THEOLOGICAL NOTES. NOTES ON LUTHER'S TABLE TALK.* I CANNOT meditate too often, too deeply, or too devotionally on the personeity of God, and his personality in the Word, Υίῳ τῷ μονογενεῖ, and thence on the individuity of the responsible creature;— that it is a perfection which, not indeed in my intellect, but yet in my habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that complexus of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and fellowtravelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the light of reason, and (the most important of all the truths that have been vouchsafed to me !) to the will which is the reason,-will in the form of reason-I can * Doctoris Martini Lutheri Colloquia Mensalia: or Dr. Martin Luther's Divine Discourses at his Table, &c. Collected first together by Dr. Antonius Lauterbach, and afterwards disposed into certain common-places by John Aurifaber, Doctor in Divinity. Translated by Capt. Henry Bell. Folio, London, 1652. form a sufficient gleam of the possibility of the subsistence of the human soul in Jesus to the Eternal Word, and how it might perfect itself so as to merit glorification and abiding union with the Divinity; and how this gave a humanity to our Lord's righteousness no less than to his sufferings. Doubtless, as God, as the absolute Alterity of the Absolute, he could not suffer; but that he could not lay aside the absolute, and by union with the creaturely become affectible, and a second, but spiritual Adam, and so as afterwards to be partaker of the absolute in the Absolute, even as the Absolute had partaken of passion (Toû Táσxew) and infirmity in it, that is, the finite and fallen creature ;-this can be asserted only by one who (unconsciously perhaps), has accustomed himself to think of God as a thing,-having a necessity of constitution, that wills, or rather tends and inclines to this or that, because it is this or that, not as being that, which is that which it wills to be. Such a necessity is truly compulsion; nor is it in the least altered in its nature by being assumed to be eternal, in virtue of an endless remotion or retrusion of the constituent cause, which being manifested by the understanding becomes a foreseen despair of a cause. Sunday, 11th February, 1826. One argument strikes me in favour of the tenet of Apostolic succession, in the ordination of bishops and presbyters, as taught by the Church of Rome, and by the larger part of the earlier divines of the Church of England, which I have not seen in any of the books on this subject; namely, that in strict analogy with other parts of Christian history, the miracle itself contained a check upon the inconvenient consequences necessarily attached to all miracles, as miracles, narrowing the possible claims to any rights not proveable at the bar of universal reason and experience. Every man among the sectaries, however ignorant, may justify himself in scattering stones and fire-squibs by an alleged unction of the Spirit. The miracle becomes perpetual, still beginning, never ending. Now on the Church doctrine, the original miracle provides for the future recurrence to the ordinary and calculable laws of the human understanding and moral sense; instead of leaving every man a judge of his own gifts, and of his right to act publicly on that judgment. The initiative alone is supernatural; but all beginning is necessarily miraculous, that is, hath either no antecedent, or one èrépov yevoûs, which therefore is not its, but merely an, antecedent, or an incausative alien co-incident in time; as if, for instance, Jack's shout were followed by a flash of lightning, which should strike and precipitate the ball on St. Paul's cathedral. This would be a miracle as long as no causative nexus was conceivable between the antecedent, the noise of the shout, and the consequent, the atmospheric discharge. The Epistle Dedicatory. But this will be your glory and inexpugnable, if you cleave in truth and practice to God's holy service, worship and religion that religion and faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is pure and undefiled before God even the Father, which is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep yourselves unspotted from the world. -James i. 27. Few mistranslations (unless indeed the word used by the translator of St. James meant differently from its present meaning), have led astray more than this rendering of Opηoкeía (outward or ceremonial worship, cultus, divine service,) by the English religion. |