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CHAPTER VI.

CHURCH LITERATURE.

THE early part of the nineteenth century witnessed a great revival of interest in theological questions, but it was not an age of great theological writers. This is all the more strange, because in some other departments of literature it was the greatest age since

"The spacious days of Queen Elizabeth."

But the Church of England still kept up the traditions of a learned Church; and if she produced no theological giants, she yet produced some whose stature was above the average, and whose writings may be read with pleasure and profit at this day and in all days.

Perhaps her two greatest divines were survivals of the eighteenth century, who just lived on to see the dawn of the nineteenth. The first of these is Samuel Horsley (1733-1806). He had demolished Priestley, and preached most of his grand sermons, before the new century began; but his later Charges, as bishop, first of Rochester and then of St. Asaph, belong to our period. He was a very powerful writer, but not a voluminous one; and it is much to the credit of the new generation that it showed its appreciation of intellectual power, though not lavishly exercised, by warmly recognizing the merits of the veteran. He is "our ablest modern prelate," "the one red leaf, the last of its clan, with relation to the learned teachers of our Church," "the first episcopal authority (if learning, wisdom, and knowledge of the Scrip

'So Bishop Jebb called him in 1818. See Forster's Life of Jebb, p. 408.

2 S. T. Coleridge. See introduction to Essays on his own Times. In his early Radical days, Coleridge had a violent antipathy against Horsley.

tures be any foundation for authority),"1 "the light and glory of the Established Church." 2 Horsley, however, was essentially an eighteenth-century man, and we cannot in this volume claim him as our own.

The other veteran was William Paley (1743-1805), the close of whose active life exactly coincided with the close of the eighteenth century. But though his bodily weakness prevented him from taking any active part in Church work, his mind was as vigorous as ever; and it was in the nineteenth century that he wrote what his biographer rightly terms "his last, but the most original and entertaining of his works"-his "Natural Theology" (1802). The vastness of the subject, which this chapter very imperfectly attempts to cover, renders a subdivision necessary; and, both in point of date as well as, in some respects, of merit, Paley's "Natural Theology" claims the first place under our first head.

EVIDENTIAL WRITINGS.

The history of Paley's "Natural Theology" is interesting, and cannot be better told than in the writer's own words in his grateful dedication of the work to his patron and diocesan, the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Shute Barrington), who gave him the living of Bishop Wearmouth. "A weak," he says, "and, of late, a painful state of health, deprived me of the power of discharging the duties of my station in a manner at all suitable, either to my sense of those duties, or to my anxious wishes concerning them. My inability for the public functions of my profession left me much at leisure. That leisure was not to be lost. It was only in my study that I could repair my deficiencies in the Church; it was only through the press that I could speak. These circumstances entitled your lordship in particular to call upon me for the only species of exertion of which I was capable, and disposed me without hesitation to obey the call in the best manner that

1 Isaac Milner in his later life (see Life, p. 212)-a very unexceptionable testimony, for Horsley had no sympathy with the Evangelicals.

2 John Milner's End of Controversy, prefatory address-another unexceptionable testimony, for Horsley had as little sympathy with Roman Catholics as with Evangelicals.

I could." What the parishioners of Bishop Wearmouth thought of this arrangement we are not told; but people were not so particular about parochial activity in those days. as they are now; and the Church at large was certainly a gainer from the fact that the rector of the large parish of Bishop Wearmouth was disabled for parish work. The plan of the "Natural Theology" was a continuation, or rather a carrying back, of earlier works. The writer says (again to quote from the dedication), "The following discussion alone was wanted to make up my works into a system; in which works, such as they are, the public have now before them the evidences of Natural Religion, the evidences of Revealed Religion, and an account of the duties that result from both. It is of small importance that they have been written in an order the very reverse of that in which they ought to be read."

It is rather too much the tendency of the present day to depreciate Paley—a tendency which has probably been increased rather than lessened by the fact that he still is a text-book in his own University for the humblest yet most indispensable of her examinations. But the "Natural Theology," with which alone the present volume is concerned, still appears to me to be, within its limits and from its writer's point of view, a most lucid, powerful, and unanswerable defence of Divine truth. The whole book is an illustration and amplification of the famous simile of the watch, with which it commences, and which, by the way, was by no means an original idea of Paley's. A watch is found. The machine demonstrates, by its construction, contrivance and design. Contrivance must have had a contriver; design, a designer. But every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. This is the gist of the whole book; but it is worked out with a wonderful wealth of illustration, and with great ingenuity. Mr. Leslie Stephen, who of course does not agree with Paley, is yet candid enough to own that the work is "a marvel of skilful statement." 1

1 See English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i. 403.

Paley lived before the days of Darwin, and therefore we cannot be surprised that he does not grapple with the theory of evolution. He probably knew nothing about German metaphysics, which were then just beginning to exercise an influence upon English thought. He was simply a plain, common-sense Englishman, not at all likely to commend himself to the mystical mind of a man like S. T. Coleridge, fresh from the study of the great German writers. “The watchmaker's scheme of prudence" seemed to Coleridge grovelling and inadequate. The majority of Englishmen, however, were not Coleridges, but plain, commonplace people, and the arguments which Paley uses are just of the sort that would come home to them; and his plain, downright, lucid style, without any rhapsody or superfluous ornament, is just the style to suit them. Of course, if any one stops short at the "Natural Theology," he gains a very poor conception of the whole field of religious truth; but it is his own fault if he does so, not the writer's, who fairly tells him what a very little way he is carrying him.

Books on the evidences are numerous during our period, as antidotes to the unbelief introduced into England through the French Revolution. But all that can be attempted here is to select a few of those which seem to be most notable. Among them a high place must be given to a little anonymous brochure which appeared in 1819, and which in its way was a singularly effective contribution to evidential literature. It was entitled "Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte," and was so popular that in thirty years it passed through nine editions-a large number considering the nature of the work. The writer was Archbishop Whately, then a young Fellow of Oriel, and his object was to show that the same doubts which were alleged against the Scripture might be applied to the history of one whose name had been in everybody's mouth, and in whose existence they had had only too good reason to believe; for Napoleon Buonaparte had been the plague of Europe, and of no part of it more so than of England. Whately's cool, unimpassioned, logical mind enabled him to treat his bizarre subject more effectively than perhaps any man living could have done. He applies to it very cleverly the arguments used by Hume in his

"Essay on Miracles." "We entertain," argues Hume, "a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are of a suspicious character; when they have an interest in what they affirm." Whately shows that the newspapers, from which nine-tenths of the people derive all they know about Napoleon, are liable to all these objections. The newspapers "fail in all the most essential points on which their credibility depends. (1) We have no assurance that they have correct information; (2) they have an apparent interest in propagating falsehood; (3) they palpably contradict each other in the most important points." Hume argued that it was contrary to experience that miracles should be true. Whately shows that Napoleon's rapid victories were quite contrary to experience. He puts the emperor's career very cleverly into scriptural phraseology-"And it came to pass, etc.,"-and then asks, "Now, if a free-thinking philosopher were to meet such a tissue of absurdities as this in an old Jewish record, would he not reject it at once as too palpable an imposture to deserve even any inquiry into its evidence?" The value and influence of this little book were out of all proportion to its bulk.

Another work of an evidential nature, very different from the one last mentioned, but very able and effective in its way, was Thomas Rennell's "Remarks on Scepticism, especially as it is connected with Organization and Life." The writer was son of another Thomas Rennell, Dean of Winchester and Master of the Temple, who survived him for many years. His "Remarks" were published in 1819, and quickly passed through six editions. He wrote them because he saw "medical science made the handmaid of irreligion, the doctrine of materialism paving the way for infidelity and atheism;" and his object was "to reconcile the views of the philosopher and the Christian." In his capacity of Christian Advocate at Cambridge, he also published another evidential work, entitled "Proofs of Inspiration, or Grounds of Distinction between the New Testament and the Apocryphal Volume; occasioned by the recent publication of the Apocryphal New Testament by Hone," 1822. Rennell won early a very high reputation for learning and ability, and his premature death in 1824 was