[130] Donne incurred some scandal by a book entitled Biathanatos, and considered as a vindication of suicide. It was published long after his death, in 1651. It is a very dull and pedantic performance, without the ingenuity and acuteness of paradox; distinctions, objections, and quotations from the rabble of bad authors whom he used to read, fill up the whole of it. It is impossible to find a less clear statement of argument on either side. No one would be induced to kill himself by reading such a book, unless he were threatened with another volume.
Of Jeremy Taylor. 71. The sermons of Jeremy Taylor are of much higher reputation; far indeed above any that had preceded them in the English church. An imagination essentially poetical, and sparing none of the decorations which, by critical rules, are deemed almost peculiar to verse; a warm tone of piety, sweetness, and charity; an accumulation of circumstantial accessories whenever he reasons, or persuades, or describes; an erudition pouring itself forth in quotation, till his sermons become in some places almost a garland of flowers from all other writers, and especially from those of classical antiquity, never before so redundantly scattered from the pulpit, distinguish Taylor from his contemporaries by their degree, as they do from most of his successors by their kind. His sermons on the Marriage Ring, on the House of Feasting, on the Apples of Sodom, may be named without disparagement to others, which perhaps ought to stand in equal place. But they are not without considerable faults, some of which have just been hinted. The eloquence of Taylor is great, but it is not eloquence of the highest class; it is far too Asiatic, too much in the style of Chrysostom and other declaimers of the fourth century, by the study of whom he had probably vitiated his taste; his learning is ill placed, and his arguments often as much so; not to mention that he has the common defect of alleging nugatory proofs; his vehemence loses its effect by the circuity of his pleonastic language; his sentences are of endless length, and hence not only altogether unmusical, but not always reducible to grammar. But he is still the greatest ornament of the English pulpit up to the middle of the seventeenth century; and we have no reason to believe, or rather much reason to disbelieve, that he had any competitor in other languages.
Devotional writings of Taylor. 72. The devotional writings of Taylor, several of which belong to the first part of the century, are by no means of less celebrity or less value than his sermons. Such are the life of Christ, the Holy Living and Dying, and the collections of meditations, called the Golden Grove. |And Hall.| A writer as distinguished in works of practical piety was Hall. His Art of Divine Meditation, his Contemplations, and indeed many of his writings, remind us frequently of Taylor. Both had equally pious and devotional tempers; both were full of learning, both fertile of illustration; both may be said to have had strong imagination and poetical genius, though Taylor let his predominate a little more. Taylor is also rather more subtle and argumentive; his copiousness has more real variety. Hall keeps more closely to his subject, dilates upon it sometimes more tediously, but more appositely. In his sermons there is some excess of quotation and far-fetched illustration, but less than in those of Taylor. These two great divines resemble each other, on the whole, so much that we might for a short time not discover which we were reading. I do not know that any third writer comes close to either. The Contemplations of Hall are among his most celebrated works. They are prolix, and without much of that vivacity or striking novelty we meet with in the devotional writings of his contemporary, but are perhaps more practical and generally edifying.[131]
[131] Some of the moral writings of Hall were translated into French by Chevreau in the seventeenth century, and had much success. Niceron, xi. 348.
In the Roman. 73. The religious treatises of this class, even those which by their former popularity, or their merit, ought to be mentioned in a regular history of theological literature, are too numerous for these pages. A mystical and ascetic spirit diffused itself more over religion, struggling sometimes, as in the Lutherans of Germany, against the formal orthodoxy of the church, but more often in subordination to its authority, and cooperating with its functions. The writings of St. Francis de Sales, titular Bishop of Geneva, especially that on the Love of God, published in 1616, make a sort of epoch in the devotional theology of the church of Rome. Those of St. Teresa, in the Spanish language, followed some years afterwards; they are altogether full of a mystical theopathy. But De Sales included charity in his scheme of divine love; and it is to him, as well as others of his age, that not only a striking revival of religion in France, which had been absolutely perverted or disregarded in the sixteenth century, was due, but a reformation in the practices of monastic life, which became more active and beneficent, with less of useless penance and asceticism than before. New institutions sprung up with the spirit of association, and all other animating principles of conventual orders, but free from the formality and torpor of the old.[132]
[132] Ranke, ii. 430.
And Lutheran church. 74. Even in the German churches, rigid as they generally were in their adherence to the symbolical books, some voices from time to time were heard for a more spiritual and effective religion. Arndt’s Treatise of True Christianity, in 1605, written on ascetic and devotional principles, and with some deviation from the tenets of the very orthodox Lutherans may be reckoned one of the first protests against their barren forms of Faith[133]; and the mystical theologians, if they had not run into such extravagances as did dishonour to their names would have been accessions to the same side. The principal mystics or theosophists have generally been counted among philosophers, and will therefore find their place in the next chapter. The German nation is constitutionally disposed to receive those forms of religion which address themselves to the imagination and the heart. Much therefore of this character has always been written, and become popular, in that language. Few English writings of the practical class, except those already mentioned, can be said to retain much notoriety. Those of George Herbert are best known; his Country Parson, which seems properly to fall within this description, is on the whole a pleasing little book; but the precepts are sometimes so overstrained, as to give an air of affectation.
[133] Eichhorn, v. part i., p. 355. Biogr. Univ. Chalmers.
Infidelity of some writers. Charron. 75. The disbelief in revelation, of which several symptoms had appeared before the end of the sixteenth century, became more remarkable afterwards both in France and England, involving several names not obscure in literary history. The first of these, in point of date, is Charron. The religious scepticism of this writer has not been generally acknowledged, and indeed it seems repugnant to the fact of his having written an elaborate defence of Christianity; yet we can deduce no other conclusion from one chapter in his most celebrated book, the Treatise on Wisdom. Charron is so often little else than a transcriber, that we might suspect him in this instance also to have drawn from other sources; which however would leave the same inference as to his own tenets, and I think this chapter has an air of originality.
Vanini. 76. The name of Charron, however, has not been generally associated with the charge of irreligion. A more audacious, and consequently more unfortunate writer was Lucilio Vanini, a native of Italy, whose book De Admirandis Naturæ Reginæ Deæque Mortalium Arcanis, printed at Paris in 1616, caused him to be burned at the stake by a decree of the parliament of Toulouse in 1619. This treatise, as well as one that preceded it, Amphitheatrum Æternæ Providentiæ, Lyons, 1615, is of considerable rarity, so that there has been a question concerning the atheism of Vanini, which some have undertaken to deny.[134] In the Amphitheatrum I do not perceive anything which leads to such an imputation, though I will not pretend to have read the whole of a book full of the unintelligible metaphysics of the later Aristotelians. It professes at least to be a vindication of the being and providence of the Deity. But the later work, which is dedicated to Bassompierre, and published with a royal privilege of exclusive sale for six years, is of a very different complexion. It is in sixty dialogues, the interlocutors being styled Alexander and Julius Cæsar, the latter representing Vanini himself. The far greater part of these dialogues relate to physical, but a few to theological subjects. In the fiftieth, on the religion of the heathens, he avows his disbelief of all religion, except such as nature, which is God, being the principle of motion, has planted in the hearts of man; every other being the figment of kings to keep their subjects in obedience, and of priests for their own lucre and honour;[135] observing plainly of his own Amphitheatrum, which is a vindication of providence, that he had said many things in it which he did not believe.[136] Vanini was infatuated with presumption, and, if he resembled Jordano Bruno in this respect, fell very short of his acuteness and apparent integrity. His cruel death, and perhaps the scarcity of his works, has given more celebrity to his name in literary history than it would otherwise have obtained.