in these words.
[←473]
Anaxagoras, a philosopher of Clazomenae, the preceptor of Socrates, among many other paradoxes, is said to have insisted that ‘snow was black, because it is made of water.’
[←474]
Quis non… Theologus. If a man’s own whimsies, without search or proof, are to be protruded as doctrines and interpretations of Scripture, then we have but to open the book and consult our fancy, and straightway we may dub ourselves divines.
[←475]
Quos diluit. Dil. properly ‘lavando aufero, as the water washes the sides of the canal, or the heavy rain washes away the labours of the husbandman: hence it is transferred to the removal of filth from any substance; and particularly, in a forensic sense, to the purging of a charge. ‘Diluere crimen est purgare refellere, criminibus respondendo et accusationes refutando.’ ‘Si nollem ita diluere crimen, ut dilui.’ — Cic. pro Milon.
[←476]
An unsupported dogmatic assertion.
[←477]
Isa 63.17. Our authorized version reads it as a question, “O Lord, why have You made us to err,” etc.
[←478]
Perdidit. ‘Apolluw, apoballw, destruo, everto, deperdo, Si vocem spectes, est a per et do; si notionem, a perqw, vasto, esse videtur.’ There is a miraculous peculiarity in Israel’s case as a nation: perishing, he does not perish; destroyed, he is still preserved. I therefore hesitated to render perd. according to its natural and proper meaning; and was disposed to adopt ‘give up,’ ‘abandon,’ ‘cast off,’ or ‘scatter.’ This would not, it seems, have been incongruous with its essential meaning. But why would Luther have used this term in preference to the others? Has their dispersion not in fact been their destruction as a state, city, and nation?
[←479]
Induration: any pathological hardening or thickening of tissue. Here, a hardening of the heart.
[←480]
Benefacit. tolerat. Benef. “heaps his benefits;” tol. “endures with much long-suffering.”
[←481]
If God hardens by conferring benefits, why is he said to have hardened Pharaoh rather than the children of Israel? If God shows mercy by afflicting, why is he said to have had mercy on Israel in afflicting him, and not on Pharaoh?
[←482]
Luther admits that there is a different effect produced in different characters; the good profit by both good and evil; some use, and others abuse, both kindness and wrath. But the question here is, what character will we assign to God’s dispensations of judgment and of mercy as falling generally upon men; upon good and evil intermixed: cum simul de bonis et malis loquimur? The result will be that God’s mercy is anger; and his anger is mercy. — The truth is, God does harden by mercies as well as judgments; and he does soften by judgments, as well as by mercies. But both the hardening and the softening are distinct from the dispensations which are made the instrument of producing them. It is a variety in the spirit which meets with them, and upon which they act, which causes variety in the result.
[←483]
Permovetur — ‘Valdè movetur;’ what goes through the substance and disturbs it throughout; not merely stirs the surface and margin.
[←484]
Remittit peccatum. So far as withdrawing present judgment may be taken as a sign of forgiveness: but was his sin blotted out? — any one of the sins which had instrumentally provoked the visitation?
[←485]
Autor et culpa.
[←486]
Volendo voluntate illá imperscrutabili. See above, Part iii. Sect. 28. notes t v x .
[←487]
Luther’s drift is, ‘There must be a will of God distinct from that which he has revealed for the regulation of man’s conduct: what he calls the inscrutable will, or will of the hidden God. My quarrel against him is that he does not show the connection and coincidence between these two wills; and he does not show a reason for this apparently harsh conduct. See, as before.
[←488]
Tempestate pluviae liquefaciente.
[←489]
Cujus numine omnia temerè fiunt. Chance is the God.
[←490]
For Zeus went yesterday to Oceanus, to the blameless Ethiopians for a feast, and all the gods followed with him; but on the twelfth day he will come back again to Olympus. — ILIAD, A. 423-425.
[←491]
Aristotle, the disciple and opponent of Plato, the tutor of Alexander, the great master of rhetoric, belles lettres, logic, physics, metaphysics, and heathen ethics, was little better in theology than an Epicurean; one of those who have learned that the Gods spend a life without care. (Hor. 1. Sat. v. 101.) It is said in excuse for the less explicit parts of his system, that he attached himself to the principles of natural philosophy, rather than those of theology. He maintained the existence of a God as the great mover of all things which have been put into motion from eternity, and will continue in motion to eternity. Thus he maintained the eternity of matter as well as of God. He painted this God finely: — ‘the necessary being;’ ‘the first, and the most excellent of beings;’ ‘immutable, intelligent, indivisible, without extension;’ ‘He resides above the enclosure of the world;’ ‘There He finds his happiness in the contemplation of himself.’ — How apt is the expression by which Luther describes him as painting God! (pinxit) a rhetorical term applied to that sort of discourse ‘which is embellished with tropes and figures, which display much genius, but charm by their sweetness, rather than edify by their intelligence.’ \ Aristotle’s God, then, is one who keeps order in the heavens, but interferes in a very limited degree with earth.
‘All the movements of nature are in some sort subordinated to him; He appears to be the cause and principle of every thing; He appears to take some care of human affairs. But, in all the universe, He can look upon nothing but Himself; the sight of crime and of disorder would defile his eyes. He could not know how to be the author either of the prosperity of the wicked, or of the misery of the good. His superintendence is like that of the master of a family, who has established a certain order of things in his household, and takes care that the end which he has in view be accomplished, but shuts his eyes to their divisions and their vices, and only takes care to obviate the consequences of them. He stamped the impress of his will upon the universe when first he projected it like a bail from his hand; and it is by a general, not minute, superintendence, that he sustains it. The perpetuation of the several species of beings is his grand object: which he secured by his one first impulse.’ (I am indebted to the Abbé Barthelemi’s Anacharsis for this concise but eloquent view of Aristotle’s Theology, vol. v. chap. Ixiv.)
Has Luther calumniated this philosopher? Yet this heathen teacher was made the great model for instruction to the Christian church, both as to form and substance, for many ages. During the second period of the reign of the schoolmen, which began early in the thirteenth century, his reputation was at its height: the most renowned doctors wrote elaborate commentaries upon his works. The predominance of his philosophy — ‘a philosophy, which knew nothing of original sin and native depravity; which allowed nothing to be criminal except certain external flagitious actions; and which was unacquainted with any righteousness of grace, imputed to a sinner’ — was itself a corruption, and the fruitful source of other corruptions which cried aloud for reformation, and which THE REFORMERS of the sixteenth century exposed and suppressed. (See Miln. Eccles. Hist. vol. iv. p. 283.)
[←492]
Correptione. The word has occurred several times before, and I have rendered it by ‘correction,’ ‘chastening,’ ‘severity.’ It properly denotes hastily snatching up a substance, and is sometimes applied to the seizure of the body by disease. Hence, it is transferred to a figurative cutting short; “At that time the Lord began to cut Israel short” (2Kng 10.23); and so, to ‘reprehension, chiding and chastisement’ in general.
[←493]
Sap. vol. praesentiá elig, discern, inspir. omissá.
[←494]
Simpliciter, as opposed to figuratively. See Sect. 3. note q .
[←495]
The Manichees, so-called from Manes their founder, arose in the reign of the Emperor Probus, A. D. 277.
‘Like most of the ancient heretics, they abounded in senseless whims, not worthy of any solicitous explanation. This they had in common with the Pagan philosophers, that they supposed the Supreme Being to be material, and to penetrate all nature. Their grand peculiarity was to admit two independent principles, a good and an evil one, in order to solve the arduous question concerning the origin of evil.’
‘Like all heretics, they made a great parade of seeking truth with liberal impartiality, and were thus qualified to deceive unwary spirits who, far from suspecting their own imbecility of judgment, and regardless of the word of God and hearty prayer, have no idea of attaining religious knowledge by any other method than by natural reason. Like all other heretics, they could not stand before the Scriptures. They professedly rejected the Old Testament as belonging to the malignant principle; and when they were pressed with the authority of the New, as corroborating the Old, they pretended the New was adulterated. — Is there any new thing under the sun? Did not Lord Bolingbroke set up the authority of St. John against St. Paul? Have we not heard of some parts of the Gospel as not genuine because they do not suit Socinian views? Genuine Christian principles alone will bear the test, and not fear the scrutiny of the whole word of God.’
Augustine, who lived about a century after they had first arisen, describes them to the life, after having himself smarted under the poison of their arrows for about twelve years — seduced partly by their subtile and captious questions concerning the origin of evil, partly by their blasphemies