Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

errors, for he would give error even a "fair field," nothing doubting that, in the end, truth will be victorious, though "all the winds of false doctrine be let loose upon her."

If any doubt yet remain concerning Milton's intention to represent Arians and Socinians as errorists, and to avow his faith in the peculiar doctrine they deny - the doctrine of the Trinity, it must be all taken away by another passage, near the close of this, his last treatise. The passage has already been cited; but truth and the importance of the subject under discussion, justify us in bringing it forward again. Having quoted 1 Thess. 5:21, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," he inquires :

"How shall we prove all things, which includes all opinions, at least, founded on Scripture, unless we not only tolerate them, but patiently hear them, and seriously read them? If he who thinks himself in the truth professes to have learnt it, not by implicit faith, but by attentive study of the Scriptures and full persuasion of heart; with what equity can he refuse to hear or read him who demonstrates to have gained his knowledge by the same way? Is it a fair course, to assert truth by arrogating to himself the only freedom of speech, and stopping the mouths of others equally gifted? This is the direct way to bring in that papistical faith, which we all disclaim. They, i. e. those who refuse toleration, pretend it would unsettle the weaker sort; the same groundless fear is pretended by the Romish clergy. At least, then, let them have leave to write in Latin, which the common people understand not; that what they hold may be discussed among the learned only. We suffer the idolatrous books of papists without this fear, to be sold and read as common as our own; why not much rather of Anabaptists, Arians, Arminians, and Socinians? There is no learned man but will confess he hath much profited by reading controversies. . . . If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together more evidently appear: it follows, then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth more true.” - Id. p. 517.

The argument here, is plainly this: we suffer papists to write and publish. Now if we suffer those that hold the greatest error, the Papist, why not those that hold an error, indeed, but one less destructive, the Arian and Socinian? Besides, to place their falsehood or error beside the truth, will make their falsehood appear more false, and the truth more clear.

Thus the evidence is full and positive that Milton, in this his last work, abjures and condemns sects and doctrines that he advocates in Christian Doctrine, and died in what he so often, in his Letters of State, calls "the ancient," "the orthodox," the "evangelic faith," viz. that The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, are really Divine and coequal persons, constituting "one Tri-Personal Godhead."

Thus it is that John Milton," the man to whom God communicated such measures of light and mental energy, that his name springs up spontaneously, when we think or would speak of the greatness of our nature; thus he shows us "in what conclusions he rested on that subject, which above all others presses upon men of thought and sensibility," rested, "after a life of extensive and profound research, of magnanimous efforts for freedom and his country, and of communion with the most gifted minds of his own and former times." "His theological opinions were the fruits of patient, profound, reverent study of the scriptures. He came to them with a 'mind not narrowed by a technical, professional education, but accustomed to broad views, to the widest range of thought." "He was shackled by no party connections. He was warped by no clerical ambition, and subdued by no clerical timidity." He came to his conclusions respecting the Son of God, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity, "in the fulness of his strength, with free mind, open to truth, and with unstained purity of life." He came to them from the very force of conviction, and in direct opposition to what he once held and taught; conviction wrought by "patient, reverent, and profound study of the word of God." "And what did this great and good man, whose intellectual energy and love of truth has made him a chief benefactor of the human mind? what, we ask, did he discover in the Scriptures? A triple Divinity? No." But that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, are "One Tri-Personal Godhead," and that this doctrine of the "Trinity is, in Scripture, a plain doctrine." 1

1 It is due the memory of the late Dr. Channing, to transcribe the remark with which he closes his exultation over the discovery he supposed had been

ARTICLE II.

CHURCH THEOLOGY AND FREE INQUIRY IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

BY REV. SETH SWEETSER, D. D., WORCESTER, MASS.

It is often the fact that the qualities which mark a particular period in history are seen vividly portrayed in the lives of prominent individuals. The complexion of an age is the result of great moral causes, which are working widely and effectively upon the public mind. A revolutionary idea reaches its dominant energy by slow accretions and by a gradual widening of the sphere of its influence. It agitates many minds. Some men of congenial temperament it awakens; it sets them in motion. At first they are only subjects of a general movement. They identify themselves. with it, they go before it, become leaders; and while they themselves are formed by the age, they assume the direction and, through the moral and intellectual force which circumstances have imperatively demanded, give the direction to the movement upon which they were thrown, and shape it after their own pleasure. Cromwell did not originate the historic epoch of which he was the life. He was called up by the political convulsions which shook Great Britain; the spirit of the times gave the direction to his imperious will, till that will seized the reins, and the whole train of events followed his resistless dictation. This representation of an era in a man, this impression of a man upon his age, so that the times produce the individual, and the individual moulds the times, is a fact observable in all marked periods.

made respecting John Milton. "Our principal object in these remarks," he says, "has been to show, that as far as great names are arguments, the cause of Anti-trinitarianism, or of God's proper unity, is supported by the strongest. But we owe it to truth to say, that we put little trust in these fashionable proofs. The chief use of great names in religious controversy is, to balance and neutralize one another, that the unawed and unfettered mind may think and judge with a due self-reverence, and with a solemn sense of accountableness to God alone." -Channing s Works, Vol, I. p. 477.

It has been often asserted that Abelard and Bernard were the representatives of two great conflicting movements of the days in which they lived. This is undoubtedly true; while it is also true that neither of them were in such a sense master spirits as to accomplish and settle, for their own age, a character which was distinctively their work. Society did not, in their lives, reach a crisis. There is no historic epoch of which either of them were artificers. Things were in a transition state. Intense agitations, bold innovations, rebellion against authority, were dominant on one side; and, on the other, aspirations and advances, a determined and irresistible progress towards an ascendency which had been the ambition of a previous age, and was the triumph of the next. Abelard was the champion of freedom; Bernard, the champion of authority. Neither of them originated the movements with which they were identified; neither of them lived to see the full development of the ideas and doctrines which they advocated.

After the fall of the old Roman empire, there was no concentration of power like it. It was a mighty shadow in the past, the magnificent embodiment of regal supremacy, the summit of a dominion upon which the eager eyes of the ambitious potentates were fixed as the model of a kingdom which would satisfy their aspirations. It is remarkable that the only approach made, by a temporal sovereign, to a centralization of power similar to that of Rome under the Caesars, was the brief empire of Charlemagne. With a comprehensiveness of view rarely surpassed, with an executive energy almost ubiquitous he combined, under a vigorous rule, the distant and the near, established laws, promoted education, refined barbarism, advanced civilization and justice, and left a great kingdom, to be dismembered with such suddenness, that one almost feels that the life of the empire was in him, and its dissolution necessarily involved in his death. The two competitors for the sway of universal power were the church (through the pontiffs) and the German empire. The emperors claimed their right to crown the pope. The popes claimed the supremacy over the emperors. For cen

turies the great collisions in Europe involved this contested point.

Just before the birth of Bernard, a man had died whose extraordinary powers and zeal had given vigor and success to the orthodox church movement. This man was the monk Hildebrand, afterwards Gregory VII. He was identified with the struggle of the church to rise to an independence of the secular power. Laxity of discipline, corruption of morals, the wide disparity between the type of the church in the scriptures and the existing church, had excited a strong desire for reformation. The more thoughtful among the clergy, and all who were inspired with just views of the Christian life, were aroused to seek a reformation. The line of their effort was in the direction of ecclesiasticism, the elevation of the spiritual power of the church, the enforcement of a more rigid discipline, the exaltation of the papacy to a supremacy over the secular power. This was the peculiar and characteristic church movement of the age, beginning about the middle of the eleventh century and advancing, with decisive steps, till it reached its highest point, near the end of the twelfth century. It was this advance of the papacy which Bernard promoted with all the zeal, fervor, and sanctity of his energetic mind. He was the real pope of his active years, reproducing the spirit of Hildebrand, and working out, with a temper hardly less firm, and with a genius hardly less versatile and comprehensive, the same dominant idea.

The antagonism of new and revolutionary ideas was less formidable during the life of Hildebrand than of Bernard. Abelard was only six years old when Gregory died, in 1085. He was more singularly individual and self-moved than was Bernard. The rebellion against authority, into which he threw himself, was unorganized. It had broken out fitfully It had combined itself with other agitations, and was, therefore, not a well-defined and consolidated movement. It was rather one of the unavoidable but impulsive reactions which, even in days of the deepest mental subjection, will show themselves: the indications of the native freedom which is

« AnteriorContinuar »