 Section 22 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 7. General Estimate, Religious Philosophy, Part 1. It now only remains briefly to sum up the results of our historical and expository survey. These results have been plainly indicated already, but it may be well to bring them together and so set in order the services which the rational movement of the 17th century has rendered to the cause of Christian thought and civilization. Finally, we shall touch on the defects of the movement and the causes of its partial failure. 1. The primary merit of our rational theologians was their inculcation of the doctrine of toleration. This doctrine is now so universally admitted in theory that it is not easy to estimate the cost at which it was first taught and the superior enlightenment out of which it arose in the 17th century. Yet no idea was at first more novel and repulsive. It was unintelligible to the ordinary political and theological mind. Footnote. Even after all the lessons of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, a theologian so eminent as Dr. Owen failed to appreciate in its true meaning the principle of toleration. See Houghton's Church of the Restoration 1.30 and 31. End of footnote. It was intolerable to the powerful factions which strove for the mastery in England. Cromwell, when he attained to power, so far realized and carried out the idea, but this was in virtue of his own superiority and his sympathy with the rational thought which otherwise he so little understood. But neither high churchmen nor Puritans understood it, or so far as they understood it, they hated it. Their essential conception, both of a national and ecclesiastical polity, implied dogmatic as well as external uniformity. In opposition to this our rational theologians announced as a principle that dogmatic uniformity is unattainable and that the prosperity both of the church and the country are to be sought in toleration and latitude of religious opinion. They proclaimed in other words that religious questions can only be settled by being left to free discussion. Then in as much as their minds and circumstances are different, necessarily differ about them. They are matters of conscience and not of control. The very effort to control religious opinion not only defeats the end in view and issues in fiercer discordance than ever, but it kills religious vitality and assails the personal foundations of all belief. The spiritual reason, on the one hand, and scripture on the other, are the sole authorities in religion. One can have no higher arbiter in the end of what is divine or credible in religion than his own judgment enlightened by God's word. These statements are now of the nature of religious commonplace, worn and perhaps vulgarized by indiscriminate repetition. The doctrine of toleration, if not of the supremacy of reason in religion, is now a popular instead of a proscribed doctrine. And even the most irrational religious organizations have learned to use the word and profess to be shocked at any thought of enforcing their religious opinions upon others. But it is easy to be tolerant after the triumph of toleration. It is good to make a virtue of necessity, and to proclaim a principle the practice of which is more or less compulsory according to modern state usages on all religious bodies. This is something entirely different from the recognition of the principle in its true sense, in the sense in which our divines recognized and taught it. Their idea of toleration was not mere non-interference with another's religious opinions, still less indifference as to the quality of such opinions as if beyond rational cognizance. It was an intelligent apprehension of the right of each and all to search and find religious truth for themselves. It sprang out of deep reverence for conscience and trust in the voice of reason as the supreme side of human nature. It was, according to them, the special function of the church to educate and not to bind and control religious thought. The truly Catholic church is not the church resting in this creed or that, proclaiming this type of doctrine or that, but the universal company of the faithful, who owned Christ as their Lord and believe in His name with all their diversities of opinion and of gift. The idea of the church, as based upon opinion, is immediate evil and not a primitive idea. The church subsists in communion of spirit, not in coincidence of doctrine. It has a common faith, it may have a common worship, but it is not bound to any definite type of theology, any argumentative or theoretic creed. The statement of facts in the Apostles' Creed is ample doctrinal basis beyond which it is wrong to go. Such was the conclusion to which the idea of toleration worked itself in the minds of our rational theologians. It seems the only logical conclusion. If the essence of the church rests in doctrine rather than in life, in creeds rather than in sympathy, then it follows directly that toleration of religious differences is inconsistent with its true order and function. If salvation depends upon true opinion, then variety of opinion must be inconsistent with it, and of course expelled from the church and prevented with all practicable force. It is impossible to get out of this circle. Persecution is the legitimate corollary of the dogmatic idea of the church. Toleration is only rationally held when differences of dogma are not only acknowledged, but, so to speak, cultivated as the very condition and nurture of spiritual activity. Uniformity of doctrine is not only impracticable, it is not a good thing in itself. It can only exist where thought and science are dead, where the cold shadow of the past lies upon the quick life of the present and imprisons it to the injury of Christian progress and civilization. Starting with the sacredness of religious conviction in the individual and its divinely incompressible character, our rational divines did not yet any of them sink into individualism or dream of a dissidence of dissent. They felt the awful reality of the religious problem and that religion was something beyond all state compulsion, but they did not therefore abandon the idea of a national church. They sought to modify the idea, not to subvert it. What is known as the voluntary principle was then unknown and would not have appeared to them a principle at all. No doubt modern voluntarism has sprung in some degree from their root thought, the sacredness of religious conviction and the absolute authority of conscience therein. But let men differ as they may in religious opinion. This was no reason, according to our divines, why there should not be common worship and a common national church. Nay, community of religious life is all the more necessary because unity of religious opinion is impossible. They solved the religious problem, therefore, not by giving it up and saying, since men cannot agree about religion let them separate and each party keep its own principles and set up its own worship, but by pushing the problem to its legitimate conclusion and drawing out the essential distinction between dogma and religion. This great distinction is one of their chief contributions to modern thought. Dogmatic opinion and religious faith belong with them to different spheres. The one is the product of the intellect, always restlessly seeking for exhaustive solutions of the divine as of everything else. The other is the fruit of the spirit, the sympathetic life in man which clings to a higher life even when light is wanting and the sphere of divine knowledge may seem conflicting and obscure. The latter is the only true basis of the church whose function is first to quicken and then strengthen and educate the religious side of humanity without primary respect to scientific accuracy of opinion. To make opinion or dogma the basis of the church is to invert the divine order according to which doctrine is placed after life and true thought as to the divine can only spring from its practice and realization. This is an idea repeatedly enforced by our theologians. They recognize religion and the church as springing from faith in a personal redeemer and finding in this faith their ample warrant. There is no other or further essential of Christian communion. Theological opinion or dogma is a growth from this. To attain to clearer and higher views of the divine being and character and the mode of the divine action in human salvation is the work of the Christian intellect within the church nurtured by an ever-nearer communion with its heavenly source. But to bar the threshold by a summary of Christian theology which all must receive as the condition of entrance to it, nay, under the peril of damnation which it pronounces upon misbelievers, is not only to narrow and sectarianize the Catholic communion but to subvert its essential idea. The church is the home of the faithful everywhere, of all who have any aspirations after God and truth. Precise opinions in theology are the labor of the schools, of the thought bred within the church, awakened and nurtured by its special life. The concept of dissent, therefore, had no place in the minds of our theologians. The church was not to them an organization for the propagation of this or that set of opinions. It was a culture or worship resting on the recognition of a few divine facts, a spiritual society within whose sheltering bosom all opinions consistent with these facts should find free room and scope. It did not begin in dogma, it does not rightly rest on it, yet one of its functions is to elaborate dogma and cultivate a higher Christian thought as well as a more diffused and earnest Christian spirit. Thought is the function of the few, it can only live and flourish along with perfect freedom. Dogma is the varying expression of the divine activity of the church in ever renewed adaptation to its own necessities and the progress of knowledge. Instead of being the beginning, therefore, it is the summit and crown of the church's being. Instead of resting upon a creed in any purely dogmatic or scientific sense, in other words, upon a special theology which was the Puritan conception, the true idea of the church is that it is continually in search of a higher theology, a more comprehensive and perfect coordination of the spiritual facts lying at its basis. Extended Footnote There is a passage in Coleridge's Notes on Jeremy Taylor, Volume 1, Notes on English Divines, Page 229, which may be quoted in connection with the view here expressed. O, that this great and good man, he says, quote, who saw and has expressed so large a portion of the truth, if by the creed I might understand the true apostles, that is, the baptismal creed, free from the additions of the first five centuries, I might say indeed the whole truth, had but brought it back to the great original end and purpose of historical Christianity and of the church visible, as its exponent, not as a hortus sickus of past revelations, but an ever enlarging enclosed area of the opportunity of individual conversion to and reception of the truth. Then instead of using this one truth to inspire a despair of all truth, a reckless skepticism within and a boundless compliance without, he would have directed the believer to seek for light where there was a certainty of finding it, so far as it was profitable to him, that is, so far as it actually was light for him. The visible church would be a walled academy, a pleasure garden in which the entrance, having presented their symbolic portee or admission contract, walk at large, each seeking private audience of the invisible teacher, alone now, now in groups, meditating or conversing, gladly listening to some elder disciple, through whom, as ascertained by his intelligibility to me, I feel that the common master is speaking to me, or lovingly communing with a class fellow who I have discovered has received the same lesson from the inward teaching with myself, while the only public concerns in which all, as a common wheel, exercise control and vigilance over each, are order, peace, mutual courtesy and reverence, kindness, charity, love, and the fealty and devotion of all and each to the common master and benefactor." A pleasing ideal of a true church, somewhat marred by the analogy of an academy rather than of a home, for discipline as well as instruction, and especially by the strange insinuation which Coleridge repeats again and again, that there was some skeptical reserve in Taylor's advocacy of the Apostles Creed as an ample doctrinal basis for the church. It does not appear to us that there is the slightest evidence of this suspicion. The scruples which Coleridge had as to the existing form of the Creed were unknown to Taylor. All the drift of his argument on the liberty of prophesying is quite as effective, or more effective, taking the Creed in its limited and original rather than in its later traditionary sense. Taylor was quite as honest in dealing with it in the larger as Coleridge in the briefer form. The idea of the church on its educational side, however, is well and happily conceived by Coleridge. It is an idea transcending alike sacerdotalism and dogmatism, both of which imply a church already in full possession of truth in its highest forms rather than in any degree in search of it, the members of which have to receive and own well-known lessons, patent to all rather than to inquire or look for higher light. The one is the more maternal view of the church, imposing her authority. The other is the rational view, which recognizes her as a mother but also as an organ of spiritual intelligence, rejecting no form of truth but appropriating and purifying all. The spirit of truth has been working in the church from the first, producing many precious fruits of Christian wisdom and knowledge which every reverent mind will receive with grateful respect. But this spirit is as living now as ever, and a sacerdotalism which fixes the divine in some definite ritual, however venerable, or a dogmatism which fixes it in a Creed or symbol, however valuable, is equally fatal to those progressive manifestations or higher harmonies of divine knowledge whereby the future may yet throw light upon the past and more fully justify the ways of God to men. It must at the same time be admitted that dogmatism and even sacerdotalism have their place and function in the Christian church. Both are real growths in the course of its historical development. They exist only because there is a side of Christian feeling and intelligence to which they answer. The real zeal and the intensity of Christian enthusiasm which inspire and sustain missionary enterprise in all churches naturally tend to dogmatism. While the deep sense of human weakness which comes from the presence of the divine in sinful hearts, perhaps as naturally tends to some form of sacramentarianism or reliance on priestly rites. Unless scope is given for both these tendencies within a national church, division or sectarianism must necessarily ensue. But why should not a church embrace within regulated or legal expansion all these tendencies? Because they are intolerable to one another or beyond the control of law? The evangelical dogmatist will not suffer the sacerdotalist and both detest and desire to expel the rationalist. Religion in short is not only beyond political compulsion which all now admit, but incapable of legislative guidance or control, the favorite view of our modern politicians. On such a view certainly the theory of a national church cannot be maintained. But neither can the idea of the church itself be maintained. It must break to pieces by the mere pressure of its diverse activities, and the very variety of those divine Charismata out of which it originally sprang and which in the course of its history, as at the beginning, constitute the presence of the divine spirit in it, involve its disintegration and dissolution. If the religious element in short be in its nature irrepressible, and religious men on different sides will have all their own way or nothing, then the church in any Catholic or national sense will become impracticable. But so also will religion cease to be a factor in modern civilization and Christianity in all lands dwindle into a mere conjuries of religious parties, the dismal spectacle, as H. Moore says, of an infinity of sects and schisms. Public life will be separated from religion altogether and the game of politics become a wild chase of ambition without even the pretense of respect for moral or religious sanction, while Christian sects look calmly on from their sanctified enclosures. Can we not already point to instances of such a result? End of footnote. In this view, the church is not a separate spiritual society, either in the form of prelacy or of Presbytery, Calvinian, Armenian or Sosinian in its tenets. Such divisions are already sectarian in their very conception. It is the nation itself in the aggregation of its spiritual activities, its collective Christian life and wisdom working with freedom yet subject to the common order and law. The true rule of the church is therefore neither with bishop nor with presbyter, with ecclesiastical council nor royal will, but with a supreme national voice. This is the only consistent deduction from the views of our divines. It was the practical creed of some of them, if not of all. Their theory of a comprehensive church, in short, embracing, as it did, every form of Christian activity and giving free play to every variety of Christian opinion, had no final element of control except the collective national will. It may be called the constitutional theory in opposition to the sacerdotal and dogmatical, or the theory of the balance of spiritual forces in contrast to that of mere autocratic will on the one hand or dogmatic compulsion on the other. Of the former, the papacy is the only pure and logical form. Of the latter, Protestant dissent, in its various manifestations, is the legitimate conclusion. The one exists to carry out the will of the divine, as expressed by a single absolute voice into which all the intellectual activities of the church gather, and every lower form of the sacerdotal theory tends to culminate in the species of autocratic supremacy. The other exists to propagate its own notions of Christian truth as necessarily the truth, and by the pressure of its special dogmatisms to crush all further spirit of Christian inquiry and within its own pale, or as far as it can, all freedom of thought. Whatever may be thought of the Latitudinarian or constitutional theory, it is at least the only theory of the church which has been found consistent with Christian science and the cultivation of intellectual fairness no less than spiritual piety and charity. Not only so, but it is the only theory not discredited by the course of civilization. A national church which can embrace all the varied activities of Christian thought and life, which can appropriate instead of repelling the results of scientific discovery and modify instead of banning even the forward energies of communistic thought, is a possibility in the future. The wildest powers of our modern scientific and social life may be brought within its control and purification. Before such powers, popery and separatism are alike helpless. Systems which have nothing to learn, which have long ago laid up and embalmed as splendid antiquarianism, their theories of the divine, have nothing to teach. The most living and powerful thought of the age passes them by without notice. Medievalism broods as a specter on the face of modern civilization. Sectarianism faintly solicits its mind and heart. Neither really move and vitalize it while it goes onward its unknown way. 2. If our rational theologians differed in their theory of the church, both from the preletists and puritans, they no less differed in their theory of religion. The one difference, indeed, implies the other. With both these parties, religion was more or less something distinct from humanity, a celestial truth in the keeping of bishops or of presbyters of the church or of a Westminster assembly. The Cambridge Divines did not, of course, deny that there was a distinct spiritual truth revealed in Scripture. On the contrary, they were the great defenders of the reality of religion and the reaction of unbelief that followed the dogmatic excesses of the time. They were Christian apologists as well as Christian rationalists, and their true position can only be understood when viewed in both aspects. On the one side, they testified to the need of reason and faith, of morality and religion. On the other side, they testified, and none have ever done it more nobly, that reason needs faith and morality, religion. This double attitude is of the highest significance. Religion, they said, is not a set of forms or magical round of rites. Neither is it a set of notions or elaborate round of doctrines. It is a life, a higher, purer, nobler expression of the ordinary human life, a deformed seed within the soul growing up into spiritual blossom and fruit. The single condition of this spiritual culture is the divine spirit in contact with the human, guiding, educating, enriching, strengthening it. This was their idea of religion, a like against the formal mysticism of the Laudians and the formal opinionativeness of the Puritans. The essence of piety was not in the spiritual performances of the one, nor the spiritual exercises of the other, but in a pure, good, and beautiful life. But then they added, and no set of theologians have ever more emphatically added, such a life can only exist in the divine, and the divine is a reality. The spiritual is as truly as and more truly than the material. While religion is never to be dissociated from life, and apart from it exists only in its simulacra, rites, or notions, it is yet no mere culture of the common external life, no mere moral coating. It is the growth of the divine side of life, and this side is as real as the natural side. Nay, it is the deeper reality of the two. In this sense, religion is distinctive, but in no other. It is of importance to bring out this aspect of the Christian rationalism of the seventeenth century, not only because otherwise one of its main aspects would be overlooked, but also because it has suffered misrepresentation on this very point. It was the accusation of its contemporary Puritan and high church critics, and it is a common assertion of the same critics to this day that the Cambridge Divines may be considered Christian moralists, but not evangelists. They preached an elevated Christian philosophy, but not the gospel of divine grace. Now, what is the gospel, and what is divine grace? The gospel is the news of divine love, the message that God is willing to save sinners, and has sent his son into the world that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. This is the very pith of the evangel, and the writings of the Cambridge Divines are full of it. Divine grace is the reality of divine help to save us when we cannot save ourselves. Moral aspirations, the very highest, unless they spring from a divine source and lay hold of divine strength, will not bring a man forth from the depths of sin, and set him upon a rock establishing his goings. This is the very essence of the Cambridge theology, which not only finds the strength of morality in the divine, but identifies the moral itself with the divine. The very idea of good is already the presence of God in humanity. Good and evil, justice and injustice, are manifestations of the divine mind in us, and have otherwise no existence. They are the movements of the divine spirit. Otherwise they are not realities at all, but mere illusions and conventions. How can a theology like this be accused of undervaluing divine grace when it finds all its distinction in the exaltation of the divine? But according to the very explanation it may be asked, does the Cambridge theology not lose the divine in the moral? Yes, but by divinizing the moral, not humanizing the divine. What it never does is to separate the divine and human, and hold the former apart in sacred rites or sacred doctrine, Pharisees of the affection or the intellect. This, so far from exalting divine grace, seemed to this theology to sectarianize and degrade it. It seems to incarnate the living spirit in a dead idol, to venerate the chalice and bread upon the altar instead of the divine presence, ever working in humanity and quickening it to a higher life, or to deify the doctrine about the Saviour instead of the living Saviour himself. The divine may, no doubt, be conceived apart from its human manifestations in the higher spiritual instincts of our race, but we can know nothing of it, save in these manifestations. Spirit can only live in spirit, can only be known by spirit. We can only find God in ourselves. The roots of the divine and the human are inseparable, and if we try to tear them asunder, we plunge, nonetheless, into materialism because we may be high church ritualists or Puritan dogmatists of an extreme kind. The noble distinction of the Cambridge Divines is that they, at once, rationalized religion and vindicated its distinctive reality. Faith and reason, the divine and the human, grace and works, were to them inextricably involved. The analysis which tries to separate them breaks and destroys them. The one is in the other. We cannot reach the higher, save through the lower. The lower is only complete in the higher. But they were so far from ignoring the divine, or losing it in the human, that their most vital struggle was to maintain and make clear the divine as the paramount crown and glory of the human. They were, if ever men were, defenders of the faith. Their special labor, as Christian philosophers, was to prove that religion was a transcending reality, a substantive power binding the soul to God, revealing God to the soul, a power more real than all the bigotries which simulated it, or all the ceremonies which represented it. This was their mission against the materialism of their time. On the one side, they aimed to purify and elevate the popular religion. On the other, they aimed to discover and vindicate a substantive religious sphere, which, however obscured or perverted, was the highest and most indestructible of all spheres of knowledge. The contentions of religious parties had discredited religion altogether. The Cambridge Divines found themselves not merely facing exhausted factions before whom they sought to present a higher ideal of religion, conciliatory instead of sectarian, but facing what appeared to them a new and formidable foe which struck at the very basis of spiritual life and left no room for the ideas of God and immortality at all. As they fought against a technical and barren theology, so they fought against an undivine and unspiritual philosophy. Hobbes appeared to them an enemy to all religion. It was no matter that he professed to reverence it and to appropriate and manipulate religious ideas as factors in the organization of society. With all he seemed to them to take from these ideas all true basis. A religion born of fear, a church constituted by mere police authority outraged all their deepest instincts. They could find no foundation for worship nor for morality, save in the fact of a divine spirit in man witnessing to a divine spirit above him. And it became the passion and labor of their lives to vindicate this twofold form of the divine, God and immortality. It is unnecessary for us to say further how they performed this great task. We have dwelt sufficiently upon this aspect of their work and indicated our estimate of its substantial success. If God and immortality can be verified by human inquiry and reasoning at all, they can only be verified in the line of their thought. That is to say, by recognizing the true place of mind in nature as first and not second, senior and not junior. The soul and God, the divine in man and the divine without him, are essential correlatives. Man is spirit and not matter, thought and not thing, if there is a spiritual world at all. As Moore himself has said in the close of his antidote against atheism, no spirit, no God. Footnote. Nulis spiritus nulis deus. Sir William Hamilton quotes from the Latin version, lectures on metaphysics, volume one, page 32. Nulis in microcosmos spiritus, nulis in macrocosmo deus. But Moore's words are simply as we have given them in the original English and in his own Latin version. End of footnote. It is impossible to advance the basis of proof for the being of a God beyond this, or to rest it anywhere else. The divine reason is an intuition of the human reason. Or conversely, the human is an index of the divine, verifying its object by its own light and revealing in the very depth of its rationality that the sphere of spirit transcends and encompasses that of sense. The divine is the reality. It is substance and not shadow, or, as all materialism must make it, a mere dream painted by the subtle associative magic of human hopes and fears and aspirations. The spiritual above is the utterance of the spiritual within, and the latter can only be found a reality in the experience of its own transcending nature, one and indivisible, a unity of consciousness which is not mine but me, which no mere material combinations, however they may modify and control it, can be conceived as originating, which, in short, is before and not after matter, and if it did not proceed could never come out of or appear within matter. It is impossible so far to overrate the services of our theologians. The exponents and advocates of a comprehensive church, the purifiers of the popular theology, they were at the same time the great champions of the reality of religion when the excesses of its partisans drove their age to unbelief. They stood in the breach and fought for the good cause with the weapon of reason, when many of the cowardly fanatics who had disgraced it were swept away with the new tide or were silent in their ignorant and irrational isolation. Their two attitudes are closely akin. It was their deep feeling of the reality of religion as a living good in humanity which made them so earnest to save it alike from the excesses of puritant dogmatism and the invasions of hobby and speculation. In the encumbrance of the one and the hollowness of the other they felt as alike fatal to it. It was the same higher rationality of thought which animated them in both cases, in the one seeking to keep religion true to fact and in the other to prove that it was a fact and no mere artifice or convention. End of Chapter 7 Part 1 Section 23 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tullock. The political services rendered by our divines should not be overlooked in any enumeration of their merits. None of them took an active part in political affairs. They were far less prominent in public life than many of the puritan divines on the one side or the preletists on the other. Yet the quiet force of their well-considered convictions and the eclectic spirit which led them to recognize what was due to the several elements of the civil constitution no less than to the diverse forms of religious life and opinion in England, their conciliatory and enlarged comprehensiveness in short in the political no less than in the ecclesiastical complications of the country, exercised a powerful influence on the national mind and contributed in no small degree to the triumph and settlement of constitutional principles at the revolution of 1688. It is striking indeed to what extent their enlightened liberality prevailed in all directions, working together as they did without any formal organization merely under the impulse of their own high thoughtfulness and unselfish desire to promote the interests of truth and the rights of all as citizens. The subversive paradoxes of Hobbes, the nobler but not less visionary model of the Republican Party headed by Milton, the servile royalism and passive obedience of the extreme high church party represented by such men as Thorndike and the non-jewers, made more noise and excited more prominent political agitation for a time, but they passed away. It was the glory of the latitudinarian divines here, as in other respects, to oppose the force of their calm and thoughtful reasonableness to all such extremes, and to set before the country an idea of the Constitution which was neither absolutist nor Republican, which rested neither on material force nor on reasoning superstition, but was equally removed from the pretense of theocratic despotism and the dreams of social democracy. Such an ideal was provided in the broad and deeply reasoned premises laid down by members of the latitudinarian type. The ground which they took up seems to have approached most nearly to that shortly afterwards adopted by the moderate and philosophical section of the early Quake Party. Their axioms of polity tended closely to that mixed or constitutional form in accordance with which the relations between sovereign and people have been since more practically defined through the influence of events rather than the progress of legislation. Loyalists at heart their regalism was leavened by liberal philosophy. Almost all the influential divines of the revolution, as we have already said, were trained in the Cambridge School and carried its principles, if no longer in their purely ideal form, into the regulation of their public conduct. It was easy, of course, for disappointed factions then, as it is easy for their successors in our own day, to attribute the conciliatory and enlightened policy of men like Tillotson or Patrick to ignoble motives of self-interest. But we agree with the writer from whom we have already quoted that this policy, quote, was the result of long and deep conviction upheld amid no little peril. It was consistent in them to welcome a policy which, regulating at once the prerogative of the crown and the immunities of the subject and reconciling in perpetuity civil freedom with regal privilege, could enlist the spontaneous sympathies and energies of the nation in support of public order and the supremacy of the legislature. Close quote. Footnote. Reverend Alexander Taylor, Michele Fellow of Queen's College Oxford, whose criticism of the Cambridge School in the preface to his edition of Patrick's Works is, as we formerly said, admirable so far as it goes. There is no other modern criticism, indeed, known to us deserving of attention. End of footnote. Two. We could have wished to close here, but impartial criticism demands from us some notice of the defects as well as the merits of our theologians. It is the less possible to pass them by that they are so obvious. They lie more on the outside and are visible to many who have no capacity of appreciating their excellences. All can see their faults of manner, style, and method, but they were also greatly deficient in critical penetration and range, deep-thoughted and comprehensive as they were. We have already spoken of the defects of the Cambridge Divines as writers. In this respect there is a great difference betwixt to them. Yet they are one and all behind many of their contemporaries. Hobbes puts them all to shame as a writer. Beside Hales and Chillingworth in our first volume, they fail greatly in clearness and force of style, in directness, readiness, and that felicitous mastery of intellect which so grasps the materials of an argument as to sift from it in the very act what is superfluous and inapplicable and bring the whole to an effective point. Hales and Chillingworth, it is true, carry less weight of thought. Their minds, if more dexterous, are more concentrated and purchase something of their comparative ease of movement from the lighter burden which they carry. But they were also, by nature, more quick-witted and perspicacious. If no less ardent students, they had brought the product of their studies more into the light of day and tested them in intercourse with men of common intellectual shrewdness and acute literary faculty. It was the misfortune of the Cambridge men to breathe almost uniformly an academic and theological atmosphere. Not merely to be in the main recluse students, for all students must be recluse so far, but seldom to emerge into the world of everyday thought and action. Thus all their writings not only smell of the academic lamp, but have the operosity and cumbersome of the school rather than the finish of the thinker who has been trained but has forgot his training in the consciousness of accomplishment and power which it has left behind. They carry their academic trappings with them, whatever they do. They crowd their books with specimens of all the intellectual furniture which they have gathered in the course of their studies. It was an age of painful verbosity and pedantry save in the very best writers. The lengthiness and tedium of the pulpit infected more or less all forms of composition. Cudworth and Moore are not only not above their contemporaries in this respect, but they have their own vices of style and grafted upon the common pedantry of the time. Their lack of method is a still more serious fault. The external disfigurement and formlessness of their writings might be excused if there were order within, but their thought is sometimes unorganized as well as their style. It is insufficiently laid out and disentangled in its details. The reader has to bring its parts together and reconstitute it as he best can. We refer especially to Moore, whose writings are as voluminous as those of all the others together. In him especially a deficient method and lack of critical penetration are apparent. But Cudworth's great work, also, with all its merits, is greatly wanting in organization. Rich, massive, and powerful as the theological mind of the 17th century was, it was, with rare exceptions, wholly uncritical. It accumulated knowledge with a marvelous power and profusion of learning, but it failed in discriminating its sources or estimating with any degree of accuracy its true proportions and value. The apparently unhesitating acceptance of the Apostle's Creed as the composition of the Twelve Apostles, even by so inquisitive and intellect as Chillingworth, not to speak of Jeremy Taylor, is a conspicuous instance of this uncritical habit and failure to sift the grounds of their knowledge. It is well to point out this, but it is also well to remember how slow the progress of criticism is in reference to theological ideas and matters of church history. Coleridge has made far too much of it after his want. While he shows himself in the very notes in which he takes Taylor to task on this point, that his own mind had by no means cleared itself from unhistorical preconceptions as to the origin and nature of Christianity. Footnote. All differences in the Christian church might be tolerated according to Coleridge, but such a difference as is represented by Trinitarianism and Sosinianism or Humanitarianism. But is there any historical student nowadays who would deny that the primitive Jewish church contained those who could be pronounced Humanitarians from a modern point of view? Quote. Contraries cannot be true. The Christ cannot be both mere man and incarnate God. Close quote. But the question, according to Coleridge himself, is not one for definition or conceptual logic at all, and why therefore should there be such an intolerable inconsistency betwixt a higher and a lower view of that which in itself is undefinable. Nothing regarding the origin of Christianity is probably more certain than that the nicene definitions of the person of Christ would have been utterly unintelligible and unacceptable to the primitive Jewish Christian. End of footnote. The Cambridge Divines show their lack of critical and historical judgment in three important particulars. A, their confusion of Platonism and Neoplatonism. B, their speculative fancifulness. And C, their misappreciation of evidence. A, the confusion between Platonism and Neoplatonism underlies their whole writings. They are, as Coleridge says, Platonists rather than Platonists. The theosophic reveries of the Alexandrian school fitted more aptly their own supersensual imaginations. And so they pass from the original to the later Platonic writings with the most indiscriminating indifference. They betray no suspicion of the enormous interval of thought betwixt Plato and Plotinus, still less of any growth or development of thought in Plato himself. What are now supposed to be his later dialogues chiefly interest to them? The Theotatus, Sophistes, Parminides, above all the Timaeus. The second book of the immutable morality is nearly half composed of quotations from the Theotatus, and the lengthened discussion in the fourth chapter of the intellectual system on the Platonic trinity rests in the main on the Timaeus and the Neoplatonic writers. Of the latter, Plotinus, 203 to 262 AD, is the chief favorite, but Proclus, 412 to 485, and Hierocles, 450, are also abundantly quoted. The Mystias died 390, and two writers of the later Neoplatonic school, Demacius and his disciples Simplicius, along with the Trismagistic writings frequently reappear in their pages. Footnote. Both belong to the sixth century and took refuge at the court of the Persian monarch, Kosroes, when Justinian closed the schools of heath and philosophy. End of footnote. Their minds were drenched with the speculations of the Alexandrian school in all its forms. Like the members of this school, they credited Plato with a sort of semi-inspiration and believed, as we have more than once seen, that he derived his wisdom from Moses. The extraordinary assumption of both Moore and Cudworth that all divine philosophy found in heath and writings is to be traced definitely to the Hebrews, that the original atomic doctrine and all the teaching of Pythagoras and of Plato have come from a Jewish fountainhead, may be considered the climax of their uncriticalness. Moore is absolutely possessed with this notion and recurs to it over and over again as the explanation of all the anticipations of Christian truth which appeared to meet him everywhere in the Platonic and Neoplatonic writings. It is needless to indicate how different in many respects is the spirit of our theologians from the genuine Platonic spirit, the one clear, bright, poetic, dramatic, scientific rather than mystical, the other vague, serious, and exclusively theological. The mysticism of Plato is a mysticism half poetic and half philosophic, touched with the brilliant and changing hues of a mythology half real, half ideal. The mysticism of Moore and Smith is purely spiritual and theosophic, an obscure region bounded by super sensual realities and the creature not of fancy and imagination but of a passionate and fertile faith. The vivacity, inquisitiveness, common sense, and dialectical badinage of the Platonic Socrates have nothing in common with the profound but somber and unwieldy thoughtfulness of the Cambridge Divines. The Platonism which dominated their thoughts and colored their theology and impressed more or less all their speculations was not the Platonism of Plato. But they never thought of distinguishing the varied elements of his philosophy in themselves or in relation to Neoplatonic speculations. It is no easy task even for modern criticism to discriminate the growth of the Platonic doctrine or to make out clearly whether it has any growth or consistent development at all. But the very idea of such a development had not even dawned upon our Divines. The suspicion that Plotinus and Proclus, while building upon the Platonic basis, may have had little or none of the spirit of the master builder, never disturbed them. Platonism was to them a vast mass of transcendental thought, dating from Pythagoras and even Moses, and stretching downwards through Alexandrian and medieval Jewish schools. And it was this Platonism of tradition, of the successive spiritualistic schools which had contended for a super sensual philosophy and peopled the world of faith with many fantastic reveries which ruled their spirits and inspired their philosophic ambition. In this sense alone can they be called Platonists. It is to be remembered that the age of historical criticism was yet unborn. Tradition, philosophic, patristic, scientific lay like an incubus upon the intelligence of the seventeenth century. Even contemporary philosophies were imperfectly understood and criticized. How much more ancient systems. Descartes and Hobbes were combated zealously but not analyzed or critically explained or fully comprehended in the totality of their principles and the relation which they bore to one another. How then could this be expected in the case of Pythagoras or Plato or Plotinus? Creeds and theologies passed without examination. Supposed heresies were vigorously refuted, but they were not challenged and asked to give an account of themselves. No one inquired or at least inquired with any critical capacity of getting a true answer as to the growth of the Apostles Creed or the Athanasian Creed. Why should not Pythagoras have learned his wisdom from the Jews, and all that was good in Greek thought have come from the great Hebrew seer? We have had speculations in our own day as to the analogies betwixt the Messiah and the Hellenic Apollo. No amount of mere learning can impart the faculty of criticism and of comparative historical induction. Especially where religious enthousiasms come into play, knowledge without insight and largeness of thought seems sometimes only to lead further astray. And uncritical tradition in many forms still lies with such a weight on all Christian churches that we may easily understand, while we regret, the inability of the Cambridge Platonists to disentangle the folds of traditionary theosophy which enveloped all their thought. B. Their speculative fancifulness was largely due to the same habits of mind. They had no adequate criteria of knowledge. They failed in distinguishing the subjective and objective in their respective elements. What was due to the conditions of the problem they discussed and what came from their own preconception? A failure more or less of all speculation. Yet it was more than usually conspicuous in our philosophers. Coleridge has said of them, quote, what they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind as part organ, part constituent of all knowledge. An examination of the scales, weights, and measures abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them. Close, quote. This expresses very much the same defect. Only we have hardly a right to expect from them such a criticism of the sources of knowledge as Coleridge desiderates. We have no warrant to look, as he implies, for a count among them or in the century to which they belong. Such anticipations of philosophical history are unreasonable. The Cambridge philosophers, however, fell below the speculative method of their own age. They were the victims of fantastic conceptions, no less than of futile traditions, from which their own reasonable culture and the new spirit of inquiry which surrounded them should have delivered them. Students of Descartes, they failed to learn the chief lesson of his philosophy, the necessity of some clear principle or ground of certitude on which to base all their thought, some touchstone by which to test it. Advocates of reason, they yet never asked themselves plainly what is reason, and how rational and irrational ideas are to be distinguished not merely in the sphere of religion but of speculation. Their rationalism was adequate to sift the notional dogmatism of the popular religion and the vagaries of Quakerism and other enthousiasms, but it failed to reach the sources of their own thought or to clear their own speculative vision. Hence all their dreams of plastic and vital natures have the pre-existence and hierarchies of souls, and generally the neoplatonic fantasies with which they filled their minds without any suspicion of their irrational incoherence and absurdity. C. We have already, more than once, adverted to their misappreciation of evidence as to the supernatural or spiritual world. Their studies had furnished them with no adequate criterion of evidence, scientific or historical. Their ignorance of natural causes they shared with their generation. Their credulity as to ghosts and apparitions was the inheritance of generations of credulity. It was almost a part of the common faith of the They are excusable here, therefore, as in other points. It is no reproach to Cudworth and more that they believed in ghosts. There were but few in the seventeenth century who ventured to disbelieve in them. But it may be fairly urged against them that they so little appreciated either the nature of evidence on the one hand or the true character of the supernatural on the other hand as to suppose that such stories of apparitions could possibly convince intelligent minds of the existence of spirits in opposition to the materialism which they saw arising around them. To place a good cause on a false issue is not only a peril to the cause, but an impediment to the progress of thought. And Moore and Glanville, in this respect, not only did not represent the rationality of their age, but were doing what they could to retard it. They have greatly suffered in consequence more than they deserved. These spiritualistic follies have clung to their name and reputation when their true enlightenment and the rational elevation and radiant warmth of their comprehensive Christianity has been forgotten. Moore's credulity, vast as it was, and the cloudy unsubstantiality of many of his speculations never obscured the clearness of his moral vision nor the essential rationality of his theological principles. He and all his school were still ready to test every form of spiritual truth by the light of the higher truths in man, the divine sagacity or image of the royal and divine logos which they might mistake and misinterpret but which they never thought of superseding or displacing. It cannot be denied that the Cambridge Platonists failed in much that they attempted. They assayed anew, in a distracted and unbelieving age, to verify the divine, not merely to witness it to man's reason and conscience, but to construe it into a philosophy and rear a science of religion. They failed partly by reason of their own weakness and errors, but especially because the time was not yet ripe for the development of an adequate spiritual philosophy. Such a philosophy can never be based merely or even mainly on the private ex-cogitations of thinkers, however great. It can never be a product of mere intuition or mere logic, however exalted, nor yet can it be a mere revival of any past phase of thought, however noble and significant. Platonism, even in its highest form, is but a splendid speculation, higher than any single effort of thought will probably ever reach again. Yet we cannot build a shelter for Catholic thought out of the most splendid fragment of speculation. Such a stately dome can only rise gradually on a comprehensive basis of historic criticism, which shall take in not merely this or that phase of speculation, but the whole growth of religious experience of which we have become the heirs. To this extent the positive or scientific method must be universally adopted, only enlarged to the area of a genuinely comprehensive induction. A true religious philosophy can only be built up slowly by the process which verifies while it accumulates and tests every addition to the fabric of discovery before it ventures to lay it to the pile. The religious experience of mankind through all the ages of historic and even prehistoric growth is as much a reality as any other phase of his experience, a good deal more a reality than most others. Religion has been and remains the most powerful factor of human history. Amidst all its changes it has been this and is likely to continue to be so. The idea that human progress shall ever transcend religion or lay it aside is the wildest dream that ever entered into the uncultured and semi-savage heart that still lurks in the bosom of modern civilization. There it is and has been always in the world, moving in some form or other its highest minds to their highest significance. There is no science, however exclusive, can refuse to recognize such facts by the very right which it itself has to exist and inquire into its own series of facts. But theologians and Christian philosophers must come to acknowledge that religious facts are not any more than other facts of private interpretation. They are individual it is true and in a certain sense cannot be investigated too closely as elements of individual experience. But in order to be fully and comprehensively understood they must also be regarded as parts of the common experience of humanity through all its stages of growth. They must be studied not only in their individualistic but in their generalized form as they appear in their gradual and complete development in history before we can interpret them right and form even approximate theory of their true value. We must have, in short, some adequate criticism of religious ideas in all their mysterious growth, dependency and involvement before we can venture to construct any adequate theory or philosophy of religion. All true thought is merely fact idealized. All right theory is merely experience generalized. No thought that is worth anything can ever rise above an historic basis. No more than science can transcend nature can religious thought transcend history. It may illuminate history but it must first of all grow out of it and a philosophy of religion before it aims at settling for us the great problems which it involves must be content to judge for long yet in reading the varied records of religious experience which modern historical criticism has only begun to unfold and arrange. Light, therefore, is not to be sought in any sudden illumination nor progress in any pet theories of modern any more than of ancient thinkers but only in patient study and faithful generalization. The vast volume of religious experience will slowly unfold its characters to inductive and patient thinkers as other volumes of experience have done. And as this volume is steadily read its pages compared and their facts coordinated and explained the divine meaning will become clearer. A religious philosophy will at least become possible when it is sought in this way not in any favorite speculation of this or that thinker however great but in the comprehensive interpretation of the religious consciousness working through all history and gathering light and force as it works onward. End of Chapter 7, Part 2. End of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 2 by John Tulloch.