NOTES ON BIOGRAPHIA SCOTICANA.* Page 14. Preface. Note. This doctrine of original sin is plainly evinced from Scripand by our British poets excellently ture * * * * * described. Thus Adam, now ope thine eyes, and first behold Conceived in sin (oh wretched state!) Before we draw our breath: The first young pulse begins to beat 66 Dr. Watts. British Poets. Capital! He ought to have meant Taliessin, Hoel, &c. But your true Scot could not bring himself to say our English Poets "—even while he is imagining himself to be writing English. And then the Dual. Milton and DOCTOR WATTS ! Life of Mr. David Black. P. 60. The liberties of the Church, and discipline presently exercised, were confirmed by divers Acts of Parliament, * Biographia Scoticana; or, an Historical Account of the Lives, Characters, and Memorable Transactions of the most Eminent Scots Worthies. Leith, 1816. approved of by the Confession of Faith, and the office-bearers of the Church were now in peaceable possession thereof; that the question of his preaching ought first, according to grounds and practice foresaid to be judged by the Ecclesiastical Senate, as competent judges thereof at the first instance. This and numerous similar attempts to form an absolute theocracy in Scotland, are pregnant with instruction. It is observable, that all theocracy commences with an assertion, express or implied, of infallibility in one or more individuals, without proof. If A. be an Ambassador from the King of Kings, all Kings must yield obedience to his words, and not pretend to be his Judges. But I, A., am an Ambassador-ergo, negatur minor: till proved. The proof was not given, nor could be given, but by some exertion of miraculous power that would have made A. a King, and the King A.'s Subject; and thus superseded the necessity of a proof. Facile prescribit, qui proscribere possit. Life of Mr. Patrick Simpson. P. 82. On a Tuesday morning, about day-break, he went into his garden as private as possible, and one Helen Gardiner, wife to one of the bailies of the town, a godly woman, who had sat up that night with Mrs. Simpson, being concerned at the melancholy condition he was in, climbed over the garden wall to observe him in this retirement; but, coming near the place where she was, she was terrified with a noise that she heard, of multitudes of people together, with a most melodious sound intermixed; she fell on her knees, and prayed that the Lord would pardon her rashness, which her regard for his servant had caused. Afterwards she went forward, and found him lying on the ground; she entreated him to tell her what had happened to him; and after many promises of secrecy, and an obligation, that she should not reveal it in his lifetime, but, if she survived him, she should be at liberty, he then said, "Oh what am I but dust and ashes, that holy ministering spirits should be sent with a message to me!" And then told her that he had a vision of angels, who gave him an audible answer from the Lord respecting his wife's condition; and then returning to the house, he said to the people who attended his wife, "Be of good comfort, for I am sure that ere ten hours of the day that brand shall be plucked from the fire." God keep me from uncharitable thoughts. It may have been a posthumous fancy, or a prose epic, of Mrs. Helen Gardiner, suggested perhaps by the wind in a Scotch fir at the moment she was peeping at her pious pastor, on his knees in his garden. But it does look horribly like a pio-fraudish confabricatum. If intended only for Mr. Simpson's solace, and as enabling him to predict with confidence, what need of the rushing of a mob of Spirits, or of the melodious voice intermixed? And if intended for a bono-publico miracle to the honour and glory of Misepiscopy (no worse word than Misanthropy), why the injunction of silence till after the death of the only person who might have contradicted it, and who alone could have confirmed it? At all events, this excuse for posthumous testimony (which is of frequent occurrence in Puritan Biography) is an injudicious, not to say, profane imitation of our Lord's prohibition to his Disciples respecting his Messiahship, his Crucifixion, and Resurrection on the third day. For here the motives for enjoining silence were evident, and the suggestions of mercy no less than of wisdom. For to have proclaimed himself the Messiahi.e., King of the Jews, would have been high treason to the civil government-i. e., the Roman Magistrates, and to have declared that the Messiah would be hung would have justified his apprehension for blasphemy by the Sanhedrim, in the exertion of the privileges accorded to them by the Roman Emperor and Senate. S. T. COLERIDGE, Who intreats and trusts in Allan Cunningham's pardon for thus bescrawling a leaf of his book. A. C. may be assured that S. T. C. is not so devoid either of genial taste, or of gratitude for pleasures enjoyed, as to have treated a book of A. Cunningham's own creation so irreverentially. Life of Mr. Josias Welch. P. 118. He had a very notable faculty in searching the Scriptures, and explaining the most obscure mysteries therein; and was a man who had much inward exercise of conscience anent his own personal cases, and was often assaulted anent that grand fundamental truth, the being of a God; in so much that it was almost customary to him to say, as when he first spoke in the pulpit, "I think it a great matter to believe that there is a God;" and by this he was the more likely to deal with others under the like temptations.* Martin Luther was of the same mind; and I am persuaded that the notion inculcated from childhood and the after-confirmed habit of considering the existence and attributes of God as a sort of selfevident truth, so little beset with difficulties, that it is a doubt with them whether there ever was such a creature as an Atheist-I am persuaded, I say, that this prepossession among the learned and those educated for the Ministry has been most injurious to * Mr. Blair says that he told him, that for three years he durst not say "my God," and that his conscience smote him for the same.Blair's Memoirs, p. 29. the Faith; and it is not the least among the causes of the prevailing indisposition to the mysteries of the Gospel-the Trinity, the Personality of the WORD, and his incarnation in the man Jesus, &c. The effects of the opposite error in this instance, viz. the too exclusive direction of the mind to the divine. personality, the contemplation of the filial Godhead in the subjective only, without duly attending to that which he is objectively, as the WORD, the LIGHT that lighteth every man, the energic Reason and Law of the World present over all, are seen in the theology of the Scottish Confessors and Martyrs under the Stuarts, and at once constitute and explain its peculiar characters. Missing the objective in the highest, they cling to it more eagerly and in the same exclusive spirit in the visible Church; and to the outward kingdom and its forms they attached all the moment and indispensability, all the deep interests of faith and conscience, which belong to the subjective or Spiritual Church, to the kingdom within! Hence their Judaizing sabbatarian principles, their predilection for the Old Testament, their equal readiness to suffer or to inflict martyrdom for points of Church Government: hence, lastly, their indecent familiarity in prayer, their anthropomorphic, yea, sarcomorphic notions of the Supreme, and their anile superstitions and devil-combats. Life of Mr. James Mitchell. P. 142. One time in conference concerning the sin in the godly, his father said to him, "I am sure you are not now troubled with corruption, being so near death." He answered, "Ye are altogether deceived, for as long as my foot remaineth on this earth, though the other were translated above the clouds, my mind could not be free of sinful motions." M |