FOWLER.
Universal redemption,—by which is signified the universal applicability of our Lord’s atoning sacrifice,—is strenuously maintained by this Divine;[476] and he speaks hopefully of the future state, through Christ, of virtuous heathens.
Passing to Church questions, the same writer expresses a preference for Episcopacy, but does not unchurch unepiscopal societies; he holds Erastian views of the power of the civil magistrate; and strangely denies, that liberty of conscience forms a part of Christian liberty. He would concede to every man liberty of opinion, but not the liberty of persuading others to adopt his opinion; so that this scheme, ecclesiastically considered, runs at last into the doctrine of intolerance. Throughout Fowler’s works an anti-Puritan feeling is predominant; and his allusions to Nonconformists are by no means friendly.[477]
Wilkins, the moderate and liberal Bishop of Chester, belonged to the same class with Fowler. Known chiefly by his scientific works, he, nevertheless, deserves notice as one of the early defenders of natural religion against the attacks and the innuendoes of sceptics and infidels. The authors who have been just mentioned passed over the evidences of religion and plunged at once into the discussion of doctrines; but Wilkins saw that there is much outside Christianity which needed defence, for the subsequent preservation of the palladium of the faith. He is to be reckoned amongst the first to expound those more general and fundamental truths which, in the next century, occupied so much attention, and were esteemed bulwarks of revelation. He wrote upon the principles and duties of natural religion; but only twelve chapters of the book on the subject were completed by himself; the rest being prepared from the Bishop’s MSS., by his friend Tillotson. Cumberland’s De legibus Naturæ Disquisitio Philosophica (1672) is scarcely a theological treatise, it being a pioneer in the dangerous region of utilitarian ethics; but Cumberland may properly be reckoned as belonging to the Latitudinarians, for his speculations are more or less intimately related to what is generally regarded as the religion of nature in its alliance with the religion of revelation.
CUDWORTH.
A chief—if not the very first place—amongst the opponents of atheism and immorality, must be adjudged to Ralph Cudworth, whose learning and ability have reflected so much lustre on the Cambridge school. His Intellectual System is left unfinished, and reminds us of costly preparations for palatial buildings which have never risen above a few layers of marble blocks. With such a comparison, however, a contrast is suggested; for whilst the substructions referred to, may be monuments of the folly, condemned in the Gospel, of him who begins to build and is not able to finish,—Cudworth’s treatise shows it was from no want of power that he left his work incomplete. Of the five chapters of the first and only book of the Intellectual System, the fourth and fifth are by very far the longest, and these are devoted to Theology. It comes not within my province to make an attempt at deciding upon the place of honour due to Cudworth in the temple of fame, to report his speculations, or to repeat his critical estimates of different philosophers; my duty is simply to call attention to the two chapters, in which he ventures to trace a resemblance between the Trinity of Plato and the Trinity of Scripture, and argues also against Atheism. Respecting the latter, Cudworth had stated in his second chapter, the various reasonings of the ancient fatalists, whose system he characterized as “a gigantical and titanical attempt to dethrone the Deity,”—“Atheism openly swaggering under the glorious appearance of wisdom and philosophy.” In the fourth chapter, where he speaks of the Trinity, he explains Platonic ideas, attempting to show, that notwithstanding the difference between them and the ideas in Scripture, the three hypostases of the Platonists were Homoousian, Coessential, and Consubstantial. He touches upon the opinions of the Fathers, and expounds the views of Athanasius, who supposes that the three Divine hypostases “make up one entire Divinity, after the same manner as the fountain and the stream make up one entire river; or the root, and the stock, and the branches, one entire tree.” Cudworth contends that the Christian Trinity, though a mystery, is more agreeable to reason than the Platonic; and that there is no absurdity at all in supposing “the pure soul and body of the Messiah to be made a living temple or Shechinah-image or statue of the Deity.”[478] The bent of the author’s mind, and the tendency of the school to which he belonged, is seen throughout this part of his design, which is not to place the doctrine of the Trinity on a scriptural basis, but to establish and illustrate its perfect reasonableness, and to point out coincidences between it and some of the best guesses, or most satisfactory conclusions, of thinkers who never enjoyed the advantages of revelation. In harmony with this, is the fact of his noting, in the midst of his speculations, the following errors:—“The first, of those who make Christianity nothing but an Antinomian Plot against real righteousness, and, as it were, a secret confederacy with the Devil. The second, of those who turn that into matter of mere notion and opinion, dispute and controversy, which was designed by God only as a contrivance, machine, or engine to bring men effectually to a holy and godly life.”[479]
CUDWORTH.
The fifth chapter is devoted to “a particular confutation of all the atheistic grounds,” which confutation covers 270 folio pages. The two principal objections which he combats are, that, either men have no idea of God at all, or else, none but such as is compounded and made up of impossible and contradictory notions; whence these Atheists would infer Him to be an inconceivable nothing, and that, as nothing could come from nothing, it may be concluded, that whatever substantially or really is, was from all eternity of itself unmade, or uncreated by any Deity. The answering of these objections—in a course of argument which combines great learning with metaphysical acuteness—leads Cudworth to introduce proofs of the Divine existence drawn from final causes, as in the subjoined passage, which is quoted as one of the most familiar and popular forms of reasoning to be found in this recondite treatise:—“It is no more possible, that the fortuitous motion of dead and senseless matter, should ever from itself be taught and necessitated to produce such an orderly and regular system as the frame of this whole world is, together with the bodies of animals, and constantly to continue the same; than that a man perfectly illiterate and neither able to write nor read, taking up a pen into his hand, and making all manner of scrawls, with ink upon paper, should at length be taught and necessitated by the thing itself, to write a whole quire of paper together, with such characters, as being decyphered by a certain key, would all prove coherent philosophic sense.” Or to take another instance:—“This is no more possible than that ten or a dozen persons, altogether unskilled in music, having several instruments given them, and striking the strings or keys thereof, any how as it happened, should, after some time of discord and jarring, at length be taught and necessitated, to fall into most exquisite harmony, and continue the same uninterruptedly for several hours together.”[480]
Cudworth directed his studies chiefly to the foundations of religion and morality. Neither from his published works, nor, it would appear, from his unpublished MSS., in the British Museum, can any definite system of Biblical doctrine be gathered. The general colouring of his theological views, however, may be inferred from the very title of one of his printed treatises: “Deus Justificatus; or the Divine Goodness vindicated and cleared against the assertors of absolute and inconditionate Reprobation.”
CAMBRIDGE.—CRITICS.