Note 161 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;
Reading edition
It does not always enter into the design of these volumes to examine those great works which produced literary quarrels. But some may be glad to find here a word on this original project.
The grand position of the Divine Legation is, that the knowledge of the immortality of the soul, or a future state of reward and punishment, is absolutely necessary in the moral government of the universe. The author shows how it has been inculcated by all good legislators, so that no religion could ever exist without it; but the Jewish could, from its peculiar government, which was theocracy—a government where the presence of God himself was perpetually manifested by miracles and new ordinances: and hence temporal rewards and punishments were sufficient for that people, to whom the unity and power of the Godhead were never doubtful. As he proceeded, he would have opened a new argument, viz., that the Jewish religion was only the part of a revelation, showing the necessity of a further one for its completion, which produced Christianity.
When Warburton was in good spirits with his great work (for he was not always so), he wrote thus to a friend:—“You judge right, that the next volume of the D. L. will not be the last. I thought I had told you that I had divided the work into three parts: the first gives you a view of Paganism; the second, of Judaism; and the third, of Christianity. You will wonder how this last inquiry can come into so simple an argument as that which I undertake to enforce. I have not room to tell you more than this—that after I have proved a future state not to be, in fact in the Mosaic dispensation, I next show that, if Christianity be true, it could not possibly be there; and this necessitates me to explain the nature of Christianity, with which the whole ends. But this inter nos. If it be known, I should possibly have somebody writing against this part too before it appears.”—Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. v. p. 551.
Thus he exults in the true tone, and with all the levity of a sophist. It is well that a true feeling of religion does not depend on the quirks and quibbles of human reasonings, or, what are as fallible, on masses of fanciful erudition.