Inconsistency of one chapter. 59. The seventeenth chapter, in which Taylor professes to consider which among the sects of Christendom are to be tolerated and in what degree, is written in a tone not easily reconciled with that of the rest. Though he begins by saying that diversity of opinions does more concern public peace than religion, it certainly appears in some passages, that on this pretext of peace, which with the magistrate has generally been of more influence than that of orthodoxy, he withdraws a great deal of that liberty of prophesying which he has been so broadly asserting. Punishment for religious tenets is doubtless not at all the same as restraint of separate worship; yet we are not prepared for the shackles he seems inclined to throw over the latter. Laws of ecclesiastical discipline, which, in Taylor’s age, were understood to be binding on the whole community, cannot, he holds, be infringed by those who take occasion to disagree, without rendering authority contemptible; and if there are any as zealous for obedience to the church, as others may be for their opinions against it, the toleration of the latter’s disobedience may give offence to the former: an argument strange enough in this treatise! But Taylor is always more prone to accumulate reasons than to sift their efficiency. It is indeed, he thinks, worthy to be considered in framing a law of church discipline, whether it will be disliked by any who are to obey it; but, after it is once enacted, there seems no further indulgence practicable than what the governors of the church may grant to particular persons by dispensation. The laws of discipline are for the public good, and must not so far tolerate a violation of themselves as to destroy the good that the public ought to derive from them.[122]
[122] This single chapter is of itself conclusive against the truth of Taylor’s own allegation that he wrote his Liberty of Prophesying in order to procure toleration for the episcopal church of England at the hands of those who had overthrown it. No one ever dreamed of refusing freedom of opinion to that church; it was only about public worship that any difficulty could arise. But, in truth, there is not one word in the whole treatise which could have been written with the view that Taylor pretends.
His general defence of toleration. 60. I am inclined to suspect that Taylor, for some cause, interpolated this chapter after the rest of the treatise was complete. It has as little bearing upon, and is as inconsistent in spirit with, the following sections as with those that precede. To use a familiar illustration, the effect it produces on the reader’s mind is like that of coming on deck at sea, and finding that, the ship having put about, the whole line of coast is reversed to the eye. Taylor, however, makes but a short tack. In the next section, he resumes the bold tone of an advocate for freedom; and, after discussing at great length the leading tenet of the Anabaptists, concludes that, resting as it does on such plausible, though insufficient grounds, we cannot exclude it by any means from toleration, though they may be restrained from preaching their other notions of the unlawfulness of war, or of oaths, or of capital punishment; it being certain that no good religion teaches doctrines whose consequences would destroy all government. A more remarkable chapter is that in which Taylor concludes in favour of tolerating the Romanists, except when they assert the pope’s power of deposing princes, or of dispensing with oaths. The result of all, he says, is this: “Let the prince and the secular power have a care the commonwealth be safe. For whether such or such a sect of Christians be to be permitted, is a question rather political than religious.”
61. In the concluding sections he maintains the right of particular churches to admit all who profess the Apostles’ creed to their communion, and of private men to communicate with different churches, if they require no unlawful condition. But “few churches, that have framed bodies of confession and articles, will endure any person that is not of the same confession; which is a plain demonstration that such bodies of confession and articles do much hurt.” “The guilt of schism may lie on him who least thinks it; he being rather the schismatic who makes unnecessary and inconvenient impositions, than he who disobeys them, because he cannot do otherwise without violating his conscience.”[123] The whole treatise on the Liberty of Prophesying ends with the celebrated parable of Abraham, found, as Taylor says, “in the Jews’ books,” but really in an Arabian writer. This story Franklin, as every one now knows, rather unhandsomely appropriated to himself; and it is a strange proof of the ignorance as to our earlier literature which then prevailed, that for many years it continued to be quoted with his name. It was not contained in the first editions of the Liberty of Prophesying; and, indeed, the book from which Taylor is supposed to have borrowed it was not published till 1641.
[123] This is said also by Hales, in his tract on Schism, which was published some years before the Liberty of Prophesying. It is, however, what Taylor would have thought without a prompter.
62. Such is this great pleading for religious moderation; a production not more remarkable in itself than for the quarter from which it came. In the polemical writings of Jeremy Taylor we generally find a staunch and uncompromising adherence to one party; and from the abundant use he makes of authority, we should infer that he felt a great veneration for it. In the Liberty of Prophesying, as has appeared by the general sketch, rather than analysis we have just given, there is a prevailing tinge of the contrary turn of mind, more striking than the comparison of insulated passages can be. From what motives, and under what circumstances, this treatise was written, is not easily discerned. In the dedication to Lord Hatton of the collective edition of his controversial writings after the Restoration, he declares that “when a persecution did arise against the church of England, he intended to make a reservative for his brethren and himself, by pleading for a liberty to our consciences to persevere in that profession, which was warranted by all the laws of God and our superiors.” It is with regret we are compelled to confess some want of ingenuousness in this part of Taylor’s proceedings. No one reading the Liberty of Prophesying can perceive that it had the slightest bearing on any toleration that the episcopal church, in the time of the civil war, might ask of her victorious enemies. The differences between them were not on speculative points of faith, nor turning on an appeal to fathers and councils. That Taylor had another class of controversies in his mind is sufficiently obvious to the attentive reader, and I can give no proof in this place to any other.
Effect of this treatise. 63. This was the third blow that the new latitudinarian school of Leyden had aimed in England at the positive dogmatists, who, in all the reformed churches, as in that of Rome, laboured to impose extensive confessions of faith, abounding in inferences of scholastic theology, as conditions of exterior communion, and as peremptory articles of faith. Chillingworth and Hales were not less decisive; but the former had but in an incidental manner glanced at the subject, and the short tract on Schism had been rather deficient in proof of its hardy paradoxes. Taylor, therefore, may be said to have been the first who sapped and shook the foundations of dogmatism and pretended orthodoxy; the first who taught men to seek peace in unity of spirit rather than of belief; and, instead of extinguishing dissent, to take away its sting by charity, and by a sense of human fallibility. The mind thus freed from bigotry is best prepared for the public toleration of differences in religion; but certainly the despotic and jealous temper of governments is not so well combated by Taylor as by later advocates of religious freedom.
Its defects. 64. In conducting his argument, he falls not unfrequently into his usual fault. Endowed with a mind of prodigious fertility, which a vast erudition rendered more luxuriant he accumulates without selection whatever presents itself to his mind; his innumerable quotations, his multiplied reasonings, his prodigality of epithets and appositions, are poured along the interminable periods of his writings, with a frequency of repetition, sometimes of the same phrases, which leaves us to suspect that he revised but little what he had very rapidly composed. Certain it is that, in his different works, he does not quite adhere to himself; and it would be more desirable to lay this on the partial views that haste and impetuosity produce, than on a deliberate employment of what he knew to be insufficient reasoning. But I must acknowledge that Taylor’s fairness does not seem his characteristic quality.
65. In some passages of the Liberty of Prophesying, he seems to exaggerate the causes of uncertainty, and to take away from ecclesiastical antiquity even that moderate probability of truth which a dispassionate inquirer may sometimes assign to it. His suspicions of spuriousness and interpolation are too vaguely sceptical, and come ill from one who has no sort of hesitation, in some of his controversies, to allege as authority what he here sets aside with little ceremony. Thus, in the Defence of Episcopacy, published in 1642, he maintains the authenticity of the first fifty of the apostolic canons, all of which, in the Liberty of Prophesying, a very few years afterwards, he indiscriminately rejects. But this line of criticism was not then in so advanced a state as at present; and, from a credulous admission of everything, the learned had come sometimes to more sweeping charges of interpolation and forgery than would be sustained on a more searching investigation. Taylor’s language is so unguarded that he seems to leave the authenticity of all the fathers precarious. Doubtless there is a greater want of security as to books written before the invention of printing than we are apt to conceive, especially where independent manuscripts have not been found; but it is the business of a sagacious criticism, by the aid of internal or collateral evidence, to distinguish, not dogmatically as most are wont, but with a rational, though limited assent, the genuine remains of ancient writers from the incrustations of blundering or of imposture.
Great erudition of this period. 66. A prodigious reach of learning distinguishes the theologians of these fifty years, far greater than even in the sixteenth century; and also, if I am not mistaken, more critical and pointed, though in these latter qualities it was afterwards surpassed. And in this erudition the Protestant churches we may perhaps say, were upon the whole more abundant than that of Rome. But it would be unprofitable to enumerate works which we are incompetent to appreciate. Blondel, Daillé, and Salmasius on the continent, Usher in England, are the most conspicuous names. Blondel sustained the equality of the apostolic church both against the primacy of Rome, and the episcopacy for which the Anglicans contended; Salmasius and Daillé fought on the same side in that controversy. |Usher, Fetavius.| The writings of our Irish primate, Usher, who maintained the antiquity of his order, but not upon such ground as many in England would have desired, are known for their extraordinary learning, in which he has perhaps never been surpassed by an English writer. But for judgment and calm appreciation of evidence, the name of Usher has not been altogether so much respected by posterity, as it was by his contemporaries. The church of Rome had its champions of less eminent renown: Gretser, perhaps the first among them, is not very familiar to our ears; but it is to be remembered, that some of the writings of Bellarmin fall within this period. The Dogmata Theologica of the jesuit Petavius, though but a compilation from the fathers and ancient councils, and not peculiarly directed against the tenets of the reformed, may deserve mention as a monument of useful labour.[124] Labbe, Sirmond, and several others, appear to range more naturally under the class of historical than theological writers. In mere ecclesiastical history—the records of events rather than opinions—this period was far more profound and critical than the preceding. The annals of Baronius were abridged and continued by Spondanus.