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Ib. p. 324-328.

Descriptions of repentance taken from the Holy Scriptures.

This is a beautiful collection of texts. Still the pious but unconverted Jew (a Moses Mendelsohn, for instance), has a right to ask, What then did Christ teach or do, such and of such additional moment as to be rightfully entitled the founder of a new law, instead of being, like Isaiah and others, an enforcer and explainer of the old? If Christianity, or the opus operans of Redemption, was synchronous with the Fall of man, then the same answer must be returned to the passages here given from the Old Testament as to those from the New; namely, that Sanctification is the result of Redemption, not its efficient cause or previous condition. Assuredly and Sanctification differ only as the plant and the growth or growing of the plant. But the words of the Apostle (it will be said) are exhortative and dehortative. Doubtless! and so would be the words of a wise physician addressed to a convalescent. Would this prove that the patient's revalescence had been independent of the medicines given him? The texts are addressed to the free will, and therefore concerning possible objects of free will. No doubt! Should that process, the end and virtue of which is to free the will, destroy the free will? But I cannot make it out to my understanding, how the two are compatible. – Answer; the spirit knows the things of the spirit. Here lies the sole true ground of Latitudinarianism, Arminian, or Socinian; and this is the sole and sufficient confutation; spiritualia spiritus cognoscit. Would you understand with your ears instead of hearing with your understanding? Now, as the ears to the understanding, so is the understanding to the spirit. This Plato knew; and art thou a master in Israel, and knowest it not?

Ib. p. 330.

Who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace.

By this passage we must interpret the words "sin wilfully," in reference to an unpardonable sin, in the preceding sentence.

Of the moral capacity of sinful habits.

Ib. s. ii. p. 432. Probably from the holiness of his own life, Taylor has but just fluttered about a bad habit, not fully described it. He has omitted, or rather described contradictorily, the case of those with whom the objections to sin are all strengthened, the dismal consequences more glaring and always present to them as an avenging fury, the sin loathed, detested, hated; and yet, spite of all this, nay, the more for all this, perpetrated. Both lust and intemperance would furnish too many instances of these most miserable victims.

Ib. s. xxxix. p. 456.

For every vicious habit being radicated in the will, and being a strong love, inclination and adhesion to sin, unless the natural being of this love be taken off, the enmity against God remains.

But the most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy of this "grace of God:" he never denies, yet never admits, it any separate operancy per se. And this, I fancy, is the true distinction of Arminianisrn and Calvinism in their moral effects. Arminianism is cruel to individuals, for fear of damaging the race by false hopes and improper confidences; while Calvinism is horrible for the race, but full of consolation to the suffering individual.

The next section is, taken together, one of the many instances that confirm my opinion that Calvinism (Archbishop Leighton's for example), compared with Taylor's Arminianism, is as the lamb in the wolf's skin to the wolf in the lamb's skin: the one is cruel in the phrases, the other in the doctrine.

Ib. s. lvi. p. 469.

But if a single act of contrition cannot procure pardon of sins that are habitual, then a wicked man that returns not till it be too late to root out vicious habits, must despair of salvation. I answer, &c.

Would not Taylor's purposes have been sufficiently attained by pressing the contrast between attrition and contrition with faith, and the utter improbability that the latter (which alone can be efficient), shall be vouchsafed to a sinner who has continued in his sins in the flattery of a death-bed repentance; a blasphemy that seems too near that against the Holy Ghost? My objection to Taylor is, that he seems to reduce the death of Christ almost to a cypher; a contrivance rather to reconcile the attributes of God, than an act of infinite love to save sinners. But the truth is, that this is the peccant part of Arminianism, and Tillotson is yet more open than Taylor. Forbid me, common goodness, that I should think Tillotson conscious of Socinianism! but that his tenets involved it, I more than suspect. See his Discourses on Transubstantiation, and those near it in the same volume.

Ib. lxiv. p. 478.

Now there is no peradventure, but new-converted persons, heathens newly giving up their names to Christ and being baptized, if they die in an hour, and were baptized half an hour after they believe in Christ, are heirs of salvation.

This granted, I should little doubt of confuting all the foregoing, as far as I object to it. I would rather be durus pater infantum, like Austin, than durus pater ægrotantium. Taylor considers all Christians who are so called.

Ib. s. lxvi. p. 481.

All this paragraph is as just as it is fine and lively, but far from confirming Taylor's doctrine. The case is as between one individual and a general rule. I know God's mercy and Christ's merits; but whether your heart has true faith in them, I cannot know. Be it unto thee according to thy faith, said Christ: so should his ministers say. All these passages, however, are utterly irreconcilable with the Roman doctrine, that the priest's absolution is operant, and not simply declarative. As to the decisions of Paulinus and Asterius, it is to be feared that they had the mortmain bequests and compensations in view more than the words of St. Paul, or the manifest purposes of redemption by faith. Yea, Taylor himself has his redime peccata eleemosynis.

By the by, I know of few subjects that have been more handled and less rationally treated than this of alms-giving. Every thing a rich man purchases beyond absolute necessaries, ought to be purchased in the spirit of alms, that is, as the most truly beneficial way of disparsing that wealth, of which he is the steward, not owner.

Ib.

St. Paul taught us this secret, that sins are properly made habitual upon the stock of impunity. Sin taking occasion by the law wrought in me all concupiscence; 'apprehending impunity,' 'by occasion of the commandment,' that is, so expressed and established as it was; because in the commandment forbidding to lust or covet, there was no penalty annexed or threatened in the sanction or in the explication. Murder was death, and so was adultery and rebellion. Theft was punished severely too; and so other things in their proportion; but the desires God left under a bare restraint, and affixed no penalty in the law. Now sin, that is, men that had a mind to sin, taking occasion hence, &c.

This is a very ingenious and very plausible exposition of St. Paul's words; but surely, surely, it is not the right one. I find both the meaning and the truth of the Apostle's words in the vividness and consequently attractive and ad-(or in-)sorbent power given to an image or thought by the sense of its danger, by the consciousness of its being forbidden, – which, in an unregenerate and unassisted will, struggling with, or even exciting, the ever ready inclination of corrupted nature, produces a perplexity and confusion which again increase the person's susceptibility of the soliciting image or fancy so intensified. Guilt and despair add a stimulus and sting to lust. See Iago in Shakspeare.

Ib. s. xi. p. 500. It was not well with thee when thou didst first enter into the suburbs of hell by single actions of sin, &c. Aye! this is excellent indeed, and worthy of a guardian angel of the Church. When Jeremy Taylor escapes from the Mononomian Romaism, which netted him in his too eager recoil from the Antinomian boar, brought forth and foddered (as he imagined) in Calvin's stye; when from this wiry net he escapes into the devotional and the dietetic, as into a green meadow-land, with springs, and rivulets, and sheltering groves, where he leads his flock like a shepherd; – then it is that he is most himself, – then only he is all himself, the whole Jeremy Taylor; or if there be one other subject graced by the same total heautophany, it is in the pouring forth of his profound common sense on the ways and weaknesses of men and conflicting sects, as for instance, in the admirable birth, parentage, growth, and consummation of a religious controversy in his Dissuasive from Popery.

Ib. s. xiii. p. 502.

Let every old man that repents of the sins of his evil life be very diligent in the search of the particulars; that by drawing them into a heap, and spreading them before his eyes, he may be mightily ashamed at their number and burthen.

I dare not condemn, but I am doubtful of this as a universal rule. If there be a true hatred of sin, the precious time and the spiritual nisus will, I think, be more profitably employed in enkindling meditation on holiness, and thirstings after the mind of Christ.

Ib. ss. xxxi-xxxv. pp..517, 518.

Scarce a word in all this but for form's sake concerning the merits and sacrifice of the Incarnate God! Surely Luther would not have given this advice to a dying penitent, but have directed him rather to employ his little time in agony of prayer to Christ, or in earnest meditations on the astounding mystery of his death. In Taylor man is to do every thing.

Vol. IX. s. xi. p. 5.

For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment even to the lesser sins and sinners, which he only had first threatened to Adam; and so Adam brought it upon them.

And such a phrase as this used by a man in a refutation of Original Sin, on the ground of its incompatibility with God's attributes! "Exasperated" with those whom Taylor declares to have been innocent and most unfortunate, the two things that most conciliate love and pity!

Ib. p. 6.

If the sequel of the paragraph, comparing God to David in one of his worst actions, be not blasphemy, the reason is that the good man meant it not as such. In facto est, sed non in agents.

Ib. ss. xvi. xvii. pp. 8, 9.

For the further explication of which it is observable that the word 'sinner' and 'sin' in Scripture is used for any person, that hath a fault or a legal impurky, a debt, a vitiosity, defect, or imposition, &c.

These facts, instead of explaining away Original Sin, are unintelligible, nay, absurd and immoral, except as shadows, types, and symbols of it, and of the Redemption from it. Observe, too, that Taylor never dares explain what he means by "Adam was mortal of himself and we are mortal from him:" he did not dare affirm that soul and body are alike material and perishable, even as the lute and the potentiality of music in the lute. And yet if he believed the contrary, then, in his construction of the doctrine of Original Sin, what has Christ done? St. John died in the same sense as Abel died: and in the sense of the Church of England neither died, but only slept in the Lord.

This same system forced Taylor into the same error which Warburton afterwards dressed up with such trappings and trammels of erudition, in direct contempt of the plain meaning of the Church's article; and he takes it for granted, in many places, that the Jews under Moses knew only of temporal life and the death of the body. Lastly, he greatly degrades the mind of man by causelessly representing death as an evil in itself, which, if it be considered as a crisis, or phenomenal change, incident to a progressive being, ought as little to be thought so, as the casting of the caterpillar's skin to make room for the wings of the butterfly. It is the unveiling of the Psyche.

I do not affirm this as an article of Christian faith; but I say that no candid writer ought to hide himself in double meanings. Either he should have used the term 'death' (ex Adamo) as loss of body, or as change of mode of being and of its circumstances; and again this latter as either evil for all, or as evil or good according to the moral habits of each individual.

Observe, however, once for all, that I do not pretend to account for Original Sin. I declare it to be an unaccountable fact. How can we explain a species, when we are wholly in the dark as to the genus? Now guilt itself, as well as all other immediate facts of free will, is absolutely inexplicable; of course original guilt. If we will perversely confound the intelligible with the sensible world, misapply the logic appropriate to phænomena and the categories, or forms, which are empty except as substantialized in facts of experience, in order to use them as the Procrustes' bed of faith respecting noumena: if in short, we will strive to understand that of which we can only know we may and must make as wild work with reason, will, conscience, guilt, and virtue, as with Original Sin and Redemption. On every subject first ask, Is it among the or the ?

Ib. s. xxiii. p. 12.

It could not make us heirs of damnation. This I shall the less need to insist upon, because, of itself, it seems so horrid to impute to the goodness and justice of God to be author of so great calamity to innocents, &c.

Never was there a more hazardous way of reasoning, or rather of placing human ignorance in the judgment seat over God's wisdom. The whole might be closely parodied in support of Atheism: rather, this is but a paraphrase of the old atheistic arguments. Either God could not, or would not, prevent the moral and physical evils of the universe, including the everlasting anguish of myriads of millions: therefore he is either not all-powerful or not all-good: but a being deficient in power or goodness is not God: – Ergo, &c.

Ib. s. xxv. p. 13.

I deny not but all persons naturally are so, that they cannot arrive at heaven; but unless some other principle be put into them, or some great grace done for them, must for ever stand separate from seeing the face of God.

But this is but accidentally occasioned by the sin of Adam. Just so might I say, that without the great grace of air done for them no living beings could live. If it mean more, pray where was the grace in creating a being, who without an especial grace must pass into utter misery? If Taylor reply; but the grace was added in Christ: why so say the Calvinists. According to Taylor there is no fall of man; but only an act and punishment of a man, which punishment consisted in his living in the kitchen garden, instead of the flower garden and orchard: and Cain was as likely to have murdered Abel before, as after, the eating of the forbidden fruit. But the very name of the fruit confutes Taylor. Adam altered his nature by it. Cain did not. What Adam did, I doubt not, we all do. Time is not with things of spirit.

Ib. s. xxvii. p. 14.

Is hell so easy a pain, or are the souls of children of so cheap, so contemptible a price, that God should so easily throw them into hell?

This is an argument against the sine qua non of Baptism, not against Original Sin.

Ib. s. lxvii. p. 49.

Origen said enough to be mistaken in the question. 'Adam's curse is common to all. And there is not a woman on earth, to whom may not be said those things which were spoken to this woman.'

Origen's words ought to have prevented all mistake, for he plainly enough overthrows the phantom of hereditary guilt; and as to guilt from a corruption of nature, it is just such guilt as the carnivorous appetites of a weaned lion, or the instinct of a brood of ducklings to run to water. What then is it? It is an evil, and therefore seated in the will; common to all men, the beginning of which no man can determine in himself or in others. How comes this? It is a mystery, as the will itself. Deeds are in time and space, therefore have a beginning. Pure action, that is, the will, is a noumenon, and irreferable to time. Thus Origen calls it neither hereditary nor original, but universal sin. The curse of Adam is common to all men, because what Adam did, we all do: and thus of Eve. You may substitute any woman in her place, and the same words apply. This is the true solution of this unfortunate question. The is in the dividing the will from the acts of the will. The will is ego-agens.

Ib. s. lxxxii. p. 52.

This paragraph, though very characteristic of the Author, is fitter for a comedy than for a grave discourse. It puts one in mind of the play – "More sacks in the mill! Heap, boys, heap!"

Ib. s. lxxxiv. p. 56.

Præposterum est (said Paulus the lawyer) ante nos locupletes dici quam acquisiverimus. We cannot be said to lose what we never had; and our fathers' goods were not to descend upon us, unless they were his at his death.

Take away from me the knowledge that he was my father, dear Bishop, and this will be true. But as it stands, the whole is, "says Paulus the Lawyer;" and, "Well said, Lawyer!" say I.

Ib. p. 57.

Which though it was natural, yet from Adam it began to be a curse; just as the motion of a serpent upon his belly, which was concreated with him, yet upon this story was changed into a malediction and an evil adjunct.

How? I should really like to understand this.

Ib. ch. vii. p. 73 in initio.

In this most eloquent treatise we may detect sundry logical lapses, sometimes in the statement, sometimes in the instances, and once or twice in the conclusions. But the main and pervading error lies in the treatment of the subject in genere by the forms and rules of conceptual logic; which deriving all its material from the senses, and borrowing its forms from the sense or intuitive faculty, is necessarily inapplicable to spiritual mysteries, the very definition or contra-distinguishing character of which is that they transcend the sense, and therefore the understanding, the faculty, as Archbishop Leighton and Immanuel Kant excellently define it, which judges according to sense. In the Aids to Reflection,⁶⁷ I have shewn that the proper function of the understanding or mediate faculty is to collect individual or sensible concretes into kinds and sorts (genera et species) by means of their common characters (notæ communes); and to fix and distinguish these conceptions (that is, generalized perceptions) by words. Words are the only immediate objects of the understanding. Spiritual verities, or truths of reason respective ad realia, and herein distinguished from the merely formal, or so called universal truths, are differenced from the conceptions of the understanding by the immediatcy of the knowledge, and from the immediate truths of sense, – that is, from both pure and mixed intuitions, – by not being sensible, that is, not representable by figure, measurement or weight; nor connected with any affection of our sensibility, such as color, taste, odors, and the like. And such knowledges we, when we speak correctly, name ideas.

Now Original Sin, that is, sin that has its origin in itself, or in the will of the sinner, but yet in a state or condition of the will not peculiar to the individual agent, but common to the human race, is an idea: and one diagnostic or contra-distinguishing mark appertaining to all ideas, is, that they are not adequately expressible by words. An idea can only be expressed (more correctly suggested) by two contradictory positions; as for example; the soul is all in every part; – nature is a sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, and its circumference no where, and the like.

Hence many of Bishop Taylor's objections, grounded on his expositions of the doctrine, prove nothing more than that the doctrine concerns an idea. But besides this, Taylor everywhere assumes the consequences of Original Sin as superinduced on a pre-existing nature, in no essential respect differing from our present nature; – for instance, on a material body, with its inherent appetites and its passivity to material agents; – in short, on an animal nature in man. But this very nature, as the antagonist of the spirit or supernatural principle in man, is in fact the Original Sin, – the product of the will indivisible from the act producing it; just as in pure geometry the mental construction is indivisible from the constructive act of the intuitive faculty. Original Sin, as the product, is a fact concerning which we know by the light of the idea itself, that it must originate in a self-determination of a will. That which we do not know is how it originates, and this we cannot explain; first, from the necessity of the subject, namely, the will; and secondly, because it is an idea, and all ideas are inconceivable. It is an idea, because it is not a conception.

Ib. s. ii. p. 74, 75.

And they are injurious to Christ, who think that from Adam we might have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it; he brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. It is a singular benefit given by God to mankind through Jesus Christ.

And none inherit it but those who are born of Christ; ergo, bad men and infidels are not immortal. Immortality is one thing, a happy immortality another. St. Paul meant the latter: Taylor either the former, or his words have no meaning at all; for no man ever thought or dreamed that we inherited heaven from Adam, but that as sons of Adam, that is, as men, we have souls that do not perish with the body. I often suspect that Taylor, in abditis fidei inclined to the belief that there is no other immortality but heaven, and that hell is a pæna damni negativa, haud privativa. I own myself strongly inclined to it; – but so many texts against it! I am confident that the doctrine would be a far stronger motive than the present; for no man will believe eternal misery of himself, but millions would admit, that if they did not amend their lives they would be undeserving of living for ever.

Ib. s. vi. p. 77.

"Lest the tumultuous crowd throw the reason within us over bridge into the gulf of sin." What a vivid figure! It is enough to make any man set to work to read Chrysostom.

Ib.

– – peccantes mente sub una.

Note Prudentius's use of mente sub una for 'in one person.'

Ib. p. 78.

For even now we see, by a sad experience, that the afflicted and the miserable are not only apt to anger and envy, but have many more desires and more weaknesses, and consequently more aptnesses to sin in many instances than those who are less troubled. And this is that which was said by Arnobius; proni ad culpas, et ad libidinis varios appetitos vitio sumus infirmitatis ingenitæ.

No. Arnobius never said so good and wise a thing in his lifetime. His quoted words have no such profound meaning.

Ib. s. vii. p. 78.

That which remained was a reasonable soul, fitted for the actions of life and reason, but not of anything that was supernatural.

What Taylor calls reason I call understanding, and give the name reason to that which Taylor would have called spirit.

Ib. s. xii. p. 84.

And all that evil which is upon us, being not by any positive infliction, but by privative, or the taking away gifts, and blessings, and graces from us, which God, not having promised to give, was neither naturally, nor by covenant, obliged to give, – it is certain he could not be obliged to continue that to the sons of a sinning father, which to an innocent father he was not obliged to give.

Oh! certainly not, if hell were not attached to acts and omissions, which without these very graces it is morally impossible for men to avoid. Why will not Taylor speak out?

Ib. s. xiv. p. 85.

The doctrine of the ancient Fathers was that free will remained in us after the Fall.

Yea! as the locomotive faculty in a man in a strait waistcoat. Neither St. Augustine nor Calvin denied the remanence of the will in the fallen spirit; but they, and Luther as well as they, objected to the flattering epithet 'free' will. In the only Scriptural sense, as concerning the unregenerate, it is implied in the word will, and in this sense, therefore, it is superfluous and tautologic; and, in any other sense, it is the fruit and final end of Redemption, – the glorious liberty of the Gospel.

Ib. s. xvi. p. 92.

For my part I believe this only as certain, that nature alone cannot bring them to heaven, and that Adam left us in a state in which we could not hope for it.

This is likewise my belief, and that man must have had a Christ, even if Adam had continued in Paradise – if indeed the history of Adam be not a mythos; as, but for passages in St. Paul, we should most of us believe; the serpent speaking, the names of the trees, and so on; and the whole account of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis seems to me clearly to say: – "The literal fact you could not comprehend if it were related to you; but you may conceive of it as if it had taken place thus and thus."

Ib. s. 1. p. 166.

That in some things our nature is cross to the divine commandment, is not always imputable to us, because our natures were before the commandment.

This is what I most complain of in Jeremy Taylor's ethics; namely, that he constantly refers us to the deeds or phenomena in time, the effluents from the source, or like the species of Epicurus; while the corrupt nature is declared guiltless and irresponsible; and this too on the pretext that it was prior in time to the commandment, and therefore not against it. But time is no more predicable of eternal reason than of will; but not of will; for if a will be at all, it must be ens spirituale; and this is the first negative definition of spiritual – whatever having true being is not contemplable in the forms of time and space. Now the necessary consequence of Taylor's scheme is a conscience-worrying, casuistical, monkish work-holiness. Deeply do I feel the difficulty and danger that besets the opposite scheme; and never would I preach it, except under such provisos as would render it perfectly compatible with the positions previously established by Taylor in this chapter, s. xliv. p. 158. 'Lastly; the regenerate not only hath received the Spirit of God, but is wholly led by him,' &c.

Ib.

If this Treatise of Repentance contain Bishop Taylor's habitual and final convictions, I am persuaded that in some form or other he believed in a Purgatory. In fact, dreams and apparitions may have been the pretexts, and the immense addition of power and wealth which the belief entailed on the priesthood, may have been their motives for patronizing it; but the efficient cause of its reception by the churches is to be found in the preceding Judaic legality and monk-moral of the Church, according to which the fewer only could hope for the peace of heaven as their next immediate state. The holiness that sufficed for this would evince itself (it was believed) by the power of working miracles.

Ib. s. lii. p. 208.

It shall not be pardoned in this world nor in the world to come; that is, neither to the Jews nor to the Gentiles. For sæculum hoc, this world, in Scripture, is the period of the Jews' synagogue, and the world to come, is taken for the Gospel, or the age of the Messias, frequently among the Jews.

This is, I think, a great and grievous mistake. The Rabbis of best name divide into two or three periods, the difference being wholly in the words; for the dividers by three meant the same as those by two.

The first was the dies expectationis, or hoc sæculum, : the second dies Messiæ, the time of the Messiah, that is, the millenium: the third the sæculum futurum, or future state, which last was absolutely spiritual and celestial.

But many Rabbis made the dies Messiæ part, that is, the consummation of this world, the conclusive Sabbath of the great week, in which they supposed the duration of the earth or world of the senses to be comprised; but all agreed that the dies, or thousand years, of the Messiah was a transitional state, during which the elect were gradually defecated of body, and ripened for the final or spiritual state.

During the millenium the will of God will be done on earth, no less, though in a lower glory, than it will be done hereafter in heaven.

Now it is to be carefully observed that the Jewish doctors or Rabbis (all such at least as remained unconverted) had no conception or belief of a suffering Messiah, or of a period after the birth of the Messiah, previous to the kingdom, and of course included in the time of expectation.

The appearance of the Messiah and his assumption of the throne of David were to be contemporaneous. The Christian doctrine of a suffering Messiah, or of Christ as the high priest and intercessor, has of course introduced a modification of the Jewish scheme.

But though there is a seeming discrepance in different texts in the first three Gospels, yet the Lord's Prayer appears to determine the question in favour of the elder and present Rabbinical belief; that is, it does not date the dies Messiae, or kingdom of the Lord, from his Incarnation, but from a second coming in power and glory, and hence we are taught to pray for it as an event yet future.

Nay, our Lord himself repeatedly speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, as yet to come. Assuredly our Lord ascended the throne and became a King on his final departure from his disciples. But it was the throne of his Father, and he an invisible King, the sovereign Providence to whom all power was committed.

And this celestial kingdom cannot be identified with that under which the divine will will be done on earth as it is in heaven; that is, when on this earth the Church militant shall be one in holiness with the triumphant Church.