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zeal? Is religion and truth less dear and precious now, than it was before? God forbid Is it in less danger? Oh that it were! But surely, beloved, our danger in this particular is but a little changed, not quite removed. Then indeed religion was in danger of a more violent and quick dispatch, and now it is in danger of a more lingering, but as sure a death: Then it was like to have been dispatched with one thrust of a sword, or one chop of a hatchet, by the hand of known and undoubted enemies; now it is like to be stabbed to death with bodkins, with variety and multiplicity of errors, that have wounded our religion in every vein; and this assassinate upon religion, committed by those that would be counted her chief and only friends.

"Truly when I behold the face and state of religion among us, it is in mine eyes, as if the Lord Jesus Christ were crucified afresh, and put to open shame in the midst of us.-Here comes a blasphemous ARIAN, and he wounds his head, by denying him to be God. There comes a sectary that is a flat ARMINIAN, though he hath not wit enough to know it, and he wounds him through the heart, by maintaining universal redemption, and that Christ shed his blood for all men, a thing that never entered into the heart of Christ! There comes an ANTINOMIAN, and he pierceth his hands. and his feet, by denying that exact walking and working by the rule of the moral law, which Jesus Christ came not to give an indulgence or dispensation from, but to give himself an example of: Atque hæc impunè. Can you plead ignorance of these things, and say, Behold we know it not? You cannot. Blessed be God, you de not; you have begun to set your faces against these blasphemies and heresies, that (servis dormientibus) are broken in upon us. Go on in this your might, to stop the mouth of all ungodliness, and the zeal of the Lord of Hosts be your strength! I know it hath been said by some, that because a heart to know and em'brace the truth is the gift of God, and the Magistrate cannot by 'forcible means work such a heart in men, therefore the Magis'trate must use no compulsion or co-ercion in matters of religion." But certainly, though the Magistrate cannot give grace, yet he may compel men to attend upon those means where God doth usually give that grace: (2 Chron. xxxiv, 11. Ezra, x, 7, 8.)

and then let not these things go on to God's dishonour. But supposing you have authority, What then is to be done? I answer, you must not take blasphemies, errors, and heresies to be such upon the reports of other men, but as the Lord ordered them in the 13th of Deuteronomy, so likewise must you do, search_diligently whether indeed such and such things are done; and when they appear to be done, out of the zeal of God do that against them which the Lord would have you do; let not your religlon be thus contaminated; suffer not your children to whom you ought to be nursing-fathers, to be thus poisoned by such corrupt doctrines, nor devoured by such wolves: This I know you will all subscribe unto:This I desire above all may stick with you, that if the Lord hath given you power, he hath not given you liberty to forbear such men : God in mercy make you zealous for him that hath been zealous for you in all your troubles !"

Else you must not only repeal the laws that enjoin Papists to come to our churches, but repent of them, as yours and the nations sins. And though the Magistrate cannot give men a heart to know and love the truth, yet certainly the Magistrate may make laws to restrain and punish errors and blasphemies that are against the truth; (Dan. iii, 29.) else, pari ratione, because a chaste heart, or a true and loyal heart, is the gift of God, and the Magistrate by all his penal laws, cannot make men have such hearts, therefore the Magistrate may not make laws to punish adultery, incest, theft, treason: Were this good divinity, or good policy?"

This was the common strain in which all the English Calvinists spoke concerning Arminianism; and their acts corresponded with their sayings. When, therefore, the two grand parties, into which the Predestinarians were divided, had scarcely sufficient charity to tolerate each other in the small matters about which they disagreed, it is not surprising that they would not suffer the Arminians, whom they classed with "heretics and blasphemers," to enjoy the exercise of their religious privileges without molestation. In pages 496 and 552, I have shewn the origin of this deadly antipathy to those who were attached to the doctrines of General Redemption. Gomarus declared, "that he durst not appear in the presence of his Maker, if he maintained the opinions which Arminius professed;" and all the subsequent champions of Calvinism, in Great Britain and in Holland, had studiously perpetuated this infernal feeling, by exhibiting the Predestinarian differences between themselves and their Arminian brethren, as fundamental verities and essential to salvation !—The English Independents, therefore, who acted upon this excluding principle to the time of the Restoration, when they were compelled to resign their "powers ecclesiastic," have in reality as slender a claim as their Presbyterian friends to the title of "the earliest and best friends to Toleration."

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In several of these sermons before the Long Parliament, the army is blamed as "the grand hot-bed of errors, heresies, and blasphemies." That the different military corps were far removed from uniformity both in doctrine and discipline, and that they had imbibed many egregious errors, no impartial person will deny. But the wonderful economy of the Providence of God is here again strikingly displayed, in over-ruling the spread of these evils for the attainment of a greater good. If the army had contained no Arians, Socinians, or Antinomians, with whom Arminians were likewise invidiously classed, the parties who held the hundred and four-score new opinions, to which Bishop Hall alludes, (p. 707,) would have had nothing to tolerate in each other: But as their religious sentiments were exceedingly multiform, and as they soon proved to the nation that they held the Supremacy in their own hands, though sufficiently zealous for their several principles, (p. 778,) they saw the propriety as well as the safety of yielding much.

liberty to each other, "in things of the mind," as it is expressed (p. 452) by one of their arch commanders. It is to the honour of ARMINIANISM and EPISCOPACY, that they were both as such formally excluded from the benefits of Toleration, even in the republican Army. Both of them, however, were ultimately gainers by this exclusion: For, in that inquisitive age, after the first intemperate heat against the two obnoxious terms had subsided, people began to examine the reasons for such partiality against some of the best men in the nation. (See page 803.) The result was just what might have been expected,-after one outrageous error had expended its fury upon another, the sober and thoughtful part of the community became enamoured with the beautiful and chaste features of Truth, and gladly embraced her at the Restora→ tion, under the form of Episcopacy,* Arminianism, and Monarchy.

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"These considerations of the unproportionableness of any other Churchgovernment than a right Episcopacy to the temper of England, moved the supercilious, yet very learned, Salmasius,-in his advice to the Prince Elector [Palatine] then in England, and to some other of the Long Parliament and of Scotized Assembly, (who desired his judgment upon the then hot and perboiling, yea, passionate and overboiling debates touching Episcopacy,)-to tell them, that, as the Episcopal government, rightly constituted and executed, is very agreeable to the word of God and most conform to all Antiquity; so it was, of all other, 'most suitable to the English spirit and constitution: The want of which, he already foresaw, was and would ever be the cause of much disorder and dis'traction, of infinite factions, heresies, schisms, and confusions.'-Thus the great Dictator of Learning (as he esteemed himself) was pleased, in this passage and other-where, graciously to express his judgment and pleasure, according to the humour he was in or to the interest which he was pleased to adopt. Sometimes he is WALO MESSALINUS, and ashamed to own his name against Episcopacy: He was, in that disguise, to gratify the pretensions of Presbytery, and the adherence or dependence which he had to the French and Dutch Churches. Otherwhile he puts off the vizard, and with open face owns the eminency, authority, antiquity, and universality of Episcopacy; yea, the incomparable utility of it, when joined with a grave and orderly Presbytery, besides a particular aptitude in it to the English genius."-GAUDEN's Ecclesiæ Anglicane Suspiria.

Salmasius was a very learned and clever man, but addicted to the love of money and of changes: His changeableness and mercenary habits rendered his writings against Milton of little estimation, though, abating his childish personalities, they were in many respects worthy of his great reputation. His character also will not be much enhanced, after the reader has perused the following extract from the last letter which the illustrious Grotius addressed to his brother in 1645, the year in which he died: "I do not know whether the account which I have heard be correct, that letters have been written in the English Parliament to Salmasius, to engage him in the defence of their [the Presbyterians'] ecclesiastical government against the Bishops and the Independents; and that he will do this "in the book which he is writing concerning the Primacy." When the English Presbyterians had contributed their share towards the murder of their king, (p. 385,) Salmasius wrote vigorously against the whole Calvinian phalanx ; but his pen was represented as a venal one by his former employers, and his fame suffered much in consequence of this report. His injustice to the memory of Grotius, by whom he had been invariably treated with particular delicacy and attention, (p. 593,) operated to his disadvantage. In his ungenerous attack upon Episcopacy, then in ruins, he had a compeer in the famous David BLONDEL, who, though nominally a Cameronist, afterwards succeeded G. J. Vossius in the Chair

5.-The culpable share which the Calvinists had in the Murder of King Charles the First.

THE guilt which attaches itself to the two grand denominations of Calvinists, on account of the murder of King Charles the First, is impartially awarded in some of the following pages.

of History at Amsterdam. In a letter to Isaac Vossius, dated April 25, 1645, Grotius says: "I desire greatly to behold all BLONDEL's productions: For he "is exceedingly skilful in history, but the party to which he has addicted himself "sometimes transports him in a wrong direction."

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It is to this last trait in the character of both, that Dr. Gauden alludes in the following passage: "Shall one David Blondel, or Walo Messalinus, (that is, Salmasius,) men indeed of excellent learning, yet obliged, (as Peter Moulin confesseth of himself, in his epistolary dispute with the most learned Bishop Andrews,) to plead what might be for the enforced stations and necessitated conditions of 'those Presbyterian churches with which they were then in actual fellowship and ⚫ church-communion,'-shall, I say, these two men, who are the greatest props for Presbytery, be put into the balance against all the ancient and modern assertors of Episcopacy? Or shall the votes of the late Assembly [of Divines] be a just counterpoise against all the chief Reformed Divines at home and abroad?"

Dr. Gauden here ascribes the conduct of these men to their "obligations to plead what might be for the enforced stations of the churches with which they were in actual fellowship." I have read Calvin's and Beza's vituperative remarks on English Episcopacy, and was always accustomed to attribute to their native French politeness, the facility with which those great men "swallowed their own words," and broke out afresh into fulsome praises of well-regulated Episcopacy. But when I behold the same practice in several of their eminent successors, such as Du Moulin, Diodati, Salmasius, Blondel, Le Moyne, De L'Angle, and Claude, (all of whom were, with a single exception, likewise Frenchmen and exceedingly polite,) I am tempted, did not charity forbid, to impute their apparent, (yet often forced,) tergiversation to the native hollowness of the Calvinistic system. Much, indeed, of this "blowing hot and cold" proceeds from the violence of the party, and the awkward predicament in which ministers are placed, when the letters which contain their private opinions about their Calvinistic brethren are published. Such were the painful circumstances in which Le Moyne, De l'Angle, and Claude, were placed, when their confidential letters, (one of which I have quoted in page 421,) were published by Bishop Stillingfleet, at the close of his Unreasonableness of Separation:" And, after all the ingenious arguments produced by Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, in his "Life of Claude," those who have perused both sides of the question, will at once perceive, that the first letters of these foreign Presbyterians contained their unbiassed opinions, and that their subsequent explanations only went to save their character with the party. I must not conclude this note without informing my readers, that Dr. Hammond wrote an able Reply in Latin to Blondel and Salmasius, the latter of whom (through a feeling of loyal gratitude for his writings against the regicides,) is purposely treated with uncommon respect, for which the Doctor briefly gives this reason in his Preface. The Doctor's production is entitled, Dissertationes Quatuor, quibus Episcopatus Jura ex S. Scripturis et Primæva Antiquitate adstruuntur. To these erudite Dissertations, and to the several English pamphlets written in vindication of them, I acknowledge myself indebted for the more correct views which I have happily gained of Episcopacy. The labours of Dr. Hammond on this argument afford another proof of the immense advantage which an accurate knowledge of the Ancient Fathers gives to a Polemic writer, and the great superiority of the English Clergy in that department of sacred literature.

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(379-391.) The craft and sophistry of the PRESBYTERIAN Calvinists, in this affair, are well expressed by the famous Daillée, one of that party, in his congratulatory letter on the Restoration of King Charles the Second (p. 606) : "When our adversaries "formerly would charge the blame of the death of the late king "of England on our religion, you know we could very well guard " ourselves from this reproach, by casting it entirely on the sectaries, "who indeed were only guilty of that horrible crime."-One of these sectaries, LEWIS DU MOULIN, thus removes the burden from his own friends, the INDEPENDENTS, and throws it upon the army: "As for the odium that is cast upon the Congregational Way, and "upon those who are called Independents,-as being the more " immediate authors and abettors of the King's murder, and of "taking away Monarchy,it can easily be wiped off and made out, that Oliver Cromwell's army, like that of King David's in "the wilderness, was a medley or a collection of all parties that were discontented, as some Courtiers, some Episcoparians, few of "any sect, but most of none, or else of the religion of Thomas "Hobbes and Dr. Scarborough; not mentioning the Papists, "who had the greatest hand in the death of King Charles the First, the success of which made them so daring and impious, "as to contrive another most damnable and hellish plot to cut off "the life of his Sacred Majesty [Charles II.] that now is, his "royal son, and our most gracious sovereign."-The Republican OFFICERS and SOLDIERS, by Moulin's special pleading, were furnished with a good excuse for their share of criminality, in the assertion, "that the Papists had the greatest hand in the death of "the King."See also Richard Baxter's assertion to the same effect, in page 294. The LONG PARLIAMENT was vindicated, I believe by DANIEL DE FOE, from all guilty participation in this foul deed, in the following manner: "How the LONG PARLIAMENT was by military force turned into the Rump, and reduced "to a small party of factious members, who with the army hatched "that barbarous tragedy, is so universally attested by historians "of all sides, that he must be altogether unacquainted with those "times who does not know it. For the Parliament, who proposed no other end in their war, than to keep the prerogative within its just limits, and to preserve the nations from the unjust invasions "which had been made upon them by evil councillors under "colour of Royal Authority, having upon a treaty obtained such "concessions from the King as they voted satisfactory for the ground of a treaty,were proceeding to accomplish that great and "noble work, until the Sectarian Party in the Army, that had "then conquered the Commanding Part of it, subverted and over"turned all, The members,' says Coke, 'met upon the first of "December 1648, and vote the King's concessions to be a sufficient ground for peace; and then adjourn for a week. But when the members were to meet again, they found all the f

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