No. 89.] (Ad Clerum.) [Price 2s TRACTS FOR THE TIMES. ON THE MYSTICISM ATTRIBUTED TO THE EARLY § i.-Occasion, Grounds, and Limits of the Present Inquiry. (1.) Ir is curious, and may be not uninstructive, to observe how from time to time the assailants of Primitive Antiquity have shifted their ground, since the beginning of the seventeenth century. During the struggle of the Reformation, men had felt instinctively, if they did not clearly see, that the Fathers were against them, so far as they had begun to rationalize, whether in ecclesiastical practice, or in theological inquiry. But it was many years before they ventured to avow this feeling distinctly to themselves, much more to maintain and propagate it. It was not until divines of his class had thoroughly wearied themselves in vain endeavours to reconcile the three first centuries with Calvin and Zuinglius, that Daillé published his celebrated treatise "Of the Right Use of the Fathers1:" in which, under pretence of impugning their sufficiency as judges between Papist and Protestant, he has dexterously insinuated every topic most likely to impair their general credit professing all the while extreme respect both for their sanctity and their wisdom; although, perhaps, an attentive reader may perceive his ironical meaning, disclosing itself more and more, as his argument draws to a point. However, by his skill in rhetorical arrangement, and by a certain air of thorough command of his subject, which he has been very successful in assuming, he became at once the standard author for all who took that side of the question; opening (if so homely a simile may be allowed) a kind ; § i. 1. § i. 1. 2 Gradual Diminution of Respect for Antiquity. of cheap shop, to which all who had a fancy for wares of that kind have ever since found it convenient to resort. But though at the bottom Daillé seems to have had no more respect for Antiquity than those who came after him, he differs from them greatly, not only in his tone and manner, but also in the very ground and substance of his argument: professing, first, to confine himself to those points which are disputed between the Reformed and the Roman Church, (and, therefore, not to except against the Fathers' evidence on matters debated in their times, e. g. on the Trinitarian Controversy;) and secondly, laying, or seeming to lay, the chief stress of his objections on the scantiness of their remains, the amount of corruption and interpolation, the difficulty of ascertaining their real sense, and the like. When he does proceed to challenge their authority, he is careful in pointing out their own disclaimers of such authority, before he exemplifies their supposed errors and inconsistencies; which he does largely, but with great show of unwillingness, in the concluding sections of his work. But now, if we pass over a hundred years, and come to the attacks made on the Fathers in the beginning of the eighteenth century, we shall find, for the most part, the same quotations appealed to, the same particulars insisted on, but with an air of much more open defiance, and with the direct and avowed purpose of impugning their credit, not in this or that point only, but in all questions of Christian religion. Thus Whitby prefaces his collection of what he calls specimens of patristical exposition of Scripture, with a declaration', that he wishes to exclude appeals to Antiquity, as to the transmission of the Rule of Faith, (meaning the great fundamental doctrines,) no less than in facts of general history, or in the controversies between England and Rome. And Middleton, in his flippant "Free Inquiry," lays the stress of his argument on his being able to prove that the ancient Fathers " were of a character from which nothing could be expected but what a weak or crafty understanding could supply, towards confirming those prejudices with which they happened to be possessed, especially where religion was the subject 2." |