SECT. II.
The Things for which Christians have persecuted one another generally of small importance.
But as the truth of history is not to be concealed; and as it can do no service to the christian cause to palliate the faults of any set of christians whatsoever, especially when all parties have been more or less involved in the same guilt; I must observe farther, as an aggravation of this guilt, that the things for which christians have persecuted each other, have been generally “matters of no importance in religion,” and oftentimes such as have been “directly contrary” to the nature of it. If my reader would know upon what accounts the church hath been filled with divisions and schisms; why excommunications and anathemas have been so dreadfully tossed about; what hath given occasion to such a multitude of suspensions, depositions and expulsions; what hath excited the clergy to such numberless violencies, rapines, cruelties, and murders, he will probably be surprised to be informed that it is nothing of any consequence or real importance, nothing relating to the substance and life of pure and undefiled religion; little besides hard words, technical terms, and inexplicable phrases, points of mere speculation, abstruse questions, and metaphysical notions; rites and ceremonies, forms of human invention, and certain institutions, that have had their rise and foundation only in superstition: these have been the great engines of division; these the sad occasions of persecution.
Would it not excite sometimes laughter, and sometimes indignation, to read of a proud and imperious prelate excommunicating the whole christian church, and sending, by wholesale, to the devil, all who did not agree with him in the precise day of observing Easter? Especially when there is so far from being any direction given by Christ or his apostles about the day, that there is not a single word about the festival itself. And is it not an amazing instance of stupidity and superstition, that such a paltry and whimsical controversy should actually engage, for many years, the whole christian world, and be debated with as much warmth and eagerness, as if all the interests of the present and future state had been at stake; as if Christ himself had been to be crucified afresh, and his whole gospel to be subverted and destroyed.
The Arian controversy, that made such havoc in the christian church, was, if I may be allowed to speak it without offence, in the beginning only about words; though probably some of Arius’ party went farther afterwards, than Arius himself did at first. Arius, as hath been shewn, expressly allowed the son to be “before all times and ages, perfect God, unchangeable,” and begotten after the most perfect likeness of the unbegotten father.
This, to me, appears to bid very fair for orthodoxy; and was, I think, enough to have reconciled the bishop and his presbyter, if there had not been some other reasons of the animosity between them. But when other terms were invented, that were hard to be understood, and difficult to be explained, the original controversy ceased; and the dispute then was about the meaning of those terms, and the fitness of their use in explaining the divinity of the Son of God.
Arius knew not how to reconcile the bishop’s words, “ever begotten,” with the assertion, that the Son, co-exists “unbegottenly with God;” and thought it little less than a contradiction to affirm, that he was “unbegottenly begotten.” And as to the word “consubstantial,” Arius seems to have thought that it destroyed the personal subsistence of the Son, and brought in the doctrine of Sabellius; or else that it implied that the Son was “a part of the Father;” and for this reason declined the use of it. And, indeed, it doth not appear to me that the council of Nice had themselves any determinate and fixed meaning to the word, as I think may be fairly inferred from the debates of that council with Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, about that term; which, though put into their creed, in opposition to the Arians, was yet explained by them in such a sense, as almost any Arian could have, bona fide, subscribed.
On the other hand, the bishop of Alexandria seems to have thought, that when Arius asserted that the son existed “by the will and counsel of the Father;” it implied the mutability of his nature; and that, when he taught concerning the Son, “that there was a time when he was not,” it inferred his being a temporary, and not an eternal being; though Arius expressly denied both these consequences. In short, it was a controversy upon this metaphysical question, “[[375]]whether or no God could generate or produce a being, in strictness of speech, as eternal as himself? Or, whether God’s generating the Son doth not necessarily imply the pre-existence of the Father, either in conception, or some small imaginable point of time;” as Arius imagined, and the bishop denied.
This was, in fact, the state of this controversy. And did not the emperor Constantine give a just character of this debate, when he declared the occasion of the difference to be very trifling; and that their quarrels arose from an idle itch of disputation, since they did not contend about any essential doctrine of the gospel? could these hard words and inexplicable points justify the clergy in their intemperate zeal, and in their treating each other with the rancour and bitterness of the most implacable enemies? What hath the doctrine of real godliness, what hath the church of God to do with these debates? Hath the salvation of men’s souls, and the practice of virtue, any dependance upon men’s receiving unscriptural words, in which they cannot believe, because they cannot understand them; and which, those who first introduced them, were not able to explain?
If I know my own heart, I would be far from giving up any plain and important doctrine of the gospel. But will any man coolly and soberly affirm, that nice and intricate questions, that depend upon metaphysical distinctions, and run so high as the most minute supposeable atom or point of time, can be either plain or important doctrines of the gospel? Oh Jesus! if thou be “the Son of the everlasting God, the brightness of thy Father’s glory, and the express image of his person;” if thou art the most perfect resemblance of his all-perfect goodness, that kind benefactor, that God-like friend to the human race, which the faithful records of thy life declare thee to be; how can I believe the essential doctrines of thy gospel to be thus wrapped up in darkness? or, that the salvation of that church, “which thou hast purchased with thy blood,” depends on such mysterious and inexplicable conditions? If thy gospel represents thee right, surely thou must be better pleased with the humble, peaceable christian, who when honestly searching into the glories of thy nature, and willing to give thee all the adoration thy great Father hath ordered him to pay thee, falls into some errors, as the consequence of human weakness; than with that imperious and tyrannical disciple, who divides thy members, tears the bowels of thy church, and spreads confusion and strife throughout thy followers and friends, even for the sake of truths that lie remote from men’s understanding, and in which thou hast not thought proper to make the full, the plain decision. If truth is not to be given up for the sake of peace, I am sure peace is not to be sacrificed for the sake of such truths; and if the gospel is a rule worthy our regard, the clergy of those times can never be excused for the contentions they raised, and the miseries they occasioned in the christian world, upon account of them.