Ib.
What canst thou imagine he could foresee in thee? a propensness, a disposition to goodness, when his grace should come? Either there is no such propensness, no such disposition in thee, or, if there be, even that propensness and disposition to the good use of grace, is grace; it is an effect of former grace, and his grace wrought before he saw any such propensness, any such disposition; grace was first, and his grace is his, it is none of thine.
One of many instances in dogmatic theology, in which the half of a divine truth has pa.s.sed into a fearful error by being mistaken for the whole truth.
Ib. p. 6. D.
G.o.d"s justice required blood, but that blood is not spilt, but poured from that head to our hearts, into the veins and wounds of our own souls: there was blood shed, but no blood lost.
It is affecting to observe how this great man"s mind sways and oscillates between his reason, which demands in the word "blood" a symbolic meaning, a spiritual interpretation, and the habitual awe for the letter; so that he himself seems uncertain whether he means the physical lymph, "serum," and globules that trickled from the wounds of the nails and thorns down the sides and face of Jesus, or the blood of the Son of Man, which he who drinketh not cannot live. Yea, it is most affecting to see the struggles of so great a mind to preserve its inborn fealty to the reason under the servitude to an accepted article of belief, which was, alas! confounded with the high obligations of faith;--faith the co-adunation of the finite individual will with the universal reason, by the submission of the former to the latter. To reconcile redemption by the material blood of Jesus with the mind of the spirit, he seeks to spiritualize the material blood itself in all men!
And a deep truth lies hidden even in this. Indeed the whole is a profound subject, the true solution of which may best, G.o.d"s grace a.s.sisting, be sought for in the collation of Paul with John, and specially in St. Paul"s a.s.sertion that we are baptized into the death of Christ, that we may be partakers of his resurrection and life. [3] It was not on the visible cross, it was not directing attention to the blood-drops on his temples and sides, that our blessed Redeemer said, "This is my body", and "this is my blood!
Ib. p. 9. A.
But if we consider those who are in heaven, and have been so from the first minute of their creation, angels, why have they, or how have they any reconciliation? &c.
The history and successive meanings of the term "angels" in the Old and New Testaments, and the idea that shall reconcile all as so many several forms, and as it were perspectives, of one and the same truth--this is still a "desideratum" in Christian theology.
Ib. C.
For, at the general resurrection, (which is rooted in the resurrection of Christ, and so hath relation to him) the creature "shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of G.o.d; for which the whole creation groans, and travails in pain yet". (Rom. viii. 21.) This deliverance then from this bondage the whole creature hath by Christ, and that is their reconciliation. And then are we reconciled by the blood of his cross, when having crucified ourselves by a true repentance, we receive the real reconciliation in his blood in the sacrament. But the most proper and most literal sense of these words, is, that all things in heaven and earth be reconciled to G.o.d (that is, to his glory, to a fitter disposition to glorify him) by being reconciled to another in Christ; that in him, as head of the church, they in heaven, and we upon earth, be united together as one body in the communion of saints.
A very meagre and inadequate interpretation of this sublime text. The philosophy of life, which will be the "corona et finis coronans" of the sciences of comparative anatomy and zoology, will hereafter supply a fuller and n.o.bler comment.
Ib. p. 9. A. and B.
The blood of the sacrifices was brought by the high priest "in sanctum sanctorum", into the place of greatest holiness; but it was brought but once, "in festo expiationis", in the feast of expiation; but in the other parts of the temple it was sprinkled every day. The blood of the cross of Christ Jesus hath had this effect "in sancto sanctorum", &c. ... "(to)" Christ Jesus.
A truly excellent and beautiful paragraph.
Ib. C.
If you will mingle a true religion, and a false religion, there is no reconciling of G.o.d and Belial in this text. For the adhering of persons born within the Church of Rome to the Church of Rome, our law says nothing to them if they come; but for reconciling to the Church of Rome, for persons born within the allegiance of the king, or for persuading of men to be so reconciled, our law hath called by an infamous and capital name of treason, and yet every tavern and ordinary is full of such traitors, &c.
A strange transition from the Gospel to the English statute-book! But I may observe, that if this statement could be truly made under James I, there was abundantly ampler ground for it in the following reign. And yet with what bitter spleen does Heylyn, Laud"s creature, arraign the Parliamentarians for making the same complaint!
Serm. II. Isaiah vii. 14. p. 11.
The fear of giving offence, especially to good men, of whose faith in all essential points we are partakers, may reasonably induce us to be slow and cautious in making up our minds finally on a religious question, and may, and ought to, influence us to submit our conviction to repeated revisals and rehearings. But there may arrive a time of such perfect clearness of view respecting the particular point, as to supersede all fear of man by the higher duty of declaring the whole truth in Jesus. Therefore, having now overpa.s.sed six-sevenths of the ordinary period allotted to human life,--resting my whole and sole hope of salvation and immortality on the divinity of Christ, and the redemption by his cross and pa.s.sion, and holding the doctrine of the Triune G.o.d as the very ground and foundation of the Gospel faith,--I feel myself enforced by conscience to declare and avow, that, in my deliberate judgment, the "Christopaedia" prefixed to the third Gospel and concorporated with the first, but, according to my belief, in its present form the latest of the four, was unknown to, or not recognized by, the Apostles Paul and John; and that, instead of supporting the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Filial G.o.dhead of the Incarnate Word, as set forth by John i 1, and by Paul, it, if not altogether irreconcilable with this faith, doth yet greatly weaken and bedim its evidence; and that, by the too palpable contradictions between the narrative in the first Gospel and that in the third, it has been a fruitful magazine of doubts respecting the historic character of the Gospels themselves. I have read most of the criticisms on this text, and my impression is, that no learned Jew can be expected to receive the common interpretation as the true primary sense of the words. The severely literal Aquila renders the Hebrew word [Greek: neanis]. But were it asked of me: Do you then believe our Lord to have been the Son of Mary by Joseph? I reply: It is a point of religion with me to have no belief one way or the other. I am in this way like St. Paul, more than content not to know Christ himself [Greek: kata sarka]. It is enough for me to know that the Son of G.o.d "became flesh", [Greek: sarx egeneto genomenos ek gynaiks] [4] and more than this, it appears to me, was unknown to the Apostles, or, if known, not taught by them as appertaining to a saving faith in Christ.
October 1831.
Note the affinity in sound of "son" and "sun", "Sohn" and "Sonne", which is not confined to the Saxon and German, or the Gothic dialects generally. And observe "conciliare versohnen=confiliare, facere esse c.u.m filio", one with the Son.
Ib. p. 17. B.
It is a singular testimony, how acceptable to G.o.d that state of virginity is. He does not dishonor physic that magnifies health; nor does he dishonor marriage, that praises virginity; let them embrace that state that can, &c.
One of the sad relics of Patristic super-moralization, aggravated by Papal ambition, which clung to too many divines, especially to those of the second or third generation after Luther. Luther himself was too spiritual, of too heroic faith, to be thus blinded by the declamations of the Fathers, whom, with the exception of Augustine, he held in very low esteem.
Ib. D.
And Helvidius said, she had children after.
"Annon Scriptura ipsa"? And a "heresy," too! I think I might safely put the question to any serious, spiritual-minded, Christian: What one inference tending to edification, in the discipline of will, mind, or affections, he can draw from the speculations of the last two or three pages of this Sermon respecting Mary"s pregnancy and parturition?
_Can_--I write it emphatically--_can_ such points appertain to our faith as Christians, which every parent would decline speaking of before a family, and which, if the questions were propounded by another in the presence of my daughter, aye, or even of my, no less, in mind and imagination, innocent wife, I should resent as an indecency?
Serm. III. Gal. iv. 4, 5. p. 20.
"G.o.d sent forth his Son made of a woman".
I never can admit that [Greek: genomenon] and [Greek: egeneto] in St.
Paul and St. John are adequately, or even rightly, rendered by the English "made."
Ib. p. 21, A.
What miserable revolutions and changes, what downfalls, what break-necks and precipitations may we justly think ourselves ordained to, if we consider, that in our coming into this world out of our mothers" womb, we do not make account that a child comes right, except it come with the head forward, and thereby prefigure that headlong falling into calamities which it must suffer after?
The taste for these forced and fantastic a.n.a.logies, Donne, with the greater number of the learned prelatic divines from James I. to the Restoration, acquired from that too great partiality for the Fathers, from Irenaeus to Bernard, by which they sought to distinguish themselves from the Puritans.
Ib. C.
That now they (the Jews,) express a kind of conditional acknowledgment of it, by this barbarous and inhuman custom of theirs, that they always keep in readiness the blood of some Christian, with which they anoint the body of any that dies amongst them, with these words; "If Jesus Christ were the Messias, then may the blood of this Christian avail thee to salvation!"
Is it possible that Donne could have given credit to this absurd legend!
It was, I am aware, not an age of critical "ac.u.men"; grit, bran, and flour, were swallowed in the unsifted ma.s.s of their erudition. Still that a man like Donne should have imposed on himself such a set of idle tales, as he has collected in the next paragraph for facts of history, is scarcely credible; that he should have attempted to impose them on others, is most melancholy.
Ib. p. 22. D. E.