Volume 4 — Notes on Baxter's Life of himself1 (continued 2)

Dr. Owen was a man of no ordinary intellect. It would be interesting to have his conduct in this point, seemingly so strange, in some measure explained: The words "those mathematics" look like an innuendo, that Baxter's scheme of union, by which all the parties opposed to the Prelatic Church were to form a rival Church, was, like the mathematics, true indeed, but true only in the idea, that is, abstracted from the subject matter. Still there appears a very chilling want of open-heartedness on the part of Owen, produced perhaps by the somewhat overly and certainly most ungracious resentments of Baxter. It was odd at least to propose concord in the tone and on the alleged ground of an old grudge.

Ib.

I have been twenty-six years convinced that dichotomizing will not do it, but that the divine Trinity in Unity hath expressed itself in the whole frame of nature and morality * * *. But he, Mr. George Lawson, had not hit on the true method of the vestigia Trinitatis, &c.

Among Baxter's philosophical merits, we ought not to overlook, that the substitution of Trichotomy for the old and still general plan of Dichotomy in the method and disposition of Logic, which forms so prominent and substantial an excellence in Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, of the Judgment, and the rest of his works, belongs originally to Richard Baxter, a century before Kant;—and this not as a hint, but as a fully evolved and systematically applied principle. Nay, more than this:—Baxter grounded it on an absolute idea presupposed in all intelligential acts: whereas Kant takes it only as a fact in which he seems to anticipate or suspect some yet deeper truth latent, and hereafter to be discovered.

On recollection, however, I am disposed to consider

this

alone as Baxter's peculiar claim, I have not indeed any distinct memory of Giordano Bruno's

Logice Venatrix Veritatis

; but doubtless the principle of Trichotomy is necessarily involved in the Polar Logic, which again is the same with the Pythagorean

Tetractys

, that is, the eternal fountain or source of nature; and this being sacred to contemplations of identity, and prior in order of thought to all division, is so far from interfering with Trichotomy as the universal form of division (more correctly of distinctive distribution in logic) that it implies it.

Prothesis

being by the very term anterior to

Thesis

can be no part of it. Thus in

Prothesis

Thesis Antithesis

Synthesis

we

have the Tetrad indeed in the intellectual and intuitive contemplation, but a Triad in discursive arrangement, and a Tri-unity in result

³

.

Ib. p. 144.

Seeing the great difficulties that lie in the way of increasing charities so as to meet the increase of population, or even so as to follow it, and the manifold desirableness of parish Churches, with the material dignity that in a right state of Christian order would attach to them, as compared with meeting-houses, chapels, and the like—all more or less

privati juris

, I have often felt disposed to wish that the large majestic Church, central to each given parish, might have been appropriated to Public Prayer, to the mysteries of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and to the

quasi sacramenta

, Marriage, Penance, Confirmation, Ordination, and to the continued reading aloud, or occasional chanting, of the Scriptures during the intervals of the different Services, which ought to be so often performed as to suffice successively for the whole population; and that on the other hand the chapels and the like should be entirely devoted to teaching and expounding.

Ib. p. 153.

And I proved to him that Christianity was proved true many years before any of the New Testament was written, and that so it may be still proved by one that doubted of some words of the Scripture; and therefore the true order is, to try the truth of the Christian religion first, and the perfect verity of the Scriptures afterwards.

With more than Dominican virulence did Goeze, Head Pastor of the Lutheran Church at Hamburg, assail the celebrated Lessing for making and supporting the same position as the pious Baxter here advances.

This controversy with Goeze was in 1778, nearly a hundred years after Baxter's writing this.

Ib. p. 155.

And within a few days Mr. Barnett riding the circuit was cast by his horse, and died in the very fall. And Sir John Medlicote and his brother, a few weeks after, lay both dead in his house together.

This interpreting of accidents and coincidences into judgments is a breach of charity and humility, only not universal among all sects and parties of this period, and common to the best and gentlest men in all; we should not therefore bring it in charge against any one in particular. But what excuse shall be made for the revival of this presumptuous encroachment on the divine prerogative in our days?

Ib. p. 180.

Near this time my book called A Key for Catholics, was to be reprinted. In the preface to the first impression I had mentioned with praise the Earl of Lauderdale. * * * I thought best to prefix an epistle to the Duke, in which I said not a word of him but truth. * * * But the indignation that men had against the Duke made some blame me, as keeping up the reputation of one whom multitudes thought very ill of; whereas I owned none of his faults, and did nothing that I could well avoid for the aforesaid reasons. Long after this he professed his kindness to me, and told me I should never want while he was able, and humbly entreated me to accept twenty guineas from him, which I did.

This would be a curious proof of the slow and imperfect intercourse of communication between Scotland and London, if Baxter had not been particularly informed of Lauderdale's horrible cruelties to the Scotch Covenanters:—and if Baxter did know them, he surely ran into a greater inconsistency to avoid the appearance of a less. And the twenty guineas! they must have smelt, I should think, of more than the earthly brimstone that might naturally enough have been expected in gold or silver, from his palm. I would as soon have plucked an ingot from the cleft of the Devil's hoof.

Ib. p. 181.

About that time I had finished a book called Catholic Thoughts; in which I undertake to prove that besides things unrevealed, known to none, and ambiguous words, there is no considerable difference between the Arminians and Calvinists, except some very tolerable difference in the point of perseverance.

What Arminians? what Calvinists?—It is possible that the guarded language and positions of Arminius himself may be interpreted into a "very tolerable" compatibility with the principles of the milder Calvinists, such as Archbishop Leighton, that true Father of the Church of Christ. But I more than doubt the possibility of even approximating the principles of Bishop Jeremy Taylor to the fundamental doctrines of Leighton, much more to those of Cartwright, Twiss, or Owen.

Ib. p. 186.

Bishop Barlow told my friend that got my papers for him, that he could hear of nothing that we judged to be sin, but mere inconveniences. When as above seventeen years ago, we publicly endeavoured to prove the sinfulness even of many of the old impositions.

Clearly an undeterminable controversy; inasmuch as there is no centra-definition possible of sin and inconvenience in religion: while the exact point, at which an inconvenience, becoming intolerable, passes into sin, must depend on the state and the degree of light, of the individual consciences to which it appears or becomes intolerable. Besides, a thing may not be only indifferent in itself, but may be declared such by Scripture, and on this indifference the Scripture may have rested a prohibition to Christians to judge each other on the point. If yet a Pope or Archbishop should force this on the consciences of others, for example, to eat or not to eat animal food, would he not sin in so doing? And does Scripture permit me to subscribe to an ordinance made in direct contempt of a command of Scripture?

If it were said,—In all matters indifferent and so not sinful you must comply with lawful authority:—must I not reply, But you have yourself removed the indifferency by your injunction? Look in Popish countries for the hideous consequences of the unnatural doctrine—that the Priest may go to Hell for sinfully commanding, and his parishioners go with him for not obeying that command.

Ib. p. 191.

About this time died my dear friend Mr. Thomas Gouge, of whose life you may see a little in Mr. Clark's last book of Lives:—a wonder of sincere industry in works of charity. It would make a volume to recite at large the charity he used to his poor parishioners at Sepulchre's, before he was ejected and silenced for non-conformity, &c.

I cannot express how much it grieves me, that our Clergy should still think it fit and expedient to defend the measures of the High Churchmen from Laud to Sheldon, and to speak of the ejected ministers, Calamy, Baxter, Gouge, Howe, and others, as schismatics, factionists, fanatics, or Pharisees:—thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the present Dissenters from it. And this seems the more impolitic, when it must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward, Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the great majority at least) would have molested.

Appendix II. p. 37.

If I can prove that it hath been the universal practice of the Church in nudum apertum caput manus imponere, doth it follow that this is essential, and the contrary null?

How likewise can it be proved that the imposition of hands in Ordination did not stand on the same ground as the imposition of hands in sickness; that is, the miraculous gifts of the first preachers of the Gospel? All Protestants admit that the Church retained several forms so originated, after the cessation of the originating powers, which were the substance of these forms.

Ib.

If you think not only imposition to be essential, but also that nothing else is essential, or that all are true ministers that are ordained by a lawful Bishop per manuum impositionem, then do you egregiously tibi ipsi imponere.

Baxter, like most scholastic logicians, had a sneaking affection for puns. The cause is,—the necessity of attending to the primary sense of words, that is, the visual image or general relation expressed, and which remains common to all the after senses, however widely or even incongruously differing from each other in other respects. For the same reason, schoolmasters are commonly punsters. "I have indorsed your Bill, Sir," said a pedagogue to a merchant, meaning he had flogged his son William.—My old master the Rev. James Bowyer, the

Hercules furens

of the phlogistic sect, but else an incomparable teacher,—used to translate,

Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu

,—first reciting the Latin words, and observing that they were the fundamental article of the Peripatetic school,—"You must flog a boy, before you can make him understand;"—or, "You must lay it in at the tail before you can get it into the head."

Ib. p. 45.

Then, that the will must follow the practical intellect whether right or wrong,—that is no precept, but the nature of the soul in its acting, because that the will is potentia cæca, non nata ad intelligendum, sed ad volendum vel nolendum intellectum.

This is the main fault in Baxter's metaphysics, that he so often substantiates distinctions into dividuous self-subsistents. As here;—for a will not intelligent is no will.

Appendix. III. p. 55.

And for many ages no other ordinarily baptised but infants. If Christ had no Church then, where was his wisdom, his love, and his power? What was become of the glory of his redemption, and his Catholic Church, that was to continue to the end?

But the Antipœdo-Baptists would deny any such consequences as applicable to them, who are to act according to the circumstances, in which God, who ordains his successive manifestations in due correspondence with other lights and states of things, has placed them. He does not exclude from the Church of Christ (say they) those whom we do not accept into the communion of our particular Society, any more than the House of Lords excludes Commoners from being Members of Parliament. And we do this because—we think that such promiscuous admission would prolong an error which would be deadly to us, though not to you who interpret the Scriptures otherwise.

In fine.

There are two senses in which the words, 'Church of England,' may be used;—first, with reference to the idea of the Church as an estate of this Christian Realm, protesting against the Papal usurpation, comprising, first, the interests of a permanent learned class, that is, the Clergy;—secondly, those of the proper, that is, the infirm poor, from age or sickness;—and thirdly, the adequate proportional instruction of all in all classes by public prayer, recitation of the Scriptures, by expounding, preaching, catechizing, and schooling, and last, not least, by the example and influence of a pastor and a schoolmaster placed as a germ of civilization and cultivation in every parish throughout the land. To this idea, the Reformed Church of England with its marriable and married Clergy would have approximated, if the revenues of the Church, as they existed at the death of Henry VII., had been rightly transferred by his successor;—transferred, I mean, from reservoirs, which had by degeneracy on the one hand, and progressive improvement on the other, fallen into ruin, and in which those revenues had stagnated into contagion or uselessness,—transferred from what had become public evils to their original and inherent purpose of public benefits, instead of being sacrilegiously alienated by a transfer to private proprietors. That this was impracticable, is historically true; but no less true is it philosophically, that this impracticability, arising wholly from moral causes, (namely, the loose manners and corrupt principles of a great majority in all classes during the dynasty of the Tudors,) does not prevent this wholesale sacrilege, from deserving the character of the "first and deadliest wound inflicted on the Constitution of the kingdom; which term, in the body politic, as in bodies natural, expresses not only what is and has been evolved, but likewise whatever is potentially contained in the seminal principle of the particular body, and which would in its due time have appeared but for emasculation in its infancy.

This

, however, is the first sense of the words, Church of England

⁴

.

The second is the Church of England as now by law established, and by practice of the law actually existing. That in the first sense it is the object of my admiration and the earthly

ne plus ultra

of my religious aspirations, it were superfluous to say: but I may be allowed to express iny conviction, that on our recurring to the same ends and objects, (the restoration of a national and circulating property in counterpoise of individual possession, disposable and heritable) though in other forms and by other means perhaps, the decline or progress of this country depends. In the second sense of the words I can sincerely profess, that I love and honour the Church of England, comparatively, beyond any other Church established or unestablished now existing in Christendom; and it is wholly in consequence of this deliberate and most affectionate filial preference, that I have read this work, and Calamy's historical writings, with so deep and so melancholy an interest. And I dare avow that I cannot but regard as an ignorant bigot every man who (especially since the publicity and authentication of the contents of the Stuart Papers, Memoirs and Life of James II. &c.) can place the far later furious High Church compilations and stories of Walker and others in competition with the veracity and general verity of Baxter and Calamy; or can forget that the great body of Non-conformists to whom these great and good men belonged, were not dissenters from the established Church willingly, but an orthodox and numerous portion of the Church. Omitting then the wound received by religion generally under Henry VIII., and the shameless secularizations clandestinely effected during the reigns of Elizabeth and the first James, I am disposed to consider the three following as the grand evil epochs of our present Church. First, The introduction and after-predominance of Latitudinarianism under the name of Arminianism, and the spirit of a conjoint Romanism and Socinianism at the latter half or towards the close of the reign of James I. in the persons of Montague, Laud, and their confederates. Second, The ejection of the two thousand ministers after the Restoration, with the other violences in which the Churchmen made themselves the dupes of Charles, James, the Jesuits, and the French Court. (See the Stuart Papers

passim

). It was this that gave consistence and enduring strength to Schism in this country, prevented the pacation of Ireland, and prepared for the separation of America at a far too early period for the true interest of either country. Third, The surrender by the Clergy of the right of taxing themselves, and the Jacobitical follies that combined with the former to put it in the power of the Whig party to deprive the Church of her Convocation,—a bitter disgrace and wrong, to which most unhappily the people were rendered indifferent by the increasing contrast of the sermons of the Clergy with the Articles and Homilies of the Church itself,—but a wrong nevertheless which already has avenged, and will sooner or later be seen to avenge, itself on the State and the governing classes that continue this boast of a short-sighted policy; the same policy which in our own days would have funded the property of the Church, and, by converting the Clergy into salaried dependents on the Government

pro tempore

, have deprived the Establishment of its fairest honor, that of being neither enslaved to the court, nor to the congregations; the same policy, alas! which even now pays and patronizes a Board of Agriculture to undermine all landed property by a succession of false, shallow, and inflammatory libels against tithes.

These are my weighed sentiments: and fervently desiring, as I do, the perpetuity and prosperity of the established Church, zealous for its rights and dignity, preferring its forms, believing its Articles of Faith, and holding its Book of Common Prayer and its translation of the Scriptures among my highest privileges as a Christian and an Englishman, I trust that I may both entertain and avow these sentiments without forfeiting any part of my claim to the name of a faithful member of the Church of England.

June 1820.

N. B. As to Warburton's Alliance of the Church and State, I object to the title (Alliance), and to the matter and mode of the reasoning. But the inter-dependence of the Church and the State appears to me a truth of the highest practical importance. Let but the temporal powers protect the subjects in their just rights as subjects merely: and I do not know of any one point in which the Church has the right or the necessity to call in the temporal power as its ally for any purpose exclusively ecclesiastic. The right of a firm to dissolve its partnership with any one partner, breach of contract having been proved, and publicly to announce the same, is common to all men as social beings.

I spoke above of "Romanism." But call it, if you like, Laudism, or Lambethism in temporalities and ceremonials, and of Socinianism in doctrine, that is, a retaining of the word but a rejecting or interpreting away of the sense and substance of the Scriptural Mysteries. This spirit has not indeed manifested itself in the article of the Trinity, since Waterland gave the deathblow to Arianism, and so left no alternative to the Clergy, but the actual divinity or mere humanity of our Lord; and the latter would be too impudent an avowal for a public reader of our Church Liturgy: but in the articles of original sin, the necessity of regeneration, the necessity of redemption in order to the possibility of regeneration, of justification by faith, and of prevenient and auxiliary grace,—all I can say with sincerity is, that our orthodoxy seems so far in an improving state, that I can hope for the time when Churchmen will use the term Arminianism to express a habit of belief opposed not to Calvinism, or the works of Calvin, but to the Articles of our own Church, and to the doctrine in which all the first Reformers agreed.

Note—that by Latitudinarianism, I do not mean the particular tenets of the divines so called, such as Dr. H. More, Cudworth and their compeers, relative to toleration, comprehension, and the general belief that in the greater number of points then most controverted, the pious of all parties were far more nearly of the same mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see: I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason;—when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls

, the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone. This I have elsewhere called the spirit of Socinianism, which may work in many whose tenets are anti-Socinian.

Law is—

conclusio per regulam generis singulorum in genere isto inclusorum

. Now the extremes

et inclusa

are contradictory terms. Therefore extreme cases are not capable subjects of law

a priori

, but must proceed on knowledge of the past, and anticipation of the future, and the fulfilment of the anticipation is the proof, because the only possible determination, of the accuracy of the knowledge. In other words the agents may be condemned or honored according to their intentions, and the apparent source of their motives; so we honor Brutus, but the extreme case itself is tried by the event.

Footnote 1:

Relliquiæ Baxterianæ

: or Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times. Published from his manuscript, by Matthew Sylvester.—London,

folio

. 1699.

return to footnote mark

Footnote 2:

See Hooker E. P. V. xviii. 3. Vol. II. p. 80. Keble.

Ed

.

return

Footnote 3:

See

Table Talk

, p. 162. 2nd edit.

Ed.

return

Footnote 4:

See the

Church and State

, p. 73, 3rd edit.—

Ed.

return

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