 Section 4 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 2. Benjamin Wichcote, Reason and Religion, Part 2. It is unnecessary to dwell minutely upon the mere controversial details of the correspondence save insofar as they bring out real points of theological or personal significance. The course of argument on the several topics used by both writers has lost much of its interest and becomes on Wichcote's part here and there very technical. We can see traces in it of that tendency to school language of which Tuckney accuses him far more so than in his sermons or aphorisms. Footnote. There is a story illustrative of Wichcote's tendency to the use of school language. It is said that one day, seeing two boys fighting in the street, he went up and parted them, exclaiming, what, moral entities, and yet pugnacious? He will's lectures on History of Moral Philosophy in England, 1852, page 45. The story is very good and may be true, but Wichcote's language in his sermons and aphorisms is, upon the whole, simple and idiomatic for his time. End of Footnote. With all Tuckney's narrowness of thought and the occasional slovenliness of his style, there is a homely vigor and expressiveness in his language which compare very well with the more elaborate but less pointed letter writing of Wichcote. In his second letter, the latter defends at length his views as to the relation of reason to religion. Reason he maintains is not merely the source and instrument of natural theology, but, moreover, has a true function in regard to sacred and evangelical theology. The contents of Revelation transcend reason, but in no respect contradict it. They lie in amplitude in a, at plenitude in a, objective, non-incontradictione rationis. Quote, quick quid receptor add modum recipientis receptor, the bucket most filled in the sea, yet least contains the ocean. Or, as he elsewhere puts what seems to have been a favorite thought with him, the ocean can but fill the vessel, which a much less quantity of water can do. One truth, by virtue of its self-illuminating power, satisfies the mind. Quote, it speaks for itself, it recommends itself to its subject, it satisfies the reason of the mind, procures its own entertainment by its own excellency. I receive the truth of Christian religion in way of illumination, affection and choice. I myself am taken with it as understanding and knowing it. I retain it as a welcome guest. It is not forced into me, but I let it in, yet so as taught of God. Do I dishonor my faith, or do any wrong to it, to tell the world that my reason and understanding are satisfied in it? I have no reason against it. Yea, the highest and purest reason is for it." He is somewhat indignant at Tuckney's insinuation that he had been indebted to Armenian sources for his opinions. Nonsum cristianis alikuyus nominus, he exclaims. Quote, I may as well be called a papist or Mohammedan pagan or atheist, and truly, sir, you are wholly mistaken as to the whole course of my studies. You say you found me largely in their apologia. To my knowledge I never saw nor heard of the work before, much less have I read a tittle of it. I should lay open my weakness if I should tell you how little I have read of the books and authors you have mentioned. Of ten years past nothing at all. I know not who should have been your informer, but truly in a thousand guesses you could not have been further off from the truth of the thing. And for schoolmen I do not think I have spent four and twenty hours in them to visim these fourteen years. Dr. Field on the church I read over eighteen years ago, but have not looked into him I believe these ten years. Jackson and Hammond I have a little looked into here and there, a good while since, but have not read the hundredth part of either of them. Truly I shame myself to tell you how little I have been acquainted with books, but for your satisfaction I do. While fellow at Emmanuel College, employment with pupils took my time from me. I have not read many books, but I have studied a few. Meditation and invention hath been rather my life than reading, and truly I have more read Calvin and Perkins and Beza than all the books, authors, or names you mention. I have always expected reason for what men say, less valuing persons or authority in the stating and resolving of truth, and therefore have read them most where I have found it. I have not looked at anything as more than an opinion which hath not been underpropped by convincing reason or plain or satisfactory scripture. I rather effect to speak with them who differ from me than those who I think agree with me, I speak of matter of opinions for about fundamentals I am satisfied, that I may be rid of my misapprehensions wherein I daily suspect myself, and seek cause to think that I may be in some errors, as well as I have been, whereof I have had experience. But this is vanity to use such a peri-autologia. I am ashamed to think what I have done and could blot it out again. But to satisfy you wherein you have me in suspicion, though it be folly in me to do it, I let it go. You seem in your letter to anatomize my life, but the description does not characterize me. You could hardly have shot further from the mark." After this significant piece of autobiography, which quote returns to criticize Tuckney's denunciation of Sosinians, Arminians, Polaris of sectaries, etc. Do we not agree even with papists he argues, quote, in what they hold as true? Truth is truth whosoever hath spoken it or howsoever it hath been abused. Every Christian must think and believe as he finds cause. If this liberty be not allowed to the university, wherefore do we study? We have nothing to do but to get good memories and to learn by heart, close, quote. He winds up, in conclusion, with a further bit of self-portraiture. Tuckney had accused him of affecting school phrases and learning in preaching and making use of philosophy and metaphysics. He resents this imputation as affecting the success of his ministry, of which he was not unreasonably jealous. Preaching was his strong point and the chief means of his influence. I have, to my best, he says, quote, endeavored to confirm truth and convince the understanding of men therein, and to that purpose, as I have been able, have made use of all those principles that derive from God and speak Him in the world. I am sure I have all along been well understood by persons of honest hearts, but of mean place and education, and I have had the blessing of the souls of such at their departure out of the world. I thank God my conscience tells me that I have not herein affected worldly show, but the real service of truth, and I have always found in myself that such preaching of others hath most commanded my heart which hath most illuminated my head. The time I have spent on philosophers I have no cause to repent, and the use I have made of them I dare not disown. I heartily thank God for what I have found in them, either have I upon this occasion one jot less loved the old scriptures. I have found the philosophers that I have read good so far as they go, and it makes me secretly blush before God when I find either my head, heart, or life challenged by theirs which I must confess I have often found. I thank St. Augustine, Seath of St. Paul, non-destruet verum quod invent it in latteri paginorum, and our Saviour reproves the Jews by tire and Sidon. I have thought it profitable to provoke to jealousy, lazy, and loose Christians by philosophers." Tuckney's third letter is in a milder and less grieved tone. He has evidently been touched by the personal feeling and modesty shown by Wichcote in defense of himself, and he tries to make the most of their points of agreement rather than to emphasize further their differences. Reciprocare Serum would be, he says, but a poor and unthrifty business for two old friends. He would be satisfied if Wichcote and his friends would only so far deny themselves, quote, as to forbear the insisting on arguments of the power of nature and reason in their sermons, which in scripture are rather abased than exalted. It would prevent heat and opposition, which at all times are uncomfortable, and especially in these crazy times may prove a very ill consequence to the university, close quote. As to the Westminster standards, heartily as he approved of them, he would be far from imposing them upon others, quote, in the assembly I gave my vote with others that the confession of faith, put out by authority, should not be required to be either sworn or subscribed to, we having been burnt in the hand in that kind before, close quote. At the same time he cannot go the length of that liberty of prophesying which some so call for. And truth be truth, he says, quote, this libertas profitandi I take to be no such truth, and I do not the more like it, but rather the more suspected, because Sosinians and Arminians do so much plead for it, and that, as it is apparent, out of design, that they might not be hindered in diffusing their poison in their other corrupt tenets, which they are more commonly known by, though the world is not now so ignorant of Sosinianism and Arminianism as to confine the one to the denial of Christ's divinity and satisfaction, or the other to the five controversial articles, close quote. He apologizes in some degree for his alleged anatomy of which quotes life. God help me, he says, quote, more to search into my own heart, that I be not so much mistaken in the one as it seemeth I am in the other. God knows I am not want to look very much into others who have so much to look after in myself. What I did herein I entreat you to think was not from an ill-minded or busy curiosity, but out of love and faithfulness. And if you will please to do as much for me, such balm shall not break my head, close quote. He naturally expresses astonishment at which quote saying that he had never read the Apollogia remonstratum, which, when it came out, we so greedily bought and read. And he adds, in a very significant clause, that amongst the English authors which he formerly named as having influenced his friend, he should have included Chillingworth and Hooker. In the first book of the ecclesiastical polity, though it be many years since I read it, he continues, quote, and I have it not now by me. If I forget not, there be divers things which divers discourses nowadays much symbolize with, close quote. This is an interesting guess, the truth and force of which will afterwards more fully appear. Which, quote, in his reply, confines himself mainly to a reiteration of the positions which he has already maintained, and rather seems to warm as Tuckney has cooled. The softness and apparent satisfaction of Tuckney's language kindles him more than his rebukes had done. He had, he says, quote, well considered the matter objected to, and when he found it had given offense, reexamined it all over again at tandem confirmati o evado. And I am fully settled in my thoughts that the matter is unexceptionable and that which must be stood to, highly tending to God's honor and worthy the gospel. And there is nothing of reality against it but mistakes, misapprehensions, jealousies, and misprisions. Sir, this I would not write to you. Did I not think the honor of God and truth engaged the interest of souls concerned, and were not I myself so assured, as that thereto, if called to it, I must give attestation with my life? Therefore, sir, though I dearly love you in my relation to you, and highly honor you for your own worth, yet cannot I, out of respect to you, give up so noble, so choice a truth, so antidotical against temptation, so satisfactory, so convictive, so quietive, in so full confirmation, to my mind, of the truth of the Christian religion. The truth, namely, of the rationality of Christian doctrine and its fitness to fill and satisfy the human mind. It was impossible for him, he argues, to dwell too much on a great truth like this, and all the blessed moral consequences which it involves, which, if settled in the hearts and lives of men, would make this world resemble heaven, whereas now, the contrary, speak hellbroken loose. And warming as he writes, he exclaims somewhat wildly, quote, too much and too often on these points. The scripture full of such truths, and I handle them too much and too often, and not discourse of them rationally. Sir, I oppose not rational to spiritual, for spiritual is most rational. But I contradistinguish rational to conceited, impotent, affected canting, as I may call it, when the ear receives words which offer no matter to the understanding, make no impression on the inward sense. Again, in the same vein, quote, exalting the power of nature, to me a strange imputation, I have indeed called upon men, supposing, as I ought, God to be with them, to use and employ all gifts, both of grace and nature, the neglect of which I am sure will prove matter of self-conviction. Close, quote. Then, as if he felt it necessary to speak his mind frankly, and to bring to the light the full differences of thought betwixt himself and his old friends, quote, permit me an imam liberare to deal freely and clearly, and I pray it may be without offence. Let the matter of difference be discovered in order to a removal and a more inward closing. I cannot return to that frame of spirit in the judging and discerning the things of God, you here and there in my apprehension seem to advise me to. I have had, in the former part of my life, experience thereof, and have freely and fully delivered myself up to God to be taught and led into truth. My mind is so framed and fashioned by him that I can no more look back than St. Paul, after Christ to discover to him, could return into his former strain. If I learn much by the writings of good men in former ages, which you advise me to, by the actings of the divine spirit in the minds of good men now alive, I may learn more. The times wherein I live are more to me than any else. The works of God in them, which I am to discern, direct in me both principle, affection, and action. And I dare not blaspheme free and noble spirits in religion, who search after truth with indifference and ingenuity, lest in so doing I should degenerate into a spirit of persecution in the reality of the thing, though in another guise. For a mistaken spirit may concede itself to be acted by the zeal of God. I pray God our zeal in these times may be so kindled with pure fire from God's altar that it may rather warm than burn, and liven rather than inflame, and that the spirits of good men may truly be qualified with gospel principles, true fruits of the divine spirit. And truly, I think that the members of the church, if not the leaders, notwithstanding all the perfections of times before us, so much pictured or applauded, on this point have very much yet to learn. For I am persuaded that Christian love and affection is a point of such importance that it is not to be prejudiced by supposals of difference in points of religion in any ways disputable, though thought weighty as determined by the parties on either side, or by particular determinations beyond scripture which, as some have observed, have enlarged divinity but have lessened charity and multiplied divisions. For the maintenance of truth is rather God's charge, and the continuance of charity ours." The correspondence winds up with two further brief letters. Both writers felt that they had delivered their souls, and that if they were not nearer to each other as the result, they at least understood each other somewhat more fully, and were not likely to make more progress by further argument. He professes himself satisfied in the main, though in diverse things he remains unsatisfied. In any case, he is convinced from the tone of Wichcote's last letter that it is better for the present to forbear. At some future time he may put down in writing a reply to certain things which still dissatisfy him. Wichcote, in a few words, says that he is sure of his own honesty as a thinker. If I know myself at all, I know that in discovering of truth I do not dally nor have any worldly design, but with all indifference of mind do receive from God what I have assurances from him. I cannot practice upon my judgment, nor use any force to command my understanding into other apprehensions. It is not in my power to fall off from my own persuasions, conceptions, and thoughts so grounded. Wherefore, he concludes, if in this point of discerning we differ, there is no help for it. We must forbear one another. And nothing is to be done unless so far mutually to value each other's judgments as to think that for such difference there is occasion given to each of us to examine our own spirits, whether we retain that indifference and ingenuity in discerning we ought always to be closed with all. These details, from the correspondence betwixt Wichcote and Tuckney, serve sufficiently to bring before us the commencement of the New Cambridge Movement. So far it is seen to concern itself with the same questions already discussed so amply by Hales and Chillingworth. Questions as to the non-importance of many of the dogmatic differences amongst Christians and the fundamental basis of Christian communion in the bonds of common sympathy and charity rather than in doctrinal agreement. All in short, that was vital in the liberal thoughtfulness of the earlier movement, is taken up and carried forward by the Cambridge School, although there is no evidence of genetic connection betwixt the two, to the charge of being indebted to Chillingworth as well as to Hooker, which makes no reply. He probably felt that in what he had formerly said as to the slight degree in which he was indebted to books at all, he had sufficiently answered such a charge. His own thoughtfulness, rather than the writings of others, had been the source of his inspiration and the nurse of his opinions. He had borrowed nothing, strange as it may seem, from the Dutch Arminians. The truth is that such thoughts as to the vitality of dogmatic controversies and the necessity of a new Catholic basis of Christian communion were a natural growth of the time in many minds. The theological atmosphere had been so vexed and the polemical spirit had raged with such bitterness and such little good effect that the more thoughtful of the younger clergy instinctively turned away from dogmatic discussions, disgusted and wearied, towards some higher and purer atmosphere of Christian truth. They had had, as witch-coat hints, in the early part of their life, experience thereof, and the result was to make them seek a more excellent way. It is unnecessary, therefore, to try to make out points of connection betwixt the Cambridge Divines and our earlier series of liberal churchmen. Hales and Chillingworth may or may not have been studied by them. The liberal sentiments which they had sown were germinating, more or less, by the middle of a century in all generous open and rational minds. But it is easy to detect in witch-coat from the first something far more searching in the shape of liberal thought than anything to be found in Chillingworth. Chillingworth's principles are sufficiently rational in a definite direction. He emphasizes with great significance the rights of the Christian reason. But he nowhere takes up the general thought pervading witch-coat's mind, the vein, as Tuckany says, running up and down all his discourses and letters, of the relation betwixt natural and revealed truth. In what respects are natural and revealed truth allied, and in what do they differ? Or in other words, what is the essence of the divine, and how is it brought near to us alike in philosophy and in religion, in nature and revelation? These are but different forms of the same problem, and the problem is the one plainly which, more than any other, runs through witch-coat's letters, and, as we shall see, still more clearly through his discourses. The only writer who had hitherto touched this problem with a true and bold hand was Hooker, as Tuckany clearly enough surmised. But Hooker strangely founded no school. His great work stands by itself at the very opening of the century, a pillar of light to which the national mind had given little heed. It was either too much in advance of the time, or the spirit of controversy had been already kindled too intensely to permit of conciliation. Certainly, it is remarkable how little the immediately succeeding generations were affected by Hooker's magnificent labours. While they have continued a source of inspiration to many thinkers of a later time, there are scarcely any signs of their having affected the thought of his own or the next age, much as the name of the writer was held in respect. As we formerly observed, no succession of thinkers sprang up in connection with him. It was reserved to the later half of the seventeenth century to propagate the seed of religious culture, first sown by the books of ecclesiastical polity. Whether or not directly transplanted, undoubtedly the quality of thought is the same. And what is really remarkable is that now, after the lapse of half a century, and in the hands of one who is comparatively unknown in the history of theological opinion, this seed of noble thought is found taking root and springing up into a powerful influence, a school of opinion which was to guide and change many minds. Of this there is abundant evidence in these letters, although half the result was not before the mind of Tuckney, nor could he foresee all that was to grow from the views which so alarmed him. Yet he felt clearly that there was a party behind Twitchcoat. His main apprehension from the teaching of his friend was that it was representative. Twitchcoat spoke not only for himself, but for others, of whom he was reputed the head. His preaching would have been of little account if it had not uttered the thoughts of many as well as his own, or at least revealed their thoughts to them. All the enthusiasm of young Cambridge was evidently turned in a liberal direction by the eloquent provost of kings and so young ones in the university tainted. It is difficult to say what peculiar combination of qualities sometimes gives a man the position of leader of thought in a university. The greatest ability and the most profound learning may fail in securing it. Distinction as a writer has often no effect. In the case of Twitchcoat there were none of these qualities prominently present. But there was that which is more than all, a certain attractiveness and glow of feeling, a persuasive enthusiasm, and aptness to teach which goes right to the hearts of the young and constitutes a power far more effective than any mere literary or intellectual capacity. The Puritan doctors who settled at Cambridge in 1644 were all men of Mark. Tuckney's letters, in mere literary and argumentative force, are certainly not inferior to those of Twitchcoat. Hill was distinguished as a preacher and Aerosmith known and loved for his personal amiability. Yet it is evident that the young thought of the university had gone after Twitchcoat and his friends. The men who had sat at Westminster and assisted in the composition of the Confession of Faith were left comparatively without followers. The very name of Orthodox Tuckney complaints was stomached, while a species of moral divinity which sought to ally natural and revealed truth and bring them to a unity carried all before it. The great instrument of Twitchcoat's influence was evidently the pulpit. He possessed great powers as a preacher, and his regular Sunday afternoon lecture in Trinity Church drew crowds till it's and tells us not only of the young scholars, but of those of greater standing and best repute for learning in the university. He contributed thus according to the same authority more to the forming of the students of that university in a sober sense of religion than any man in that age. He was the great university preacher of the Commonwealth, and to his afternoon sermons, probably more than to any single means of influence, is the progress of the new movement to be attributed. Both from his own language and the language of his opponents, it is clear that he aimed by his sermons to give a new tone to contemporary thought and to turn men's minds away from polemical argumentation to the great moral and spiritual realities lying at the basis of all religion, from the forms of words as he himself says to the inwards of things and the reason of them. We will consider immediately what appears most striking and original in Twitchcoat's discourses. They are all, or nearly all, that remains to attest his power as a preacher and the novelty and force of the truth which he preached. But in trying to estimate the value of his living eloquence we must remember the very imperfect form in which these discourses have been preserved. Like Frederick Roberts and sermons in our own day they seem to have been printed merely from notes, his own or others. We are told that in the pulpit he used no other than very short notes not very legible, specimens of which he has himself presented in his letters to Dr. Tuckney and which are evidently the mere bones which he clothed with a living shape in the course of delivery. He had the temperament of the orator, which yields, like a flexible glowing medium, to the inspiration of the moment. For when Tuckney accuses him of using in one of his sermons, in reference to certain views, the very strong expression, divinity taught in hell, he answers, the phrase divinity minted or taught in hell I find not in my notes, but it was suddenly spoken. It can be easily imagined, therefore, that animated and vigorous as many of Twitchcoat's sermons are in comparison with most of the sermons of his age, they give us only an imperfect idea of the life and impulse of thought which moved him in the pulpit and which made him such a power as afternoon lecturer in Trinity Church. All the more was he likely to be such a power that his whole activity was apparently given to his university work. He had no worldly ambition, no schemes of authorship, like Moore and Cudworth. He was a born teacher, one whose highest qualities were stimulated by contact with young minds, and that play of speech which seems to be necessary to the finest development of certain intellectual natures from Socrates downwards. Such men are teachers, divinely called. Their proper place is in the academic chair or the pulpit. Surrounded by questioning spirits and eager looks, there they are great as the life of thought grows warm within them and overflows in copious and impressive utterance. Had by no means follows that they will be equally great as writers. Often they are not. Often or still they want the impulse to authorship. Their thoughts only rise freely, their words only come fitly in the face of a listening audience. Which quote appears to have been a man of this stamp. And hence his peculiar position and fate. He stood at the head of the Cambridge thought of his time. He moved the university youth with a force which Tuckney and Hill and others failed to imitate. He inspired and formed the highest intellect which it was destined to produce for thirty years. Men like Smith and Cudworth and Moore and Tillotson looked back to him as their intellectual master. But he himself never appeared as an author. His sermons were only published some time after his death. They have been prized by all who have fallen in with them. They cannot be prized too highly. But they have not served as they scarcely could to preserve his name from partial oblivion. He was infinitely greater in life than he appears in history. One of the powers of his age his name may be sought for in vain in a biographical dictionary. His life may be said to be summed up in his academic career which he continued till the restoration. So far as can be gathered from scanty hints he was a warm admirer of the great protector whose death in 1658 he lamented in a copy of Latin Verses commemorative of his government and congratulatory of Richard's succession. This may be supposed to indicate his political position and sympathies. But he was not a partisan in politics or anything else. He was of too great and noble a spirit, his biographer says, to follow a party servilely and was never so attached to any as not to see and own and seek to serve real merit wherever it was to be found. And in evidence of this is mentioned his anxiety to assist Isaac Barrow in his application for the Greek professorship about 1654, which was refused to him on account of his royalist and supposed Armenian leanings. Barrow is almost the only great name in Cambridge at this time that remained uninfluenced or nearly so by the new movement. Comparatively young, having only taken his degree in 1648, his genius was of that bold, original, self-concentrated type which strikes out its own orbit. It is pleasant to note Wichcote's appreciation of him and to be told that Barrow ever acknowledged his good offices and readiness to serve him unsuccessful as they were then. All testimonies unite in attributing to Wichcote as provost of kings, a happy breadth and equity of temper and a genuine love of fair play. He was no bigot for his own opinions, deeply as he valued and resolutely as he maintained the characteristic principles which lay at their root. We have seen how widely he differed from Dr. Tuckney and what reason he might have had to be offended by the latter's freedom. Yet some years afterwards he was one of the six electors who raised Tuckney to the chair of divinity. He felt, no doubt, according to his views, that they agreed in far more than they differed, and that they were more at one even when they differed, than their modes of language would allow them to seem to be. It might have been supposed that such a man would have been spared in his post at the Restoration, but separated as he was in thought from the Puritan leaders who had been sent with him to Cambridge in 1644, he shared their fate when the time came for the king and the king's friends to have their own again. He was removed from the provost ship by a special order of the king, and Dr. James Fleetwood was put into it. This is the statement of his biographer. He adds, but though removed, he was not disgraced nor frowned upon. When the act of uniformity was passed he adhered, as might have been expected, to the church. And in the end of 1662, November, he was appointed to the cure of St. Anne's, Black Friars London. When this church was burned down in the Great Fire of 1666 he retired for a while to Milton in Cambridgeshire, a county rectory seen a cura, his biographer says, a piece of preformant to which he had succeeded by the favour of his college on the death of Dr. Collins, whom he had displaced in the provost ship. He had taken the precaution, after the Restoration, to have his presentation to this living renewed, and he continued to keep it as long as he lived. Here he spent some years in comparative retirement till the promotion of his friend, Dr. John Wilkins, to the Bishopric of Chester in 1668, by whose interest and recommendation he was presented to the vicarage of St. Lawrence Jewry, which Wilkins had vacated. This was his last stage. Here he continued in high and general esteem, preaching twice every week to a very considerable and judicious auditory, but not very numerous, by reason of the weakness of his voice in his declining age. He was about sixty when thus finally settled in London. The days of his activity were past, he had done his work, or nearly so, and although he survived about fifteen years, we hear no more of him beyond what we have now quoted. He had his own circle, his auditory judicious but not very numerous, who delighted in his preaching and who loved and respected his person. He kept up his old Cambridge friendships, although he had been severed from all official connection with the university. We find Worthington writing to him there at Dr. Cudworth's in Christ's College. He may, through his friends there, have continued to exercise some of his old influence, but upon the whole he was content to live in the background during those unhappy times. He died on one of his visits to Cambridge, in the house of his ancient and learned friend Dr. Cudworth. Having gone down there a little before Easter in 1683, he caught a cold and fell into a distemper which in a few days terminated his life. It is added that, quote, he died with uncommon sentiments of piety and devotion. He expressed great doubts of the principles of separation, this is extremely natural and consistent with all his principles, and said that he was the more desirous to receive the sacrament that he might declare his full communion with the church all the world over. He disclaimed popery and, as things of near affinity with it, or rather parts of it, all superstition and usurpation upon the consciences of men. Tillotson preached his funeral sermon and draws his character after the manner of the time, adding trait after trait without much subtlety of insight or of combination, without much glow or enthusiasm of feeling, but so that we can read in his cautious sentences many indications of a high and fine nature. A godlike temper and disposition, as he was wont to call it, was, Tillotson says, quote, what he chiefly valued and aspired after, that universal charity and goodness which he did continually preach and practice. His conversation was exceeding kind and affable, grave and winning, prudent and profitable. He was slow to declare his judgment and modest in delivering it. Never passionate, never peremptory, so far from imposing upon others that he was rather apt to yield. And although he had a most profound and well-poised judgment, yet he was, of all men I ever knew, the most patient to hear others differ from him, and the most easy to be convinced when good reason was offered, and which is seldom seen, more apt to be favourable to another man's reason than his own. This and inquisitive men, he adds, quote, at such an age, at forty or fifty at the utmost, have fixed and settled their judgments on most points, and, as it were, made their last understanding, supposing that they have thought or read or heard what can be said on all sides of things, and after that they grow positive and impatient of contradiction. But our deceased friend was so wise as to be willing to learn to the last, knowing that no man can grow wise without some change of his mind, without gaining some knowledge which he had not, or correcting some error which he had before. He had attained so perfect a mastery of his passions, that for the latter and greater part of his life he was hardly ever seen to be transported with anger, and, as he was extremely careful not to provoke any man, so not to be provoked by any, using to say, if I provoke a man he is the worst for my company, and if I suffer myself to be provoked by him I shall be the worst for his. He was a great encourager and kind director of young divines, and one of the most candid hearers of sermons I think that ever was, so that though all men did mightily reverence his judgment, yet no man had reason to fear his censure. He never spake well of himself, nor ill of others, making good that saying of Pansa or Tulli, name in an altarius qui sue consider et virtuti invideri, that no man is apt to envy the worth and virtues of another that hath any of his own to trust to. In a word he had all those virtues, and in a high degree, which an excellent temper, great condescension, long care and watchfulness over himself, together with the assistance of God's grace, which he continually implored and mightily relied upon, are apt to produce. Particularly he excelled in the virtues of conversation, humanity, and gentleness and humility, a prudent and peaceable and reconciling temper. The portrait is an engaging one, and leaves a pleasant impression upon the mind. It is easy to see the elements at once of intellectual strength and moral beauty which made Wichcote a leader of minds and gave him so much influence at Cambridge. As he was well-born he appears to have been wealthy throughout his life, and this, no doubt, helped his influence. He was frugal and expense upon himself, but very liberal and charitable towards the necessities of others. More than was well known to many, says Tillotson, because in the disposal of his charity he very much effected secrecy. He bequeathed valuable legacies to the University of Cambridge and King's College and Emanuel College, with which he had been connected, and also to the poor of the several places where his estate lay and where he had been minister. He was married, but I cannot learn to whom, says the author of the preface to his correspondence with Tuckney. Footnote Dr. Salter, from whom we have already so often quoted. We have learned nowhere else anything of Wichcote's marriage, but there is a pleasant and characteristic allusion to his wife in his first letter to Tuckney, where, in excusing himself for not having been able to hear one of Tuckney's sermons at Trinity, preached for him, he says that all he knew of it was that, quote, my wife told me how much she was moved by your excellent pains as I think upon we as ambassadors beseech you to be reconciled. End of Footnote This event in his life is supposed to have taken place when he left the University for a brief period in 1643 and went to reside at his living of North Cadbury in Somersetshire. He is believed not to have had any children, and he certainly left none, his nephews, sons of Sir Jeremy Wichcote, of the inner temple and deputy lieutenant of Middlesex, being appointed his executors. End of Chapter 2, Part 2. Section 5 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 2, Benjamin Wichcote, Reason and Religion, Part 3. It will now be our aim to exhibit somewhat more fully the substance of Wichcote's teaching. Its main tendencies have already appeared in the correspondence with Tuckney, but it is necessary to draw them out in greater fullness and detail as presented in his Discourses and Aphorisms. Four volumes of Discourses and a series of moral and religious aphorisms collected from his manuscripts and forming the first portion of one volume containing the correspondence from which we have quoted so largely comprise all his works. They give probably but an inadequate picture of his intellectual and religious activity. He was so obviously greater, according to our estimate, as a living teacher than as an author, but they are all that survive from his pen or that help us to understand the character of his influence. Unhappily they are imperfect in some degree, both in substance and in form. None of them were published during his lifetime nor even left by him in a state for publication. Their history is, in fact, a curious one and of itself deserves attention. Two years after his death appeared a small octavo of eight sheets under the title Theophoremena Lugmata, or some select notions of that learned and reverend divine Dr. B. Wichcote faithfully collected by a pupil and particular friend of his. The volume consists of notes on a few texts of scripture and a series of what the editor calls apostolical apathems. Of the editor nothing is known, and the volume itself seems to have gone out of sight entirely. Then in 1697 there was published a treatise of devotion with morning and evening prayer for all the days of the week, attributed to our author and which has also disappeared. In the following year his select sermons were printed in two parts with a preface which has been universally ascribed to the Earl of Shaftesbury, author of The Characteristics. The preface bears internal evidence of its authorship and is a very interesting and characteristic document both in relation to Wichcote and Shaftesbury. It contains no indication, however, of the manner in which either the publisher or the writer of the preface became possessed of the sermons. They are held forth as the genuine productions of the author, beyond question, in contrast to some things which had been lately set out in his name which his best friends disowned to be his. In allusion it is supposed to the treatise of devotion, printed in the preceding year, or possibly to the imperfect notes collected by a pupil shortly after his death. A very unnecessary apology is made for the unpolished style and phrase of the author as, quote, being more used to school learning and the language of an university than to the conversation of the fashionable world, close quote. It is further stated that none of the discourses were ever designed for publication and that the publisher has sometimes supplied the author out of himself by transferring to a defective place that which he found in some other discourse where the same subject was treated. Yet it is added, quote, so great a regard was had to the very text and letter of the author that he, the editor, would not alter the least word, and wheresoever he had added anything he has taken care to market in different characters, close quote. This edition was reprinted at Edinburgh about the middle of last century, in 1742, by Dr. Wishart, principal of the university, with a dedication to young ministers and students in divinity. Wishart was himself a remarkable man, of great learning and liberality of spirit. He also edited and prefixed a recommendatory preface to Scoogle's Life of God in the Soul of Man, a well-known work of the Small School of Scottish Meditative Devines who have some analogy to the Great Cambridge School in the seventeenth century. Footnote. Scoogle was born in 1650 and died in 1678, only twenty-eight years of age. He was one-year minister of a country parish and four-years divinity professor in King's College, Aberdeen. End of footnote. Wishart was prosecuted for heresy by the Presbytery of Edinburgh in 1738, among other things, for wishing to remove confessions and freeing persons from subscription thereto, and for licentiously extending the liberty of Christian subjects. But the prosecution was unsuccessful. Both the Synod and the General Assembly acquitted him, and he afterwards rose to great influence in the church and became moderator in the Year of the Rebellion, 1745. Principal Wishart, no doubt, appreciated the full significance of which coats sermons and sought to extend their influence in Scotland. It is difficult to say how far he may have succeeded in this or what traces may be found of them in the religious literature of the time, which was then assuming, in the northern part of the island, that somewhat extreme phase of rationality which has been stigmatized under the name of moderateism. One curious testimony to their widespread circulation is to be found in the fact that, in addition, not only of the sermons edited by Shaftesbury, but of the others subsequently published by which coats own friends, appeared at Aberdeen from the press of J. Chalmers in 1751. To this day, this edition is the most common and easily accessible to the ordinary student. It may have been Shaftesbury's edition in 1698, and the language of his preface, which seems in some respects to have been displeasing to which coats friends, or the mere knowledge that there were many unauthorized copies of his sermons in circulation, which led them in the beginning of the eighteenth century to entertain the idea of issuing an edition, as far as possible, from his own manuscripts. His nephew entrusted his papers to Dr. Geoffrey, who had the highest veneration for the deceased author and every talent beside that could qualify him to be a diligent, faithful, and judicious editor. Geoffrey was Archdeacon of Norwich, and author of a volume entitled, Religion the Perfection of Man, London, 1689. He also edited Sir Thomas Brown's Christian Morals. The result of Dr. Geoffrey's labors was the publication, in the three first years of the eighteenth century, of three octavo volumes of which coats sermons to which a fourth volume was afterwards added under the care of Dr. Samuel Clarke. To the same editor we owe the original publication of the Moral and Religious Aphorisms, which were revised and re-edited in 1753 by Dr. Salter, Geoffrey's grandson, who, quote, solicitates himself most unaffectedly that he lives in an age, a happiness which his reverend grandfather Geoffrey could not boast, in which such a generous freedom of thinking, chastened and tempered by the genuine spirit of true piety, and a most exalted devotion, and by the most sound and exact judgment in religion and all learning, cleared from froth and grounds, as the ever-memorable Mr. John Hales of Eaton expresses it, meets with the esteem and applause it so well deserves, close, quote. Such men as Witchcoat, the same complacent and somewhat indiscriminating admirer adds, quote, do indeed recommend religion by their lives and by their writings, proving its influence on themselves and show well-grounded persuasion of its truth by the whole tenor of their conduct, and making such and only such representations of it in their works, as demonstrate its entire agreeableness to the best improved reason of man, as show it to be worthy of God, to institute, and of man to believe and to obey, placing it in its fairest and truest light as the highest perfection of the human nature and greatest improvement of the human powers. While the narrow, systematical pretenders to religion, before and since his time, do all they can to expose and disgrace what they cannot extinguish and destroy. These men, to anticipate the masculine sense and words of the aphorisms, fancy they advance religion, while they but draw it down to bodily acts, or carry it up into I know not what of mystical, symbolical, emblematical, whereas the Christian religion has not mystical, symbolical, enigmatical, but unclothed, unbodied, intellectual, rational, spiritual. Close quote. It is somewhat difficult to group Witchcoat's views and opinions scattered throughout his sermons and aphorisms, and yet it would be of little use to present to the reader an unclassified series of extracts. We will make the best attempt we can to bring together the main points of his teaching under several heads. We begin with that which may be said to be the center and most distinctive principle of all his thought. One. The use of reason in religion. The following are some of his most characteristic sayings on this subject. Quote. I find that some men take offense to have reason spoken of out of a pulpit, or to hear those great words of natural light or principles of reason and conscience. They are doubtless in a mighty mistake. There is no inconsistency between the grace of God and the calling upon men carefully to use, improve, and employ the principles of God's creation. Indeed, this is a very profitable work to call upon men to answer the principles of their creation, to fulfill natural light, to answer natural conscience, to be throughout rational in what they do, for these things have a divine foundation. The spirit in man is the candle of the Lord, lighted by God and lighting man to God. Therefore to speak of natural light, of the use of reason in religion, is to do no disservice at all to grace, for God is acknowledged in both, in the former as laying the groundwork of his creation, in the latter as reviving and restoring it. A man has as much right to use his own understanding in judging of truth as he has a right to use his own eyes to see his way. The written word of God is not the first or only discovery of the duty of man. It doth gather and repeat and reinforce and charge upon us the scattered and neglected principles of God's creation that has suffered prejudice and damnation by the defection and apostasy of man. Those that differ upon reason may come together by reason. He that gives reason for what he saith has done what is fit to be done and the most that can be done. He that gives no reason speaks nothing though he saith never so much. There is nothing proper and peculiar to man but the use of reason and the exercise of virtue. To go against reason is to go against God. It is the self-same to do that which the reason of the case doth require and that which God himself doth appoint. Reason is the divine governor of man's life. It is the very voice of God. Reason consists in things that are good in themselves or that are for the recovery in us of what are good in themselves. Nothing in religion is a burden but a remedy or a pleasure. When the doctrine of the gospel becomes the reason of our mind it will be the principle of our life. Reason discovers what is natural and reason receives what is supernatural. 2. Differences of opinion among Christians. By the way I will observe how little there is in many controversies if wise and temperate men had the managing of them. But when once there is suspicion and jealousy these make and increase differences. All artists differ in their notions. There are different opinions on several points of philosophy. What is one man's meat is another's medicine and another's poison. We differ in age, in stature, in feature, in gait, in complexion, in constitution of life, in profession. These varieties and differences as well as harmonies and proportions explain the infinite wisdom of the Creator. Yet all agreeing in human nature are fit companions one for another, can take delight in each other's company. Why should not they who meet in the regenerate nature who agree on the great articles of faith and principles of good life overlook subordinate differences? If there be love and good will we come to be more rational, better grounded in our resolution from our different apprehensions. Discourse is as soon ended as begun where all say the same. Whereas he that speaks after and says a new thing searcheth the former, proverbs 18, 17, so no truth will be lost for want of being offered to consideration. We may meet in the rule of truth though we differ in the particular application. If there were no contradiction in the several apprehensions of men we might never be awakened to search into things and so if we were once in a mistake we should never come out of it. The points of Christian faith are as clearly intelligible to all capacities as they are clearly necessary to be believed by all men. God accepts alike the faith that results from the dark mists of the ignorant and from the clearest intelligence of the learned. The holy scriptures are so written that they are sooner understood by an unlearned man that is pious and modest than by a philosopher who is arrogant and proud. Why should not consent in the main be more available to concord in union than difference when powerful matters prevail to distance and separation? Every man hath a right of judging if he be capable. Yea, can a man ought a man to believe otherwise than he sees cause? Is it in a man's power to believe as he would or only as the reason of the thing appears to him? He that is light of faith by the same reason will be light of unbelief. He will as easily disbelieve truth as believe error. By discourse men accommodate things. In conference they render a reason. There is, gratia voltas, the light of one's countenance, presence is winning. The presence of men conciliates favor and acceptance. When persons at difference talk together they often find that they stand not at that distance they did imagine. Distance gives tail-bearers opportunity and advantage. It is neither of our fault that our understandings are not cast in the same mold or that our organs or bodily constitutions which occasion variety are not alike. It may be also our apprehensions are nearer than our expressions. Two who think they say not the same may think the same as to God. Nothing is desperate in the condition of good men. They will not live and die in any dangerous error. God who will not lose anything that is good will finally save what is capable of salvation, will not reject malign dispositions which will not be altered and subdued to the temper of heaven. Jerome and Rufinus charged each other with heresy. Jerome and Epiphanius refused to join in prayers. The former wishing the latter might not return alive. The latter that the former might not die a bishop, both which came to pass. It is a great mistake in quest for truth to let it run out on some smaller matters which have scarce been thought of by the whole series of Christians of all ages but only of late. They who have rashly augmented the materials of faith have thereby weakened and diminished charity. Two things a man may easily perceive, whether he be a hypocrite, whether an heretic. Not the former if he means well. Not the latter if he be not willful, but patient to be informed. It becomes the modesty of particular persons when their sentiments are singular to ask themselves this sober question. How went the spirit of God from the generality of his worshipers and determined itself to me? All these passages are taken from two sermons in the beginning of the second volume on the traits of the church maintained by sincere Christians. They might be increased indefinitely. Many of the noble descriptions by our author of the essence and character of true religion also well deserve quotation, but the following extracts, with those already given, must suffice to bring something like a picture of which quotes mind before our readers. 3. The Character of True Religion. A true gospel spirit doth excel in meekness, gentleness, modesty, humility, patience, forbearance. And these are eminent endowments and mightily qualify men to live in the world. This is that which makes men bear universal love and good will, and overcomes evil with good, teacheth men to return courtesies for injuries. This I daresay had we a man among us that we could produce that did live an exact gospel life, had we a man that was really gospelized, were the gospel a life, a soul, and a spirit to him, as principles upon moral considerations are, he would be the most lovely, useful person under heaven. This man, for everything that is excellent, and worthy, and useful, would be miraculous and extraordinary in the eyes of all men in the world. Christianity would be recommended to the world by his spirit and conversation. For the life of the heavenly state, so far as it can be expressed to us, is delivered in the gospel law and rule, and is put into an act in a gospel spirit and life. The fruit of the spirit in us is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth. For a man sincere, honest, and true in the way of his religion he would not be grievous, intolerable, or unsufferable to anybody, but he would command due honor and draw unto himself love and esteem. For the true gospel spirit is transcendently and eminently remarkable every way for those things that are lovely in the eyes of men, for ingenuity, modesty, humility, gravity, patience, meekness, charity, kindness, etc. And so far as anyone is Christian in spirit and power, so far he is refined and reformed by these graces. Such is the nature of religion, that it keeps the mind in a good frame and temper, it establishes a healthful complexion and constitution of soul, and makes it to discharge itself duly in all its offices towards God, with itself, and with men. Whereas the mind of a wicked and profane man is a very wilderness, where lust and exorbitant passions bear down all before them and are more fierce and cruel than wolves, bears, and tigers. The heavenly state consists in the mind's freedom from these kind of things. It doth clear the mind from all impotent and unsatiable desires which do abuse and toss a man's soul and make it restless and unquiet. It sets a man free from eager and impetuous loves and by these men are torn in pieces, from vain and disappointing hopes which sink men into melancholy, from lawless and exorbitant appetites, from frothy and empty joys, from dismal presaging fears and anxious self-devouring cares, from inward heart-burnings, from self-eating envy, from swelling pride and ambition, from dull and black melancholy, from boiling anger and raging fury, from annoying aching conscience, from an arbitrary presumption, from rigid sourness and severity of spirit. For these make the man that is not biased and principled of religion to seethe like a pot, inwardly to boil with the fire and pitchy fumes of hell, and as outrageous as when the great Leviathan doth cause the waves of the sea to cast out mire and dirt. The first thing in religion is to refine a man's temper, and the second to govern his practice. If a man's religion do not this, his religion is a poor slender thing and of little consideration, to his then only a naked profession and fit to give him a denomination. I say such a man's religion is but of little value, for it hath no efficacy, but falls short of the very principles of nature. Religion is intelligible, rational, and accountable. It is not our birthing, but our privilege. The moral part of religion never alters. Moral laws are laws of themselves without sanction by will, and the necessity of them arises from the things themselves. All other things in religion are in order to these. The moral part of religion does sanctify the soul, and is final both to what is instrumental and instituted. There is nothing so intrinsically rational as religion is, nothing that can so justify itself, nothing that hath so pure reason to recommend itself as religion hath. The more false anyone is in his religion, the more fierce and furious in maintaining it, the more mistaken, the more imposing. There are but two things in religion, morals and institutions. Institutions may be known by the reason of the thing. Morals are owned as soon as spoken, and they are nineteen parts in twenty of all religion. Institutions depend upon scripture, and no one institution depends upon one text of scripture only. That institution which has but one text for it has never a one. All the differences in Christendom are about institutions, not about morals. He that produces the best reason in morals, and he that produces the best scripture in institutions, is to be closed with. As follow the law of God's creation according to the law of God's institution, theirs is reasonable service. Religion is the being as much like God as man can be like him. Religion which is a bond of union ought not to be a ground of division, but it is in an unnatural use when it doth disunite. Men cannot differ by true religion, because it is true religion to agree. The spirit of religion is a reconciling spirit. The state of religion lies in a good mind and a good life. All else is about religion, and men must not put the instrumental part of religion for the state of religion. Religion doth possess and affect the whole man, and the understanding it is knowledge, and the life it is obedience. In the affections it is delight in God. In our carriage and behavior it is modesty, calmness, gentleness, quietness, candor, ingenuity. In our dealings it is uprightness, integrity, correspondence with the rule of righteousness. Religion makes men virtuous in all instances. Religion has different denominations and names from different actions and circumstances, but it is one thing, viz, universal righteousness. Accordingly, it had place at all times before the law of Moses, under it, and since. Religion is not a hearsay, a presumption, a supposition, is not a customary pretension and profession, is not an affectation of any mode, is not a piety of particular fancy consisting of some pathetic devotions, vehement expressions, bodily severities, affected anomalies, and aversions from the innocent usages of others, but consisteth in a profound humility and an universal charity. Truth lies in a little compass and narrow room. Vitals in religion are few. The moral part of religion consists of things good in themselves, necessary and indispensable. The instituted part of religion consists of things made necessary only by the determinations of the divine will. He that denies the former is atheistical. He that denies the latter is infidel. 4. Prayer and Forms of Prayer. In the Reformed Church there is both use of forms of prayer and allowance for conceived prayer, and they are both justified. As to forms of prayer, they are great helps to our wandering mind, and then they are proper and succinct, whereas prayers suddenly conceived are not so, are not always purely prayer matter, which is of four sorts—matter of confession of sin, thankfulness to God for His goodness, acknowledging Him in His greatness and our dependence upon Him, and petitioning Him for grace. That that refers not to these four is extravagance in prayer. I do observe a great deal in conceived prayer is very good, but may do better in the sermon. Now this advantage a form of prayer hath that things are proper and succinct. The true Excellency of Prayer is a sincere intention of mind in presenting our thoughts to God. 5. Popory. An implicit faith in men or in the church, this is popory. There are three great designs in popory. One to keep the civil magistrate in awe. Two to maintain the clergy in state and honor. Three to keep the people in ignorance and so to enslave them. The Romanists adulterate what is true in religion and super-add what is false. 6. Miscellaneous aphorisms. He that is light of belief will be as light of unbelief if he has a mind to it. By the same reason he will as easily believe an error as a truth and as easily disbelieve a truth as an error. I have always found that such preaching of others hath most commanded my heart which hath most illuminated my head. The reason of our mind is the best instrument we have to work with all. Reason is not a shallow thing. It is the first participation from God. Therefore he that observes reason observes God. Heaven is first a temper and then a place. The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices are false measures of truth. No man is to make religion for himself but to receive it from God, and the teachers of the church are not to make religion for their hearers but to show it only as received from God. Curious determinations beyond scripture are thought to be the improvement of faith and inconsiderate dullness to be the denial of our religion, fierceness in a sect to be zeal for religion, and speaking without sense to be the simplicity of the spirit. Determinations beyond scripture have indeed enlarged faith but lessened charity and multiplied divisions. It is better for us that there should be difference of judgment if we keep charity, but it is most unmanly to quarrel because we differ. Let him that is assured that he errs in nothing take upon him to condemn every man that errs in anything. In doctrines of supernatural revelation we shall do well to direct our apprehensions and to regulate our expressions by words of scripture. It is not necessary to the satisfaction of him who is offended that a perfect recompense should be made by the offender, but the offender is master of his own right and may accept of ingenuous acknowledgment only from the offender as satisfaction if he pleases, and expiation is then made when that which is displeasing is taken away by something which is pleasing. Lord Veriolam, everyone almost worships Idolam Fori, the idol of general imagination. Fools and conceited persons worship Idolam Spacus, the idol of particular fancy. It is less to worship Idolam Fori than Idolam Spacus, though best to worship neither. If I have not a friend, God send me an enemy that I may hear of my faults. To be admonished of an enemy is next to having a friend. There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it. Nothing is more specific to man than the capacity of religion and sense of God. Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable. The principles of it are troublesome. Platonists' principle of creation, eros and peña, the activity of divine love, the non-entity of all creatures, the grossest errors are but abuses of some noble truths. We are all of us at times in a fool's paradise, more or less, as if all were our own, all as we would have it. Enthusiastic doctrines, good things strained out of their wits. Among Christians those that pretend to be inspired seem to be mad. Among the Turks those that are mad are thought to be inspired. It is inconsistent with any kind of honesty and virtue to neglect and despise all kind of religion. It is not good to live in jest since we must die in earnest." It is unnecessary to add to our quotations much as we feel that they give only an imperfect idea of the substance of which coats thought. Its temper and quality are sufficiently apparent. These conceptions of human nature, of religion, and of the Church all stand forth in distinct contrast to the prevailing modes of thought. A new, broader, and more philosophical element enters into them. It may be difficult to sum up in definite detail the distinctive points of difference, but there is no difficulty in catching everywhere the breath of a new spirit and in recognizing that he looks at the same subjects in a more comprehensive and intellectual manner. Nationalism, whether of dogma or institution, affects him little. He moves in an ideal and open atmosphere, unfamiliar to the school theologian. Truth is not embodied to him in this or that form of divine assumption, standing apart from the ordinary cycle of human knowledge and experience. Religion does not displace or supersede or make an extraneous addition to other truths. It is apprehended as the summit and ideal of all others. Man's knowledge does not lie in incommunicable spheres, the secular and the spiritual, but in different planes of elevation, the lower tending towards the higher and the higher sending down its light to the lower levels of intellectual aspiration. I cannot, he says, quote, distinguish truth in itself, but in way of descent to us. Truth either of first inscription, in reason, or of after revelation from God. God hath set up two lights to enlighten us in our way, the light of reason, which is the light of His creation, and the light of scripture, which is after revelation from Him. Let us make use of these two lights and suffer neither to be put out." This is a higher range of thought than that hitherto reached by any Protestant theologian in England, with the exception of Hooker, who, as we have already said, struck into the same vein in a special direction. He saw distinctly in connection with his subject of ecclesiastical polity how the lines of spiritual truth in reason and revelation converge. But he did not see with equal clearness, or at least he did not interpret with equally consistent comprehension their intermingling and coordination in all directions, so as to irradiate the whole theological sphere with the light of rational inquiry. Hales and Chillingworth boldly adventured in the same path, but under limitations arising out of the nature of their subjects and the special religious controversies of their time. The necessities of controversy still embarrass Wichcote, but it takes with him from the first a wider sweep and elevation. A higher philosophic manner marks even his correspondence with Tuckney, which is directly polemical in form, and in his sermons there is scarcely a trace of the theological polemic. He is by turns the religious philosopher, the moralist, the evangelical expositor, scarcely ever the dogmatist or controversialist. In passing to these sermons from either the High Church or the Puritan literature of the time, we feel ourselves surrounded with an ampler aether, a diviner air. Points of doctrine and duty are discussed in their broadest rational relations, and not merely as parts or data of an inherited system. Human nature is conceived and depicted not as set forth in the creeds, but in the totality of its spiritual powers and functions as a rational constitution in a rational universe. Religion is not a mere section of knowledge supernaturally communicated, nor a side of life supernaturally imparted, but a culture and discipline of the whole man, and education and consecration of all his higher activities. And so religion is not only not independent of morality, but its necessary complement, not only not an enemy of philosophy, but its highest fulfillment. Christianity binds the broken lines of human aspiration into a well-orbed power which embraces and completes them all. The simplicity and grandeur of religious truth and its independence of the special dogmas which divide Christians had been well exhibited in the liberty of prophesying, but Taylor was himself, as some of his subsequent writings show, only partially emancipated from the crudities and formalities of scholastic tradition. He could not maintain, and indeed he probably never realized, in relation to thought and life as a whole, the same rational and enlightened elevation which necessity compelled him to occupy on the subject of the Church. It remained to witch-coat, as a preacher, to take up the idea of religion in its full breadth, moral and philosophical, and like the Alexandrian teachers of old and the platonic temper always, to bring it into affinity with all the varied energies of humanity. True thought and true power everywhere, all pure and high ideas, all pure and healthy activities, all genuine expressions of reason and aspirations of nature, are so far religion. Morality is distinct and supreme, not in rejecting and casting aside, but in interpreting and completing what is otherwise good and true in man. Morality, even in its most obscure forms, is its shadow, philosophy, its summit. Reason is not only not opposed to faith, but there can be no faith without reason, nor yet any higher reason without faith. In other words, the spiritual life of our race is a unity. All our aspirations are alike divine, whether they are kindled within us by the candle of the Lord, set up in our hearts, or by the light of the Divine Word communicated to us from without. To initiate once more such a phase of thought as this, to penetrate to the deeper relations and harmonies of spiritual truth, and so to the unity of all the moral forces which govern civilization, was a great gain for the seventeenth century. It was something more than merely to expand and moralize the conception of the Church. It was to expand, elevate, and universalize the whole conception of religion and of the moral rights of human nature, and so to prepare the way for the triumph of those principles of civil and religious liberty which we derive, although not directly, from the conflicts of the century. End of Chapter 2, Part 3 Section 6 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tullock. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3, John Smith, Foundations of a Christian Philosophy, Part 1. In the life and opinions of Witchcoat, the new movement of thought in Cambridge takes its rise. It is seen springing partly out of a fresh activity of the philosophical spirit, wearied with the aridities of the exhausted scholasticism, and quickened by the revived study of Plato, and partly out of a reaction against the religious bigotries of the time which in their violence and intolerance had disgusted the higher minds at the universities. The religious aspect of the movement is, in the first instance, more conspicuous than its philosophical character and affiliation. Witchcoat's relations to the religious parties of his time come into more direct view than his relation to the speculative influences, which, beyond doubt, he also greatly modified. In other words, he is more prominently the rational religious thinker than the Platonic philosopher. The explanation of this is easy. Religion masked every other interest in the 17th century. Both politics and philosophy, although they had broken the ecclesiastical yoke and were seeking emancipation, had not yet accomplished it. In order to get a hearing for themselves, they had studiously to court theology and assume a religious side, or at least to pay deference, if it were only as with Bacon, the deference of respectful distance, to what was still held to be the queen of the sciences. The philosophical attitude of Bacon is the least involved with religion. Even Descartes is more theological and professes to hold his theories only with the approval of the church. But the most striking illustration of the dominance of the religious spirit is Hobbes himself. The hostile, as his writings are to the foundations of religious belief, they are everywhere pervaded with a religious tone and coloring. The Leviathan, in many of its chapters, is a perfect mosaic of scriptural quotations. The very title itself, and the titles of its several books, are biblical. It cheats the ear with religious phrases and the solemnity of a religious purpose, which it breaks to the intelligence with its merciless logic. The difference in this respect between Bacon and Hobbes is curious and interesting. Bacon, in acknowledging the supremacy of theology, excludes it from the circle of rational knowledge and inquiry. He treats it with an assumed humility, a grand air of respect, which has a touch of condescending mockery in it. He bows it out of the court of the sciences as sacredly transcending all nature and reason. Hobbes, on the other hand, mixes his politics, philosophy, and religion inextricably together. We cannot get at the one without the other, or separate them without destroying his whole intellectual system. In this respect, Hobbes was the truer child of his age. How men were to live together at all. How society was to be formed and the state constituted. Were in the seventeenth century still identical with the questions how men were to live together as religious beings, what dogmas they were to profess, what mode of worship they were to observe? And so religion naturally took the front in every new movement of thought. It is to be remembered that Wichcote himself, with his friends and followers, were all clergymen of the Church of England. They were fellows or heads of colleges. They were preachers in the university. All their teaching accordingly took a religious turn. They were philosophers in the interests of Christianity. It was their instincts of rational Christian defense at once against the bigotries and the atheisms, as they believed them to be, of their time, which drove them in search of a deeper, more comprehensive, and more inspiring philosophy. There are sufficient traces of such a philosophy in Wichcote, although they lie behind other phenomena more prominently marked. His general view of religion as a seed of a deformed nature, implanting and strengthening within us all lofty and pure aspirations, and rationally elevating and sweetening the whole nature in communion with God, is essentially platonic. So also is the whole turn of his thought and its diffusive ideality, his love of the abstract rather than the concrete, and even his nicety of verbal and argumentative definition. We are told that, quote, he set young students much on reading the ancient philosophers, chiefly Plato and Tully and Plotinus, close quote. Tuckney accuses him, after he came to be a lecturer at Emanuel, of laying aside in a great measure all other studies and betaking himself to philosophy and metaphysics. The chief objection to his preaching was its moral and philosophical character in contrast to that doctrinal style which Puritans have curiously always considered to be more identical with the simplicity of scriptural truth. He, in his turn, confesses his obligations to philosophers and the good which he had got from them in the use of all those principles that derive from God and speak him in the world. He defends with some warmth and jealousy his favorite studies, but at the same time it never occurs to him to put them in front of or in place of religion. The chief point in his vindication is the consistency which he has found between them and the main points of Christianity. I have sometimes publicly declared, he says, quote, what points of religion I have found excellently held forth by them and I never found them enemies to the faith of the gospel, close quote. The religious interest is first with him and the philosophical only second. The speculative character of the movement becomes more prominent with its advance. The younger minds that which quote led and influenced are less affected by the accidental relations of religious party and the conflicts of religious dogma amidst which he himself moved and which gave the primary bias to his teaching. They take up the same questions in their broader spiritual aspects, their more generalized and philosophical shape. John Smith is a Platonist, not only like his master because he has found in the study of the Platonic writings certain principles coincident with his own enlarged Christian thoughtfulness by the light of which he is able to rebuke the narrowness or expose the falsehood of those whom he designates lazy and loose Christians, but because from the beginning he has more or less taken up his line of thought from Plato or the writings of the Neoplatonic school. Moreover, the questions which occupy him are more directly philosophical. They touch those general principles or relations of thought out of which all philosophy comes whether it takes a religious or irreligious form. The essence of divine knowledge, in what it consists, the ultimate springs of our rational and spiritual life out of which arise respectively superstition, atheism, theism, the nature of revelation and the true idea of righteousness. Such are the questions to which his discourses are devoted. Religious in the highest sense, they yet involve in their mere statement the primary data of all philosophy, and Smith we shall find handles them as a preacher indeed, for the discourses were intended for oral delivery, yet with a freedom, elevation and amplitude of grasp which stamps him preeminently as a Christian philosopher. Of Smith's life unhappily we know little or nothing. In some respects the most remarkable of all the Cambridge school, the richest and most beautiful mind and certainly by far the best writer of them all, he died at the early age of thirty-four. There was nothing to tell of a career so brief and which never seems to have passed beyond the precincts of the university. He is a thinker without a biography. Two friends, John Worthington, who edited his discourses, and Simon Patrick, who preached his funeral sermon in the chapel of Queen's College, where he himself had discoursed with such marvelous eloquence, have given us some sketch of his character, but left much to be desired even in this respect. There is elevation and beauty, but also a good deal of indistinctness in the picture which they draw. The lines are grand but wavering and lose themselves after the manner of the time in vagueness and generality. Yet here and there there are touches of affection and felicity, which in the case of Patrick in particular break into downright bursts of tearful tenderness over the loss of so much genius and goodness. Quando ulem invanient param is the keynote of all he says, and the pressure of the painful thought interrupts the flow of his panegyric with the most honest exclamations of grief. Quote, Who can think of his gracious lips, his profitable and delightful converse, his cordial love without a sigh and a tear, without saying, ah, my father, ah, his glory. Close quote. A recent writer has said that in all the literature of the period with which he is acquainted, he has not met with a more pathetic production than this funeral sermon. Footnote. Mr. Mollinger of St. John's College, who in a small volume entitled Cambridge Characteristics in the 17th Century, has touched but only very slightly upon our subject. End of footnote. Quote, The artistic skill is not great but there is an expression of genuine feeling throughout with an occasional outbreak of honest grief which produces an effect above all art. Close quote. This is quite true and the fact is equally creditable to Patrick and the friend whom he and the university so deeply mourned. John Smith was a native of North Hamptonshire where his father seems to have been a small farmer. He was born at a church near Aundall in that county in the year 1618. Before his birth, Patrick says, his parents had been long childless and were grown aged. He was sent to Cambridge in 1636 and entered, as which Quote had before him, at Emanuel College. We would infer from this that his father, like many of his class, especially in the Midland Districts of England, had Puritan leanings and sent him to the well-known Puritan foundation to be trained in the true gospel of Protestantism. At this time which Quote was a fellow and tutor in the college and he is supposed also to have commenced his influence as a preacher. He was nine years older than Smith and it is expressly stated by Worthington that he became tutor to the young and probably somewhat friendless undergraduate from North Hamptonshire. This is one of the few facts embodied in Worthington's rhetorical address to the reader, prefixed to the original edition of the Discourses. It is also implied in his statement that the tutor's comparative wealth was freely given to assist his pupil. His words are, Quote, I knew him, the author of the Discourses, for many years not only when he was a fellow of Queen's College but when a student in Emmanuel College where his early piety and the remembering his creator in those days of his youth has also his excellent improvements in the choicest parts of learning and deared him to many particularly to his careful tutor, the fellow of Emmanuel College, afterwards provost of King's College, Dr. Wichcote, to whom for his directions and encouragements of him in his studies, his seasonable provision for his support and maintenance when he was a young scholar, as also upon other obliging considerations our author did ever express a great and singular regard. Smith took his bachelor's degree in 1640 and his master's four years later, and in the same year in which he became master or in 1644 he was chosen a fellow of Queen's College. The explanation given of his not having received a fellowship in his own college is that by the statutes no more than one fellow could be admitted from any one county and that the fellowship open to a Northamptonshire graduate was filled up at the time Smith became eligible. It was at this time, our readers will remember, that Wichcote returned to Cambridge after a brief absence and was appointed provost of King's College. We have no trace of further personal relations betwixt the former tutor and his pupil, but they no doubt renewed their old intercourse and it is easy to imagine the enthusiasm with which a mind like Smith's would regard Wichcote's growing influence over the youth of the university. Smith's success, again, could scarcely have been less acceptable to his former teacher. While the discourses which he delivered in the chapel of Queens must have been among the most powerful stimulants of the higher and more expansive thoughtfulness which was rapidly springing up to the alarm of Tuckany and his friends. They contributed, according to Tillotson's biographer, to raise new thoughts and a sublime style in the members of the university. Smith is said to have discharged his duties as tutor with great faithfulness and to have had great gratitude and ease of expression in the communication of knowledge. Particular mention is made of his distinction as a mathematical lecturer in the public schools. His health seems to have been weak from the first and his illness was born with singular sweetness and patience. He died on the 7th of August, 1652, a few months after Wichcote closed his correspondence with Tuckany and the new movement may be said to have attained definite recognition and significance. Worthington's description of his friend throws but upon his character. He tells us that he might fill much paper in recounting particularly his many excellences, yet after all he gives us but a very vague and indefinite impression in such sentences as the following. Quote, I might truly say that he was both a righteous and truly honest man and also a good man. He was a follower and imitator of God in purity and holiness and benignity, goodness and love, a love enlarged as God's love is whose goodness overflows and spreads itself to all and his tender mercies are over all his works. He was a lover of our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, a lover of his spirit and of his life, a lover of his excellent laws and rules of holy life, a serious practiser of his sermon on the mount, the best sermon that ever was preached and yet none more generally neglected by those that call themselves Christians. To be short, he was a Christian more than a little, even holy and altogether such, a Christian inwardly as he was but without any vain gloriousness and ostentation, not so much a talking or a disputing as a living, a doing and an obeying Christian, one inwardly acquainted with the simplicity and power of godliness but no admirer of the pharisaic forms and sanctimonious shows though never so goodly and specious. Besides being thus a truly humble and learned man and with all in the midst of all these great accomplishments as eminent and exemplary in unaffected humility and true lowliness of mind. To conclude, he says, he was a plain hearted friend and Christian one in whose spirit and mouth there was no guile, a profitable companion, nothing of vanity and triflingness in him as there was a weighty, substantial and clearly expressive of his sense his private discourses would be and both formatter and language much what of the same importance and value with such exercises as he studied for and performed in public. Close quote. Such are the most characteristic passages of Worthington's description in his address to the reader. They are hearty but featureless in his character drawn by Patrick he thinks this unnecessary. If some part of that character he adds quote should seem to have in it anything of hyperbolism and strangeness it must seem so to such only who either were unacquainted with him and strangers to his worth or else find it a hard thing not to be envious of his intuition of his spirit and in the well-ordered course of his life a life as I remember Seneca doth express it somewhere in his epistles all of one color everywhere like itself and eminent in those things that are worthy of praise and imitation. Close quote. The character drawn by Patrick amid all its elaborate eulogy and unwanted height of emotion and giving too ready a flow to exaggerations of language as he recalls the virtues of his friend. Let us first look upon him he says quote in his eminency, dignity and worth a very glorious star he was and shown brighter in our eyes than any that he ever looked upon when he took his life. He had such a huge wide capacity of soul such a sharp and piercing understanding such a deep reaching mind that he set himself about nothing but he soon grasped it and made himself a full possessor of it. He was a most laborious searcher after wisdom a living library better than that which he had of course I have got with him for he was not a library locked up nor a book clasped but stood open for any to converse with all that had a mind to learn. Yea he was a fountain running over laboring to do good to those who perhaps had no mind to receive it none more free and communicative than he was to such as desired to discourse with him nor would he grudge to be taken off from interrupt sentences as easily as an ordinary man's could speak sense and he was no less happy in expressing his mind than in conceiving. He had such a copia verborum a plenty of words and those so full pregnant and significant joined with such an active fancy as is very rarely to be found in the company of such a deep understanding and judgment as dwelt in him. Close quote which his mind craved sympathy and to unburden itself of its teeming thoughts. This was no doubt the secret of the enthusiasm with which his friends regarded him and of the extraordinary interest which his death excited. They felt that not only a great student and thinker but a great teacher was gone one whose qualities preeminently fitted him to adorn the university and to influence its higher studies. His learning as Patrick phrases it quote was so concocted that it lay dead but made him fit for any employment. He was very full and clear in all his resolutions at any debates a most wise counselor in any difficulties and straights dexterous in untying any knot of great judgment in satisfying any scruple or doubt even in matters of religion. He was one that soon saw into the depth of any business that was before him and looked it quite through that would presently well balanced noble intellectual nature fitted to rule in the halls of learning and to diffuse a quickening and powerful influence. Nor were Smith's moral qualities less remarkable. He had incorporated continues his eulogist quote or insold all principles of justice and righteousness and made them one with himself so that I may say of him and Antoninas his phrase he was dipped into justice as it were and died and colored quite through with it so that whosoever he had a soul there was justice and righteousness. They who knew him very well know the truth of all this and I am persuaded he did as heartily and cordially as eagerly and earnestly do what appeared to be just and right without any self-respect or particular reflections as any man living. Me thinks I see how earnest he would be in a good and speaking at his mouth. It was a virtue indeed that he had a great affection unto and which he was very jealous to maintain in whose quarrel he was in danger to be angry and sometimes to break forth into a short passion close quote here we have a genuine bit of nature Smith was evidently a high sold, eager and somewhat impetuous man easily warmed into emotion for what he felt to be the temperament which kindles at wrongdoing or folly of any kind and which goes straight at its object without management or guile. The spirit which reveals itself by the eyes and mouth may not be a great spirit and certainly may not always be right but at least it is never crafty or deceitful and in his case the diffuse of expressiveness of the face was plainly as he proceeds in his description and makes him exclaim quote and now what word shall I use what shall I say of his love none that knew him well but might see in him love bubbling and springing up in his soul and flowing out to all and that love unfeigned without guile hypocrisy or dissimulation I cannot tell you how his soul universalized how tenderly he embraced and would even have emptied his soul into theirs let any that were thoroughly acquainted with him say if I lie and truly my happiness is that I have such a subject to exercise my young and weak oratory upon as will admit of little hyperbole his patience was no less admirable than his love under a lingering and tedious disease wherein he never murmured or complained but rest he told me in his sickness that he hoped he had learned that for which God sent it and that he thought God kept him so long in such a case under such burdens and pressures that patients might have its perfect work in him and really in his sickness he showed what Christianity and true religion is able to do what might power and virtue there is in it to bear up a soul commended in similar language he was absorbed by religious earnestness and resolved so he said quote if it had pleased the lord of life to prolong his days very much to lay aside other studies and to travel in the salvation of men's souls but at the same time he was free from all devouring zeal he called for no fire to descend from heaven upon men but the fire of divine love that might of kindness everybody that knew him will remember that he ever had their names in his mouth and I assure them they were no less in his heart and life as knowing that without these truth itself is in a faction and Christ is drawn into a party and this graciousness of spirit was the more remarkable in him because he was of a temper naturally hot and caloric as the greatest minds most commonly are he was wiser than to let any anger rest in his bosom and bitterness if he was at any time moved on to anger it was but a sudden flushing in the face and it did as soon vanish as a rise close quote having thus described all his worth and eminency and alluded to the last days of his friend's life which passed away in a kind of sleep Patrick's feelings seemed to give way all together as he breaks forth quote have we not reason to be so sad as you see our faces tell you that we are but alas our eyes might have seen had you been acquainted with him I want thoughts and words to make a lively portraiture of him my young experience hath not yet seen to the height or the depth of these things which I have here given you a rude draft of and so my conceits and expressions must needs fall far below that excellent degree of beauty wherein they dwelt in him there is not one but will cry out with Elisha oh the chariot of this place and the horsemen thereof oh thou by thyself a college in brief what a loss have we sustained by thy departure to which of us was not he dear who is there that was not engaged to him who can think himself as wise as he was when we had him close quote the picture of mind and character raised by these grand eloquent touches is of so lofty a kind that we might be disposed to attribute it in some degree to that enthusiasm of personal friendship which often binds young university men together to exalt above criticism the parts and influences of some favorite tutor or companion student this is so common that we are apt to smile at youthful eulogy knowing well that the only test of what a man is really worth and what he is capable of doing for any branch of knowledge is not the intense and frequently narrow judgment of a university but the broad and well sifted judgment of the intellectual world many a university marvel special interest among their fellow students have afterwards taken the lead and left their stamp upon their generation in many impresses of noble and advancing thought accordingly we turn to smith's discourses with some anxiety they are all that survived to represent his genius they first appeared in 1660 under the editorship of worthington and although it was then stated by him that there were other pieces of the authors which would make end of chapter 3 part 1