Religious Forebodings.
Nearly sixty years since, Southey wrote his famous anticipation of Mormonism, and of some other matters as important as Mormonism, in a letter to Rickman (1805), as follows:
“Here I do not like the prospects: sooner or later a hungry government will snap at the tithes; the clergy will then become State pensioners or parish pensioners; in the latter case more odious to the farmers than they are now, in the former the first pensioners to be amerced of their stipends. Meantime, the damned system of Calvinism spreads like a pestilence among the lower classes. I have not the slightest doubt that the Calvinists will be the majority in less than half a century; we see how catching the distemper is, and do not see any means of stopping it. There is a good opening for a new religion, but the founder must start up in some of the darker parts of the world. It is America’s turn to send out apostles. A new one there must be when the old one is worn out. I am a believer in the truth of Christianity, but truth will never do for the multitude; there is an appetite for faith in us, which if it be not duly indulged, it turns to green sickness, and feeds upon chalk and cinders. The truth is, man was not made for the world alone; and speculations concerning the next will be found, at last, the most interesting to all of us.”
Folly of Atheism.
Morphology, in natural science, teaches us that the whole animal and vegetable creation is formed upon certain fundamental types and patterns, which can be traced under various modifications and transformations through all the rich variety of things apparently of most dissimilar build. But here and there a scientific person takes it into his foolish head that there may be a set of moulds without a moulder, a calculated gradation of forms without a calculator, an ordered world without an ordering God. Now, this atheistical science conveys about as much meaning as suicidal life; for science is possible only where there are ideas, and ideas are only possible where there is mind, and minds are the offspring of God; and atheism itself is not merely ignorance and stupidity—it is the purely nonsensical and the unintelligible.—Professor Blackie: Edinburgh Essays, 1856.
The first Congregational Church in England.
In the State-Paper Office has been discovered a manuscript, showing that in the Bridewell of London[25] were imprisoned the members of the Congregational Church first formed after the accession of Queen Elizabeth. They were committed by the Privy Council to the custody of the gaoler, May 20, 1567. It is, no doubt, to this company that Bishop Grindal refers, in his letter to Bullinger, July 11, 1568:—“Some London citizens,” he says, “with four or five ministers, have openly separated from us; and sometimes in private houses, sometimes in fields, and occasionally even in ships, they have held meetings, and administered the sacraments. Besides this, they have ordained ministers, elders, and deacons, after their own way.” The Rev. Dr. Waddington has discovered some original papers, written by the members of this Church in the Bridewell, signed chiefly by Christian women, together with a statement of the principles of the sect. It appears from these interesting records, which have been kept, though in a loose form, for nearly three hundred years, that Richard Fitz, their first pastor, died in the prison. Dr. Waddington shows, by indisputable evidence, from original papers in the public archives, that the succession of Congregational Churches from the above period is continuous; so that the Bridewell may be regarded as the starting-point of Congregationalism after the Reformation; or, in other words, the origin of the first voluntary church in England, after the Marian persecution, was contemporaneous with the Anglican movement. And it is as remarkable as it is satisfactory, that these touching and simple memorials should have been preserved by the Metropolitan Bishop, and finally transmitted to the Royal Archives.
Innate Ideas, and Pre-existence of Souls.
In the Second Series of Things not Generally Known, pp. 147-152, we have illustrated this doctrine at some length; but return to it here for the purpose of quoting an argument directly opposed to the above illustrations, by the writer of the eloquent exposition of Plato, in the Edinburgh Essays, 1856: