ANGLICANS.—BULL.
The Defensio Fidei Nicenæ (1685) was written not to establish, by proofs from Scripture, the doctrine of Christ’s Divinity, but to show that the opinions of the ante-Nicene Fathers upon the subject, were in harmony with those expressed in the Creed of the first Œcumenical Council. This purpose Bull formed, in consequence of an attack upon those Fathers, by the learned Jesuit Petavius, and the use made of that attack, for ends opposed to his, by Arians and Socinians. The most perfect success on the part of the Anglican advocate would not, in the estimation of Divines of the Puritan school, be conclusive evidence of our Lord’s Deity, nor would his failure shake their faith; but the importance which he attached to the question, appears from the immense labour which he devoted to it. To him, as an Anglo-Catholic, the inquiry into what the early Church believed and taught appeared one of vital interest; and into his chosen task he threw the treasures of a vast erudition, and, if not powers of the highest order, certainly a decisive will and an extraordinarily active and patient inquisitiveness. Parts of his argument, it must be confessed, seem unsatisfactory. For he deals with his patristic authorities, as we do with the Holy Scriptures. Whilst we reasonably assume that the latter are always consistent, and therefore endeavour to harmonize apparent discrepancies, he assumes the same with regard to the writings of the Fathers. Hence he attempts to reconcile contradictory passages in the same author, and also contradictory passages in different authors. Moreover, upon a presumption of the perfect unity of patristic opinions, and of a thoroughly logical apprehension of subjects on the part of the Fathers, he sometimes educes proofs not from what they plainly say in so many words, but from what their language may be made to imply, when analyzed and manipulated with the utmost sagacity and skill. Loyal men standing at the bar have been unjustly arraigned for constructive treason. In controversy men of the soundest opinion have been unrighteously charged with constructive heresy. On the other hand, Bull’s method of criticism serves sometimes to vindicate opinions open to suspicion, and so to throw around doubtful points the halo of a constructive orthodoxy.[400]
ANGLICANS.—HEYLYN.
There is a good deal of special pleading in Bull’s Defence of the Nicene Creed. Nevertheless he has, in my opinion, clearly and fully established his main point, that a belief in the Divinity of our blessed Lord was common in the ante-Nicene Church. Bull’s views, as they are expressed in these works, are coincident as far as they go with those of Thorndike on the same subjects, but Bull leaves unvisited many fields which Thorndike traversed from end to end. Before leaving this eminent theologian it may be interesting to notice that he was one of those who in this country, in the seventeenth century, revived the ancient and scriptural distinction between soul and spirit; yet he so united the Spirit of God with the spirit of man that his theory amounts to a sort of tetrachomy. I may add—Hammond, in his Paraphrase (1 Thess. v. 23), and Jackson On the Creed, also insisted upon a distinction between soul and spirit.[401]
Another investigator, or rather champion, more comprehensive in his way than Bull, even going beyond Thorndike in variety of discussion, is Peter Heylyn, inferior to them both in all respects. Educated at Oxford, partly under a Puritan tutor, he, within three years after his ordination as a deacon, expressed such extreme ecclesiastical opinions, that he was denounced by Prideaux, the Regius Professor of Divinity, as Bellarminian and Pontifician: these very opinions, however, recommended him to the favour of Laud, at the time Bishop of Bath and Wells.
Heylyn, in his Theologia Veterum, gives what he calls “the sum of Christian theology, positive, philological, and polemical, contained in the Apostles’ Creed, or reducible to it.” Drawing his outline from the Creed, which he pronounces to be written by the Apostles, and to be all but canonical, he falls, though at a distance, into the wake of Dean Jackson: the eloquence of that great Divine it was impossible for Heylyn to reach; his candour and practical habit of mind, he had no disposition to cherish. In his preface, Heylyn declares himself an English Catholic,—keeping to the doctrines, rules, and forms of government established in the Church of England; and beyond those bounds, regulating “his liberty by the traditions of the Church, and the universal consent of the ancient Fathers.” The authority of the Church, in this writer’s opinion, includes the exposition of Scripture, the determination of controversies and the ordering of ceremonies; and he never misses an opportunity of upholding the rank and reputation of the Fathers. Heretics greatly excite his wrath, yet he admits, that neither all nor any who are merely schismatics, exclude themselves from the Catholic pale; but, speaking of Presbyterians and Popery, he remarks, the last is the lovelier error: better the Church be all head, than no head at all.[402] The antiquity and importance of fasts and festivals he strenuously maintains; the forgiveness of sin he connects with baptism; and he advocates both confession to a priest, and sacerdotal absolution. He is orthodox respecting the doctrines of the Trinity and the Atonement. The article upon Christ’s descent into hell, he discusses at length; and informs us, in his preface, that his inquiries into this mysterious subject led him to an exposition of the whole Creed. Pearson says cautiously that Christ’s soul “underwent the condition of the souls of such as die, and being.[403] He died in the similitude of a sinner, His soul went to the place where the souls of men are kept who die for their sins, and so did wholly undergo the law of death.” But Heylyn maintains that hell in the Creed means “the place of torments;” and that the soul of Christ as really descended there as His body entered the grave. The indication of these points will suffice to show the stamp of Heylyn’s theology, and the place to be assigned him among Anglican Divines. His talents were considerable, his learning does him credit; but he is so full of prejudice and party spirit that, whilst he has incurred odium from opponents, he can never win admiration even from friends.
ANGLICANS.—TAYLOR.
Jeremy Taylor is better known and more renowned for the rhythm of his rhetorical diction, the exuberance and felicity of his poetical illustrations, and the inexhaustible stores of his varied knowledge, than for Biblical scholarship, or for the depth, wisdom, and soundness of his theological reasonings. Yet he was a learned, painstaking, and diligent Divine, as well as a surprisingly eloquent and persuasive preacher: and though he has left behind him no body of divinity, there are some points distinctive of the Anglican school which he has treated with especial fulness; and, whilst faithful to its theology as a whole, there are portions of it which he has handled after a manner of his own. The influence of his patristic studies may be traced throughout his works; and the patronage of Archbishop Laud, and his friendship with Christopher Davenport—a learned and able Franciscan friar—were not likely to be altogether without effect upon so sensitive a nature as that of young Jeremy Taylor.
ANGLICANS.—TAYLOR.
He has much to say upon baptismal regeneration. In baptism, according to his teaching, we are admitted to the kingdom of Christ, we are presented unto Him, we are consigned with His sacrament, and we enter into His militia. It is also an adoption into the covenant, and a new birth. In it, all our sins are pardoned. “The catechumen descends,” he says,—following the words of Bede,—“into the font a sinner, he arises purified; he goes down the son of death, he comes up the son of the resurrection; he enters in, the son of folly and prevarication, he returns the son of reconciliation; he stoops down the child of wrath, and ascends the heir of mercy; he was the child of the devil, and now he is the servant and the son of God.” Baptism not only pardons past sins, but puts us into a state of pardon for time to come. It is a sanctification by the spirit of grace. It is the suppletory of original righteousness. Its effects are illumination, new life, and a holy resurrection. In short, by baptism we are saved. After having thus, in the most unqualified way, exhausted, one might suppose, all which imagination could conceive of the efficacy of the rite, Taylor says, there is less need to descend to temporal blessings, or rare contingencies, or miraculous events, or probable notices of things less certain; and then he speaks of miraculous cures effected by the baptismal water, and of the appointment of an angel guardian to each baptized person—which, indeed, he does not insist upon, although it seems to him “hugely probable.” Resuming a poetical theology, he adds, in patristic phraseology, that baptism is a new birth, “a chariot carrying us to God, the great circumcision, a circumcision made without hands, the key of the kingdom, the paranymph of the kingdom, the earnest of our inheritance, the answer of a good conscience, the robe of light, the sacrament of a new life, and of eternal salvation, Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ.”[404] Perhaps no one ever hung so many wreaths of flowers around the font as Taylor did; and if we were to take the highly coloured words which he uses by themselves, we should say, that his teaching on the subject was calculated to lull his disciples, if they had been only baptized, into a state of most deceptive and fearful self-security. But then, we know that other parts of his writings are of the most pungent and heart-searching description, destructive of all self-delusion, and, in some respects, ministering to a spirit of bondage, rather than to a spirit of presumptuous hope. The truth is, that much of the air of the old economy is breathed over Taylor’s views of the new dispensation. At times it blows with a chilling gust. We lack, in the garden of his rhetoric, the genial warmth of an evangelical summer; and in his language respecting sacraments, he shows a fondness for what St. Paul calls, “beggarly elements.” It should be noticed, in connection with his doctrine of baptism, that, though, in his Liberty of Prophesying, he deals gently with Anabaptists, no one could hold more strongly than did he the doctrine of infant baptism.