Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope

by Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke

I cannot conclude my discourse on this occasion better than by putting you in mind of a passage you quoted to me once, with great applause, from a sermon of Foster, and to this effect: “Where mystery begins, religion ends.” The apophthegm pleased me much, and I was glad to hear such a truth from any pulpit, since it shows an inclination, at least, to purify Christianity from the leaven of artificial theology, which consists principally in making things that are very plain mysterious, and in pretending to make things that are impenetrably mysterious very plain. If you continue still of the same mind, I shall have no excuse to make to you for what I have written and shall write. Our opinions coincide. If you have changed your mind, think again and examine further. You will find that it is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature’s God—that is, he follows God in His works and in His Word; nor presumes to go further, by metaphysical and theological commentaries of his own invention, than the two texts, if I may use this expression, carry him very evidently. They who have done otherwise, and have affected to discover, by a supposed science derived from tradition or taught in the schools, more than they who have not such science can discover concerning the nature, physical and moral, of the Supreme Being, and concerning the secrets of His providence, have been either enthusiasts or knaves, or else of that numerous tribe who reason well very often, but reason always on some arbitrary supposition.

Much of this character belonged to the heathen divines, and it is in all its parts peculiarly that of the ancient Fathers and modern doctors of the Christian Church. The former had reason, but no revelation, to guide them; and though reason be always one, we cannot wonder that different prejudices and different tempers of imagination warped it in them on such subjects as these, and produced all the extravagances of their theology. The latter had not the excuse of human frailty to make in mitigation of their presumption. On the contrary, the consideration of this frailty, inseparable from their nature, aggravated their presumption. They had a much surer criterion than human reason; they had divine reason and the Word of God to guide them and to limit their inquiries. How came they to go beyond this criterion? Many of the first preachers were led into it because they preached or wrote before there was any such criterion established, in the acceptance of which they all agreed, because they preached or wrote, in the meantime, on the faith of tradition and on a confidence that they were persons extraordinarily gifted. Other reasons succeeded these. Skill in languages, not the gift of tongues, some knowledge of the Jewish cabala and some of heathen philosophy, of Plato’s especially, made them presume to comment, and under that pretence to enlarge the system of Christianity with as much licence as they could have taken if the word of man, instead of the Word of God, had been concerned, and they had commented the civil, not the divine, law. They did this so copiously that, to give one instance of it, the exposition of St. Matthew’s Gospel took up ninety homilies, and that of St. John’s eighty-seven, in the works of Chrysostom; which puts me in mind of a Puritanical parson who, if I mistake not—for I have never looked into the folio since I was a boy and condemned sometimes to read in it—made one hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm.

Now all these men, both heathens and Christians, appeared gigantic forms through the false medium of imagination and habitual prejudice; but were, in truth, as arrant dwarfs in the knowledge to which they pretended as you and I and all the sons of Adam. The former, however, deserved some excuse; the latter none. The former made a very ill use of their reason, no doubt, when they presume to dogmatise about the divine nature, but they deceived nobody. What they taught, they taught on their own authority, which every other man was at liberty to receive or reject as he approved or disapproved the doctrine. Christians, on the other hand, made a very ill use of revelation and reason both. Instead of employing the superior principle to direct and confine the inferior, they employed it to sanctify all that wild imagination, the passions, and the interests of the ecclesiastical order suggested. This abuse of revelation was so scandalous that whilst they were building up a system of religion under the name of Christianity, every one who sought to signalise himself in the enterprise—and they were multitudes—dragged the Scriptures to his opinion by different interpretations, paraphrases, comments. Arius and Nestorius both pretended that they had it on their sides; Athanasius and Cyril on theirs. They rendered the Word of God so dubious that it ceased to be a criterion, and they had recourse to another—to Councils and the decrees of Councils. He must be very ignorant in ecclesiastical antiquity who does not know by what intrigues of the contending factions—for such they were, and of the worst kind—these decrees were obtained; and yet, an opinion prevailing that the Holy Ghost, the same Divine Spirit who dictated the Scriptures, presided in these assemblies and dictated their decrees, their decrees passed for infallible decisions, and sanctified, little by little, much of the superstition, the nonsense, and even the blasphemy which the Fathers taught, and all the usurpations of the Church. This opinion prevailed and influenced the minds of men so powerfully and so long that Erasmus, who owns in one of his letters that the writings of Œcolampadius against transubstantiation seemed sufficient to seduce even the elect (“ut seduci posse videantur etiam electi”), declares in another that nothing hindered him from embracing the doctrine of Œcolampadius but the consent of the Church to the other doctrine (“nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiæ”). Thus artificial theology rose on the demolitions, not on the foundations, of Christianity; was incorporated into it; and became a principal part of it. How much it becomes a good Christian to distinguish them, in his private thoughts at least, and how unfit even the greatest, the most moderate, and the least ambitious of the ecclesiastical order are to assist us in making this distinction, I have endeavoured to show you by reason and by example.

It remains, then, that we apply ourselves to the study of the first philosophy without any other guides than the works and the Word of God. In natural religion the clergy are unnecessary; in revealed they are dangerous guides.