devoted to the several atheistic sys
tems as conceived and discriminated by him. In
the fourth chapter he enters for the first time upon
the positive aspect of his subject, and endeavours to
deal directly with the " Idea of God." But he has
no sooner begun than he is seduced into the two
longest of all his digressions, as to the true meaning
of the pagan mythology and the relation of the
Platonic and Christian Trinities. Both these excur
sions, which are treatises in themselves, spring up In
connection with the primary divine attribute of unity.
In the fifth and last chapter, which is subdivided
into five sections, he resumes the thread of his ex
position of the idea of God, with something in the
shape of proof of the validity or objective character
of the idea^or, in other words, of argumentative
evidence for the being of a God. But here too his
argument Is chiefly negative, or in the form of replies
to objections. It takes everywhere the aspect of
polemical, rather than of direct, exposition. Positive
principles only come out against a vast background
of argumentative and negative detail. They do not
stand clear and together by themselves.
To tak^up the course of discussion, therefore,

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 247
from point to point, in this vast and tangled array,
would be to plunge into a review of systems, and a
mass of " philology and antiquity," as the author him
self says, which would ill reward our pains. For his
mode of dealing with ancient opinion was simply
accumulative. He massed quotations from every
source ; but he neither illumined them with discern
ing insight, nor sifted and fitted them together with
reference to their relative meaning or any sense of
historical perspective. It would be easier for modern
criticism to begin the task de novo, and reconstruct
the ancient speculative systems and the fabric of
pagan mythology from first sources, than to attempt
to unravel the maze which they exhibit in his pages.
We abandon, therefore, all attempt to do so, as labour
both useless In itself and without any bearing on
our purpose, which is to bring out the significance of
Cudworth's own thought, rather than his mode of
handling the thought of others.
Our purpose will be best attained by keeping In
the first Instance free of all his digressions, and
endeavouring to bring out clearly the import of
his theistic attitude against the atheistic systems
which he discusses. We shall then pass briefly
under review his subordinate speculations touching
a plastic Nature, the Trinity, and the Resurrection,
which have been considered peculiarly characteristic,
and exposed him to criticism both in his own time
and since. Finally — after a brief treatment of his
position as a moralist — we shall endeavour to esti
mate his relation to contemporary thinkers, parti
cularly Descartes and Hobbes, and point out how

248 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
far any of his speculations may still have a living
interest in reference to later cosmical controversies.
Under these successive heads we shall gather up in
the best manner all that seems most significant in
Cudworth's labours.
(a) The materialism which Cudworth chiefly at
tacks by name is that of Democritus^ and Epicurus —
what he calls the " Atheism of Atomlcism." But in
reality he has constantly in view the speculations of
his contemporary Hobbes, which he identifies in
many ways with the ancient Democrltic philosophy.
In the same connection he frequently glances at
Descartes, who sought in his physical system to solve
phenomena by the mere laws of their connection or
Interdependence, without the interposition of any
special or subordinate agency. The idea now so
familiar, and it may be said, accepted by all thinkers,
that there Is nothing intermediate betwixt the
Primal Mover and all the phenomena of movement
which constitute the universe, appeared a startling
novelty In the seventeenth century, and presented
peculiar difficulties to the mind both of Cudworth
and of More. The decisiveness with which the
idea was seized by Descartes, and the large sphere
which he thus seemed to clear for the operation of
purely physical laws, seemed to them, as it were, to
empty the world of Deity, and place His action out
of view. And this serves to explain the manner in
which Cudworth occasionally speaks of Descartes, as
well as Hobbes, as Inimical to Theism.^
* B.C. 460-361. he says (c. III. xxxvii.) that they
2 Referring to the Cartesians, "have an undiscerned tang ofthe

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 249
In the opening of his work he distinguishes care
fully betwixt the Democrltic or Atomic Atheism,
and the general theory of the Atomic philosophy.
This theory he defines as the recognition of certain
primitive " simple elements of magnitude, figure, site,
motion," out of which all corporeal phenomena have
been formed. Instead of seeing anything to con
demn in it, he traces It more or less in all the
philosophical systems of antiquity, and even in the
primitive Hebrew literature. The monads of Pytha
goras, the " homogeneous elements "^ of Anaxagoras,
and the " root-elements " ^ of Empedocles, are all to
him but different phases of the same fundamental con
ception ; while a passage In Strabo which speaks of
a certain SIdonlan or Phoenician of the name of
Moschus as the inventor of the Atomic theory,
immediately suggests to him the identity of the said
Moschus and Moses. ^ There was nothing, there
fore, in this venerable and widely accepted dogma,
originally inconsistent with Theism. It professed to
explain the physical origin of the universe, and noth
ing else. It presupposed the divine Will as the primal
moverof all. But Leucippus and Democritus,andafter
them Protagoras and Epicurus, cut off the spiritual
side of the philosophy, and left only the material.
They took away the highest part of it, and left only,
as he says, " the meanest and lowest." In this
respect Hobbes followed them. He repeatedly
recurs to this view, and reprehends his materialistic
mechanic Atheism hanging about ' 'Pifm/iara.
them." ^ C. I. X., along with Mosheim's
^ 'Opoiopeprj. notes. See Tegg's ed., i. 20, 21.

250 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
Opponents with bad faith and stupidity, as well as
impiety, in thus mutilating the old Atomic doctrine,
and putting forth their Atheistic speculations under
its name.
The ancient physiologers, he says, " atomised,
but they did not athelse ; atheistical atomology
was a thing first set on foot by Leucippus and
Democritus." ^ " Joining these two things to-'
gether, the atomlcal physiology, which supposes
that there is nothing in body but magnitude, figure,
site, and motion, and that prejudice or prepossession
of their own minds, that there was no other sub
stance in the world besides body — between them
they begat a certain mongrel and spurious philo
sophy, atheistlcally atomlcal or atomically atheis
tical."^ He strongly repudiates the assertion confi
dently made in his time, and virtually repeated In our
own, that the " ancient philosophers never dreamed
of any such thing as incorporeal substance,"® and
that this conception is therefore " the new-fangled
invention of bigotical religionists." On the contrary,
he maintains that though in all ages there have
been those who have disbelieved the existence of
anything beyond what was sensible, the fact of Mind
or Spirit as a distinct substance has been held by all
the most distinguished names in philosophy, from
Thales downwards. He quotes Plato and Aristotie
at length on the subject, and vindicates to himself
^ C. I. xxvi. the idea of spirit, in the sense of
^ C. I. xliii. incorporeal substance, " could
^ C. I. xix. — His allusion is evi- never enter into the mind of any
dently to Hobbes's statement, c. man by nature."
12, part I. of the ' Leviathan,' that

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 251
satisfactorily the conclusions that all the best of the
ancient thinkers, including the original Atomlsts,
were "both Theists and Incorporealists."
In addition to the mechanical hypothesis which Is
his main point of attack, Cudworth indicates three
other forms of Atheism, to which he gives the
respective names of (i.) Hylopathian ; (2.) Cosmo-
plastic, and (3.) Hylozoic. All are essentially
materialistic, no less than the Democrltic theory,
inasmuch as they do not recognise any existence)
beyond matter ; but they are distinguished from it,
and from each other, by the very different concep- 1
tions under which they regard matter as operating '
in the formation of nature. Whereas the mechanical
theory views the world as originating inexplicably In
the mere conjunction of matter and motion — or atoms
somehow in movement, these speculations severally
conceive matter itself as the spring of everything.
In the first the vXrj or original matter is supposed to
be primarily dead and stupid, but to possess qualities
and forms capable of generating or pushing forward
into all the phenomena of nature, and even those
which contain life and intelligence. This form of
Atheism is associated with the name of Anaximan-
der.^ Again, " the cosmo-plastic or stoical atheism
supposes one plastic but senseless nature to preside
over the whole corporeal universe;" and lastly, " the
hylozoic or Stratonical, attributes to all matter as such
a certain living and energetic nature, but devoid of
all animality, sense, and consciousness." ^ He calls
this latter system "Stratonical," as being derived
1 B.C. 610-547. ^ C. III. XXX.

252 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
from Straton of Lampsacus, a philosopher of the
third century before Christ.'- It is needless to point
out the Identity of the fundamental conception in all
these systems. Matter is conceived in all as pos
sessed of a certain independent activity, capable of
generating or developing the world. " Evolution "
is the underlying idea of all — whereas " mechanism "
or " construction " is the special idea of the Demo
crltic system. And according to the confession of
Cudworth himself all atheistic speculation may be
reduced to these two main types, the one of which
seeks to explain everything by accidental combina
tions of matter and motion, and the other by the con
ception of matter as In Itself living, active, and capable
of endless development Into higher forms of being.
The one may be said to bring us ultimately in face
of an atom or mere point of matter — the other before
some vague conception of material life or force.
Even this distinction disappears in the last analysis,
and leaves us only a general conception of a law of
origin, or primal activity, out of which all being
comes. The essential question concerns the charac
ter of this law in the last resort. Is it material or
spiritual ? Is the primal force any form of matter,
or is it Mind ? Is Mind first or second, or, in Cud
worth's language, "senior" or "junior"? And Is
the world to be conceived as matter plus mind, or
mind plus matter ?
The whole question comes at length to this, and
no one has ever more clearly apprehended or more
' Tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and supposed by some a precur
sor of Spinoza.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 253
distinctly put the Issue than the author of ' The
True Intellectual System of the Universe.' He saw
in full light what so many Theistic thinkers have
taken so long to see, that the subordinate con
ception of " construction " or " evolution "—of an
act or process of origin — is of no vital moment.
Theism is no more essentially involved in the one
conception than the other ; and just as there have
been Theistic Atomlsts, there have been Theistic
Hylozolsts. The Hylozoist who " professes to hold
a Deity and a rational soul Immortal, is not to be
taken for a mere disguised Atheist or counterfeit
histrionical Theist." ^ Hylozoism or Atomism by
themselves are merely modes of conceiving the
order of things or the formation of the world. They
are only Atheistic when combined with corporealism,
— In other words, when they exclude Mind from its
place in nature, as the prime source and ruler of all,
and " acknowledge no other substance besides body
or matter." The essence of Atheism, in short, is the
displacement of Mind from its position at the head
of nature — the subordination of mind to matter as its
outcome and highest flower of development, rather
than its Maker and Governor. All Atheism is
materialism, or, as Cudworth calls it, corporealism.
It denies the independent existence and supreme
character of mind, and leaves us face to face, not
with intelligence, but with a mere vague force which
is capable of growing into intelligence, as into any
other force of cosmic activity. Cudworth insists
over and over again upon this final view of the
1 C. III. iii.

254 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
question, and directs all the force of his argument,
under its pressure, to an attempt to establish the
distinction and supremacy of Mind in the universe.
The genuine Theist, he says, is he " who makes the
first original of all things universally to be a con
sciously understanding nature (or perfect mind)."
" Now," he remarks elsewhere, " there are two grand
opinions opposite to one another," the one of which
contends that " the first p/inciple of all things Is
senseless matter," the other that " the only unmade
thing, and principal cause and original of all other
things, was not senseless matter, but a perfect con
scious understanding, nature, or mind. And these
are they who are strictly and properly called Theists,
who affirm that a perfectly conscious understanding
being, a mind existing of itself from all eternity, was
the cause of all other things ; and they, on the
contrary, who derive all things from senseless
matter, as the first original, are those that are pro
perly called Atheists. Wherefore the true and
genuine idea of God in general is this — a perfect
conscious understanding being (or mind), exist
ing of Itself from eternity, and the cause of all
other things." ^ Again, he says, " all Atheists are
mere corporealists. For as there was never any
yet known, who, asserting corporeal substance, did
deny a Deity, so neither can there be any reason
why he that admits the former should exclude the
latter." ^
Thus broadly does Cudworth lay down the dls-
1 C. IV. iv., at the beginning, statement of his Theistic doctrine.
where he enters upon the positive " C. III. xxv.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 255
tinction between a Theistic and Atheistic theory of
the universe. This is what he means by ' The True
Intellectual System of the Universe ' — the recogni
tion of Mind, or spiritual Intelligence, at the head of
all things, as their original Source and supreme
Governor. That on the other hand is a false or ;
Atheistic system, which, under whatever form,
recognises material nature as originating and con
taining its own development. The first word
of the one system is mind, the second, matter.
The only word of the other is matter — of which
mind Is regarded as merely one of the manifesta
tions or evolutions. This is the ultimate Issue to
which thought comes on the subject But, in order
" more fully and punctually to declare the true Idea
of God," Cudworth adverts to " a certain opinion of
some philosophers who went as it were in a middle
betwixt both the former, and neither made matter
alone nor God the sole principle of all things ; but
joined them both together, and held two first prin
ciples or self-existent unmade beings independent
upon one another — God, and the matter." This
middle opinion he ascribes to the Stoics, on the
authority of Cicero,^ Plutarch, and others. He does
not think, however, that it is fairly attributed to
Aristotle, or to the Neo-Platonlsts, notwithstanding
that these philosophers asserted the eternity of the
world. The independent existence of matter and
its eternity are not to be confounded. Those
who maintain two self-existent principles, God and
matter, he pronounces " imperfect Theists." For
1 Academ. Qusst., lib. i. cap. 6.

256 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
" there may be," he says, " a latitude allowed in
Theism. And though, in a strict and proper sense,
they be only Theists who acknowledge one God
perfectly omnipotent, the sole original of all things,
and as well the cause of matter as of anything else ;
yet it seems reasonable that such consideration
should be had of the infirmity of human under
standings as to extend the word further, that it may
comprehend within it those also who assert one
intellectual principle self-existent from eternity, the
framer and governor of the whole world, though not
the creator of the matter ; and that none should be
condemned for absolute Atheists merely because
they hold eternal uncreated matter, unless they also
deny an eternal unmade mind ruling over the matter,
and so make senseless matter the sole original of
all things."^
Having thus laid down the essential basis of the
idea of God, he shows how It includes not only in
finite power and knowledge, or, in other words,
omnipotence and omniscience, but, above all, infinite
good or love. " Knowledge and power alone," he
says, " will not make a God. For God is generally
conceived by all to be a most venerable and most
desirable being : whereas an omniscient and omni
potent arbitrary Deity, that hath nothing either of
benignity or morality In its nature to measure and
regulate its will, as it could not be truly august and
venerable,^ so neither could it be desirable, It being
that which could only be feared and dreaded." Love,
therefore — ¦" the very idea or essence of the good" —
1 c. IV. vii.
2 According to that maxim, " Sine bonitate nulla majestas."

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 257
must be added to power and knowledge in order to
give us the true conception of the divine, — a conclu
sion for which Cudworth appeals. In his usual man
ner, to the authority of Plato and the Hebrew
Cabalists, who "make a Sephirah in the Deity,
superior both to BInah and Chochmah (understand
ing and wisdom), which they call Chether, or the
crown. "^
It Is at this point of his exposition that the question
of the divine unity comes before him ; and having
started this question, he runs off into a prolonged
disquisition as to the " true and genuine sense of
the pagan Polytheism." It had been argued " that
this opinion of monarchy, or of one supreme God,
the maker and governor of all, hath no foundation in
nature, nor In the genuine ideas and prolepses of
men's minds ; but is a mere artificial thing, owing
its original wholly to private fancies and conceits,
or to positive laws and institutions amongst Jews,
Christians, and Mahometans."^ This, if well founded,
was a formidable objection to the truth of the divine
unity. For one of the fundamental principles of the
philosophy of the Cambridge school was, that all true
divine ideas, as all other ideas, were so far innate —
coincident with the natural anticipations, even when
transcending the actual discovery of the human mind.
If Polytheism, therefore, rather than Monotheism,
was the natural expression of the mind In religion,
and the Monotheistic stage was only reached by
artificial means — the influence of a special culture or
special authority, this constituted an obvious diffi-
' C. IV. ix. ' c. IV. xi.
VOL. II. R

258 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
culty. Were it found true that Pagan nations gene
rally worshipped " a multitude of self-existent and
independent deities, acknowledging no sovereign
Numen — this," he says, " would much have stumbled
the naturality of the divine idea." It was with the
view of " assolllng of this difficulty, so formidable at
first sight," that he entered into the whole subject of
Pagan theology, and sought to trace the hidden
Monotheism underlying its polytheistic modes of
expression. We shall not follow our author in this digression.
The subject of ancient beliefs and of the growth of
religious ideas has passed into a new phase with the
advance of historical criticism. And whatever may
now be thought of our author's conclusion, " that the
Pagan theologies all along acknowledged one sov
ereign and independent deity from which all their
other gods were generated," there are no modern
students who would consider it of any serious im
portance in its bearing on the general question of
Theism. For were it granted that Polytheism was
the natural religion of man everywhere, and that the
course of religious thought, as modern inquiry tends
to show, has been upwards from the rudest nature-
worship to a Monotheism more or less pure — instead
of the Pagan religions being, according to the old
view, distortions and popular corruptions of an
original revelation — the fact nevertheless remains,
that Monotheism represents the higher growth of
reason and civilisation In all countries. And this
fact surely — that man everywhere, with the advance
of thought and the general improvement of his

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 259
nature, outgrows the Polytheistic instincts in which
worship begins — must be held to be a clear proof
that the Monotheistic idea is natural, — as natural,
certainly, as any other growth or discovery of the
human reason in regard to the Divine.
Passing therefore from this topic, and also, in the
mean time, from our author's discussion of the Chris
tian and Platonic Trinities, we shall follow up as briefly
as we can his defence of Theism in his concluding
chapter. Here, as everywhere, he so mixes up his
argument with endless replies to objections, that it
is extremely difficult to disentangle its main thread.
He Is very anxious, as he says, not " to dissemble
any ofthe Atheist's strength;" and so he parades all
their " most colourable pretences against the idea of
God," with a view of exposing their " folly and in
validity." There are, first of all, objections to the
idea itself, already so far explained and vindicated.
These objections are set forth and elaborately re
futed in the first section of the chapter. Then there
is a series of special objections as to the impossibility
of creation out of nothing — the nature of spiritual or
incorporeal existence — the "phenomena of motion and
cogitation," and, finally, the difficulties of providence
— all of which are treated in separate sections. From
this mass of laborious argumentation we shall en
deavour to extract the most distinctive principles.
The essential core of all his thought — the reality
of mind or spiritual existence — Cudworth vindicates
on many grounds, some of them far from satisfac
tory — as, for example, apparitions and miracles.
It is strange how much stress even philosophical

26o RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
theologians in the seventeenth century were in
clined to lay upon the supposed fact of apparitions
as a direct confutation of Atheism. Our author is
less credulous than his friend More or Glanvlll.
He does not give a series of ghost stories in proof
of the supernatural. He admits even that there
is " much of fabulosity " In many of the relations
of such appearances. Still he is very indignant
with men like Hobbes, who had ventured to explain
them by the mere force of imagination — " as if the
strength of imagination were such that it could not
only create fancies, but also real sensible objects,
and that at a distance too from the imaglners. From
which prodigious paradox," he adds, " we may take
notice of the fanaticism of some Atheists, and that
there is nothing so monstrously absurd which men
infected with atheistic Incredulity will not rather
entertain Into their belief than admit of anything
that shall the least hazard or endanger the existence
of a God. For If there be once any invisible ghosts
or spirits acknowledged as things permanent, it will
not be easy for any to give a reason why there
might not be one supreme ghost also, presiding over
them all and the whole world." '
The ideas of miracle and prophecy, again, already
presuppose a higher spiritual intelligence. Super
natural results are only Intelligible on a basis of
supernaturalism. But seeing that this Is the very
point in question. It Is plainly invalid to argue from
an effect which can only be conceived in connection
with a supernatural intelligence, back to the reality of
^ Chap. V. sect. i.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 261
such an intelligence as its cause. The supposed
effect can only come from such a cause ; but the effect
itself, however extraordinary, could never have been
pronounced miraculous without the presumption of
the very thing which It is alleged to prove. Miracles,
in short, being only provable on the presupposition
of supernatural Intelligence, It Is clear we can never
prove the fact of such intelligence by supposed
miraculous occurrences.
But Cudworth urges stronger evidence than any
thing of this kind for his main position. He sees
very well that the question is really one as to the
philosophical interpretation of human nature. Have
we any conceptions except those that we derive
through sense, and the objects of which are essen
tially subject to sense-conditions ? If we have not,
then whatever is not sensible must be to us nothing.
If we cannot validly conceive, but only feign or
" imagine " spiritual existence, then it can have no
reality to us. This is the position which he ascribes
to Hobbes, although, unhappily, he seldom quotes
his great opponent quite accurately ; and the reader
has to be cautious as to the conclusions which he
draws. He makes Hobbes an extreme sensationalist,
and represents him as not only deriving all our
knowledge from sense, but as denying that there can
be any proof of anything apart from sense. Upon
the whole this representation is not unjust, even if
it be somewhat loosely drawn in Cudworth's pages.
Hobbes certainly taught that all our mental con
ceptions are born from sense, that " there is no con
ception in a man's mind which hath not at first

262 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs
of sense." ' Nor can it well be disputed that he
denied the reality of any existence other than
corporeal, although he does not use the exact words
attributed to him by our author — "that the only
evidence which we have of the existence of anything
is from sense." He does not say so directly, but he
plainly implies that pure incorporeal existence is an
absurdity without any valid ground of evidence.^
Cudworth's answer to all this is the common one
— that sense could never give us cognition, nor
originate thought, or the conscious distinction
betwixt nature and ourselves. If sense were our
highest, and indeed only ultimate faculty, all dis
crimination of the objects of our sensations, and of
ourselves in relation to them, would have been
impossible, — " Since one sense cannot judge of
another or correct the error of it ; all sense, as such
(that is, as fancy and apparition), being alike true."
He quotes even Democritus as supporting " two
kinds of knowledge, one by the senses and another
by the mind ;" and appeals to the atomic philosophy
itself — misinterpreted, he says, by the "notorious
dunces " who so much pretend to it — -In proof of
certain supposed qualities of matter (the so-called
secondary qualities), such as heat and cold, bitter and
1 Leviathan, Part I., " Of Man," any man by nature ; because,
c. i. though men may put together
2 Speaking of invisible agents, words of contradictory significa-
he says, in a passage already so tion, as spirit and incorporeal,
far quoted in a preceding note : yet they can never have the ima-
" The opinion that such spirits gination of anything answering
were incorporeal, or immaterial, to them." — Part I. c. xii.
could never enter into the mind of

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 263
sweet, red and green, not being " real qualities in
the objects without, but only our own fancies," — In
other words, the contribution of our minds in sensi
tive perception. To make sense everything, seems
to him to destroy the very basis of the supposed
knowledge derived from it. Upon such an hypo
thesis, sense itself could hardly escape from becom
ing a nonentity, " forasmuch as neither fancy nor
sense falls under sense, but only the objects of
them ; we neither seeing vision, nor feeling taction,
nor hearing audition, much less hearing sight, or
seeing taste, or the like. Wherefore, though God
be never so much corporeal as some Theists have
conceived Him to be ; yet since the chief of His
essence, and as it were His inside, must by these
be acknowledged to consist In mind, wisdom, and
understanding. He could not possibly, as to this,
fall under corporeal sense (sight or touch) any more
than thought can." ^ Again : " Were existence to
be allowed to nothing that doth not fall under
corporeal sense, then must we deny the existence of
soul and mind in ourselves and others, because we
can neither feel nor see any such thing. Whereas
we are certain of the existence of our own souls,
partly from an inward consciousness of our own
cogitations, and partly from that principle of reason,
that nothing cannot act. And the existence of other
individual souls is manifest to us from their effects
upon their respective bodies, their motions, actions,
and discourse. Wherefore, since the Atheists cannot
deny the existence of soul or mind in men, though no
1 Chap. v. sect. i.

264 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
such thing fall under external sense, they have as little
reason to deny the existence of a perfect Mind, presid
ing over the universe, without which it cannot be con
ceived whence our imperfect ones should be derived."^
To this subject of the reality and nature of spir
itual existence, Cudworth reverts again and again.
In addition to all that he says in the opening section
of his final chapter, he devotes two further sections
virtually to the same subject. He discusses at spe
cial length the nature of spirit, the difficulties of
exempting it from the Idea of extension, and pard-
cularly the question whether any created spirit can
be conceived as entirely incorporeal, or, as he says,
" without a corporeal indument." And here it is he
runs off into his digression as to the doctrine of the
Resurrection. He discusses also with great keen
ness the question of the origin of Life, and pro
nounces, it is needless to say, very strongly against
the possibility of its springing out of what he calls
" dead and senseless matter." It is curious to notice
how closely he here approaches the recent phases of
such discussions, and how little of essential novelty
there is even in the most starding theories of the
modern scientific world. In speaking, for example,
of certain speculations which attributed the origin of
life — " not only the sensitive in brutes, but also the
rational In men" — to modifications of matter "by
organisation alone," he might be supposed charac
terising the theory of evolution in its late.st form.
Whether he can be supposed as giving any satisfac
tory answer to it in what he says by way of exposing
' Chap. V. sect. i.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 265
its absurdity is another question. " This hylozoic
Atheism," for so he calls it, " thus bringing all con
scious and reflexive life or animality out of a sup
posed senseless, stupid, and inconsclous life of nature
in matter, and that merely from a different accidental
modification thereof, or contexture of parts, does
plainly bring something out of nothing — which is an
absolute Impossibility. If matter, as such, had life,
perception, and understanding belonging to It, then
of necessity must every atom, or smallest particle
thereof, be a distinct percipient by itself ; from
whence it will follow, that there could not possibly
be any such men and animals as now are, com
pounded out of them, but every man and animal
would be a heap of Innumerable percipients and in
numerable perceptions and Intellections ; whereas It
is plain that there is but one life and understanding,
one soul or mind, one percelver or thinker in every
one. And to say that these Innumerable particles
of matter do all confederate together — that is, to
make every man and animal to be a multitude or
commonwealth of percipients and persons, as it were,
clubbing together — is a thing so absurd and ridicu
lous, that one would wonder the hylozolsts should
not rather choose to recant their fundamental error
of the life of matter, than endeavour to seek shelter
and sanctuary for the same under such a pretence.
For though voluntary agents and persons may many
of them resign up their wills to one, and by that
means have all but, as It were, one artificial will, yet
can they not possibly resign up their sense and un
derstanding too, so as to have all but one artificial

266 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
life, sense, and understanding ; much less could this
be done by senseless atoms, or particles of matter
supposed to be devoid of all consciousness or ani
mality."^ " Life and understanding" cannot be con
ceived as mere accidents of matter, or as possibly
evolved or " generated " from it by any process.
" That which understandeth in us" is not " blood or
brains, but an incorporeal soul or mind vitally united
to a terrestrial organised body. And the most per
fect mind or Intellect of all is not the soul of any
body, but complete in itself, without such vital union
and sympathy with matter. We conclude therefore,"
he adds, with what he no doubt felt to be an effec
tive slap at Hobbes, "that this passage of a modern
writer — ' we worms cannot conceive how God can
understand without brains' — Is vox pecudis, the 'lan
guage and philosophy' rather of worms or brute ani
mals than of men." ^
He pursues in effect the same discussion in the
following or fourth section regarding the phenomena
of motion and cogitation. He can only conceive of
motion as originating in some primal self-activity, or
uncreated mind. " Whatever is moved is moved by
something else." — But the world is an " Eternal
moved." It presents nothing but a course of end
less changes; there is no break or beginning in
the infinite series. He supposes the Democritic
Atheist to urge this as an argument against any first
cause or original self-moving power. But admitting
the fact of motion to be as represented, this is no
reason, but the contrary, he urges, in favour of its
' Chap. V. sect. 3. 2 Ibid.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 267
endless continuity. " For were all the motion that
is in the world a passion from something else, and
no first unmoved active mover, then must it be a
passion from no agent, or without an action, and con
sequently proceed from nothing, and either cause
itself, or be made without a cause." ^ The very idea
of motion as a translation of Influence from one body
to another, or what we now call the " correlation of
forces," seems to him to prove undeniably an original
self-moving force or intelligence, or, in his own
words, " that there Is some other substance besides
body, something incorporeal, which is self-moving
and self-active, and was the first unmoved mover of
the heavens or world." The movement of one body
upon another, or the mere translation of force, he calls
" heterokinesy." But we can only rest in self-acti
vity, or " autokinesy" — that Is to say. In the action of
" some cogitative or thinking Being, which, not acted
upon by anything without it, nor at all locally moved,
but only mentally, is the immovable mover of the
heaven."^ And so he returns to the primary and
essential strain of all his thought, that " cogitation is
in order of nature before " what he calls " local mo
tion," and ^^incorporeal before corporeal substance,
the former having a natural imperlum upon the
latter" — in other words, that Mind is before Matter,
and superior to it. As he elsewhere expresses It —
" Knowledge is older than all sensible things ; mind
senior to the world, and the architect thereof" This,
he says, was the doctrine of the Pagan Theists, and
the essential controversy betwixt them and their
1 Chap. V. sect. 4. ^ Ibid.

268 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
Atheistic opponents. Whereas to the former. Mind
was " the oldest of all things senior to the world and
elements,^ and by nature hath a princely and lordly
dominion over all ; " to the latter. Matter or Body
was the first principle, and Mind merely " apostnate
thing!'' younger than the world — a weak, umbratlle,
and evanid Image, and next to nothing." ^
And the controversy thus stated may be also, as
he supposes, " clearly and satisfactorily decided."
" Dead and senseless matter," he says, " could never
have created or generated mind and understanding,
but a perfectly omnipotent mind could create mat
ter."* "There must be something self-active and
hylarchlcal, something that can act both from itself
and upon matter, as having a natural imperlum or
command over it. Life and understanding, soul and
mind, are no syllables or complexions of things,
secondary and derivative, but simple, primitive,
and uncompounded natures. . . . Moreover, nothing
can be more evident than this, that mind and under
standing have a higher degree of entity or perfection
in It, and is a greater reality In nature than mere
senseless matter or bulky extension. . . . If the sun
be nothing but a mass of fire or inanimate subtile
matter agitated, then hath the most contemptible
animal that can see the sun and hath consciousness
and self-enjoyment, a higher degree of entity and
^ UpoyevfiTTaTos, KoX Kvpios KaTa ed chapter, sect. 4. The passages
(j)icnv. are respectively, p. 59 and p. 435i
' YaTepoyevfjs. vol. iii., Tegg's ed. ; and p. 729,
' C. V. sect. i. — Compare an- and 858-9, original folio 1678.
other passage in the same extend- * C. v. sect. i.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 269
perfection in it than that whole fiery globe." There
fore, he concludes, " a perfect understanding Being
is the beginning and head of the scale of entity.^
An omnipotent understanding Being which is it
self its own Intelligible, is the first original of all
things." 2
{b) But while Cudworth thus clearly maintains
Mind or Nous at the head of the universe, he has
difficulty in conceiving the translation of mind into
nature. The conception of God on the one side,
and a series of material phenomena on the other,
acting under their own laws, by no means satisfy him.
Such a philosophy appeared to exclude from nature
the operation of any save material causes; and, indeed,
" any other vitality acting in it than only the produc
tion of a certain quantity of local motion, and the con
servation of it according to some general ,laws." ^
Hence his theory of a " Plastic Nature," which Is de
fined in his own language " as an inferior and subor
dinate instrument drudgingly executing that part of
Providence which consists in the regular and orderly
motion of matter — yet, so as there Is besides a higher
Providence which, presiding over it, doth often sup
ply the defects of it, and sometimes overrule It — for
asmuch as this plastic nature cannot act electively
or with discretion." * Unless we recognise such a
medium for the divine action, we must, he sup
poses, either conclude (with the Democritic Atheists)
against the reality of this action altogether, or else
hold that " God Himself doth all immediately, and
1 C. v. sect. 4. 2 Ibid. = C. III. xxxvii. " Ibid.

270 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
as It were with His own hands, form the body of
every gnat and fly, insect and mite." The Cartesian
notion of a supreme Mover originally starting the
machine of the world, and holding all its final springs
In His hand, while it moves onwards unceasingly in
obedience to its original impress, was uncongenial
to the Platonic type of thought A God thus stand
ing at a distance from the world was very much the
same as no God at all ; and hence the " tang of
mechanic Atheism " which he found In Carteslanism.
It seemed to him, as well as to More, to banish
the presence of mental, and consequently divine,
causality from the world. Moreover, many natural
phenomena were to him Inexplicable on the princi
ple of mere mechanical law. On the other hand,
the idea of God Himself acting In all things Im-
mediatel}^ served to " render divine Providence
operose, solicitous, and distractions, and thereby to
make the belief of It to be entertained with great
difficulty, and give advantage to Atheists."^ Such
an idea, according to him, was inconsistent with the
actual course of nature, the slow and gradual pro
cess by which the generation of things proceeds,
and " those errors and bungles " which may be
supposed to be the result of some agency less than
the highest, and therefore capable of being some
times frustrated and disappointed by the Interposi
tion of matter. Whereas an omnipotent agent, as
it could despatch Its work in a moment, so it would
always do it infallibly and irresistibly ; no inaptitude
or stubbornness of matter being ever able to hinder
^ C. III. xxxvii.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 271
such a one, or make him bungle or fumble In any
thing. "^
Cudworth's " Plastic Nature" is an embodied art or
reason—" reason Immersed and plunged into matter,
and, as it were, fuddled in it and confounded with
it." It Is not " the divine, — not archetypal, but only
ectypal." It Is a dull unconscious soul animating all
things, and, working In all — a living yet blind power
carrying out the purposes of the divine Architect,
and insensibly clothing and making manifest the
divine Mind. It is curious how he insists on its
vital and even spiritual character, and yet on the
fact that it is without definite consciousness or self-
possession. He illustrates its action by reference to
the force of habit, according to which we execute so
many spontaneous movements without any delibera
tion or conscious purpose. As there is thus, so to
speak, a subordinate and secondary soul in us, which
carries out unreflectively the behests of the higher
intelligent nature, so is there such a soul in the world
constantly executive of the divine plans — a dumb,
patient, sleepless energy, ever obedient to the divine
will, and unceasingly translating it into form and
action. It is something like the ancient distinction
of the divine Reason in itself and in manifestation. ^
Or, again, it Is like the instinct of animals, which
directly or without knowledge in the ordinary sense
accomplishes all the ends of knowledge. But instinct
is in this sense superior to the plastic nature, that
1 Ibid. the Mind and the reason uttered."
^ The \6yos ivbidOeros and the — Ibid.
\6yos irpotpopiKos — " the reason of

272 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
while it moves blindly it moves sensitively ; whereas
the soul which he supposes to be resident in matter
is destitute alike of sensation and intelligence — a
purely motive organic principle in the hands of a
higher Agent.
Nor is Cudworth content with asserting the exist
ence of such a general principle or power animating
the world — an anima -mundi everywhere diffused, and
taking various forms in plants, animals, and human
beings. He seems to recognise something of a
special plastic force in plants and animals, and the
various orders of being, " forming them as so many
little worlds." Although it be unreasonable, he says,
"to think that every plant, herb, and pile of grass hath
a plastic or vegetative soul of Its own, yet there may
possibly be one plastic unconscious nature in the whole
terraqueous globe, by which vegetables may be sever
ally organised and framed, and all things performed
which transcend the power of fortuitous mechan
ism."^ And so there may be in the ascending
orders of creation a series of higher plastic principles
governing their formation, and moulding them to
their special ends.
It is unnecessary to enlarge our exposition. Cud
worth's general Idea of a plastic nature is no
thing else than the old Platonic dream of a soul
of the world, adopted in his case from affinity with
this type of thought, and also In distinct reaction
against the mechanical theory of Descartes. It Is
plainly this spirit of antagonism which prompts his
minor adaptations of the idea to the several orders
^ Digression, appended to C. III.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 273
of animals and plants. Descartes, it is well known,
carried out his mechanical theory so as to deny all
special animal life In men or in brutes. Thought
on one side, and Extension on the other, made up for
him the sum of the universe. The simplicity of the
Cartesian conception seemed bald, and empty of
divine meaning to the Cambridge school. They
wished to feel the breath of the Divine in every part
of nature, and to bring It before them in all its
movements, as animated and full of life. But
in doing this Cudworth ceased to philosophise.
He lost sight of facts, as his school was too apt to
do, and yielded to the mere phantasies of imagina
tion in suggesting such a number and variety of
intermediary principles. The Cartesian generalisa
tion may or may not be able to vindicate itself; but
the theory of a general plastic nature, with distinct
plastic principles in the progressive orders of being,
is condemned by that law of parsimony which is
the first and most imperative canon of all genuine
phllosopnical investigations.
{c) In carrying out his lengthened analysis of the
idea of the divine unity as underlying both the my
thological and philosophical conceptions of antiquity,
Cudworth, as we have already said, comes across the
subject of the Platonic Trinity and its relation to the
doctrine of the Christian Trinity. This leads him into
a special subdigression, which exposed him in his own
age and in the age immediately following to much
animadversion. He was supposed to have so ex
pressed himself in reference to the opinions both of
Plato and the Christian Fathers as to indicate not
VOL. II. s

274 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
merely a Trinity of Persons, but a Trinity of Beings.
He was accused. In other words, of so conceiving
the Trinity, that while the Son and the Holy Ghost
are acknowledged to be of the same substance with
the Father, yet they were not numerically or in
dividually the same. They were centred not In
" one singular or individual, but only one common
or universal, essence or substance." This and other
assertions of a like nature are said to have made so
much noise, that they were not only " often cited
in company," but that " hardly a pamphlet or book
for some years was written about the blessed
Trinity, especially in England, and in the heterodox
way, which did not bring in Dr Cudworth upon the
stage, and vouch his name and quotations for Its pur
pose ; " while, on the other hand, " the truly orthodox"
made his doctrine " as a mark of their invective." ^
He was denounced as a Tritheist, or a " Tritheistic"
in the language of the time ; and by others, as a
virtual Arian in the sense of Dr Samuel Clarke,
who, while asserting the divinity of the three persons
In the Godhead, yet maintained that the Father
alone is truly and properly the Supreme Being.
It is unnecessary to enter into any detailed con
sideration of Cudworth's views on the point, because,
first of all, he has nowhere distinctly enunciated his
own views ; and, secondly, the topic is at best a sub
ordinate one to the main structure of his thought
as a Christian philosopher. It came before him
merely in relation to his exposition of the ancient
philosophy, which itself is an excrescence upon his
' Introduction to an Abridgment of the Intellectual System, by
Tho. Wise, B.D. : 1706.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 275
true subject ; and whatever opinions he expresses
are designed solely to expound and illustrate the
affinity of the Platonic and Christian thinkers. Hav
ing, first of all, in the course of his historical review
In the fourth book, brought forward and condemned
what he calls the pseudo- Platonic Trinity, or the
views of several of the later Platonlsts, who, while
speaking of a Trinity, yet " adulterated and de
formed " the original conception — -which he supposes,
in his usual manner, to have been derived from the
secret doctrine or Cabala of the Hebrews — he pro
ceeds to vindicate the genuine Platonic doctrine,
and to draw out its affinities with the Christian.
Whereas the pseudo-Platonic Trinity confounded
the difference betwixt God and the creature, and set
forth "a confused jumble of created and uncreated
beings together," Plato and " some of the Platon
ists," " retained much of the ancient genuine Cabala,
and made a very near approach to the true Chris
tian Trinity." ^ Their three divine hypostases —
viz.. Monad or God, mind, and soul — are conceived
as numerically distinct, or possessing distinct singular
essences of their own, and yet as united in one Deity.
None of them " are accounted as creations, but all
other things whatsoever the creatures of them."^
" They are not only all eternal, but also necessarily
existent and absolutely undestroyable." ^ And yet
they are " all three really but one Creator and one
God."* "The three Platonic hypostases seem to
be really nothing else but infinite goodness, infinite
wisdom, and infinite active Love and Power — not
as mere qualities or accidents, but as substantial
' C. IV. XX. 2 Ibid. ' Ibid. * Ibid.

276 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
things, that have some kind of subordination one
to another — all concurring together to make up one
©elov or " Divinity," just as the centre, immovable
distance, and movable circumference, concurrendy
make up one sphere." ^ So far, therefore, he argues,
there is an undoubted congrulty betwixt the Platonic
and the Christian Trinities. They are alike, at
least in " these three fundamentals." " First, in not
making a mere trinity of names and words, or of
logical notions and Inadequate conceptions of one
and the same thing ; but a trinity of hypostases, or
subsistences, or persons. Secondly, in making none
ofthe three hypostases to be creatures, but all eternal,
necessarily existent, and universal ; infinite, omni
potent, and creators of the whole world ; which is
all one, in the sense of the ancients, as if they should
have affirmed them to be Homoouslan. Lasdy, In
supposing these three divine hypostases, however
sometimes paganically called three Gods, to be
essentially one divinity. From whence It may be
concluded, he adds, " that Platonism is undoubtedly
more agreeable to Christianity than Arianism — it
being a certain middle thing betwixt that and Sabel-
lianism, which, In general, was that mark which the
Nicene Council also aimed at."^
From this very condensed summary of Cudworth's
exposition, it is at least evident that he did not wish
to depart in any respect from the orthodox doctrine
of the Trinity. If he Platonised, according to his
manner of speaking, he certainly did not mean to
Arianise. On the contrary, Arianism is spoken of
' Ibid. 2 Ibid.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 277
throughout as a distinct system from Platonism ; and
again, the Platonic doctrine of the Trinity, near as
it seemed to him to the Christian doctrine, is in two
important respects discriminated from it, and pro
nounced so far deficient. " First, because the Pla
tonists dreamed of no such thing at all as one and
the same universal essence or substance of the three
divine hypostases ; and, secondly, because, though
they acknowledged none of these hypostases to be
creatures, but all God, yet did they assert an essen
tial dependence of the second and third upon the
first, together with a certain gradual subordination ;
and therefore no absolute co-equality."^ These fea
tures of the Platonic doctrine, in which It came short
of the full Catholic doctrine, have led " many late
writers" to "symbolise" it with Arianism, but wrongly
so. For they are plainly separated on the essential
and testing point of the eternity of the second hypo
stasis, which the Arians denied (hence receiving the
name of Exoucontlans ^) and the Platonists affirmed.
The real affinity of Platonism is not with Arianism,
but with the undeveloped doctrine of the three first
centuries, which hesitated to assert the absolute one
ness in essence of the Father and Son, and " did not
so much as determine that the Holy Ghost was an
hypostasis, much less that he was God."
This clear recognition on the part of Cudworth of
a process of development in the Christian doctrine of
the Trinity, was evidendy his main point of difference
1 Ibid. Arian catch-phrases. Hence the
2 'E| ovK ovTwv—" of a substance name " Exoucontlans."
that once was not;" one of the

278 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
from the common orthodoxy of his time. Speaking
in the name of " a Christian Platonist, or Platonic
Christian," he apologises for Plato and the genuine
Platonlsts, that while approaching so near the Chris
tian doctrine of the Trinity they yet fell short of it ;
which, however, was not to be wondered at, seeing
that " the generality of Christian doctors for the first
three centuries " failed In the same manner to reach
Its full meaning and statement. This he points out
and illustrates at length by quotations, and discovers
plainly a certain measure of sympathy with the less
systematised and less articulated doctrine of the
early Church. It is in connection with this that
he reverts to the distinction betwixt a " singular "
essence, numerically, and "one common and universal
essence or substance ; " and shows, further, how the
early Fathers commonly did not distinguish betwixt
ousia and hypostasis. But while freely pointing out
this, and tracing the steps in the development of the
Christian doctrine, he nowhere avows his own opinions
in any definite manner, nor lays himself open to any
charge of heterodoxy. He may be mistaken in his
historical analysis of the opinions of the early Church,
or in some of the definite statements he makes on
the subject, but his conception of the Christian doc
trine as only attaining gradually to its full expression
in the consciousness of the Church, is now a common
place in all schools of theological thought. It was a
distinct merit of Cudworth to have seized the con
ception so clearly as he did in his time. The affinity
of the Christian and Platonic doctrines was overdone
by him, and there is much vagueness and uncertainty

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 279
in many points of the analogy which he draws
betwixt them, as there is in all the details of his
historical sketch — throughout there is the usual lack
of criticism and historical perspective ; but there were
few minds, after all, but his own, which had then con
ceived the idea of such analogy at all, or sought to
trace and unfold those correspondences of thought
that constitute the basis of a philosophy of religion.
{d) Cudworth's views of the Resurrection are in a
similar manner a mere appendix to his general line of
argument. They occur In the third section of the fifth
or concluding chapter, in relation to his discussion of
the nature of Incorporeal and unextended being. With
unnecessary minuteness he tries to meet all the objec
tions that may be urged against the idea of such being,
and, amongst others, the inference which seems to
follow from it, as to the " Illocallty and immobility of
human souls and other spirits." But how can such
finite spirits be conceived as " thus illocal and
immovable, nowhere and everywhere " ? ^ This is
inconsistent with their finlteness ; and, moreover,
opposed to the " very principles of religionists them
selves," which imply that the souls of men departing
out of the body do move from one place to another.
With this clue in his hand he leaves off the general
discussion in which he has been engaged, and enters
upon a prolonged consideration of the state of the
soul after death. Is it, after all, divested of all out
ward vehicle or body ? On the contrary, he holds
it to be plainly the teaching of the " old philoso
phic Cabala," — through which every element of
' Chap. v. sect. iii.

28o RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
truth appears to him always filtered, — that while the
soul quits the earthly body, it is yet by no means
stripped of all bodily shape. The gross, earthy part
is put off as an outer garment, but there is " an in
terior instrument or vestment " hanging about It
even in this life, which remains and serves to give
to the departed soul locality and capacity of motion.
Nay, there is not only, according to the ancient opi
nion, such a " spirituous and airy body" surrounding
the terrestrial, but yet a third kind of body, of a
higher rank than either — " luciform " and " celestial "
—the special clothing of those souls that have become
purged and cleansed from all corporeal affections.^
Our author explains at length the agreement be
twixt this ancient philosophic doctrine and the
Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. They re
semble each other in the two points of acknowledg
ing, first, that the supreme happiness of the soul Is
not to be found In disjunction from all body ; and,
secondly, that its future bodily investment cannot be
pf a gross, earthy nature. The doctrine of the Resur
rection is a response to the intellectual instinct which
associates enjoyment with definiteness and locality of
being, and at the same time to the spiritual aspira
tion which seeks for an emancipation from all grosser
affections and passions. The spiritual resurrection-
doctrine of St Paul is an inspired affirmation of
the Neo-Platonic dream of a " luciform " and " celes
tial " vehicle for the purified soul. This present body,
according to the inspired expositor, is to be looked
upon as merely " a dead seed of the future resurrec-
' Ibid.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 281

don-body, which, therefore, is in some sense the
same, and in some sense not the same, with it."^
The " sowing in corruption " and the " raising in in-
corruption" represents closely the idea ofthe " Pytha-
goric cabala." The change will consist not in merely
"gilding and varnishing over of the outside," but
in a spiritual transformation, whereby we shall be
fashioned in the likeness of Christ's glorious body.
This is very much the sum of his expanded ex
position, which leads us, however, through many
winding paths, and special discussions as to the im
mediate state of the dead, and as to whether angels
and even ghosts have bodies. His opinion clearly
is, that there is no finite spirit can be conceived as
entirely bodiless. This is the exclusive property of
the Supreme Spirit, who alone can be absolutely
and purely incorporeal, " whose essence is com
plete, and life entire within itself, without the con
junction or appendage of any body." And so also
is this Spirit, or God Himself, alone ubiquitous ;
it being " peculiar to that incorporeal essence which
is infinite to quicken and actuate all things, and take
cognisance of all." ^
III. It now only remains to us, before endeavour
ing to sum up our estimate of Cudworth as a thinker,
to consider him specially as a moralist. So far we
have seen the ethical interest that lies at the root of
all his thinking. It was this interest more than any
thing else which inspired his first labours in phil
osophy, and which continued his highest inspiration.
The vindication of man's distinctive position in the
1 Ibid. ^ Ibid.

282 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
universe as a rational and moral creature formed the
centre of his whole system of speculation, around
which all its most elaborated reasonings revolved.
Man Is divine, if there Is any divinity at all. All
the lines of argument for Christian Theism go forth
from the recognition of the human soul as a spir
itual reality distinct from nature — absolute amidst
its accidents — the true life of all its apparent and
reflected life. Such a view already implies a definite
moral doctrine ; for if the soul be thus a reality —
distinct in being and supreme In character — It must
in itself be an organ and source, and not merely a
receptacle, of truth. What is true or false, good or
evil, just or unjust, must be determined, not from
without, but from within, and the determinations will
partake of the absolute character of the source
whence they proceed. Morality in its full con
tents and development may be an educt of ex
perience, just as every branch of knowledge in its
details must be ; but the moral no less than the
intellectual judgment is from the soul itself —
the spiritual affirmation of a spiritual subject going
forth into the world of experience, and condition
ing it — In no sense derived from It, or conditioned
by It.
This is the essential point in Cudworth's moral
system, which implies and rests upon a distinct
theory of knowledge. The treatise on ' Eternal and
Immutable Morality ' is, in fact, mainly a discussion
of the source of knowledge. It sets out with lay
ing down very clearly the question from the au
thor's point of view. Is morality a thing in itself?

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 283
Are the ideas of good and evil, justice and injustice,
absolute or only relative — real or factitious — eternal
and immutable or only positive and arbitrary ? Are
they what they are, in short, as he often says, ^vcrei,
" by nature," or diaei, " by institution " ? After enu
merating the various defenders of the latter opinion
amongst the ancient philosophers — Protagoras in the
' Thesetsetus ;' Polus and Calllcles in the ' Gorglas ;'
Thrasymacus and Glaucon in the ' Politics ;' and
Epicurus, "the reviverofthe Democritical philosophy,
the frame of whose principles must needs lead him
to deny justice and injustice to be natural things ;"
he brings forward, in his usual manner, Hobbes, not
byname, but under the general appellation " that late
writer of ethics and politics," as the modern exponent
of the same views. He has revived " in this latter
age," not only " the physiological hypotheses of De
mocritus and Epicurus," but also the moral paradoxes
of the same philosophers. Good and evil are repre
sented by him as only " authentic," in respect of the
human laws defining and constituting them. It be
longs to the Christian state to determine what is
right and what Is wrong. The passages quoted are
from Hobbes's original treatise ' De Give,' and will be
found below. ^ But " he gives the same over again
in English," our author adds, as follows : — In the
state of nature " nothing can be unjust ; the notions
of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there
1 "Doctrinas de justo et injusto, Christianam quid sit justitia, quid
bono et malo, prseter leges in una- injustitia, sive peccatum contra
quaque civitate constitutas auth- justitiam determinare.— Libri de
enticas esse nuUas," &c. Again, Cive, cap. xvii. 10.
— " Ad civitatem pertinet etiam

284 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
no place ; where there is no common power, there is
no law ; where no law, no transgression."^ " No law
can be unjust."^ " Nay," he continues, "temperance
is no more ^vcret, ' naturally,' according to this civil
(or rather uncivil) philosopher, than justice." " Sen
suality, in that sense In which it Is condemned, hath
no place till there be laws."^
From this attitude of philosophical paradox he
turns to the views of " divers modern theologers,"
who, in like manner, deny the absolute and intrinsic
character of the ideas of good and evil by attributing
them solely to the positive enactment or command
of God. Whatever may be the true meaning of the
philosophers, he says, as If himself in some degree
doubtful whether he had rightly interpreted them,
there can be no doubt that there have been theolo
gians who have thus referred all morality to the
" arbitrary will and pleasure of God." The ancient
Fathers of the Church were Indeed " very aborrent
from this doctrine," but " it crept up after-jvard in
the scholastic age," and has maintained itself from
the time of Ockham, under the pretence of being
a necessary corollary from the conception of an
Almighty Divine Will. As nothing can be supposed
apart from such a will, or as existing Independently
of it, so good and evil, justice and injustice, can only
be as derived from or constituted by God. Curiously
* Leviathan, part i. chap. 13. word sensual, as it is used by those
Hobbes's words are, "Where no only that condemn them [pleasures
law, no injustice" of sense], having no place till
^ Part ii. chap. 30. there be laws." They are used
^ Leviathan, part i. chap. 6. parenthetically.
Hobbes's exact words are : " The

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 28$
enough, he afterwards distinguishes Descartes as the
chief advocate of such a doctrine.
The question being thus stated, he sets forth, for
him very briefly, the grounds on which the higher view
of morality as in itself something — or a distinct and
absolute reality — apart from all human statute or
special divine command, appears demonstrable. It
is so (i.) because " It is universally true that things are
what they are, not by will but by nature." A thing,
for example, is white by " whiteness, and black by
blackness, triangular by triangularity, and round by
rotundity, like by likeness, and equal by equality,"
- — that is, by "such certain natures of their own."
Such properties cannot be changed even by Omni
potence without abstracting the things. We cannot
have a thing white or black without whiteness or
blackness, nor a body triangular without having the
nature and properties of a triangle in it. Mere will
does not and cannot constitute such things, which
are what they are in themselves. And so good and
evil, justice and Injustice, debita and illicita, cannot
be by mere will — without the nature of goodness, jus
tice, lawfulness. He has no suspicion that he Is here
merely stating an identical proposition — that what
is moral Is moral, — that a thing cannot be both moral
and without morality, — a proposition which no one
would deny. But such a proposition throws no light
on the question, why a thing is moral and not im
moral ? which is the reaTquestlon betwixt him and
his opponents. (2.) Since things are what they are
by nature and not mere will, they are " immutably
and necessarily what they are." " There is no such

286 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
thing as an arbitrarious essence, mode, or relation,
that may be made indifferently anything at pleasure ;
for such an essence is a being without a nature,
a contradiction, and therefore a nonentity." ^ Un
doubtedly, as a thing cannot be, and not be, at the
same time, it is immutably what it is, according to
its nature. Take away its nature, and the thing
itself disappears. A just act can never be anything
but just ; but this does not explain why it Is just, or
rather, why a particular act is pronounced just, and
another unjust. (3.) While it is true that a divine or
human command in the form of statute may make
something which was before indifferent, moral in
the sense of " obligatory or unlawful " — yet the real
element of morality, even in such a case, does not
come from the mere assertion of will, but from " the
right or authority of the commander, which is
founded in natural justice and equity, and an
antecedent obligation to obedience In the subjects.
Any law without this natural foundation in right, or
for the mere purpose of enforcing the will of one
upon others, is properly esteemed " ridiculous and
absurd." No true obligation can be constituted in
this manner. For " the obligation to obey all posi
tive laws is older than all laws, and previous or
antecedent to them." " The bare will of God Him
self" cannot beget the obligation to do anything
which is not in itself or " in its own nature, morally
good and just." Here our author seems to deal
with Hobbes's position more directly, but still too
much in the form of mere affirmation, without
1 B. I. c. ii.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 287
analysis, or going to the root of the matter. (4.)
While, therefore, there is such a thing as positive
morality, the moral quality of the things which it en
joins transcends the mere will or pleasure that enjoins
them. The obligation is not in the mere command,
but In the relation of the authority to the intellectual
nature commanded. If, for example, a father should
order a son to do something, the duty of the son is
not constituted by the mere will of the father, but by
the fact that it is the very nature of the filial relation
to be dutiful and obedient. Or again, the obligation
may arise out of our own voluntary act, whereby
something in itself indifferent may become to us
sacredly obligatory. As when we make a promise
to do something which we needed not to have done,
the thing promised assumes to us a new relation,
and becomes binding on us in the highest degree.
It falls under the general law of keeping faith, and
acquires all the sanction arising out of the obvious
dictates of natural morality. The thing is not
changed ; it remains in its nature indifferent as
before. But to us it is changed ; and the motive
for doing it consists not in the matter of the action,
but in the principle of keeping faith. " Wherefore,
in positive commands, the will of the commander
doth not create any new moral entity, but only
divinely modifies and determines that general duty
or obligation of natural justice to obey lawful
authority, and to keep oaths and covenants, as our
own will in promising doth but produce several
modifications of keeping faith." ^
1 Ibid.

288 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
But while moral good and evil are admitted to be
independent of any created will, there are those who
contend that they " must needs depend upon the
arbitrary will of God." Otherwise there would be
" something that was not God," or did not take Its
being from Him. " This is plainly asserted," our
author adds, " by that ingenious philosopher, Renatus
des Cartes," from whose answer to the sixth objec
tion to his Meditations he quotes, in proof a passage
of some length. The aim of Descartes in the passage
is plainly enough to connect everything, including the
ideas of good and evil, with the determination of the
divine will. It is a contradiction, he says, to imagine
anything prior to this determination.^ Elsewhere In
the same answer, he maintains that it is manifest, in
the view of the divine immensity, that " there can
be nothing at all which does not depend upon God ;
not only nothing subsisting, but also no order, no
law, no reason of truth and goodness.^ The analysis
of the relation of the divine understanding or wis
dom to the divine will, is one of those subjects which
possessed a fascination for the older schools of philo
sophy, but which is really quite beyond our pene
tration or logic. It may be doubted whether sub-
1 " Repugnat enim Dei volun- ^ " Attendenti ad Dei immensi-
tatem non fuisse ab seterno indif- tatem manifestum est, nihil om-
ferentem ad omnia quae facta sunt, nino esse posse, quod ab ipso non
aut unquam fient, quia nullum pendeat, no modo nihil subsis-
bonum, vel verum, multumve ere- tens, sed etiam nullum ordinem,
dendum, vel faciendum, vel omit- nullam legem, nullamvi radonem
tendum finge potest. Cujus idea veri et boni."
in intellectu divino prius fecerit, These passages will be found in
quam ejus voluntas se determi- p. 160-162 of the 3d ed. of ' Medi-
navit ad effecundum ut id tale tations,' with ' Answers to Objec-
esset." tions.' Amsterdam, 1650.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 289
stantlally there was, after all, such a difference be
twixt Descartes and Cudworth as admits of being
clearly apprehended. For the latter, no less than
the former, of course, traces the ideas of good and
evil, and all those necessary truths of which he
makes so much, to a divine source. They exist for
us because they are In the mind of God ; necessary
forms of a perfect and Immutable wisdom, in which we
imperfectly share. Only he contends that they are
before rather than behind the divine will. That is to
say, not even the divine will can be conceived unmak
ing what necessarily is, according to the divine mind
— converting, for example, two Into three, or square
or triangular into round, or truth into falsehood, or
good into evil. But Descartes did not, or could not,
assert this. All that he asserted was, that these
things were so because God had made them so.
All possible truth has its source in the Divine — only
Cudworth conceives the Divine more on the side of
mind, a luminous and eternal order ; and Descartes
(in this case at least) more on the side of will or
creative cause. The conception of Cudworth ap
pears the higher and juster of the two, so far as it
is possible to separate and compare them. The
contemplation of the Divine as a bare will, is infe
rior in grandeur, and far more liable to abuse, than
the contemplation of it as an infinite mind at once
wise and good. The former, we agree with our
author, is " a contracted idea of God." The Neo-
Platonic representation of a divine circle, of which
the centre is goodness, the radii wisdom, and the
circumference will, is — however " mystical and enig-
VOL. II. T

290 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
matical" — more sublime, and probably also nearer to
the truth. The most absolute freedom of the divine
will or activity can only be rationally conceived in
union with these other attributes, and executive of
them. It Is the very perfection of this freedom
"to be determined by infinite wisdom and good
ness." Having thus dealt directly with the problem of
morality, and vindicated to his .satisfaction its ab
solute character, Cudworth expands with his usual
amplitude far beyond the limits ofthe special question.
He sees clearly that the real difference of thought in
such a case Is not merely as to the character and
origin of moral ideas, but the character and origin
of all ideas. The essential problem is, in fact, the
problem of knowledge altogether— whence derived,
and whence authenticated ? Has our knowledge an
element of universal certainty derived from within,
innate and co-divine ; or is it only particular — such as
it appears to every man — gathered and elaborated by
the senses, or at most by "the strange chemistry"
of some " intellectus agens,"^ or obscure power acting
upon the materials of sense ? It Is needless to say
which side he espouses In this world-old controversy.
The remaining three books of the treatise on ' Eter
nal and Immutable Morality ' are devoted to its dis
cussion ; and the moral interest, which is yet supreme
with him everywhere as a source of inspiration, falls
behind the widespread historical and pyschological
inquiry into which it carries him.
He treats first of the Protagorean scepticism, which
1 B. IV., c. i.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 291
made all being and knowledge alike " fantastical and
relative only." This brings him again in front ofthe
sensational philosophy, which he has combated at
such length in the ' True Intellectual System ; ' and he
explains once more how It is a degenerate and not a
true form of " the old atomlcal and Phcenlclan philo
sophy," derived from Moschus or Moses. The same
field which we have already traversed is gone over
with the same result. In the second book he con
siders the whole question as betwixt sense and In
tellection, their different natures, and the Impossibility
of explaining all our knowledge by the former. The
fact of knowledge, distinctively so called, or science,
cannot, he contends, emerge from sense. Even out
ward things or bodies cannot be understood without
the co-operation of " reason and intellect judging of
the appearances of sense."^ It " follows from hence,"
in his own language, " that knowledge is an inward
and active energy of the mind itself and the display- .
ing of its own innate vigour from within, whereby it |
doth conquer, master, and command Its objects."^
" The mind cannot know anything but by something
of its own, that is native, domestic, and familiar to
it."^ This leads him in the concluding book to ex
plain more fully this innate faculty and its appropriate
ideas, intellectual and moral. The faculty is clearly
distinct from any mere organ of " sense and pas
sion," and marks the whole diameter of difference
betwixt man and the brute. The latter is governed
solely by its relation to the outer world, and the
activities of appetite thence arising. It can have no
1 B. IIL, c. iv. ^ B. IV., c. i. ' Ibid.

292 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
sense of anything beyond the Impression which cor
poreal objects make upon it. But man discriminates
betwixt himself and the constant flux of outward
impressions, and penetrates to their meaning and
reality — their harmony, beauty, and music. All the
" plenitude " of nature. Its " interior symmetry, pro
portions, aptitudes, and correspondencies,'' which
suggested to the ancients the idea " of Pan (that Is,
nature) playing upon an harp," are undiscernlble to
mere sense, which in the brute only perceives par
ticular objects, and hears nothing but mere noise,
and sound, and clatter, — no music or harmony at all,
— having " no active principle or anticipation within
itself " whereby to comprehend all ; " whereas the
mind of a rational and intellectual being will be
ravished and enthusiastically transported in the con
templation, and of its own accord dance to this pipe
of Pan — nature's intellectual music and harmony."
There is a whole sphere of being In man, therefore,
distinct from the brute ; and all the characteristic
Ideas of metaphysics, mathematics, esthetics, and
morality, belong to this sphere. They are voyjTo,
and not ata-drjTa — the Immediate objects of intellec
tion and science — " eternal and immutable " as the
source whence they come.
And so he returns In the end to the central thought
of all his thinking — the nature of the human soul.
Its divine nature and origin make It distinctive,
and an organ of higher truth than the mere world
of nature can convey or create It is no " mere
passive or receptive thing," quickened and formed
from without — an educt of matter finely and labori-

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 293
ously organised — but a living divine power formed
from above, and endowed with the divine image.
This is the only basis of all higher knowledge. And
so morality and djyinity meet and find a common
centre. The one cannot be destroyed without de
stroying the other. Let all knowledge spring from
sense, and all morality from utilitarian experience,
then man loses the higher side of his being, and
sinks back into the world of nature. He loses all
foothold of the Divine, and "there cannot possibly be
the least shadow of argument to prove a deity by."^
IV. The mass and texture of Cudworth's thought
are sufficiently before our readers. We must now
rapidly gather up the threads of our exposition, and
endeavour to estimate his value as a thinker, both
for his own time and with reference to the present
aspect of the great questions with which he deals.
His relations to Hobbes and Descartes have appeared
with ample clearness. He is the reactionary creation
of the former, in the shadow of whose speculations
all his own live and move. If the ' De Cive' and
' Leviathan ' had never been written, neither, pro
bably, would have ' The True Intellectual System
of the Universe,' nor the treatise on ' Immutable
Morality.' The special substance and colour of their
thought would certainly never have been what they
are. In a lesser but sufficiently distinct manner, he
stands in contrast to Descartes, or at least to the
more specific and detailed form which Cartesian
speculation assumed in the ' Principles of Philosophy,'
and ' Objections and Replies.' To the more spiritual
^ B. IV.-, conclusion of last chapter.

294 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
phase of this speculation — the famous doctrine of
Consciousness, with the principle of certitude based
upon it, expounded in the discourse ' On Method'
and the second ' Meditation ' — there is singularly no
allusion either in Cudworth or More.''
It is impossible not to feel Cudworth's Inferiority
in originality, clearness, and brightness of concep
tion to both the contemporary thinkers with whom
he Is thus brought in contrast. It is not only that
he comes behind them in the line of his thought,
which, but for them, would not have been laid
down — that they are the originators of new methods,
pioneers in the freshly opened tract of speculative
enterprise — while he Is only the reviver and defender
of an old position. This would not necessarily place
them above him ; for it is possible, as in the case of
Hobbes, to strike into new paths which only lead
to old falsehoods, and which, in fact, are, after all,
mainly rediscovered traces of old and wrong routes.
In the attitude in which Cudworth chiefly contem
plates him, Hobbes has no claim to originality.
The antagonisms which once more meet in them
had been drawn out long before in Democritism
on the one side, and Platonism on the other. And
if it Is different with Descartes — whose whole cast of
mind is of an intensely original as well as powerful
kind — it is yet the manner rather than the substance
of their thought to which we refer when we contrast
them with our author in point of originality. Both
Descartes and Hobbes always think directly as well
as vigorously. They start from a fresh upturned
' None that we have traced.

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 295
vein of speculation in their own minds, and bring
its contents at once before their readers. They
have none of the pedantry of learning, and the
involved modes of approaching a subject which the
Cambridge philosophers have. They have some
thing to say which they think new and Import
ant—which they have got not from books, but
from insight and meditation — and they say It out
unencumbered by the thought of others, or the
trammels of scholastic association. Hobbes was
aware of this characteristic in his own case, and
prided himself on what he had got by thinking,
rather than by reading.^ Descartes is still more ;
than Hobbes the pure thinker. Of all philo
sophers, perhaps, he Is the most directly personal
and original, the most independent of all rela
tion to other minds, the most intrepid builder
out of the structure of his own thought. This self-
possession and freedom give a singular animation
and force to his writings, which read to this day
as lightly and freshly as when they came from his
pen. The style of the 'Discourse' and 'Medita
tions' runs as smoothly, rapidly, and delicately as
that of a modern essayist, while yet every sentence
is weighted with meaning, and the whole compacted
and vivified by an intense life of thought To turn
from Descartes and Hobbes, as writers, to Cud
worth, is in some degree like turning from the bright
and open daylight to an obscure labyrinth.
1 He was wont to say, accord- have continued still as ignorant as
ing to Aubrey, " that if he had read other men."
as much as other men, he should

296 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
It must be admitted, also, that Cudworth is hardly
fair, and certainly not generously fair, to either of his
opponents. He presses frequently the least favour
able interpretation of their meaning, and quotes
Hobbes, as we have already said, at times with care
less inaccuracy.^ Upon the whole, he must be pro
nounced deficient in a cordial appreciation of con
temporary thought. His allusions to Bacon in the
' Intellectual System ' are scarcely more compliment
ary than those to Hobbes.2 This may be attributed
to the intellectual connection betwixt these philoso
phers, and the manner in which the author of the
' Leviathan ' sometimes sheltered himself under the
opinions and statements of the author of the ' Novum
Organum ;' but it was also probably due to an In
stinctive dislike of Bacon's method and influence,
and especially his manner of treating the relation of
philosophy and religion. The Platonic temper could
I not brook the idea of separation betwixt these two
great planes of thought.
/At the same time, with all Cudworth's dislike of
Hobbes, and the extreme manner in which he some
times Interprets his meaning, it Is not to be granted
that he seriously misunderstands his drift, or mis
represents the substance of his doctrines. It may
be true that theoretically Hobbes did not maintain

^ It is unnecessary to enumerate ed. 1678, in reference to the same
instances. The reader will find passage handled by him in the
them pointed out in Mosheim's treatise on 'Immutable Morality,'
elaborated notes. A conspicuous which we have considered in the
instance of his somewhat un- text.
generous treatment of Descartes * See c. v., p. 680, folio ed.
is found, c. v., p. 646, 647, folio

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 297
that the civil authority creates morality, and forms
its only standard. On the contrary, he frequently
speaks of the laws of morality as natural, and
attributes to them irnmutability. " What they
forbid can never be lawful, and what they order can
never be unlawful."^ All the same the basis of
morality is with him, so to speak, an unmoral basis
— unmoral certainly in Cudworth's estimate, because
the human nature, out of which he draws it, has no
primary moral or divine side. Moral Ideas are
not, according to him, the translation of divine
thought, surviving In man, and connecting him with
his divine original, but only a growth from a rudi
mentary chaos of craving appetites and passions
Not only so. While it is extreme and so far untrue to
say that Hobbes attributes all morality to the sov
ereign will of the state, it is strictly true that he
assigns no security or warrant for Its observance,
save the supreme civil power. If the Idea of
morality is not represented by him as absolutely
originating with the state, yet Its exercise can only
be conceived under political sanction and control.
Man may be theoretically a moral being without the
state, but he cannot be so practically. The civil
authority does not create the ideas of right and
wrong — they are products of our original disposi
tions ; but, without this authority, they have no
influence, and cannot be conceived coming Into any
orderly development. All moral obligation, in
short, comes from without, and not from within —
from the consensus of political forces which have
¦•l ^ De Cive, c. iii. 29.

298 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
found an equilibrium in some definite common
wealth, and not from any consensus of divine
instincts in men, or common conscience uttering
within them the voice of God.
Such a theory was to the Cambridge school radi
cally and entirely false. It Implied the denial of
a divine side In life. It blotted out at once all true
ideas of good and of God. From their point of
view it necessarily did so. To Cudworth, it was of
no consequence that Hobbes spoke of "natural
principles of morality," while he plainly repudiated
a spiritual or divine side to human nature. Save
as the expression of a higher law than nature, in
Hobbes's sense — morality was not to him morality.
It did not come within the sphere of true obligation
or duty, which can only find Its spring in the divine
mind (not divine will) — the eternal order or reason
which directs and controls all things. This was the es
sential difference betwixt the two schools of thought;
and Cudworth, if he does not sufficiently discriminate
Hobbes's position, yet certainly does not misinterpret
his essential meaning, as the teacher of a compre
hensive system, which sought to build up morality,
politics, and religion on an external basis, or an en
forced consensus of mere selfish interests, originally
at war with one another.
Of religion, no less than morality, Hobbes speaks
with deference and reverence. We have already
alluded to the manner in which he studs his pages
with Scriptural quotations. There are chapters of the
'Leviathan' that look like chapters of Biblical exposi
tion more than anything else. But all this Is beside

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 299
the purpose. The question is not as to what Hobbes
himself was — a Christian or not — orthodox or
heterodox. All such personal questions are imper
tinent in philosophical discussion ; and although
Cudworth yields to the temptation of speaking disre
spectfully of the consequences of Hobbes's opinions,
he was far too enlightened to make anything of such
personal matters. /The real and only question is not
what Hobbes was or professed himself to be, but
what Is the essential meaning and drift of his thought ?
what are the principles on which his whole system
rests — and are they consistent with a rational theory
of religion ? Can the ideas of morality and the
idea of God be rationally sustained on his naturalistic
view of human life and society ? Is humanity to be
primarily and essentially conceived on the side of
matter or of mind ? This was the question betwixt
Cudworth and Hobbes. It included all else. And
in supposing Hobbes to occupy one side and him
self another on this great question, Cudworth cer
tainly did no injustice to the author ofthe 'Leviathan.'
Nor can it be denied that with all his faults as a
writer, and his slovenliness and cumbrousness as a
thinker, Cudworth went to the root of his side of the
question, and has done substantially as much to vin
dicate it as any writer before or since. Both the
pe'netratlon and the comprehensiveness of his views
are apparent everywhere. At a time when the his
tory of philosophy was still unknown as a science^ he
cast his glance over all the systems of antiquity, and
brought their results together, If not critically, yet with
an appreciation of their difference and relations which

300 RALPH CUDWORTH : CHRISTIAN
would be In vain sought for In any other writer of the
century. Immersed in Platonic and pseudo- Platonic
conceptions which frequently distort his view of the
opinions of others, he seldom allowed them to domin
ate or corrupt his own rational vision. He kept the
eye of his own reason single ; and it was a large,
open, and discerning eye. On the one hand, he
sought to purify the conceptions of the popular the
ology ; and, on the other hand, to vindicate for man
a genuine sphere of religious and moral idea, in
which he could move freely yet feel securely. The
rights of reason and of conscience are alike dear to
him. He has no conception of truth which can
not be brought to the test of the former, and no in
dulgence for a philosophy which denies the latter.
As religion is not an extravagance, so neither
can It be a formality ; as it Is not a mere dream of
pietism, so neither can it be a creation of state
craft. With him, as with Whichcote and Smith, In
separably conjoined with morality — morality again
can only be conceived as resting on the Divine, and
authenticating itself in God. Man is the creature
of God : made In the divine image, endowed with
the divine reason, and fitted for divine communion.
The intuitions of his reason and the dictates of his
conscience are alike Indestructible. The Ideas of
good and evil are as absolute as the axioms of
geometry. Both are true, and only true, not as
constituted by any personal act — even that of the
supreme will — but as expressions of eternal Mind, —
the head and ruler of all things. Life, nature, his
tory, thought, are only intelligible in the light of

PHILOSOPHY IN CONFLICT WITH MATERIALISM. 301
such a Mind ; a central self-consciousness illuminating
and controlling all spheres of being — the worlds of
matter and of mind. Mind is the originator ; matter
the originated. To reverse the order, and to make
thought the issue instead of the source of material
organisation, appeared to Cudworth to blot out all
light from the heavens — all hope from man.
It is needless to point out how these questions are
as living for us and our time, as they were for Cud
worth and his. The very form of them has been
slightly altered. Is man a divine creature, or merely
the outgrowth of a primitive germ ? Is reason a
distinct endowment from above, or merely a develop
ment of nervous life from below ? Is the world, with
all its connected species, only a hylozoic evolution,
the ages of which no one can reckon ; or is it the
manifestation of a divine Mind appointing all things
in their season ? Is It an order of thought, or a
blind sequence ? And is the original home of man
to be sought In a primitive paradise of communion
with God, or in the primeval forests of the chim
panzee and the ape ? Are we the children of a divine
Father, or only the items of a great progress from
the unknown to the unknown ?
These are the questions which Cudworth pon
dered ; they are those which our age still ponders.
If he cannot be said to have solved them, he yet
steadily and rationally faced them. He has shown —
no one has ever shown better — how we cannot work
from below upwards ; and that if we begin with mat
ter and a pllllosophy of sense, we can never reach con
science and a philosophy of reason. He has exhibited

302 RALPH CUDWORTH.
the co-ordination of the different planes of thought,
and made it clear how we must stand on the one side
or the other. It is not possible perhaps to do more,
or to fathom the depths of that dualism that meets
us everywhere in the last stages of our inquiry.
If we learn nothing further from Cudworth, we will
learn strength, patience, and candour in conducting
so great an argument. His form of exposition "may
be antiquated, but his spirit and reason will never
grow old. And if we do not come in his pages
nearer to that certainty which some minds are des
tined never to reach In this world of endless interro
gation, we may be helped to trust where we cannot
know, to tolerate those who differ from us, and to
welcome light and truth from whatever quarter it
may come.

303

V.

HENRY MORE— CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY
AND MYSTICISM.
As the Cambridge movement reached Its highest, or
at least its most elaborate, intellectual elevation in
Cudworth, so It ripened Into Its finest personal and
religious development in Henry More. Cudworth
is much less interesting than his writings ; More is
far more interesting than any of his. He was a
voluminous author. His writings fill several folio
volumes ; they are in verse as well as prose ; they
were much read and admired In their day ; but they
are now wellnigh forgotten. Some of them are
hardly any longer readable. Yet More himself is
at once the most typical and the most vital and
interesting of all the Cambridge school. He Is the
most Platonical of the Platonic sect, and at the same
time the most genial, natural, and perfect man of
them all. We get nearer to him than any of them,
and can read more intimately his temper, character,
and manners — the lofty and serene beauty of his
personality — one of the most exquisite and charming
portraits which the whole history of religion and
philosophy presents.
More was born in 1614, three years before Cud-

304 HENRY MORE

worth, at Grantham, in Lincolnshire ; and we have
happily the means of tracing both his external and
internal history more familiarly than that of his great
colleague.^ His father was "Alexander More, Esq.,
a gentleman of fair estate and fortune," greatly be
loved and esteemed by his son, who dedicated to
him the collection of his ' Philosophical Poems ' in
1647. He speaks in his dedication of his father's
" generous openness and veracity," and wishes he
were a " stranger to his blood," that he " might with
a better decorum set out the nobleness of his spirit"
He attributes his poetical taste to his father's read
ing with him In the winter nights 'Spenser's Rhymes,'
especially " that incomparable piece of his, ' The
Fairy Queen,' a poem as richly fraught with divine
morality as phansy." We gather from the same source
that, with all his sense of filial obligation, he had
broken away from the old home Influences, and chosen
his career and opinions for himself Apparently his
father had wished him to enter upon some active
profession as a road to wealth and influence. But
says the son, "your early encomiums of learning
and philosophy did so fire my credulous youth with
^ In addition to a ' Life by sive, after the manner of the time.
Richard Ward, Rector of Ingolds- The second part, which was in-
by, Lond., 1710, 8vo,' More him- tended to embrace a review of
self has given us many interesting More's writings, and to consider
details of his life in the "Prefatio him more particularly as an
Generalissima " prefixed to his author, was never published. The
' Opera Omnia,' published in 1679; manuscript, however, was in ex-
and also "a General Account" of istence in 1847, in the possession of
the manner and scope of his writ- John Crossley, Esq. of Manchester,
ings, in an ' Apology ' published in Editor of Worthington's Diary for
1664. Ward's Life is interesting, the Chetham Society.
but vague, uncritical, and digres-

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 305
the desire of the knowledge of things, that your after
advertisements, how contemptible learning would
prove without riches, and what a piece of unmanner-
liness and incivility it would be held to seem wiser
than them that are more wealthy and powerful, could
never yet restrain my mind from her first pursuit, nor
quicken my attention to the affairs of the world. "^
His change of religious opinion was of more im
portance. " Both my father and uncle, and so also
my mother," he says, " were all earnest followers of
Calvin." 2 To the "almost fourteenth year" of his
age, he was bred up in strict Calvinism ; his tutor,
as well as his parents, being of this persuasion —
" great Calvinists," he says again,^ " but withal very
pious and good ones." At this age he was sent to
" Eton School, not to learn any new precepts or
institutes of religion, but for the perfecting of the
Greek and Latin tongue." Already, however, he
had been the subject of strong religious convictions.
" Even in my first childhood, an inward sense of the
divine presence was so strong upon my mind, that
I did then believe there could no deed, word, or
thought be hidden from Him ; nor was I by any
others that were older than myself to be otherwise
persuaded." He has no doubt that this deep, religi
ous feeling was an " innate sense or notion " in him,
"contrary to some witless and sordid philosophasters"
of the age, or to the supposition that it was merely
" ex traduce, or by way of propagation, as being born
of parents exceeding pious and religious." In such
1 Epistle to his father, prefixed ^ Pref. Gen., vi.
to • Philosophical Poems,' 1647. ' Ibid., v.
VOL. II. U

306 HENRY MORE :

a case, it was inexplicable how he " drew not alsd
Calvinism in- along with It." So far from doing this,
" he could never swallow that hard doctrine concern
ing fate." And no sooner had he gone to Eton, than
he fell Into a violent dispute on the subject with his
brother, who had accompanied him and his uncle
thither. His uncle, on being informed of his theo
logical precocity and the untoward turn it had taken,
chid him very severely, " adding menaces withal of
correction, and a rod for my immature forwardness
in philosophising concerning such matters." ^ His
religious forwardness, however, was not to be re
strained in this manner. The mystery of predesti
nation had got hold of his mind, and so possessed
him, that " on a certain day, in a ground belonging
to Eton College, where the boys used to play and
exercise themselves, musing concerning these things
with myself and recalling to my mind the doctrine
of Calvin, I did thus seriously and deliberately con
clude within myself — viz., ' If I am one of those that
are predestinated into hell, where all things are full
of nothing but cursing and blasphemy, yet will I be
have myself there patiently and submissively towards
God ; and if there be any one thing more than
another that Is acceptable to Him, that will I set my
self to do with a sincere heart, and to the utmost of
my power.' Being certainly persuaded that if I thus
demeaned myself. He would hardly keep me long in
that place. Which meditation of mine is as firmlyfixed
in my memory, and the very place where I stood, as If
the thing had been transacted but a day or two ago."^
^ Ibid., V. ° Ibid., v. vi.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 307
" And as to what concerns the existence of God,"
he adds — "though in that ground mentioned, walking,
as my manner was, slowly, and with my head on one
side, and kicking now and then the stones with my
feet, I was wont sometimes with a sort of musical
and melancholic murmur to repeat, or rather hum
to myself those verses of Claudian : —
' Oft hath my anxious mind divided stood ;
Whether the Gods did mind this lower world ;
Or whether no such ruler (wise and good)
We had ; and all things here by chance were hurled.' ^
Yet that exceeding hail and entire sense of God,
which nature herself had planted deeply In me, very
easily silenced all such slight and poetical dubltations
as these." ^
Personal as these details are, there Is nothing
egotistical in them. They are naturally and simply
told, after the manner of the time. Such moods are
for the most part left untold. The reserve of after-
years and many experiences seldom permits the
veil to be lifted upon the early secrets of the soul.
But More, both as a boy and as a man, was singularly
transparent in his deepest nature. His communings
and ecstasies have not the slightest taint of morbid
self- elation. They are the natural carriage of his
strangely -gifted spirit. " From the beginning all
things in a manner came flowing to him;" and his
1 The translation in the text is Curarent Superi terras; an nullus in-
by his biographer. Claudian's ^^^^^^\^ .^^^^^^ a^,,,„t Mortalia
words are— ^^u_..
" Ssepe mihi dubiam traxit sententia
mentem; ^ Pref. Gen., vi.

30S HENRY MORE

mlnd^accordlng to his own saying — " was enlight
ened with a sense of the noblest theories in the
morning of his days."
His scholarly progress as a boy seems to have
been remarkable — although here we have few facts
related. " His master would be at times in admi
ration at the exercises that were done by him."
His " anxious and thoughtful genius" ^ showed itself
in his work as well as in his meditations ; and his
varied and profuse scholarship could only have been
the fruit of diligent study at Eton as well as after
wards at the university.
Having spent about three years at Eton, he was
admitted at Christ's College, Cambridge (1631), just
about the time that Milton was leaving it He was
recommended to the care of a tutor " both learned
and pious," and, what he was " not a little solicitous
about, not at all a Calvinist." Here, he says, he was
possessed with a " mighty and almost immoderate
thirst after knowledge — especially that which was
Natui^al, and, above all others, that which was said
to dive Into the deepest Cause of Things." He
immersed himself " over head and ears in the study
of philosophy, promising himself the most wonder
ful happiness in the perusal of Aristotle, Cardan,
Julius Scaliger, and other philosophers of the greatest
note." He professes, however, to have got little
satisfaction from the reading of such authors. The
result of his four years' studies of this kind was that
he fell into a sort of scepticism — not, as he carefully
tells us, regarding the existence of God or the duties
' Divine Dialogues, iii. 27.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 309
of morality — " for of these he never had the least
doubt ;" but regarding the origin and end of life.
He was puzzled like many a young dreamer before
him as to the meaning of existence, and what were
its shows, and what its substance. He expressed
his feelings in a Greek epigram, under the title
ATTopCa, which he afterwards himself translated : — ¦
" Know I :
Nor whence nor who I am, poor wretch !
Nor yet — oh, madness ! — whither I must goe :
Lies, night-dreams, empty toys, fear, fatal love.
This is my life : I nothing else do see."
This unhappy state of mental disturbance lasted
until he had taken his Bachelor's degree in 1635.
After that he fell anew to thinking with himself
" whether the knowledge of things was really the
supreme felicity of man or something greater or
more divine was. Or, supposing it to be so, whether
it was to be acquired by such an eagerness and
intentness in the reading of authors, and contem
plating of things — or by the purgation of the mind
from all sorts of vices whatsoever." This new train
of thought was greatly encouraged, if not excited,
by his study of the " Platonic writers, Marsilius
Ficinus,^ Plotinus himself Mercurlus Trismegistus,^
^ Marsilius Ficinus was one of sought to amalgamate their theo-
the well-known school of Floren- logy with Christianity.
tine Platonists who composed the " Trismegistus was an epithet
brilliant circle which surrounded given to the Egyptian Hermes.
the Medici in the fifteenth cen- Numerous philosophical and as-
tury. He translated Plato and trological works bore this name
Plotinus, with other Neo-Platonic in the early Christian centuries,
writers, and, like More himself, and purported to be written under

310 HENRY MORE

and the mystical divines, among whom there was
frequent mention made of the purification of the
soul, and of the purgative course that is previous to
the illuminative." He was greatly fascinated by
these writers ; and the fascination was one which
never left him. They opened up a congenial world
of thought to his richly meditative mind, while their
transcendental pietisms exactly met the aspirations
of his mystic and enthusiastic spirit. But " amongst
all the writings of this kind, there was none so
pierced and affected " him " as that golden litde
book with which Luther is also said to have been
wonderfully taken — viz., ' Theologia Germanica.'"
Something of defect he recognised in this marvellous
manual — ¦" a certain deep melancholy, as also no
slight errors In matters of philosophy ; " but its great
lesson of self-renunciation aroused and quickened
his whole being " as it were out of sleep." Hence
forth he was " most firmly persuaded, not only con
cerning the existence of God, but also of His abso
lute both goodness and power, and of His most real
will that we should be perfect, even as our Father
which is in heaven is perfect" And so a violent
conflict was awakened in him betwixt " the divine
principle and the animal nature," — a conflict which
he represents as the very "punctum saliens, or first
motion ofthe new life or birth begun in us." "As
to other performances," he adds, " whether of mo
rality or religion arising from mere self-love, let
divine inspiration. They were phers of the Neo-Platonic school,
mostly written at Alexandria by probably in the fourth century of
Gnostic Christians or philoso- the Christian era.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM, 311
them be as specious or goodly as you please, they
are at best but as preparations, or the more refined
exercises of a sort of theological Hobbianisme."
The result was, that all More's other studies be
came of no value in comparison with the course of
spiritual discipline upon which he now entered. It
was his earnest effort in all things to subdue his own
will to the divine will, and cherish within him the
seed of the divine life. He felt that " the divine seed
alone is that which is acceptable unto God — and the
sole invincible basis of all true religion." His former
" insatiable desire and thirst after the knowledge of
things" became almost wholly extinguished. He
was "solicitous about nothing so much as a more
full union with the divine and celestial principle, the
Inward flowing wellspring of life eternal — with the
most fervent prayers breathing often unto God that
He would be pleased thoroughly to set him free
from the dark chains and sordid captivity of his own
will." And no sooner strangely had he entered
upon this course, and his immoderate desire after
mere knowledge been allayed, than he began to have
a clearer assurance of those very things which he had
desired to know. Gradually light as well as peace
came to him. " Within a few years " he " got into a
most joyous and lucid state of mind " — the very anti
thesis of his former state. As he had described his
darkness and embarrassment in an epigram ^ — so now
also he describes his relief and satisfaction : —
1 Both epigrams were originally former under that of Atto/jio. They
written in Greek — the latter are both found at the end of his
under the title of EuTropi'a, as the ' Philosophical Poems.'

312 HENRY MORE

" I come from heaven ; am an immortal ray
Of God ; O joy ! and back to God shall go.
And here sweet love on's wings me up doth stay.
I live, I'm sure ; and joy this life to know.
Night and vain dreams begone : Father of lights
We live, as Thou, clad with eternal day.
Faith, wisdom, love, fix'd joy, free winged might.
This is true life : all else death and decay."
More's period of scepticism seems to have lasted
for three or four years following his graduation.
All that we distinctly know Is the spiritual character
of the rest which he reached, and that its full attain
ment was marked by the composition of his first
philosophical poem. " I was fully convinced," he
says,^ — a conviction which lies at the basis of all his
higher thought, — " that true holiness was the only
safe entrance into divine knowledge." And not con
tent with expressing his thoughts in the epigram we
have already given, he " afterwards, about the begin
ning of the year 1640, comprised his chief specula
tions and experiences in a pretty full poem called
' Psychozoia, or the Life of the Soul.' " He had no
intention at first of publishing this poem; but at
length he yielded, as so many have done before and
since, to the " instigation of some learned and pious
friends," who had accidentally come to know of it
It was published accordingly for the first time in
1642, along with another poem of considerable
length, entitled " Psychathanasia ; or, the second part
of the Song of the Soul, treating of the Immortality
of Souls, especially Man's Soul." Finally, four other
' Pref. to 'Mystery of Godliness.'

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 313
poems on kindred subjects,^ along with several minor
poems, were added, and the complete collection of
'Philosophical Poems' appeared in 1647, when he
was thirty-three years of age.
More's poems are now hardly known; they have
fallen out of the rank which even the poems of
Donne and Davies maintain, and are not found in
any collection. In some respects they form the
most singular attempt in literature to turn metaphy
sics into poetry. Apart from the " notes " and " in
terpretation general," which he has himself happily
furnished, they are barely intelligible. Even with
such assistance they are a most Intricate and per
plexing study. Not only the strain of thought and
complexities of Neo-Platonic allusion, but the invo
lutions and phantasies of the verse itself, contribute
to this. Yet there are here and there not a few
genuine gleams both of poetic and spiritual insight ;
and the mental picture which the poems present is
altogether so curious as to reward the patience of a
congenial student. No one unless such a student,
animated in some degree by the " Platonic rage,"
from which they " powerfully flow forth," need at-
^ The titles of these four poems, Third Book of the Song ofthe
which are more or less closely .Soul : containing a confutation of
connected with his primary "Song the Sleep of the Soul after Death."
of the Soul," may interest the 3. "The Pras-existency of theSoul
reader. l. " Democritus Platonis- — an Appendix to Third Part of
sans; or an Essay upon the Infi- the Song of the Soul." 4. " Anti-
nity of Worlds out of Platonic monopsychia ; or the Fourth Part
principles. Annexed to this second of the Song of the Soul, contain-
Part of the Song of the Soul." ing a Confutation of the Unity of
2. " Antipsychopannychia ; or the Souls."

314 HENRY MORE

tempt them. The eye must be profound as well as
'" clear," which would penetrate their " deep search
ing thoughts often renewed." The reader is to
expect, as he himself duly warms —
" No Teian strain,
No light wanton Lesbian vein."
His is a far nobler function than that of the ordinary
poet. " Nor ladies' loves, nor knights' brave martiall deeds,
Yvnrapt in rolls of hid antiquitie ;
But th' inward fountain, and the unseen seeds.
From whence are these and what so under eye
Doth fall, or is record in memorie.
Psyche, I'll sing. Psyche ! from thee they sprong.
O life of Time and all Alterity !
The life of lives instill his nectar strong.
My soul t'inebriate, while I sing Psyche's song.

My task is not to try
What's simply true. I onely do engage
Myself to make a fit discovery.
Give some fair glimpse of Plato's hid Philosophy.
What man alive that hath but common wit
(When skilfull limmer suing his intent
Shall fairly well pourtray and wisely hit
The true proportion of each lineament.
And in right colours to the life depaint
The fulvid eagle with her sun-bright eye).
Would wexen wroth with inward choler brent
Cause 'tis no buzard or discolour'd Pie ?
Why man ? I meant it not : cease thy fond obloquie.
So if what's consonant to Plato's school
(Which well agrees with learned Pythagore,
Egyptian Trismegist, and th' antique roll
Of Chaldee wisdome, all which time hath tore,

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. .^IJ

But Plato and deep Plotin do restore).
Which is my scope, I sing out lustily :
If any twitten me for such strange lore,
And me all blamelesse brand with infamy,
God purge that man from fault of foul malignity. "
The philosophical doctrines ofthe poems will suffi
ciently appear as we proceed. For, like all his school,
More uses up again and again his fundamental Ideas ;
and the " Platonic principles," which he turned into
song in his early years, were the same which he
handled afterwards in various forms of prose. We
may give, however, a few further extracts, some of
which condense in pregnant fragments the pith of
his thought, while others, by a happy chance, attain
true poetic form — ^golden threads of simple thought
or feeling tracing the " wastful woods " — the harsh
involvements — of his verse.^
" Hence the soul's nature we may plainly see :
A beam it is of th' Intellectual Sun.
A ray indeed of that Eternity ;
But such a ray as when it first out shone.
From a free light its shining date begun. ^
If then, said he, the spirit may not be
Right reason, surely we must deem it sense.
Yes, sense it is, this was my short reply.
Sense upon which holy Intelligence
^He did not himself estimate his In my cold breast. Then 'gin I rashly
poetic power highly when the fit blame
. . . My rugged lines: this word is obsolete;
Of composition was over. .^.^^ ^^j^j^ ^^^,^ . ^ ^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^
, , , . doth beat
¦ A rude confused heap of ashes dead ^.^^ humorous ears. "
My verses seem, ' when that Celestial „ „, .. . ^ . , ^ ,
jj^jjjg , 2 The Life of the Soul, cant.
That sacred Spirit of Life's extinguished ii. 22.

3l6 HENRY MORE

And heavenly Reason and comely Prudence
(O beautious branches of that root divine !)
Do springen up, through inly experience
Of God's hid wayes, as he doth ope the ey'n
Of our dark souls, and in our hearts his light enshrine.^
If light divine we know by divine light.
Nor can by any other means it see.
This ties their hands from force that have the spirit.^
But yet my Muse, still take an higher flight.
Sing of Platonick Faith in the first Good,
That faith that doth our souls to God unite
So strongly, tightly, that the rapid flood
Of this swift flux of things, nor with foul mud
Can stain, nor strike us off from th' unity,
Wherein we steadfast stand, unshak'd, unmov'd,
Engrafted by a deep vitality.
The prop and stay of things in God's benignity.^
When I myself from mine own self do quit
And each thing else ; then an all-spreaden love
To the vast Universe my soul doth sit.
Makes me half equall to All-seeing Jove.
My mightie wings high stretch'd then clapping light
I brush the starres and make them shine more bright."*
The following are not without a genuine touch of
fancy and poetic skill : —
" I saw pourtrai'd on this sky-coloured silk
Two lovely Lads with wings fully dispread
Of silver plumes, their skins more white than milk.
Their lilly limbs I greatly admired,
Their cheary looks and lusty livelyhed :
' Ibid., ii. 99. Book III., cant. iv.
'^ Ibid., ii. 105. * Cupid's Conflict.
^ The Immortality of the Soul,

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 317
Athwart their snowy brest, a scarf they wore
Of azure hew."-
By this the sun's bright waggon 'gan ascend
The eastern hill, and draw on chearful day ;
So I full fraught with joy do homeward wend
And fed myself with that that Nymph did say.
And did so cunningly to me convey.
Resolving for to teach all willing men
Life's mysterie, and quite to chase away
Mind-mudding mist sprung from low fulsome fen :
Praise my good will, but pardon my weak falt'ring pen."^
It was about this same period of his life that More
believed himself to have had a curious vision, which
he afterwards recounted under the name of Bathy-
nous in his ' Divine Dialogues.' There cannot be
any reasonable doubt that he speaks of himself under
the name ; and there Is so much that Is characteristic
in the story — It gives us such an Insight into his
clear, confiding, and enthusiastic spirit — that we shall
quote it at some length for its biographic signi
ficance. It occurs in the third of the series of his
' Divine Dialogues.' He is discussing with his Inter
locutors the subject of the divine goodness, when
he informs them that he had a strange dream in his
youth of " an old man with a grave countenance
speaking to him in a wood ; " and on being impor
tuned to tell his dream, he agrees to do so as " ex
quisitely and briefly " as he can. " You must know,
then, of what an anxious and thoughtful genius I was
from my very childhood, and what a deep and strong
sense I had of the existence of God, and what an
1 The Life of the Soul, cant. =" The Immortality of the Soul,
i. 26. B. I., cant. vi. 31.

3l8 HENRY MORE :

early conscientiousness of approving myself to Him ;
and how, when I had arrived to riper years of reason,
and was imbued with some slender rudiments of
philosophy, I was not then content to think of God
in the gross only, but began to consider His nature
more distinctly, accurately, and to contemplate and
compare His attributes ; and how, partly from the ¦
natural sentiments of my own mind, partly from the
countenance and authority of Holy Scripture, I did
confidently conclude that Infinite power, wisdom, and
goodness, were the chiefest and most comprehensive
attributes of the divine nature, and that the sovereign
of these was His goodness, the summity and power,
as I may so speak, of the divinity. In the mean
time, being versed in no other natural philosophy nor
metaphyslcks but the vulgar, my mind was for a long
time charged with Inextricable puzzles and difficulties,
to make the phenomena of the world and vulgar
opinions of men In any tolerable way to comport or
suit with these two chiefest attributes of God, His
wisdom and His goodness. These meditations closed
mine eyes at night ; these saluted my memory at
first in the morning ; these accompanied my remote
and solitary walks Into fields and woods, sometimes so
early as when most of other mortals keep their beds.
"It came to pass, therefore, that one summer
morning having rose much more early than ordinary,
and having walk'd so long in a certain wood (which
I had a good while frequented) that I thought fit to
rest myself on the ground, having spent my spirits
partly by long motion of my body, but mainly by
want of sleep,: and over-anxious and solicitous think-

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 319
Ing of such difficulties as Hylobares (one of the
speakers in the dialogues) either has already, or, as I
descry'd at first, is likely to propose ; I straltway re
posed my weary limbs amongst the grass and flowers
at the foot of a broad-spread flourishing oak, where
the gentle fresh morning air played in the shade on
my heated temples, and with unexpressible pleasure
refrigerating my blood and spirits, and the industri
ous bees busily humming round about me upon the
dewy honeysuckles ; to which nearer noise was most
melodiously joined the distant singings of the chear
ful birds re-echoed from all parts of the wood ; these
delights of nature all conspiring together, you may
easily fancy, would quickly charm my weary body
into a profound sleep. But my soul was then as
much as ever awake, and, as It seems, did most vividly
dream that I was still walking in these solitary woods
with my thoughts more eagerly intent upon those
usual difificulties of providence than ever. But while
I was in this great anxiety and earnestness of spirit,
accompanied (as frequently when I was awake) with
vehment and devout susplrations and ejaculations
towards God, of a sudden there appeared at a distance
a very grave and venerable person walking slowly
towards me. His stature was greater than ordinary.
He was clothed with a loose silk garment of a purple
colour, much like the Indian gowns that are now
in fashion, saving that the sleeves were something
longer and wider ; and it was tied about him with a
Levitical girdle also of purple ; and he wore a pair
of velvet slippers of the same colour, but upon
his head a Montero of black velvet, as if he were

320 HENRY MORE

both a traveller and an inhabitant of that place at
once. " While he was at any distance from me, 1 stood
fearless and unmoved ; only. In reverence to so ven
erable a personage, I put off my hat, and held It In
my hand. But when he came up closer to me, the
vivid fulgour of his eyes that shone so piercingly
bright from under the shadow of his black Montero,
and the whole air of his face, though joined with a
wonderful deal of mildness and sweetness, did so of
a sudden astonish me, that I fell into an excessive
trembling, and had not been able to stand if he had
not laid his hand upon my head, and spoken comfor
tably to me, which he did In a paternal manner, say
ing, — ' Blessed be thou of God, my son ; be of good
courage, and fear not ; for I am a messenger of God
to thee for thy good. Thy serious aspires and
breathings after the true knowledge of thy Maker and
the ways of His providence (which is the most be
coming employment of every rational being), have
ascended into the sight of God ; and I am appointed
to give into thy hands the two keys of Providence,
that thou mayest thereby be able to open the treasure
of that wisdom thou so anxiously and yet so piously
seekest after.' And wherewithal he put his right
hand into his left sleeve, and pulled out two shin
ing bright keys — the one silver, the other of gold,
tied together with a sky-coloured ribbon of a pretty
breadth — and delivered them Into my hands, which 1
received of him, making low obeisance, and profes
sing my thankfulness for so great a gift."
By this time, he tells us, he had acquired so much

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 32I
confidence and familiarity as to be able to converse
with the venerable figure which had appeared to him.
Having received first the silver key into his hand, he
was instructed to observe the letters written on it,
which, when formed into a sentence or motto, proved
to be Claude fenestras, ut luceat domus. He then,
holding the lower part of the key In his left hand,
pulled at the handle with his right, when there came
out a silver tube with a scroll of thin paper, " but as
strong as any vellum, and as white as driven snow."
On this paper was sketched what, according to his
somewhat elaborate description, was obviously de
signed to be a representation of the motions of the
planetary bodies round the sun, and of the starry
hemisphere — a sort of revelation of the Copernican
or true system of the universe. His attention was
then specially drawn to the motto of the golden key,
which was a " treasure of itself" It was Amor Dei
Lux Animce. A golden tube with a similar scroll
of paper disclosed itself, when he pressed, as before,
the handle of this key, on which were inscribed twelve
sentences written with letters of gold, to such effect
as the following : — Divine goodness is commensurate
with divine providence or infinite ; Time and Space
— ' the thread of time and the expansion of the uni
verse ' — proceed from a benevolent Deity ; Intellec
tual Spirits rejoiced with God before creation ; in a
world of free agents, sin must be a possibility ; but
happiness exceeds sin and misery ' as much as the
light exceeds the shadows.' He was proceeding with
his analysis of these divine sentences, when he was
rudely Interrupted by the braying of two asses, and
VOL. IL X

322 HENRY MORE

the bright vision of the " aged grave personage, the
silver and golden keys, and glorious parchment"
suddenly vanished, when he found himself sitting
alone at the bottom of the oak where he had fallen
asleep — an ass on each side of him !
We confess, with one of the interlocutors, that we
are somewhat at a loss to understand the moral of this
singular interruption of his vision, the ludicrous ab
surdity of which strikes us at first more than anything
else; unless it be Intended, as he himself half hints, to
signify the indifferent noisiness with which the world,
and even the Church, often receive and interrupt the
speculations of a higher thoughtfulness striving to
read, from the charactered scroll of nature and life,
the mysteries of being. More professes that the
completed vision would have been too much for him,
and that he was more gratified at things happening
as they did than if he had been all at once put in
possession of Truth — the continued search for which
had been to him a repeated and prolonged pleasure.
One of the speakers — " a zealous but airy-minded
Platonist and Cartesian, or Mechanist" — suggests
that the object of the vision was not merely to
attest the Copernican system of the world, but the
truth of Descartes' principles. But More, in the
name of Bathynous, repudiates this view on the
ground that he espied in one of the sentences or
aphorisms of the golden key, which he had not time
to read in full, the statement, " That the primordials
of the world are not mechanical, but spermatical or
vital" which, he adds, " is diametrically and funda
mentally opposite to Descartes' philosophy." He Is

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 323
convinced further, that. If he had had full conference
with the divine sage, he would have found his phil
osophy "more Pythagorical or Platonical than Car
tesian. For there was also mention of the seminal
soul of the world, which some modern writers call
the spirit of nature." The aphoristic revelations,
both of the silver and the golden key, gave rise
to a great deal more discussion amongst the friends
assembled in Cuphophron's "philosophical bower" —
a delightful retreat of the " airy-minded Platonist "
— with the cool evening summer air " fanning itself
through the leaves of the arbour," and a " frugal col
lation" spread — " a cup of wine, a dish of fruit, and a
manchet" ^ The rest was made up with " free dis
courses in philosophy." The picture is a pleasant
one, if the dialogue is sometimes tiresome ; and the
whole vision and description are strikingly Illustrative
of the dreamy ideal enthusiasm with which the young
Platonist pursued his studies and inquiries.
More's poems, we have seen, were first published
In 1642. He had previously taken his Master's
degree In 1639 ; and immediately afterwards was
chosen Fellow of his college. This was his first
promotion, and It may almost be said to have been
his last. Many offers of preferment were subse-
quendy made to him; but he persistendy refused
them all, with one exception. Fifteen years after the
Restoration, or in 1675, he accepted a prebend in
Gloucester cathedral, only to resign it almost Im
mediately in favour of Dr Edward Fowler, after-
1 A small loaf of fine bread, toast of manchet, dipped in oil of
" Take," says Bacon, " a small sweet almonds," &c.

324 HENRY MORE

wards the well-known Bishop of Gloucester. The
suspicion was, that More only accepted the office In
order to pass it on to Fowler. He patronised not
only Fowler, but Worthlngton, whom he appointed
to the rectory of Ingoldsby, in Lincolnshire, the
advowson of which he had Inherited from his father.
Apparently he held this living himself for a short
time ;^ but he had no love for any work beyond the
gates of his college. He had no ambition, and
steadily declined every attempt to draw him into a
public position. He would not even accept the
mastership of his college, to which it is understood
he would have been preferred in 1654, when Cud
worth was appointed. Other offers of the provost
ship of Trinity College, Dublin, and the deanery of
St Patrick's, shared the same fate. He had set his
heart on the quiet privacy of his life as a Fellow, and
as such he lived and died. The precincts of Christ's
College remained his home, and here, it Is said, he
had made a sort of paradise for himself Noble
friends importuned him ; the royal favour even
solicited him to accept some office more worthy of
his reputation. " Pray be not so morose," one noble
person is represented as saying, " or humoursome, as
to refuse all things you have not known so long as
Christ's College." But he was not to be moved.
His friends even got him " on a day as far as White
hall, in order to the kissing of the royal hand ;" but
' Ward says, — " This living he ister anno 1642, but whether of
was possessed of, I suppose, for his own writing I cannot cer-
some veiy short time ; for I find tainly say."
his name once to the public reg-

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 325
when he understood that the condition of his doing
so was the acceptance of a bishopric, " he was not
upon any account to be persuaded to it." We have
often heard of the Nolo Episcopari ; but It is seldom
it is exemplified in so simple and honest a way as
this — by running away from the unwelcome offer.
Soon after he became Fellow of Christ's College,
he seems to have acted as tutor to several persons
of " great quality." "His deep thoughtfulness did
not take him off from all that due care that was any
way requisite for the discharge of so great a trust."
His biographer speaks on the authority of personal
knowledge and letters which had passed betwixt
More and some of his pupils, one of whom told him
in particular, " what excellent lectures he would
deliver to them of Piety and Instruction, from the
chapter that was read on nights in his chamber."
Others " confirmed " the same report ; and we can
easily understand the hearty bonds of sympathy
which would unite such a tutor and young men of a
refined and thoughtful turn of mind. But amongst
all his pupils, the most interesting was a young lady
of noble family — a " heroine pupil," as his biographer
says, "of an extraordinary nature." This lady
appears to have been a sister of Heneage, Lord
Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, Chancellor
and Lord Keeper under Charles 11.,^ a well-known
statesman of great legal ability and eloquence, who,
1 This is expressly stated (Chal- Ottoman Court, and an early
mers's Biog. Diet.) ; but Ward, pupil of More's, of whom we can
More's biographer, speaks of a Sir learn nothing.
John Finch, Ambassador at the

326 HENRY MORE

with something of the harshness and subserviency of
his age, maintained a high personal character, and
was animated by genuine and lofty religious aspira
tions.-^ Thus distinguished by birth, More's favourite
pupil married Lord Conway, and settled at Ragley,
in Warwickshire, where " at intervals he spent a
considerable part of his time." He had the highest
esteem for her, and the feeling was mutual, notwith
standing causes of difference which arose betwixt
them. He was wont to say " that he scarce ever
met with any person, man or woman, of better natural
parts than the Lady Conway ; " and she in her turn
had an " extraordinary value " for his genius. Her
husband was scarcely less enthusiastic, and is said to
have treasured everything of More's " with as much
reverence as if it were Socrates'." It Is added, that
" as she always wrote a very clear style, so would
she argue sometimes, or put to him the deepest and
noblest queries imaginable."
Lady Conway was of delicate constitution, and
appears to have suffered much, particularly from
"pains and disorders in her head." Her bodily in
firmity, as in many similar cases, had developed her

^ In evidence of this, it is enough his harshness is a saying attri-
to mention that Cudworth's 'Intel- buted to him when Andrew Mar-
lectual System ' was dedicated to veil proposed that the fees in-
Lord Finch, in acknowledgment curred by Milton during his brief
of "his heartyaffection for religion, custody after the Restoration
and zeal for it." Cudworth also should be refunded by Pariia-
speaks highly of his eloquence; ment. " No," said Finch; "Milton
while Pepys says, "He was a man had been Latin secretary to Crom-
of as great eloquence as ever I well, and instead of paying .^15°)
heard, or ever hoped to hear in all he well deserved hanging."
my life." The main evidence of

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 327
spiritual enthusiasm, and she gradually passed from
More's pupilage into the ranks of the Quakers.
This was a great blow and discouragement to him ;
and he entered Into many arguments, not only with
her, but with her Quaker friends. He wrote a letter
to Penn concerning Baptism and the Lord's Supper,
and even tried a discussion with " their great leader,
George Fox." But Fox, either by his rudeness or
his Ignorance, proved too much for him. He said to
some one, " that in conversing with him, he felt him
self, as it were, turned into brass, so much did the
spirit, crookedness, or perverseness of that person
move and offend his mind." ^ More failed to recon
vert his pupil, but he retained her friendship. He
continued to spend much of his time, as before, at
Ragley " and its woods," and there composed several
of his books, at Lady Conway's " own desire and
instigation." When she died, she left him a legacy ;
and he, on the other hand, drew an interesting por
trait of her In the form of a preface to a volume of
remains of her genius, which at one time It was
designed to publish. He drew this portrait under
another name, and with so much address, that we
are told " the most rigid Quaker would see every
thing they could wish in it, and yet the soberest
Christian be entirely satisfied with It" ^
Lady Conway was evidently a remarkable person,
and there is some reason to think that she exercised
a greater influence upon More than his biographer
is willing to confess. Her mysticism was in close
1 Ward's Life, p. 197. the name of Van Helmont, and
2 The preface was written under is printed at length in Ward's Life.

328 HENRY MORE :

affinity with one side of his religious nature. She
had studied in Latin " both Plato and Plotinus," and
" searched into, and judiciously sifted, the abstrusest
writers of theosophy." ^ But to her mysticism she
plainly united a vigorous and confident will. More
himself said "that she was one that would not
give up her judgment entirely unto any." Such a
character — enthusiastic, yet self-reliant — of subde
spiritual insight, chastened by suffering, and yet of
firm purpose, naturally exerted a great attraction for
an Intelligence like More's, free and rational, yet
mobile and restlessly sympathetic. Her genius and
generous force of thought charmed him, and probably
influenced and stimulated him more than he ima
gined ; and the fact that he wrote so many of his
books at Ragley may be taken as clear evidence of
this. But Ragley was the seat of other Influences be
sides those of a congenial and thoughtful mistress.
Spiritualism found a favourite abode in it, in the
shape not only of religious enthusiasm, but of gifts
and wonders which seemed to many little else than
miraculous. In addition to the " best and chiefest of
the Quakers," its society embraced two of the most
extraordinary men of the time. Baron Van Helmont,
and the " no less famous " Valentine Greatrakes,
with both of whom More made special acquaintance
in this pleasant retreat. The former is not to be
confounded with the well-known chemist of the same
name, who, following in the footsteps of Paracelsus,
did much, with all his extravagances, to advance the
^ More's Preface.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 329
study of natural science In the first half of the
seventeenth century.^ The Van Helmont who was
More's associate, and in whose person and name he
wrote the panegyric of Lady Conway to which we
have already adverted, was the son of this distin
guished chemist. He inherited something of his
father's genius, but more of his enthusiasm and
extravagance. He seems to have devoted himself
solely to those occult medical studies which were a
secondary passion with his parent, and to have lived
for some time in Lady Conway's family as physician.
He was greatly attached, along with his friend and
patroness, to the Quakers, and attended their meet
ings frequently. From all we learn of him, It is diffi
cult to get a real view of his character. More's
remark might lead us to infer that he was either a
pure, unconscious enthusiast, or a well-intentioned,
self-denying philanthropist "He knew as little of
himself, truly and really," More says, " as one that
had never seen him in his life."
Greatrakes is a comparatively well-known person,
— his name being one of the most celebrated In that
strange history of occult marvels which Is so far from
having run its course that our age, with all its
enlightenment, is likely to add to it one of its most
startling and memorable chapters. His wonderful
cures made even more noise in the seventeenth cen
tury than any similar phenomena have yet done in
' Jean Baptist Van Helmont passed most of his time on his
was a gentleman of Brabant, and Flemish estate, engaged in the
Lord of Merode, &c. He was researches of his laboratory. He
born in Brussels in 1577, and died in 1644.

330 HENRY MORE

the nineteenth. They were the subject of formal
investigation by the Royal Society, and quite car
ried away men like More and Glanvlll, both of
whom have specially adverted to them.-^ Greatrakes
was a native of Ireland — a gentleman of liberal birth
and fortune, well educated, and apparently possessed
both of public and private virtues. There is no rea
son to doubt his honesty. At first It is said that he
was far from eager to exert the strange powers with
which he felt himself endowed. But at length the Im
pulse became too powerful for him, and having tried
his skill on some persons In the neighbourhood of his
residence, the effect was so marked that sick people
flocked to him from all quarters. He cured them In
the most extraordinary manner, merely by laying his
hands upon them and stroking them. Lady Conway's
sufferings led her to invite him to England, where his
success was no less astonishing, save in her own case.
His performances became the talk of town and coun
try ; and his reputation was keenly canvassed. " At
the coffee-houses and everywhere," writes " a person
of great veracity and a philosopher" to Glanvlll,
" the great discourse now is about Mr G., the famous
Irish stroker. He undergoes curious censures here;
some take him to be a conjuror, and some an im
postor, but others, again, adore him as an aposde.
I confess, I think, the man is free from all design, of
a very agreeable conversation, not addicted to any
vice, nor to any sect or party ; but is, I believe, a
^ The former in the notes to his his well-known publication on
Latin version of ' Enthusiasmus Witchcraft.
Triumphatus,' and the latter in

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 33 1
sincere Protestant. I was three weeks together with
him at my Lord Conway's, and saw him (I think) lay
his hands upon a thousand persons ; and really there
Is something in it more than ordinary ; but I am con
vinced 'tis not miraculous. I have seen pains
strangely fly before his hand till he hath chased them
out of the body ; dimness cleared and deafness cured
by his touch ; twenty persons at several times, In fits
of the falling-sickness, were in two or three minutes
brought to themselves, so as to tell where their pain
was ; and then he hath pursued It till he hath driven
It out at some extreme part : running sores of the
king's evil dried up, and kernels brought to a pura-
tion by his hand." " Yet," adds Glanvlll, agreeing
in this respect with his friend More, " I have many
reasons to persuade me that nothing of all this is
miraculous. He pretends not to give testimony to
any doctrine ; the manner of his operation speaks
it to be natural, the cure seldom succeeds without
reiterated touches, his patients often relapse, he fails
frequently, he can do nothing where there is any
decay in nature, and many distempers are not at all
obedient to his touch. So that I confess I refer all
his vertue to his particular temper and complexion ;
and I take his spirits to be a kind of elixir and uni
versal ferment, and that he cures (as Dr M. ex
presseth it) by a sanative contagion." ^
More had a strong faith, as many men of genius
have had, in what may be called the sanatory virtue
of rare personal gifts, whether of inind or of body.
With the most unaffected candour — a candour so
^ Sadducismus Triumph., p. 583. 1726.

332 HENRY MORE

perfectly simple as to be to our modern tastes
ludicrous — he expresses his belief that he was
himself endowed in a remarkable degree with such
gifts. Like Socrates, he had his monitory counsel-
lings and warnings — impulses borne in upon his
spirit in an irresistible and " more than ordinary
manner." Frequently in his writings such Impulses
would come to him, and lead him In a different line
of thought from that which he had intended, " when
he saw afterwards that the way he was going would
have led him into what he calls " an Angiportus," or
position of difficulty. " He was in a very great rap
ture when he was thus affected." It is added by his
biographer ^ that he was " not a little shy in speaking
of matters of this nature ;" that it was only occasion
ally to his most Intimate friends that he would do so ;
and that there was good reason to believe that he was
more frequently moved In such a manner " than he
hath anyhow particularly related." His vivid realisa
tion of the spiritual world, and the presence of higher
powers everywhere encircling human life, made It
natural and easy for him to believe such things.
His belief in what he declared to be the strange
properties of his body is of a more remarkable
kind. He has himself placed on deliberate re
cord. In speaking of Greatrakes's singular endow
ments, that certain products of his own person " had
naturally the flavour of violets; that his breast
and body, especially when very .young, would of
themselves, in like manner, send forth flowery and
aromatick odours from them, and such as he daily
^ Ward, p. 130.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 333
almost was sensible of, when he came to put off
his clothes and go to bed. And even afterwards,
when he was older, about the end of winter or begin
ning of the spring, he did frequently perceive certain
sweet and herbaceous smells about him, when yet
there were no such external objects near from
whence they could proceed." ^ Whatever explana
tion may be given of this curious story, More him
self supposed the results to arise from the peculiar
virtue of his temperament and constitution. Anima
sicca, anima pura; anima sicca, sapientissima — he
was wont to say, repeating an^ ancient aphorism, and
explaining that a " dry constitution," such as he had,
was naturally the seat of the purest and wisest mind.
Undoubtedly he had a singularly healthy and elastic
bodily frame, fitted as " a well-strung instrument to
his soul." "It seemed built for a hundred years ;"
and as he further says of himself " there were not
many that could have borne that high warmth and
activity of thoughtfulness and intense writing."
" After all his study and depth of thought In the
day-time, when he came to sleep he had a strange
sort of narcotic power (as his word was), that drew
him to it ; and he was no sooner In a manner laid in
his bed, but the falling of a house would scarce
wake him. When yet early in the morning he was
wont to awake usually into an immediate unexpres
sible life and vigour, with all his thoughts and
notions raying about him, as beams surrounding
the centre from whence they all proceed." He
had so tempered and attuned his body that it
^ 1 Schol. in Enthus. Triumph., sect. 58.

334 HENRY MORE

readily obeyed all the movements of his mind; and
he was able to have his thoughts " oftentimes as
clear as he could almost desire," and to " take them
off or fix them upon a subject in a manner as he
pleased." " It was pleasant," he said, " to go quick
In thought from notion to notion, without any Images
of words In the mind."
As we have glided Into these personal details, it
may be as well so far to complete them. More
lived very much alone in the " paradise " which he
had made for himself in Christ's College, save when
the mistress of Ragley tempted him to join her
society. " Many happy days, he said, he had spent
in his chamber ; " and so " sweet and pleasing was
the fruit " of his solitary labours and musings, that
they often appeared to him, " in looking back upon
them, as an aromatick field." His father, who had,
we have seen, at one time cherished other and
ambitious hopes regarding him — :" coming Into his
room, and seeing him there with his books about
him, and full well knowing the tendencies of his
studies, was most highly affected with it, and in a
rapture said — what indeed was the truth — that he
thought he spent his time in an angelical way." '
He had no doubt of the propriety of the mode of
life he had chosen for himself He knew his own
powers, and appreciated what he could do as well
as what was agreeable to him. There were some of
the " spiritualists," he said, " who would have had
him to go upon a stall, and from thence preach to
the people ; but I have measured myself," he added,
' Ward, p. 60.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 335
" from the height to the depth, and know what I can
do and what I ought to do — and I do it." " If he
was to live his whole life over again, he would do
just, for the main, as he had done."
Living in college, he frequented, for the most part,
" the public hall, except on Fridays, which being a fish-
day, and that a sort of food which did not then so well
agree with him, he chose rather to dine upon some
thing else in his chamber. He kept more than once
the time of Lent, abstaining from flesh; but he found,
he said, that it quite altered the tone of his body,
and so afterwards forbore the observing of it. His
drink was, for the most part, the college small beer,
which, in his pleasant way of speaking, he would
say sometimes was seraphical, and the best liquor in
the world. And he hath several times observed,
according to the generous heat that was in him, how
mightily he should find himself refreshed by it. But
he was not at times without his farther refreshments
of a better sort. And every one," adds his biogra
pher, with more sense than many who have ventured
to touch such details, " must here follow his own con
stitution and best experience in these matters."^
Such a life as More's necessarily presents few
points of contact with the great events of his time.
" He was so busy in his chamber with his pen and
lines as not to mind much the bustles and affairs of
the world without." He did not occupy any party
position, even in that indefinite sense in which
Whichcote and Cudworth may be said to have
done. He had no relations with the statesmen of
1 Ward, p. 94.

336 HENRY MORE

the civil war and the Commonwealth, and never
made, like his friends, any prominent public appear
ance. Educated in a Calvlnistic although not a
Puritan home,^ he turned aside very early from all
that could have connected him with the religious
parties dominant in his youth. His ideal was the
Church of England as it existed before the times
of disturbance — the Church of the Reformation and
of Hooker. To Popery, in every form, he was as
violently opposed as it was in his nature to be ; and
one of his chief works ^ is mainly devoted to an
exposure of its antichristian features — the points in
which it seems to him to favour idolatry, to bind
burdens upon the conscience, and to deaden and
resist, instead of quickening and educating, the
divine life. All his rational impulses rose against
such a system. But both his reason and his love of
quietness and order were opposed to what he con
sidered the excesses of Puritanism — "the dismal
spectacle of an infinity of sects and schisms." We
have already seen his relations with the Quakers.
Not all his affectionate respect for Lady Conway
could make him regard them with any leniency or
favour, and he is here and there through his writings
hardly fair to them, as when he describes them as
the offspring of the Famillsts.^ He probably dis-
1 Decided Calvinist as his " " A Modest Enquiry into the
father was, he does not seem to Mystery of Iniquity : first part,
have been a Puritan. More containing a careful and partial
himself at least says, " His delineation of the true idea of
nearest relations were deep suf- Antichristianism. 1564.
ferers for the king."— Quoted by ^ Divine Dialogues, p. 459"
Ward, p. 186. 567. These so - called Familists

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 337
liked the many forms of obtrusive fanaticism which
prevailed in England in the seventeenth century, all
the more because there was a side of his nature
on which he felt he had some affinity with them.
In all that he says of the Quakers, and through
out his interesting ' Treatise on Enthusiasm,' It Is
not difficult to trace the operation of this feeling.
But his intense hatred of disorder was sufficient
to keep In check all his own natural tendencies
towards enthusiasm. Ardent as his religious feel
ings were, he cherished a strong dislike to that indivi
dualism and assertion of special divine prerogative
which more or less lie at the basis of all fanaticism.^
" Your enormous contumacity and schismatlcalness,"
he said to the sectaries, " is hugely for the interest
of Antichrist, and as manifesdy against the interests
ofthe Kingdom of Christ." ^ Both in his poems and
were the special bugbear of rea- the National Church sick and
sonable religious people amidst crazy ;— if it were so, indeed,
the swarming sects of the century, where is your charity, and how
More describes them and their little your discretion— to run out
principles at length in his ' Grand of the house now your mother
Mystery of Godliness,' B. VI., lies thus on her sick-bed ? Is it
chap. xii. -xviii.; and connects to call the physician? No. I
them directly with H. Nicholas, demand then why do you run out
a fanatic of Amsterdam. They of the house? O my mother is
seem to have resembled the sick, and I am in good health.
modem Communities of Love. Will not any one reply, More
I Dial. V. 37. unmannerly and unnatural son
= Apology, chap. x. 1664. — In you ! to leave your mother (when
this same Apology he presses the you ought most to assist and
Sectaries with the following administer help unto her), and
rather happy expostulation :— thus to strut out of doors merely
" Ye that fancy yourselves the to ostentate your own health, as if
only zealots for truth and holi- your glory was the greater that
ness, the only sound and incon- your mother is sick, while you
laminate part of our nation— but fancy yourself so well?

VOL. II.

Y

338 HENRY MORE

elsewhere he inveighs against the empty Opiniona-
tiveness so rampant, and the source of so many
evils : —
" 'Tis opinion
That makes the riv'n heavens with tempests ring,
And thund'ring engine murderous balls outsling,
And send men's groaning ghosts to lower shade
Of horrid hell ; This the wide world doth bring
To devastation, makes mankind to fade —
Such direful things doth false religion persuade.
But true religion, sprung from God above,
Is like her fountain, full of charity,
Embracing all things with a tender love ;
Full of good- will and meek expectancy ;
Full of true justice and sure verity.
In heart and voice free, large, even infinite ;
Not wedged in strait particularity.
But grasping all in her vast active spright :
Bright lamp of God ! that men would joy in thy pure light."'
For himself he loved nothing more, and desired
nothing better, than the Church of England with its
" decent grandeur and splendour." He " cannot but
think that it would be a sorry exchange to accept
of presbytery instead, which would prove ¦ but a
democratical Papacy.'"^ Yet he elsewhere^ admits
that Episcopacy may be prized unduly, and that the
popular element may not be without its value and
advantage. His main concern is, that neither one
order of Church government nor another usurp the
place which only religion itself should hold. He is
for the " naked truth of Christianity," and nothing
' Immort. of the Soul, B. II. = Pref. to Expos, on Daniel, 58.
Cant. iii. 5, 6. ' Apol., c. v.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 339
more ; willing even to be called a Puritan, " If this be
to be a Puritan." " I am," he concludes, " above all
sects whatsoever as sects ; for I am a true and free
Christian ; and what I write and speak is for the inter
est of Christ, and in behalf of the Life of the Lamb." ^
If More's life as a student kept him retired from
the world, it greatly stimulated his productivity as
an avithor. Probably, also, it contributed in some
degree to the endless prolixity and repetitions of his
writings. We feel especially with him — as more or
less with all the Cambridge school, except Which
cote — that we are conversing with a mind too little
braced by active discipline, and the prompt, sys
tematic, compact habits which come from large
intercourse with men, and the affairs which stir men
to powerful movement or great ambitions. The air
of a school, which was after all confined to a narrow if
influential sphere, is more pervading in his writings
than in any of the others. Christ College, with Its
books, is never far out of sight ; and all the sweet
ness and seclusion of Ragley, " the solemness of
the place, its shady walks and hills and woods, where
he lost sight of the world and the world of him," ^
did not help to let the light of day or the breath of
the common air into his " choice theories," however
they may have assisted him in " finding them out "
and elaborating them. In this respect we have
been reminded more than once of an analogy
betwixt him and the leaders of the modern High-
Church school in its original development. Oxford
' Pref. to Reply to Eugenius Philalethes, sect. 1 1— quoted by
Ward, p. 188, 189. ' Ep. Ded. to Imm. of Soul.

340 HENRY MORE

and Hursely Parsonage may not inaptly be com
pared to Cambridge and Ragley; and the enervat
ing force of a wilful seclusion from the world Is
certainly not less conspicuous in Keble and New
man — although in a different direction — than in our
author. It may be pleasant to keep away from the
" bustles and affairs of the world without," as it is
pleasant to contemplate the peculiar beauty and
serenity of character which ripen amidst such retire
ments ; but, after all, no man can escape from his
fellow-men, and the rough facts of ordinary human
life, without spiritual and intellectual injury. The
product may be finer that is grown in solitude, but It
will neither be so useful, nor, in many respects, so
true and good.
And so More's writings, largely as they bulk in his
life, and deeply interesting as some of them are to the
religious and philosophical student, have long ceased
to exert any Influence. They never became litera
ture. None of them have even attained the sort of
dignified prominence accorded to Cudworth's ' Intel
lectual System,' which is eminently one of those books
which people agree in highly respecting, without think
ing of reading. As to their reception in his own age,
there are two accounts not very easy to reconcile.
On the one hand it is stated,^ that an eminent London
bookseller declared that, " for twenty years after the
return of Charles 1 1., the 'Mystery of Godliness,'
and Dr More's other works, ruled all the booksellers
in London." On the other hand, his biographer^
^ Chalmers's Biog. Diet. The authority is not given.
= Ward, p. 73-75.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 341
says virtually, on his own authority, " that, though he
had not wanted particular and extraordinary respects
from many persons, yet the world in general had
either been in part averse to his writings, or not
known well what to make of some things in them."
" 'Tis very certain," he adds, " that his writings are
not generally (I will not say, read, but) so much as
known ; and many scholars themselves are in a great
measure strangers to them." The truth seems to be,
that some of his writings at least were very well
received, and, judging from the number of editions
which they reached, may be said to have been popu
lar ; but that he himself was disappointed with the
welcome accorded to his favourite notions, or
" theories," as he called them. These children of
his brain were naturally much prized by him, and he
wondered (as so many theorists have done before and
since) that others did not value them as much as
himself To his own mind, they appeared " so very
clear, as well as glorious, that he almost fancied he
should have carried all before him ; but a little ex
perience served to cure him of this vanity, and he
quickly perceived that he was not like to be over-
popular." ^
The period of his activity as an author stretched
from the first publication of his poems, in 1642, to
within ten years of the close of his life, in 1687 — or a
period of thirty-five years. During all this time he
continued to write sometimes what we would now
call pamphlets rather than books, but also many
elaborate and formal treatises. He has himself left
1 Ward, p. 72.

342

HENRY MORE :

us a list of his publications in their chronological
order, and we give a summary of It below,^ which
may interest the reader. Some of the most charac-

' The following is a summary
of More's statement of the order
in which he composed his works.
We have abbreviated or thrown
out the personal details which he
intersperses with his statement,
save in so far as they give some
real explanation of the character
of the works, or the circumstances
of their origin. We have also ad
ded such explanations of our own
as may give the reader some idea
of writings which he has not him
self characterised.
I. I 6 4 2 - 4 7. — Philosophical
Poems. 2. 1650-51.— Letter and Replyto
Eugenius Philalethes under the
Pseudonym of Alazonomastix. We
have not seen this letter nor re
ply, except as quoted by Ward in
his " Life." He himself describes
them as follows: — " Opuscula
sane ludicro-seria et quse nun-
quam scripsissem nisi UEeniis nug-
isque eorum temporum enthusias-
ticis dicam an phantasticis eo
provocatus." 3. 1652. — Antidote against Athe
ism. New edition, 1655 ; also in
Collection of Phil, writings, 1662.
4. 1653. — Conjectura Cabbalis-
tica, or Attempt to interpret the
Three first Chapters of Genesis in
a threefold manner— literal, phil
osophical, and mystical, or divinely
moral. Also in Collection, &c.,
1662. 5. 1656. — Enthusiasmus Trium
phatus ; or a brief discourse of the

nature, causes, kinds, and cure of
enthusiasm ; also in Collection,
&c., 1662.
6. 1659. — Immortality of the
Soul — with a valuable preface on
the general subject of his phil
osophy ; also 1662.
7. 1660.^ — An Explanation ofthe
Grand Mystery of Godliness —
written after an illness in which
/he had vowed, if spared, to write
a book demonstrative of the truth
of the Christian Religion^so far
as concerns the person and offices
of Christ ^ — -to the confusion of
fanatics and infidels alike.
8. 1662.— Collection of Phil
osophical Writings, embracing
Nos. 3, 4, 5, and 6, with an Ap
pendix to No. 3 ; Latin corres
pondence with Descartes, and
letter to V. C.
9. 1 664. — Enquiry into the Mys
tery of Iniquity ; first part chiefly
directed against Popery ; second
part treating of the Prophecies of
Scripture regarding the reign of
Antichrist. 10. 1666. — ^Enchiridium Ethi
cum, or Manual of Ethics— the
occasion of writing which is ex
plained in our notice of Cud
worth. New ed. 1669.
II. 1668. — Divine Dialogues;
containing Disquisitions concern
ing the Attributes and Providence
of God.
12. 1669. — Expositio Prophetica
septem Epistolarum ad septem
Ecclesias Asiaticas una cum An-

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 343

teristlc of his works seem to have been the most
popular ; and amongst these may be mentioned the
' Antidote against Atheism,' his first prose publica
tion, in 1652, and the essay on the ' Immortality of
the Soul,' along with his two extended treatises, the
' Grand Mystery of Godliness ' and the ' Mystery
of Iniquity ;' the former of which was published in
the year of the Restoration, and the latter four years
later. But of all his writings, the only one which can
be said to have retained any literary popularity, or to
be commendable to the modern reader, is his ' Divine
Dialogues,' from which we have already given an
extract of some length, illustrative of his mental and

tidoto adversis Idolatriam. (Pro
phetical Explanation of the Seven
Epistles to the Seven Churches of
Asia, along with Antidote against
Idolatry, especially directed a-
gainst certain Doctrines of the
Council of Trent.)
13. 1670. — Philosophise Teuton-
ica; Censura (Criticism of the
Philosophy of Jacob Bohme).
14. 167 1. — Enchiridium Meta-
physicum — partly translated ap
parently by himself, along with a
letter (" Answer to a learned Psy
ch opyrist ") on the Nature of
Spirit in Glanvill's Sadducismus
Triumphatus. 15. 1672-78. — More employed
himself in issuing complete edi
tions of his works in Latin : first,
his " Opera Theologica," in 1675,
and subsequently, in 1678, his
" Opera Philosophica." The
" Opera Theologica'' contain Nos.
7, 9, 12, along with some smaller
pieces and hymns in Latin. The

latter form two volumes folio.
Volume I. contains Nos. 10, 14,
II, along with various minor
philosophical writings, the pro
ductions of his later years ; partly
essays on what may be called
Natural Philosophy — for example,
the gravity and weight of fluid
bodies in connection with the
experiments of Toricelli ; and
partly a series of Cabbalistical
writings, such as a mystical ex
planation of the vision of Ezekiel,
a Cabbalistic Catechism, &c. ;
also a further letter to V. C, and
a refutation of Spinoza (Duarum
prEecipuarum Atheismi Spino-
ziani columnarum subversio).
Volume II. contains the Collection
of the Philosophical writings pub
lished in English in 1662. This
Latin republication of his writings
was aided by a legacy from an
admiring disciple, John Cock-
shuit of the Inner Temple, who
left ;£3oo for the purpose.

344 HENRY MORE

Spiritual growth. It is of this volume that Dr Blair
speaks in his lectures on Rhetoric, ^ as " one of the
most remarkable In the English language." "Though
the style," he adds, " be now In some measure obso
lete, and the speakers be marked with the academic
stiffness of those times, yet the dialogue is animated
by a variety of character and a sprightliness of con
versation beyond what are commonly met with in
writings of this kind." The ' Divine Dialogues'
are certainly, upon the whole, the most interesting
and readable of all More's works. The current of
thought runs along smoothly, with less tendency than
in any of his other writings to digressive absurdity
and wearisome subdivisions ; the style is here and
there fresh and powerful ; and there is not only some
liveliness of movement in the successive conversa
tions, but an attempt is made, as Blair implies, to im
part a definite portraiture to the several speakers,
and to preserve throughout their individuality and
consistency. This attempt is not very successful,
but it is one in which scarcely any modern writer of
dialogues has succeeded,^ and More may in this re
spect compare happily even with Berkeley, in an age of
far more literary brilliancy. The ' Divine Dialogues,'
moreover, possess for the common reader the advan
tage of condensing his general views in philosophy
and religion. In fact, most of his characteristic prin
ciples may be gathered from them.
The year 1668, in which he composed the 'Dial
ogues,' may be said to mark the apex of More's In-
^ Lecture xxxvi. Landor, in some of his ' Imagin-
" Except, perhaps, Mr Savage ary Conversations.'

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 345
tellectual activity. It is true that after this he com
posed his ' Manual of Metaphysics,' and attacked
both Jacob Bohme and Spinoza In elaborate treatises.
But the elasticity and temper of his philosophical
genius are less buoyant in these efforts. Flis ' Meta
physics,' elaborate though they be, are in the main
only a systematic and somewhat desultory expansion
of views regarding the nature and proof of Incorporeal
substances, which he had already more than once
expressed ; while his cabbalistical and prophetical
studies have acquired a stronger hold of his mind.
Within the next ten years there are no fewer than
five publications taken up with mystical subjects^ —
some of them of the most curious technical character
— Including a 'Cabbalistic Catechism.' Two of these
writings are addressed to a friend, Knorr, a learned
German orientalist, whose speculations at this time
considerably influenced him. Knorr had travelled
a great deal, and zealously devoted himself in his
peregrinations to chemistry and the Cabbalistic art.
He was a friend of Van Helmont, with whom he
conducted a correspondence which appears to have
engaged the attention of our author.^ He was evi
dently a man of remarkable, if somewhat useless,
erudition, from the interest which he excited in Light-
foot and others.^ He had read and admired More's
works ; and his admiration seems to have exercised
' Tome i. 423. 3 vols. 4to. "A farrago," it is said,
2 His reputation was chiefly "of wild reveries and mystical ab-
founded on a work entitled ' Kab- surdities, with occasionally some
bala Denudata, seu Doctrina learned notices of the philosophy
Hebrseorum transcendalis, et me- of the Hebrews."— Chalm. Biog.
taphysica, atque theologica,' &c. Diet.

34^ HENRY MORE :
an injurious Influence on a mind only too much in
clined naturally to transcendental vagaries and mys
tical dreams.^ The theosophic elements already so
apparent in his philosophical poems, were for some
time held In check by his higher life of reason and
healthy appreciation of natural and moral facts. But
gradually they acquired a more marked ascendancy,
as his mental habits became fixed, and the elasticity
of natural feeling and thought began to decay. The
balance which had been long trembling began at
length to decline on the unhealthy side. Prophetical
studies, which have been the bane of so many minds
of his stamp, became more and more attractive to
him. ' Ezekiel's Dream,' and the ' Synchronous Me
thod of the Apocalyptic Visions,' received elaborate
transcendental explanation. He was himself con
scious, apparently, of an undue confidence In this sort
of study. Yet he was unable to resist its fascina
tions.^ Such confidence, it may be safely said, is never
found united with a sober and healthy rational dis
cernment. A mind addicted to prophetical Interpre
tation is almost always a mind either weak In Itself,
or becoming weakened in the Intoxication of Its own
delusions. ^ See his series of Cabbalistic ^ In allusion it is supposed to
writings, OperaOmnia, torn. i. 423- himself, he makes one of the
528 ; especially his Cabbalistic speakers in his fifth Dialogue
Catechism and FundamentaPhilo- say : — " The greatest fanaticism I
sophise sive Cabbalas-aeto-psedo- know in him is this : that he pro-
Melissffiae, in which he discusses fesseth he understands clearly the
an extraordinary dream which he truth of several prophecies of the
had of an eagle, a boy, and a bee, mainest concernment, which yet
which appeared to him in their many others pretend to be very
transformations to represent a obscure."
form of Jewish Cabbala.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 347
Of the last ten years of More's life we have
no record. His health does not seem to have
been good, for we find him writing In the end of
1680, " I have not been in bodily health — this is
the best day I have had a great while." ^ Yet he
does not appear even then to have laid aside his
pen. On the contrary, says his biographer, " he
wrote to the very last; and had then under his hands
Medela Mundi, or a practical treatise which he call'd
in that title. The cure of the World."''' There Is no
further trace of this treatise, but it was probably the
same which he mentions In one of his letters under
the name of ' The Safe Guide.' It is pleasant to
reflect that his active mind remained full of thoughts
for others to the last, and that those great questions
in which he said^ he had spent all his time — What
Is good, and what is true ? — were apparently as fresh
and important with him at the end as at the begin
ning. He died on the morning of the ist of Sep
tember 1687, and was interred In the chapel of his
college, where his friend Cudworth was to be laid
beside him within less than a year.
More was in person tall and thin, but of a " serene
and vivacious countenance — rather pale than florid in
his later years — yet was it clear and spirituous ; and
his eye hazel, and vivid as an eagle." There is In
deed, as all who have seen his portrait by Loggan*
will admit, a singularly vivid elevation in his coun
tenance — with some lines strongly drawn round the
mouth, but with ineffable sweetness, light, and dignity
^ Ward, p. 356. * Prefixed to the Latin edition
¦" Ibid., p. 212. 2 Ibid., p. 222. of his works.

348 HENRY MORE

in the general expression. As he Is the most poetic
and transcendental, so he is upon the whole the most
spiritual-looking of all the Cambridge divines.
His character has been already so far sketched;
but it is in some respects so marked and interesting
a type of the devout mystic — a character which, as
the world grows older, seems to become rarer, at least
in any healthy form — that we may be excused for
adding a few further touches. He was from youth
to age evidently gifted with the most happy and
buoyant religious temper. " He was profoundly
pious ; and yet without all sourness, superstition, or
melancholy." His habitual cast of mind was a
serene thoughtfulness, while his " outward conversa
tion " with his friends was for the most part " free
and facetious."^ Religion was in practice with him
clearly what he conceived It to be in theory, — the
consecration and perfection of the natural life —
the brightest and best form which it could reach,
under the inspiration and guidance of the Divine
Spirit. Although he chose for himself a secluded
life, and so far suffered in consequence from a lack
of that comprehensive experience which is more
than all other education to the wise and open mind,
he was not yet actuated in doing so by any indiffer
ence to the lighter and more active Interests of
humanity. " There was such a life and spirit in
him as loved the exercises of reason, wit, and divine
speculation at once."^ And his biographer has
heard him say " that he could not get melancholy
enough," by which he was supposed to mean, " dive
^ Ward, p. 119. ^ Ibid., p. 120.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 349
deep enough into divine sense and meditation."^
His spiritual happiness seems at times to have
overpowered him, and given him cause for self-
reflection. He professed to a friend that he was
" sometimes almost mad with pleasure ; " and he
experienced this ecstatic feeling in the simplest cir
cumstances. " Walking abroad after his studies, his
sallies towards Nature would be often inexpressibly
ravishing, beyond what he could convey to others."^
Many passages in his writings, and particularly in
his ' Dialogues,' show how great was his love of and
delight in Nature. He was wont to say that he
wished that he could be " always sub dio : " " he
could study abroad with less weariness by far to
himself than within doors."^ His freedom and
buoyancy of mind, and rapturous delight in his own
thoughts, would sometimes carry him away. It sti
mulated unduly his rapidity as a writer, and left him
without the cool judgment that rigorously revises,
condenses, and brings Into form the heated thoughts
which the brain casts from it in moments of spiritual
and intellectual excitement. He said that he felt
sometimes in writing as If his mind " went faster than
he almost desired," and that " all the while he
seemed, as It were, to be in the air."*
This mystical glow and elevation were the chief
features of his mind and character ; a certain trans
port and radiancy of thought which carried him
beyond the common life, without raising him to any
false or artificial height. It was remarked that his
1 Ibid., p. 121. ^ Ibid., p. 145.
= Ibid., p. 54. * Ibid., p. 14S. 146.

350 HENRY MORE

very air had In it something angelical. " He seemed
to be full of introversions of light, joy, benignity, and
devotion at once — as if his face had been overcast
with a golden shower of love and purity."^ Strangers
even noticed this " marvellous lustre and irradia
tion " in his eyes and countenance.^ " A divine
gale," as he himself said, breathed throughout all his
life as well as his works ; but however far it lifted him,
it never inflated him. " A highly learned and pious
man "' said " that he looked upon Dr More as the
holiest person upon the face of the earth." But
his charity and humility were not less conspicuous
than his piety. "His very chamber -door was a
hospital to the needy."* " When the winds were
ruffling about him, he made it his utmost endeavour
to keep low and humble, that he might not be driven
from that anchor."* While More, in short, was no
hero, either in thought or In deed, — his speculations
were too transcendental and his life too retired for
this, — he yet comes before us as a singularly beauti
ful, benign, and noble character — one of those higher
spirits who help us to feel the divine presence on
earth, and to believe in its reality.
II. In now turning to estimate More as a Chris
tian thinker, we must, first of all, consider him in
relation to the school of which he is a prominent
representative, and the forms of contemporary
thought which influenced him ; and then endeavour
to sum up and explain some of the more distinctive
1 Ibid., p. 105. * Ibid., p. 85.
=* Ibid. ' Ibid., p. 89.
2 Dr Outram : Ward, p. 78.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 351
principles of his peculiar philosophy. In other
words, we shall look first at his general method and
position ; and secondly, at his special ideas and
theories, so far as they retain interest or significance.
In doing this, we shall refer to his writings indis
criminately, as may suit our purpose. More, still
more than Cudworth, repeats himself adding pre
faces and appendices to what he has already
written, and returning again and again upon the
same track of thought. The germ, in fact, of
most of his speculations may be traced in his
early ' Philosophical Poems.' His genius, in one
sense, was singularly fecund. Work after work
sprang with easy luxuriance from his pen. But
his writings do not exhibit any clear growth or
system of ideas, unfolding themselves gradually, and
maturing to a more comprehensive rationality. This
lack of method is more or less characteristic of the
school ; but the multifarious character of More's
writings renders It more conspicuous in him than In
the others. Not only so. In his later productions
there is rather a decay than an increase and enrich
ment of the rational element. To enter into any
exposition of his Cabbalistical studies — of his dis
covery of Carteslanism in the first chapters of
Genesis, and his favourite notion of all true philo
sophy descending from Moses through Pythagoras
and Plato ; and still more to touch his prophetical
reveries, — the divine science which he finds in the
dream of Ezekiel or the visions of the Apocalypse —
would be labour thrown away, unless to illustrate
the weakness of human genius, or the singular

352

HENRY MORE

absurdities which beset the progress of knowledge,
even in its most favourable stages. The supposi
tion that all higher wisdom and speculation were
derived originally from Moses and the Hebrew
Scriptures, and that it was confirmatory both of the
truth of Scripture and the results of philosophy to
make out this traditionary connection, was widely pre
valent in the seventeenth century. 1 1 was warmly sup
ported and elaborately argued by some of its most
acute and learned intellects.^ Both Cudworth and
More profoundly believed in this connection.^ But

^ Gale's once famous book,
• The Court of the Gentiles,' was
written in support of this theory
(1669-1677), and was widely popu
lar both in England and on the
Continent. ^ The supposed traditionary
connection was chiefly based on
a passage in Strabo, Lib. II. 10
(to which reference has been
already made), to the effect that
a certain Sidonian or Phoenician
of the name of Moschus, who
lived before the Trojan war, was
the reputed father of the Atomic
Philosophy : — Ei fit fiti Jloa-eiSajvia
7no-T€vo'ai Koi to wepX tS)V aTaptav
Soypa ttoKmov iaTiv avSpis SiSovi'ou
Jdmaxov npb tSiv Tprnxaiv \p6vav
yeyoKOTot. This Moschus or
Mochus (for so he is elsewhere
called in various passages, see
Cud. in loco) was believed to be
"no other than the celebrated
Moses of the Jews, with whose
successors, the Jewish philoso
phers, priests, and prophets,
Pythagoras conversed at Sidon.

Such is Cudworth's conjecture
(Intell. Syst. I. x.) ; and Selden
and others, no less distinguished
in learning, seemed to have joined
in it. More puts the connection
more distinctly and curiously as
follows : — " The Cartesian philo
sophy being in a manner the same
with that of Democritus, and that
of Democritus the same with the
physiological part of Pythagoras's
philosophy, and Pythagoras's
philosophy the same with the
Sidonian, as also the Sidonian
with the Mosaical ; it will neces
sarily follow that the Mosaical
philosophy, in the physiological
part thereof, is the same with the
Cartesian." — Appendix to the
Defence of the Philosophick
Cabbala, C. I.
Culverwell, it will be seen, dis
tinctly repudiates this supposed
indebtedness of the Greeks to the
Hebrews; in this respect, as in
some others, showing his superio
rity to his age and school.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 353
this was only one of many instances of their lack of
critical and historical judgment. Historical criticism,
in the modern sense, was not even then dreamed of ;
and It is needless to consider forgotten delusions
which have perished, rather with the common
growth of reason than by the force of any special
genius or discovery.
(i.) In his general method and the avowed basis
of his thought. More occupies the common ground
of the Cambridge school. He was a vigorous
advocate of the rights of reason, and believed it to
be one of his chief missions to show how the
" Christian and Philosophic genius " should " mix
together." ^ " The Christian religion, rightly under
stood," appeared to him to be " the deepest and
choicest piece of philosophy that is." ^ It was " the
main. If not the only scope " of his long and anxious
studies, to demonstrate the rationality of the Chris
tian religion throughout. " For to heap up a deal
of reading and notions and experiments without some
such noble and important design, had but been to
make his mind or memory a shop of small wares." ^
He adopted therefore without hesitation the "gene
rous resolution of Marcus Cicero, Rationem quo ea
me cunque ducet, sequar." He was proud to adorn
himself as a writer with " the sacerdotal breastplate
of the Aoytoi' or Rationale." " Every priest," he
adds, quoting Philo,* " should endeavour, according
to his opportunity and capacity, to be as much as he
can a rational man, or Philosopher" Again, "to
1 Ward, p. 30. ^ Pref. to Antidote against Ath., IV.
» Ibid., p. 223. * De Monarch.
VOL. II. Z

354 HENRY MORE

take away reason under what fanatic pretence soever,
is to disrobe the priest, and despoil him of his
breastplate, and, which Is worst of all, to rob Chris
tianity of that special prerogative it has above all
other religions In the world — namely, that it dares
appeal unto reason, which as many as understand
the true Interest of our religion will not fail to
stick closely to — the contrary betraying it to the
unjust suspicion of falsehood, and equalising It to
every vain imposture. For take away reason, and
all religions are alike true ; as the light being re
moved, all things are of one colour."^
More's doctrine of reason is eminently Alexan
drine. He quotes Philo and Clemens and Plotinus
alike In support of his general position — " that the
Image of God Is the royal and divine Logos, but the
image of this image is the human Intellect^ Or, as
he elsewhere explains more fully : " For mine own
part, reason seems to me to be so far from being any
contemptible principle in man, that It must be ac
knowledged In some sort to be in God Himself For
what is the divine wisdom but that steady compre
hension of the ideas of all things, with their mutual
respects, one to another, congruities and Incon
gruities, dependences and Independences ? which
respects do necessarily arise from the natures of the
ideas themselves ; both which the divine intellect
looks through at once, discerning thus the order and
coherence of all things. And what Is this but
Ratio stabilis, a kind of steady and immovable
reason, discovering the connection of all things at
1 Pref. to Antidote, VI. = Ibid., V.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 355
once ? But that in us is Ratio mobilis, or reason in
evolution, we being able to apprehend things only in
a successive manner, one after another. But so many
as we can comprehend at a time, while we plainly
perceive and carefully view their ideas, we know
how well they fit, or how much they disagree one
with another, and so prove or disprove one thing by
another, which is really a participation of that divine
reason In God, and Is a true and faithful principle in
man, when it is perfected and polished by the Holy
Spirit ; but before, very earthly and obscure, especi
ally in spiritual things. But now seeing the Logos,
or steady comprehensive wisdom of God, in which
all ideas and their respects are contained, is but
universal stable reason, how can there be any pre
tence of being so highly inspired as to be blown
above reason itself unless men will fancy themselves
wiser than God, or their understandings above the
natures and reasons of things themselves ?" -^ To
exclude the use of reason in the search of divine
truth was therefore, according to More, simply to
destroy the light by which divine truth can alone be
recognised. It was to act, as he himself says, like a
company of men, who, travelling by night, "with
links, torches, and lanterns," put out their borrowed
light from misconcelt of it in comparison with " the
sweet and cheerful splendour of the day," and choose
rather " to foot it in the dark and tumble into the
next ditch," than to go happily forward with such
light as they had.^
^ Pref. to Conjectura Cabba- "^ Discourse of Enthusiasm,
listica, IL, III. Sect. LIV.

356 HENRY MORE

But while More Is thus strenuous in his advocacy
of reason as the only guide of the philosophical theo
logian, and the only sure foundation of divine truth,
he no less strongly advocates the recognition of a
higher principle " more noble and inward than
Reason Itself and without which Reason will falter,
or, at least, reach but to mean and frivolous things."'
To this principle he gives the name of " Divine
Sagacity," and speaks of It as antecedent, or, in his
own language, " antecedaneous," to Reason, but also
and more correctly as " the first rise of successful
Reason, especially In matters of great comprehension
and moment." " All pretenders to philosophy," he
adds, " will be ready to magnify Reason to the skies,
to make It the light of heaven, and the very Oracle
of God ; but they do not consider that the Oracle of
God Is not to be heard but In His holy temple — that
Is to say, in a good and holy man, thoroughly sancti
fied in spirit, soul, and body. For there Is a sanctity
even of body and complexion, which the sensually-
minded do not so much as dream of Aaron's
Rationale — his Aoyioi^ or Oracle of Reason — did It
not include in It the Urim and Thummlm, furity
and integrity of the will and affections, as well as the
light of the understanding ? Was not that breast
plate square, not only in reference to the firmness
of Ratiocination, as Philo intimates, but also to
denote the evenness and uprightness of his spirit
that will take upon him to pronounce great truths ? "
" For If this Divine Sagacity be wanting, by
reason of the impurity of a man's spirit, he can
' Pref. to Gen. Collection of Philos. Writings, p. 6.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 357
neither hit upon a right scent of things himself nor
easily take it, or rightly pursue It, when he is put
upon it by another." ^
Here, again, our author not only quotes his Neo-
Platonical authorities, but makes a great point of
having Aristotle on his side, in a sentence which he
quotes from the Eudemian Ethics,^ to the effect that
" the beginning of Reason in us Is something higher
than Reason or the Divine itself" He appears to
mean substantially,-— what is familiar to Platonic
students, and may be said to have become a com
monplace with certain theologians, — that in order to
apprehend higher divine truth we must approach It
with a right disposition, as well as a free and unpre
judiced intellect All such truth, from its very
nature, addresses our reason on Its moral as well as
its Intellectual side. Its reality can only be grasped
through some share in us of the Divine, whence It
comes, and which it represents. To affirm this
seems little else than a truism, on the supposition that
there is spiritual truth at all, and that the divine
ideal of the Gospels forms its highest expression.
Yet, beyond question, so plain an axiom has been
frequently forgotten, both In theology and philo
sophy; and More did right to emphasise it, as he
does. It became the key-note of his whole system
of thought. Without the recognition of such a
spiritual side in Reason, he could not make a start
at all. It Is natural, therefore, to find him return
ing to the subject In the Preface to the Latin edi
tion of his works, In which he reviews all that he
1 Ibid. ^ Lib. vii., c. 14.

358 HENRY MORE

has done, and insisting upon it formally as the
explanation of his having put his Ethics there in
front of all his other philosophical writings. He did
this, he says, with the view of marking for ever his
opinion that the only solid foundation of a true philo
sophy of human life was moral purity — such a temper
and quality of mind as he has described in his Ethics
under the name of moral prudence, or philosophical
temperance.^ For any one to attempt the compre
hension of divine things without a clear and purified
spiritual insight, was like a man trying to grasp
difficult objects at a distance, without a healthy and
properly-assisted vision.^
With such a rational basis of thought, it may be
matter of wonder that More developed so largely,
not only an element of mysticism, but a vein of
credulity, which must be pronounced excessive even
for his age. It requires some acquaintance with his
writings to estimate the force of this vein, and the
strange manner in which It is constantly cropping
out. He believed not only all the popular stories
about witchcraft, but he recounts with an abounding
faith the most absurd and frivolous narratives of
ghosts and apparitions. Nay, he sets them forth
^ " Hascigiturapertaestipsorum ficetur. Impuro enim fas non est
Tomorum ordinis ratio. Univer- quod purum est attingere, quem-
sis ver6 Scriptis Philosophicis admodum monet Plato, nee un-
Enchiridium Ethicum prasfixi ut quam in Animo repuUuIat Aaa-
aeternum fit nostrse sententias 5j;cria ilia Pythagorica sine ea
Monumentum, frustrk scilicet quam nos in Enchiridio nostro
verse Philosophias ac solidse et in Ethico descripsimus Morali Pru-
qua humani generis interest ver- dentii et Temperantia Philoso-
sari, operam impendi, nisi mores phici." — Pref. Generalissima, xiii.
prius corrigantur Animaque a " Enchirid. Ethic, lib. iii., cap.
vitiis omnibus expurgetur et puri- 9, sect. 6, 7, 8.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 359
in a systematic manner, with perfectly honest aim,
as attestations and arguments on behalf of the
supernatural. The third book of his ' Antidote
against Atheism ' is entirely devoted to this subject,
and is nearly as long as the two preceding books
together — the first of which may be said to deal with
the a priori, and the second with certain a posteriori
aspects of the Theistic argument. It is scarcely
possible, without consecutive perusal of this treatise,
to conceive a mind so acute, searching, and logical,
as is displayed in some parts of the first book,
sinking into such puerility and nonsense as abound
in the last. The metaphysician, hesitating with
critical thoughtfulness over certain forms of the
Cartesian demonstration of the existence of Deity,
passes into a mere retailer of popular gossip, which
has not even the merit of being Interesting. We
must bear in mind, however, the strong hold which
such stories of the supernatural had upon the mind
of the seventeenth century. Glanvlll, the advocate
of a scientific scepticism, ran In this respect a race
of blind credulity with his friend.^ We may also
recall the phenomena of what is called spiritualism
In our day, before condemning too loudly the absur
dities of such men. Some of More's and Glanvill's
stories are, in fact, singularly like those now or lately
soliciting scientific Investigation. " Spirit-thumping
' Hobbes was one of the few the well-known story be true as
men of the age who professed en- to his apprehensions when left
tirely to disbelieve in ghosts, and alone in the dark, his disbelief
to look upon them as " nothing does not seem to have been of a
else but creatures of the fancy " very practical kind.
(Leviathan, c. 12, Parti.); but if

360 HENRY MORE

on the bench " ^ must have been very much the same
as table-rapping. Nor does it seem more absurd to
conceive spirits employed in the fantastic mischief-
making attributed to them by our theologians, than
in making senseless revelations without meaning or
utility to any human creature.
In the general cast of his theological and ecclesias
tical views. More was equally in accord with his
school. His early alienation from Calvinism did not
throw him Into any opposite extreme of dogma. In
his works he seldom alludes to Calvinism or Armin
ianism, and nowhere discusses or shows any Interest
in their doctrinal differences. His Platonic genius
and the philosophic atmosphere around him saved
him from this. All his theological interests go
deeper. They concern not so much differences
within the Church as the reality of Christian truth
itself and the existence of an organic Christian Com
munion or Church at all. His contentions were with
" Atheists " or " Corporealists," on the one hand, and
Quakers on the other — those who, In his view, either
cut away the basis of the supernatural altogether, or
destroyed the idea of a Church in the dream of a new
or " second dispensation." The consciousness of
this higher task made him, as well as his friend Cud
worth, indifferent to minor distinctions of controversy.
Indeed, he disliked such distinctions cordially, and
frequently reprobates them under the name of
" opinions," which, according to him, were merely
" the goodly Inventions of nice theologers," destined
to disappear when men have learned a higher wisdom
' Antidote, B. III. c. 13.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 361
and a more "corroborated faith In Christ"^ With
all the Cambridge divines, he emphasises the moral
and practical side of Christianity. Religion was for
him, as for all of them, embodied In life rather than
In dogma ; not that he disparaged right opinion or
true doctrine, but that he desired, in a contentious
age, to draw the earnestness of men from theological
disputation to Christian duty. He could very well
conceive a Christian man in honest error as to vari
ous points of doctrine ; but religion without moral
aspiration and action was wholly unintelligible.
Nay, it was the wildest form of delusion, which could
only end in fanaticism or imposture. His own pro
claimed adherence to the principle of a light within
us as the ultimate test of religious truth, presented
either by nature or Scripture, made him Insist all the
more strongly on the application of a moral criterion
to all religious profession.^ It might be a fair ques
tion for any one perplexed amidst the swarming sects
around him, as to which form of Christian doctrine
was the true or divine form ; but there could be no
real question as to the vital principles lying at the
foundation of all religion. To one thus perplexed
he says : — " I demand of you, is there any way
Imaginable but this i*— viz., to adhere to those things
that are Incontrovertibly good and true ; and to be
stow all that zeal, and all that heat, and all that pains,
for the acquiring the simplicity of the life of God,
that we do in promoting our own interest, or needless
and doubtful opinions ? And I think It is without
controversy true to any that are not degenerate
1 Mystery of Godl., Book X. c.9. '^ Ibid., B. VII. c. 12.

362 HENRY MORE

below men, that temperance is better than intemper
ance, justice than injustice, humility than pride, love
than hatred, and mercifulness than cruelty. It Is also
uncontrovertedly true, that God loves His own
Image ; and that the propagation of it is the most
true dispreading of His glory ; as the light which Is
the Image of the sun Is the glory of the sun. Where
fore It is as plainly true, that God is as well willing
as able to restore this image In men, that His glory
may shine in the world. This, therefore, is the true
faith, to believe that, by the power of God In Christ,
we may reach to the participation of the divine
nature ; which is a simple, mild, benign light, that
seeks nothing for itself as self ; but doth tenderly and
cordially endeavour the good of all, and rejolceth In
the good of all, and will assuredly meet them that
keep close to what they plainly (in their own con
sciences) are convinced Is the leading to it. And 1
say that sober morality, conscientiously kept to. Is like
the morning light reflected from the higher clouds,
and a certain Prodrome of the Sun of Righteousness
itself But when he is risen above the horizon, the
same virtues then stream immediately from his visible
body ; and they are the very members of Christ,
according to the spirit. And he that is come hither,
Is a pillar in the temple of God, for ever and
ever."i Again, when he looks forward to the future,
he sees the triumph of Christianity — the dawn of a
true Millennium — not in the elevation of this or that
form of dogmatism, but only in the universal diffusion
^ Ward, p. 52-54, quoted from Mastix's letter. See list of works.
No. 2.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 363
of a Spirit of Christian purity, self-denial, and peace.
" The childish conceit of some is, that the future
prosperity of the Church will be nothing but the set
ting up of this form or that opinion ; and so every
faction will be content to be Millennists upon condi
tion that Christ may reign after their way or mode ;
that is, in Calvinism, in Arminianism, in Papism, in
Anabaptism, in Quakerism, in Presbytery, in Episco
pacy, in Independency, and the like. But the true
happiness of those days is not to be measured by
formalities or opinions, but by a more corroborated
faith in Christ and His promises ; by devotion un
feigned, by purity of heart and innocency of life, by
faithfulness, by common charity, by comfortable pro
visions for the poor, and abundance of kindness, and
discreet condescensions one to another, by unspotted
righteousness and an unshaken peace, by the removal
of every unjust yoke, by mutual forbearance, and bear
ing up one another, as living stones of that Temple
where there is not to be heard the noise of either axe
or hammer, no squabble or clamour about forms or
opinions, but a peaceable study and endeavour of
provoking one another to love and good works." ^
(2.) But More, like Cudworth also, had a determi
nate philosophic aim which carried him beyond the
general teaching of the Cambridge school. He was
not only in profession a rational theologian, and
an advocate of conciliatory principles in religion and
the Church; but he was still more characteristically a
spiritual thinker, who sought to survey the whole
^ Apology containing general sages in his ' Mystery of Godli-
account of his writings, with " par- ness,' " c. v. 1664.
ticular application of several pas-

364 HENRY MORE

field of knowledge in his day, and to bring Its fresh,
and in many respects startling, discoveries into some
new form of theoretic synthesis or satisfactory phil
osophy. This was undoubtedly his own conception
of his mission, as may be gathered from many hints
in his writings; and its conscious dignity probably in
spired and consoled him more in his solitary life of
meditation than we might at first imagine.'' The
tone of one who had really worked for his age, and
led it into a freer and nobler line of speculation,
suited to its larger intellectual wants, may be traced
throughout the elaborate preface to his collected
works to which we have already so often adverted.'
His own estimate of his labours has not been
verified ; some of his favourite speculations have
even perished from the memory of the philosophical
student ; but the general force of his thinking was
not only influential In its day, but has passed into the
common Inheritance of spiritual or theistic thought,
as it stands once more in the course of revolution In
the front of a materialistic philosophy. While there
is much, therefore, in More's speculative attitude and
theories which has merely a curious and antiquarian
interest, there is also a good deal which is vital and
perennially significant.
His general attitude as a thinker Is to be deter
mined with relation to the two great intellectual
forces of the time — -Hobbes and Descartes, especially
the latter. There is no evidence, Indeed, that our
1 He speaks of himself in his ous to draw them to, or retain
Apology (see preceding note) as them in, the Christian faith."
•¦ a fisher for philosophers, desir- ' Pref. Generalissima.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 365
author was a student of Hobbes In any such sense
as Cudworth, or that the speculations of the ' De Cive '
or the ' Leviathan ' had impressed him in the same
manner. To Cudworth's more severe moral temper,
Hobbes was an alarming phenomenon. He never
speaks of him with any complimentary respect. He
seems to have felt too closely, and, so to speak,
too solemnly, the hostile bearing of his materialistic
theories. But to More, from the more serene heights
of his meditative enthusiasm, the author of the ' Levi
athan' did not bulk with any such formidable signifi
cance. He was merely a hostile power among many
other hostile powers ; and when he alludes to him,
which he does very seldom, he uses language more
genial and respectful than he frequently applies to
Quakers and other fanatical opponents. He is "our
countryman, Mr Hobbes," whose speculative confi
dence " may well assure any man that duly considers
the excellency of his natural wit and parts, that he has
made choice of the most demonstrative arguments "
in favour of his own conclusions.^ Probably the
very distance and elevation of More's mind from the
peculiar principles that animated Hobbes, led him to
look with comparative composure on the philosophy
of the latter. He was too much above It or apart
from It to understand it fully, or the attraction which
it possessed for many minds. His own mode of
thought was too diffusive, genial, and indistinct, to
enable him to realise all the strength of a system so
' Immort. of Soul, c. ix. 2. He exploder of immaterial substance
speaks of Hobbes again in the out of the world," c. x.
same treatise as " that confident

366 HENRY MORE :

simple, compact, and definite. Two minds more
different It would be hard to conceive ; the one full
of eager enthusiasm and aspiring dreams of human
philanthropy, fertile, earnest, and vaguely Ingenious ;
the other sober, contemptuous, and severely thought
ful — with the most keen and shrewd insight into the
difificulties of life and society, but without any faith or
enthusiasm — content if only it could weave the con
flicting threads of human interest and passion into a
web of theory which would hold them together, and
give them solidarity in their natural and constant
tendency to repulsion and dissolution. It was easy
for minds so entirely separate and so unlike to be
mutually respectful. With so few common sympa
thies, and such divided aims, they could salute each
other deferentially at a distance. For the story Is,
that Hobbes, reciprocating More's feeling, was In the
habit of saying that If ever he found his own opinions
untenable, " he would embrace the philosophy of Dr
More." ^ It Is pleasant to note such interchanges of
personal compliment betwixt the opposing camps of
thought ; but they do not, of course— any more than
the salutations of other combatants — pass for anything
in the grave crisis of the struggle.
More's only direct polemic with Hobbes is to be
found in his treatise on the ' Immortality of the Soul.'
Here ^ he quotes at length the statements In the
' Leviathan ' ^ and elsewhere,* about the nature and
' We have not ascertained the of Moral Philosophy, p. 6l.
authority for this story, but it is ^ C. ix., x.
commonly told in notices both of ^ C. 12, 34, 45, 46.
More and Hobbes. Whewell * Hum. Nature, xi., art. 4, 5,
mentions it in his lectures. — Hist. &c.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 367
universality of Body, and attempts a detailed refu
tation of them. It is unnecessary in the mean time
to enter Into this polemic, because it joins on to
our author's general views respecting the existence
and nature of incorporeal substances, discussed at
length in his Metaphysics and his correspondence
with Descartes. It is enough to say that it strongly
Illustrates what we have already remarked as to the
general relation of the two thinkers. Their primary
position or starting-point is so diverse, that they can
not get together for fair argument and encounter.
As Hobbes admits no other evidence than what he
calls "conception;" and all conception, he adds, "is im
agination, and proceedeth from sense ;" ^ so of course
he can find no rational or intelligent evidence for
the existence of spirits — ^whlch he supposes to be
those substances which work not upon the sense, and
therefore are " not conceptlble." To a philosophy
which provides no Inlet for any other form of truth
and reality than that which is corporeal or sensible,
it necessarily follows that there is nothing in the
universe but body. " Body and Substance are but
names of one and the same thing — which is called
body, as it fills a place, and substance, as It Is sub
ject to various accidents or alterations." ^ But " It is
plain to all the world," as More retorts, " that this is
not to prove, but to suppose what is to be proved." ^
To shut the window may exclude the light, but does
not prove that the light does not exist. On the
other hand, the philosophy of More, opening from
' Hum. Nature, xi. 5. guage. Lev., c. 34.
"^ Substantially Hobbes's Ian- ' Im. of Soul, I., x.

368 HENRY MORE

the commencement a higher Inlet of fact — starting not
from Sense, but from the spiritual Reason — not only
has no difficulty in recognising spiritual or Imma
terial substance, but finds Its highest evidence in this
very region of truth which Hobbes deliberately shuts
out of sight.
With Descartes, the connection of our author Is far
more Intimate as well as definite. We do not trace Its
first beginnings, or the points by which he travelled
from his favourite Neo-Platonic studies to the writ
ings and system of the great modern thinker, the con
temporary of his early manhood. But we have abun
dant evidence In his letters and elsewhere how heartily
for a while he embraced Carteslanism. It would be
too much to say that he ever did so entirely, for
the letters themselves are occupied with the discus
sion of their points of difference. Even in the height
of his first admiration, More mixed together, as he
himself said, " some main points of Carteslanism and
Platonism." ^ He was never a follower of Descartes,
In the sense of having ceased to be a disciple of
Plato. In other words, he never abandoned the
Platonic or Neo-Platonic basis of his thought. But
there was plainly a far more complete agreement
betwixt them at first than afterwards. His state
ments In the correspondence and subsequently, apart
from the general evidence furnished by the course of
his writings, show this beyond doubt.
More's first letter to Descartes bears the date of
December 1648. It is subscribed " cultor devotlssl-
mus ; " and commences in the following exalted strain :
^ Apolog}-, c. 12.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 369
" You alone can Imagine the pleasure I have had in
perusing your writings. I can assure you that I have
felt not less exultation In apprehending and appre
ciating your admirable theories than yourself In dis
covering them, and that these fine productions of
your genius are really as dear to me as if they had
been the children of my own brain. In a sense, In
deed, they appear to be my own — so entirely have
my own thoughts run in the same channel In which
your fertile mind has anticipated me. So much Is
this the case, that I cannot expect to meet anywhere
with speculations more congenial to me, or more
consonant with sound reason wherever It is to be
found. — I speak freely what I feel. All the great
leaders of philosophy who have ever existed, or who
may exist, are mere pigmies in comparison with your
transcendant genius ; and no sooner had I made
acquaintance with your works, than I formed the
conjecture that your illustrious pupil, the Princess
Elisabeth, had shown herself wiser, not only than
all the rest of her sex, but even the philosophers,
in Europe.^ And the more thoroughly I became
¦^ The Latin alone can do jus- cipem Elizabetham, universis En
tice to the magniloquence of the ropaeeis, non foeminis solum, sed
encomium: — "Libere dicam quod viris, etiam Philosophis, longe
sentio : omnes quotquot exstit- evasisse sapientiorem. Quod
erunt, aut etiamnum existunt, mox evidentius deprehendi, ciim
Arcanorum Naturje Antistites, si inceperim scripta tua paul6 pen-
ad magnificam tuam indolem itius rimari et intelligere. Tan-
comparentur, Pumilos planfe vid- dem enim clar^ mihi affulfit Car-
eri ac Pygmasos : m^que, cum vel tesiana Lux (i. e.) libera, distincta,
unici vice evolvissem Lucubra- sibique constans Ratio, quse Na-
tiones tuas Philosophicas, suspi- turam pariter ac paginas tuas
catum esse, illustrissimam tuam mirificfe coUustravit ; itk ut aut
discipulam, Serenissimam Prin- paucissimse supersint latebrje, et
VOL. IL 2 A

370

HENRY MORE

acquainted with them, the more reason did I find to
apprehend this. For at length the Cartesian Light
shone upon me in all its fulness — a reason free,
distinct, and self-consistent, marvellously illuminat
ing nature and your pages alike, — so that there are
but few hidden recesses which remain unexplored by
it, or which at least, with a little trouble, may not be
explored. All Is so perfectly harmonious in your
' Principles of Philosophy ' and other writings, and
so conformable with itself and with nature, that the
human mind could scarcely desire a more pleasant
and agreeable spectacle. In your Method also there
is a certain elegant and modest playfulness, which
shows that nothing can be more amiable, lofty, and
generous than your character as a man." Then, with
a sentence or two in justification of his enthusiasm,
which he Is sure he shares only in common with his
countrymen, he concludes : — " But there Is no one
who loves you more heartily than myself or who
has embraced more thoroughly your excellent philo
sophy." The points as to which he differs, or feels
hesitation, do not, he says, refer to fundamental prin
ciples, but would leave all the noble essence of Car
teslanism untouched, or rather more coherent and
satisfactory.^ He then enters with some detail upon those points
of difference. They refer to Descartes's definition
of matter, and the consequences arising from it, —
loci quos non patefecit nobilis ilia ^ " Nihil ad essentiam Philo-
fax, aut saltem vel levissimo ne- sophias tuse ac fundamenta per-
gotio, mihi cum libitum fuerit, mox tinere, illdque sine isti soptime
non vel patefactura," &c. — H. posse constare." — Ibid.
Mori Opera, torn. ii. 234.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 371
such as the possibility of a vacuum and the divisi
bility of atoms, — and further, to his famous doctrine
as to the motions of animals being merely mechan
ical. From this doctrine, which More characterises
as " internecina ilia et jugulatrix sententia," he
expresses his strong dissent. Altogether, it may
be inferred, even from this early correspondence,
that, with all our author's enthusiasm for Des
cartes's genius and the general character of his
philosophy, he differed more from him than he him
self supposed. The simplicity and thoroughness
of the great French thinker were at variance with
his own more complex and traditional modes of
thought. This was evident to Descartes, and be
trays Itself beneath all the courtesy of his replies and
his expressions of astonishment at More not more
fully understanding his meaning. He declines to
argue about words, but explains clearly and at length
what he Intends by extension, and how mudi more
radically and essentially it defines matter than such
terms as sensibility, tangibility, and impenetrability,
suggested by his correspondent. He shows, further,
that in speaking of the movements of animals as
only mechanical, he did not so much wish to dis
parage the lower animals as to discriminate and
exalt man. In man there is, so far, the same sort of
movement as in other animals — a movement auto
matic or self-regulating, yet purely mechanical, as
depending upon external influences and the adapta
tion of the sensitive organs. The spring of this
movement may be called an animal or corporeal
soul (anima corporea). But in man there is, over

372 HENRY MORE

and above, a thinking soul, or mens incorporeus or
substantia cogitans. FI e had pondered carefully as
to whether there was any trace of this latter power
in the lower animals, and could find no such trace.
All their characteristic movements, on the contrary,
appear to him explicable, and he engages to explain
all by the conformity of their organs to the external
world. ^
They continue the general discussion as to the
true nature and definition of matter and spirit
through several letters ; and in his last letter More
diverges into mathematical and physical details.
Through all he retains something of the same
enthusiasm for Descartes personally, and the same
lofty admiration for his philosophy, of which he
subscribes himself in the end a faithful student and
adherent.^ The same tone, or nearly so. Is found in his reply
seven years later, or in May 1655, to the request of
Descartes's editor, Clerselier, to be allowed to
publish More's letters amongst the Remains of the
French philosopher, whose death followed shordy
after More's last letter.* The first ardour of his
Cartesian enthusiasm had evidently, by his own
confession, begun to die away before this — very
much, he says, from lack of new materials to feed
upon. Yet he remembers his old enthusiasm with
pleasure, and renews his raptures over the splendid
attributes of Descartes's genius, and the admirable
' Responsum R. Cartesii ad ^ Philosophias tuae Studiosissi-
Epist. Primum, H. Mori. — Ibid., mus.
p. 238-241. 3 Nov. 1649.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 373
order and consistency of his theories. A thousand
times read, they never failed to interest, any more than
the light of the sun in its daily rising ceased to fill
man, cattle, and birds with daily rejoicing.-^ Nor is
the Cartesian philosophy only pleasant to read, but
also, whatever some babblers may say, in the utmost
degree useful for the highest end — the support of
religion. " There is no philosophy, indeed, except
perhaps the Platonic, which so firmly shuts the
door against Atheism." ^ Still later. In his letter to
V. C, first published in 1662, he defends Descartes
at length from the vulgar charge of Atheism, and
while not withdrawing any of the objections formerly
urged against some of his principles, points out how
far he had, by the application of mathematical and
mechanical laws, elevated the study of physics, and
liberated It from the " substantial forms " or " occult
qualities " and other nonsense of the' schoolmen.
He does credit also to his great services In meta
physics, especially the clear distinction which he had
drawn between soul and body, his vindication of in
nate ideas, and his demonstration of the existence of
Deity from our idea of a necessary and perfect Being.
It is all the more wonderful that, within a few
years, we find his tone entirely changed, and changed
clearly In the view of what he had formerly said.
The evidence of this Is the curious address, under
' "Est enim illudrerum pondus, sordescant: non magis qukm lux
veritatis pulchritudo, amplitudo Soils, cujus ortum singulis diebus
ingenii et acumen, Theorematum aves, pecudes, ipsique adeo ho-
denique omnium admirabilis ille mines gratulabundi contemplan-
ordo et consensus in scriptis Car- tur." — Responsum H. M. ad Epist.
tesianis, ut vel millies lecta non C. Clerselier. ^ Ibid.

374 HENRY MORE :

the title of " The Publisher to the Reader," which
he prefixed to the ' Divine Dialogues,' published in
1667. There can be no doubt that this address is
from More's own pen, although somewhat disguised,
with a view to preserve the anonymous character
of the publication. After premising the subject of
the Dialogues, and glancing contemptuously at the
Cartesians under the name of Nullubists,^ he pro
ceeds to explain his opposition to " that so much
admired philosopher, Renatus Des Cartes, on
whom persons so well versed In philosophical spe
culations have bestowed so high encomiums, espe
cially a writer of our own [himself], who, besides
the many commendations he up and down in his
writings adorns him with, compared hlm^ to Be-
zallel and Aholiab, as if he were Inspired from above
with a wit so curiously mechanical as to frame
so consistent a contexture of mechanical philosophy
as he did." ^ He questions whether, as the writer of
the Dialogues, he does not risk his credit by ven
turing to impugn so great a name and authority.
Yet the cause of truth and the glory of God force
the task upon him, in which, besides, he is encouraged
by the example of that very encomiast of Descartes's
philosophy (himself again), who, In his letter to V. C,
"when he makes It his business to apologise for
Descartes, and extol and magnify him to the skies,
yet does plainly and expressly declare, 'That it
is a kind of vile and abject vXoXaTpeCa, or superstitious
idolising of matter, to pretend that all the phenomena
^Seep. 399. fence of his Philosophical Cabbala.'
In his Appendix to the ' De- ' Dialogues, vii. Ed. 1713.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 375
of the universe will arise out of it by mere mechani
cal motion.' " The author of this letter, with all his
admiration of Descartes's mechanical genius, only
acknowledged " some few effects " to be " purely
mechanical ; " and he is now convinced, after more
serious consideration, " that there is no purely me
chanical phenomenon in the whole universe."
He then endeavours to explain his scriptural com
pliment to Descartes as meaning nothing more than
that " he had a great deal of wit and sagacity to find
out the most credible material causes and their
' specious contexture,' so as to explain the existing
system of things. But ' that these things can neither
arise nor hold together without an higher principle,'
he had always maintained, and plainly declared In
several writings long before. He has now come to
the conclusion that what is really good In the Car
tesian philosophy Is borrowed from the ancient Cab
bala of Moses, and the ' traditions of Pythagoras and
his followers' — 'and no new Inventions of the Car
tesian wit.' ' The rest of the philosophy Is rather
pretty than great, and In that sense that he drives
at, of pure mechanism, erroneously and ridiculously
false.' "
This is a very different tone, indeed, from that of
his early letters ; and in his elaborate ' Manual of
Metaphysics, or Enchiridium Metaphysicum,' pub
lished some few years later (1671), he speaks In
still more disparaging terms of Descartes, whom he
now identifies with the Materialists and Atheists. It
is true that the French thinker has declared incor
poreal substance to be the proper object of Meta-

376 HENRY MORE

physics, and vindicated a distinction betwixt soul and
body; but, on the other hand, he has so conceived and
defined both spirit and matter that they lose their
essential distinction, and thus he leaves the triumph
to the Materialist. What if God be represented as
absolutely perfect, and His existence deduced from
the idea of necessary and absolute perfection, if at
the same time. He is conceived as unextended, and
therefore nowhere ; and if matter. In its own proper
idea, no less necessarily exists, and cannot be thought
away from the universe of space ! What is the use
of a God that cannot act upon matter ? or a Divine
Providence whose ends are not to be inquired into ? ^
And many other objections More insists upon at
length, with an acerbity and exaggeration of state
ment no less remarkable than his previous raptures.
His Cartesian enthusiasm has at length not only
died down, but turned into sourness and bitterness
of spirit. The express design of the ' Enchiridium
Metaphysicum ' Is, In fact, as implied on the title-
page, to refute Carteslanism, or. In his own lan
guage, to estimate its mechanical explanations of the
universe, and expose their " vanity and falsehood."
This cursory statement of our author's relations to
Descartes Is interesting In itself but chiefly for the
light which it throws upon More's mental character
and his real philosophical bias. Enamoured at first by
the rational clearness and originality of the Cartesian
speculations, he could not long maintain the higher
attitude of pure" reason to which they raised him.
Strongly rational on one side of his nature against
' Opera H. Mori, tom. i., ad Lectorem Prjef., p. 137.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 377
the extremes of enthusiasm, and the prejudices of
religious party spirit, he was yet continually lapsing
on the other side Into mystical extravagances. His
reason was never a " dry light " like that of the
French philosopher, which penetrated all disguises,
and brought him face to face with the secrecies of
nature. More loved — even in his highest exaltations
of thought — the shadow of mystery; and the clear
simplicities of the ' mechanical ' philosophy appeared
bald and false when he had time to reflect upon
them. They hid from his view the presence of the
divine life, and even of any lower ' spermatical ' life In
nature, and seemed to leave nothing but a congeries
of self-acting phenomena. The truth is, that he was
not only by education, but essential nature, a tran-
scendentalist. In mixing up Carteslanism with his
original Neo-Platonism, he never abandoned any of
the distinctive Ideas of the latter. A temporary enthu
siasm for Descartes carried him away, and a gener
ous spirit could not find words large enough to con
vey his admiration. But he was altogether of a
different temper of mind. He never quite thoroughly
entered into the meaning of the Cartesian philoso
phy, and in natural course his mind reverted to its
original bias with something of the disappointment
which comes from baffled enthusiasm, and the in
justice with which all thinkers absorbed in a religious
aim are apt to regard a rejected idol.
More's great aim, and the aim throughout of the
Cambridge philosophy, was the vindication of a true
sphere of spiritual being. That there is an incor
poreal world, and Incorporeal substances transcend-

378 HENRY MORE :

ing and embracing the physical system of things, was
the animating idea of all his chief writings, from his
early poems to his ' Metaphysical Manual.' The
Manual Is devoted exclusively to the proof and defi
nition of such substances. It Is " de Existentia et
Natura Rerum Incorporearum." This is with him
the sole object of metaphysics. It Is the science of
spiritual being, and treats first of the fact of such
being, and then of Its nature and attributes. All
that Is further distinctive of our author's thought,
and more than has any longer any living meaning,
may be gathered up In a brief exposition of his views
on this great subject, and of his attitude as a Moralist,
in his ' Ethical Manual.'
Besides the ' Enchiridium Metaphysicum ' there
are two of his earlier and most elaborate writings
— the 'Antidote against Atheism' and the treatise on
the ' Immortality of the Soul '—which both specially
deal with the question of the existence of spirit The
treatment is less formal and extended in the Anti
dote ; but the essay on Immortality Is scarcely less
elaborate and technical than the Manual. His
object is exacdy the same in both, but his attitude
Is somewhat dififerent. In the eariler work, Hobbes
is his chief opponent; and in the later work, Des
cartes. We shall endeavour to collect his views in
relation to both. His own thought Is so imbedded
in controversy that it can only be thus cleariy under
stood. Our analysis will fall under the following
heads : (a) the notion of spirit ; (b) the fact or proof
of the existence of spirit ; and (c) its special nature
or qualities. On all these points, and especially the

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 379
first, he comes into direct conflict with Hobbes and
Descartes. (a) The notion of spirit Is one of his main points,
to the exposition of which he repeatedly recurs.
While Hobbes appears to him to deny altogether
the notion as valid or natural,^ — as indeed anything
but a figment or "creature ofthe fancy,"— he contends
that the notion is equally clear and distinct with that
of body — " as intelligible and congruous to reason."^
A spirit is to him a " substance penetrable and In-
discerptible ;"^ that Is to say, capable of penetration
and Incapable of distribution. The capacity of pene
tration Implies " self-motion, self- contraction, and
dilation," while indiscerptibility implies that spirit, of
its own nature, invincibly holds itself together so
that it cannot be disunited or dissevered.* His
notion of body or matter is exactly the converse —
" a substance Impenetrable and dlscerptlble."^ The
idea of matter Is resistance, or the capacity of "keep
ing out stoutly and irresistibly another substance
from entering into the same space or place with
itself; "° and again, the capacity of endless subdivi
sion and distribution into parts. There is nothing
more " conceivable " to him In the one idea than the
'"The opinion that such spirits" them." — Leviathan, c. xii. This,
(as men commonly fancy — ghosts, withmanyotherpassages,C.xxxiv.,
for example) "were incorporeal or xlv., xlvi., are quoted at length by
immaterial could never enter into More. — Immortality of Soul, B. I.
the mind of any man by nature, c. ix.
because though men put together ' Im. of Soul, B. I. c. iii.
words of contradictory significa- ' Ibid.
tion as spirit and incorporeal, yet * Ibid., I. c. v.
they can never have the imagina- ^ Ibid., I. c. iii.
tion of anything answering to ^ Ibid., I. c. v.

380 HENRY MORE

Other ; or, in other words, more natural and rational.
So far, therefore, he opposes Hobbes with assump
tion against assumption. For the latter to affirm
that " everything in the universe is body, and that
body and substance are one and the same thing, it
being called body as it fills a place, and substance as
it is the subject of several alterations and accidents,"^
"is not to prove, but to suppose what is to be proved."^
Such an afifirmatlon professedly rests, and can only
rest, on the presupposition that body is the only con
ceivable substance. But this Is so far from being
true that the notion of spirit Is the more direct and
Immediate, and therefore natural, of the two. There
is certainly " as much reason for the one as the
other." ' So far as our mere conception or notion is
concerned, it is as easy or difficult for us to hold the
one before our minds as the other. There is no
thing more inconceivable In indiscerptibility than
resistance — the absolute holding together Implied in
the one, than the absolute holding out implied In
the other. And so far, therefore, there " can be no
prejudice to the notion of spirit." *
With Desqartes, of course, he can have no quarrel
on the primary point of the validity of the notion
of spirit For the French thinker has put this
point far more clearly and effectively than himself
He has vindicated the idea of spirit and thought as
the primary datum of all knowledge — the original
certitude out of which all other certitude and science
comes. And it is highly singular, as we have already
' Leviathan, c. xxxiv. ' Ibid., I. c. iii.
Mm.of Soul.B. I. c. X. ' Ibid.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 381
remarked, that neither More nor Cudworth does any
justice to this fundamental aspect of the Cartesian
philosophy, nor, so far as we remember, alludes to
it Passing by the service which Descartes could
here have rendered against Hobbes, he forces a vigor
ous quarrel upon the former respecting the manner in
which he has conceived or defined his notion of both
spirit and matter — viz., as thought in the one case,
and extension in the other. On the first point he
does not dwell at much length ; but the Cartesian
definition of matter as extension may be said to be
More's philosophical bugbear, which he Is never
tired of chasing — returning to It on all occasions, and
assaulting it with renewed weapons of argument and
abuse. It Is the point, we have seen from his cor
respondence with Descartes, which he repudiates
even in the first fervour of his admiration and en
thusiasm. " You define," he then said, " matter or
body In too general a manner as extension. For all
existence, even God, must be conceived as extended,
or res extensa."'^ "All substances are extended."^
In his ' Metaphysical Manual ' he returns to the
subject and argues it at great length. To define
matter by extension, appeared to More to Invest it
with eternal and Immutable qualities. If we must
conceive matter wherever we conceive extension,
then we must admit matter everywhere, and admit It
as necessarily subsisting, for we cannot think away
the idea of extension. Its existence becomes ne
cessary of itself "because in its very notion or idea
' Epistola prima, H. Mori ad R. Cartesium.
2 Im. of Soul, B. I. c. ii.

382 HENRY MORE

It cannot but be conceived to be — we being not able
otherwise to conceive, but that there is an indefinite
extension round about us." ^ In short, extension and
space become interchangeable ; and More, so far
from regarding space as material, made it the primary
basis of his elaborate proof in his Metaphysics for
the existence of spirit. Space Is with him the neces
sary Ideal background of matter ; but It is in no sense
Itself material or of the nature of body. For body
Is definite and movable. Space is indefinite and
Immovable. Body can only be conceived in rela
tion to It, and we can readily think it away as non
existent But space survives all our attempts to
think it away. Is it then a mere abstraction ? No.
It has real attributes of unity. Immensity, immobility,
eternity ; and these must have some reality answer
ing to them. For an abstraction is a mere void or
negation. What then is space ? It is not only some
thing real, but something divine. It represents to
us. In a confused and general manner, the divine
essence. It is a manifestation of God. " Est con-
fusior qucedam et generalier representatio essentice, sive
essentialis prcssenticB divines quatenus a vita atque
operationibus prceciditur." ^
So far, therefore, from conceiving matter as ex
tension, extension became to More a direct Indication
of a spiritual or divine Substance. To confound
matter and extension with Descartes, appeared to
him to end in materialism. But not only so. Such
an idea of matter not only invested it with inde
structible and necessary qualities ; but, on the- other
' Introd. to Divine Dialogues, x. 2 Enchir. Metaph., c. viii., xv.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 383
side, It detracted from the essential character of
Deity as everywhere present. For supposing God
to be unextended. He is necessarily nowhere. The
unextended thing is a thing not in space — is a
thing nowhere and non-existent. Into such an
abyss of Atheism, on the one side and the other,
did the Cartesian definition seem to lead him. These
ideas, at first vaguely entertained, evidently acquired
a vivid hold of More's mind, and inspired the Anti-
Cartesian furor of his later years, which he has vent
ed in his 'Divine Dialogues' and Metaphysics.
He has gone the length of characterising the Car
tesians as Nullubists, and devoting a lengthened
chapter to their refutation under this name.^
The Nullubists are those who affirm that a spirit
is nullubi, or nowhere ; and their chief author and
leader is " that pleasant wit " Descartes, who In his
"jocular metaphysical meditations " has so argued as
to Imply this extraordinary conclusion. For, says
our author, the whole force of such conclusion Is com
prised in the axioms, first, that whatsoever thinks is
immaterial ; second, that whatever is extended is
material ; third, that whatever is unextended is no
where. The last appears to him a " consectary," or
' Enchirid. Metaphys., c. xxvii. locality. " This the Greeks would
In addition to " Nullubists," or fitly call olauiv oKfvpepfj, ' an es-
those who affirm that a spirit is sence that is all of it in each part,'
nullubi or nowhere, he distin- and the propriety thereof, the
guishes those whom he calls Holenmerism (tjjx Sk^vpepeiav) of
" Holenmerians " (oKevpepeia) as incorporeal beings. Whence these
maintaining that spirit is not only other philosophers, the opposite
somewhere, or present in a de- of the former, may significantly
finite locality, but wholly present and compendiously be called Hol-
in every part or point of that enmerians." — Ibid. i.

384 HENRY MORE :

corollary from the two first On the contrary, he
maintains that whatever is — spiritual or material sub
stance — in virtue of its simple being, is somewhere,
and therefore extended ; and to the difficulty which
ensues from this of conceiving a being at once
spiritual, that is indivisible, indlscerptible, and yet
extended, or located in space, he replies as for
merly by representing space as twofold — at once as
material and spiritual, external and internal ; or,
in special phrase, as extensive and intensive. To
this latter conception he has given the name of
essential consistency (spissitudo essentialis), and it
may be held as answering In some degree to the
modern conception of force. This is indeed the one
fruitful issue of More's speculations on this subject
In his reaction against the bare idea of thought as
constituting spirit, and his difficulty of conceiving
mere thought In relation to matter, he brought
out the necessity of contemplating spirit, not merely
as cogitation or intellection, but also as activity.
The operation of spirit, and spirit Itself — thought
and thought-in-actlon — are essentially united, and
cannot even be conceived apart. Thought is activity,
and no mere abstract entity, and activity of course Is
somewhere. Spirit In Its essence Is not merely
thought, but force — going forth for ever Into the
world of external being, and animating and illumin
ating it.
There was something, therefore, in More's criticism
of the Cartesian notion of spirit. Under all the
absurdity and irrelevance of many of his detailed
arguments he probed its deficiency, and vaguely

CHRISTIAN TPIEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 385
Indicated a higher unity of conception, in which life,
united with thought, in indistinguishable union —
now presenting the side of will and now the side of
reason— constitute spirit. The Cartesian world of
mere thought and extension appeared to him a bald
and imperfect world, from which the living energy
of the Divine was banished. He sought, there
fore, to clothe both factors with a richer meaning ;
and while translating matter into something more
than extension, he expanded this category so as to
embrace mind, and only In the idea of thought oper
ating or actively manifesting its presence found his
complete notion of spirit.
(p) Turning from More's conception of spirit to
his proof of spiritual existence, we enter upon a
wide tract of speculative argument repeatedly tra
versed by him. Now, as In his ' Antidote against
Atheism' and his Metaphysics, he treats the sub
ject on the divine side, with reference to a supreme
spiritual existence ; and again, as in his essay on
the ' Immortality of the Soul,' he discusses the
special, question as to whether there is a spirit in
man distinct from his bodily organisation. The
two aspects of the question are indissolubly united
with him, as with Smith and Cudworth. But his
discursive genius takes sometimes the one, and some
times the other direction, without keeping clearly
before him their cohesion or organic relation. He
traverses frequently the same course of argument,
and, especially In, his Metaphysics, diverges into de
scriptions of physical phenomena, and their scientific
explanation, with a copiousness which, while it repels
VOL. II. 2 B

386 HENRY MORE :

the modern reader. Indicates a marvellous acquaint
ance with all the branches of science in his time.
The singular fertility of More's genius shows itself
in nothing more than in the facile fulness with which
it ranges over almost every field of knowledge then
open to the student.
One of his most elaborate arguments in favour of
spiritual existence is that which we have already con
sidered, drawn from the idea of extension and space.
This Idea remains an indestructible element of con
sciousness under every attempt to thrust It away. It
Implies therefore a reality, and a reality which in
his view does not come under the essential categories
of matter. It is neither sensible, impenetrable, nor
discerptlble. On the contrary, It is one, indivisible,
infinite; and so It Is the revelation or manifestation of
an infinite divine Being, transcending matter, and
unmoved by its conditions. He devotes the sixth,
seventh, and eighth chapters of his ' Enchiridium
Metaphysicum ' to an elaboration of this argument
Other forms of argument are as follows : —
It Is an essential property of matter that It Is con
tingent. But the very idea of contingency implies
a higher principle of necessity — something which
depends not upon another, but exists in and for
itself Further, that which Is not contingent — ^whlch
excludes one of the essential properties of matter —
must be spiritual. ^ The same argument is turned in
a dififerent form In the essay on the ' Immortality of
the Soul.'^ The Idea which we have of God is that
of "an essence absolutely perfect." But such an
'Enchirid. Met., c. 9, 10. 2g_ j^ ^ .^,;_

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 387
essence "cannot possibly be body." It must be
something incorporeal. And so the very idea of
God contains a reason or proof of spiritual existence.
Again, the mere fact of motion or force implies
something transcending matter. For the nature of
matter is homogeneal. It is either at rest or in
motion ; but it has no specifical differences in Itself,
or no power of itself of passing from the one state
to the other. In Its own nature, it is without any
principle of motion. It may conserve that originally
imparted to it. The primary Impress or force may
not require constant renewal, any more than the
matter Itself requires to be constantly created anew.^
But it has no power of origination. And such a
power can only be conceived as springing from a
spiritual self-subsisting cause. In other words, motion
necessarily implies a mover outside of the thing, or
material phenomenon moved. Spirit Is therefore the
necessary analogue of force.
Still more strongly does the order of material phe
nomena imply a mind or ordering spirit behind. If
the simple fact of motion proves the necessity of a
power distinct from matter, there is in More's own
language " a further assurance of the truth from the
consideration of the order and admirable effect of
this motion in the world. Suppose matter could
move itself would mere matter with self-motion
amount to that admirable wise contrivance of things
which we see in the world ? Can a blind impetus
produce such effects with that accuracy and con
stancy, that the more wise a man Is, the more he will
be assured that no wisdom can add, take away, or alter
1 Ibid.

388 HENRY MORE

anything in the works of nature, whereby they may
be bettered? How can that, therefore, which has
not so much as sense, rise to the effects of the
highest pitch of reason or intellect ?"^ So he argues
in the essay on the ' Immortality of the Soul,' and
to the same effect at length in the second book of his
' Antidote against Atheism ;' while In his Meta
physical Manual he passes under review all the most
important phenomena of nature, the double rotation
of the earth, the flux and reflux of the ocean, the
arrangement and movement of the heavenly bodies,
the composition and effects of light, the processes of
organisation in plants and animals, and especially
the operations of the human mind — all with a view of
showing how impossible it Is to account for them by
mere mechanical laws. The argument Is exactly of
the same tenor with that which the modern Theist
urges against the Darwinian or any other materialistic
hypothesis. Given matter even " with the advantage
of sense," or an obscure protoplastic power — the
orderly development of the world of life, and, still
further, of the world of thought, appears imprac
ticable. " Assuredly, when all is summed up that
can be imagined, it will fall short of the amount" ^
The motion of " universal matter " may be supposed
" to grind itself into the more rude and general de-,
lineation of nature, but it fails wholly to account for
the diversities of animal species."^ These diversities
are only explicable as the outcome, each of an under
lying Idea. And " how Is it conceivable that any
particle of matter, or many together — there not
' Ibid., c. xii. '' Ibid. ^ Antidote against Atheism, B. IL, c. i.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 389
existing yet in nature any animal — can have the idea
Impressed of the creature they are to frame ? " ^
How, In short, can the series of animal being. In all
its beauty and variety, grow from the mere obscure
shootings of an aboriginal plasticity ? Still more,
how can Intelligence be flashed into being from the
mere upward groplngs of a power without conscious
ness, or even life ? This seemed to More more im
possible than that " so many men, blind and dumb
from their nativity, should join their forces and wits
together to build a castle or carve a statue of such a
creature as none of them ever knew of "^
All these are arguments which more or less retain
Interest and meaning. The difificulties of a mate
rialistic or merely mechanical hypothesis of the origin
of life and thought are very much where they were.
A wider induction of natural facts, and closer obser
vation of the variations which arise through long
periods In natural species, may have opened up pos
sibilities of development unknown to the seventeenth
century ; but they have done nothing more. So far,
therefore, the principles of our author's argumenta
tion are not out of date. But he was not content in
any of his writings, even in his Metaphysics, to appeal
to argument alone on this great subject. He had
always in reserve an appeal to spiritual phenomena
or apparitions, of whose credibility neither he him
self nor any of his contemporaries, with the exception
of Hobbes, had any doubt. He deals chiefly with
this sort of evidence in his Antidote ; but it reap
pears in the essay on Immortality, as well as in the
' Imm. of Soul, B. I., c. xii. ^ Ibid.

390 HENRY MORE

Metaphysics, and was evidendy a real source of his
belief In spiritual facts. It seems rather to have
gained than lost hold upon his mind as he advanced
in years : for in the essay on Immortality he dis
tinguishes "the pre-eminence of arguments drawn
from reason above those from story ; " while in his
later correspondence with Glanvlll he is enthusias
tic in his defence of witches and ghosts as evidences
of a spiritual world. Such evidences seem to have
been specially vouchsafed for the confutation of
" Hobblans, Splnozlans, and the rest of that rabble,"
in order " that their dull souls, so inclinable to con
ceit, may be rubbed and awakened with a suspicion,
at least, if not assurance, that there are other intel
ligent beings besides these that are clad in heavy
earth and clay." ^ " Let the small philosophick Sir
Foppling of this present age," he adds, deride them
as much as they will ; those who are at pains to collect
" well-attested stories of witches and apparitions do
real service to true religion and sound philosophy,
and the most effectual and accommodate service to
the confounding of infidelity and Atheism, even in
the judgment of the Atheists themselves, who are
as much afraid of the truth of these stories as an
ape is of a whip." Something of the " sharpness
and satirlcalness " of this letter and postscript may
be due to the confidence of correspondence with a
sympathetic friend ; but there is reason to think that
it expresses the normal attitude of More's mind on
this subject. So little had his philosophic and
' Letter to Glanvill, prefixed to atus,' 1726. More's letter is dated
4th ed. of 'Sadducismus Triumph- 1678.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 39I
scientific studies given him any real or clear Idea
of the nature of evidence, or his own enlargement
of Christian thought enabled him to understand the
motives of those who differed with him beyond a
certain point, or professed opinions more advanced
than his own.
It is unnecessary to dwell upon the special argu
ments by which he aims to prove the existence of a
soul in man, distinct from his body. They present
nothing of novelty or particular Interest. The facts
of perception or an ideal element in knowledge, and
of free-will, are his two main proofs of an imma
terial principle. He argues both points at length,^
chiefly against Hobbes, but keeping Descartes also
in view, and particularly his well-known theory of the
conarlon or pineal gland being the seat of the think
ing principle. This theory has to him a suspicion
of materialism, notwithstanding Descartes's strong
affirmation of a rational soul or independent spiritual
faculty. He supposes it to imply that the business
of knowledge may be actively transacted betwixt this
central seat and the animal spirits and organs of the
body as Its ministers or messengers, and Is at pains
to prove from Descartes's own description that this
cannot be without the intervention of a soul, which Is
no more than what the author of the theory himself
distinctly maintains.^ In the end he admits that
there Is much to be said for the Cartesian opinion,^
but, upon the whole, for himself, inclines to place the
seat of the soul in the fourth ventricle of the brain ! as
1 The Imm. of Soul, B. IL, c. ^ Ibid., c. v.
ii.-xi. ' Ibid., c. vii.

392 HENRY MORE

being in most direct and happy communication
with the animal spirits, " which are the soul's im
mediate organs for sense and motion." " If there
fore there be any place where these spirits are in
the fittest plenty and purity, and In the most con
venient situation for animal functions, that in all
reason must be concluded the chief seat and acropolis
of the soul. Now the spirits in the middle ventricle
of the brain are not so indifferently situated, for both
the body and the head, as those in th& fourth are— nor
so pure." The two upper ventricles are also described
as comparatively unfit for the function ; so it Is
manifest that " the fittest situation of the spirits "
being In the fourth ventricle, this must be con
sidered as " the centre of perception, and the com
mon sensorium of the soul " ! -^
{c) But it was by no means enough for More to
vindicate to his own satisfaction the existence of
spiritual substance or of a soul In man. His
philosophic imaginativeness pursued the subject far
beyond the bounds of rational Inference, or even
rational conjecture. The nature of soul, whence
it comes, and in what form it survives Its departure
from the body, are copiously and tediously discussed.
The very obscurity of such questions has a charm
for his quaint and dreamy thoughtfulness, which
delighted in the fantasies of its own musing. He
1 Professor Huxley, speaking Descartes's principle, and suppose
of Descartes's hypothesis, ob- that the soul is lodged in the
serves ;—" Modern physiologists cortical part of the brain — at
do not ascribe so exalted a func- least, this is commonly regarded as
tion to the little pineal gland, but the seat and instrument of consci-
in a vague sort of way they adopt ousness.— ' Lay Sermons,' p. 370.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 393
struck Into this dim region in his early poems, and it
never ceased to allure him.
One of these poems, for example, is on " The
Pre-existency of the Soul ; " and in his essay on
Immortality he recurs to this hypothesis as " more
agreeable to reason than any other hypothesis what
ever." It is necessary for him to have some theory
of the production of the soul. It must come ex
traduce, or be created on occasion, or emerge from a
previous state of being ; and of all these theories,
the last seems to him the only one consistent with
the real nature and dignity of the soul and the
majesty of the divine action In the process. ¦• His
arguments are of a singular character, and will
hardly bear to be repeated. In a strict sense, It Is
needless to say that they are not arguments at all.
His mind makes no advance in the subject from the
early poem, which condenses his dreams In more
fitting and fresher shape than the essay. If such a
subject is to be handled at all, a " Platonical Song "
is the most appropriate vehicle ; and the reveries
of the singer may Interest or amuse when the reason
ings of the essayist weary and repel. " I would
sing," he begins — " The pre-existency
Of human souls, and live once more again.
By recollection and quick memory,
All what is past since first we all began.
But all too shallow be my wits to scan
So deep a point, and mind too dull to clear
So dark a matter. But Thou, O more than man,
' Imm. of Soul, B. IL, c. xii.

394 HENRY MORE

Aread, then, sacred bard of Plotin deare ;
Tell what we mortals are, tell what of old we were.
A spark or ray of the Divinity,
Clouded in earthy fogs, yclad in clay,
A precious drop, sunk from Eternity,
Spilt on the ground, or rather slunk away ;
For then we fell when we 'gan first t' assay
By stealth of our own selves something to been,
Uncentring ourselves from our great Stay,
Which fondly we new liberty did ween ;
And from that prank right jolly wights ourselves did deem."^
In this poem he not only sings the soul's pre-exis
tency, but gives expression to all his notions — sub
sequently developed in the Essay on Immortality
— of various vehicles of spiritual being. He could
not, any more than Cudworth, conceive of spirit
apart from body or expression. Even the Divine
Spirit was to him " Res Extensa," a Supreme
Activity, manifesting itself In space ; and created
spirits arranged themselves below the Divine In a
hierarchy of manifestation less tenuous and pure
as they approached the earth. The Alexandrian
mysticism had filtered something of the old Gnos
ticism into his speculations ; and no doubt It is the
very same difificulty over which Gnosticism pon
dered as to the connection betwixt heaven and
earth — the Divine and the human — which gives
the cue to all More's philosophy. On the one hand,
Hobbism seemed to him to cut away the upper,
heavenly, or Divine sphere altogether, leaving no
thing beyond the world of sense and utility. On
the other hand, Carteslanism drew a sharp and
^ The Pre-existency of the Soul, c. ii. and iii.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 395
ineffaceable line of distinction between spirit and
matter — thought and extension. The two worlds
appeared dissociated as bare mind and bare me
chanism — a great chasm between, without lines of
intersection or points of fusion.^ Both views were
almost equally intolerable to his divinely intoxicated
genius, which saw the spiritual everywhere, and
God's great fecundity filling all things —
" Stretching out Himself in all degrees,
His wisdom, goodness, and due equity
Are rightly ranked ; in all the soul them sees.
O holy lamps of God ! O sacred eyes !
Filled with love and wonder everywhere.
Ye wandering tapers, to whom God descries
His secret path, great Psyche's darling dear." ^
He imagined at least three definite stages of soul-
development or manifestation — ethereal, aerial, and
terrestrial — " in every one whereof there may be
several degrees of purity and impurity, which yet
need not amount to a new species." The myriad
spirit-world, " undrest as yet," wait their time " for
generation fit," and at length find habitation In an
appropriate vehicle. In the poem the destiny of
the soul is conceived as a descent, beginning with
the " celestial or fiery cloud " —
" The orb of pure, quick life and sense.
Which the thrice mighty Mercury of yore
Ascending, held with angels' conference,
And of their comely shapes had perfect cognoscence.
Sphere of pure sense which no perpessions curb.
Nor uncouth shapen spectres ever can disturb.
^ " It seems not so probable to ' The Pre-existency of the Soul,
me that nature admits of so great c. x.
a chasm." — Imm. of Soul, c. xiv.

396 HENRY MORE

Next this is that light vehicle of air,
Where likewise all sense is in each part pight.
This is more gross, subject to grief and fear.
And most-what soiled with bodily delight,
Sometimes with vengeance, envie, anger, spight.
This Orb is ever passive in sensation.
But the third wagon of the soul, that hight
The terrene vehicle, beside this passion
Hath organised sense distinct by limitation.
These last be but the soul's live sepulchres.
Where least of all she acts, but afterward
Rose from this tomb, she free and lively fares
And upward goes, if she be not debarred
By too long bondage in this Cave below." ^
In the Essay he traverses the same round of spe
culation, but more from the conception of an ascend
ing series of developments awaiting the human soul
after death. There are very few that arrive at once
at the celestial or ethereal vehicle " Immediately
upon their quitting the terrestrial one — that heavenly
chariot necessarily carrying us in triumph to the
greatest happiness the soul of man is capable of —
which would arrive to all men indifferently, good
and bad. If the parting with this earthly body would
suddenly mount us into the heavenly. Wherefore,
by a just Nemesis, the souls of men that are not
very heroically virtuous will find themselves re
strained within the compass of this caliglnous air, as
both reason Itself will suggest and the Platonists
have unanimously determined." ^ The duration of
the soul's abode in these various vehicles is very
different. " The shortest of all is that of the terres-
1 The Pre-existency of the Soul, ° Imm. of Soul, B. II. c. xiv.
c. xiii., xiv., xv., xvi.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 397

trial vehicle; in the aerial, the soul may inhabit
many ages ; and in the sethereal, forever." ^
To all this hierarchy of spiritual development.
More of course adds on with Cudworth the idea
of a spirit of nature, a dumb inarticulate spirit,
"without sense and animadversion, pervading the
whole matter of the universe, and exercising a plas-
tlcal power therein ; " producing " such phenomena as
cannot be resolved into mere mechanical powers." ^
One of his main arguments for the existence of
such a spirit, it is curious to notice, is the pheno
menon of gravity. The law of gravity, it Is to be
remembered, was not yet discovered ; and the de
scent of heavy bodies to the earth seemed to More
only capable of explanation as the impulse of " some
immaterial cause, such as we call the spirit of nature,
or inferior soul of the world, that must direct the
motions of the ethereal particles to act upon those
grosser bodies to drive them towards the earth."
The " immediate corporeal cause," he agreed with
Descartes, " was the ethereal matter abounding In
the air more than in grosser bodies;" but as usual
he superadded a spiritual element to the Cartesian
mechanics. He enters also into a long polemic with
Hobbes on the subject, which is not only now with
out interest, but hardly Intelligible.
{d) In turning finally to view More as a moralist,
we emerge from the dim twilight of speculation In
which we have been faintly following him. His
" Enchiridium Ethicum ' is perhaps the most com
pact, clear, and generally intelligible of all his works.
1 Ibid. ''¦ Ibid., B. III. c. xii.

398 HENRY MORE

It Is, moreover, compendious, and answers truly to
its tide of a " Manual." Somewhat singularly, con
sidering this character, and the definite outline of
ethical doctrine which the treatise contains, it has
passed comparatively out of sight ; and while Cud
worth always occupies a prominent position In a
historical review of English moral philosophy. More
is frequently omitted altogether.'^ His Ethics is
almost as forgotten as his Metaphysics, although In
Its day It passed into a second edition within two
years. We have already explained the origin of More's
Ethics in connection with Cudworth's long-deferred
labours on the same subject.^ The letter we then
quoted, addressed to Worthlngton, sets all the cir
cumstances before us ; and he tells them over again,
very much in the same language. In his preface to
the Manual. Friends importuned him very much
in the years following the Restoration " to write a
short Ethicks." The times seemed urgently to call
for such a work. The spirit of inquiry, everywhere
awakened, and searching, as he says, for the " causes
of all things, would not rest short of ' right reason '
In this as in other matters." ^ He was reluctant
however, to undertake the task on various accounts :
he knew that his friend Dr Cudworth had been long
^ Mackintosh, for example, his Lectures on ' The History of
makes no mention of More in his Moral Philosophy in England,'
well-known Dissertation; neither has noticed him with appreciation,
does Professor Bain in his recent and given a brief summary of his
' Compendium of Mental and Mo- ethical doctrine, lect. iii.
ral Science,' in which he gives " See p. 215 of this volume.
a review of ethical systems ' Ad Lectorem.
(Part II.) Whewell, however, in

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 399

meditating an elaborate work on morals; he was
absorbed In what appeared to him more agreeable
and exciting studies — his speculations as to the ex
istence of God and the immortality of the soul ; and
especially, he had no faith in making people virtuous
by " fine systems" of morality. He emphasises this
latter reason particularly in his preface. Mere de
finitions and rules of moral philosophy, he says,
have no force against vice and baseness. Vice
can only be overcome by active virtue, and such
virtue can only be taught by divine faith in God and
His living Word.' He yielded, however, to the im
portunity of his friends, and once entered upon his
task, he pursued it not without pleasure. So far as Dr
Cudworth was concerned, he was led to believe that
his own, " being a small treatise running through the
whole body of ethics," would not interfere with his
larger design.
There Is, in fact, little, if any, resemblance betwixt
More's treatise and Cudworth's. The latter Is de
voted to a special point of great Importance — the
essence or radical character of morality. The former
is really, as it professes to be, an " Ethical Manual."
It Is composed In Latin. It " runs" through the whole
subject, and treats of it briefly but comprehensively
in three divisions or books. In the first the author
discusses the general question of ethics, and explains
the nature of the ethical life or virtue — Its conditions
and instruments. In the second he gives a very arbi
trary but elaborate classification of the virtues, or the
principal elements of morality. And in the third
1 Ibid.

400 HENRY MORE :

book, after a defence of Free Will as the essential con
dition of all morality, he treats specially of the ethical
art, or the means of acquiring virtue. In direct con
trast to Cudworth, he views the subject from the
beginning mainly in Its practical or useJQJL aspect, and
defines morality not so much In itself as in its end.
It is, he says In his opening sentence, the "art of
: living well and happily." Goodness and happiness
^ are to him identical — merely dififerent aspects of the
highest law of our being, or what the ancient moralists
spoke of as the summum bonum.
" Beatitude," therefore, is the same as morality,
or the ethical life. It is the distinguishing quality or
definition of this life. And in what is it found.?
What are Its conditions and Instruments ? It is not
found in the intellect, and does not pecullariy be
long to it as Its property^ — In this respect also differ
ing from Cudworth, who makes good and evil, justice
and Injustice, intuitions of the pure reason. The
special seat of morality Is in a certain " boniform
faculty," by which we instinctively and absolutely
deem what is best, and delight in it alone.^ It Is the
mind, not in the mere exercise of reason, but acting
ex sensu virtutis, which brings us within the moral
sphere. This Is the highest and truly divine side
of our being, corresponding to to dyadop in the
Platonic Deity. It Is the side, moreover, which may
be cultivated by all men. For all men are capable
of the love of God and their neighbours, and this
divine love is the highest form and best fruit of the
" boniform faculty." At the same time, the intellec-
1 Enchirid. Eth., Lib. I. c. ii. 5. 2 j^jjj^

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 401

Jua,l and the divine are never to be separated. Morality
is always agreeable to right reason, and in its nature,
essence, and verity comes within Its cognisance.
Only it requires something more than reason — a cer
tain divine instinct or special faculty of good — to
apprehend it in life, and realise it.' " To estimate
the fruit of virtue by that imaginary knowledge of
it which Is acquired by mere definition, is very much
the same as if one were to estimate the nature of
fire from a fire painted on the wall, which has no
power whatever to keep off the winter's cold. Every
vital good is perceived and judged by life and sense.
True virtue is a certain Intimate life, not any exter
nal form visible to the outward eyes." " If you have
ever been this, you have seen this." This, which he
quotes from Plotinus, he appropriates as the secret
of all true moral science.
Such being the nature and conditions of virtue — the
crown and summit of our practical llfe-i-the passions
are to be regarded as its ministers or instruments.
They are not evil in themselves, but only In their
abuse — the beneficent purpose of Divine Providence
being no less clearly shown in them than in cur
bodily organs. In this respect he signalises his
opposition to the Stoics. By a passion he means any
impression of sense affecting the mind and influencing
its judgment, or any Idiosyncrasy of constitution or
education. 2 All such impulses are strictly natural,
and therefore part of the human order, to be con
trolled and regulated, and not extirpated. He com
pares them to the winds In the external world, which
^ Ibid., c. v. I. ^ Ibid., Lib. I. c. vi. 2.
VOL. II. 2 C

402 HENRY MORE

purify the air and prevent stagnation.'' So the pas
sions stir our blood and stimulate the moral system, by
which it gains larger experience and a higher degree of
happiness, which. In More's conception, is equivalent
to an increase of moral power. The plastic nature, of
which the heart is the centre, is the seat of the pas
sions — the perceptive nature, with the brain as its chief
organ, being the seat of the reason; and while both
enter equally into the human constitution, it is yet the
business of the higher to control the lower. In other
words, human life is a constitution, order, or polity,
In which the mind or reason does not stand alone, but
surrounded by its ministers, whom it ought to govern.
It ought to dominate not only the passions, but the
spirit of nature, to overcome whose enchantments
it-requires to be enforced by divine ald.^
In his enumeration of the passions, More professes
to follow Descartes closely. According to the French
philosopher, there are only six primitive passions—
viz., admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness.
All the others are composed from these, or are spe
cies under these genera.^ Our moralist thinks that
they may be reduced to the three first. For what,
he asks, is desire, but love turned towards a future
good ; and what joy but love exulting in the beloved
' Ibid 1
2 ,. 4 ,' . . mcantamenta et illecebras, divi-
Palam est igitur Regnum niori quadam magia fretus, com-
quoddam m nobis esse sive Prin- primere potest vel extinguere."-
cipatum, Animumque nostrum Lib. I. c. 6, lo. Dr Whewell has
rem esse non adeo solitariam, sed quoted this passage (Lectures,
saus numeroso stipatam satelli- III.), but imperfectly
tio, nee in proprias solum pas- » Lib. I., c. 7(3). Descartes, Les
siones imperium habere, sed in Passions de I'Ame Part II Art
ipsum Natura Spiritum, cujus 69, p. 94, vol. IV. ' Cousin's Ed.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 403
presence of good ; and what sadness, except hatred
enfolded and oppressed by present evil ?' He then
arranges them in several classes. Admiration stands
by itself as a passion of the first class; love and
hatred are of the second ; desire. In its various mani
festations, forms the third; and joy and sadness,
although only modifications of love and hatred, make
a fourth and final class. He treats of them in suc
cession, and their functions and uses. Many of his
observations are highly pertinent and interesting,
and anticipate some of the results of later analysis in
a very different school from his own. He points out,
for example, the distinction betwixt glory and shame,
how the former stimulates our higher nature, and the
latter checks our lower.^ Anger Is a conspicuous
part of retributive justice, and by no means to be
confounded with hatred. All the family of irascible
passions (^u^aoeiSes) are highly useful and necessary,
since it concerns us more to drive away evil than to
rejoice in superfluous good.^ Quoting from an an
cient author,* he represents desire as the purveyor
and resentment as the soldier of the moral state.
In this idea or picture of a moral constitution in
m^an, it is difificult to say whether More had any
reference to Hobbes. He mentions him only once,
which is all the more remarkable since he quotes so
frequently from Descartes and the ancient moralists.®
' Ibid., i. c. 7 (5). Aristotle (both the Magna Moralia
^ Ibid., i. c. II (10). and the Nicomachaean Ethics).
' Ibid., i. c. II (9). the Neo-Platonists, Cicero (the
* Theagis, i. c. 11 (8). Tusculan Questions), and Marcus
' Lib. HI. c. I, 6. Of ancient Antoninus.
authorities he quotes especially

404

HENRY MORE :

His conception of human nature is clearly marked off
from that of his great contemporary. With certain
affinities not to be found in Cudworth arising out of a
more living and comprehensive view of all the facts,
his discrepancy of doctrine is equally radical. Hobbes's
analysis. Interesting as It is in many of Its details, no
where rises to a similar unity of conception. The in
dividual man remains a mere congeries of instinctive
and clashing appetites, till he is brought within the
control of the body politic, and so reduced to a moral
condition. With More, on the other hand, no less
than with Cudworth, the distinctive or supreme
aspect of human nature is divine, and all appetites
and passions, while no less really parts of nature,
with their due offices and objects, yet fall into proper
subordination to the higher divine faculty or reason,
which distinguishes man, and stamps him a moral
being. The remaining books of More's Ethics are less
important, and may be hastily summarised. Hav
ing treated of virtue in genere, he devotes the second
book to the virtues in specie. His classification of
virtues, we have already said, is very arbitrary. In
place of the four cardinal virtues of the ancients,^
he enumerates only three, corresponding to the three
primitive passions — viz., prudence, sincerity, and
,/ patience. Prudence answers to admiration, sincerity
to desire, and patience to resentment.^ Justice, cour
age, and terhperance are reckoned next in order as
^Wisdom, courage, justice, tem- changes his nomenclature, and
perance. even somewhat his analysis of
' Lib. II. c. i. I. — He here the primitive passions.

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 405
the three principal derivative virtues, while justice
again is subdivided into piety and probity.'' There
are various subordinate virtues enumerated and de
scribed, such as liberality, gratitude, veracity, can
dour, urbanity, fidelity ; and a chapter is devoted to
the discussion of the Aristotellc mean (c. Ix.) Fin
ally, he sums up all virtue in intellectual love, which
he Interprets to be love of the highest good. This Is
the highest name and true measure of all morality.
All special virtues spring from this, and may be re
solved Into It. Just as numbers spring from unity,
and may be measured by it, so intellectual love, as a
simple and single principle, is the source and rule of
all diverse forms of good.^
The third book contains an excellent defence of
Free Will as the basis of morality. Against the
Theological Necessitarians who deny contingency.
More argues clearly that God Himself can alone
know what events are necessary and what contingent.
Prescience of such events either implies a contradic
tion or not But to suppose a contradiction is virtually
to say that the prescience Is not divine. Contradictory
objects cannot come within the sphere of the divine
omniscience. And if there is no contradiction, we
may recognise in this very fact that there is no in
consistency betwixt the divine prescience and Free
Will. Either way, no solid argument can be drawn
against moral liberty from the idea of divine pre
science.^ Again, the whole force of the objections
as to the Will always following what appears for
the moment best. More supposes to be met by the
Mbid., c. iv., V. Mbid., II. c. ix. 14, 15, 16. ^ Lib. IIL, c. ii. 2.

4o6 HENRY MORE

simple experience that the good we know we fre
quently do not do. Our works are not determined
by our knowledge of what Is best. We may have
fine Ideas of virtue, and yet never put them in
practice. Our freedom in this sense is only too real;
and It Is the very object of morality to bring the idea
and the will into unison, and so enlighten the one
and discipline the other that they may attain to the
highest good.
The character of More's genius and thought has
been sufficiently set before our readers. As a thinker
he is much less systematic, but more fertile and
genial, than Cudworth. He is poet, moralist, and
mystic, rather than thinker. It is difficult to bring
his varied speculations to a unity, or to fix his
opinions into a definite system. His attitude is
sufificlendy determinate; but his sympathies and
views are apt to vary with his temporary enthusi
asms and the altered pressure of the moral and theo
logical atmosphere around him. He Is never Incon
sistent with himself — whether commending Descartes
or abusing him— whether warning Lady Conway
against the Quakers, and exposing their fanati
cism, or transported by the wonder-working vagaries
of Van Helmont or the ghost-stories of Glanvlll.
But his genius is. rich, complex, and enthusiastic-
swayed by passionate and lofty emotion — rather than
clear, penetrating, and illumined by a definitely
rational purpose. He is less philosopher or theolo
gian than prophet and gnostic — with his mind brimful
of divine Ideas, In the delighted contemplation of

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 407
which he lives, and moves, and writes. All his
works are Inspired by a desire to make known some
thing that he himself has felt of the Divine. The
invisible or celestial, so far from being hard for him
to apprehend, is his familiar haunt. He has diffi
culty In letting himself down from the higher region
of supernal realities to the things of earth. This
celestial elevation Is the most marked feature at
once of his character and his mind. It is the key to
his beautiful serenity and singular spiritual compla
cency — a complacency never offensive, yet raising
him somewhat above common sympathy. It Is the
source of the dreamy imaginings and vague aerial
conjectures which fill his books. These may seem
to us now poor and unreal, and some of them absurd,
but they were to him living and substantial. Nay,
they were the life and substance of all his thought.
He felt himself at home moving in the heavenly
places, and discoursing of things which it hath not
.entered into the ordinary mind to conceive or utter.
He was a spiritual realist. It was his passion and
study so to feel and describe divine facts, that
others might see and know them as he himself did.
Thus it was that he delighted to dwell on such sub
jects as the existence of God and the immortality of
the soul ; and felt that when he was drawn aside
from these, even to ethical questions and rules, he
was drawn from a pleasant and congenial atmosphere
to a dry and uninviting one.
The substantive value of More's thought cannot
be judged high. It is imiposslble indeed to over
estimate the tone, character, and spiritual ideal after

408 HENRY MORE

which he aimed in all his life and work. But so far
as the progress of truth is concerned — the removal of
prejudice — the simplification of belief — the concilia
tion of natural and spiritual knowledge — he accom
plished little. With all his enthusiasm of reason, he
is an imperfect representative of the rational move
ment. The Cambridge philosophy, while it showed
in him some of Its finest fruit, yet also brought
forth In him all its weakness. The Neo-Platonic
extravagances which lay hidden in it from the first,
came in his writings into luxuriant blossom. Origin
ally a protest against spiritual fanaticism, no less than
dogmatic bigotry, it remained free In all its course
from any taint of the latter ; but it certainly reached
in More a new species of fanaticism. He Is not
merely inspired, but possessed by his favourite Ideas.
They not only guide but dominate him, and some
times in the most traditionary and outworn forms.
They are never kept calmly before him in an attitude
of Inquiry. His aim is not to purify, enlarge, and
harmonise them, but to teach them even in exag
gerated and fantastic forms. All this bespeaks the
decadence rather than the growth of reason.
Withal, More Is true to the two great springs of
the movement. He loves inquiry, although he is
himself an Imperfect Inquirer. He never shrinks
from reason, if he fails to give it free play and scope,
and to draw it into the full light of day. Again, he
believes profoundly In the harmony of natural and
spiritual truth. He has lost the threads of this
harmony, and some of his own speculations have
rather tended to obscure than to illuminate it But

CHRISTIAN THEOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM. 409
If he must be pronounced in many things a spiritual
dreamer rather than a Christian Rationalist, his
dreams are not merely of a higher world, fashioned
by his own imaginings, but of a cosmos of nature
and spirit — of life here and life hereafter, united by
continuity of effort in the beneficent designs of
divine love.

410

VI.
MINOR MEMBERS OF THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL.
culverwel, worthington, rust, patrick, fowler,
Glanvill, Norris.
There are several less Important members of the
Cambridge fraternity who deserve commemoration.
With one exception, none of them can be said to
have enriched or modified the impulse of thought in
which they shared, while the most prominent belong,
in their full ecclesiastical and theological activity, to
the new political type of latitudlnarlanlsm which came
into vogue at the Revolution, to which our historical
survey in these volumes is not designed to extend.
Yet we must glance at several names intimately con
nected with the great teachers whose labours we
have been reviewing, without some notice of whom
the picture of the Cambridge school in its full char
acteristics would remain Imperfect.
Most of these names have already been mentioned
in our pages, and their literary and personal con
nections In some degree indicated. Worthlngton,
Rust, Fowler, and Patrick, for example, have come
before us more than once. They were all Cambridge

CULVERWEL. 4"

men, and more or less satellites of- the party. Some
of them bore to its chief members very definite and
special relations. We shall sketch their position
and relations somewhat more fully, and fill In such
particulars regarding them as may seem significant.
None of those now mentioned, save Patrick, have
left writings which give them any prominent dis
tinction in English theological literature, and their
personality has barely lifted them above the obscurity
which so rapidly overtakes Inferior workers in every
intellectual department.
There Is one name, however, hitherto little men
tioned in our pages, which claims attention before
any of these — that of Nathaniel Culverwel, author
of a ' Discourse of the Light of Nature.' Culverwel
came forth from the bosom of the school, and was In
some respects one of its most remarkable products.
Both chronologically and In point of Intellectual
significance, he deserves to stand at the head of
our subordinate list. The ' Discourse of the Light
of Nature' appeared in 1652, and in genius and
wealth of thought it claims the very highest rank.
It is, moreover, a distinct variety In the literature
of the school — one of its most characteristic mani
festations, and yet discrepant from its special theo
logy. Not even John Smith's discourses are more
instinct with a lofty ideality and all the glow and
beauty of a luminous yet impassioned imagina
tion. Few writings of any age show a rarer and
finer spiritual insight, or teem with fruits of a more
largely developed thoughtfulness. It is almost a
poem in its grandeur and harmony of conception.

412

CULVERWEL.

and the lyrical enthusiasm with which It chants the
praises of Reason. And yet Culverwel was a Cal
vinist, and the first edition of his discourse bears
the imprimatur of Edward Calamy, and was dedi
cated to Whichcote's Puritan correspondent and
critic, Antony Tuckney. This gives a peculiar In
terest to his connection with the school, and reveals
in a striking light the strength of its influence in
those early years, when Whichcote was in his full
activity as a preacher, and the fresh life of his
sermons was moving many minds. It is hardly pos
sible to avoid the suspicion that Culverwel was In
Tuckney's view, in some of the allusions which he
makes in his letters to the effects of Whichcote's
-teaching on the "young ones" of the University.'
The youthful genius who had celebrated Reason
in his discourse in such felicitous and glowing
language, had just closed his brief career when these
letters were written.
Of Culverwel, even more truly than of John
Smith, there is no biography. His name is not even
found In any biographical dictionary. ^ The year of
his birth is unknown, and his parentage is uncertain.
There seems little doubt, however, that he was de-
' This conjecture has occurred be said to be critically edited, and
to the modern editor of Culver- so to survive in a form suited to
wel's discourse — the late Dr John the modern reader. It is seldom
Brown of Edinburgh — to whose that editorial work is done so well
careful and loving appreciation as by Dr Brown in this case — so
we owe the beautiful edition which fully, and yet so concisely, with so
appeared from the press of the much real learning, and yet so
' Messrs Constable in 1857. The little pedantry.
result is, that Culverwel alone, of ^ Not even in Phillip's recent
all the Cambridge divines, may Dictionary of Biographical Refer-

CULVERWEL. 413

scended from a race of Culverwels who, in the begin
ning of the century, and even before, were noted
for their Puritanism. Probably he was the son or
nephew of Ezekiel Culverwel, rector of a parish in
Essex, and author of a popular ' Treatise on Faith,'
published in 1623 — a friend of the well-known Dr
SIbb,s, who edited a small volume by him after his
death, and describes him as " a man very well ex
perienced in all the ways of God." Nathaniel was
sent to Emmanuel College in 1633. He Is entered
in that year as a pensioner. Whichcote was then
a Fellow of the College, and John Smith began
his studies three years later. He graduated as
Master In 1640, the same year in which Smith
took his Bachelor's degree. He afterwards became
a Fellow, and for some time before his death was a
regular preacher In the college chapel. He was,
therefore. In the very centre of the Platonic movement
in its earlier form. He must have heard Whichcote
often preach — probably those very sermons com
plained of by Tuckney, in which Reason was so much
"cried up." John Smith and he could hardly fail being
friends — with so much In common. Their very differ
ences may have been a source of mutual interest
For there seems no doubt of Culverwel's hearty Puri
tanism. In one of his smaller pieces' he speaks of the
public men of the time in the usual Puritan style as
" Zerubbabels and Jehoshuas building God a temple."
ence, which is very elaborate, and ^ ' Mount Ebal,' originally pub-
contains some names twice over : lished, as well as some other
London, 1871. This fact is noted minor pieces, along with 'The
by Dr Brown. Light of Nature.'

414 CULVERWEL.

In the Discourse, however, little remains of his Puri
tan Calvinism, save its distilled and finer essence of
spiritual rapture. A few traces of dogmatic narrow
ness are manifest here and there, but never in a
harsh form.
The date of Culverwel's death, as of his birth, is
unknown. It probably took place about a year be
fore the publication of the Discourse, and in circum
stances of deep affliction of some kind or another.
The hints which are conveyed in his brother's Ad
dress to the Reader seem to point to something of
the nature of mental aberration, during which the
youthful genius had exposed himself to the criticism
of his friends " as one whose eyes were lofty, and
whose eyelids lifted up, who bare himself too high
upon a conceit of his parts, — although they that knew
him Intimately are most willing to be his compur
gators in this particular." The original editor of the
Discourse ' seems to Indicate something of the same
kind in acknowledging Tuckney's kindness to the
author, " especially when he lay under the discipline
of so sad a providence." A mind so .finely strung
as that of Culverwel, so soaring and passionate in its
yearnings after truth, and so susceptible to all influ
ences of life and nature, can readily be supposed to
have lost its balance, and In the very sublimity of Its
aspirations to have gone astray. It is barely pos
sible, also, that some conflict arising put of his
^ A Dr Dillingham, of whom supposed to have translated into
little seems known, except that he Latin the Westminster Confession
succeeded Tuckney in the master- and Catechisms.
ship of Emmanuel College, and is

DISCOURSE OF THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 4x5
peculiar religious position may have plunged him
into perplexity, and helped to unsettle his thoughts ;
although there is no evidence of this in the Dis
course itself It Is singularly radiant and hopeful
In its religious confidence.
The orginal editor says of the ' Discourse of the
Light of Nature,' that its " design was on the one
hand to vindicate the use of reason in matters of re
ligion from the aspersions and prejudices of some
weaker ones In those times, who, having entertained
erroneous opinions which they were in no way able
to defend, were taught by their more cunning se
ducers to wink hard, and except against all offensive
weapons ; so, on the other hand, to chastise the
sauclness of Socinus and his followers, who dare
set Hagar above her mistress, and make faith wait
at the elbow of corrupt and distorted reason." '^ As
it stands, the use of reason, and the special nobility
of its function in the search after truth, form Its main
theme. The conciliation of reason and faith In re
futation of the Socinians, and all who disparaged
the mysteries of the Gospfl, was to form the second
and more important part of the treatise, which the
author did not live to complete. This is to be borne
in mind In judging of his opinions. He stands " in
the midst, between two adversaries of extreme per
suasions," and while " he opposes the one he seems
to favour the other more than is meet." But
"judge candidly," says the editor, "and take his
opinion as thou wouldst do his picture, sitting, —
not from a luxuriant expression, wherein he always
^ Discourse : To the Reader, p. 6. Brown's ed.

4X6 CULVERWEL.

allowed for the shrinking, but from his declared
judgment when he speaks professedly of such a
subject." '
The author himself announces, In the Porch or In
troduction to his Discourse, that his ultimate aim was
, the reconciliation of faith and of reason, — " to give
unto reason the things that are reason's, and unto faith
the things that are faith's ; to give faith her full scope
and latitude, and to give reason also her just bounds
and limits." ^ He then launches into a high-toned
comparison of the two, which gradually passes into
an eloquent defence of reason from the aspersions
which some had cast upon her. " This " (reason)
" is the first-born, but the other has the blessing.
There Is a twin-light springing from both, and they
both spring from the same fountain of light, and
they both severally conspire in the same end —
the glory of that being from which they shine, and
the welfare and happiness of that being upon which
they shine. . . . To blaspheme reason is to re
proach Heaven itself and to dishonour the God of
reason, to question the' beauty of His image." ^
Some, however, are " so strangely prejudiced " that
the very name of reason, especially in a pulpit, must
needs have at least a thousand heresies couched in
it. " What would these men have ? " he exclaims.
" Would they be banished from their own essences ?
would they forfeit and renounce their understand
ings ? or have they any to forfeit or disclaim ?
Would they put out the candle of the Lord, Intel
lectuals of His own lighting ? or have they any to
1 Ibid., p. 7. = Ibid.— Introd., p. 17. 3 Ibid., p. 17, 18.

THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 417
put out ? Would they creep into some lower spe
cies, and go a-grazing with Nebuchadnezzar among
the beasts of the field ? or are they not there
already ? Oh, ivhat hard thoughts have these men
of religion ! Do they look upon it only as a bird of
prey, that comes to peck out the eyes of men ? " '
He admits that " the eye of reason is weakened,"
but then this is no reason for plucking it out Leah is
not to be hated merely " because she is blear-eyed."
" Is It not better to enjoy the faint and languishing light
of this ' candle of the Lord,' than to be In palpable
and disconsolate darkness ? There are indeed but a
few seminal sparks left In the ashes, and must there
be whole floods of water cast upon them to quench
them ? It is but an old imperfect manuscript, with
some broken periods, some letters worn out ; must
they therefore, with an unmerciful indignation, rend it,
and tear it asunder ?" It is granted that " the picture
has lost its gloss and beauty, the oriency of its colours,
the elegancy of its lineaments, the comeliness of its
proportions ; must it therefore be totally defaced ?
must it be made one great blot ? and must the very
frame of it be broken in pieces ? " ^ Reason, more
over, is conscious of her deficiencies. The very
apprehension of her weakness comes from herself.
" When awakened, she feels her own wounds, bears
her own jarrings, sees the dimness of her own sight.
Reason herself has made many sad complaints unto
you ; she has told you often, and that with tears in
her eyes, what a great shipwreck she has suffered,
what goods she has lost, how hardly she escaped
^ Ibid., p. 19. ^ Ibid., p. 20.
VOL. II. 2 D

4x8 CULVERWEL.

with a poor decayed being; she has shown you
often some broken relics, as the sad remembrance of
her former riches. She had nothing but two or
three jewels about her, two or three common notions,
and would you rob her of them also ? " ' Or Is rea
son offensive because she cannot grasp and compre
hend the things of God ? " Vain men ! will they
pluck out their eyes because they cannot look upon
the sun in his brightness and glory ? What though
reason cannot enter the ' holy of holies,' and pierce
within the veil .'' May it not, notwithstanding, be
as the porch at the gate of the Temple called Beau
tiful, and be a doorkeeper In the house of God ? " ^
Reason has been accused of " wrangling against the
mysteries of salvation ; " but It Is not " right," but
" distorted reason," that ever does this. Nor is it a
valid objection, that errors are sometimes introduced'
under " the fair disguise of so beautiful a name," and
have some tincture of reason in them. It Is " be
coming to put a good face on things," and every
thing, in so far as it is really rational, is good. Even
error is better with "some tincture of reason" than
without it. He acknowledges, at the same time,
its abuse in commending what he thinks errone
ous. " Thus Arminianism pleads for itself under the
specious notion of God's love to mankind. Thus
that silly error of Antinomianism will needs style
itself an 'Evangelical honeycomb ' ! "3 Finally, reason
is the best help for disentangling all difficulties. It
prepares and fortifies the mind against deception, by
the very fact that it reveals its liability to go astray.
1 Ibid., p. 20. 2 Ibid., p. 21. 8 Ibid., p. 28.

THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 419
Some men's reason is not so well advanced and
improved as it might be. " A sharper edge would
quickly cut such difificulties asunder. Some have
more defined and clarified intellectuals, more vigor
ous and sparkling eyes than others, and one soul
differs from another In glory ; and that reason which
can make some shift to maintain error, might with a
great deal less sweat and pains maintain a truth."'
Culverwel employs himself in his second chapter
in explaining the phrase " the Candle of the Lord,"^
which he has already used as identical with Reason.
He does this in a manner to suggest that the dis
course was originally delivered from the pulpit ; and
it is curious to reflect how the text of Proverbs con
taining this phrase was bandied about betwixt the
disputants of the period. Tuckney accuses Which
cote of " over-frequendy" quoting It, and the true
meaning and application of it are among the subjects
debated In their letters. Culverwel is more ingeni
ous than satisfactory In some of his comments, but
he deduces fairly enough that " the proper and
genuine meaning of the place" is, " that God hath
breathed into all the sons of men reasonable souls,
which may serve as so many candles to enlighten
and direct them in the searching out their Creator — In
the discovering of other inferior beings, and them
selves also." ^ In short, he finds in the words " a brief
commendation of Natural Light, or the Light of Rea
son ;" * and then with the view of " further clearing,"
^ Ibid., p. 24. ' Ibid., p. 29.
^ Prov. XX. 27 : " The spirit of * Ibid., p. 31.
¦man is the candle ofthe Lord," &c.

420 CULVERWEL.

and entering upon his subject, he proceeds to in
quire : I. " What Nature is ? 2. What the law of
Nature is ? 3. What the light of Nature is ? "
These inquiries occupy him in the remainder of
the treatise ; and although here and there his style
is ornate to a fault, and the tone of the pulpit lingers
in reiterative and imaginative emphasis, which occa
sionally blurs rather than brightens his meaning, it is
impossible not to be struck with the range of know
ledge and wide capacity of thought, as well as richness
of illustration, which It everywhere displays. Not to
speak of the philosophers of antiquity, who were the
natural text-books of the school, he deals familiarly
with all the great writers of the time. Bacon and
Descartes (Hobbes had scarcely yet emerged), Sel
den, Grotius, and Salmaslus ; and, amongst smaller
philosophers, Sir Kenelm Digby and Lord Brooke.'
He is especially just to the speculations of Suarez
and Lord Herbert in the preceding age, and finds
in the latter a distinct support for his own theory
of knowledge, as involving both elements of thought
and (sensational) experience. While contending
strongly for the subjective side of knowledge —
" some clear and indelible principles, some first and
alphabetical notion stamped and printed upon the
being of man"^ — he yet opposes what he believes to
be the extreme Platonic doctrine of the soul's origi
nating knowledge of itself and communicating inde
pendently Its own light to the objects of experience.^
' Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, Union and Unity with the Soule,'
eulogised by Milton in his 'Areo- &c. Lond. 1641.
pagitica,' and author of a treatise ^ Chap. vii. p. 81.
on the ' Nature of Truth : its ' Chap. x. p. 124.

THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 42 1
The whole theory of Pre-existence, which proved such
a snare to the mind of More and others of the school,
is set aside by him as irrational. Plato " might as well
fancy such implanted ideas such seeds of light in his
external eye, as such seminal principles in the eye of
the mind." The Platonists were right in exalting
reason, and looking upon the spirit of a man as " the
candle of the Lord," but " they were deceived in the
time when It was lighted." Man has only to reflect
to be convinced that he brings no " connate ideas,"
as Culverwel calls them, into the world with him.
" Do but analyse your own thoughts, do but consult
with your own breasts ; tell us whence it was that
the light first sprang in upon you. Had you such
notions as these when you first passed into being ?
Had you these connate ' ideas' in the cradle ? and
were they rocked asleep with you ? Or did you
then meditate upon these principles — ' The whole
is greater than the part,' and ' nothing can be, and
not be, at the same time.' Never tell us that you
wanted organlcal dispositions, for you plainly have
recourse to the sensitive powers, and must needs
subscribe to this, that all knowledge comes flourish
ing in at these lattices." ' In short, the capacity or
faculty of knowledge is from within — the content of
it from without. We have no innate or connate ideas,
but ideas are born of our original powers, " the
beginning of the soul's strength, espoused to their
virgin objects, closing and complying with them long
before discourse (reasoning) can reach them — nay,
with such objects as discourse cannot reach at all." 2
* Chap. V. p. 126. ° Ibid., p. 128.

422 CULVERWEL.

We have been led Into this explanation of Culver
wel's general position as a thinker, in connection
with what he says of Lord Herbert, whose views he
Is setting forth with sympathy and approval in the last
quotation. H Is theory of knowledge is Intimately con
nected with his special argument. Nature Is to him
a great order, embracing the spiritual and material ;
the law of Nature Is the reflection of the Eternal
Law, which is nothing else than God Himself; and '
Reason is at once the light which discerns the law |
and the subject which obeys it. There Is some i
Indistinctness in the sequence of his thoughts ;
but his views in detail are clear and admirable.
Nothing can be finer than his vindication of the true
meaning both of Nature and of Law, in contradistinc
tion to the current modern perversion of both these
words. " Why bodies only," he says, "should engross
and monopolise natural philosophy, and why a soul
cannot be admitted into It, unless it bring a certificate
and commendamus from the body, is a thing alto
gether unaccountable, unless it be resolved into a
mere arbitrary determination and a philosophical
kind of tyranny. ' . . . Herein Plato was defective,
that he did not correct and reform the abuse of
this word Nature ; that he did not screw it up to a
higher and more spiritual notion. For it is very
agreeable to the eternal and supremest Being. Nature
is that regular line which the wisdom of God Himself
has drawn in being." ^
Law, again, he defines as characteristically moral
in its essence. We may speak of God setting a law
^ Ibid., p. 33. 2 Ibid., p. 37, 38.

THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 423
to the winds and the waves ; but such things are
at the most but " tendencies and gravitations," and
not " the fruits of a legislative power. A rational
creature only Is capable of law which Is a moral
restraint, and so cannot reach to those things which
are necessitated."^ It is necessary In order to con
stitute a law that it not only flow forth and express
the Divine Being, but that It be clearly promulgated
by the Divine Will. There must be " the voice of
the trumpet" " Law is for a public good, and it
must be made known in a public manner." ^ " Law
is founded on the intellectuals — on the reason — not
on the sensitive principle. It supposes a noble and
free-born creature, for where there is no liberty there
is no law- — a law being nothing else than a rational
restraint and limitation of absolute liberty. Now all
liberty Is ' radically in the intellect,' and such creatures
as have no light have no choice — no moral variety."^
Mere sensitive creatures " are absolute Antino
mians." " The law of Nature Is ' hatched ' by Reason from
those ' first and oval principles of her own laying,
scattered In the soul, and filling It with a vigorous
pregnancy, a multiplying fruitfulness, so that it brings
forth a numerous and sparkling posterity of second
ary notions." As specimens of these first principles
he gives the following : " We must seek good and
avoid evil ;" " we must seek happiness." ^ He quotes
with approval the saying of Bacon, " All morality is
nothing but a collection and bundling up of natural
precepts." The moralists but " enlarge the fringe of
1 P. 40, 41. 2 P. 49. 2 Ibid., p. 62. * Ibid., p. 81.

424 CULVERWEL.

Nature's garment." ^ " They are so many commenta
tors and expositors upon Nature's law." ^ It is
Reason alone, " as an intellectual lamp In the soul,"
which discovers and verifies this law. Nowhere does
Culverwel show higher sense and penetration than
in dealing with this part of his subject.^ He
ridicules the idea of the Jews being the source of
all moral and spiritual knowledge, with evident
reference to this prevalent delusion of the Cambridge
school. " Some say Pythagoras lighted his candle
there " (at the Jews' sun), " and Plato also his.
Why, did they borrow common notions of them ?
Was this 'written law'? — ^only some Jewish man
uscript which they translated into Greek. Can
Pythagoras know nothing unless a Jew's soul come
and inform him ? ... If they will but attend
unto Pythagoras himself, they shall hear him re
solving these first notions of his and others into
Nature's bounty and not into the Jews' courtesy."*
" This, indeed, must be granted," he adds, " that the
whole generality of the heathen went a-gleaning in
the Jewish fields. They had some of their grapes,
some ears of corn that dropped from them." Yet
" Give unto the Jew the things of the Jews, and to
the Gentile the things of the Gentiles, and that
which God had made common, call not thou pecu
liar. The apostle's question is here very seasonable :
' Is He the God of the Jews only ? Is He not also
of the Gentiles ? Yes, of the Gentiles also.'"^
While Reason is the chief voice of Nature's law,
' Ibid. 2 p. 83. » Chap. viii.
* Ibid., p. 94. c Ibid., p. 96, 97.

THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 425
" the consent of nations," in a secondary way, " con
tributes no small light " to its manifestation. General
results can only come from some common cause.
"When you see so many rays of the same light
shooting themselves into the several corners of the
world, you presently look up to the sun as the glorious
original of them all." ' " As face answers to face, so
does the heart of one man the heart of another ; even
the heart of an Athenian the heart of an Indian."
Instead of arguing, like Locke, that the diversity of
moral practice in the world is inconsistent with any
radical or innate moral truth, Culverwel draws the
strongest evidence of the universality of certain
common notions or principles of material law from
the affinities which subsist amongst men, notwith
standing all their differences. " Certainly It Is some
transcendent beauty that so many nations are enam
oured withal. It is some powerful music that sets
the whole world a-dancing." " Look upon the diver
sities of nations, and there you will see a rough and
barbarous Scythian, a wild American, an unpolished
Indian, a superstitious Egyptian, a subtle Ethiopian,
a cunning Arabian, a luxurious Persian, a treacherous
Carthagenian, a lying Cretian, an elegant Athenian,
a wanton Corinthian, a desperate Italian, a fighting
German, — and tell me whether it must not be some
admirable and efficacious truth that shall so over
power them all as to pass current amongst them, and
be owned and acknowledged by them." ^
Having thus explained the questions opened by
him, Culverwel launches into a panegyrical descrip-
ip. no. 2 P. 113.

426 WORTHINGTON.

tion of Reason as a " derivative light," a " diminutive
light," a " certain light," — as a light " directive," " calm
and peaceable," " pleasant," and finally " ascendant,"
— filling the remaining chapters of the treatise.
It is unnecessary and beyond our space to follow
further his eloquent analysis. Everywhere there is
the impress of a full and teeming mind, overflowing
In its wealth of thought and expression — a mind
sometimes too intense and narrow in Its judgments,
in obedience to early prejudices and training,' yet
genial even in its narrowness, and far more vivid,
rapid, glowing, and poetic In Its movements, than any
other mind of the school. Smith is, upon the whole,
more profound in Insight His vision ranges over a
larger area of spiritual contemplation ; but even he
hardly equals Culverwel in exuberance of genius,
and flow and fertility of imaginative thoughtfulness.
After Culverwel, John Worthlngton deserves the
first place on our list. His name has been fre
quently before us in the course of our survey. He
was the original editor of Smith's ' Select Dis
courses ; ' and his ' Diary and Correspondence '^ gives
us glimpses Into the interior life of the school, of
which we have already so far availed ourselves.
They are hardly as full and interesting as might
have been expected, but they help now and then to
' As in his judgment of Pela- Correspondence' were edited for
gianism and Arminianism, and the Chetham Society, Manches-
his view of the fate of the wise ter, in 1847, by James Crossley,
and good among the heathen Esq., to whose careful and inter-
— modified as it is — p. 270. esting labours we have already
^ Worthington's ' Diary and referred.

WORTHINGTON. 427

light up the picture, heavy in its theological drapery,
with a bright and homely touch.
Besides being the editor of Smith's Discourses,
Worthlngton was the correspondent and enthusiastic
admirer of both Cudworth and More. He is known
himself by a volume of ' Discourses,' first published
by his son In 1725, and since republished ; and also by
a smaller volume of ' Miscellanies,' which appeared
earlier, in 1 704. He was a native of Manchester, and
educated at Emanuel College, where Whichcote and
Cudworth had preceded him, and which Smith pro
bably entered about the same time. He was chosen
Master of Jesus College during the Commonwealth,
but resigned after the Restoration in favour of Dr
Richard Sterne, who had been ejected by the Puritan
authorities. Sterne subsequently became Archbishop
of York. After 1660 Worthlngton appears to have
withdrawn from Cambridge, and exclusively devoted
himself to the labours of a clergyman in a succession
of livings — Horton, Fen Ditton, Ingoldsby (to which
he was presented by More, in whose gift It was), and
finally Hackney, of which church he was chosen lec
turer in 1670. He was a diligent correspondent not
only with his Cambridge friends, but with Mr Samuel
Hartllb, whom some of our readers may remember
in connection with Milton. Hartllb, like Evelyn —
Jeremy Taylor's friend — is a figure constantly flit
ting through the theological and literary society
of the seventeenth century. He was a writer and
great authority on agriculture, as Evelyn was on
gardening and forestry. Deeply interested in the
philosophical and religious questions of the time, and

428 WORTHINGTON.

an ardent educational reformer — which is his point of
connection with Milton — he was eager to learn all that
was going on — the new books appearing, or the new
speculations afloat. Worthington's correspondence
with him Is, of course, chiefly on religious subjects,
but the letters are full of literary and social as well as
theological gossip. More is frequently mentioned
with great respect, and his ' Mystery of Godliness'
spoken of as a book- the like of which " hath not yet
appeared in the world." The appearance of Glan
vill's ' Vanity of Dogmatising' Is signalised in May
1 66 1, and the author spoken of as a young man of
much reading and promise, " abating some juvenile
heat." " As one said of the parts of pregnant young
men. We may guess what the wine will be, and it will
taste better when broached some years hence." It
may be doubted in this case whether the new wine
was not better than the more mature.
Worthington's own writings do not possess much
substance. The volume of Discourses Is the more
readable of the two, and the style occasionally rises
to dignity and a quaint plaintive eloquence, studded
with many a golden sentence from the favourite Neo-
Platonic mint. Speaking of the necessity of inward
purity in order to see God, — now, he says, it is when
the soul has set itself in good earnest on the task of
self purification "that the locks of Samson grow
again, and the strength which went away and was
gone, by its yielding to the blandishments and soft
nesses of the sensual and animal life — that most dan
gerous and Inveigling Delilah— Is returned. Now it
is that the 'wings of the soul grow again, and

DISCOURSES AND MISCELLANIES. 429
better ; ' Mt moves more freely, being delivered from
what did hitherto clog and stay its heavenly flight, its
'journey upwards,'^ to use the expression of Hiero-
cles. And as it prospers in its sincere and earnest
endeavours to purge and cleanse itself from all that
within which is contrary to God, by the same degrees
and proportions 'it revives,' and becomes more
lively, active, and vivacious. ' It is collected within
itself, and is filled with divine strength and power,
and unites Itself to the fountain of intellectual purity
and perfection.'"^
Such a passage — and there are many such — re
minds us strongly of Smith. It is everywhere the
well-accustomed speech, rich in spiritual aim, but
darkened by Neo-Platonic, or Cabbalistic, or apo
calyptic allusion, that addresses us both in the
' Discourses' and in the ' Miscellanies,' which, how
ever, bear a nearer resemblance to some of More's
speculations. It must be allowed, at the same time,
that there is a distinct vein of manner, if not of
thought, in Worthlngton — a vein of practical earnest
ness, tenderness, and spiritual vivacity, which gives
the impression, which we also gather from his life,
that his natural sphere of labour was the pulpit, and
that he m.ust have excelled as a preacher. His suc
cessive promotions, and his appointment as lecturer
at Hackney, indicate this. We are told, in fact,
by his son, who originally edited his 'Discourses,'
and characterises them as the " substance of sundry
parcels of sermons," that he was very successful in his
^ IlTepoipvta aplarr]. ' Worthington's Discourses, p.
^ npos Tiji/ &va> Tvopeiav. 486.

430 WORTHINGTON.

ministry. "He had great cause to be thankful to God
for the fruit of his labours, some of very dififerent
persuasions, and that had wandered through all
forms, placing the kingdom of God in opinions and
extra-essentials, being by his practical teaching awak
ened to other thoughts, and receiving settlement in
better things, as they themselves acknowledged, and
he heard also from others." ^ Tillotson, who preached
his funeral sermon, gives the same impression. The
" character " briefly drawn by the archbishop is not
very descriptive, but a few touches may be given
from it. It considers Worthlngton " chiefly in his
profession, in his accomplishment for it, and his public
usefulness In It He had, by the great industry and
power of his whole life, and God's blessing upon
them, furnished himself with a great stock of all ex
cellent learning proper to his profession, especially
with that which did more immediately conduce to the
knowledge of the Holy Scriptures — the best and
most proper skill of a divine. Thus he was pecu
liarly fitted to teach and instruct others; and that
the doctrine might be the more effectual, he showed
himself in all things a follower of good works, and
taught others nothing but what he had first learned
himself His whole demeanour was pious and grave,
and yet not blemished with any moroseness or fond
affectation. . . . He was universally inofifensive, kind,
and obliging even to those that differed from him. . . .
Especially in debates and controversies of religion he
was not apt to be passionate and contentious, remem
bering that ' the wrath of man worketh not the right-
^ Preface to Discourses.

LABOURS AND CHARACTER. 431
eousness of God.' . . . But that which was most
singularly eminent in him was the publicness of his
spirit, and his great zeal and Industry to be useful,
especially in those things which tended to the pro
moting of piety and learning." His edition of the
works of Joseph Mede, the famous expositor of the
Apocalypse,^ Is specially mentioned as an Instance of
his industry. The edition cost him " Infinite pains
for several years together." It would be difificult to
find " so vast a work that was ever published with
more exactness."
Worthlngton married a niece of Whichcote,^ so
that he was connected not only by mental but by
personal ties with the Platonic brotherhood. His
letters and diary reveal the intimancy of this con
nection in numberless ways. If somewhat disap-
^ The works of the pious and that Whichcote's wife was "the
profoundly - learned Mr Joseph widow of Matthew Cradock, a
Mede, B.D., sometime Fellow of wealthy London merchant," and
Christ College, Cambridge, in five the " first governor of the Com-
books, folio. Mede died in 1638, pany of Massachusetts Bay."
before the rise of the Platonic In 1650 Mrs Whichcote petitioned
school; but there is considerable the general court of Massachu-
affinity between certain trains of setts for the payment of a sum of
their thought — not the best or money alleged to be due to her
most rational — and his specula- former husband ; and, later, the
tions. court voted that in consideration
^ In a former page — 93, vol. ii. of the great disbursements of Mr
— we have said that we had been Cradock in planting the colony,
unable to learn anything of Which- "one thousand acres of land be
cote's marriage. An interesting given to Dr Whichcote and his
letter which has reached us from wife Rebecca." We have to thank
Massachusetts, from the Rev. our correspondent for this infor-
Henry A. Miles, D.D., in refer- mation, which it has been plea-
ence to the appearance of the sant to receive from an American
chapter on Whichcote in the student and admirer of Which-
¦ Contemporary Review' (Octo- cote's ' Aphorisms.*
ber 1 871), gives the information

432 WORTHINGTON.

pointing, they are yet full of curious information, and
open up familiar glimpses into the domestic as well as
academic life of the seventeenth century. There are
love-letters, and scraps of poetry, and pathetic details
of family suffering, and criticisms of new books and
public events. Writing to Mrs Mary Whichcote at
her father's house at Frogmore on the eve of his
marriage In September 1657, he expresses himself
with all the ardour of an impatient lover : " It is now
a week since I left Frogmore, which upon other
occasions is accounted no long time ; but to me it is
a week many times told. For the present I place
myself In the constant remembrance of your loves
and sweetnesses, and all these your lovely and en
dearing perfections both of body and mind, dispo
sition and deportment, not forgetting your music.
And I shall hasten to prepare for that happy time of
enjoying your ever-desired company and the crowning
of our affections — for love affects not delays." And
nothing can be more pleasing and prettily becoming
than the lady's reply. " Your welcome lines are
come to hand, than which nothing but yourself could
have been more welcome to me, in which you have
expressed a great deal of love to me, and that far
above my deserving. I cannot but acknowledge the
moving of my heart to you — that of all the men that
ever I saw, if I were to chuse of ten thousand, my
heart would not close with any as with yourself,
— you having such knowledge, goodness, and a lovely
disposition, which you have manifested to me, and
suitableness of temper, and in my eye no person so
desirable. Love covereth a multitude of faults ; and

GEORGE RUST. 433
I am persuaded that your love and wisdome will cover
my weaknesses." ¦^
But we cannot pause over such details. George
Rust, the next in our group, appears far less pro
minently in connection with the movement than
Worthlngton, although he attained a more prominent
ecclesiastical position. He is the eloquent although
somewhat Inflated and artificial panegyrist of Jeremy
Taylor, and — our readers may remember — is strongly
recommended by Cudworth to Cromwell's Secretary
of State, John Thurloe, as " an understanding, pious,
discreet man, of exceeding good parts and a general
scholar," but who seemed unwilling to divert him
self from preaching and divinity to any civil ser
vice.^ This was probably in 1657,^ and at this time
Rust was a Fellow of Christ's College, where he
been educated. After the Restoration he went to
Ireland at Taylor's solicitation, and was first of all
appointed Dean of Connor, and then, on Taylor's
death in 1667, he succeeded him as Bishop of Dro-
more, which was divided from Down and Connor,
and constituted Into a separate bishopric. He sur-
' Diary and Correspondence, We give the four opening
1. 86 - 88. Worthlngton sub- lines : —
scribes himself to his "dearest ,,^  „ r- i
Come, come, fair nymphs, your gar-
lady, " Madam — your servant ; lands bring,
and she responds, "Honoured Strew all the ground with flowers ;
sir — your servant." He seems to Come, gentle shepherds, leave your
have composed a " Pastoral Epi- flocks,
thalamium" on the occasion of his '^'^"'^^ '"'° *^=« bowers."
marriage, in which euphonious ^ gge page 208 of this volume.
names and " shepherds and shep- ' Cudworth's letter is undated,
herdesses" make the usual figure, as printed by Birch.
VOL. II. 2 E

434 GEORGE RUST.

vived his promotion only three years, having caught
a fever which cut him off In the end of 1670.
Rust is chiefly known and connected with our
subject as the author of a ' Discourse of Truth,'
given to the world in 1682, under the editorship of
Glanvlll, who speaks of him in the highest terms as
" a man of a clear mind, a deep judgment, and a
searching wit, greatly learned in all the best sorts of
knowledge, old and new, a thoughtful and diligent
inquirer, of a free understanding and vast capacity,
joined with singular modesty and unusual sweetness
of temper, which made him the darling of all that
knew him. . . . He was one of the first in the Uni
versity (Cambridge) who overcame the prejudices
of the education of the times, and was very instru
mental to enlarge others. He had too great a soul
for the trifles of that age, and saw early the naked
ness of phrases and fancies. He outgrew the pre
tended orthodoxy of those days, and addicted him
self to the primitive learning and theology, in which
he became a great master." '•
The ' Discourse of Truth,' and sermon on the
death of Taylor, hardly bear out these encomiums
of Glanvill. There is a lack of life, freshness, and
strength of thought in both. The Discourse has an
air of elaboration in the sections into which it was
probably divided by the editor. It is also, upon the
whole, clearly and well written. But It has no sub
stance or originality of argument. It Is like read
ing Cudworth over in a minor and diluted form.
^ Letter concerning the subject and author prefixed to ' Discourse
of Truth,' 1682.

GEORGE RUST. 435

It overdoes altogether the argument in opposition
to the idea of the Divine as a mere arbitrary Will.
" Can Infinite Wisdom Itself make the damning
of all the innocent and the unspotted angels in hea
ven a proportionate means to declare and mani
fest the unmeasureableness of His grace, and love,
and goodness towards them ? Can lying, swearing,
envy, malice, nay hatred of God and goodness itself,
be made the most acceptable service of God, and
the readiest way to a man's happiness ? " For all
these consequences seem to the author to follow
from the denial that there are things, or, in his
own language, " mutual respects and relations of
things," irrespective of the Divine Will.^ " If the
nature of God be such that His arbitrarious imagi
nation, that such and such things have such and
such natures and dependencies, doth make these
things to have those natures and dependencies, then
He may as easily unimaglne that imagination. . . .
Contradictions are true if God will understand them
so, and then the foundation of all knowledge is taken
away." ^ ... If Will as such be the only principle of
the Divine actions, then changeableness rather than
unchangeableness must be a perfection of the Divine 1
nature. " For it is the nature of an arbitrarious prin- ^
ciple to act or not, to do or undo upon no account '
but Its own will or pleasure." ^
There is much of the same sort of reasoning, but
litde advance of thought — a thoroughly rational and
enlightened spirit and intention, but no largeness
of grasp or comprehension. Truth Is described as
1 Discourse, sect. iv. ' Ibid., v. ^ Ibid., vi.

436 GEORGE RUST.

twofold : Truth in things or in the object, and
Truth in the understanding or the subject. The
first order of Truth is nothing else than those " ne
cessary mutual respects and relations of things," to the
proof and Illustration, or rather repeated affirmation,
of which, the Discourse is almost entirely devoted.
It comes after all to this, that things " necessarily are
what they are, ex natura not ex voluntate." Stat pro
ratione voluntas Is the height of all falsehood. And
the truth of things being thus immutable, truth in us
is nothing but the conformity of our ideas with the
immutable reality of things. " All truth that is in
any created being is by participation and derivation
from the first understanding and fountain of intel
lectual light. And that truth In the power of faculty
is nothing but the conformity of its conception or
ideas with the natures and relations of things, is
clear and evident In itself and necessarily follows
from what hath been formerly proved concerning the
truth of things In themselves, antecedently to any
understanding or will, for things are what they are,
and cannot be otherwise without a contradiction, and
their mutual respects and dependencies eternal and
unchangeable ; so that the conceptions and ideas of
these natures and their relations can only be so far
true as they conform and agree with the things
themselves, and the harmony which they have to one
another." ^ This Is the clear voice of the Platonic
School, and Rust seems thoroughly to have im
bibed its spirit and Influence. He appears also to
have been an earnest, thoughtful man, deeply In-
¦^ Ibid., concluding sect, xviii.

FOWLER AND PATRICK. 437
terested in the progress of truth and an enlightened
Christian philosophy. But there is no such signifi
cance in his character or his brief writings as to
claim for him more prominence In our pages. The
Discourse from which we have quoted is only about
thirty pages, and seems to have been an enlarged
University sermon.
Of Fowler, who became Bishop of Gloucester
(1691), and Patrick, who was successively Bishop of
Chichester and of Ely after the Revolution, we have
already spoken, in connection with the contemporary
estimates formed of our School,, and the controversies
which It called forth.^ Both names are associated
with the defence ofthe "Latitude-men," or "Latitudi
narians," as the Cambridge divines were then called.
Fowler's authorship ofthe ' Free Discourse' (1670),
in which the principles and practices of these
divines are discussed, is beyond question ; but
whether Simon Patrick was the S. P. who describes
the "New Sect," and gives a "brief account" of
"the New Philosophy" in a letter to a friend at
Oxford (1662), remains doubtful. Both, however,
were undoubted offshoots of the School. Patrick was
trained at Cambridge throughout, and took his
degree of M.A. in 165 1, at the very time at
which Whichcote's influence was rising to Its height.
Fowler was only partially educated at Cambridge,
but he also took his Master's degree there as a
member of Trinity College about 1655. His father
appears to have been a Presbyterian minister, or at
least was ejected for nonconformity after the Resto-
^ See pages 34-44 of this volume.

438 FOWLER.

ration ; but the son did not inherit any of the father's
scruples, and attracting the favourable notice of
Sheldon, he gradually rose from one important posi
tion to another, till he attained the see of Gloucester.
He Is mainly known by a treatise on ' The Design
of Christianity,' ^ which followed his ' Free Dis
course ' in little more than a year, and was intended
as a sequel to the defence of the Cambridge doc
trines which he had adventured in the preceding
volume. John Bunyan attacked this book with
great vigour. It appeared to him, in Its advocacy of
a moral Christianity, to upset the cardinal doctrine
of Justification by Faith in Jesus Christ as the only
source of " Gospel holiness;" and he issued from his
prison at Bedford a violent polemic against it. The
teaching was such, he said, as gave " just offence to
Christian ears," and the author himself was " a pre
tended minister of the Word," who had " vilely ex
posed to public view the rottenness of his heart on
principles diametrically opposite to the simplicity of
the Gospel of Christ" ^ Fowler unhappily had not
the forbearance to receive Bunyan's abuse with
silence or contempt. He replied in a pamphlet en
titled ' Dirt wiped out : or a manifest discovery of
the gross ignorance, erroneousness, and most un
christian and wicked spirit of one John Bunyan, lay
^ The full title of this treatise is, end of our Saviour's coming into
' The Design of Christianity : or the world, and is the great intend-
a plain demonstration and im- ment of His blessed Gospel:'
provement of this proposition, 1671.
viz., that the enduing men with ^ ' Defence of the Doctrine of
inward real righteousness and Justification : ' 1672.
true holiness was the ultimate

FOWLER. 439

preacher at Bedford.' The contents of the pam
phlet were only too suitable to the title. He de
signated the author of the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' as
" a wretched scribbler, a most foul-mouthed calum
niator," " so very dirty a creature that he disdains to
dirty his fingers with him."
This slight glimpse of Fowler's controversial art
is enough to show, that whatever he had learned
at Cambridge in intercourse with the ' Moderate '
divines there whom he admired and defended, he
had also learned in other schools. He was. In fact,
much more of a pamphleteer and a politician than
a thinker of any sort He had but slight hold of
the principles of the Cambridge theology, and has
sketched them, as we have already remarked, from a
superficial and somewhat confused point of view. In
any case, his main activity, like that of Patrick, be
longs to the period ofthe Revolution. He followed
our Thinkers ; he was no doubt greatly influenced
by them, and imbibed some of their characteristic,
although by no means their most profound and In
ward, principles ; he defended them heartily and
manfully, if with an inadequate appreciation ; but
he does not, after all, belong to them. His Intel
lectual temper is too slight, and his personal ambi
tion too prominent. The type of latitude charac
teristic of the Revolution, and which Fowler more
distinctly represents, was dififerent from that of the
Platonic School. By this time the higher philoso
phical inspiration of the movement had spent itself
It had become practical, political, and ambitious.
This further aspect of the general Impulse of rational

440 PATRICK.

thought has also Its heroes, one of them, at least —
Tillotson — of high wisdom and noble character ; but
it Is beyond our present scope.
For the same reason we do little more than allude
to Patrick, whose personal and theological signifi
cance might otherwise have claimed an extended
notice. A friend and prot^gd of Whichcote and
Cudworth, the contemporary and admirer of Henry
More, and confidential pupil of John Smith' — Patrick
had not only such close personal associations with
the Platonic School, but he imbibed, at least in a
profounder sense than Fowler, its characteristic spirit
There is in some of his writings a vein of tender
mysticism, and in others a grave spiritual earnest
ness, which show that he had not merely caught up
Its tone, but had been inwardly touched by its contem
plative enthusiasm. Yet even Patrick's mysticism
is practical rather than ideal : the sentiment of the
preacher rather than of the thinker. There is little
in all his writings to remind us of the deeper specu
lations of Cudworth or of More. He is preacher, con
troversialist. Scriptural expositor, and bishop, but In
no respect, philosopher. He has carried away the air
of the Cambridge divinity ; it breathes through his
practical writings and sermons ; but he has done no
thing to advance its thought or enrich its fruitfulness.
His liberality, like that of Fowler, is the more common
place and worldly liberality of the Revolution period,
which adopted and applied the Cambridge princi
ples, rather than intellectually lived in them. And
there is in both — even In Patrick, with his richer
' Preface to Patrick's writings : Oxford ed., 1858.

PATRICK. 441

culture and genuine spirituality — a capacity of po
lemical coarseness, which is foreign to the Platonic
temper, and separates them from the genuine spirit of
the movement. It was difificult for theologians who
engaged in public life after the Restoration to avoid
polemical violence ; but it is the special glory of the
school of thought, in both its phases, which we have
aimed to sketch in these volumes, that not one of Its
writers ever soiled their pens by vituperative abuse,
or that species of advocacy which insinuates evil
motives in an opponent, instead of replying to his
arguments. It is highly noteworthy to what extent
moderation of dogmatic opinion, and breadth of
philosophical and theological Insight, have been in
all Christian history associated with moderation of
Christian temper and the courtesies of controversy ;
while extreme dogmatists of every school, in the very
rashness of their confidence, have too often dis
graced their cause by unchristian harshness. There
are instances, no doubt, in which " moderate " opin
ions have been defended without moderation ; but
such instances — as in the examples of Fowler and
Patrick — will almost invariably be found in those
who have adopted moderation as a side, rather than
worked it out for themselves as a principle ; who, in
short, follow in the wake, rather than add to the
rank of rational thinkers.'
^ This may be said of Stilling- a member of the rational brother-
fleet, who is the only one in our hood, and it is not in connection
list of theologians to whom the with it, or advocacy of any of its
complimentary statement of the principles, that he makes use of
text can be held to apply with any harsh controversial weapons.
qualification. He is only partially

442 BISHOP WILKINS.
Bishop Wilkins is mentioned by Burnet along
with our Cambridge divines. In his well-known
description quoted in the opening chapter of this
volume. Burnet's statement Is, that Wilkins "joined
at Cambridge with those who studied to propagate
better thoughts, to take men off from being In parties,
or from narrow notions, from superstitious conceits,
and fierceness about opinions." This is true. To
great gifts and a most varied intellectual activity,
Wilkins united a moderate temper, and was a strong
advocate for comprehension after the Restoration.
But he cannot. In any true sense, be called a mem
ber, or even an adherent, of the Cambridge School.
Almost all his academic connection is with Oxford,
where he was educated, and where he was Warden
of Wadham College during all the period, from 1647
to 1667, that the Cambridge theologians were in
their highest activity. He was a Calvinist, more
over, of a somewhat strict type, and allied to the
dominant party during the same period far more
closely than any of our theologians can be said to
be. Wilkins was " an excellent mathematician," and
" a great observer and promoter of experimental phi
losophy ; " but he had comparatively little genius for
religious speculation, and none of the Platonic enthu
siasm which is the special note of our confederation
of writers.'
^ Many of Wilkins's physical the Secret and Swift Messenger,
speculations seem to have been of showing how a man may, with
a really original kind — such as his privacy and speed, communicate
speculations as to the planetary his thoughts to a friend at a dis-
system, the habitable character of tance:' 1641. He was also the
the moon, and his ' Mercury : or author of a remarkable ' Essay

GLANVILL AND NORRIS. 443
There are still two other names which must be men
tioned. One has already crossed us frequently, while
the other carries forward to another age the impulse
of Platonic idealism. We mean Joseph Glanvill and
John Norris. Both men were Oxford students,
and much younger — Norris greatly younger — than
any of the Cambridge divines, but they were alike
fascinated by the character and speculations of More,
and warm admirers of his genius. In More's later
years, Glanvill seems almost to have been his special
friend. They encouraged each other In their spirit
ualistic delusions; and after Glanvill's death In 1680,
at the early age of forty-four, his work on witchcraft
was reissued, with large additions by More, under
the title by which it is generally known, of ' Sadducis
mus Triumphatus.' Norris again opened a corre
spondence' with the venerable Platonist in his closing
years, and nourished his fresh Platonic fire at the
dying embers of a genius which had so long dwelt on
its transcendental heights.
Glanvill's early promise was very unlike his later
defence of witchcraft; yet there is an Intelligible
consistency, from his own point of view, in all the
stages of his development. His work on ' The
Vanity of Dogmatizing ' first appeared in 1 661, when
he was only twenty-five years of age. Worthlngton
toward a real character and a found annexed to one of Norris's
philosophical language.' He was earliest books — ' The Theory and
married to Cromwell's sister, and Regulation of Love ; a Moral Es-
enjoyed certain advantages from say, in two parts : to which are
this connection during the Com- added, Letters Philosophical and
monwealth. Moral between the Author and
' This correspondence is very Dr Henry More." Oxford : 1688.
curious and interesting. It is

444 GLANVILL.

saw In it the traces of juvenile " heat," but augured,
we have seen, higher things of the author when the
wine of his genius had fully ripened. His genius
never reached anything higher, except in the late
edition of the same work (1665), which was consider
ably altered and more carefully elaborated under the
special title of ' Scepsis Sclentlfica.' The special
object of this work, as its name implies. Is to prove
the vanity of dogmatism, or " confidence in opinions,"
from the uncertainty attaching to all our sources of
knowledge. It runs over with a rapid, fluent, and
occasionally brilliant pen, the various instances
of our ignorance, as to the nature of soul and
of body, their union and mode of action. It dis
courses of the fallacies of the senses and the imagi
nation, the errors " imaged " in us by the force of
affection, custom, and education, and especially " an
tiquity and authority." It devotes five considerable
chapters to the " Aristotelian Philosophy," with the
view of showing its Ineptness for the modern in
quirer, and the Injurious bondage which it has exer
cised over the human mind. And finally, it closes
with a spirited representation of all the evils of dog
matism as the fruit of " untamed passions" and " an
ungoverned spirit," a " disturber of the worid," and
a source of " 111 manners. Immodesty, and narrow
ness of mind."
This work has been gready admired and commend
ed both by Hallam and Mr Lecky.^ It deserves
^ Hallam's Hist, of Lit., iv. of Rationalism, i. 121, 125.
119, 122 — 6th ed. Hist, ofthe Both writers also speak of the
Use and Influence of the Spirit scarcity of the book, especially

GLANVILL. 445

a great deal of the commendation bestowed upon
it. It has " the felicity," upon which the author him
self set so much value, " of clear and distinct think
ing ;" it is fluent, and here and there brilliant, both
in sentiment and expression ; especially it Is lively
and readable throughout, and many of its happy and
pregnant sentences remain in the memory. Withal
it is marked by little originality or depth of thought.
Its intellectual life runs thinly, with all Its vivacity
and rhetorical glitter. It is deficient in arrangement
— a common fault of the period, but more notice
able in this case from the brevity of the work, which
even in Its later form is little more than a pamphlet,
of less than two hundred widely - printed pages !
It is, in short, an amazingly clever book, which
gathered up and applied to Philosophy as well as
Theology the advancing tendencies of the time.
But there is little evidence that Glanvlll had worked
out for himself the new spirit which he applies so
aptly, or that his clever criticism comes forth from
any fulness of rational light in his own mind. Many
of his best sayings against contentiousness and dog
matism in religion, and the ridiculous value at
tached to authority and antiquity, are but echoes of
what Hales had said before — although he may not
have been indebted to the ' Golden Remains,' pub
lished only two years before his own book. He
certainly makes no allusion to it. His personal
of the second edition of 1665. far as our experience goes, the
" A remarkable work," says Hal- book is by no means unknown in
lam, " but one so scarce as to both editions.
be hardly known at all." But so

446 GLANVILL.

allusions are confined to the great philosophic names
of the period, — Descartes, Hobbes, More, and along
with these philosophic notabilities. Sir Kenelm
Digby, whose portrait, as drawn by Clarendon, we
formerly quoted.' Digby, after his retirement to
Paris, became a philosopher, and published there. In
1644, two elaborate treatises : one on ' Bodies,' and
another ' On Man's Soul.' He and his theories at
tracted some renewed attention at the Restoration.
The Digbcean hypothesis as to the genesis of Me
mory is enumerated by Glanvill in conjunction with
the Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Hobbian, and re
ceives an equal share of attention. Nothing comes
amiss to his flowing, easy pen ; great and small are
touched happily, but llghdy and superficially. This
is the general character of the work. It is a rapid,
facile, striking, and eloquent criticism from the hand
of a student, with the boldness and dash, but also
with something of the rawness, characteristic of
juvenile effort.
The following are a few specimens of its happy
manner : —
" We reverence grey - headed doctrines, though
' Vol. i. p. 106-108. We do not at the Restoration, and delivered
profess to have studied Sir K. at Gresham College, in the begin-
Digby's treatises, but we have ning of 1660, " A Discourse con-
looked into them. They are not ceming the Vegetation of Plants."
very readable : yet they show This, with another brief essay
more solid labour, and even subt- on " the Powder of Sympathy," is
lety of disquisition, than we could bound up with the two treatises
have supposed possible from the referred to in the text. Another
versatile and restless character brief tract of his, " Conference
attributed to him. See vol. i. p. with a Lady upon Choice of Re-
106-108. Digby lived, as implied ligion," attracted some attention.

in the text, to return to England

GLANVILL. 447

feeble, decrepit, and within a step of dust. . . .
The beauty of a truth, as of a picture. Is not ac
knowledged but at a distance." — Scepsis Sclentlfica,
p. I02.
In allusion to Aristotle, he says : " If we owe it
to him that we know so much, 'tis perhaps lazy of
his fond adorers that we know so little more. I can
see no ground why his reason should be textuary to
ours ; or that God or nature ever intended him an
universal headship. 'Twas this vain idolising of
authors which gave birth to that silly vanity of im
pertinent citations, and Inducing authority in things
neither requiring nor deserving it. . . . 'Tis an in
glorious acquist to have our heads or volumes laden,
as were Cardinal Campeius his mules with old and
useless luggage. And yet the magnificence of many
high pretenders to science, if laid open by a true
discovery, would amount to no more than the old
boots and shoes of that proud and exposed ambas
sador. . . . Authorities alone with me make no
number, unless evidence of reason stand before
them." — P. 105, 106.
" 'Tis no good fishing for verity in troubled waters."
—P. 122,
" Opinions are the ratdes of immature intellects.
. . . True knowledge Is modest and wary ; 'tis
ignorance that Is bold and presuming. . . . They
that never peeped beyond the common belief In
which their easie understandings were first indoc
trinated, are strongly assured of the truth and com
parative excellency of their receptions; while the
larger souls that have travelled the divers climates

448 GLANVILL.

of opinions are more cautious In their resolves, and
more sparing to determine." — P. 167.
" The union of a sect within itself Is a pitiful
charity : it's no concord of Christians but a con
spiracy against Christ ; and they that love one an
other for their opinionative concurrences, love for their
own sakes and not their Lord's, — not because they
have His image, but because they bear one an-
others." — P. 169.
None of Glanvill's subsequent writings equal this
early essay. They are without its brilliancy, and
they have not acquired, in compensation, depth or
solidity. They have nearly all, moreover, lost in
rationality. His ' Lux Orien talis' is nothing but a
lighter and weaker reproduction of More's dreams
about the pre-existence of souls ; and his ' Saddu
cismus Triumphatus,' which has already more than
once come in our way. Is one of the most singular
compounds of philosophy and credulity in the world.
Mr Lecky has said of this book, that it " Is pro
bably the ablest ever published" in defence of
witchcraft. The statement astonishes us ; for, with
the exception of some ingenious argument in the
first part,' on the possibility of spiritual existences
under the form of witches and apparitions, and the
chapters on the notion of spirit translated from
' The first part seems originally not till after Glanvill's death that
to have been the whole book : the book was published in its
the sixth edition of this smaller enlarged form, under the title of
volume, corrected and enlarged, ' Sadducismus Triumphatus,' in
under the name of 'A Blow at 1681, and More's additions were
Modern Sadducism,' lies before not added till the following year.
us, bearing the date 1668. It was

GLANVILL. 449

More's ' Metaphysics,' the book is nothing but a
collection of ghost -stories, or supposed manifesta
tions of demons, some of them of a singularly silly
and uninteresting description. The excitement
caused by certain disturbances in a house at Ted-
worth, seems quite to have upset More and Glan
vill's mind, and both devoted themselves to the
collection of instances corroborative of the agency of
demons and the devil. The controversy became
general and exciting. Dr Merle Casaubon, the
Dean of Canterbury, joined In it. Glanvill plainly
believed the whole question of the supernatural to
be at stake, and laboured zealously for the cause as
for the life of religion. All the while he was plunged
In a controversy on behalf ofthe New Royal Society,
and the right of free scientific inquiry. His ' Plus
Ultra; or the Progress and Advancement of Know
ledge since the Days of Aristotle,' was a vigorous
defence of the spirit of physical research everywhere
spreading in opposition to scholasticism.
Nothing can be more singular than this combination
of credulity and love of free inquiry in Glanvill. It
is not merely, as In Cudworth or others, the fact of the
belief In Witchcraft lying alongside other tradition
ary beliefs, in a mind otherwise of great power and
rationality. This is perfectly conceivable. But it is
the case of an acute, lively intellect, whose whole
natural activity seems developed in the defence of
scepticism, embracing equally the defence of witch
craft, with a sort of fanaticism. He makes the same
vigorous and Intrepid fight for witches and for the
Royal Society ; and to crown the curious combina-
VOL. II. 2 F

4SO GLANVILL.

tion, he draws a picture of " Ante-Fanatical Religion
and Free Philosophy," in which he no less pointedly
attacks the various " fanatical " sectaries, and defends,
very much in the spirit of Fowler, the moderate
Theology. This latter writing, which appeared in a volume of
" Essays on several Important Subjects in Philosophy
and Religion" in 1676, brings him once more into
direct contact with our School. In was designed, in
continuation of Bacon's ' New Atlantis,' to give a
narrative of a visit to an " angelical " country under
the name of Bensalem, and to describe the happy
state of religion there. Under this thin guise
Glanvill depicts the chara.cter of the Rational divines
whom he admired and with whom he associated.
" They thought it not enough to read a few systems
to understand the correct orthodoxy of the times, or
to gain the faculty of speaking to the people In the
taking tone and phrase. But they read the histories
of the Church and the Fathers of the first three cen
turies. In them they looked for the doctrine and
practice that were in the beginning, and considered
that religion was most pure in those primitive
times. . . . They Inquired Into the reasonableness of
the great principles of religion, and provided them
selves thereby to deal with atheists, infidels, and
enthusiasts. . . . They asserted liberty of judgment,
but bounded it with so much caution, that no preju
dice could arise to legal establishments. They knew
that truth would have the advantage, could it but
procure an Impartial trial. . . . They considered often,
and filled their thoughts with a great sense of the

GLANVILL. 45 1

narrowness of human capacity, and the Imperfec
tions of our largest knowledge. . . . They were not
so fond of their own opinions as to think them ne
cessary for all others ; nor were they Infected with
the common zeal to spread and propagate every
truth they thought they knew. Their main design
was to make men good, not notional and know
ing. . . . They studied in the places where some of the
chief of the {Puritan) sects governed and preached pub
licly. This they scrupled not, because they were young,
and had been under no explicit engagements to those
laws that were then unhappily overruled. In those
and other University exercises, they much saved the
interest of the Church of Bensalem by undermining
the Ataxites {for so the sectaries were called). ...
In order to cure the madness of the age, they were
zealous to make men sensible that Reason Is a
branch and beam of the Divine Wisdom — that light
which God hath put into our minds, and that law which
He hath writ upon our hearts-^ that faith Itself Is an
act of reason, and built upon the two reasonable
principles, that there is a God, and that what He
saith is true. . . . According to such principles they
managed their discourses." '
It is needless to enlarge extracts. They might
be indefinitely multiplied in many significant touches
to the same effect. Nothing can be more transpa
rent than Glanvill's aim to vindicate the rational
position and character of the Platonic divines ; and
his vindication upon the whole is more effective, as
^ Ante-Fanatical Religion and Free Philosophy (1676), p. 9, 12, 13,
16, 17.

452 GLANVILL.

It is more vivid, than that of Fowler, or the " Brief
Account of the new Sect of Latitude Men by S; P." It
fails like them in adequate criticism, and grasp of prin
ciples in their relation to one anothter ; and it is defi
cient in order of thought, like all his books. But
his lively and acute force of analysis, and varied feli
city of expression, give an interesting and graphic
picture, and bring the attitude of the School dis
tinctly before us.-'
Glanvill's peculiar position as a thinker, and his
relation to the Cambridge School, on both sides of
his mind — on the weaker credulous side no less than
on the rational and sceptical side — naturally claimed
so much notice. After Worthlngton and Rust, he
is, Oxford man as he was, the most direct expression
of the same spirit and mind as Cudworth and More,
with the latter of wbom he has, besides, so many per-
' Nothing, for example, can be not solve the phenomena. These
more graphic than the following judged that nothing could be
description of More's philosophi- done in physiology without ad-
cal position. In Descartes they mitting the Platonical Xdyot sTvep-
(the divines whom the author is panxoi and spirit of Nature, and
describing) " found a prodigious so would have the mechanical
wit, and clear thoughts, and a principles aided by the vital.
wonderfully ingenious fabric of " As to Moral Philosophy, they
philosophy, which they thought did by no means approve of the
to be the neatest mechanical sys- contentious disputing ethics that
tem of things that had appeared made it to be rather (as Cicero
in the world. Yet some of them speaks) ostentatio Scientiae than
who thought highly of this me- lex Vitas. But they founded them
chanical wit, and believed that he upon the excellent knowledge of
had carried matter and motion as human nature and passions, . . .
far as they would go, declared ear- and formed their knowledge into
nestly against the completeness solid rules of life." — Ante-Fana-
and perfection of his hypotheses, tical Religion and Free Philoso-
and learnedly showed that the phy (1676), p. 51.
mechanical principles alone would

NORRIS. 453

sonal associations. Norris is also brought into
direct connection with More. He conducted a cor
respondence with him, " philosophical and moral."
But otherwise he stands aside, not indeed from our
subject, but from our history. His philosophical
activity only commences with the termination of the
Cambridge movement. He carries it forward to
another age, but he does not himself belong to it.
Norris, indeed, stands by himself in the history of
English philosophy, the solitary Platonist of the Re
volution era, who handed on the torch of Idealism
into the next century, till it was grasped by the
vigorous and graceful hands of Berkeley. It may
be difificult to trace any direct connection betwixt
the author of the ' Principles of Human Knowledge'
and the author of ' The Theory of the Ideal or In
telligible World.' ^ There may have been no in
debtedness on the part of the Dublin idealist to the
Idealist of Bemerton. But the impulse of thought Is
the same ; the line of Platonic speculation runs for
ward from the one to the other. Norris has com
paratively passed out of sight; and Berkeley is a
familiar name to every student of philosophy. But
Norris, although a half-forgotten. Is really a striking
and significant figure in the history of English philo
sophy. He was an Idealist of the purest type, sus
tained by the loftiest inspiration. His fine genius,
exquisite spiritual sensibility, and tender exaltation
1 Berkeley's ' Theory of Vision ' death. The ' Theory of the Ideal
was published in 1709, and his or Intelligible Worid' was pub-
• Principles of Human Know- lished, the first part in 1701, and
ledge' a year later, before Norris's the second part in 1704.

454 SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

of character, well deserve a niche by itself in the
temple of Idealism. Chronological limits exclude
him from our series ; but it Is a happy chance which
enables us to connect the last links of the Cambridge
School ^ with a name so honoured, and a philosophy
so elevated, as that of John Norris.
Some readers will perhaps miss, in the foregoing
enumeration of Platonic writers in the seventeenth
century, the name of Sir Thomas Browne, author of
'Religio Medici' and ' Christian Morals.' Browne
undoubtedly belongs to the Platonic type of thought,
and Is highly deserving of criticism both as a thinker
and writer. But he does not come into any contact
with our series of writers, and we have not been
able to find a place for him without diverging from
the historical sequence which we have more or less
sought to preserve in these sketches. As an author,
he preceded considerably any of the Cambridge Pla
tonists — the ' Religio Medici ' having been pub
lished in 1643, ^nd having been written, It Is sup
posed, nearly ten years earlier.^ He survived, it
is true, the Restoration twenty-two years ; and his
mixed devotion to science and credulity, his love of
a comprehensive and liberal Christianity, his quaint
enthusiasm and love of pleasantry, his vivacious and
garrulous mysticism, which peopled the world around
him with spiritual agencies, and saw in it everywhere
1 Norris may be said to be con- — See present vol. p. 227.
nected with Cudworth, as well as ^ See Editor's Preface to Pick-
More, through Lady Masham, ering's beautiful edition of ' Re-
with whom he had a controversy ligio Medici ' and ' Christian Mo-
as to the nature of divine love, rals,' 1845.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 455
the " picture of the Invisible," closely ally him with
such writers as More and Glanvill. Unconnected
by any external bonds, he represents with them the
same combination of inquiry and faith — the same
yearning towards higher forms of truth, and the
same love and fondness for the Past — the same
eclecticism in thought — and must we not also say
the same dreamy religious imaginativeness, more
beautiful than strong, more picturesque and ideal
than practically earnest, self-denying, and victorious ?

456

VIL
GENERAL ESTIMATE— RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
It now only remains briefly to sum up the results
of our historical and expository survey. These
results have been plainly indicated already ; but it
may be well to bring them together, and so set In
order the services which the rational movement of
the seventeenth century has rendered to the cause
of Christian thought and civilisation. Finally, we
shall touch on the defects of the movement, and
the causes of its partial failure.
I. The primary merit of our Rational Theolo
gians was their inculcation of the doctrine of tolera
tion. This doctrine is now so universally admitted
in theory, that it is not easy to estimate the cost at
which it was first taught, and the superior enlighten
ment out of which it arose in the seventeenth century.
Yet no idea was at first more novel and repulsive.
It was unintelligible to the ordinary poHtlcal and
theological mlnd.^ Itwas Intolerable to the powerful
factions which strove for the mastery in England.
' Even after all the lessons of in its true meaning the principle
the civil war and the Common- of toleration. — See Houghton's
wealth, a theologian so eminent Church of the Restoration, i. 30,
as Dr Owen failed to appreciate 31.

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 457
Cf omwell, when he attained to power, so far realised
and carried out the idea ; but this was in virtue
of his own superiority, and his sympathy with the
rational thought which otherwise he so little under
stood. But neither High Churchmen nor Puri
tans understood it — or, so far as they understood it,
they hated it. Their essential conception, both of
a national and ecclesiastical polity, implied dogma
tic as well as external uniformity. In opposition
to this, our Rational Theologians announced as a
principle that dogmatic uniformity Is unattainable,
and that the prosperity both of the Church and the
country are to be sought in toleration and latitude
of religious opinion. They proclaimed in other words,
that religious questions can only be settled by being
left to free discussion. Men, inasmuch as their minds
and circumstances are dififerent, necessarily differ
about them. They are matters of conscience and not
of control. The very effort to control religious opinion
not only defeats the end In view and issues in fiercer
discordance than ever, but It kills religious vitality,
and assails the personal foundations of all belief
The spiritual reason on the one hand, and Scripture
on the other, are the sole authorities in religion.
Man can have no higher arbiter in the end, of what
is divine or credible in religion, than his own judg
ment enlightened by God's Word.
These statements are now of the nature of religious
commonplace, worn and perhaps vulgarised by indis
criminate repetition. The doctrine of toleration —
if not of the supremacy of reason in religion — is now
a popular instead of a proscribed doctrine. And

458 GENERAL ESTIMATE :
even the most Irrational religious organisations have
learned to use the word, and profess to be shocked
at any thought of enforcing their religious opinions
upon others. But it Is easy to be tolerant after the
triumph of toleration. It is good to make a virtue
of necessity, and to proclaim a principle the practice
of which Is more or less compulsory, according to
modern State usages, on all religious bodies. This
is something entirely different from the recognition
of the principle in its true sense — In the sense In
which our Divines recognised and taught It. Their
idea of toleration was not mere non-interference with
another's religious opinions, still less Indifference as
to the quality of such opinions, as if beyond rational
cognisance. It was an intelligent apprehension ofthe
right of each and all to search and find religious
truth for themselves. It sprang out of deep reverence
for conscience, and trust in the voice of reason as the
supreme side of human nature. It was, according to
them, the special function of the Church to educate,
and not to bind and control, religious thought. The
truly Catholic Church Is not the Church resting in
this creed or that, proclaiming this type of doctrine or
that, but the universal company of the faithful, who
own Christ as their Lord, and believe In His name,
with all their diversities of opinion and of gift. The
idea of the Church as based upon opinion Is a medi
eval and not a primitive idea. The Church sub
sists in communion of spirit, not in coincidence of
doctrine. It has a common faith — it may have a com
mon worship ; but it Is not bound to any definite type
of theology — any argumentative or theoretic creed.

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 459
The statement of facts in the Apostles' Creed is
ample doctrinal basis, beyond which It Is wrong to go.
Such was the conclusion to which the idea of
toleration worked itself in the minds of our Rational
Theologians. It seems the only logical conclusion.
If the essence of the Church rests In doctrine rather
than In life, in creeds rather than In sympathy, then it
follows directly that toleration of religious differences
Is inconsistent with its true order and function. If
salvation depends upon true opinion, then variety
of opinion must be inconsistent with it, and of course
expelled from the Church, and prevented with all
practicable force. It is Impossible to get out of this
circle. Persecution is the legitimate corollary of the
dogmatic Idea of the Church. Toleration is only
rationally held when differences of dogma are not
only acknowledged, but, so to speak, cultivated as
the very condition and nurture of spiritual activity.
Uniformity of doctrine is not only impracticable ;
It is not a good thing in itself It can only exist
where thought and science are dead ; where the cold
shadow of the past lies upon the quick life of the
present, and Imprisons it, to the injury of Christian
progress and civilisation.
Starting with the sacredness of religious convic
tion in the individual, and its divinely Incompres
sible character, our Rational Divines did not yet any
of them sink into individualism, or dream of a " dis-
sidence of dissent." They felt the awful reality
of the religious problem, and that religion was some
thing beyond all State compulsion, but they did not
therefore abandon the idea of a national Church.

460 GENERAL ESTIMATE

They sought to modify the Idea — not to subvert it.
What is known as the " Voluntary principle " was
then unknown, and would not have appeared to them
a principle at all. No doubt modern Voluntaryism
has sprung in some degree from their root-thought
— the sacredness of religious conviction, and the
absolute authority of conscience therein. But let
men differ as they may in religious opinion — this
was no reason, according to our divines, why there
should not be common worship and a common
national Church. Nay, community of religious life
is all the more necessary because unity of religious
opinion is impossible. They solved the religious
problem, therefore, not by giving it up, and saying.
Since men cannot agree about religion let them
separate, and each party keep its own principles and
set up Its own worship — but by pushing the problem
to its legitimate conclusion, and drawing out the
essential distinction between dogma and religion.
This great distinction is one of their chief con
tributions to modern thought. Dogmatic opinion and
religious faith belong with them to different spheres.
The one Is the product of the intellect, always restlessly
seeking for exhaustive solutions of the Divine, as of
everything else. The other is the fruitofthe Spirit; the
sympathetic life In man which clings to a higher life,
even when light is wanting, and the sphere of divine
knowledge may seem conflicting and obscure. The
latter is the only true basis of the Church, whose
function is first to quicken, and then strengthen and
educate, the religious side of humanity, without primary
respect to scientific accuracy of opinion. To make

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 461

opinion or dogma the basis of the Church Is to in
vert the divine order, according to which doctrine is
placed after life, and true thought as to the Divine
can only spring from its practice and realisation.
This Is an idea repeatedly enforced by our Theolo
gians. They recognise religion and the Church as
springing from faith in a personal Redeemer, and
finding In this faith their ample warrant. There Is
no other or further essential of Christian communion.
Theological opinion or dogma is a growth from this.
To attain to clearer and higher views of the divine
Being and character, and the mode of the divine
action in human salvation, is the work of the Chris
tian intellect within the Church, nurtured by an ever
nearer communion with its heavenly Source. But
to bar the threshold by a summary of Christian
Theology, which all must receive as the condition of
entrance to it — nay, under the peril of damnation
which it pronounces upon misbelievers — Is not only to
narrow and sectarianlse the Catholic communion, but
to subvert its essential idea. The Church Is the
home of the faithful everywhere — of all who have any
aspirations after God and truth. Precise opinions
in Theology are the labour of the schools — of the
thought bred within the Church, awakened and nur
tured by its special life.
The conception of dissent, therefore, had no place
in the minds of our Theologians. The Church was
not to them an organisation for the propagation of
this or that set of opinions ; it was a culture or
worship resting on the recognition of a few divine
facts — a. spiritual society, within whose sheltering

462 GENERAL ESTIMATE :
bosom all opinions consistent with these facts should
find free room and scope. It did not begin in dogma ;
it does not rightly rest on it ; yet one of Its functions
is to elaborate dogma, and cultivate a higher Chris
tian thoup-ht, as well as a more diffused and earnest
Christian spirit. Thought is the function of the few ;
it can only live and flourish along with perfect free
dom. Dogma is the varying expression of the divine
activity of the Church in ever-renewed adaptation to
its own necessities and the progress of knowledge.
Instead of being the beginning, therefore, it is the
summit and crown of the Church's being. Instead
of resting upon a creed, in any purely dogmatic or
scientific sense — In other words, upon a special The
ology, which was the Puritan conception — the true idea
of the Church Is that It is continually in search of a
higher Theology, — a more comprehensive and perfect
co-ordination of the spiritual facts lying at its basis.^
In this view the Church Is not a separate spiritual
society either In the form of Prelacy or of Presbytery,
1 There is a passage in Cole- tianity and of the Church visible,
ridge's 'Notes on Jeremy Taylor' as its exponent, not as a hortus
(vol. i.. Notes on English Divines, siccus of past' revelations, but an
p. 229) which may be quoted in ever-enlarging enclosed area of
connection with the view here ex- the opportunity of individual con-
pressed : " Oh that this great and version to, and reception of, the
good man," he says, "who saw truth! then, instead of using
and has expressed so large a por- this one truth to inspire a despair
tion of the truth (if by the Creed of all truth, a reckless scepticism
I might understand the true Apos- within, and a boundless compli-
tles', that is, the Baptismal Creed, ance without, he would have di-
free from the additions of the first reeled the believer to seek for
five centuries— I might say, indeed, light where there was a certainty
the whole truth), had but brought of finding it, so far as it was pro-
it back to the great original end fitable to him— that is, so far as it
and purpose of historical Chris- actually was light for him. The

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.

463

Calvlnlan, Arminian, or Soclnian in its tenets. Such
divisions are already sectarian in their very concep
tion. It is the nation Itself in the aggregation of its

visible Church would be a walled
academy — a pleasure-garden, in
which the entrants, having pre
sented their symbolum porta, or
admission contract, walk at large,
each seeking private audience of
the invisible teacher, — alone now,
now in groups, meditating or con
versing — gladly listening to some
elder disciple, through whom (as
ascertained by his intelligibility
to me) I feel that the common
Master is speaking to me ; or
lovingly communing with a class-
fellow who, I have discovered, has
received the same lesson from the
inward teaching with myself,
while the only public concerns in
which all, as a common weal, ex
ercised control and vigilance over
each, are order, peace, mutual
courtesy and reverence, kindness,
charity, love, and the fealty and
devotion of all and each to the
common Master and Benefactor."
A pleasing ideal of a true Church !
somewhat marred by the analogy
of an Academy rather than of a
Home — for discipline, as well as
instruction — and especially by the
strange insinuation, which Cole
ridge repeats again and again, that
there was some sceptical reserve
in Taylor's advocacy of the
Apostles' Creed as an ample doc
trinal basis for the Church. It
does not appear to us that there is
the slightest evidence of this sus
picion. The scruples which Cole
ridge had as to the existing form

of the Creed were unknown to
Taylor. All the drift of his
argument on ' The Liberty of Pro
phesying ' is quite as effective, or
more effective, taking the Creed in
its limited and original, rather than
in its later traditionary sense.
Taylor was quite as honest in
dealing with it in the larger as
Coleridge in the briefer form.
The idea of the Church on its
educational side, however, is well
and happily conceived by Cole
ridge. It is an idea, transcend
ing alike sacerdotalism and dog
matism — both of which imply a
Church already in full possession
of Truth in its highest forms,
rather than in any degree in search
of it — the members of which have
to receive and own well - known
lessons, patent to all, rather than
to inquire or look for higher light.
The one is the mere maternal view
of the Church, imposing her au
thority ; the other is the rational
view, which recognises her as a
mother, but also as an organ of
spiritual intelligence, rejecting no
form of truth, but appropriating
and purifying all. The spirit of
truth has been working in the
Church from the first, producing
many precious fruits of Christian
wisdom and knowledge, which
every reverent mind will receive
with grateful respect. But this
spirit is as living now as ever ;
and a sacerdotalism which fixes
the Divine in some definite ritual,

464

GENERAL ESTIMATE :

Spiritual activities — its collective Christian life and
wisdom working with freedom, yet subject to the
common order and law. The true rule of the Church

however venerable, or a dogmatism
which fixes it in a creed or symbol,
however valuable, is equally fatal
to those progressive manifesta
tions, or higher harmonies of
divine knowledge, whereby the
future may yet throw light
upon the past, and more fully
justify the ways of God to men.
It must at the same time be ad
mitted that dogmatism, and even
sacerdotalism, have their place
and function in the Christian
Church. Both are real growths
in the course of its historical de
velopment. They exist only be
cause there is a side of Christian
feeling and intelligence to which
they answer. Evangelical zeal
and the intensity of Christian en
thusiasm, which inspire and sus
tain missionary enterprise in all
Churches, naturally tend to dog
matism ; while the deep sense of
human weakness which comes
from the presence of the Divine in
sinful hearts, perhaps as naturally
tends to some form of sacramenta-
rianismor reliance onpriestly rites.
Unless scope is given for both
these tendencies within a national
Church, division or sectarianism
must necessarily ensue. But why
should not a Church embrace,
within regulated or legal expan
sion, all these tendencies? Because
they are intolerable to one another,
or beyond the control of law? The
Evangelical dogmatist will not
suffer the sacerdotalist ; and both

detest and desire to expel the ra
tionalist. Religion, in short, is
not only beyond political compul
sion — which all now admit — but
incapable of legislative guidance or
control, — the favourite view of our
modern politicians. On such a
view certainly the theory of a
national Church cannot be main
tained. But neither can the
idea ofthe Church itself be main
tained. It must break to pieces
by the mere pressure of its diverse
activities ; and the very variety
of those divine charismata, out of
which it 'originally sprang, and
which, in the course of its history,
as at the beginning, constitute the
presence of the Divine Spirit in it,
involve its disintegration and dis
solution. Ifthereligious element, in
short, be in its nature irrepressible
— and religious men on different
sides will have all their own way
or nothing^then the Church in
any catholic or national sense will
become impracticable. But so
also will religion cease to be
a factor in modern civilisation,
and Christianity in all lands
dwindle into a mere congeries
of religious parties — " the dismal
spectacle," as H. More says, " of
an infinity of sects and schisms'"
(see vol. ii. p. 336). Public life
will be separated from religion
altogether, and the game of politics
become a wild chase of ambition,
without even the pretence of re
spect for moral or religious sane-

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 465
Is, therefore, neither with bishop nor with presbyter,
with ecclesiastical council nor royal will, but with the
supreme national voice. This is the only consistent
deduction from the views of our Divines. It was
the practical creed of some of them, if not of all.
Their theory of a comprehensive Church, in short, _
embracing, as it did, every form of Christian activity, '
and giving free play to every variety of Christian \
opinion, had no final element of control except the '
collective national will. It may be called the consti
tutional theory, in opposition to the sacerdotal and
dogmatical ; or the theory of the balance of spiritual
forces, in contrast to that of mere autocratic will on
the one hand, or dogmatic compulsion on the other.
Of the former, the Papacy is the only pure and logi
cal form ; of the latter, Protestant Dissent, in its
various manifestations, is the legitimate conclusion.
The one exists to carry out the will of the Divine, as
expressed by a single absolute voice, into which all
the intellectual activities of the Church gather ; and
every lower form of the sacerdotal theory tends to
culminate in this species of autocratic supremacy :
the other exists to propagate its own notions of Chris
tian truth as necessarily the truth, and by the pres
sure of Its special dogmatisms to crush all further
spirit of Christian Inquiry, and, within its own pale,
or as far as it can, all freedom of thought.
Whatever may be thought of the Latltudinarlan or
constitutional theory, it is at least the only theory of
tion, while Christian sects look point to instances of such a
calmly on from their sanctified result"?
enclosures ! Can we not already
VOL. n. 2 G

466 GENERAL ESTIMATE :
the Church which has been found consistent with
Christian science, and the cultivation of intellectual
fairness no less than spiritual piety and charity. Not
only so, but it is the only theory not discredited
by the course of civilisation. A national Church
which can embrace all the varied activities of Chris
tian thought and life — which can appropriate instead
of repelling the results of scientific discovery, and
modify instead of banning even the froward energies
of communistic thought — is a possibility in the future.
The wildest powers of our modern scientific and
social life may be brought within its control and puri
fication. Before such powers Popery and Separatism
are alike helpless. Systems which have nothing to
learn — which have long ago laid up and embalmed,
as splendid antlquarianism, their theories of the
Divine — have nothing to teach. The most living
and powerful thought of the age passes them by with
out notice. Mediaevalism broods as a spectre on
the face of modern civilisation. Sectarianism faintly
solicits its mind and heart. Neither really move and
vitalise It, while it goes onward Its unknown way.
(2.) If our Rational Theologians differed in their
theory of the Church both from the Prelatists and
Puritans, they no less differed in their theory of re
ligion. The one difference. Indeed, implies the
other. With both these parties religion was more
or less something distinct from humanity — a celestial
truth In the keeping of bishops or of presbyters of
the " Church," or of a Westminster Assembly. The
Cambridge Divines did not, of course, deny that there
was a distinct spiritual truth revealed In Scripture ;

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 467
on the contrary, they were the great defenders of the
reality of religion In the reaction of unbelief that
followed the dogmatic excesses of the time. They
were Christian Apologists as well as Christian Ration-
allstSj. and their true position can only be understood
when viewed in both aspects. On the one side they
testified to the need of reason and faith, of morality
and religion ; on the other side they testified — and
none have ever done it more nobly — that reason
needs faith^ and morality religion, This double atti-
"tude Is of the highest significance. Religion, they
said, is not a set of forms or magical round of rites ;
iieidier is it a set of notions or elaborate round of
doctrines. It is a life — a higher, purer, nobler ex
pression of the ordinary human life — a " deiform
"Seed " within the soul, growing up into spiritual blos
som and fruit. The single condition of this spiritual
culture Is the Divine Spirit in contact with the human,
guiding, educating, enriching, strengthening It. This
was their idea of religion, alike against the formal
mysticism of the Laudians and the formal oplnlona-
tiveness of the Puritans. The essence of piety was
not In the spiritual performances of the one, nor the
spiritual exercises of the other — but in a pure, good,
and beautiful life. But then they added — and no set
of theologians have ever more emphatically added —
such a life can only exist in the Divine, and the
Divine is a reality. The spiritual is as truly as, and
more truly than, the material. While religion is never
to be dissociated from life, and, apart from it, exists
only in its simulacra — "rites" or " notions" — it is yet
no mere culture of the common external life — no

468 GENERAL ESTIMATE :
mere moral coating. It is the growth of the divine
side of life, and this side is as real as the natural side ;
— nay, it is the deeper reality of the two. In this
sense religion is distinctive, but in no other.
It is of importance to bring out this aspect of the
Christian Rationalism of the seventeenth century,
not only because otherwise one of its main aspects
would be overlooked, but also because it has suffered
misrepresentation on this very point. It was the
accusation of its contemporary Puritan and High
Church critics, and it is a common assertion of the
same critics to this day, that the Cambridge Divines
may be considered Christian moralists, but not evan
gelists. They preached an elevated Christian phil
osophy, but not the Gospel of divine grace. Now
what is the Gospel ? and what is divine grace ?
The Gospel Is the news of divine love — the message
that God is willing to save sinners, and has sent His
Son Into the world, that whosoever "belleveth in
Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
This is the very pith of the Evangel, and the writ
ings of the Cambridge Divines are full of it. Divine
grace is the reality of divine help to save us when
we cannot save ourselves. Moral aspirations, the
very highest, unless they spring from a divine source,
and lay hold of divine strength, will not bring a man
forth from the depths of sin, and set him " upon a
rock, establishing his goings." This ]s the very
essence ofthe Cambridge theologyj,which^ not only
finds the strength of morality in the Divine, but"
identifies the moral itself with the Divine. The very
idea of good Is already the presence of God in hu-

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 469
manity. Good and evil, justice and injustice, are
manifestations of the divine mind in us, and have
otherwise no existence. They are the movements
of the Divine Spirit — otherwise they are not realities
at all, but mere illusions and conventions. How can
a theology like this be accused of undervaluing
divine grace, when it finds all its distinction in the
exaltation of the Divine ?
But according to the very explanation, it may be
asked. Does the Cambridge theology not lose the
divine In the moral? Yes ; but by divinising the
moral, not humanising the divine. What it never
does is to separate the divine and human, and hold
the former apart in sacred rites or sacred doctrine —
Pharisees of the affection, or the intellect. This, so
far from exalting divine grace, seemed to this theo
logy to sectarianlse and degrade it. It seemed to
incarnate the living spirit in a dead idol, to venerate
the chalice and bread upon the altar, instead of the
divine presence, ever working In humanity, and
quickening it to a higher life ; or to deify the doctrine
about the Saviour, instead of the living Saviour Him
self. The Divine may, no doubt, be conceived apart
from Its human manifestations in the higher spiritual
instincts of our race — ^but we can know nothing of it,
save in these manifestations. Spirit can only live in
spirit, can only be known by spirit. Wecan only
find Godjn^ourselves., The roots of the divine and
the human are inseparable ; and If we try to tear
them asunder, we plunge none the less into material
ism because we may be High Church ritualists, or
Puritan dogmatists of an extreme kind.

470 GENERAL ESTIMATE :
The noble distinction of the Cambridge Divines Is
that they at once rationalised religion and vindicated
its distinctive reality. Faith and reason — the divine
and the human — grace and works — were to them in
extricably Involved. The analysis which tries to
separate them, breaks and destroys them. The one
is in the other. We cannot reach the higher, save
through the lower ; the lower Is only complete in
the higher. But they were so far from ignoring the
Divine, or losing it in the human, that their most
vital struggle was to maintain and make clear the
Divine as the paramount crown and glory of the
human. They were, if ever men were, defenders of
the faith. Their special labour as Christian Philo
sophers was to prove that religion was a transcend
ing reality, a substantive power binding the soul to
God, revealing God to the soul — a power more real
than all the bigotries which simulated it, or all the
ceremonies which represented it.
This was their mission against the materialism of
their time. On the one side they aimed to purify
and elevate the popular religion ; on the other
they aimed to discover and vindicate a substan
tive religious sphere, which, however obscured or
perverted, was the highest and most indestruc
tible of all spheres of knowledge. The conten
tions of religious parties had discredited religion
altogether. The Cambridge Divines found thei^x-
selves not merely facing exhausted factions, before
whom they sought to present a higher ideal of reli
gion — conciliatory instead of sectarian — but facing
what appeared to them «a new and formidable foe,

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 471
which Struck at the very basis of spiritual life, and
left no room for the ideas of God and immortality at
all. As they fought against a technical and barren
theology, so they fought against an undlvine and
unspiritual philosophy. Hobbes appeared to them
an enemy to all religion. It was no matter that he
professed to reverence it, and to appropriate and
manipulate religious ideas as factors in the organisa
tion of society. Withal he seemed to them to take
from these ideas all true basis. A religion born of
fear, a Church constituted by mere police authority,
outraged all their deepest instincts. They could
find no foundation for worship nor for morality,
save In the fact of a Divine Spirit In man, witnessing
to a Divine Spirit above him. And it became
the passion and labour of their lives to vindicate
this twofold form of the Divine — God and Immor
tality. It is unnecessary for us to say further how they
performed this great task. We have dwelt suffi
ciently upon this aspect of their work, and Indicated
our estimate of its substantial success. If God and
Immortality can be verified by human inquiry and
reasoning at all, they can only be verified in the line
of their thought ; that is to say, by recognising the
true place of mind In nature, as first and not second
— senior and not junior. The soul and God, the
Divine In man, and the Divine without him, are
essential correlatives. Man is spirit, and not mat-'
ter ; thought, and not thing— If there is a spiritual !
worid at all. As More himself has said in the close,;
of his ' Antidote against Atheism '— " No Spirit,

472 GENERAL ESTIMATE

no God.i " It is impossible to advance the basis of
proof for the being of a God beyond this, or to rest
it anywhere else. The divine Reason is an intuition
of the human reason ; or, conversely, the human
is an index of the Divine, verifying its object by its
own light, and revealing in the very depth of its
ratlonahty that the sphere of Spirit transcends and
encompasses that of Sense. The Divine is the reality.
It is substance, and not shadow ; or, as all material
ism must make it, a mere dream painted by the subtle
associative magic of human hopes, and fears, and
aspirations. The Spiritual above Is the utterance
of the spiritual within, and the latter can only be
found a reality in the experience of its own trans
cending nature, one and indivisible — a unity of
consciousness which is not mine, but me — which no
mere material combinations, however they may
modify and control it, can be conceived as origina
ting; which, in short, is before and not after matter ;
and if it did not precede, could never come out of,
or appear within, matter.
It Is impossible so far to overrate the services
t of our Theologians. The exponents and advocates
' of a comprehensive Church, the purifiers of the
popular theology, they were at the same time the
great champions of the reality of religion when the
excesses of its partisans drove their age to un-
j belief They stood in the breach, and fought for
' " Nullus spiritus, nullus spiritus, Nullus in Macrocosmo
Deus.'' Sir William Hamilton Deus." But More's words are
quotes from the Latin version simply as we have given them in
(Lect. on Metaphysics, vol. i. p. the original English and in his
32), — " Nullus in Microcosmo own La'tin version.

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 473
the good cause with the weapon of reason, when
many of the cowardly fanatics who had disgraced
it were swept away with the new tide, or were
silent in their ignorant and Irrational Isolation.
Their two attitudes are closely akin. It was their
deep feeling of the reality of religion, as a living
good in humanity, which made them so earnest to
save it alike from the excesses of Puritan dogma
tism and the Invasions of Hobbian speculation. The
encumbrance of the one, and the hollowness of the
other, they felt as alike fatal to it. It was the
same higher rationality of thought which animated
them in both cases — in the one, seeking to keep
religion true to fact, and in the other to prove that
it was a fact, and no mere artifice or convention. ^
(3.) The political services rendered by our Divines
should not be overlooked in any enumeration of their
merits. None of them took an active part In political
affairs. They were far less prominent in public life
than many of the Puritan Divines on the one side,
or the Prelatists on the other. Yet the quiet force
of their well-considered convictions, and the eclectic
spirit which led them to recognise what was due to
the several elements of the civil constitution, no less
than to the diverse forms of religious life and opinion
in England — their conciliatory and enlarged com
prehensiveness, in short, in the political no less than
in the ecclesiastical complications of the country —
exercised a powerful influence on the national mind,
and contributed in no small degree to the triumph
and setdement of constitutional principles at the
Revolution in 1688. It is striking, indeed, to what

474 GENERAL ESTIMATE :

extent their enlightened liberality prevailed In all direc
tions, working together as they did without any formal
organisation, merely under the impulse of their own
high thoughtfulness, and unselfish desire to promote
the Interests of truth and the rights of all, as citizens.
The "subversive paradoxes" of Hobbes, " the nobler
but not less visionary model of the republican party
headed by Milton," the servile royalism and " pas
sive obedience" of the extreme High Church party,
represented by such men as Thorndike and the
nonjurors, made more noise and excited more pro
minent political agitation for a time, but they passed
away. It was the glory of the Latltudinarlan Divines
here, as In other respects, to oppose the force of
their calm and thoughtful reasonableness to all such
extremes, and to set before the country an idea
of the Constitution which was "neither absolutist
nor republican," which rested neither " on material
force nor unreasoning superstition, but was " equally
removed from the pretence of theocratic despo
tism and the dreams of social democracy." Such
an Ideal " was provided in the broad and deeply-
reasoned premises laid down by members of the
Latltudinarlan type. The ground which they took
up seems to have approached most nearly to that
shortly afterwards adopted by the moderate and
philosophical section of the early Whig party. Their
axioms of polity tended closely to that mixed or con
stitutional form in accordance with which the rela
tions between sovereign and people have been since
more practically defined through the influence of events
rather than the progress of legislation. Loyalists at

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 475
heart, their regalism was leavened by liberal philo
sophy." Almost all the influential divines of the
Revolution, as we have already said, were trained In
the Cambridge school, and carried its principles —
if no longer in their purely ideal form — Into the
regulation of their public conduct. It was easy, of
course, for disappointed factions then, as It is easy
for their successors in our own day, to attribute
the conciliatory and enlightened policy of men like
Tillotson or Patrick to ignoble motives of self-
interest. But we agree with the writer from whom
we have already quoted,^ that this policy " was the
result of long and deep conviction, upheld amid no
little peril. It was consistent In them to welcome a
policy which, regulating at once the prerogative of
the Crown and the Immunities of the subject, and
reconciling in perpetuity civil freedom with regal
privilege, could enlist the spontaneous sympathies and
energies of the nation In support of public order
and the supremacy of the legislature."
II. We could have wished to close here, but Im
partial criticism demands from us some notice of the
defects as well as the merits of our Theologians. It
is the less possible to pass them by that they are so
obvious. They lie more on the outside, and are
visible to many who have no capacity of appreciat
ing their excellences. All can see their faults of
manner, style, and method ; but they were also
1 Rev. Alex. Taylor, Michel Fel- as we formerly said (see p. 22 of
low of Queen's College, Oxford, this volume), admirable so far as it
whose criticism of the Cam- goes. There is no other modern
bridge school in the preface to criticism, indeed, known to us,
his edition of Patrick's works is, deserving of attention.

476 GENERAL ESTIMATE :
greatly deficient in critical penetration and range,
deep-thoughted and comprehensive as they were.
We have already spoken of the defects of the
Cambridge Divines as writers. In this respect there
Is a great difference betwixt them ; yet they are
one and all behind many of their contemporaries.
Hobbes puts them all to shame as a writer. Beside
Hales and Chillingworth in our first volume, they
fail greatly in clearness and force of style, in direct
ness, readiness, and that felicitous mastery of intellect
which so grasps the materials of an argument as to
sift from it in the very act what is superfluous and
Inapplicable, and bring the whole to an effective
point. Hales and Chillingworth, it Is true, carry less
weight of thought. Their minds, if more dexterous,
are more concentrated, and purchase something of
their comparative ease of movement from the lighter
burden -which they carry. But they were also by
nature more quick-witted and perspicacious. If no
less ardent students, they had brought the product
of their studies more into the light of day, and tested
them In intercourse with men of common intellectual
shrewdness and acute literary faculty. It was the
misfortune of the Cambridge men to breathe almost
uniformly an academic and theological atmosphere ;
not merely to be in the main recluse students — for
all students must be recluse so far — but seldom
to emerge into the world of everyday thought and
action. Thus all their writings not only smell of the
academic lamp, but have the operoslty and cum
brousness of the school rather than the finish of the
thinker who has been trained, but has forgot his

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 477
training in the consciousness of accomplishment and
power which It has left behind. They carry their aca
demic trappings with them, whatever they do. They
crowd their books with specimens of all the intellec
tual furniture which they have gathered in the course
of their studies. It was an age of painful verbosity
and pedantry, save in the very best writers. The
lengthiness and tedium of the pulpit infected more
or less all forms of composition. Cudworth and
More are not only not above their contempora
ries in this respect, but they have their own vices
of style engrafted upon the common pedantry of
the time.
Their lack of method is a still more serious fault.
The external disfigurement and formlessness of their
writings might be excused if there were order within.
But their thought is sometimes unorganised as well
as their style. It Is insufificlently laid out and dis
entangled in its details. The reader has to bring its
parts together and reconstitute it as he best can.
We refer especially to More, whose writings are as
voluminous as those of all the others together. In
him, especially, a deficient method and lack of critical
penetration are apparent. But Cudworth's great
work also, with all its merits. Is greatly wanting in
organisation. Rich, massive, and powerful as the
theological mind of the seventeenth century was — it
was, with rare exceptions, wholly uncritical. It ac
cumulated knowledge with a marvellous power and
profusion of learning, but it failed in discriminating
its sources, or estimating with any degree of accuracy
its true proportions and value. The apparendy un-

478 GENERAL ESTIMATE

hesitating acceptance of the Aposdes' Creed as the
composition of the twelve aposdes, even by so in
quisitive an intellect as Chillingworth, not to speak
of Jeremy Taylor, Is a conspicuous instance of this
uncritical habit, and failure to sift the grounds of their
knowledge. It Is well to point out this, but it is also
well to remember how slow the progress of criticism
Is In reference to theological ideas and matters of
Church history. Coleridge has made far too much
of it, after his wont ; while he shows himself in the
very ' Notes ' In which he takes Taylor to task on
this point, that his own mind had by no means
cleared itself from unhistorlcal preconceptions as to
the origin and nature of Christianity.^
The Cambridge Divines show their lack of critical
and historical judgment in three important particu
lars — (a) Their confusion of Platonism and Neo-
Platonism ; {b) Their speculative fancifulness ; and
(c) Their misappreciatlon of evidence.
{a) The confusion between Platonism and Neo-
Platonism underlies their whole writings. They are,
^ All differences in the Chris- according to Coleridge himself, is
tian Church might be tolerated, not one for definition or concep-
according to Coleridge, but tual logic at all; and why, there-
such a difference as is repre- fore, should there be such an
sented by Trinitarianism and So- intolerable inconsistency betwixt
cinianism or Humanitarianism. a higher and a lower view of that
But is there any historical student which in itself is undefinable ?
nowadays who would deny that Nothing regarding the origin of
the primitive Jewish Church con- Christianity is probably more
tained those who could be pro- certain than that the Nicene de
nounced Humanitarians from a finitions of the person of Christ
modern point of view? "Contra- would have been utterly unintel-
ries cannot be true. The Christ ligible and unacceptable to the
cannot be both mere man and primitive Jewish Christian.
incarnate God." But the question,

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 479
as Coleridge says, Plotlnlsts rather than Platonists.
The theosophic reveries of the Alexandrian school
fitted more aptly their own supersensual imagina
tions ; and so they pass from the original to the
later Platonic writings with the most indiscriminating
indifference. They betray no suspicion of the enor
mous interval of thought betwixt Plato and Plotinus,
still less of any growth or development of thought
in Plato himself What are now supposed to be
his later ' Dialogues,' chiefly interest them — the
Theaetetus, Sophistes, Parmenldes, above all the
Tlmseus. The second book of the ' Immutable
Morality ' is nearly half composed of quotations from
the Theaetetus ; and the lengthened discussion In
the fourth chapter of the ' Intellectual System on the
Platonic Trinity' rests in the main on the Tlmaeus
and the Neo-Platonic writers. Ofthe latter, Plotinus^
.is the chief favourite ; but Proclus ^ and Hierocles ^
are also abundantly quoted. Themlstius * and two
writers of the later Neo-Platonic school, Damasclus
and his disciple Slmpllclus,^ along with the Trisme-
glstic writings, frequendy reappear in their pages.
Their minds were drenched with the speculations of
the Alexandrian school in all its forms. Like the mem
bers of this school they credited Plato with a sort of
semi-Inspiration, and believed, as we have more than
once seen, that he derived his wisdom from Moses.
The extraordinary assumption of both More and
1 203-262 A.D. tury, and took refuge at the court
2 412-485. ofthe Persian monarch Chosroes
3 4CQ ? when Justinian closed the schools
* D. 390. o^ heathen philosophy.
" Both belong to the sixth cen-

48o GENERAL ESTIMATE :
Cudworth, that all divine philosophy found In hea
then writings Is to be traced definitely to the He
brews — that the original atomic doctrine and all the
teaching of Pythagoras and of Plato have come from
a Jewish fountain-head — may be considered the cli
max of their uncriticalness. More is absolutely pos
sessed with this notion, and recurs to it over and
over again as the explanation of all the anticipations
of Christian truth which appear to meet him every
where In the Platonic and Neo- Platonic writings.
It is needless to indicate how different In many
respects is the spirit of our theologians from the gen
uine Platonic spirit — the one clear, bright, poetic,
dramatic, scientific rather than mystical ; the other
vague, serious, and exclusively theological. The
mysticism of Plato is a mysticism half poetic and
half philosophic, touched with the brilliant and chang
ing hues of a mythology half real, half ideal. The
mysticism of More and Smith is purely spiritual and
theosophic — an obscure region bounded by super-
sensual realities, and the creature not of fancy and
imagination, but of a passionate and fertile faith.
The vivacity, inqulsitiveness, common-sense, and dia
lectical badinage of the Platonic Socrates, have no
thing in common with the profound but sombre and
unwieldy thoughtfulness of the Cambridge Divines.
The Platonism which dominated their thoughts
and coloured their theology, and Impressed more
or less all their speculations, was not the Platonism
of Plato. They never thought of distinguishing the
varied elements of his philosophy in themselves or

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 481
In relation to Neo-Platonic speculations. It is no
easy task even for modern criticism to discriminate
the growth of the Platonic doctrine, or to make out
clearly whether it has any growth or consistent
development at all. But the very idea of such a
development had not even dawned upon our Divines.
The suspicion that Plotinus and Proclus, while build
ing upon the Platonic basis, may have had little or
none of the spirit of the master-builder, never dis
turbed them. Platonism was to them a vast mass of
transcendental Thought, dating from Pythagoras and
even Moses, and stretching downwards through Alex
andrian and medieval Jewish schools ; and it was
this Platonism of tradition — of the successive spir
itualistic schools which had contended for a super-
sensual philosophy, and peopled the world of faith
with many fantastic reveries — which ruled their spir
its and inspired their philosophic ambition. In this
sense alone can they be called Platonists.
It is to be remembered that the age of historical
criticism was yet unborn. Tradition, philosophic,
patristic, scientific, lay like an incubus upon the
intelligence of the seventeenth century. Even con
temporary philosophies were imperfectly understood
and criticised. How much more ancient systems ?
Descartes and Hobbes were combated zealously,
but not analysed or critically explained, or fully com
prehended in the totality of their principles, and the
relation which they bore to one another. How then
could this be expected in the case of Pythagoras, or
Plato, or Plotinus ? Creeds and theologies passed
without examination. Supposed heresies were vlg-
VOL. II. 2 H

482 GENERAL ESTIMATE

orously refuted ; but they were not challenged and
asked to give an account of themselves. No one
inquired, or at least inquired with any critical capa
city of getting a true answer, as to the growth of
the Aposdes' Creed, or the Athanasian Creed. Why
should not Pythagoras have learned his wisdom
from the Jews, and all that was good in Greek
thought have come from the great Hebrew seer ?
We have had speculations in our own day as to
the analogies betwixt the Messiah and the Hellenic
Apollo. No amount of mere fearnlng can impart
the faculty of criticism and of comparative historical
induction. Especially where religious enthusiasms
come Into play, knowledge without insight and large
ness of thought seems sometimes only to lead further
astray. And uncritical tradition, In many forms, still
lies with such a weight on all Christian Churches,
that we may easily understand, while we regret, the
inability of the Cambridge Platonlsts to disentangle
the folds of traditionary theosophy which enveloped
all their thought.
{b) Their speculative fancifulness was largely due
to. the same habits of mind. They had no adequate
criteria of knowledge. They failed in distinguish
ing the subjective and objective in their respective
elements — what was due to the conditions of the
problem they discussed, and what came from their
own preconception — a failure more or less of all
speculation. Yet it was more than usually conspi-
cuovis in our philosophers. Coleridge has said of
them — ¦" What they all wanted was a pre-inqulsition
into the mind as part organ, part constituent of all

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 483
knowledge — an examination of the scales, weights,
and measures abstracted from the objects to be
weighed or measured by them."^ This expressesvery
much the same defect ; only we have hardly a right
to expect from them such a criticism of the sources
of knowledge as Coleridge desiderates. We have
no warrant to look, as he implies, for a Kant among
them, or in the century to which they belong. Such
anticipations of philosophical history are unreason
able. The Cambridge Philosophers, however, fell
below the speculative method of their own age.
They were the victims of fantastic conceptions, no
less than of futile traditions, from which their own
reasonable culture, and the new spirit of inquiry
which surrounded them, should have delivered
them. Students of Descartes, they failed to learn
the chief lesson of his philosophy — the necessity
of some clear principle or ground of certitude on
which to base all their thought — some touchstone by
which to test it. Advocates of Reason, they yet
never asked themselves plainly what Is reason, and
how rational and irrational ideas are to be distin
guished, not merely in the sphere of religion, but of
speculation. Their Rationalism was adequate to sift
the notional dogmatism of the popular religion, and
the vagaries of Quakerism and other enthusiasms;
but it failed to reach the sources of their own
thought, or to clear their own speculative vision.
Hence all their dreams of plastic and vital natures,
of the pre-existence and hierarchies of souls; and
generally the Neo-Platonic fantasies with which they
1 Notes on English Divines, i. 351, 352.

484 GENERAL ESTIMATE :
filled their minds without any suspicion of their
irrational incoherence and absurdity.
(c) We have already, more than once, adverted
to their misappreciatlon of evidence as to the super
natural or spiritual world. Their studies had fur
nished them with no adequate criterion of evidence,
scientific or historical. Their ignorance of natural
causes they shared with their generation. Their
credulity as to ghosts and apparitions was the in
heritance of generations of credulity. It was almost
a part of the common faith of the Church. They
are excusable here, therefore, as in other points. It
is no reproach to Cudworth and More that they
beHeved in ghosts. There were but few in the
seventeenth century who ventured to disbelieve in
them. But it may be fairly urged against them that
they so little appreciated either the nature of evi
dence on the one hand, or the true character of the
supernatural on the other hand, as to suppose that
such stories of apparitions could possibly convince
Intelligent minds of the existence of spirits, in op
position to the materialism which they saw rising
around them. To place a good cause on a false
issue is not only a peril to the cause, but an impedi
ment to the progress of thought. And More and
Glanvill, in this respect, not only did not represent
the rationality of their age, but were doing what
they could to retard it. They have greatly suffered
In consequence, more than they deserved. These
spiritualistic follies have clung to their name and re
putation, when their true enlightenment, and the
rational elevation and radiant warmth of their com-

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 485
prehenslve Christianity has been forgotten. More's
credulity, vast as it was, and the cloudy unsubstan-
tiality of many of his speculations, never obscured the
clearness of his moral vision, nor the essential ra
tionality of his theological principles. He and all
his school were still ready to test every form of
spiritual truth by the light of the higher truths In
man — the ' divine sagacity,' or "image of the royal
and divine logos" — which they might mistake and
misinterpret, but which they never thought of super
seding or displacing.
It cannot be denied that the Cambridge Platonists
failed in much that they attempted. They essayed
anew, in a distracted and unbelieving age, to verify
the Divine — not merely to witness it to man's reason
and conscience, but to construe It Into a Philosophy,
and rear a Science of religion. They failed partly
by reason of their own weakness and errors, but
especially because the time was not yet ripe for the
development of an adequate spiritual Philosophy.
Such a Philosophy can never be based merely, or
even mainly, on the private excogitations of thinkers,
however great. It can never be a product of mere
intuition or mere logic, however exalted. Nor yet
can it be a mere revival of any past phase of thought,
however noble and significant. Platonism, even in
its highest form. Is but a splendid speculation —
higher than any single effort of thought will proba
bly ever reach again. But we cannot build a shelter
for catholic thought out of the most splendid frag
ment of speculation. Such a stately dome can only
rise gradually on a comprehensive basis of Historic

486 GENERAL ESTIMATE :

criticism, which shall take in not merely this or
that phase of speculation, but the whole growth of
religious experience of which we have become the
heirs. To this extent the positive or scientific me
thod must be universally adopted — only enlarged to
the area of a genuinely comprehensive Induction.
A true Religious Philosophy can only be built up
slowly by the process which verifies while it accumu
lates, and tests every addition to the fabric of dis
covery before It ventures to lay it to the pile. The
religious experience of mankind through all the ages
of historic and even pre-historic growth, is as much
a reality as any other phase of his experience — a
good deal more a reality than most others. Religion
has been and remains the most powerful factor of
human history. Amidst all its changes it has been
this, and Is likely to continue to be so. The idea
that human progress shall ever transcend religion,
or lay It aside, is the wildest dream that ever
entered Into the uncultured and semi-savage heart
that still lurks In the bosom of modern civilisa
tion. There it Is, and has been always in the world,
moving in some form or other its highest minds to
their highest significance. There is no science, how
ever exclusive, can refuse to recognise such facts,
by the very right which it itself has to exist, and in
quire into its own series of facts. But theologians
and Christian philosophers must come to acknow
ledge — that religious facts are not, any more than
other facts, of " private interpretation." They are
individual, it Is true, and in a certain sense can
not be investigated too closely as elements of indi-

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. 487
vidual experience ; but in order to be fully and com
prehensively understood, they must also be regarded
as parts of the common experience of humanity
through all its stages of growth. They must be
studied not only In their individualistic, but in their
generalised form, as they appear in their gradual
and complete development In history, before we
can interpret them right, and form even a proxi
mate theory of their true value. We must have, in
short, some adequate criticism of religious Ideas in
all their mysterious growth, dependency, and involve
ment, before we can venture to construct any ade
quate theory or Philosophy of Religion. All true
thought is merely fact idealised ; all right theory Is
merely experience generalised. No thought that Is
worth anything can ever rise above an historic basis.
No more than science can transcend nature, can reli
gious thought transcend history. It may illuminate
history, but it must first of all grow out of It ; and a
Philosophy of Religion, before it aims at settling for
us the great problems which it involves, must be
content to drudge for long yet in reading the varied
records of religious experience which modern histori
cal criticism has only begun to unfold and arrange.
Light, therefore. Is not to be sought In any sudden
illumination, nor progress in any pet theories of mo
dern, any more than of ancient, thinkers — but only
in patient study and faithful generalisation. The vast
volume of religious experience will slowly unfold its
characters to inductive and patient thinkers, as other
volumes of experience have done. And as this
volume is steadily read — Its pages compared, and

488 GENERAL ESTIMATE.
their facts co-ordinated and explained — the divine
meaning will become clearer. A Religious Philoso
phy will at least become possible when it is sought
in this way, — not in any favourite speculation of this
or that thinker, however great — but in the compre
hensive Interpretation of the religious consciousness
working through all history, and gathering light and
force as it works onward.

INDEX.

Abraham, in the Persian story, i. 410.
Academy of the Medici, literary and hu
manistic in its tendencies, ii. 14 note.
Accommodation of Episcopacy and Pres
bytery, idea of, conceived by Usher, re-
fived by StillingSeet, i. 417 et seq.
Anabaptists, i. 6, ii. 9.
Anaxagoras, ii. 249.
Anglo-Catholicism, growth of, marks the
decay ofthe Catholic .spirit, i. 54— how
connected with the Anglican Reforma
tion, -ib. et se^' — emerges as a system in
! the seventeenth century, in opposition
^- to Puritanism, 56 et seq. — what the ideal
of Anglo-Catholicism is, 61 — character
of its theology, 62 — tendency to Roman
ism, 63 — tendency to liberalism con
trasted with Puritau tendency to dog
matism, ib. ei seq.
Anglo-Catholics, their theory of the min
istry, as opposed to that of the Puritans,
i. 58 — ^their idea of the Church in con
trast to that of the Roman Catholics, 324.
Antinomians highly obnoxious to the Pu
ritans, ii. 9 et seq., 239.
Antiquity, Hales's view of, as a note of
truth, i. 249.
Anti-Scripturists, one of the Common
wealth sects obnoxious to Puritans, ii. 9.
Anti-Trinitarians, ii. 9.
Aphorisms, Whichcote's, ii. 94 — miscella
neous, 111.
Apollo, the, i. 105.
Arianism, Chillingworth'sopinionof,i. 282.
Arians, the, i. 421, ii. 9.
Aristotle, his definition of a natural law, i.
427 — supposed opposition of the Cam
bridge divines to his philosophy, ii. 22,
357, 403 note — Glanvill's opposition to
his philosophy, 444, 449.
Arminianism, the principles of, start from
the modification of the doctrine of Pre
destination, i. 16 et seq. — as a dogmatic
theory not connected with the subject,
18 — its connection as a method of reli
gious inquiry, 19 — assumes thiee main
directions, 26 et seq.—sA first not wel
comed in England, 72— a subject of Par
liamentary complaint, 73— begins to be
favourably looked upon at court, ib.—
— objections lodged by the Arminians at
the Synod of Dort, 179— Whichcote not
indebted to Dutch Arminians, ii. 81.
VOL. II.

Arminius, the impugner of Calvinism, i.
11— his education, 12 — his mental char
acteristics, 13— he is appointed professor
of theology at Leyden, 14 — appearance
of changed sentiments,i6. — he is opposed
by Gomar, ii).- why accused of Pelagi-
anism by the Calvinists, 17.
Arrowsmith, Dr, friend of Whichcote,
made head of St John's-College, Cam
bridge, ii, 63 — character, 56.
Articles, the thirty-nine, settled in 1571,
i. 42— see note ib. as to origin— their
theology, ib. — not a characteristic speci
men of Anglo-Oatholic theology, 65.
Articles of Smalkald, i. 22, note.
Arundel Castle, capture of, i. 295.
Athanasius renounced tradition as a source
of religious belief, i. 400.
Atheism, ii. 139, 151 — akin to superstition,
153— Cudworth's 'True Intellectual Sys
tem' an argument against, 24 et seq.—
democratic or atomic atheism, 249 —
other forms of atheism refuted by Cud
worth, (1) hylopathian, (2) cosmoplastic,
(3) hylozoic, 251 — all atheism material
istic according to Cudworth, 254 et seq.
Aubrey, i. 108 — the "selections" of, 115
and passim — on tho intimacy between
Falkland and Chillingworth, 129 — he
charges Chillingworth with treachery,
265 — absurdity of the charge, 266 et seq.
Augustine did not shrink from the conse
quences of predestination, i. 9 — renoun
ced tradition as a source of religious be
lief, 400.
Augustinianism the root of Lutheranism
and Calvinism, i. 8 — influences their in
terpretation of Scripture, 20 — Colet and
Augustinianism, 40— Tyndale and Au
gustinianism, 41— English theologians,
from Cranmer to Hooker, Augustinian
in doctrine, 43— opinion as to Scripture
containing all things necessary to salva
tion, 327.
Bacon, Lord, writings ; influence of his
opinions in Cambridge at first not clear
ly traceable, ii. 15— his philosophy and
the Cambridge school, 17 et sea. — allu
sions of Cudworth to him as " Viscount
of St Albans," 202, 296.
Balcanqual, Walter, the Scottish Commis
sioner to the Synod of Dort, i. 181.
2 I

490

INDEX.

Bancroft asserts a theory of divine right
on behalf of Episcopacy, i. 57.
Basil, St, renounced tradition as « source
of religious belief, 400.
Bastwick impugns the prelatic constitu
tion of the Church of England, i. 94.
Becon denies distinction between bishop
and presbyter, i. 48.
Belief, Hales's view of, i. 245 ei seq. — why
men adopt the beliefs of others in reli
gion, 246 et seq.
Bengel, i. 8.
Bertius, P., funeral oration of Arminius
Cay, quoted, i. 13, note — further quota
tion from, 17.
Beza of Geneva, one of Arminius's teach
ers, i. 12.
Bible, the, the religion of Protestants, i.
261 et seq.
Bill, the "root and branch," for abolishing
Episcopacy, i. 145.
"Bishop's War," the, i. 129.
" Blount's characters," i. 126.
Bodley, Sir Thomas, the founder of the
Bodleian Library, i. 172.
Bogermannus, Mr, the president of the
Synod of Dort, i. 173.
'Brevis Disquisitio,' of disputed author
ship, i. 204.
Brown, Sir Thomas, a Platonic writer, but
unconnected with the Cambridge school,
ii. 454 et seq.
Burford, Falkland's birthplace, i. SO.
Burgoin, Sir Francis, i. 414.
Burnet, his ' History of his own Time,' i.
122 passim.
Burton impugns the prelatic constitution
of the Church of England, i. 94.
' Cabala,' collection of seventeenth century
documents, i. 86, note — Jewish Cabala,
ii. 275 — Pythagoric do., 281 — More's
Cabalistic studies, 345 ei seq.
Calixtus, i. 8.
Calvin, main interests of, evangelical, i. 3
— more powerful and consistent than
Luther, 8 — his interpretation of Scrip
ture coloured by Augustinian prepos
sessions, 20.
Calvinism, intensely dogmatic from the
beginning, i. 8— its influence in Hol
land, 10 — essential difi'erenoe between
Calvinism and Arminianism, 17 et seq. —
under Beza, Melville, Gomar, becomes
polemical, 23 — Scripture, according to
it, not only directive, but constrain
ing, 28 — simultaneous excitement at
Oxford and Cambridge on the subject,
44, note — Calvinism in the Thirty-nine
Articles, 66 — Calvinism and Puritanism,
67 — Falkland trained in Calvinism, and
apparently remained attached to it, 82 —
that of Morley, 124.
Cambridge, rather than Oxford, by the
middle of the seventeenth century the
centre of the liberal theological move
ment, i. 413 — character of theology then
taught there, ii. passim.

Cambridge School, its historical position,
i. 1 et seq. — relation of Cambridge move
ment to previous liberal movement, 6 et
seq. — rise of the School towards the
middle of the seventeenth century from
the Puritan side, 7 ei, seq. — reaction
against the ultra-dogmatism of the time,
11 — growth of a new speculative spirit, 13
— relation to the philosophy of Bacon and
Descartes, 15 etseq. — relation to Hobbes,
26 et seq, — contemporary notices of, 31 et
seq. — general estimate of the Cambridge
divines, 456 — their primary merit the
inculcation of the doctrine of tolera
tion, 456 et .seq. — dissent on the "Vol
untary principle " unknown to them,
460 et seq. — their idea of the Church, 462
et seq. — their theory of religion, 466 et
seq. — their theology at once rational and
evangelical, 468 et seq. — religious phil
osophers, 13 — defenders of the faith
against materialism, 470 et seq. — their
political merits, 473 et seq. — their de
fects as writers, 476 — lack of method,
speculative fancifulness, 477 et seq. —
how far they failed, 485.
Carberry, the second Lady, the "Lady"
of Milton's 'Comus,'i. 366.
Cardigan, royal forces routed before the
castle of, i. 359.
Carew, Thomas, a celebrated wit, i. 104.
Carleton, Sir Dudley, ambassador to the
Hague, i. 173.
Carlstadt, i. 4.
Gary, Falkland's family name, i. 76 — State
appointments of Henry Gary, 1st Lord
Falkland, i. 79 — his character, ib. — re
lations with his son, 88 et seq.
Casaubon, the elder, his ' Exercit. de Re
bus Sacris et Eccles.' quoted, i. 423,
note — Isaac, his letter to Cardinal Perron
quoted, 416, note— Dr Moric, Dean of
Canterbury, ii. 449.
Gastellio, a representative of the earlier
humanistic spirit, i. 6.
' Charity Mistaken,' the, of Knott, i. 282.
Charles I., Popish influences allowed
greater scope on the accession of, i. 70,
263— relations with Falkland, 146 et seq.
— seeks refuge in tho Scottish camp, 375.
Cheynell, Francis, a Puritan divine, i. 296—
his pamphlet on Chillingworth, 297— bis
conduct towards Chillingworth, 298et seq.
Chichester, Chillingworth a prisoner at,
i. 296.
Ghiliasm ofthe Fathers, i. 403.
Chillingworth, William, the most intimate
friend of Falkland, i. 128— he is more pro
minent in the history of religious opinion
than Hales, 261 — his birth and educa
tion, ib. — he is accused of treachery,
265 — his conversion to Romanism, 270—
he goes to the Jesuit College at Douay,
271— he is reconverted to the Church
of England, 272— allusions which show
his disappointment with Douay, 273—
reconverting influences were from with
in, 274 — arguments which influenced

INDEX.

491

him on the one side and the other, 275
et seq. — his reply to Lewgar's letter, 279
et seq. — his reply to Knott's treatise on
'Mercy and Truth,' 282— he refuses
Church preferment, 283 — his letter to
Dr Sheldon, 283, note — he at last accepts
preferment, 288 — he is accused of So
cinlanism, 290 — he is appointed Chan
cellor of Sarum and prebend of Brix-
worth, 293 — his association with the
Royalist party, 294 — ^he attends the
Siege of Gloucester, 295 — he is taken
prisoner, 296 — his sickness and death,
30!3— Ills personal character, 304 — his
works, 305 — his -tract on Episcopacy,
806 — his ' Religion of Protestants ' ex
amined, 307 el seq. — its high intellec
tual and literaiy character, 308 et seq.
— his own description of his changes
in religion, 313, note — the principles
on which the argument of his ' Relig.
Prot.' rests, 317 — the subjects under dis
cussion in the 'Relig. Prot.,' 322 — he
has settled the question regarding the
interpretation of Scripture, 325 — quota
tions from his 'Relig. Prot.' regarding
the interpretation of Scripture, 326 et
seq. — the chief point of difference be
tween him (Chin.) and Knott, 331 — on
Christian unity, 335 ei seq. — on freedom
of religious opinion, 339 — what he means
by the religion of Protestants, 342 — he
was the first expounder of the true
meaning of Protestantism, 343.
" Christ," the life of, the Great Exemplar,
by Jeremy Taylor, i. 362.
Christian Philosophy, specially in Vol
ume II. — difference betwixt the Cam
bridge philosophy and the Christian
philosophies of the Middle Ages, ii. 14
— traces of Christian philosophy in
Whichcote, 115 ei se^.— foundation of,
in Smith's Discourses, chap, iii., par
ticularly 186 et seq. — Christian philo
sophy in conflict with Materialism,
chap. iv. , particularly 240 etseq. , 470 e£ seq.
Christian Philosophy and Mysticism,
chap, v., particularly 377, 392 et seq.,
406 ei seq.
Church, power to determine controversies
amongst the Calvinists, i. 32 — to apply
and enforce these, 33 et seq. — has the
Church a right to insist upon non-
fundamentals ? 35 — definition of the
" Church " in the nineteenth article, 42
et seq. — influence of Augustine over the
whole Western Church, 45— Whitgift's
opinion of the essential notes of the
Church, 50 — Hooker's opinions on the
same point, 62 — the nedlssity of an in
fallible Church a great point with the
Jesuits, 76— with Falkland, ecclesiasti
cal authority must not override private
judgment, 157 ei seq. — Hales occupies
the same position, 233 et m?.— Chilling-
worth's standpoint against Church
authority, 323 et seq. — basis for the
Christian Church (vide Taylor), 408 et

seq. — Taylor on the Church in a dif
fusive capacity, 396.
Church of England, rational spirit of, 41
et seg.— views as to the sacraments, 46
et seq. — on the question of orders, i. 48
et seq. — on Church government, 49 ei
My. -tendency of the Church of Eng
land after Plooker, 54 — reverence for
the fathers, a note of the Church of
England, 55 et seq. — emergence of the
rival dogmatisms of Anglo-Catholicism
and Puritanism, 58 ei seq.
Church government, according to the
original principles of Church of Eng
land, not definitely fixed in Scripture,
i. 49 — two phases in the struggle con
cerning Church government, represent
ed by Whitgift and Hooker, 50 ei seq.—
forms of, defended on the ground of
expedience, by Falkland, 138 ei seq. —
by Chillingworth, 306 et seq.~hy Stil-
lingfleet, 422 et seq. — how far divine,
how far human (viae Stillingfleet), 426
et seq. ; also 442 et seq. — neither Presby
tery nor Episcopacy can make out a
Jus divinum either from a plain institu
tion of Christ, 445 et seq. — or from apos
tolic practice, 448 et seq. — elements of
Church constitution, 462.
Circumcellians, the, i. 421.
Clarendon, his graphic sketch of Falkland,
i. 76 — on Falkland's Parliamentary ex
perience, 131 — on the effect which the
civil war had on Falkland, 149 — on
Hales's conference with Laud, 210, note
— on Hales's preferment, 214, note— on
Hales's library, 216, note.
Golepepper, Sir John, the member for
Kent, i. 142— is appointed Chancellor of
the Exchequer by Charles I., 146.
Coleridge, his 'Aids to Reflection,' i. 364
—mistakes some of Jeremy "Taylor's
expressions, 396, note ; ii. 462, 478 —
his ideal of the Church, 463 et seq. note
— on the Cambridge Platonists, 479,
483.
Colet, at once rational and evangelical,
38 — his lectures on St Paul, ib. — charac
teristics of his teaching, 40.
Collins, Dr, Whichcote's predecessor as
Provost of King's College, Cambridge,
ii. 48.
Confessions, number of Protestant, i. 21 —
design of, 30 — Belgic confession, lOei seq.
Congregationalism disposed of by Still
ingfleet, i. 443, 444.
Convivium Theologicum, the, i. 95, 129.
Conway, Lady, H. More's friend and
pupil, ii. 325-329 — Lord, he induces
Taylor to go to Lisburn.
Cornheert, 'Theodore, the writings of, i.
11 — is proclaimed a herei;ic, ib.
Councils, Hales's opinions concerning, i.
238 et sey. — Taylor's views of their
authority, 401.
Gowley, his verses inscribed to Falkland
quoted, i. 131.
Granmer, teaching of, regarding the Ea-

492

INDEX.

charist, i. 46 — opinions about Church
orders, 48.
Creed (Apostles'), i. 3— the simplest and
best, 335 — the sum of what is necessary
for salvation, 382— (the Athanasian),
Chillingworth objects to, 283 — Jeremy
Taylor on, 382 et seq.
Creeds, all the great Protestant, completed
before the end of sixteenth century, i.
7 — multiplication of, in the reformed
Churches, i. 20 ei seq. — creeds and con
fessions attacked by the Arminians, 30
— true meaning of these as held by
Arminians, 30 ei seq. — interpretation of
them by Calvinists, 32 et seq. — Chilling-
worth's opinion of, 286— the Church
rightly based not on a theoretic creed
but a common faith, ii. 458 et seq.
Cressy, his epistle apologetical quoted, i.
207.
Cudworth, Ralph, the most celebrated of
the Cambridge School, ii. 193— relation
to John Smith, 193, 194 ei! seq. — native of
Somersetshire, trained at Emmanuel
College, 194— appointed Rector of North
Cadbury in 1641, 195— first authorship,
ib. eisey.- quotes, like Smith, copiously
from Neo-Platonists, 201 — his theses on
taking degree of B.D. (1644), 202— ap
pointed master of Clare Hall same year,
203 — made Regius Professor of Hebrew
(1645), 204 — preached before House of
Commons(l647), 205— appointed master
of Christ's College (1654), 206— made a
member of committee for revision of
the Scriptures (1657), 207 — communica
tions with Secretary Thurloe, 208 — dis
course on Daniel's prophecy of seventy
weeks, 200 et seq. — not disturbed at
Cambridge after the Restoration, 212 —
appointed Vicar of Ashwell (1662), 214
--anxiety as to projected treatise on
Ethics, 215 et seq. — publication of
' The True Intellectual System of the
Universe ' (1878), 219 — made a pre
bendary of Gloucester same year, 225 —
course of thought at the time, 219 et
sej. -reception of the work, 222 et seq.
— death (1688), 225 — personal character,
ib. — estimate of him as a preacher, 228 et
seq. — as a theistic thinker, 240 e( seq. — as
a moralist, 281 et seq. — general estimate
of his value as a thinker, 293 et seq.
Culverwel, author of ' Discourse of the
Light of Nature,' ii. 411— striking
characteristics of this discourse, ih. — a
Calvinist, 412 — probable parentage, 413
— relation to Whichcote and John
Smith, ib. — attached to Puritanism, ib.
^supposed madness, 414 — design of
'Discourse of the Light of Nature,'
415 — his panegyrical description of
reason, 416, 426 — his inquiries as to
"Nature," "The Law of Nature," and
" The Light of Nature," 420 et seq.
DailM, his treatise ' Concerning the right
use of the Fathers,' note on, i. 158, 403.

Davenaut, Sir William, successor of Jon-
son as poet-laureate, i. 104 — his autho
rity not of value in reference to a story
against Chillingworth, 265.
Davenport, Christopher, the Popish mis
sionary, i. 355.
Delfian theology, origin of, i. 11 — Sup-
ralapsarianism and Infralapsarianism,
ib — development into Arminianism, 12
— seeks to exclude from the sphere of the
Divine Determinism theorigin ofevil, 16.
Democritus, ii. 165, 242, 248, 250— De
mocritic atheism, 249 ei seq.
Descartes — his influence on the Cambridge
School more obvious than that of Bacon,
i. 17 — difference of his philosophical
spirit from that of the Cambridge
teachers, 18 — his philosophy exalted
under the name of " mechanical," in
tract of S. P., 23 — spoken of by Cudworth
as inimical to thetsm, 248 — his theory
as to the nature of brutes, 273, 371—
his generalisation as to Thought and
Extensi^Ti composing the universe op
posed by Cudworth, ib. — difference with
Cudworth as to the relation of good and
evil to the Divine will, 288 et seq. — no
allusion to his famous doctrine of con
sciousness, 294 — interesting relation to
Henry More, 368 et seq. — More's enthu
siasm for his philosophy, and corrts-
pondence with him, 368 et seq. — More's
change of tone towards his philosophy,
374 et seq. — his definition of matter
opposed by More, 381 — criticism of his
notion of spirit, 384, 385 et seq.
Devil Tavern, the meeting-place of Jonson
and his associates, i. 105.
Digby, Sir Kenelm, one of the " Falkland
set," i. 96 — character by Clarendon, 106
et seq. — pervert to Romanism, 107 et seq.
— alluded to by Culverwel, ii. 420 — also
by Glanvill, 446 — his writings, ib. note.
Divine right, the nature of a, according
to Stillingfleet, i. 425 etseq. — what it is,
and where found, i. 427.
Dogmatism, early dogmatic character of
Protestantism, i. 5 et seq. — evidenced in
the multiplication of creeds, 20 et seq.
— assailed by Arminianism, 25 et seq.
— that of the Lambeth Articles, 44 et
seq. — that of Puritanism provokes the
counter - dogmatism of Anglo - Catholi
cism, 67 et seq. — Selden's hatred of it,
100 — dogmatic differences in Hales's
opinion have nothing to do with reli
gion, 224 et seq. — true relation of dogma
to faith, ii. 260.
Donatists, the, i. 421.
Donne, Dr, i. TIS.
Dort, the Synod of, ii. 2 — the number of
its members, 176— the points in dispute
at, i. 183 — main business of, how con
ducted, 188 — Hales's connection with,
and letters concerning, ib. et seq.
Douay, college of the Jesuits at, i. 271.
Dryden— his opinion of Cudworth's great
work, ii. 223.

INDEX.

493

'Ductor Dubitantium,' tho, of Jeremy
Taylor, i. 364.
Earles, Dr. friend of Falkland, i. 117 — a
distinguished author, i. 126 — appoint
ment of, to the bishopric of Salisbury,
128 — his character, ib. — he is favourably
disposed to the Nonconformists, ib.
Empedocles, ii. 249.
Emmanuel College founded as a Puritan
college by Geo. W. Mildmay, ii. 48 —
Whichcote, J. Smith, Cudworth, edu
cated in it, 47, 49, 123, 193.
"Enquiry and Private Judgment in Re-
hgion," sermon by Hales, quoted, i.
243.
Epicurus, Atheism of, ii. 141, 155 et seq.
Episcopacy, speech of Falkland upon, i.
138 et seq.— its maintenance advocated
by him, 140 — abstractof speech, 141 — its
reform referred to a committee, ib. —
two parties in Parliament on the ques
tion, i. 142 et seq. — Chillingworih on
Episcopacy, i. 306 et seq. — Episcopacy
defended by Hall, Usher, ind Taylor, i.
357 et seq.—\io^ defended by the latter,
i. 385 ei seq. — and Presbytery, could
the advantages of them not be united
on some rational basis? This is the
question Stillingfleet set himself to ex
amine, 418 — Taylor's views regarding,
885.
Episcopius, his ' Tnstit. ' quoted, i. 11 —
successor of Ai'minins in the leadership
ofthe Remonstrants, 15— defends them
at the Synod of Dort, ib. — speech on
the occasion, ib. and 178 et seq. — his
character, 16 note — his * Confession of
Remonstrants' quoted, 23, note, 25, 26,
and passim — his reply on the Remon
strants being expelled from the Synod,
186.
Erasmus, the representative of Rational
Christian spirit before the Reformation,
i. 2.
Evelyn, his fi-iendship with Jeremy Taylor,
i. 366 — well-known figure in seventeenth
century, ii. 427.
Exoucontlans, name for Arians, ii. 277.
Faith, Taylor on the nature of, 380.
Falkland, first Lady, a victim of the
Jesuits, i. 80 — second Lady, high char
acter of, 88, note — the first Lord, account
of, i. 86 et seq. — the third Lord, an ac
count of, i. 163 — Lucius Gary, second
Lord, a moderate and a liberal thinker,
i. 77 — his parentage, 79 — his general
characteristics, 77— his birth, 80 — his
place of education disputed, 83- his im
prisonment, 86— his marriage, 87— dis
agreement with his father, ib. — depar
ture of, for Holland, 90 — returns to
England and retires for study, 92 — his
literary associates, 96 et seq. — extracts
from his poetry, 91, 92, 101, 105, 116-
character of his poetry, 117— new edi
tion of his poems, 118, note— the studies

in which ho engages himself, 120 — he goes
to Scotland upon the expedition raised
to suppress rebellion, 129 — he is elected
M. P. for Newport, 131 — his political
life divided into three parts, 132 — his
speech on illegal exaction and its in
fluence, 135 — his first gi-eat speech on
Episcopacy quoted, 137 — he advocates
the exclusion of bishops from judicial
functions, 142 — he is substantially con
sistent in Church discussions, 14^ — his
second speech "concerning Episcopacy,"
144 note — ho withdraws from the ex
treme liberal party, 146 — he is appointed
Secretary of State, ib. — his policy in
accepting office, 148 — effect the civil
war had upon him, 149 — his death and
personal ajipearance, 153 — the signifi
cance of his position as a churchman, 154
— he supports Episcopacy, ib. — but re
pudiates the jus divinum of bishops, 155
— and all sacerdotal pretensions, ib. —
his discourse on infallibility, 157 — clearly
indicates his attitude in religious mat
ters, ib. — it wants arrangement and
connection, 161 — his 'Reply' to the
'Answer' to his 'Discourse, '162, note —
he advocates rational inquiry, 165 — he
is properly placed at the head of the
contemporary rational thinkers, 167.
Familists, one of the sects of the Com
monwealth, ii. 9, 336, and also note, ib.
Farindon, a moderate Episcopalian, i. 216,
note — tlales's friend, ib.
Fate, Cudworth's three kinds of, (1) Mate
rial, (2) Theological, (3) Stoical, ii. 241
et seq.
Fathers, constantly appealed to in the
Sacramentarian discussions, i. 55— sup
posed special advantages of. in interpret
ing divine truth, 60— Falkland's argu
ment for Protestantism from them, 114,
ib. — bis knowledge of their writings,
119 — Hales's knowledge of their writ
ings, 255 — Taylor on, as a source of
authority, 458.
Fell, Bishop, Life of Hammond by, i. 125,
note.
Ficinus Marsilius, ii. 14.
Finch, the Lord Keeper, saves his life by
flight, i. 133— Heneage, Lord Finch, in
Charles II.'s time, well-known states
man, ii. 235— Cudworth's ' True Intel
lectual System of the Universe' dedi
cated to him, 326— his saying about
Milton, ib.
•Fisher, John, the Roman missionary, his
enthusiasm in the work of proselytism,
i. 269.
Five-Mile Act, i. 121.
Florentine School in fifteenth cent., ii. 14.
' Formula of Concord,' i. 7, note.
Fowler (Edward), Bishop of Gloucester,
author of ' Principles and Practices of
Certain Moderate Divines of the Church
of England,' ii. 35, 437— his treati.se on
' The Design of Christianity,' 438— rela
tion to the Cambridge School, 439 et seq.

494

INDEX.

Freedom, religious, placed on its true
basis by Chillingworth, i. 338 et seq. —
Taylor's position identical, 379 et seq. —
general view of the Cambridge divines
on the subject, ii. 58 et seq.
Fundamentals and non-fundamentals, most
significant principle enunciated by Ar
minianism, i. 34 el seq. — question as to
the authority of the Church in funda
mentals in Hales, 237 ei sej.— Hales's
opinion ofj 238.
General Councils, absurd confldenoe of all
churches in, i. 239 et seq.
Geneva, deputies from, at the Synod of
Dort, i. 174.
Ghosts, belief in, by Cudworth, ii. 260 —
by More and Glanvil, 359— Hobbes's
professed disbelief in them, 260, 359.
Gill, a friend of Milton and acquaintance
of Chillingworth at Oxford, i. 265— his
arraignment, trial, and condemnation,
266.
Glanvill (Joseph), Oxford student, friend
and admirer of Henry More, ii. 443 —
his ' Variety of Dogmatising,' 428, 443
— specimens of the work, 446 ei seq. —
his defence of witchcraft, or ' Sadducis
mus Triumphatus,' 330,390, 443, 448— his
picture of ' Anti-Fanatical Religion and
Free Philosophy,' 450 — his peculiar po
sition as a thinker, and relation to the
Cambridge School, 461 ei seq.
Gloucester, the siege of, i. 151.
Goclenius on the Remonstrants, i. 181.
6od, inseparable from the thought of ab
solute good, i. 9.
Godolphin, Sidney, account of, i. 109.
' Golden Grove,' the, of Jeremy Taylor, i.
362.
Gomar (Francis), accuses Arminius of Pe-
lagianism, i. 14 — at the Synod of Dort,
184 — he demands a duel, 188.
'Goring's Conspiracy,' i. 113, note.
Gospel, tJm, significance of the word, i. 327
— did the Cambridge divines preach the
Gospel? ii. 468.
Greatrakes, celebrated enthusiast, friend
of More and Lady Conway, ii. 328 et seq.
Gregory Nazianzen, his Epistle to Groco-
pius, quoted, i. 401.
Grosart, Rev. A. B., editor of Falkland's
Poems, i. 118, note.
Grotius, imperfect beginnings of historical
criticism traceable in, i. 27 — his return
from exile, 91 — Falkland's verses to
him, ib. — design of his ' De Veritate
Religionis Christian £e,' 92 — his ' De
Imper. sum. Protestat. circa saeva '
quoted, 417, note.
Grynseus of Basil, one of Arminius's
teachers, i. 12.
Hales, John, of Eton, causes which connect
him with the rational movement, i. 170
— the records of his life are scanty, 171
^his birth and parentage, 171 — his
education, 172 — he is appointed Pro

fessor of Greek, 172— and is admitted a
Fellow of Eton, ih. — he attends the
Synod of Dort, 173— his letters written
from Holland, ib. — extracts from them,
174 et seq., ha.— on the speech of
Episcopius, 178 ei seq. — on the dis
mission of the Remonstrants, 187 — he
returns to the Hague, 190 — the Synod
of Dort created a lasting influence on his
opinions, ib. — he left the narrowness of
Calvinism, but did not rush to the other
extreme, 191 — he returns to England,
192 — his love for retirement, 194— his
companionship at Eton, 195 — his "Tract
on Schism and Schismatics," 201 — his
other writings, 202 — he is the reputed
author of the Latin treatises, ib. — the
question of their authorship important,
203 — no ground for regarding him as a
Sooinian, 207— on the Triidty, 208—
his conference with Laud, 209— he re
grets the offence given by his Tract on
Schism, 212 — on the pursuit of truth,
213— he is appointed Canon of Windsor,
214 — he is reduced to poverty, and left
friendless, 215 — his death, 217— sum
mary of the chief features of his charac
ter, 218 et seq. — the publication of his
writings, 220— their value, 221 — his
works of two kinds, 222 — aspects of his
teaching, 223 — theological differences
not religious differences, 224 — an in
stance of it, 226 — another instance quot
ed from his Tract on Schism, 227 ei seq.
— his views of Church authority, 230 —
the interest excited by his Tract on
Schism, 231 — his definition of Schism,
ib. — the grounds of Schism, 233 — his
rational position markedly shown in
two of his tracts, 235 — his views of the
Lord's Supper, 236 et seq. — the ques
tion, " Do Councils err in their
decisions?" answered, 238, 240 — his
analysis of the term " spirit," 241 —
Hales on the " Power of the Keys,"
242 — he is not always rational, 243 — his
rational theory of (Jhristianity, 244
et seq. — he inquires why men rely on
the beliefs of others, 247 — the substi
tutes on which men place their beliefs,
249 ei seq. — Hales as an expositor of
Scripture, 262 — his felicity of thought
and expression, 254 — summary of his
characteristics, 256 et seq.
Hall, Dr Joseph, his sermon at the Synod
of Dort, i. 175.
Hallam, his Constit. Hist, quoted, i. 213,
note, ii. 444 — attributes roughness and
audacity of language to Hales, 239.
Hamilton, Falkland's Poem "Upon the
death of the Ladie Marquesse," i. 16.
Hammond, Dr, i. 120— his writings and
character, 125.
Hampden accuses Falkland of changed
opinions, i. 144.
Hatton, of Kirby, Lord, the patron of
, Jeremy Taylor, i. 359.
Henrietta, the Queen of Charles I., i. 263.

INDEX.

495

Heresy, definition of, by Hales, i. 237 —
Taylor on the nature of, 386 ei seq. —
cause of heresies in the eaily church,
390 ei seq. — heresy, what it is (vide
stillingfleet), 439.
Heylin, his remarks on Hales, i. 209 — are
not to be trusted, 211.
Hill, Dr, friend of Whichcote, made head
of Trinity College, Cambridge, ii. 63 —
character, 55.
Hobbes, his influence upon the rise of the
Cambridge School, ii. 26 — essential
principle of his philosophy to reinstate
authority on a philosophic basis, ib. — a
radical in the service of reaction, ib. —
general tendency of his philosophy, 27
et seq. — antagonism to the Platonic
School, 29 et seq. — unknown to John
Smith, 141— relation to Cudworth, 203,
217, 221, 222, 241, 248, 266— regarded
by Cudworth as an extreme sensa
tionalist, 261 — quotations from the ' De
Give,' 283 — superiority to Cudworth as
a writer, 294 — substance of his doctrines
fairly interpreted by Cudworth, 296
ei seq. — abundance of Scriptural quota
tions in ' Leviathan ' and other works,
118, 298— spirit sceptical, unmoral, and
unchristian, 299 — his professed disbelief
in ghosts, 359, note — his relation to
Henry More, 365, 368 — his saying as to
More's Philosophy, 366 — essential dis
crepancy betwixt his Philosophy and
that of More.
Holland, his Reply to Falkland's 'Dis
course,' i. 162, note.
Holland, national life of, most powerfully
moved by Calvinism, i. 10 — the home of
free opinion in 17th cent., 36 — letters of
Hales written from, 173.
'Holy Living and Holy Dying,' the, of
Jeremy Taylor, i. 362.
Hooker, his statement about ordination,
i. 48— his views of church government,
52— his 'Laws of Ecol. Polity,' 53—
characteristics of the work, do.
Hooper, dogmatic scripturismseenin, i. 68.
Independents and the Presbyterians, i.
324 — they show greater deference to
the King's religious scruples than the
Parliament, 376.
Infallibility, Hales on, i. 214— Knott on,
331, 334— Chillingworth on, ib. — In
fallibility of the Church of Rome, Dis
course of, 157 — it denied by Falkland,
ib. ei seq. — mere numbers afford no pre
sumption of infallibility, 240— examina
tion of the subject by Hales, 241 et seq.
— more general handling of infallibility
by him, 243 et sey.— Chlllingworth's de
nial of infalUbility to the Church of
Rome, 281— Taylor on, 402 et seq.
Infralapsarianism, what it is, i. 11.
Intolerance contrary to the spirit of Ghi-is-
tianity, 164— Hales's protest against in
tolerance, 858— Chillingworth's denun
ciation of, 339 et seq.

Irenieus renounced tradition as a source of
religious belief, i. 400.
Jackson, Dr Thomas, signifloaut name in
history of English theology at begin
ning of 17th cent., ii. 67.
Jacob, and the sceptre not departing from
Judah, variety of the explanations of
the prophecy about, i. 899.
James I. professedly a Calvinist, i. 72.
Jefl'rey, Dr, editor of Whichcote's sermons,
ii. 97.
Jerome, renounced tradition as a source
of religious belief, i. 400.
Jewel, rational in his sacramentarian
teaching, i. 47.
Jonson (Ben), his poem, the " Under
woods," i. 84 — eulogy on, 105 — he is ap
pointed poet-laureate, 192.
Junius, Francis, corresponds with Armi
nius, i. 14.
Jus, the meaning of, with respect to church
government, i. 425 et seq.
Justification, variety of opinion regarding
the diversity of James and Paul concern
ing, i. 399.
Juxon, Bishop of London, he appoints
Taylor rector of Uppingham, i. 355.
Killigrew, jester to King Charles, i. 96.
Knorr, friend of H. More, ii. 345.
Knott, i. 35.
Lambeth Articles, the, origin of, i. 43 —
last proposition of, 44 — never legally
sanctioned, 45.
Latitudinarians, name applied to the
Cambridge School, ii. 6— pamphlet by
S. P. on "New Sect of Latitude-Men," 22
—description of them by Burnet, 32 —
by Fowler, 35 — humorous definition of a
" Latitude-Man," 88.
Latimer, dogmaticscripturismseenin, i.68.
Laud, he is one-sided in the extreme, i. 70
— his statementof Buckingham's Roman
Catholic tendencies, 74— he is voted a
traitor, 237— his connection with Hales,
209 et seq. — with Chillingworth, 261-
266 et sey.— with Jeremy Taylor, 351—
his appreciation of theological genius,
353.
Lecky, Mr, ii. 444, 448.
Le Clerc, publishes extracts from Cud
worth's 'Intellectual System' in his
'Bibliotheque Choisie,' ii. 224. ,
Leicester, Lord, negotiates with Land, i.
10''.
Leucippus, ii. 249, 250.
Lewgar, sends a letter to Chillingworth, i.
279. , . f
Libertines at Geneva, the opponents ot
Calvin, i. 5. , . . t. ¦
Librandus, on the transaction of the busi
ness of tho Synod ot Dort, i. 189.
Lisburn, Jeremy Taylor goes to a Lec
tureship at, i. 867.
Liturgy, a Defence of the, by Jeremy
Taylor, i. 360 et seq.

496

INDEX.

Llandafi', Carleton, Bishop of, on Church
attendance, i. 174.
Long, Thomas, his examination of Hales's
Tract on Schism, i. 231.
Lorenzo, Gary, i. 89, 163.
Lucretius, Atheism of, ii. 141, 155.
Luther, main interests of, evangelical, i. 3
— his vehemence, 4 — his conference with
Zmngle in 1529, 6, 20.
Lutheranism, tardy emergence of the
rational spirit in, and causes thereof, i.
8 et seq. — spirit of contentiousness within
it, 23.
Maizeaux, his account of the life and
writings of Hales, i. 171, note — on the
trustworthiness of Heylins's remarks on
Hales, 211 — on the penury of Hales,
216.
Martin Marprelate pamphlets, i. 57.
Martinius, of Breme, at the Synod of
Dort, i. 188.
Mary, Rowland Taylor suffers martyrdom
in the reign of, i. 349.
Masham (Lady), Cudworth's daughter, ii.
212, 226 — her Discourse on the Love of
God, 226 — disciple of her father's
rational theology, 228.
Mayne, Dr Jasper, the dramatist, i. 96.
" Mercy and Truth," the, of Knott, i. 282.
Melanchthon, a representative of the
earlier humanistic spirit, i. 67 — more
rational than Luther and Knox, 20.
Miorocosmography of Earles, passages
from the, i. 127.
Mildmay, Sir Walter, the founder of
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, ii. 47 —
story regarding foundation of College,
48.
Milton (John), on 'Reformation of Eng
land,' i. 357 — contemporary of Jeremy
Taylor at Cambridge, i. 349, ii. 16
— state of education there, i, 349 — il
lustrated by his College exercises, ii. 16.
Minor Members of Cambridge School,
Culverwel, Worthlngton, Rust, Patrick,
Fowler, Glanvill, Norris, ii. 410 et seq.
Mitford, draws attention to Falkland's
poems, i. 118, note.
Montague, dogmatism of, i. 73 — Bishop of
Chichester, ib. note — letter of, to Falk
land, 114 — his "pastoral," ib.
More, Henry ; in More the Cambridge
movement reached its finest personal
development, ii. 303 — born in 1B14,
three years before Cudworth, in Lin
colnshire, 303 et seq. — his youth and
education at Eton and Christ College,
Cambridge, 304 et seq. — his dislike of
Calvinism, 305 — his study of the Neo-
Platonic writers, 305— his scepticism
and emergence from it, 307 ei seq. —
chosen fellow of Christ College about
1640, 323— Philosophical Poems, 1642,
7, 313 et seq. — his vision recounted in
his 'Divine Dialogues,' 217 ei seq. — ¦
refuses all Church perferment, 324
et seq. — tutor and friend of Lady

Conway, 326 et seq. — his connection with
Van Helmont and Greatrakes, 328 el seq.
— strange notion as to his bodily en
dowments, 332 ei seq. — his mode of life,
334 ei seq. — his relation with the
Quakers, 328 et seq. — his love of the
Church of England, 338 — his seclusion
at Ragley and Christ College, 339 ei seq.
— his activity as an author extends
from 1642 to 1687, 341— reception ot
his writings, ib.— classification of his
writings, 342 et seq. — the ' Divine
Dialogues,' the most interesting of his
works, 344 — person and character, 347
et seq. — estimate of More as a Christian
thinker, 350 ei seq. — his method, 353 ei seq.
— his mysticism, 358 etseq. — generalthe-
ological views, 360 et seq. — position as
a thinker determined, with relation to
Descartes and Hobbes, 364 et seq. —
change of attitude towards Descartes,
373 — great aim as a thinker to vindicate
a true sphere of spiritual being, 377
— his notion of spirit, 379 et seq. — his
proof of the existence of spirit, 325
el seq. — special nature and organ of
spirit, 392 et seq. — More as a moralist,
397 et seq. — substantive value of More's
thought, 406 et seq.
More, Sir Thomas, i. 2.
Morison, Sir Richard, the father-in-law of
Falkland, 1. 87.
Montanus condemned for heresy by Epi-
phanus, i. 391.
Morley, zeal of, against Popery, i. 132
— a reputed Calvinist, 124 — his defini
tion of Arminianism, ib.
Moschus (Moses), supposed inventor of
the atomic theory, ii. 249, 352.
Neo-Platonists, frequently quoted by the
Cambridge divines, ii. 137, 201, 313.
"New learning" traceable in Italy and
England before Refoi-mation, i. 2.
Newbury, the battle of, i. 151.
Nice, the Council of, i. 251.
Nicene Fathers, Taylor regarding the, i.
393.
Nicholas, the Deacon of Autioch, con
demned for heresy by Jerome, i. 391.
Nicholson, Wm., his association with
Jeremy Taylor, i. 361.
Niemeyer, his ' Collectio Confessionum in
Ecclesiis Reformatis,' i. 21, note.
Norris (John), idealist. Rector of Bemer
ton, ii.227 — his doctrine as to the love of
God opposed by Lady Masham (Cud
worth's daughter), tJ. — educated at
Oxford, 452 — friend, admirer, and cor
respondent of Henry More in his old
age, 443, 453— relation to the Cambridge
philosophy, 453 et seq.
Nottingham, raising of Royal Standard at,
23d Aug. 1642, i. 146.
Opinion, Hales's views as to variety of
religious opinion, i. 223 et seq. — Chll
lingworth's views, 336 et seq. — Jeremy

INDEX.

497

Taylor on same subject, 379 — Which
cote on same, ii. 101 et seq. — poetical
descriptiou of by More, 338.
Ordei-s, Cranmer's opinions on bishop
and presbyter, i. 48 — the question of
Episcopal ordination is not regarded as
vital, 49 — nor with Hales, ii. 442 et .vq.
Original sin, sixteen several opinions about,
i. 399.
" Oxford reformers," i. 3, note.
Parker, Dr Samuel, Bishop of O.xford, i.
222, note ; u. 35, 219.
Parker, Ai'chbishop, his canons an indica
tion of the state of opinion in the
Church, i. 56, note.
Parliament, the Long, divided into consti
tutionalists and radical reformers, i. 145.
Parliament petitions Charles regarding the
Jesuits, i. 263.
Patrick (Simon), Bishop of Ely, supposed
to be S. P., author of " A brief account
of the new sect of Latitude men," pub
lished in 1662, ii. 22 — his authorship of
the pamphlet doubtful, ib. — connec
tion with the Cambridge school, 440 ei
seq.
"Peace and concord of the Church,"
treatise on,, i. 205.
Pearson, Dr, Bishop of Chester, his admira
tion of Hales, i. 220 — his eulogium on
Hales quoted, 221, note.
Philip n.,i. 10.
Philosophy of Religion, ii. 484 ei seq.
Pici of Mu-audola, ii. 14, note.
Pickering, probably the informant against
Gm, i. 268.
PieiTcpoint, Mr, i. 414.
Plastic nature, Cudworth's theory, ii. 269,
273— More's theory, 397.
Plato, ii. 24, 25, 81, 67, 136.
Platonic academy at Florence, i. 2.
Platonists, name given to the Cambridge
school, ii. 6 — school formed by the study
of the Platonic writings, 24 — importance
of the Platonic revivaf in England, 25 —
confession by the Cambridge divines of
PJatonism and Neo-Platonism, 478, 481
— rather Platonists, according to Cole
ridge, 479— difference ofthe genuine Pla
tonic spirit and the spirit of the Cam
bridge divines, 480.
Plotinus, ii. 32, 146, 192, 309, 479, 381.
Pope, the, as a source of authority in reli
gious opinion, i. 402.
Popery, why obnoxious to the Reformers,
i. 4 — its activities roused a spirit of new
thought in England in seventeenth cen
tury, 74— attempts to regain the English
court and people, ib. — Whichcote on, ii.
109 et seq.—n. More's dislike of, 336.
Potter, Dr, his reply to " Charity Mista
ken," i. 282.
"Power ofthe keys,"tractconcerning,i.202.
Power of the magistrate in religion, vide
Stillingfleet, i. 433 et seq.
Prayer, forms of, VSTiichcote on, ii. 109.
Presbytery, Scottish, Falkland's objections

to, i. 155 — Henry More's views regard
ing, ii. 39.
" Pretence of the Spirit," Taylor on the, i.
396. 1 ' J-
Prophesying, The Liberty of, of Jeremy
Taylor, i. 364.
Protestant Churches, demand upon the,
to give a definite account of their doc
trines and principles, i. 21.
Protestantism, spirit of national inquiry in,
specially conspicuous before the Refor
mation, i. 1, 2 — intellectual freedom not
so prominent with the great Reformers,
2 et seq. — causes of the subsidence of the
rational .side of Protestantism, 4 el seq.
— Protestantism stationary both in char
acter and progress, 6 ei seq. — reappearance
of its rational side, 7 — earliest reaction
against Calvinism in Holland, 8 et seq. —
course of the reaction, and its general in
fluence upon Protestantism, 10 et seq. —
Protestantism becomes dogmatic, multi
plying confessions, 20 et seq. — Protestant
ism imperfect where it does not reach
ultimate gi'ounds of religious knowledge
(Hales), 247 — can Protestantism be a
means of salvation ? (vide Chillingworth),
319 ei seq.
Prynne impugns the prelatic constitution
of the Church of England, i. 94.
Puritans, their theory of the ministry
against the Anglo-Catholics, i. 58— Pres-
byterianism clearly revealed to the, i. 65.
Puritanism, dogmatic, the oifspring of an
uncritical age, i. 67 — claims to, rests on
direct Scriptural authority, i. 65 — com
pleteness of its antagonism to Anglo-
Catholicism, 66 — character of its theolo
gy, 67 et seq. — in its Presbyterian form
not connected directly with the English
Reformation, 69 et seq. — grows through
opposition, ib. et seq. — its instincts of po
litical liberty its highest element, 259 —
Hales and Chillingworth fail to appreci
ate this element, 293.
Pym, he opposes Falkland's suggestion re
garding Strafford, i. 133.
Pythagoras, ii. 249 — "monads" of, 481.
Quakerism disposed of by Stillingfleet, i.
444.
Rational party, natural growth out of the
opposition between Puritan and Anglo-
Catholic, i. 71 et seq. — special causes of
the new movement, 72 et seq. — Latltu
dinarlan views of Church government in
Trinity College, Dublin, 82 — theologi
cal discussions among Falkland's literary
associates, 112 e< seq. — Falkland's public
career shows the rational reflective turn
of his mind, 132 et seq. —the significance
of his position as head of the rational
party, 155 et seq. — influence of Synod of
Dort upon the progress of rational opin
ion and the views of Hales, 190 et seq.
— Chillingworth's position in this party
summarised, 343— connection of Taylor

498

INDEX.

and Stillingfleet with the party, 348—
centre of this party shifted from Oxford
to Cambridge, 418 — contrasts betwixt
the Oxford and Cambridge phase of the
party, ii. 5 et seq. — progress of the party
under filename of Cambridge Platonists,
ii. passim —Whichcote's rationalism, ii.
68, 99 et seq. — Cudworth's rationalism,
233 ei seq. — More's rationalism, 353 ei
seq. — Culverwel's connection with the
party, 411 et seq. — estimate of the ser
vices of the rational theologians, con
cluding chapter, 456 et seq.
Reason, Suckling's ' Account of Religion
by Reason,' i. 1-112— Falkland's views
as to reason, 161 — Hales's views, 243 et
seq. — Chillingworth's views, 231 et seq.
— J. Taylor's views, 404 et seq.
Reason and religion, II. , chap. ii. — 'Which
cote's views of the use of reason in reli
gion, 99 et seq., 853.
Reformation, tlie product of many influ
ences, i. 1 — rational spirit in its earlier
manifestations, Erasmus, Colet, Wessel, 2
— religious opinion in England from the
Reformation, I., chap. ii. — singularity of
English Reformation amongst the move
ments of the sixteenth century, 37 et seq.
Reformers before the Reformation, i. 2;
ii. 3, note.
Religion, Hales on religion and dogmatic
orthodoxy, I., chap. iv. — the Bible the
religion of Protestants, chap. v. — charac
ter of true religion, as drawn by Which
cote, ii.l04 ei seq.' — same as drawn by J.
Smith, 185.
' Religion of Protestants,' the, of Chilling
worth, i. 292 — quotations from it, 827
et seq.
Remonstrants, why so called, 1. 15, note
— their arrival at the Synod of Dort, 177
— they object to the Synod being judge,
ib. — they are refused a copy of the de
cree issued against them, 182 — they are
dismissed from the Synod, 186.
Repentance, doctrine and practice of, trea
tise on the, by Jeremy Taylor, i. 362.
Resurrection, Cudworth's doctrine of, ii. 279.
Reuchlin, i. 2.
Ridley, views of, regarding the Eucharist,
i. 47 — dogmatic scripturism seen in, 68.
Risdeu, a fellow-student of Taylor's, i. 351.
Romanism, Chillingworth's conversion to,
i. 271 et seq. — two standing-points in his
reconversion, 1. 275 et seq.
Romanists, the, repudiate the right of pri
vate judgment, i. 160.
Rome, the position of Church of, i. 158 —
the alleged ground of its infallibility, 159.
Rust, George, panegyri,st of Jeremy Taylor,
i. 851 — recommended to Thurloe by
Cudworth, ii. 208— one of the minor
members of Cambridge school, 433 et
seq. — JeremyTaylor'ssuccessorasBishop
of Dromore, 433 — ^his ' Discourse of
Truth,' published in 1682, 434— charac
ter of his discourse, 435 ei seq. — on the
turning-point of Taylor's career, i. 852.

Rutherford, Samuel, note on, i. 352 — ' Ex
am. Armin.' quoted, 29— his ' Free Dis
putations,' 28, 33 passim.
Saadi, the Persian poet, story from a tale
of, i. 409.
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, Hales's
tract on, i. 202.
Sacraments, views as to — at first the .same
in the Church of England as in the Gen
evan Churches, i. 46 — Cranmer and
Ridley reject corporeal eflicacy, 47 —
Hales on the Sacrament of the Lord's
Supper, 285 et seq. — there are many de
finitions of the, 399.
St Bartholomew's Day, i. 121.
St Paul, why speciaDy dear to the Re
formers, i. 4.
Salter, Dr, ii. 54 — re-edits Whichcote's
'Aphorisms ' in 1758, 97.
Salter, the Lady, she assists Hales, i. 215,
note.
Sanderson, his distress at Jeremy Taylor's
speculations, i. 368.
Sandys, George, intimacy of, with Falk
land, i. 100— his ' Travels,' i. 101.
Savile, Sir Henry, the patron of Hales, i.
195 — his acquirements and liberality, 196.
Savoy Conference, i. 123.
Schism, Hales on the origin of, 'with dis
tinction between schism and heresy, i.
227 ei seq. — definition of schism, 231 —
creeps into the Church in three ways,
232 — schism, what it is (vide Stilling
fleet), 439.
"Scotch Ecclesiastical Government," why
Falkland objected to, i. 165.
Scougal, his ' Life of God in the Soul of
Man,' ii. 96.
Scripture, its supreme authority recognised
equally by Calvinists and Arminians, i.
26— different application of the theory of
Scripture by the two parties, 27 — incon
sistency of the extreme theory, 28 et seq.
primacy of Scripture becomes a dogma,
80 — in England attempt made to deliver
the study of it from scholasticism, 38 —
Colet and Tyndale on Scriptural exposi
tion, 39 et seq. — handling of Scripture in
the " Thirty -nine " Articles, 42 et seq. —
Scripture and Church government, 50
et seq . — use of Scripture am ong the earlier
Anglo-Catholics, 66 — among the Puri
tans, 67 — Scripture and the Fathers in
Anglo-Catholicism, 61 — Scripture an in
fallible dogmatic codeinPuritanism, 64 —
Falkland on interpretation of Scripture,
161, 164 ei seq. — Hales on same subject,
253 — meaning of Scripture, how known ?
(vide Chillingworth) 325 ei seq. — Taylor
on Scripture as a source of authority,
396 et seq. — ' The Abuses of Hard Places
in,' a sermon on, by Hales, 258.
Selden, learning of, his treatise on tithes,
i. 98— passage from 'Table Talk' of, 100
— characteristics of, 98.
"Seminary Priests," activity of the, 1.263.
Servetus, i. 6.

INDEX.

499

Sheldon, appointed Archbishop of Canter
bury, i. 121 — more a politici.an than a
divine, 122— elected Warden of All Souls',
123 — a reputed Calvinist, 124 — his cor-
resi^ondence with Chillingworth regard
ing Church creeds, 283 — he opposes
Jeremy Taylor's election to a Fellow
ship, 362 — extreme conduct at the Res
toration, i. 463, ii. 214.
' Shepherd's Paradise,' the, of Montague, i.
114.
' Smectymnuans,' the, the controversy with,
i. 358.
Smith, John, in him the movement initi
ated by Whichcote becomes more specu
lative, ii. 121 — a thinker without a bio
graphy, 122 — son of a small farmer in
Northamptonshire, 123 — educated at
Emmanuel, pupil of Whichcote there, ib.
— chosen a Fellow of Queen's College
(1644), 124 — character by Worthlngton,
125 et seq. — by Patrick, 127 et seq. — great
gifts as a teacher, 129 — character of his
' Select Discourses,' 184 et seq. — subjects
of the Discoui-ses, 138 ei seq. — (a) How
to attain Divine Knowledge, 140 el seq. —
(b) Superstition and Atheism, 157 et seq.
— (c) Immortality, 157 el seq. — (d) God,
169 et seq. — (c) Revelation or Prophecy,
174 et seq. — (/) Distinctive Character of
Christianity, 180 et seq. — solidity and
power of Smith as a religious thinker,
estimate of his philosophical position,
186 et seq.
Socinlanism wrongly charged against Falk
land and Hales, i. 202, 206, note — same
charge made against Chillingworth, 290
— the "Rise, Growth, and Danger of,"
i. 296.
Sozomen, his Hist. Eccles., quoted, i. 421,
note.
Spirit-thumping, 11. 369, 360.
Stapleton, Dr, his writings the means of
unsettling Chlllingworth's Romish con
victions, i. 276.
Staupitz, i. 2.
Stillingfleet, Edward, associated with the
Chui'ch of the Restoration and Revolu
tion, i. 411 — his birth and education,
413— he is appointed Rector of Sutton,
414 — his various church preferments,
415 — publication of his 'Irenictim,' 414 —
he is the expositor of the idea of " ac
commodation," 417 — general design of
the ' Irenioum,' 423 — first part of the
argument, how far founded on divine
law, 425 et seq. — ^how far founded on nat-
TU-al law, 441 et seq. — he holds radical
power of ordination to lie in presbyters,
453 — conclusion of his argument, 461 —
elements of a Church constitution as de
fined by him, 462.
Stoics, H. More's opposition to, ii. 401.
Straton of Lampsacus, ii. 252.
Subscription to articles, meaning of, accord
ing to Chillingworth, i. 283 et seq.— see
especially note, ib. et seq.
Suckling, his treatise, i. 112— his fate.

113 — his verses addressed to Hales,
19,1.
Superstition, ii. 139— along with atheism
opposed to divine knowledge, 151.
Supralapsarianism, what is it ? i. 11.
Taylor, Jeremy, his main features as a
critic, i. 346 — his education, 349 — he is
elected Fellow of Gains College, Cam
bridge, 351— and Fellow of All Souls',
Oxford, 352— his appointment to Up
pingham Rectory, 855 — he is suspected
of attachment to Romanism, 856 — his
treatise in defence of Episcopacy, 357 —
its character, 358 — he is taken prisoner
among the Royalists at Cardigan, 859 —
he teaches a school in the parish of Llan-
vihangel-Aberbythic, 361 — sketch of his
literary and theological activity,362 et seq.
— his external life and circumstances, 365
— he is induced to accept a lectureship
in Ireland, 367 — ^his appointment to the
bishopric of Down and Connor, 369 — of
his episcopate, ib. — ^liis death, 371 — ori
gin of liis ' Liberty of Prophesying, ' 372
et seq. — the principles on which the argu
ment of ' Liberty of Prophesying ' rests
exhibited, 378 — his position identical
with that of Chillingworth, 379, 406
— on the "nature of faith," 380 et seq. —
his belief regarding Episcopacy, 385 — on
the "nature of heresy," 386 et seq. — his
account of the various heresies in the
early Church, 399 — on the sources of
authority in religious opinion, 396 — on
the authority of reason as ground of re
ligious belief, 404 — his toleration of re
ligious opinions, 406 — his basis for the
Christian Church, 408 — passage from the
close of his treatise, 409.
Tedworth, supposed spiritual disturbances
in a house there, ii. 449.
" Testimony of the ministers in the pro
vince of Essex, a ; " "A testimony sub
scribed by the ministers within the pro
vince of London, against errors,heresies,
and blasphemies of these times," quoted,
ii. 9.
Theism, Cudworth's treatment of the essen
tial distinction of a theistic and atheistic
theory of the universe, 250 et seq.
Thirty Years' War, the miseries of the, de
stroyed activity of thought in the Lu
theran Church, i. 7.
Tillotson, Archbishop, preaches Which
cote's funeral sermon, ii. 49, 91 — high
wisdom and character, 440.
"Tract concerning Schisms and Schis
matics," i. 201.
Tradition as a source of authority in reli
gious opinion, i. 400 — Jeremy Taylor on,
ib.
Trinity, Cudworth's doctrine of, ii. 27Seiseq.
Trinity Church, Cambridge, influence of
Whichcote as afternoon lecturer there, ii.
84 et seq.
Triplet, Dr Thomas, the editor of Falk
land's 'Discourse,' &c., i. 163, note.

Soo

INDEX.

Tritheistic, epithet applied to Cudworth,
ii. 222.
Tuckney, Whichcote's tutor at Emmanuel,
ii. 47 — made master of Emmanuel, 63 —
his abilities and character, 63 et seq. —
correspondence with Whichcote, 59 el seq.
— account of, 53 — appointed regius pro
fessor of divinity, 54.
Tyndale, i. 2 — at once rational and evan
gelical, 38 — characteristics of him, 41 —
dogmatic scepticism seen in him, 68.
Universality, a substitute for personal in
quiry in matters of religion, i. 250.
Usher, the reputed author of the Irish
Articles, i. 82.
Van Helmont, More's associate, ii. 829.
"Via Intelligentiffi," the, of Jeremy
Taylor, i. 364.
Waller, Edmund, genius of, 1. 110 — his
selfish nature, i. 110 — Sir William re
captures Houndel Castle, i. 296.
Walpole, Horace, mistakes the true signi
ficance of Falkland's career, i. 79.
Walton on Bishop Earles, quoted, i. 128 —
his life of Wotton quoted, 198.
Weuman, Sir Francis, a most intimate
friend of Falkland, i. 108— his character,
ib.
Wessel, John, i. 2.
Westminster Assembly, almost no differ
ences of doctrinal opinion within, ii. 10
— its theory bears the stamp of dogmatic
uniformity, ib.
Westminster Confession of Faith, ultra-dog
matic character of, quoted, ii. 33.
Whichcote, Benjamin, stands at the head
of a new theological movement in Cam
bridge, ii. 4, 5 — significance of his in
fluence hitherto unappreciated, 46 —
birth and education at Emmanuel Col
lege, 47 — his appointment to the Provost
ship of King's College, 48— brought up
among Puritans, 49 — his letters to
, Tuckney quoted, 60 — significance of
his appointment to the Provostship,
52 — names specially associated with
his, 58 — the nature of his studies differ
ent from his friends', 67 — Tuckney on
theories of new opinions in Whichcote,
ib. — his now opinions make themselves
felt, 59 — the effect produced by his
" Commencement Sermon," ih. — cor-
resjiondence between him and Tuckney,
59 et seq. — the commencement of the
new movement fully shown in the pas
sages quoted, 80— he is not indebted to
the Dutch Arminians for his views, 81 —
he is more searching in thought than

Chillingivorth, 82— the problem pervad
ing his mind, i6.— Tuckney's apprehen
sion regarding Whichcote's teaching, 83
— 'Whichcote's influence lay in his
preaching, 84 — his discourses preserved
in an imperfect form, 85 — he is not a
partisan, 87 — ^he is expelled from the
provostship, and presented to the vicar
age of St Laurence Jewry, 89 — his death,
90 — his funeral sermon preached by
Tillotson, ib. — Tillotson's character of
him, 91 el seq. — his teaching exhibited
under several heads, 93 el seq. — remarks
on his teaching, 112 et seq.
Whitelock, story told by, concerning Sel
den, i. 100.
Whitgift on Church government, i. 50.
Wilkins's (Bishop) connection with the
Cambridge school, ii. 32, 442.
William of Orange, i. 10.
Williams, Lord-Keeper under James I.,
i. 70 — Holland gains independence un
der, 91.
Windebank saves his life by flight, i. 1 33.
Wishart, Principal, reprints Whichcote's
Sennons in 1742, ii. 95 et seq. — Moder
ator of Church of Scotland, 96.
Witchcraft, Glanvill's defence of, ii. 443 —
issued with additions by More, imder
the title of ' Sadducismus Triumphatus,'
ib. — character of the book, 448 — contro
versy arising out of it, 449.
Wood, his 'Athene Oxoniensis,' i. 171.
Worthington, John, editor of Smith's ' Se
lect Discourses,' ii. 122 — his Diary and
Correspondence, edited for Chetham
Society, 42S — author of ' Discourses '
and 'Miscellanies,' 427 — educated at Em
manuel College, ib. — Master of Jesus Col
lege, ib. — labours as a clergyman, ib. —
con'espondent of Mr Samuel Hartlet, ib.
— character of his writings, 428 etseq. —
married Wbichcote's niece, love-letter to
her, 431 el seq.
Wotton, Sir Henry, his education and
scholarship, i. 197 — he is appointed
ambassador to the republic of Venice,
ih. — he returns to England, and is ap
pointed Provost of Eton College, 198 —
his catholicity of feeling, 199 — stories
regarding him, 199 — his death, 201.
Wren, Bishop of Ely, his impeachment, i.
137.
Wyatt, William, his association with Jer
emy Taylor, i. 361.
Zwickau fanatics, i. 5.
Zwingli, the most candid and rational
leader of the Reformation movement, i. 6
^more rational than Luther and Calvin,
20.

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