In addition to the notice of these Discourses given in the text, it may be well to give a brief account of their contents.
In Discourse I. Woolston aims at showing (α) that healing is not a proper miracle for a Messiah to perform, and that the fathers of the church understood the miracles allegorically: (β) that a literal interpretation of miracles involves incredibility, as shown in the miracle of the expulsion of the buyers and sellers from the temple, the casting out devils from the possessed man of the tombs, the transfiguration, the marriage of Cana, the feeding the multitudes: (γ) the meaning of Jesus when he appeals to miracles. In Discourse II. he selects for examination the miracle of the woman with the issue of blood, and also her with the spirit of infirmity; also the narrative of the Samaritan woman, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the temptation, the appearance of the spirits of the dead at the resurrection. In Discourse III. he selects the cursing of the fig-tree, and the miracle of the pool of Bethesda. It may be allowable to give one illustration of the coarse humour with which he rationalizes the sacred narrative in his explanation of this last miracle. He says of the healed man, “The man's infirmity was more laziness than lameness; and Jesus only shamed him out of his pretended idleness by bidding him to take up his stool and walk off, and not lie any longer like a lubbard and dissemble among the diseased.” It will be perceived, that if the coarseness be omitted, the system of interpretation is the naturalist system afterwards adopted by the old rationalism (rationalismus vulgaris). In Discourse IV. he selects the healing with eye-salve of the blind man, the water made into wine at Cana; where he introduces a Jewish rabbi to utter blasphemy, after the manner of Celsus; and the healing of the paralytic who was let down through the roof, which, as being one of the most characteristic passages of Woolston, Dean Trench has selected for analysis. (Notes on Miracles, Introduction, p. 81.) In Discourse V. he discusses the three miracles of the raising of the dead; and in Discourse VI. the miracle of Christ's own resurrection.
His conclusion (in Disc. I.) is, that “the history of Jesus, as recorded in the evangelists, is an emblematical representation of his spiritual life in the soul of man; and his miracles figurative of his mysterious operations;” that the four Gospels are in no part a literal story, but a system of mystical philosophy or theology.
Lecture V.
Note 23. p. [178]. The Literary Coteries Of Paris In The Eighteenth Century.
An account of these coteries may be seen in Schlosser's Hist. of Eighteenth Century, (E. T.) vol. i. ch. ii. § 4; the particulars of which chapter he has gathered largely from the Autobiography of Marmontel, and from Grimm's Correspondence. See also Sainte-Beuve's Papers (Portraits, vol. ii.) on Espinasse and Geoffrin. These coteries were specially four: viz. (1) that of Madame De Tencin, mother of D'Alembert, which included Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Mairan, Helvetius, Marivaux, and Astruc; (2) of Madame Geoffrin, who took the place of De Tencin. It included, besides some of the above, Poniatowsky, Frederick the Great when in France, the Swedish Creutz, and Kaunitz, the whole of the Voltaire school, and at first Rousseau; (3) of Madame Du Deffant, contemporary with Geoffrin. This was less a coterie of fashion, and more entirely of intellect; and included Voltaire, D'Alembert, Hénault, and Horace Walpole when in Paris. Later Mlle. Espinasse took the place of Deffant, and this became the union-point for all the philosophical reformers, D'Alembert, Diderot, Turgot, and the Encyclopædists; (4) of D'Holbach, consisting of the most advanced infidels.