DIVINITY.
[Sidenote: The Pulpit in the Restoration epoch.]
Passing from the biographers of divines to the divines themselves, we
observe that, with the signal exception of _Pilgrim's Progress_, nearly
all the writers in this department whose productions have established a
claim to rank among English classics belong to 'the company of the
preachers.' This is not in itself surprising; preaching stimulates
eloquence, and the homilist enjoys a much greater freedom of range, and
a fuller exemption from restraint, than the writer upon strictly
technical or professional subjects. It does, however, at first sight
seem remarkable, that an age so generally decried for immorality as the
Restoration should, with the decade immediately preceding, have been the
golden age of the English pulpit. In fact, as we have implied when
treating of the drama, the apparent licence of the age did not really
extend much beyond gay and fashionable circles, which could not greatly
affect the pulpit except to its advantage, by furnishing it with
impressive topics. Even in these circles immorality was far from
necessarily implying irreligion; and the sober citizens who crowded
churches and meeting-houses, and the universities, whose routine
afforded so many opportunities for the delivery of discourses from the
pulpit, were much as heretofore. In the rudimentary condition of the
press as an organ of public information and education, and when the
meeting was hardly an institution as yet, the spoken word possessed a
power of which the newspaper has since gone far to deprive it. In times
of public disquiet, such as the days of the Exclusion Bill or those
which preceded the Revolution, churches and chapels were crowded with
people seeking guidance, popular sermons went through edition after
edition, and popular divines were almost tribunes of the people.
Theological considerations moulded political opinion to a degree now
hardly conceivable; the storm of pamphlets on both sides called forth by
the resipiscence or tergiversation of a leading divine like Sherlock
shows what importance attached to his conduct upon either view of it.
The age, moreover, was in the stage of literary development most
favourable for pulpit eloquence. As a huge glacier takes longer to melt
than a small one, the quaint and involved periods of the Elizabethan
pulpit stood out longer than ordinary prose against the disintegrating
influence of seventeenth century taste, and while the new movement was
triumphant in most branches of literature, it in general only affected
the style of the sermon so far as to chasten and mellow it, leaving it
still that sonorous dignity and that flavour of the antique with which
stately and impressive eloquence can rarely dispense. The two greatest
preachers, Barrow and South, stand just upon this culminating point of
excellence, uniting the majesty of the old style to the ease and
clearness of the new. Tillotson, going a step further, and bringing the
pulpit down to the level of ordinary educated society, performed indeed
a most useful work, but inevitably prepared the way for the sensible but
unimpressive preaching of the next century.
[Sidenote: Isaac Barrow (1630-1677).]
Isaac Barrow, Master of Trinity College, was the son of a respectable
tradesman, linendraper to Charles I. His royalist and Arminian opinions
kept him back under the Commonwealth, but after the Restoration he was
acknowledged as the first mathematician of his country, except, as he
was the first to allow, another Isaac whose surname was Newton. Newton,
who had been Barrow's pupil, revised his lectures on optics (1669), an
epoch-making work, but composed in Latin, as were his scarcely less
celebrated lectures on geometry. His reputation as an English classic
rests upon two great theological works, his _Treatise on the Pope's
Supremacy_ (edited, after his death, by Tillotson) and his _Exposition
of the Creed_, and upon his sermons, which do not seem to have been
extremely popular in his own day, though gaining the suffrage of such
dissimilar men as Locke and Charles II., who called Barrow 'an unfair
preacher, because he exhausted every topic, and left no room for
anything to be said by anyone who came after him.' It may be reasonably
conjectured that when Barrow preached before Charles he did not indulge
in the inordinate expansiveness, it was not prolixity, that sometimes
drove away his congregation. It is to the king's honour that his
bestowal of the mastership of Trinity upon Barrow was entirely his own
act.
[Sidenote: Robert South (1633-1716).]
Robert South, on the whole perhaps the greatest preacher of his age, was
born in 1633, and educated at Westminster and Christ Church. He is
accused by Antony Wood, the principal authority for his life, of having
been a time-server, who sided successively with the Independents, the
Presbyterians, and the Church of England in the days of their power.
Wood seems, however, to have had some private grievance against him; and
if South was really at the same time so pliant and so able, it seems
strange that he should have attained no higher preferment than stalls at
Christ Church and Westminster. Quarrelsome he certainly was, and he
entered into a most acrimonious controversy with Sherlock, which it
required a royal proclamation to compose. He died in 1716.
[Sidenote: John Tillotson (1630-1694).]
Unlike South's, the character of John Tillotson is no matter for
controversy. With the possible exception of Archbishop Herring,[11] he
was the most amiable man that ever filled the see of Canterbury, and was
pronounced by the discerning and experienced William III. the best
friend he had ever had and the best man he had ever known. To the
meekness of the pastor Tillotson added the qualities of the statesman,
and happy was it for the Church of England that such a man could be
found to fill the primacy at such a time. As a master of oratory he is
greatly inferior in eloquence to both Barrow and South, but historically
is more important than either, for Addison was influenced by him, and
his discourses long gave the tone to the English pulpit, affording the
almost universally accepted model throughout the greater part of the
eighteenth century.
Of these three great preachers South is certainly the greatest as
respects eloquence and energy of diction. Almost every sentence is
striking, and at the same time in perfect good taste. By so much,
however, as he surpasses his rivals in purely literary qualities, does
he fall below them in others even more essential to the preacher. His
judgment is often greatly at fault, he commits himself to plainly
untenable propositions, and enforces them with the confidence of one
displaying self-evident truths. After a few experiences of this kind the
reader begins to look upon him as a rhetorician, and to prefer the more
cautious, but still vivid and vigorous ratiocination of Barrow; or the
'sweet reasonableness' of Tillotson, inferior to Barrow, as he to South,
in the gifts of the consummate orator, but more truly persuasive in the
gentleness of his expostulation and his transparent candour.
Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester (1635-1699), though a fine
preacher, is less remembered in this capacity than for his unsuccessful
controversy with Locke and his _Origines Sacrae_, a work of great
learning in defence of the Church of England, which Coleridge in his
_Notes on Books_ emphatically prefers to the corresponding labours of
Chillingworth. Coleridge was naturally prejudiced in favour of the
antagonist of Locke, whose graces of mind and person, however, are
attested by a dispassionate witness, Pepys.
Theology, apart from eloquence, is hardly entitled to a place in
literary history; yet some of the theologians of the period were too
illustrious to be passed over without mention. John Pearson, Bishop of
Chester (1612-1686), ranks among the Fathers of the Church of England by
his standard work on the Creed. 'Pearson's very dust,' says Bentley, 'is
gold.' Barrow's great controversial treatise has been mentioned. George
Bull, Bishop of St. David's (1634-1710), achieved even more, for he
extorted the thanks of the clergy of France by his _Nicaenae Fidei
Defensio_ (1685), written in Latin, but afterwards translated into
English. The author's object was to prove the orthodoxy of the
Ante-Nicene Fathers, which had been disputed by several Protestant
divines; the cost of publication was borne by the munificent Bishop
Fell. The French prelates further paid Bull the equivocal compliment of
wondering why in the world so excellent a man did not join the Church of
Rome. _Talis cum sis, utinam noster esses._ Bull expounded his
difficulties in a treatise on the corruptions of that church, the most
popular of his works at home, but which, being written in English,
failed to vindicate his position in the eyes of the Frenchmen. Next to
these giants of learning may be named a very dissimilar person, Richard
Baxter (1615-1691), whom moderate men had designated for a bishopric at
the Restoration, but whom the Bartholomew's Day of 1662 made a
Nonconformist. He wrote one hundred and sixty-eight books, two of which
have survived, _A Call to the Unconverted_ and _The Saints' Everlasting
Rest_. The latter Professor Minto calls 'a volume of pious thoughts that
have a peculiar interest when we view them as the aspirations of an
infirm man turning wearily from the distractions of a time utterly out
of joint.' The writings of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, mostly
belong to a previous period; but the _No Cross, no Crown_ of William
Penn (1644-1718) falls within Restoration literature. A far more
important work is the _Apology_ of Robert Barclay (1648-1690). This
remarkable book, which has been recommended by bishops to theological
students as the best available for many purposes, is the standard
exposition of Quakerism, and undoubtedly ranks among the classics of its
period. Mr. Leslie Stephen describes it as 'one of the most impressive
theological writings of the century: grave, logical, and often marked by
the eloquence of lofty moral convictions.' 'The St. Paul of the
Quakers,' says Coleridge of the author. Barclay, the descendant of an
old Scotch family, became a Quaker in 1667, following the example of his
father. He underwent some persecution, but was in the main shielded by
the favour of James II. His works were collected by Penn in 1692.
Two devotional writings of the age, besides Baxter's, obtained
sufficient currency to merit a place in the history of literature. _The
Whole Duty of Man_, first published in 1658, is an excellent
representative of the sobriety and sound sense characteristic of the
Church of England. At the same time it must be confessed that it has
more reason than unction, and seeks rather to menace and upbraid than to
allure men into the religious life. At the present day it would be
pronounced grievously deficient in fervour, servile in its political
teachings, and too exclusive in its appeals to prudential and
self-interested motives; but its adaptation to a positive and prosaic
age was sufficiently evinced by a circulation enormous for the period.
The authorship is involved in mystery: it is usually attributed to
Archbishop Sterne or Lady Pakington; but Sterne can hardly have had time
to write the seven other treatises ascribed, apparently with good
ground, to the same author; and it is clearly not the composition of a
woman. Evelyn attributes it on the authority of Archbishop Tenison to a
Dr. Chaplin, of University College, Oxford, who cannot be traced. Lately
Mr. Dobie, in the _Academy_, has ascribed it and its companions on
strong grounds to Richard Allestree, Provost of Eton, an intimate friend
of Bishop Fell. The Bishop appears to have copied some of them in his
own hand, and certainly was acquainted with the authorship. The most
important of the other works ascribed to the writer of _The Whole Duty
of Man_ are _The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety_, _The Gentleman
and Ladies' Calling_, and _The Government of the Tongue_.
Another work of edification, which almost rivalled the popularity of
_The Whole Duty of Man_, was the _Practical Discourse concerning Death_
(1689), by William Sherlock (1641-1707), Master of the Temple and Dean
of St. Paul's, the divine whose tergiversations respecting the oath of
allegiance to William and Mary are so amusingly detailed by Macaulay. It
is a model of clear and forcible writing, but on the lowest plane of
unspiritual selfishness. 'How unreasonable is it for us to trouble
ourselves about this world longer than we are like to continue in it!'
exclaims Sherlock, with the air of one apologizing for enunciating a
truism.
[Sidenote: John Ray (1628-1705).]
Natural theology had a representative of much higher moral calibre than
professional theology found in Sherlock in John Ray (1628-1705). Ray, a
Cambridge man, prevented by scruples from ministering in the Church of
England after the fatal legislation of 1662, but substantially accepting
her doctrines, was the first English naturalist of eminence, and wrote
chiefly in Latin, but composed his treatise on _The Wisdom of God in the
Creation_ in his mother-tongue. The anthropomorphism of this earnest,
lucid, and ingenious book, the prototype of Paley's, is a defect hardly
to be avoided in an age when the Deity was almost universally conceived
as an artificer; and yet Ray comes very near indeed to the conception of
a power immanent in Nature. His style is limpid and persuasive; his
reasoning cogent; his good sense is apparent in his discussion of
spontaneous generation and the stories related in its support, although
the caution and modesty of his temper sometimes incline him to defer too
much to authority. He has no mercy, for example, on frogs rained from
the sky, but will not, in the face of the testimony of eye-witnesses,
carry scepticism to the point of disputing that they may have been
occasionally found immured in the middle of stones.
Ray's teleology had allies in Derham (1657-1735), an observant
naturalist and author of _Astro-Theology_, and in the Hon. Robert Boyle,
the best of men in disposition, and an admirable natural philosopher,
but feeble and diffuse as a natural theologian.
[Sidenote: Thomas Burnet (1635?-1715).]
Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charter House, is the reverse of Boyle in
most respects; a visionary as natural theologian and natural
philosopher, but the only writer of his day, the great preachers
excepted, who attained to sublimity in prose. A Cambridge man and a
pupil of Tillotson, Burnet was elected Master of the Charter House in
1685, and signalized himself by his courage in resisting James II.'s
attempted intrusion of Roman Catholics into the foundation. He became
Clerk of the Closet to William III., which post he was obliged to resign
from the freedom of his criticism of the Mosaic narrative, but retained
his mastership unmolested to his death. He left behind him two
theological works in Latin, privately printed, but soon afterwards
published, _De Fide et officiis Christianorum_ and _De Statu mortuorum
et resurgentium_, in which he carried the liberty of speculation very
far. The book on which his fame rests, _The Sacred Theory of the Earth_,
was also originally composed in Latin, to which circumstance it is
probably indebted for much of its exceptional dignity of style. It was
intended by the author as sober natural philosophy, but to a scientific
age appears a poetical vision of the former immersion and future
conflagration of the earth, justly compared by Mr. Gosse to the gorgeous
apocalyptic imaginings of Danby and Martin. According to Burnet the
earth was originally an egg both in shape and smoothness, enclosing the
waters in an 'antediluvian abyss.' At the universal deluge the earth
sank into this internal cavity. Upon the subsidence of the waters the
land partly emerged in the confused shapes into which it had been
tumbled by the crash, partly remained beneath the sea. The argument is
very ingenious and entertaining, and instructive also, for it exhibits
to perfection two of the most ordinary causes of fallacy, the assuming
imaginary data as unquestionable premises and the enthusiast's adoption
of sublimity as the standard of truth. Burnet's mind was the mind of a
poet; he had just enough science to misguide him, and more than enough
learning to gloss over the vagaries of his science. He is quite as much
at home in expounding the catastrophe of the future, the final
conflagration, as the watery catastrophe of which he believes the traces
to be visible everywhere around him. At the same time he has a strong
affinity to the rationalizing divines, even more visible in his strictly
theological writings, and would not for the world propound anything of
whose reasonableness he has not first convinced himself. As a writer he
stands high, combining the splendour and melody of a former age with the
ease and lucidity of his own. The following is a fair average specimen
of his picturesque imagination and impassioned diction:
'Thus the Flood came to its height; and 'tis not easy to
represent to ourselves this strange scene of things, when the
Deluge was in its fury and extremity; when the earth was broken
and swallowed up in the abyss, whose raging waters rose higher
than the mountains, and filled the air with broken waves, with
an universal mist, and with thick darkness, so as nature seemed
to be in a second chaos; and upon this chaos rid the distrest
Ark, that bore the small remains of mankind. No sea was ever so
tumultuous, as this, nor is there anything in present nature to
be compared with the disorder of these waters; all the poetry,
and all the hyperboles that are used in the description of
storms and raging seas, were literally true in this, if not
beneath it. The Ark was really carried to the tops of the
highest mountains, and into the places of the clouds, and
thrown down again into the deepest gulfs; and to this very
state of the Deluge and of the Ark, which was a type of the
Church in this world, David seems to have alluded in the name
of the Church, Psalm xlii. 7, Abyss calls upon abyss at the
noise of thy cataracts or waterspouts; all thy waves and
billows have gone over me. It was no doubt an extraordinary and
miraculous providence, that could make a vessel, so ill manned,
live upon such a sea; that kept it from being dashed against
the hills, or overwhelmed in the deeps. That abyss which had
devoured and swallowed up whole forests of woods, cities, and
provinces, nay the whole earth, when it had conquered all, and
triumphed over all, could not destroy this single ship. I
remember in the story of the Argonautics, Dion. Argonaut. l.
i., v. 47, when Jason set out to fetch the Golden Fleece, the
poet saith, all the gods that day looked down from Heaven to
view the ship, and the nymphs stood upon the mountain-tops to
see the noble youth of Thessaly pulling at the oars; we may
with more reason suppose the good angels to have looked down
upon this ship of Noah's; and that not out of curiosity, as
idle spectators, but with a passionate concern for its safety
and deliverance. A ship, whose cargo was no less than a whole
world; that carried the fortune and hopes of all posterity, and
if this had perished, the earth for any thing we know had been
nothing but a desert, a great ruin, a dead heap of rubbish,
from the Deluge to the conflagration. But death and hell, the
grave, and destruction have their bounds. We may entertain
ourselves with the consideration of the face of the Deluge, and
of the broken and drowned earth, in this scheme, with the
floating Ark, and the guardian angels.'
The most eminent natural theologian of the time after Ray, and one who
would have surpassed Ray in importance if his labours in this department
had been more than a brief episode in a busy career, was Richard
Bentley, whose power of destructive criticism in other fields proved how
formidable a champion he could be on the negative side of any question.
Bentley's massive intelligence, however, aptitude for broad commonsense
views, and impatience of niceties and subtleties, entirely qualified him
to embrace and expound the form in which natural theology commended
itself to the vast majority of the thinkers of his day. He dealt solely
with the materialism of Hobbes, 'there may be some Spinosists beyond
seas,' he says, but to him _de non existentibus, et de non apparentibus,
eadem est ratio_. The questions and the answers of a Goethe would have
been equally unintelligible to him; if Newman would certainly have
thought him shallow, he would as certainly have thought Newman
whimsical. He must be judged from the standpoint of his own day, and
from this his argument, delivered as the Boyle lecture for 1691 and
1692, must be pronounced a splendid and cogent piece of reasoning. It is
particularly remarkable for its absolute reliance on the doctrines of
Newton's _Principia_, when Newton had hardly a disciple out of England.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] On the flyleaf of a copy of Birch's _Life of Tillotson_ in the
British Museum is a transcript of a letter from Archbishop Herring to
the author, in which, acknowledging his dedication, he says: "I think
myself extremely honoured in having my inconsiderable name connected
with that of the best of my predecessors. I feel the disparity of the
characters, and must submit to the censure which will arise from a
comparison so infinitely to my disadvantage. But, as posterity, when the
real object is out of sight, may imagine from your picture that there
might be some distant shadow of a resemblance, I think I may, I think I
ought to enjoy the contemplation." The resemblance was closer than the
good archbishop's modesty would admit.