ART. VIII.-TULLOCH'S RATIONAL THEOLOGY.

By Prof. E. H. GILLETT, D.D., New York.

RATIONAL THEOLOGY AND CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND) IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. By John Tulloch, D.D., Principal of St. Mary's College, in the University of St. Andrews. In two vols. 8vo. pp. 463, 500. Scribner, Welford & Armstrong, New York.

In the study of what may be called the Broad Church element of English Christianity in the Seventeenth Century, Principal Tulloch has fallen upon a congenial subject for his investigations, and he has handled it with marked ability. He has brought forward into clearer light than that in which they have hitherto been seen, some of the most independent and noteworthy thinkers, preachers and scholars of their time. The names of some of these, like Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Cudworth and Henry More, are familiar enough to theological scholars, and have long been so, but there are others, like Dr. Whichcote, John Smith, and other of the Cambridge Platonists, of whom the world has heard little, and whose merit has been buried in an obscurity which Dr. Tulloch has done his best to remove.

The position of these men can be understood only by a reference to the views and relations of the religious parties of the time. Dr. Tulloch represents them as repelled alike by the two extremes with which the age brought them into contact. He goes back to the Synod of Dort, and sets before us the theological conflict of which that Synod was the scene, and to which must be traced the rise of Arminianism in England. Here we meet with the famous Alexander Hales, of Eton, not a member of the Synod, but a spectator and reporter of its proceedings. He carries back with him to England an admiration for Episcopius, and a keen sense of he injustice with which the remonstrants were treated, and thenceforth, we presume, whether the expression in so many words fell from his lips, or not, he bids good night to John Calvin. His writings indicate remarkable largeness and liberality of thought for his age, and he evidently commands the highest admiration of Dr. Tulloch.

Of Lord Falkland, on whom Lord Clarendon has lavished his warmest eulogy, we have a glowing sketch. Although a layman, he was well read in theology, and in his hospitable mansion, men like Chillingworth found sympaty and a hearty welcome. His character commands our respect, and his early fate-a victim to what many will regard as a mistaken loyalty excites commiseration. His position in relation to Church questions, was much the same with that of Chi.lingworth and

Taylor. He was no extremist, and only by the force of circumstances was he brought to espouse a party in the State. On Church questions he was an Episcopalian, but held moderate views. In Parliament he was indisposed to act with Laud and the High Church on the one side, or with the Puritans on the other.

Here, then, we discern the grounds upon which the "Rational Theology" which Dr. Tulloch delineates planted itself. It was a theology developed under peculiar conditions. It was a combination of reactions from two opposite extremes. It could neither acquiesce in the dogmatical puritanism of the Westminster Assembly on the one hand, nor the intolerant assumptions and bigoted exclusiveness of High Church on the other. It was repelled in almost equal measure by Presbyterian rigidity and Prelatic tything of "mint, anise and cumin." This is seen alike in Chillingworth's "Religion of Protestants" and in Jeremy Taylor's" Liberty of Prophesying." Chillingworth indeed had passed through a peculiar experience. Loyal to his convictions of truth, and by the logical necessities of his mental constitution compelled to search out the solid foundations of belief, his inability to satisfy himself with the results of his own thinking left him a prey to Jesuit arts. Entrapped in the meshes of their sophistry, he sought the guidance of infallibility in the Roman Catholic Church, and for a short time became a resident at the seminary of Douay. Rome probably never had a more sincere convert, but a very short experience satisfied him of his mistake. Resenting, so far as his calm and impassive nature could resent, the imposition that had been practiced on his reason, and making himself a thorough master of the relative position of both parties in the conflict, he set himself to the task of producing that memorable work, which, considered as an argument, is one of the most exhaustive and complete in the whole range of literature. He was under the necessity of asserting the just claims of reason. The claims of an infallible Church had been urged on the grounds of reason and could be judged on earth only at the bar of reason. So that in the entire course of his argument, Chillingworth was really the advocate of a Rational Christianity.

It is obvious, however, that he speaks not in the interest of a party, and although the freedom of his thinking was resented by some of the narrower minds of the Puritan class, we can scarce make him the representative of any theological school. He stands as it were by himself, and is by no means in his mental development a product to characterize the century. It is an unnatural and forced association when Laud, although his patron, is brought into any sort of theological juxtaposition with him.

Of Jeremy Taylor the same can be said only with grave qualifications. His "Liberty of Prophesying" was a genuine product of the age, and if we recognize in him the eloquent advocate of liberty of thinking and worship, as well as of latitude of dogmatic belief, we find the explanation of it in the theological collisions which ensued when the Long Parliament wrested from the prelates' hands the keys of that cave of Æolus in which they had so long held imprisoned the controversial elements of English religious thought. "Sects" multiplied to an alarming extent. Should they be violently repressed? Should a Presbyterian despotism, now that Prelacy had fallen, assume the task for which this was no longer competent? Taylor answered, while himself stinging under what he regarded as oppression, with an emphatic No! His negative was not calmly reasoned out in the still air and under clear skies. The answer he gave was forced from him, and it was given not in the interests of a "Rational Christianity," but under the pressure of circumstances peculiar to the time.

That this is the case, and that Taylor's "Rationalism" belongs to a crisis of English history rather than to the century as a feature peculiar to it, is obvious from some facts to which Dr. Tulloch only hastily adverts. When the day of hardship had passed by, and the needy Welsh schoolmaster had become Bishop of Down and Conner, he changed his tone. Dr. Tulloch does not say, but he might have said, Taylor flatly contradicts himself. We are not insensible to the charm which the author's genius has thrown over the pages of the only product of the age which for beauty and eloquence can vie with Milton's "Plea for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." The wealth of a mind stored with all the treasures of quaint and curious reading, and of an imagination that laid all nature under tribute and seemed to revel at will in every sphere of thought and fancy, has so enriched Taylor's memorable treatise, that in the splendor of its diction, and the fascination of its rhetoric, his later utterances are cast in shadow. And it is scarce too much to say, that neither Heylin nor Sheldon could have found anything fitter to express the severity of their intolerant feelings toward dissenters, than what Irish Presbyterians might have heard with indignation from the lips of the author of "Liberty of Prophesying," when his time of hardship had passed and his time of triumph had come.

With very material abatement, indeed, we may yet bring an analogous charge against Stillingfleet, whose portrait is number four in Dr. Tulloch's gallery of Rational Christianity. It is very significant that when the King returned, Stillingfleet also felt it expedient to palliate the early indiscretion of his " Irenicum." He too was a rationalist—so far as he was one-from the force of circumstances. Under Cromwell's

Protectorate, when the prospects of Episcopacy were dark enough, he was ready to accept a modified ecclesiastical system of Usher's stamp. He was a moderate then, and to his credit, be it said, he never became afterward so extreme as some of his associates. But his moderate views were developed in the hot-bed of the Commonwealth administration, and quite wilted away when the heat of royalty beat down again on Prelatic heads and hearts.

In passing on to the Platonists of Cambridge, we come upon a school of thought springing up under the Commonwealth, and continuing on after the Restoration, in which we find the elements of a "Rational Theology" attaining a legitimate development, and possessing something more than the merely temporary significance which we allow to those -Hales' excepted-whose names have been already mentioned. to Whichcote's "Rationalism," we are willing to concede all that Dr. Tulloch claims. Indeed, his representations fall far short of the assertion of Toland, who, in his Nazarenus, states that "it was a saying of Dr. Whichcote that natural religion was eleven parts out of twelve of all religion ;" and we are tempted to believe that Tuckney had even more reason than the language here quoted from Whichcote would warrant, in finding fault with the extent to which he indulged in rationalistic speculation.

The tone of Whichcote's thought may be inferred from a few sentences in one of his letters addressed in self-vindication to Tuckney: "I thank God," he says, 66 my conscience tells me that I have not herein (preaching) affected worldly show, but the real service of truth. And I have always found in myself that such preaching of others hath most commanded my heart which hath most illuminated my head. The time I have spent on philosphers I have no cause to repent, and the use I have made of them I dare not disown. I heartily thank God for what I have found in them; neither have I upon this occasion one jot less loved the old Scriptures. I have found the philosophers that I have read good so far as they go; and it makes me secretly blush before God when I find either my head, heart or life challenged by theirs, which I must confess I have often found. I think St. Augustine saith of St. Paul, Non destruit verum quod invenit in latere Paganorum; and our Saviour reproves the Jews by Tyre and Sidon."

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He will not admit that he dwells too much and too often on tionality of Christian doctrine." "The scriptures," he exclaims, "full of such truths, and I handle them too much and too often! Sir, I oppose not rational to spiritual, for spiritual is most rational." In keeping with this, he vindicates his own charity: "I dare not blaspheme free and noble

spirits in religion who search after truth with indifference and ingenuity; lest in so doing, I should degenerate into a spirit of persecution, in the reality of the thing, though in another guise. . . . And truly I think that the members of the Church, if not the leaders, on this point have very much yet to learn. For I am persuaded that Christian love and affection is a point of such importance that it is not to be prejudiced by supposals of difference in points of religion in any ways disputable, though thought weighty as determined by the parties on either side."* Again he says: "To speak of natural light, of the use of reason in religion, is to do no disservice at all to grace; for God is acknowledged in both-in the former as laying the groundwork of his creation, in the latter as reviving and restoring it."

On this point he repeats himself, and with increased emphasis. "To go against reason is to go against God. Reason is the Divine Governor of man's life; it is the very voice of God."‡ "Can a man, ought a man to believe otherwise than he sees cause? Is it in a man's power to believe as he would, or only as the reason of the thing appears to him?"§ "Reason is not a shallow thing, it is the first participation from God; therefore, he who observes reason observes God." || It is likewise indicative of the philosophical tastes as well as peculiar theological sympathies of Whichcote that "he set young students much on reading the ancient philosophers, Plato and Tully and Plotinus."

One of these "young students" was John Smith, who died at the age of thirty-four, but whose brief remains attest that he was a worthy pupil of his master. A man of genius, and an eloquent preacher, his few sermons which serve as his memorial, define his theological position. At nearly the time when the Westminster Assembly was drawing up its creed, he took occasion to say that "the Great Master would not, while here on earth, draw up into any system or body, nor would his disciples after him" the truth they taught; "He would not lay it out to us in any articles or canons of belief. . . His main scope was to promote a holy life as the best and most compendious way to a right belief. And again, "We should not, like rigid censurers, arraign and condemn the creeds of other men which we comply not with, before a full and mature understanding of them, ripened not only by the natural sagacity of our own reason, but by the benign influence of holy and mortified affection; so neither should we ever hastily subscribe to the symbols and articles of other men. They are not always the best men who blot most paper . . . Whilst we plead so much our right to the patrimony of our fathers, we may take too fast a possession of their errors as well as of their sober opinions." **

* Vol. II. 77, 9. Ib. p. 99. ‡ Ib. 100. § Ib. 102. || Ib. 110. ¶ Ib. 146.

** Ib. 146-7.