shown himself a long time ago, and in a very different country. He became the almost grotesque deity of Warburton-the supernatural chief justice whose sentences were carried out in a non-natural world-the constitutional monarch who had signed a social compact, and retired from active government. These thinkers would join with the sceptics in contemptuously assailing deistical rationalism as too flimsy for actual life. To the optimism of their rivals, they opposed a vigorous assertion that vice, misery, and corruption still existed in the world. The sentimental morality was met by a downright statement of the tangible motives of a selfish prudence. And, even in artistic questions, the correct and classical school was encountered by an unflinching realism which showed things as they are in their whole deformity. The two tendencies are intricately blended. Appeals to experience mingle with appeals to a priori demonstration. Common sense, in the vulgar acceptation of the world, is confused with the philosophical appeal to innate ideas and universal intuitions. The imagination confounds the two really distinct deities, and, indeed, is shocked at a plain statement of the inconsistencies involved. Men, who are really working with the forces of disintegration, believe in the most entire good faith that they are supporting the established order. It is not an easy task to unravel these opposing currents of thought and feeling, or to discover the logic implied in unreasoning impulses, and the unconscious tendencies which would have been disavowed if plainly brought before the consciousness. Heterogeneous elements are so united, that it is not only difficult to discover their existence, but almost impossible to indicate it plainly in a continuous narrative. I propose, however, to describe the most obvious phenomena as well as I am able, by first considering that series of writers who seem to represent what may be called the most characteristic product of the eighteenth century; and then, to trace the second series, who represent the growing element of reaction or development. But though the line may be thus drawn for the present purpose, it does not correspond to an equally marked division in reality. We shall find, for example, amongst the religious writers, the poets, the novelists, and the essayists, tendencies analogous to those which are represented in specu mon sense. lation by the ontologists, the sceptics, and the school of comBut amongst men who felt rather than reasoned, or who reasoned by feeling, the logical divisions will be less distinctly marked, and one man may often represent the resultant of various forces, rather than the impulse of a single force. The poet may naturally seek to bring into unity all the strongest impulses of his time, and sometimes he fuses into a whole very inconsistent materials. II. THE PREACHERS. 7. I will begin with that system of practical theology which corresponds more or less distinctly to the speculative theory of Clarke. How could the theistic doctrine, vague, frigid, and artificial as we have seen it to be, be applied to influence human conduct? That was the problem presented to the dominant theological school. They should, therefore, give us the best clue to the solution of the problem which we have to consider. Two things, it may be said, were conspicuously absent from that form of religious doctrine-faith and poetry. What remains when they are taken away? Common sense and candour. Without a distinct doctrine and without any warmth of feeling, what guides are to be found? Substantially those empirical guesses which provide for the ordinary affairs of life, although there must be an ostensible connection of such guesses with a foundation of demonstrated truth. An alternation, then, of high-sounding appeals to reason with dexterous appeals to obvious motives must be the general tendency of such theology. Sometimes the preacher will lose himself in abstract reasoning, and sometimes descend to the full level of homely common sense. Rhetoric, in its full sense, becomes almost impossible. The first condition of effective oratory is given in the words 'this man speaketh with authority.' English preachers, since the seventeenth century, have never possessed this secret, and have, therefore, never commanded their hearers. The demonstrations which are so frequent in the sermons of the eighteenth century are obviously not demonstrative, or they would not be used. The preacher can take nothing for granted. He is always bound to encourage himself and his hearers by once more repeating a series of proofs which he knows to generate at most probabilities, though he is forced to give them the air of certainties. He can never advance, because his base is never beyond the reach of attack. It would be well, it is sometimes said, if every preacher felt that there was an opponent in his congregation. It might be well for his logic, though it would be of doubtful benefit to his rhetoric. But in these sermons we often feel that the opponent must not only be present as the butt of the preacher's arguments, but that he has got into the pulpit, for we feel that the preacher is too often arguing with himself. 8. And, again, the preacher, uncertain of his position, is obliged to be arguing as much against the extremes of his own party as against his avowed antagonists. He is in constant fear lest he should be thought to believe too much or too little. The aim of every orthodox or rationalist preacher is to keep to the via media between superstition and fanaticism. Superstition is the belief that God ever reveals himself to external experience in the modern world; and fanaticism the belief that he reveals himself by internal experience. The preacher, in denouncing these extremes, shows himself as much afraid that we should believe in God too much as that we should believe in him too little. The deity whose existence is established by abstract reasoning must never be allowed to place himself in contact with the concrete facts. He appears, at most, under the colourless shape of Providence-a word which may be taken to imply a remote divine superintendence, without admitting an actual divine interference. 9. Thus the preacher, uncertain, as it were, of his equilibrium, and with his hands tied by a strict bondage, is unable to give way to any spontaneous bursts of emotion. We have none of Taylor's flashes of fancy; or of Barrow's masculine reasoning; or of South's wit, or of Baxter's earnestness. The positive element, which replaces all these, is good commonplace morality, defended by ordinary common sense, and supported by appeals to the ordinary facts of daily life. Don't get drunk, or you will ruin your health; nor commit murder, for you will come to the gallows; every man should seek to be happy, and the way to be happy is to be thoroughly respectable. That is the main substance of such preaching as is not controversial, backed by the argument that it is decidedly probable that there is another world in which the bad will be turned into hell. Every man of sense would admit a certain force in such arguments; though no man of imagination could be moved by the rhetoric, and no human being, at the present day, not forced by some external consideration, could ever read the literature thus produced. 10. Yet the literature of the pulpit should give us the most characteristic indications of contemporary thought. What, the preacher should ask himself, are the true roots of the religious faith of his countrymen? What was it that the ordinary Englishman of the Georgian period really believed? What arguments satisfied his reason, and what emotions clothed themselves in his forms of worship? Pedants in the schools, and controversialists in their professional literature, might wrangle over matters for which the ordinary merchant or lawyer cared not a farthing. The preacher has to move the masses, and must dwell upon the topics which are really capable of sending a sympathetic thrill through the ordinary bosom. The mere dead forms of extinct thought are useless in a form of literature which men judge by their spontaneous feelings and not by deliberate reflection. In the pulpit we should hear the living voice, not the mechanical echoes of departed centuries. 11. The study of eighteenth-century sermons, however, is not exhilarating. We know from sufficient testimony that they really impressed our forefathers. We can discover on reflection that in some cases they represent genuine thought and emotion. But no one, unless he were confined to a desert island with no other form of literature at hand, could really affect to read them with pleasure. Dull, duller, and dullest are a sufficient critical vocabulary to describe their merits; or, if one would fain discover some less damnatory form of description, it may perhaps be said that they are but one degree superior to the average sermons of the succeeding century. If less emotional, they have a greater appearance of sincerity. There is in them, too, a certain vein of common sense which may be prosaic, but is in its way respectable. There is no effort to stimulate the imagination of the hearers, to raise them above the turmoil of daily life into a higher region of thought, and still less to provoke anything like a passionate outburst of emotion. But there is a sincere wish to stock the ordinary mind with a due provision of common-sense maxims, which may serve to keep its proprietor out of mischief, and make him a respectable member of society. To dip very deeply into such literature would be superfluous as well as wearisome. A few brief characters of the most distinguished performers will be amply sufficient for my purpose. 12. Let us take, for example, Clarke, the typical rationalist divine. Warburton commends his sermons as the best model for a young preacher, especially for their abundant illustrations of Scripture,' and Johnson, though with a due reservation on the score of orthodoxy, seems to admire them equally.9 The most obvious criticism upon these performances is, that they are, for the most part, not sermons at all, but lectures upon metaphysics. They are generally fragments of the arguments in the Boyle lectures, illustrated by quotations of texts, profuse enough to prove Clarke's powerful memory, and to explain Warburton's eulogy. To believe in God is to have 'worthy and honourable apprehensions of his nature and attributes;' that is to say, fully to appreciate the arguments of the Boyle lectures. A thorough assimilation of that thrice-sifted essence of reasoning will naturally generate virtue and lead to a reception of the corollaries added by Revelation. The belief may be commanded on pain of damnation; for being reasonable in itself, and proved by 'the strongest evidence in the world,' the only cause of its rejection must be 'a love of vice.'4 As demonstration is the basis of our belief, appeals to the reasoning faculty are everywhere substituted for addresses to the imagination or the emotions. The glowing imagery of poetical writers suggests to Clarke's mind a legal fiction to be carefully defined and analysed. He gives a mathematical diagram where Taylor would have drawn a picture. His twentieth sermon, for example, is on the text, 'Call no man your father on earth, for one is your father which is in heaven.' We have first a careful statement of what is precisely meant by the Fatherhood of God-the sacred phrase which to some later writers has appeared to be the • Clarke's Works, i. 177. 1 Warburton, x. 373. 2 Boswell (Fitzgerald's edit.) ii. 268. • Ib. i. 330. |