and his latter years might have been spent, like those of Lipsius, in defending legendary miracles, or in waging war against the honoured dead of the reformation. He did not sufficiently remember that a silent neutrality is never indulged to a suspicious proselyte. 17. It appears to me, nevertheless, that Grotius was very far from having truly subjected his understanding to the church of Rome. The whole bent of his mind was to effect an exterior union among Christians; and for this end he did not hesitate to recommend equivocal senses of words, convenient explanations, and respectful silence. He first took up his reverence for antiquity, because he found antiquity unfavourable to the doctrine of Calvin. His antipathy to this reformer and to his followers led him on to an admiration of the episcopal succession, the organised hierarchy, the ceremonial and liturgical institutions, the high notions of sacramental rites, which he found in the ancient church, and which Luther and Zwingle had cast away. He became imbued with the notion of unity as essential to the Catholic church; but he never seems to have gone the length of abandoning his own judgment, or of asserting any positive infallibility to the decrees of man. For it is manifest that, if the councils of Nice or of Trent were truly inspired, it would be our business to inquire what they meant themselves, not to put the most convenient interpretations, nor to search out for some author or another who may have strained their language to our own opinion. The precedent of Grotius, therefore, will not serve those who endeavour to bind the reason of the enlightened part of mankind, which he respected like his own. Two predominant ideas seem to have swayed the mind of this great man in the very gradual transition we have indicated; one, his extreme reverence for antiquity and for the consent of the Catholic church; the other, his Erastian principles as to the authority of the civil magistrate in matters of religion. Both conspired to give him an abhorrence of the liberty of prophesying," the right of private men to promulgate tenets inconsistent with the established faith. friendly conversation or correspondence, even, perhaps, with due reserve, in Latin writings, much might be indulged to the learned; room was to be found for an Erasmus and a 66 In Cassander; or, if they would themselves consent, for an Episcopius and a Wytenbogart, at least for a Montagu and a Laud; but no pretext was ever to justify a separation. The scheme of Grotius is, in a modified degree, much the same as that of Hobbes. Calixtus. 18. In the Lutheran church we find an eminent contemporary of Grotius, who may be reckoned his counterpart in the motives which influenced him to seek for an entire union of religious parties, though resembling him far more in his earlier opinions, than in those to which he ultimately arrived. This was George Calixtus, of the university of Helmstadt, a theologian the most tolerant, mild and catholic in his spirit, whom the Confession of Augsburg had known since Melanchthon. This university, indeed, which had never subscribed the Form of Concord, was already distinguished by freedom of inquiry, and its natural concomitant, a large and liberal spirit. But in his own church, generally, Calixtus found as rigid schemes of orthodoxy, and perhaps a more invidious scrutiny into the recesses of private opinion, than in that of Rome, with a less extensive basis of authority. The dream of good men in this age, the re-union of Christian churches in a common faith, and meanwhile the tolerance of differences, were ever the aim of Calixtus. But he fell, like the Anglican divines, into high notions of primitive tradition, placing, according to Eichhorn and Mosheim, the unanimity of the first six centuries by the side of Scripture itself. He was assailed by the adherents of the Form of Concord with aggravated virulence and vulgarity; he was accused of being a Papist and a Calvinist, reproaches equally odious in their eyes, and therefore fit to be heaped on his head; the inconsistency of calumnies being no good reason with bigots against uttering them.* 19. In a treatise, published long after his death, in 1697, De tolerantia Reformatorum circa quæstiones inter His attempts ipsos et Augustanam confessionem professos contro- at concord. versas consultatio, it is his object to prove that the Calvinists held no such tenets as should exclude them from Christian communion. He does not deny or extenuate the reality of Eichhorn, vol. vi. part ii. p. 20. Mosheim. Biogr. Univ. their differences from the Confession of Augsburg. The Lutherans, though many of them, he says, had formerly maintained the absolute decrees of predestination, were now come round to the doctrine of the first four centuries.* And he admits that the Calvinists, whatever phrases they may use, do not believe a true and substantial presence in the Eucharist. But neither of these errors, if such they are, he takes to be fundamental. In a shorter and more valuable treatise, entitled Desiderium et studium concordiæ ecclesiasticæ, Calixtus proposes some excellent rules for allaying religious heats. But he leans far too much towards the authority of tradition. Every church, he says, which affirms what others deny, is bound to prove its affirmation; first by Scripture, in which whatever is contained must be out of controversy; and, secondly, (as Scripture bears witness to the church that it is the pillar and foundation of truth, and especially the primitive church which is called that of the saints and martyrs,) by the unanimous consent of the ancient church, above all, where the debate is among learned men. The agreement of the church is therefore a sufficient evidence of Christian doctrine, not that of individual writers, who are to be regarded rather so far as they testify the Catholic doctrine, than as they propound their own. This deference to an Nostri e quibus olim multi ibidem absolutum decretum approbarunt, paulatim ad sententiam primorum quatuor sæculorum, nempe decretum juxta præscientiam factum, receperunt. Qua in re multum egregiè laboravit Egidius Hunnius. Difficile autem est hanc sententiam ita proponere, 'ne quid Pelagianismo habere affine videatur. p. 14. + Si tamen non tam quid loquantur quam quid sentiant attendimus, certum est eos veri corporis et sanguinis secundum substantiam acceptorum præsentiam non admittere. Rectius autem fuerit utramque partem simpliciter et ingenuè, quod sentit, profiteri, quam alteram alteri ambiguis loquendi formulis imponere. Qualem conciliandi rationem inierunt olim Philippus et Bucerus, nempe ut præscriberentur formulæ, quarum verba utraque pars amplecteretur, sed singulæ suo sensu acciperent ac interpretarentur. Quem conatum, quamvis ex pio eoque ingente concordiæ desi derio et studio profectum, nulla successûs felicitas excepit. p. 70. This observation is very just in the abstract; but in the early period of the reformation, there were strong reasons for evading points of difference, in the hope that the truth would silently prevail in the course of time. We, however, who come later, are to follow the advice of Calixtus, and in judging, as well as we can, of the opinions of men, must not altogether regard their words. Upon no theological controversy, probably, has there been so much of studied ambiguity as on that of the eucharist. Calixtus passes a similar censure on the equivocations of some great men of the preceding century in his other treatise mentioned in the text. + Consensu itaque primæ ecclesiæ ex symbolis et scriptis manifesto doctrina Christiana rectè confirmatur. Intelligimus autem doctrinam fundamentalem et necessariam, non quasvis appendices et quæstiones, aut etiam quorundam scrip imaginary perfection in the church of the fourth or fifth century must have given a great advantage to that of Rome, which is not always weak on such ground, and doubtless serves to account for those frequent desertions to her banner, especially in persons of very high rank, which afterwards occurred in Germany. High-church 20. The tenets of some of those who have been called High-church Anglicans may in themselves be little different from those of Grotius and Calixtus. But party in England. the spirit in which they have been conceived is altogether opposite. The one is exclusive, intolerant, severe, dogmatical, insisting on uniformity of faith as well as of exterior observances; the other Catholic in outward profession, charitable in sentiment, and in fact one mode, though a mode as imprudent as it was oblique, in which the latitudinarian principle was manifested. The language both of Grotius and Calixtus bears this out; and this ought closely to be observed, lest we confound the real laxity of one school with the rigid orthodoxy of the other. One had it in view to reconcile discordant communions by mutual concession, and either by such explication of contrarieties as might make them appear less incompatible with outward unity, or by an avowed tolerance of their profession within the church; the other would permit nothing but submission to its own authority; it loved to multiply rather than to extinguish the risks of dissent, in order to crush it more effectually; the one was a pacific negotiator, the other a conquering tyrant. Daillé on the 21. It was justly alarming to sincere Protestants, that so many brilliant ornaments of their party should either desert to the hostile side, or do their own so much right use of injury by taking up untenable ground.* Nothing, it the Fathers. augural lecture as professor of theology, his determination to follow the consent of antiquity, in explicatione Scripturarum et controversiarum diremtionibus diligenter examinare et expendere catholicum et antiquissimum consensum, cum sine dubio illud quod a pluribus et antiquissimis dictum est, verissimum sit. Epist. Virorum præstantium, p. 6. It was a poor consolation for so many losses, that the famous Antonio de Dominis, archbishop of Spalato, came appeared to reflecting men, could be trusted to the argument from antiquity; whatever was gained in the controversy on a few points was lost upon those of the first importance. It was become the only secure course to overthrow the tribunal. Daillé, himself one of the most learned in this patristic erudition whom the French reformed church possessed, was the first who boldly attacked the new school of historical theology in their own strong-hold, not occupying their fortress, but razing it to the ground. The design of his celebrated Treatise concerning the right use of the Fathers, published in 1628, is, in his own words, to show "that they cannot be the judges of the controversies in religion at this day between the Papist and the Protestant," nor, by parity of reasoning, of many others; "1. Because it is, if not an impossible, yet at least a very difficult thing to find out what their sense hath been touching the same. 2. Because that their sense and judgment of these things, supposing it to be certainly and clearly understood, not being infallible, and without all danger of error, cannot carry with it a sufficient authority for the satisfying the understanding." 22. The arguments adduced by Daillé in support of the former of these two positions, and which occupy the first book of the treatise, are drawn from the paucity of early Christian writers, from the nature of the subjects treated by them having little relation to the present controversies, from the suspicions of forgery and interpolation affecting many of their works, the difficulty of understanding their idioms and figurative expressions, the habit of some of the fathers to say what they did not believe, their changes of mind, the peculiar and individual opinions of some among them, affording little evidence of the doctrine of the church; finally, the probability that many who differed from those called the fathers, and over to England, and by his book De Republica Ecclesiastica, as well as by his conversation, seemed an undisguised enemy to the church of Rome. The object of his work is to prove that the pope has no superiority over other bishops. James gave De Dominis the deanery of Windsor and a living; but whether he, strictly speaking, belonged to the church of England, I do not re member to have read. Preferments were bestowed irregularly in that age. He returned, however, to the ancient fold; but did not avoid suspicion, being thrown into prison at Rome; and after his death, the imputations of heresy against him so much increased that his body was dug up and burned. Neither party has been ambitious to claim this vain and insincere, though clever, prelate. |