41. It can hardly be conceived that any one would think the worse of human nature or of himself by reading these magnificent lamentations of Pascal. He adorns and ennobles the degeneracy he exaggerates. The ruined aqueduct, the broken column, the desolated city, suggest no ideas but of dignity and reverence. No one is ashamed of a misery which bears witness to his grandeur. If we should persuade a labourer that the blood of princes flows in his veins, we might spoil his contentment with the only lot he has drawn, but scarcely kill in him the seeds of pride.
42. Pascal, like many others who have dwelt on this alledged degeneracy of mankind, seems never to have disentangled his mind from the notion that what we call human nature has not merely an arbitrary and grammatical, but an intrinsic objective reality. The common and convenient forms of language, the analogies of sensible things, which the imagination readily supplies, conspire to delude us into this fallacy. Each man is born with certain powers and dispositions which constitute his own nature; and the resemblance of these in all his fellows produces a general idea, or a collective appellation, whichever we may prefer to say, called the nature of man; but few would in this age contend for the existence of this as a substance capable of qualities, and those qualities variable, or subject to mutation. The corruption of human nature is therefore a phrase which may convey an intelligible meaning, if it is acknowledged to be merely analogical and inexact, but will mislead those who do not keep this in mind. Man’s nature, as it now is, that which each man and all men possess, is the immediate workmanship of God, as much as at his creation; nor is any other hypothesis consistent with theism.
43. This notion of a real universal in human nature, presents to us in an exaggerated light those anomalies from which writers of Pascal’s school are apt to infer some vast change in our original constitution. Exaggerated, I say, for it cannot be denied, that we frequently perceive a sort of incoherence, as it appears at least to our defective vision, in the same individual; and, like threads of various hues shot through one web, the love of vice and of virtue, the strength and weakness of the heart, are wonderfully blended in self-contradictory and self-destroying conjunction. But even if we should fail altogether in solving the very first steps of this problem, there is no course for a reasonable being, except to acknowledge the limitations of his own faculties; and it seems rather unwarrantable, on the credit of this humble confession, that we do not comprehend the depths of what has been withheld from us, to substitute something far more incomprehensible and revolting to our moral and rational capacities in its place. “What,” says Pascal, “can be more contrary to the rules of our wretched justice, than to damn eternally an infant incapable of volition, for an offence wherein he seems to have had no share, and which was committed six thousand years before he was born? Certainly, nothing shocks us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. Man is more inconceivable without this mystery, than the mystery is inconceivable to man.”
44. It might be wandering from the proper subject of these volumes if we were to pause, even shortly, to inquire whether, while the creation of a world so full of evil must ever remain the most inscrutable of mysteries, we might not be led some way in tracing the connection of moral and physical evil in mankind with his place in that creation; and especially, whether the law of continuity, which it has not pleased his Maker to break with respect to his bodily structure, and which binds that, in the unity of one great type, to the lower forms of animal life by the common conditions of nourishment, reproduction, and self-defence, has not rendered necessary both the physical appetites and the propensities which terminate in self: whether, again, the superior endowments of his intellectual nature, his susceptibility of moral emotion, and of those disinterested affections which, if not exclusively, he far more intensely possesses than any inferior being; above all, the gifts of conscience, and a capacity to know God, might not be expected, even beforehand, by their conflict with the animal passions, to produce some partial inconsistencies, some anomalies at least, which he could not himself explain, in so compound a being. Every link in the long chain of creation does not pass by easy transition into the next. There are necessary chasms, and, as it were, leaps, from one creature to another, which, though not exceptions to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a new series of being. If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars, and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute, who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus, standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both! But these are things which it is difficult to touch; nor would they have been here introduced, but in order to weaken the force of positions so confidently asserted by many, and so eloquently by Pascal.
Vindications of Christianity. 45. Among the works immediately designed to confirm the truth of Christianity, a certain reputation was acquired, through the known erudition of its author, by the Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, bishop of Avranches. This is paraded with definitions, axioms, and propositions, in order to challenge the name it assumes. But the axioms, upon which so much is to rest, are often questionable or equivocal; as, for instance: Omnis prophetia est verax, quæ prædixit res eventu deinde completas—equivocal in the word verax. Huet also confirms his axioms by argument, which shows that they are not truly such. The whole book is full of learning; but he frequently loses sight of the points he would prove, and his quotations fall beside the mark. Yet he has furnished much to others, and possibly no earlier work on the same subject is so elaborate and comprehensive. The next place, if not a higher one, might be given to the treatise of Abbadie, a French refugee, published in 1684. His countrymen bestow on it the highest eulogies; but it was never so well known in England, and is now almost forgotten. The oral conferences of Limborch with Orobio, a Jew of considerable learning and ability, on the prophecies relating to the Messiah, were reduced into writing and published; they are still in some request. No book of this period among many that were written, reached so high a reputation in England as Leslie’s Short Method with the Deists, published in 1694: in which he has started an argument, pursued with more critical analysis by others, on the peculiarly distinctive marks of credibility that pertain to the scriptural miracles. The authenticity of this little treatise has been idly questioned on the Continent, for no better reason than that a translation of it has been published in a posthumous edition (1732) of the works of Saint Real, who died in 1692. But posthumous editions are never deemed of sufficient authority to establish a literary title against possession; and Prosper Marchand informs us, that several other tracts, in this edition of Saint Real, are erroneously ascribed to him. The internal evidence that the Short Method was written by a protestant should be conclusive.[743]
[743] The Biographie Universelle, art. Leslie, says: Cet ouvrage, qui passe pour ce qu’il a fait de mieux, lui a été contesté. Le Docteur Gleigh [sic] a fait de grands efforts pour prouver qu’il appartenait à Leslie, quoiqu’il fût publié parmi les ouvrages de l’Abbe de Saint Real, mort en 1692. It is melancholy to see this petty spirit of cavil against an English writer in so respectable a work as the Biographic Universelle. No grands efforts could be required from Dr. Gleig or anyone else, to prove that a book was written by Leslie, which bore his name, which was addressed to an English peer, and had gone through many editions; when there is literally no claimant on the other side; for a posthumous edition, forty years after an author’s death, without attestation, is no literary evidence at all, even where a book is published for the first time, much less where it has a known status as the production of a certain author. This is so manifest to anyone who has the slightest tincture of critical judgment, that we need not urge the palpable improbability of ascribing to Saint Real, a Romish ecclesiastic, an argument which turns peculiarly on the distinction between the scriptural miracles and those alledged upon inferior evidence. I have lost, or never made, the reference to Prosper Marchand; but the passage will be found in his Dictionnaire Historique, which contains a full article on Saint Real.
Progress of tolerant principles. 46. Every change in public opinion which this period witnessed, confirmed the principles of religious toleration, that had taken root in the earlier part of the century; the progress of a larger and more catholic theology, the weakening of bigotry in the minds of laymen, and the consequent disregard of ecclesiastical clamour, not only in England and Holland, but to a considerable extent in France; we might even add, the violent proceedings of the last government, in the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and the cruelties which attended it. Louis XIV., at a time when mankind were beginning to renounce the very theory of persecution, renewed the ancient enormities of its practice, and thus unconsciously gave the aid of moral sympathy and indignation to the adverse argument. The Protestant refugees of France, scattered among their brethren, brought home to all minds the great question of free conscience; not with the stupid and impudent limitation which even protestants had sometimes employed, that truth indeed might not be restrained, but that error might; a broader foundation was laid by the great advocates of toleration in this period, Bayle, Limborch, and Locke, as it had formerly been by Taylor and Episcopius.[744]
[744] The Dutch clergy, and a French minister in Holland, Jurieu, of great polemical fame in his day, though now chiefly known by means of his adversaries, Bayle and Le Clerc, strenuously resisted both the theory of general toleration, and the moderate or liberal principles in religion which were connected with it. Le Clerc passed his life in fighting this battle, and many articles in the Bibliothèque Universelle relate to it.
Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary. 47. Bayle, in 1686, while yet the smart of his banishment was keenly felt, published his Philosophical Commentary on the text in Scripture, “Compel them to come in;” a text which some of the advocates of persecution were accustomed to produce. He gives in the first part nine reasons against this literal meaning, among which none are philological. In the second part he replies to various objections. This work of Bayle does not seem to me as subtle and logical as he was wont to be, notwithstanding the formal syllogisms with which he commences each of his chapters. His argument against compulsory conversions, which the absurd interpretation of the text by his adversaries required, is indeed irresistible; but this is far from sufficiently establishing the right of toleration itself. It appears not very difficult for a skilful sophist, and none was more so than Bayle himself, to have met some of his reasoning with a specious reply. The sceptical argument of Taylor, that we can rarely be sure of knowing the truth ourselves, and consequently of condemning in others what is error, he touches but slightly; nor does he dwell on the political advantages which experience has shown a full toleration to possess. In the third part of the Philosophical Commentary, he refutes the apology of Augustin for persecution; and a few years afterwards he published a supplement answering a book of Jurieu, which had appeared in the mean time.
Locke’s Letter on Toleration. 48. Locke published anonymously his Letter on Toleration in 1689. The season was propitious; a legal tolerance of public worship had first been granted to the dissenters after the revolution, limited indeed to such as held most of the doctrines of the church, but preparing the nation for a more extensive application of its spirit. In the Liberty of Prophesying, Taylor had chiefly in view to deduce the justice of tolerating a diversity in religion from the difficulty of knowing the truth. He is not very consistent as to the political question, and limits too narrowly the province of tolerable opinions. Locke goes more expressly to the right of the civil magistrate, not omitting, but dwelling less forcibly on the latitudinarian scepticism of his predecessor. His own theory of government came to his aid. The clergy in general, and perhaps Taylor himself, had derived the magistrate’s jurisdiction from paternal power. And as they apparently assumed this power to extend over adult children, it was natural to give those who succeeded to it in political communities, a large sway over the moral and religious behaviour of subjects. Locke, adopting the opposite theory of compact, defines the commonwealth to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests. He denies altogether that the care of souls belongs to the civil magistrate, as it has never been committed to him. “All the power of civil government relates only to men’s civil interests, is confined to the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come.”