XVIII

THE MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF

CONYERS MIDDLETON1

FEW parts of our literature are better known by name, or less frequently read, than the books which contain the great moral and religious controversies of the eighteenth century. It is the habit of every successive champion of orthodoxy to repeat, with triumphant variations, the song of triumph which Burke sang, in his Reflections on the French Revolution, over the early Deists. 'We too have had writers of that description, who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers of London what is become of these lights of the world?'

1 The Miscellaneous Works of the late Reverend and Learned Conyers Middleton, D.D. 5 vols.

This is, no doubt, true to a great extent, though less true now than it was in 1790; but the questions ought to be carried further, if even justice is to be done. Who, born within the last forty years, has read those who answered the eighteenth-century Deists? The answers of the London booksellers to such questions would probably not be very favourable to these lights of the world. The truth is, that mere controversy must be ephemeral, however ably it is conducted. It is at best but pamphleteering. After a time, the soldiers on each side retreat, and leave the stage clear for a younger generation. The books which live are those which either rise to the height of real philosophy, like Hobbes and Butler; which add something to our knowledge of matters of fact, like Lardner or Gibbon; or which have the good fortune to answer some immediate practical purpose, as, for instance, by becoming University text-books, like Paley's Evidences.

It is, however, anything but true that the booksellers' test is the one by which the importance of controversy is to be measured. The controversies themselves, and the books in which they are embodied, by degrees die away and are forgotten, but their effects are permanent. They model the opinions and influence the conduct of thousands, nay of millions, who have never read a single word of them.

It is easy to ask, with superb contempt, who reads Bolingbroke, and who ever read him through? The answer is, Voltaire read Bolingbroke. The French

ation read Voltaire to some purpose for a good many ears. The most orthodox of mankind read, at all vents, Sir Archibald Alison's History of the French Revolution; the least orthodox read Strauss and Renan; and each party reads the Pope's Encyclical Letter, and the eighty-four propositions which it condemns.

With facts like these before us, Burke's questions look less impressive than they did when he set the fashion of asking them. It is very true that, when we look into old controversies, we find a discussion of the questions of our own time under rather different conditions, but it is equally true that this increases instead of diminishing their interest. Nothing can help us to understand the nineteenth century better than some familiarity with the writers of the eighteenth.

Hardly any writer of that century attracted more attention in his time than Dr. Conyers Middleton. The names of his principal works are still sufficiently well known, though, with the exception of the Life of Cicero, they are probably little read; still no one who has a taste for controversy, and who takes up the Free Inquiry or the Letter from Rome, and their respective appendices, is likely to stop till he has read them through.

They are for the most part excellently written, for, notwithstanding the reproaches which have often been bestowed upon him for flippancy and want of reverence, Middleton always wrote both

like a gentleman and like a good man. He is certainly severe enough on his antagonists, but he never abuses, and hardly ever sneers at them. The severity of his style consists entirely in the quiet and easy way in which he meets his antagonists; and the flippancy with which he is often taxed will be found on examination to be nothing else than a quiet indifference to the rank and station of his opponent, or to the popularity of the opinions which he is attacking.

Altogether his style is a model of well-bred, educated criticism. He says just what he means, no more and no less. He never gets in a passion,

and hardly ever goes even the length of irony. Still, such is the clearness and neatness of his style that the mere statement of his opinions, and the grounds on which he held them, is incomparably more effective than the vehemence of such a writer as Warburton, and even than the rather affected irony of Berkeley.

Good as is Middleton's style, the position which he held in English literature and the substance of his principal controversial works are more important. The present generation has almost forgotten, in its ignorant alarm at a few contemporary writers, how strong a current of what in the present day would be called liberalism, ran through the ecclesiastical literature of England for more than two centuries, from the days of Hooker to those of Bishop Horsley. Indeed, for obvious reasons, we are not so familiar as

ve might be with the fact that theologians were for great length of time the most prominent of English Literary men, and that during a considerable part of its history the Church might, without presumption, claim the position of the intellectual teacher of the nation at large.

This growth and progress of religious liberalism in the Church of England would be an excellent subject for a book. Such a work would begin by showing how as against the claims of the Pope to infallibility, and the claim of the Calvinists to make the letter of the Bible a guide in every action of life, to the exclusion of every other source of knowledge Hooker was led to ascribe to reason much higher functions and greater importance than were conceded to it by either of his antagonists.

This would lead to a consideration of the divines of Charles I.'s time, in whose writings there may be traced a sympathetic antipathy to liberalism, not unlike that which is to be seen in the present day, though of course the form in which it appears is different. Their theories led them to attach extreme importance to the doctrines of the early Church, and their tone of mind led some of them-Laud, for instance, and, to some extent, Jeremy Taylor-to sympathise with the ascetic and mortified view of life. On the other hand, the study of antiquity implied reasoning and criticism, and the nature of the case excluded appeals to any specific embodiment of infallibility.

VOL. II

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