The power of St. Augustine.
In saying this I am far from overlooking the fact, that the Protestant Reformers, in reverting to a purer form of Augustinian doctrine than that held by the Schoolmen, did practically by it bring Christianity to bear upon men with a power and a life which contrasted strangely with the cold dead religion of the Thomists and Scotists. I am as far also from underrating the force and the fire of St. Augustine. What, indeed, must not that force and that fire have been to have made it possible for him to bind the conscience of Western Christendom for fourteen centuries by the chains of his dogmatic theology! And when it is considered, on the one hand, that the greatest of the Schoolmen were so loyal to St. Augustine, that some of their subtlest distinctions were resorted to expressly to mitigate the harshness of the rigid results of his system, and thus were attempts, not to get from under its yoke, but to make it bearable;[764] and, on the other hand, that the chief reactions against scholastic formalism—those of Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin, the Portroyalists, the Puritans, the modern Evangelicals—were Augustinian reactions; so far from under-estimating the power of the man whose influence was so diverse and so vast, it may well become an object of ever-increasing astonishment to the student of Ecclesiastical History.
At the same time, these considerations must raise also our estimate of the need and the value of the firm stand taken 350 years ago by the Oxford Reformers against this dogmatic power so long dominant in the realm of religious thought. It has been seen in every page of this history, that they had taken their standpoint, so to speak, behind that of St. Augustine; behind even the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom; behind those patristic hypotheses which grew up into the scholastic theology; behind that notion of Church authority by which these hypotheses obtained a fictitious verification; behind the theory of ‘plenary inspiration,’ without which the Scriptures could not have been converted, as they were, into a mass of raw material for the manufacture of any quantity of hypotheses—behind all these—on the foundation of fact which underlies them all.
The essential difference between the standpoints of the Protestant and Oxford Reformers Luther had been the first to perceive. And the correctness of this first impression of Luther’s has been singularly confirmed by the history of the three-and-a-half centuries of Protestant ascendency in Western Christendom. The Protestant movement, whilst accomplishing by one revolutionary blow many objects which the Oxford Reformers were striving and striving in vain to compass by constitutional means, has been so far antagonistic to their work in other directions as to throw it back—not to say to wipe it out of remembrance—so that in this nineteenth century those Christians who have desired, as they did, to rest their faith upon honest facts, and not upon dogmas—upon evidence, and not upon authority—instead of taking up the work where the Oxford Reformers left it, have had to begin it again at the beginning, as Colet did at Oxford in 1496. They have had, like the Oxford Reformers, to combat at the outset the theory of ‘plenary inspiration,’ and the tendency inherited along with it from St. Augustine, by both Schoolmen and Protestant Reformers, to build up a theology, as I have said, upon unverified hypotheses, and to narrow the boundaries of Christian fellowship by the imposition of dogmatic creeds so manufactured. They have had to meet the same arguments and the same blind opposition; to bear the same taunts of heresy and unsoundness from ascendant orthodox schools; to be pointed at by their fellow-Christians as insidious enemies of the Christian faith, because they have striven to present it before the eyes of a scientific age, as what they think it really is—not a system of unverified hypotheses, but a faith in facts which it would be unscientific even in a disciple of the positive philosophy to pass by unexplored.
VIII. MORE’S DOMESTIC LIFE (1519).
By the aid of a letter from Erasmus to Ulrich Hutten,[765] written in July 1519, one more lingering look may be taken at the beautiful picture of domestic happiness presented by More’s home. This history would be incomplete without it.
More forty years old.
His first wife.
The ‘young More,’ with whom Colet and Erasmus had fallen in love twenty years ago, was now past forty.[766] The four motherless children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John, awhile ago nestling round their widowed father’s knee, as the dark shadow of sorrow passed over the once bright home in Bucklersbury, were now from ten to thirteen years old. The good stepmother, Alice Middleton, is said to have ruled her household well, and her daughter had taken a place in the family circle as one of More’s children. There was a marked absence of jarring or quarrelling,[767] which in such a household bore witness to the goodnature of the mistress. She could not, indeed, fill altogether the void left in More’s heart by the loss of his first wife—the gentle girl brought up in country retirement with her parents and sisters, whom he had delighted to educate to his own tastes, in letters and in music, in the fond hope that she would be to him a lifelong companion,[768] and respecting whom, soon after his second marriage, in composing the epitaph for the family tomb, in which she was already laid, he had written this simple line:—
‘Cara Thomæ jacet hic Joanna uxorcula Mori!’[769]
His second wife.