The Whole Duty of Man has been more condemned and more praised than it deserves. It presents a large amount of moral advice, but it lacks the main motive power which produces Christian virtue; and as to style, it is hard and unattractive from beginning to end, utterly lacking tenderness, and exhibiting practical religion only in a dry light.
Some of the Anglican Divines zealously devoted themselves to Biblical criticism. In the matter of exegesis, the Puritans achieved much; but they looked with suspicion upon all attempts to amend the sacred text. In this department, certain of their theological opponents laid their own age and posterity under immense obligation. Bryan Walton, perhaps, is not to be numbered with Anglicans; and amongst his most efficient helpers, was Lightfoot, more of a Latitudinarian than an Anglican,—but Castell and Pocock, Herbert Thorndike, and Alexander Huish, if not Thomas Hyde and Samuel Clark,[454] all of them eminent scholars, were more or less Anglican, certainly they were all Episcopalian, in their views; and it is to them, assisted by Oliver Cromwell, who permitted the paper for the purpose to be imported duty free, that we owe the English Polyglott,—which competent judges have pronounced superior to its more splendid predecessors, published on the Continent. Castell was enthusiastically devoted to critical studies, to which he sacrificed his property, his time, and his energies, with small reward, in the way of Church preferment. His Lexicon Heptaglotton is a monument of astonishing learning, and worthy of being associated with his friend’s Polyglott Bible.
After the Restoration, an idea was entertained of printing the famous Alexandrian MS., which had been sent as a present to Charles I. from the Greek Patriarch Cyrillus; and the editorship was to have been entrusted to Dr. Smith, an Oxford scholar, to whom Charles II. promised a Canonry at Windsor or Westminster for his labour; but the design was abandoned. Dr. John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, published, in 1675, an edition of the Greek New Testament, with various readings, taken from Walton and others; his object being to show the substantial correctness of the received text, and how little its integrity is affected by the numerous lections accumulated by an industrious collation of MSS.
ANGLICAN CRITICS.
To these critics must be added the well-known commentator Dr. Hammond, who, instead of following the Fathers and the Reformers in their schemes of mystical interpretation, struck out a path for himself, and sought to illustrate the grammatical sense of the sacred writings. He studied the Hellenistic dialect, compared Greek MSS., examined ancient manners and customs, and employed the opinions of the Gnostics to elucidate references in the Epistles to early heresies. This is very remarkable in an Anglican Divine, and it indicates what some who sympathized with him in other respects might have regarded as a rationalistic tendency—certainly they would have so regarded it in any one not belonging to themselves. Hammond’s Paraphrase and Annotations, published in 1659, may be taken as constituting an epoch in the history of exegesis; the more so on account of his influence, for his name stood so high with the Episcopalian clergy, “that he naturally turned the tide of interpretation his own way.”[455]
CHAPTER XV.
Four eminent Divines, who have made a deep mark on English literature, now claim attention, coming, as they do, from their complexion of thought, and from their characteristic opinions, between the Anglicans just reviewed, and the Latitudinarians who remain to be noticed.
William Chillingworth was one of those clever, hard-headed men in whom the reasoning faculty predominates over imagination and sentiment, and who are thoroughly at home in the exercises of logic, subjecting the opinions of opponents to a subtle analysis, and entrenching themselves behind carefully-constructed outworks of argumentative defence. The skill which, as an engineer, he displayed at the siege of Gloucester, in framing engines to storm the place, was of a piece with the skill which he exhibited in attacking what he believed to be forms of error and superstition.[456] He is best known by his great work, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation; and it is evident that he had derived advantages, as an assailant of the Roman Church, from the acquaintance with it which he had formed during the period of his connection with that community.
LIBERAL ORTHODOX.—CHILLINGWORTH.
His famous dictum, “The Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants”—the lever with which he sought to upheave and overthrow the tenets of Popery—placed him in a theological position distinct from that which was occupied by Anglicans; for, though they were ready enough to appeal to Scripture against Rome, they also appealed to Christian antiquity against Puritanism. Chillingworth’s method of reasoning betrayed an absence of sympathy with High Church Divines in their reverence for the early Fathers, and showed how he fixed his religious opinions solely upon the basis of the written revelation, as interpreted by reason. And at the same time, by largely insisting upon the principle that the Apostles’ Creed contains all necessary points of mere belief,[457] and by the disposition which he manifested to recognize as little doctrinal meaning upon disputed points as possible in the articles of that early Christian confession, he not only separated himself from Anglicans, but he separated himself from Puritans. He was reticent upon evangelical subjects, respecting which the latter delighted to speak; and from his desire to comprehend people of considerable dogmatic divergency within the pale of the Church, he incurred reproaches from those last named, and was stigmatized by them, not only as an Arminian, but as a Socinian. No definite idea of his opinions upon some important parts of Divine truth can be gathered from his writings. It is plain that he loved a large liberty in all kinds of thinking, and set a higher value upon a religious temper, a devout spirit, a Catholic disposition, and a moral life, than upon orthodoxy of sentiment, or forms of worship, or methods of ecclesiastical government and discipline.