“Note.—The cause which removes natural impediments may be a proper efficient cause with regard to that removal, yet it is not properly efficient, but merely permissive with regard to the consequences of that removal.
“A moral permissive cause removes moral impediments, or takes away prohibitions, and gives leave to act: so a master is a permissive cause of his scholars going to play; a general is the same cause of his soldiers plundering a city; and a repeal of a law against foreign silks is the permissive cause why they are worn.
“Query.—Was not God’s permission of Satan to afflict Job rather natural than moral, since his mischievous actions did not become lawful thereby, and since it is now become his nature to do mischief where he has no natural restraint?
“A condition has been usually caused causa sine quâ non, or a cause without which the effect is not produced. It is generally applied to something which is requisite in order to the effect, though it hath not a proper actual influence in producing that effect. Daylight is a condition of ploughing, sowing, and reaping; darkness is a condition of our seeing stars and glowworms; clearness of the stream is the condition of our spying sand and pebbles at the bottom of it; being well dressed with a head uncovered is a condition of a man’s coming into the presence of a king; and paying a peppercorn yearly is the condition of enjoying an estate. How far the perfect idea of the word condition, in the civil law, may differ from this representation is not my present work to determine.
“Note.—These three last causes may possibly be all ranked under the general name of conditions, but I think it more proper to distinguish them into their different kinds of causality.”
We perhaps repeat ourselves in these last remarks, for all is an illustration of that perspicuity which we mentioned as Watts’ first characteristic; but in him perspicuity was not the attribute of a small mind, or a limited range of vision; perspicuous speech is the natural instrument of perspicuous thought: how can that man express himself clearly who does not see clearly? Hence dark language must be the companion of dark vision; but the perspicuity of a child amongst its playthings, in its playground or its garden is one thing, and the perspicuity of the pilot of a vessel, or a gifted astronomer, is quite another. However wide or vast the subjects upon which Watts wrote, it seemed he had cleared thought in his own mind, by the clearness with which speech served him in making the things in his own mind the property of others; and upon whatsoever he wrote there was always the same suffusing light of the devoutness of the spiritual mind. Here is no flippancy; here are no impertinent epigrams, no hard words even for opponents; we have to search a long way through his works before we find an expression of severity, we will not say of contempt—perhaps there are such—but we are sure they will only be used of those who, by some abandonment of sentiment, had separated themselves from the common feeling of mankind. Yet there was considerable nervousness in his speech, he was a great preacher, he commanded attention; judging from the testimony of Johnson, he must have been, to cultivated minds, one of the most distinguished preachers of his day: his enunciation was clear, forcible, and distinct, and what was wanting to an imposing presence was made up from the earnestness of the manner, the calm luminousness, elevation, and we would even say, the sustained but subdued vehemence of his diction. His sermon on the “Reformation of Manners,” to which Southey has referred, not in his life of Watts but in one of the volumes of his “Common-place Book,” as “an extraordinary piece,” is an illustration of this. It was preached at the time when we were in conflict with Louis XIV. He gives the following side-glance to the wars in Flanders, and on the borders of the Rhine, and he refers to the importance, not only of fighting the enemy abroad, but resisting vice at home. He exclaims, in a remarkable passage:
“But was there ever any war without danger, or victory without courage? Besides, the perils you run here are almost infinitely less than those which attend the wars of nations, where the cause is not half so Divine. The fields of battle in Flanders, and almost all over Europe, have drunk up the blood of millions, and have furnished graves for large armies; but it can hardly be said that you have hitherto ‘resisted unto blood striving against sin.’ In a war of more than twelve years’ continuance (i.e., against vice at home) there has but one man fallen. The providence of God has put helmets of salvation upon your heads. Some of you can relate wonders of deliverance to safety when you have been beset by numbers, and their rage has kindled into resolutions of revenge; the Lord has taken away their courage in a moment, the ‘men of might have not found their hands;’ thus He has caused ‘the wrath of man to praise Him, and the remainder of wrath He hath restrained.’[55] Read over this psalm, and with Divine valour pursue the fight. But if your life should be lost in such a cause as this, it will be esteemed martyrdom in the sight of God, and shall be thus written down in the book of the wars of the Lord. Believe me, these red lines will look well in the records of heaven, when the judgment shall be set, and the books opened in the face of men and angels.”
Watts in the pulpit ought to furnish the subject for a distinct chapter—it must fall into this feeble attempt to realize the man’s mind in his works. His sermons were evidently carefully prepared and admirably arranged; it was not possible for him to speak without thought, but he used very few notes in the pulpit, preparing carefully so that the mind and memory were fully charged, giving to such a mind as his freedom, instantaneous propriety, and fulness of expression; many men who exhibit fulness of wisdom, both in thought and language, in the study, find all fail them when they come to speak in public. On every hand we hear that this was not the case with Watts, and that his deliverances in public corresponded to his great powers in the study; and his sermons are of that nature that they assure us if the delivery corresponded to the strength of the matter and the felicity and harmony of the composition, they must have been very impressive. As some of the great sermons of Jeremy Taylor appear to have been prepared to preach when he was in exile at the Golden Grove in Wales, in the drawing-room of Lord Vaughan, so some of Watts’ sermons were prepared for delivery at the evening worship at Theobalds; one of the noblest of these is a commanding piece on the Scale of Blessedness, or Blessed Saints, Blessed Saviour, Blessed Trinity. In this subduing sermon occurs one of the passages which excited the wrath of Thomas Bradbury, and to which we have referred. Here it is; the note is evidently intended to justify himself from his coarse assailant, although he does not say so.
A SCALE OF BLESSEDNESS.
“Can we ever imagine that Moses the meek, the friend of God, who was, as it were, His confidant on earth, His faithful prophet to institute a new religion, and establish a new Church in the world, who, for God’s sake, endured forty years of banishment, and had forty years’ fatigue in a wilderness; who saw God on earth face to face, and the shine was left upon his countenance: can we suppose that this man has taken his seat no nearer to God in Paradise than Samson and Jephthah, those rash champions, those rude and bloody ministers of Providence?[56] Or can we think that St. Paul, the greatest of the apostles, ‘who laboured more than they all,’ and ‘was in sufferings’ more abundant than the rest; who spent a long life in daily services and deaths for the sake of Christ, is not fitted for, and advanced to a rank of blessedness superior to that of the crucified thief, who became a Christian but a few moments at the end of a life of impiety and plunder? Can I persuade myself that a holy man, who has known much of God in this world, and spent his age on earth in contemplation of the Divine excellences, who has acquired a great degree of nearness to God in devotion, and has served Him, and suffered for Him, even to old age and martyrdom, with a sprightly and faithful zeal: can I believe that this man, who has been trained up all his life to converse with God, and is fitted to receive Divine communications above his fellows, shall dwell no nearer to God hereafter, and share no larger a degree of blessedness, than the little babe who has just entered into this world to die out of it, and who is saved, so far as we know, merely by spreading the veil of the covenant grace, drawn over it by the hand of the parent’s faith? Can it be that the Great Judge who ‘cometh and His reward is with Him, to render to every one according to his works,’ will make no distinction between Moses and Samson, between the apostle and the thief, between the aged martyr and the infant, in the world to come? And yet, after all, it may be matter of inquiry, whether the meanest saint among the sons of Adam has not some sort of privilege above any rank of angels by being of a kindred nature to our Emmanuel, to Jesus the Son of God.”