Chapter IV: Preface (4)

There is an absurdity in the notion of a finite divided from, and superaddible to, the infinite,--of a particular 'quantum' of power separated from, not included in, omnipotence, or all-power. But, alas! we too generally use the terms that are meant to express the absolute, as mere comparatives taken superlatively. In one thing only are we permitted and bound to assert a diversity, namely, in God and 'Hades', the good and the evil will. This awful mystery, this truth, at once certain and incomprehensible, is at the bottom of all religion; and to exhibit this truth free from the dark phantom of the Manicheans, or the two co-eternal and co-ordinate principles of good and evil, is the glory of the Christian religion.

But this mysterious dividuity of the good and the evil will, the will of the spirit and the will of the flesh, must not be carried beyond the terms 'good' and 'evil.' There can be but one good will--the spirit in all;--and even so, all evil wills are one evil will, the devil or evil spirit. But then the One exists for us as finite intelligences, necessarily in a two-fold relation, universal and particular. The same Spirit within us pleads to the Spirit as without us; and in like manner is every evil mind in communion with the evil spirit. But, O comfort! the good alone is the actual, the evil essentially potential. Hence the devil is most appropriately named the 'tempter,' and the evil hath its essence in the will: it cannot pass out of it. Deeds are called evil in reference to the individual will expressed in them; but in the great scheme of Providence they are, only as far as they are good, coerced under the conditions of all true being; and the devil is the drudge of the All-good.

Serm. IV. Luke ii. 29, 30. p. 29. Ib. p. 30. B.

We shall consider that that preparation, and disposition, and
acquiescence, which Simeon had in his epiphany, in his visible seeing
of Christ then, is offered to us in this epiphany, in this
manifestation and application of Christ in the sacrament; and that
therefore every penitent, and devout, and reverent, and worthy
receiver hath had in that holy action his 'now'; there are all things
accomplished to him; and his 'for, for his eyes have seen his
salvation'; and so may be content, nay glad, 'to depart in peace'.

O! would that Donne, or rather that Luther before him, had carried out this just conception to its legitimate consequences;--that as the sacrament of the Eucharist is the epiphany for as many as receive it in faith, so the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ himself in the flesh, were the epiphanies, the sacramental acts and 'phænomena' of the 'Deus patiens', the visible words of the invisible Word that was in the beginning, symbols in time and historic fact of the redemptive functions, passions, and procedures of the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world;--the incarnation, cross, and passion,--in short, the whole life of Christ in the flesh, dwelling a man among men, being essential and substantive parts of the process, the total of which they represented; and on this account proper symbols of the acts and passions of the Christ dwelling in man, as the Spirit of truth, and for as many as in faith have received him, in Seth and Abraham no less effectually than in John and Paul! For this is the true definition of a symbol, as distinguished from the thing, on the one hand, and from a mere metaphor, or conventional exponent of a thing, on the other. Had Luther mastered this great idea, this master-truth, he would never have entangled himself in that most mischievous Sacramentary controversy, or had to seek a murky hiding-hole in the figment of Consubstantiation.

Ib. B. C.

In the first part, then ... More he asks not, less he takes not for
any man, upon any pretence of any unconditional decree.

A beautiful paragraph, well worth extracting, aye, and re-preaching.

Ib. p. 34. E.

When thou comest to this seal of thy peace, the sacrament, pray that
God will give thee that light that may direct and establish thee in
necessary and fundamental things; that is, the light of faith to see
that the Body and Blood of Christ is applied to thee in that action;
but for the manner, how the Body and Blood of Christ is there, wait
his leisure, if he have not yet manifested that to thee: grieve not at
that, wonder not at that, press not for that; for he hath not
manifested that, not the way, not the manner of his presence in the
Sacrament to the Church.

O! I have ever felt, and for many years thought that this 'rem credimus, modum nescimus,' is but a poor evasion. It seems to me an attempt so to admit an irrational proposition as to have the credit of denying it, or to separate an irrational proposition from its irrationality. I admit 2 + 2 = 5; how I do not pretend to know, but in some way not in contradiction to the multiplication table. To spiritual operations the very term 'mode' is perhaps inapplicable, for these are immediate. To the linking of this with that, of A. with Z. by 'intermedia,' the term 'mode,'--the question 'how?' is properly applied. The assimilation of the spirit of a man to the Son of God, to God as the Divine Humanity,--this spiritual transubstantiation, like every other process of operative grace, is necessarily modeless. The whole question is concerning the transmutation of the sensible elements. Deny this, and to what does the 'modum nescimus' refer? We cannot ask how that is done, which we declare not done at all. Admit this transmutation, and you necessarily admit by implication the Romish dogma, of the separation of a sensible thing from the sensible accidents which constitute all we ever meant by the thing. To rationalize this figment of his church, Bossuet has recourse to Spinosism, and dares make God the substance and sole 'ens reale' of all body, and by this very 'hypothesis' baffles his own end, and does away all miracle in the particular instance.

Ib. p. 35. B.

When I pray in my chamber, I build a temple there that hour; and that
minute, when I cast out a prayer in the street, I build a temple
there; and when my soul prays without any voice, my very body is then
a temple.

Good; but it would be better to regard solitary, family, and templar devotion as distinctions in sort, rather than differences in degree. All three are necessary.

Ib. E.

And that more fearful occasion of coming, when they came only to elude
the law, and proceeding in their treacherous and traitorous religion
in their heart, and yet communicating with us, draw God himself into
their conspiracies; and to mock us, make a mock of God, and his
religion too.

What, then, was their guilt, who by terror and legal penalties tempted their fellow Christians to this treacherous mockery? Donne should have asked himself that question.

Serm. V. Exod. iv. 13. p. 39.

Ib. p. 39. C. D.

It hath been doubted, and disputed, and denied too, that this text,
'O my Lord, send I pray thee by the hand of him whom thou wilt
send', hath any relation to the sending of the Messiah, to the
coming of Christ, to Christmas day; yet we forbear not to wait upon
the ancient Fathers, and as they said, to say, that Moses 'at
last' determines all in this, 'O my Lord', &c. It is a work,
next to the great work of the redemption of the whole world, to redeem
Israel out of Egypt; and therefore do both works at once, put both
into one hand, and 'mitte quem missurus es, Send him whom I know
thou wilt send'; him, whom, pursuing thine own decree, 'thou
shouldest send'; send Christ, send him now, to redeem Israel from
Egypt.

This is one of the happier accommodations of the 'gnosis', that is, the science of detecting the mysteries of faith in the simplest texts of the Old Testament history, to the contempt or neglect of the literal and contextual sense. It was, I conceive, in part at least, this 'gnosis', and not knowledge, as our translation has it, that St. Paul warns against, and most wisely, as puffing up, inflating the heart with self-conceit, and the head with idle fancies.

Ib. E.

But as a thoughtful man, a pensive, a considerative man, that stands
still for a while with his eyes fixed upon the ground before his feet,
when he casts up his head, hath presently, instantly the sun or the
heavens for his object; he sees not a tree, nor a house, nor a steeple
by the way, but as soon as his eye is departed from the earth where it
was long fixed, the next thing he sees is the sun or the heavens;--so
when Moses had fixed himself long upon the consideration of his own
insufficiency for this service, when he took his eye from that low
piece of ground, himself, considered as he was then, he fell upon no
tree, no house, no steeple, no such consideration as this--God may
endow me, improve me, exalt me, enable me, qualify me with faculties
fit for this service, but his first object was that which presented an
infallibility with it, Christ Jesus himself, the Messias himself, &c.

Beautifully imagined, and happily applied.

Ib. p. 40. B.

That 'germen Jehovæ', as the prophet Esay calls Christ, that offspring
of Jehova, that bud, that blossom, that fruit of God himself, the Son
of God, the Messiah, the Redeemer, Christ Jesus, grows upon every tree
in this paradise, the Scripture; for Christ was the occasion before,
and is the consummation after, of all Scripture.

If this were meant to the exclusion or neglect of the primary sense,--if we are required to believe that the sacred writers themselves had such thoughts present to their minds,--it would, doubtless, throw the doors wide open to every variety of folly and fanaticism. But it may admit of a safe, sound, and profitable use, if we consider the Bible as one work, intended by the Holy Spirit for the edification of the Church in all ages, and having, as such, all its parts synoptically interpreted, the eldest by the latest, the last by the first, and the middle by both. Moses, or David, or Jeremiah (we might in this view affirm) meant so and so, according to the context, and the light under which, and the immediate or proximate purposes for which, he wrote: but we, who command the whole scheme of the great dispensation, may see a higher and deeper sense, of which the literal meaning was a symbol or type; and this we may justifiably call the sense of the spirit.

Ib. p. 41. B.

So in our liturgy 'we stand up at the profession of the creed'
thereby to declare to God and his Church our readiness to stand to,
and our readiness to proceed in, that profession.

Another Church might sit down, thereby denoting a resolve to abide in this profession. These things are indifferent; but charity, love of peace, and on indifferent points to prefer another's liking to our own, and to observe an order once established for order's sake,--these are not indifferent.

Ib. p. 42. C.

This paragraph is excellent. Alas! how painfully applicable it is to some of our day!

Ib. p. 46. C.

Howsoever all intend that this is a name that denotes essence, being:
Being is the name of God, and of God only.

Rather, I should say, 'the eternal antecedent of being;' 'I that shall be in that I will to be'; the absolute will; the ground of being; the self-affirming 'actus purissimus'.

Serm. VI. Isaiah liii. 1. p. 52.

A noble sermon in thought and diction.

Ib. p. 59. E.

Therefore we have a clearer light than this; 'firmiorem propheticum
sermonem', says St. Peter; 'we have a more sure word of the prophets';
that is, as St. Augustine reads that place, 'clariorem', a more
manifest, a more evident, declaration in the prophets, than in nature,
of the will of God towards man, &c.

The sense of this text, as explained by the context, seems to me this;--that, in consequence of the fulfilment of so large a proportion of the oracles, the Christian Church has not only the additional light given by the teaching and miracles of Christ, but even the light vouchsafed to the old Church (the prophetic) stronger and clearer.

Ib. p. 60. A.

He spake personally, and he spake aloud, in the declaration of
miracles; but 'quis credidit auditui Filii?' Who believed even his
report? Did they not call his preaching sedition, and call his
miracles conjuring? Therefore, we have a clearer, that is, a nearer
light than the written Gospel, that is, the Church.

True; yet he who should now venture to assert this truth, or even contend for a co-ordinateness of the Church and the Written Word, must bear to be thought a semi-Papist, an 'ultra' high-Churchman. Still the truth is the truth.

Serm. VII. John x. 10. p. 62.

Since the Revolution in 1688 our Church has been chilled and starved too generally by preachers and reasoners Stoic or Epicurean;--first, a sort of pagan morality was substituted for the righteousness by faith, and latterly, prudence or Paleyanism has been substituted even for morality. A Christian preacher ought to preach Christ alone, and all things in him and by him. If he find a dearth in this, if it seem to him a circumscription, he does not know Christ, as the 'pleroma', the fullness. It is not possible that there should be aught true, or seemly, or beautiful, in thought, will, or deed, speculative or practical, which may not, and which ought not to, be evolved out of Christ and the faith in Christ;--no folly, no error, no evil to be exposed, or warred against, which may not, and should not, be convicted and denounced from its contrariancy and enmity to Christ. To the Christian preacher Christ should be in all things, and all things in Christ: he should abjure every argument that is not a link in the chain, of which Christ is the staple and staple ring.

Ib. p. 64.

In this page Donne passes into rhetorical extravagance, after the manner of too many of the Fathers from Tertullian to Bernard.

Ib. p. 66. A.

Some of the later authors in the Roman Church ... have noted ('in
several of the Fathers') some inclinations towards that opinion, that
the devil retaining still his faculty of free-will, is therefore
capable of repentance, and so of benefit by this coming of Christ.

If this be assumed,--namely, the free-will of the devil,--as a consequence would indeed follow his capability of repenting, and the possibility that he may repent. But then he is no longer what we mean by the devil; he is no longer the evil spirit, but simply a wicked soul.

Ib. p. 68. C.

As though God had said 'Qui sum', my name is 'I am'; yet in truth it
is 'Qui ero', my name is 'I shall be'.

Nay, 'I will or shall be in that I will to be'. I am that only one who is self-originant, 'causa sui', whose will must be contemplated as antecedent in idea to or deeper than his own co-eternal being. But 'antecedent,' 'deeper,' &c. are mere 'vocabula impropria', words of accommodation, that may suggest the idea to a mind purified from the intrusive phantoms of space and time, but falsify and extinguish the truth, if taken as adequate exponents.

Ib. p. 69. C.

We affirm that it is not only as impious and irreligious a thing, but
as senseless and as absurd a thing, to deny that the Son of God hath
redeemed the world, as to deny that God hath created the world.

A bold but a true saying. The man who, cannot see the redemptive agency in the creation has but a dim apprehension of the creative power.

Ib. D. E. p. 70. A.

These paragraphs exhibit a noble instance of giving importance to the single words of a text, each word by itself a pregnant text. Here, too, lies the excellence, the imitable, but alas! unimitated, excellence of our divines from Elizabeth to William III.

Ib. D.

O, that our clergy did but know and see that their tithes and glebes belong to them as officers and functionaries of the nationalty,--as clerks, and not exclusively as theologians, and not at all as ministers of the Gospel;--but that they are likewise ministers of the Church of Christ, and that their claims and the powers of that Church are no more alienated or affected by their being at the same time the established clergy, than they are by the common coincidence of being justices of the peace, or heirs to an estate, or stockholders! [6] The Romish divines placed the Church above the Scriptures; our present divines give it no place at all.

But Donne and his great contemporaries had not yet learnt to be afraid of announcing and enforcing the claims of the Church, distinct from, and coordinate with, the Scriptures. This is one evil consequence, though most un-necessarily so, of the union of the Church of Christ with the national Church, and of the claims of the Christian pastor and preacher with the legal and constitutional rights and revenues of the officers of the national clerisy. Our clergymen in thinking of their legal rights, forget those rights of theirs which depend on no human law at all.

Ib. p. 71. A.

This is the difference between God's mercy and his judgments, that
sometimes his judgments may he plural, complicated, enwrapped in one
another; but his mercies are always so, and cannot be otherwise.

A just sentiment beautifully expressed.

Ib. C.

Whereas the Christian religion is, as Gregory Nazianzen says,
'simplex et nuda, nisi prave in artem difficillimam
converteretur': it is a plain, an easy, a perspicuous truth.

A religion of ideas, spiritual truths, or truth-powers,--not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding,--is therefore 'simplex et nuda', that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the 'simplex et nuda' of Gregory be perverted to the Socinian, 'plain and easy for the meanest understandings!' The truth in Christ, like the peace of Christ, passeth all understanding. If ever there was a mischievous misuse of words, the confusion of the terms, 'reason' and 'understanding,' 'ideas' and 'notions,' or 'conceptions,' is most mischievous; a Surinam toad with a swarm of toadlings sprouting out of its back and sides.

Serm. VIII. Mat. v. 16. p. 77.

Ib. C.

Either of the names of this day were text enough for a sermon,
Purification or Candlemas. Join we them together, and raise we only
this one note from both, that all true purification is in the light,
&c.

The illustration of the name of the day contained in the first two or three paragraphs of this sermon would be censured as quaint by our modern critics. Would to heaven we had but even a few preachers capable of such quaintnesses!

Ib. D.

Every good work hath faith for the root; but every faith hath not good
works for the fruit thereof.

Faith, that is, fidelity--the fealty of the finite will and understanding to the reason, 'the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world', as one with, and representative of, the absolute will, and to the ideas or truths of the pure reason, the supersensuous truths, which in relation to the finite will, and as meant to determine the will, are moral laws, the voice and dictates of the conscience;--this faith is properly a state and disposition of the will, or rather of the whole man, the I, or finite will, self-affirmed. It is therefore the ground, the root, of which the actions, the works, the believings, as acts of the will in the understanding, are the trunk and the branches. But these must be in the light. The disposition to see must have organs, objects, direction, and an outward light. The three latter of these our Lord gives to his disciples in this blessed sermon on the Mount, preparatorily, and, as Donne rightly goes on to observe, presupposing faith as the ground and root. Indeed the whole of this and the next page affords a noble specimen, how a minister of the Church of England should preach the doctrine of good works, purified from the poison of the practical Romish doctrine of works, as the mandioc is evenomated by fire, and rendered safe, nutritious, a bread of life. To Donne's exposition the heroic Solifidian, Martin Luther himself, would have subscribed, hand and heart.

Ib. p. 78. C.

And therefore our latter men of the Reformation are not to be blamed,
who for the most, pursuing St. Cyril's interpretation, interpret this
universal 'light that lighteneth every man' to be the light of
nature.

The error here, and it is a grievous error, consists in the word 'nature.' There is, there can be, no light of nature: there may be a light in or upon nature; but this is the light that shineth down into the darkness, that is, the nature, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. All ideas, or spiritual truths, are supernatural.

Ib. p. 79.

Throughout this page, Donne rather too much plays the rhetorician. If the faith worketh the works, what is true of the former must be equally affirmed of the latter;--'causa causæ causa causati'. Besides, he falls into something like a confusion of faith with belief, taken as a conviction or assent of the judgment. The faith and the righteousness of a Christian are both alike his, and not his--the faith of Christ in him, the righteousness in and for him. 'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet, not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me'. [7]

Donne was a truly great man; but, after all, he did not possess that full, steady, deep, and yet comprehensive, insight into the nature of faith and works which was vouchsafed to Martin Luther. Donne had not attained to the reconciling of distinctity with unity,--ours, yet God's; God's, yet ours.

Ib. D.

'Velle et nolle nostrum est', to assent, or to dis-assent, is our own.

Is not this, even with the saving afterwards, too nakedly expressed?

Ib.

And certainly our works are more ours than our faith is; and man
concurs otherwise in the acting and perpetration of a good work, than
he doth in the reception and admission of faith.

Why? Because Donne confounds the act of faith with the assent of the fancy and understanding to certain words and conceptions. Indeed, with all my reverence for Dr. Donne, I must warn against the contents of this page, as scarcely tenable in logic, unsound in metaphysics, and unsafe, slippery divinity; and principally in that he confounds faith-- essentially an act, the fundamental work of the Spirit--with belief, which is then only good when it is the effect and accompaniment of faith.

Ib. p. 80. D.

Because things good in their institution may he depraved in their
practice--'ergone nihil ceremoniarum rudioribus dabitur, ad juvandam
eorum imperitiam?'

Some ceremonies may be for the conservation of order and civility, or to prevent confusion and unseemliness; others are the natural or conventional language of our feelings, as bending the knees, or bowing the head; and to neither of these two sorts do I object. But as to the 'adjuvandam rudiorum imperitiam', I protest against all such ceremonies, and the pretexts for them, 'in toto'. What? Can any ceremony be more instructive than the words required to explain the ceremony? I make but two exceptions, and those where the truths signified are so vital, so momentous, that the very occasion and necessity of explaining the sign are of the highest spiritual value. Yet, alas! to what gross and calamitous superstitions have not even the visible signs in Baptism and the Eucharist given occasion!

Ib. p. 81. E.

Blessed St. Augustine reports, (if that epistle be St. Augustine's)
that when himself was writing to St. Hierome, to know his opinion of
the measure and quality of the joy and glory of heaven, suddenly in
his chamber there appeared 'ineffabile lumen', says he, an
unspeakable, an unexpressible light, ... and out of that light issued
this voice, 'Hieronymi anima sum', &c.

The grave recital of this ridiculous legend is one instance of what I have called the Patristic leaven in Donne, who assuredly had no belief himself in the authenticity of this letter. But yet it served a purpose. As to Master Conradus, just above, who could read at night by the light at his fingers' ends, he must of course have very recently been shaking hands with Lucifer.

Ib. p. 83. D.

Eve's recognition upon the birth of her first son, 'Cain I have
gotten, I possess a man from the Lord.'

'I have gotten the Jehovah-man', is, I believe, the true rendering and sense of the Hebrew words. Eve, full of the promise, supposed her first-born, the first-born on earth, to be the promised deliverer.

Ib. p. 84. D. E.
Serm. IX. Rom. xiii. 7. p. 86,
Admirable passages. Ib. p. 90. A.

That soul that is accustomed, &c.

Ib. p. 94. A. B.

Serm. XII. Mat. v. 2. p. 112. Ib. B. C. D.

The disposition of our Church divines, under James I, to bring back the stream of the Reformation to the channel and within the banks formed in the first six centuries of the Church, and their alienation from the great patriarchs of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, and others, who held the Fathers of the 'ante'-Papal Church, with exception of Augustine, in light esteem, this disposition betrays itself here and in many other parts of Donne. For here Donne plays the Jesuit, disguising the truth, that even as early as the third century the Church had begun to Paganize Christianity, under the pretext, and no doubt in the hope, of Christianizing Paganism. The mountain would not go to Mahomet, and therefore Mahomet went to the mountain.

Ib. p. 115. A.

An excellent passage.

Ib. p. 117. E.

And therefore when the prophet says, 'Quis sapiens, et intelliget hæc?
Who is so wise as to find out this way'? he places this cleanness
which we inquire after in wisdom. What is wisdom?

The primitive Church appropriated the name to the third 'hypostasis' of the Trinity; hence 'Sancta Sophia' became the distinctive name of the Holy Ghost; and the temple at Constantinople, dedicated by Justinian to the Holy Ghost, is called the Church--alas! now the mosque--of Santa Sophia. Now this suggests, or rather implies, a far better and more precise definition of wisdom than Donne's. The distinctive title of the Father, as the Supreme Will, is the Good; that of the only-begotten Word, as the Supreme Reason, ('Ens Realissimum', [Greek: Ho_O N], the Being) is the True; and the Spirit proceeding from the Good through the True is the Wisdom. Goodness in the form of truth is wisdom. Wisdom is the pure will, realizing itself intelligently, or the good manifesting itself as the truth, and realized in the act. Wisdom, life, love, beauty, the beauty of holiness, are all 'synonyma' of the Holy Spirit.

6, December, 1831.

Ib. p. 121. A.

The Arians' opinion, that God the Father only was invisible, but the
Son 'and the Holy Ghost' might be seen.

Here we have an instance, one of many, of the inconveniences and contradictions that arise out of the assumed contrary essences of body and soul; both substances, and independent of each other, yet so absolutely diverse as that the one is to be defined by the negation of the other.

Serm. XIII. Job xvi. 17, 18, 19. p. 127. Ib. p. 129. A. B. C. Ib. pp. 134. 135.

Truly excellent.

Serm. XV. 1 Cor. xv. 26. p. 144. Ib. D.

Who, then, is this enemy? an enemy that may thus far think himself
equal to God, that as no man ever saw God, and lived; so no man ever
saw this enemy, and lived; for it is death.

This borders rather too closely on the Irish Franciscan's conclusion to his sermon of thanksgiving: "Above all, brethren, let us thankfully laud and extol God's transcendant mercy in putting death at the end of life, and thereby giving us all time for repentance!"

Dr. Donne was an eminently witty man in a very witty age; but to the honour of his judgment let it be said, that though his great wit is evinced in numberless passages, in a few only is it shown off. This paragraph is one of those rare exceptions.

N. B. Nothing in Scripture, nothing in reason, commands or authorizes us to assume or suppose any bodiless creature. It is the incommunicable attribute of God. But all bodies are not flesh, nor need we suppose that all bodies are corruptible. 'There are bodies celestial'. In the three following paragraphs of this sermon, we trace wild fantastic positions grounded on the arbitrary notion of man as a mixture of heterogeneous components, which Des Cartes shortly afterwards carried into its extremes. On this doctrine the man is a mere phenomenal result, a sort of brandy-sop or toddy-punch. It is a doctrine unsanctioned by, and indeed inconsistent with, the Scriptures. It is not true that body 'plus' soul makes man. Man is not the 'syntheton' or composition of body and soul, as the two component units. No; man is the unit, the 'prothesis', and body and soul are the two poles, the positive and negative, the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' of the man; even as attraction and repulsion are the two poles in and by which one and the same magnet manifests itself.

Ib. p. 146. B.

For it is not so great a depopulation to translate a city from
merchants to husbandmen, from shops to ploughs, as it is from many
husbandmen to one shepherd; and yet that hath been often done.

For example, in the Highlands of Scotland in our own day.

Ib. p. 148. A.

The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell
me how high or how large that was. It tells me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust
of great persons' graves is speechless too, it says nothing, it
distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst
not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not, look upon, will trouble
thine eyes, if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath
blown the dust of the churchyard unto the church, and the man sweeps
out the dust of the church into the church-yard, who will undertake to
sift those dusts again, and to pronounce;--this is the patrician, this
is the noble, flour, and this the yeomanly, this the plebeian, bran.
[8]

Very beautiful indeed.

Ib. p. 149. C.

But when I lie under the hands of that enemy, that hath reserved
himself to the last, to my last bed; then when I shall be able to stir
no limb in any other measure than a fever or a palsy shall shake them;
when everlasting darkness shall have an inchoation in the present
dimness of mine eyes, and the everlasting gnashing in the present
chattering of my teeth, and the everlasting worm in the present
gnawing of the agonies of my body and anguishes of my mind; when the
last enemy shall watch my remediless body, and my disconsolate soul
there,--there, where not the physician in his way, perchance not the
priest in his, shall be able to give any assistance; and when he hath
sported himself with my misery, &c.

This is powerful; but is too much in the style of the monkish preachers: 'Papam redolet'. Contrast with this Job's description of death, [9] and St. Paul's 'sleep in the Lord'.

Ib. p. 150. A.

Neither doth Calvin carry those emphatical words which are so often
cited for a proof of the last resurrection,--'that he knows his
Redeemer lives, that he knows he shall stand the last man upon earth,
that though his body be destroyed, yet in his flesh and with his eyes
shall he see God'--to any higher sense than so, that how low soever he
be brought, to what desperate state soever he be reduced in the eyes
of the world, yet he assures himself of a resurrection, a reparation,
a restitution to his former bodily health, and worldly fortune which
he had before. And such a resurrection we all know Job had.

I incline to Calvin's opinion, but am not decided. 'After my skin', must be rendered 'according to, or as far as my skin is concerned.' 'Though the flies and maggots in my ulcers have destroyed my skin, yet still, and in my flesh, I shall see God as my Redeemer'. Now St. Paul says, that flesh and blood cannot ([Greek: sàrx kaì aima--ou dynantai]) inherit the kingdom of heaven, that is, the spiritual world. Besides how is the passage, as commonly interpreted, consistent with the numerous expressions of doubt and even of despondency in Job's speeches? [10]

Ib. B. C. (Ezekiel's vision xxxvii.)

I cannot but think that Dr. Donne, by thus antedating the distinct belief of the Jews in the resurrection, "which you all know already," destroys in great measure the force and sublimity of this vision. Besides, it does not seem, in the common people at least, to have been much more than a mongrel Egyptian-catacomb sort of faith, or rather superstition.

_In fine_. This is one of Donne's least estimable discourses; the worst sermon on the best text. Yet what a Donne-like passage is this that follows!

P. 146. A.

Let the whole world be in thy consideration as one house; and then
consider in that, in the peaceful harmony of creatures, in the
peaceful succession, and connexion of causes and effects, the peace of
nature. Let this kingdom, where God hath blessed thee with a being, be
the gallery, the best room of that house, and consider in the two
walls of that gallery, the Church and the state, the peace of a royal
and religious wisdom. Let thine own family be a cabinet in this
gallery, and find in all the boxes thereof, in the several duties of
wife and children, and servants, the peace of virtue, and of the
father and mother of all virtues, active discretion, passive
obedience; and then lastly, let thine own bosom be the secret box and
reserve in this cabinet, and then the gallery of the best home that
can be had, peace with the creature, peace in the Church, peace in the
state, peace in thy house, peace in thy heart, is a fair model, and a
lovely design even of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is _visio pacis_,
where there is no object but peace.

Serm. XVI. John xi. 35. p. 153. Ib. C.

The Masorites (the Masorites are the critics upon the Hebrew Bible,
the Old Testament) cannot tell us, who divided the chapters of the Old
Testament into verses: neither can any other tell, who did it in the
New Testament. [11]

How should the Masorites, when the Hebrew Scriptures were not as far as we know divided into verses at all in their time? The Jews seem to have adopted the invention from the Christians, who were led to it in the construction of Concordances.

Ib. p. 154. E.

If they killed Lazarus, had not Christ done enough to let them see
that he could raise him again?

Malice, above all party-malice, is indeed a blind passion, but one can scarcely conceive the chief priests such dolts as to think that Christ could raise Lazarus again. Their malice blinded them as to the nature of the incident, made them suppose a conspiracy between Jesus and the family of Lazarus, a mock burial, in short; and this may be one, though it is not, I think, the principal, reason for this greatest miracle being omitted in the other Gospels.

Ib. p. 155. B.

Christ might ungirt himself, and give more scope and liberty to his
passions than any other man; both because he had no original sin
within to drive him, &c.

How then is he said to have 'condemned sin in the flesh'? Without guilt, without actual sin, assuredly he was; but [Greek: egéneto sàrx], and what can we mean by original sin relatively to the flesh, but that man is born with an animal life and a material organism that render him temptible to evil, and which tends to dispose the life of the will to contradict the light of the reason? Did St. Paul by [Greek: homoi_ómati sarkòs hamartiás] mean a deceptive resemblance? [12]

Ib. D.

I can see no possible edification that can arise from these _ultra_-Scriptural speculations respecting our Lord.

Ib. p. 157. A.

Though the Godhead never departed from the carcase ... yet because the
human soul was departed from it, he was no man.

Donne was a poor metaphysician; that is, he never closely questioned himself as to the absolute meaning of his words. What did he mean by the 'soul?' what by the 'body?' [13]

Ib. D.

And I know that there are authors of a middle nature, above the
philosophers, and below the Scriptures, the Apocryphal books.

A whimsical instance of the disposition in the mind for every pair of opposites to find an intermediate,--a 'mesothesis' for every 'thesis' and 'antithesis'. Thus Scripture may be opposed to philosophy; and then the Apocryphal books will be philosophy relatively to Scripture, and Scripture relatively to philosophy.

Ib. p. 159. B.

And therefore the same author (Epiphanius) says, that because they
thought it an uncomely thing for Christ to weep for any temporal
thing, some men have expunged and removed that verse out of St. Luke's
Gospel, that 'Jesus, when he saw that city, wept'. [14]

This, by the by, rather indiscreetly lets out the liberties, which the early Christians took with their sacred writings. Origen, who, in answer to Celsus's reproach on this ground, confines the practice to the heretics, furnishes proofs of the contrary himself in his own comments.

Ib. p. 161. D.

That world, which finds itself in an authumn in itself, finds itself
in a spring in our imaginations.

Worthy almost of Shakspeare!

Serm. XVII. Matt. xix. 17. p. 163. Ib. E.

The words are part of a dialogue, of a conference, between Christ and
a man who proposed a question to him; to whom Christ makes an answer
by way of another question, 'Why callest thou me good?' &c. In the
words, and by occasion of them, we consider the text, the context, and
the pretext; not as three equal parts of the building; but the
context, as the situation and prospect of the house, the pretext, as
the access and entrance into the house, and then the text itself, as
the house itself, as the body of the building: in a word, in the text
the words; in the context the occasion of the words; in the pretext
the purpose, the disposition of him who gave the occasion.

What a happy example of elegant division of a subject! And so also the 'compendium' of Christianity in the preceding paragraph (D). Our great divines were not ashamed of the learned discipline to which they had submitted their minds under Aristotle and Tully, but brought the purified products as sacrificial gifts to Christ. They baptized the logic and manly rhetoric of ancient Greece.

Ib. p. 164. A. B.

Excellent illustration of fragmentary morality, in which each man takes his choice of his virtues and vices.

Ib. D.

Men perish with whispering sins, nay, with silent sins, sins that
never tell the conscience they are sins, as often as with crying sins.

Yea, I almost doubt whether the truth here so boldly asserted is not of more general necessity for ordinary congregations, than the denunciation of the large sins that cannot remain 'in incognito'.

Ib. p. 165. A.

'Venit procurrens, he came running'. Nicodemus came not so, Nicodemus
durst not avow his coming, and therefore he came creeping, and he came
softly, and he came seldom, and he came by night.

Ah! but we trust in God that he did in fact come. The adhesion, the thankfulness, the love which arise and live after the having come, whether from spontaneous liking, or from a beckoning hope, or from a compelling good, are the truest 'criteria' of the man's Christianity.

Ib. B.

When I have just reason to think my superiors would have it thus, this
is music to my soul; when I hear them say they would have it thus,
this is rhetoric to my soul; when I see their laws enjoin it to be
thus, this is logic to my soul; but when I see them actually, really,
clearly, constantly do thus, this is a demonstration to my soul, and
demonstration is the powerfullest proof. The eloquence of inferiors is
in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action.

A just representation, I doubt not, of the general feeling and principle at the time Donne wrote. Men regarded the gradations of society as God's ordinances, and had the elevation of a self-approving conscience in every feeling and exhibition of respect for those of ranks superior to their own. What a contrast with the present times! Is not the last sentence beautiful? "The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action."

Ib. B. and C.

He came to Christ, he ran to him; and when he was come, as St. Mark
relates it, 'he fell upon his knees to Christ'. He stood not then
Pharisaically upon his own legs, his own merits, though he had been a
diligent observer of the commandments before, &c.

All this paragraph is an independent truth; but I doubt whether in his desire to make every particle exemplary, to draw some Christian moral from it, Donne has not injudiciously attributed, _quasi per prolepsin_, merits inconsistent with the finale of a wealthy would-be proselyte. At all events, a more natural and, perhaps, not less instructive interpretation might be made of the sundry movements of this religiously earnest and zealous admirer of Christ, and worshipper of Mammon. O, I have myself known such!

Ib. D.

He was no ignorant man, and yet he acknowledged that he had somewhat
more to learn of Christ than he knew yet. Blessed are they that
inanimate all their knowledge, consummate all in Christ Jesus, &c.

The whole paragraph is pure gold. Without being aware of this passage in Donne, I expressed the same conviction, or rather declared the same experience, in the appendix [15] to the Statesman's Manual. O! if only one day in a week, Christians would consent to have the Bible as the only book, and their minister's labour to make them find all substantial good of all other books in their Bibles!

Ib. E.

I remember one of the Panegyrics celebrates and magnifies one of the
Roman emperors for this, that he would marry when he was young; that
he would so soon confine and limit his pleasures, so soon determine
his affections in one person.

It is surely some proof of the moral effect which Christianity has produced, that in all Protestant countries, at least, a writer would be ashamed to assign this as a ground of panegyric; as if promiscuous intercourse with those of the other sex had been a natural good, a privilege, which there was a great merit in foregoing! O! what do not women owe to Christianity! As Christians only it is that they do, or ordinarily can, cease to be things for men, instead of co-persons in one spiritual union.

Ib. p. 166. A.

But such is often the corrupt inordinateness of greatness, that it
only carries them so much beyond other men, but not so much nearer to
God.

Like a balloon, away from earth, but not a whit nearer the arch of heaven. There is a praiseworthy relativeness and life in the morality of our best old divines. It is not a cold law in brass or stone; but "this I may and should think of my neighbour, this of a great man," &c.

Ib. p. 167. A.

Christ was pleased to redeem this man from this error, and bring him
to know truly what he was, that he was God. Christ therefore doth not
rebuke this man, by any denying that he himself was good; for Christ
doth assume that addition to himself, 'I am the good shepherd'.
Neither doth God forbid that those good parts which are in men should
be celebrated with condign praise. We see that God, as soon as he saw
that any thing was good, he said so, he uttered it, he declared it,
first of the light, and then of other creatures. God would be no
author, no example of smothering the due praise of good actions. For
surely that man hath no zeal to goodness in himself, that affords no
praise to goodness in other men.

Very fine. But I think another--not, however, a different--view might be taken respecting our Lord's intention in these words. The young noble, who came to him, had many praiseworthy traits of character; but he failed in the ultimate end and aim. What ought only to have been valued by him as means, was loved, and had a worth given to it, as an end in itself. Our Lord, who knew the hearts of men, instantly in the first words applies himself to this, and takes the occasion of an ordinary phrase of courtesy addressed to himself, to make the young man aware of the difference between a mere relative good and that which is absolutely good; that which may be called good, when regarded as a mean to good, but which must not be mistaken for, or confounded with, that which is good, and itself the end.

Ib. B. C. D.

All excellent, and D. most so. Thus, thus our old divines showed the depth of their love and appreciation of the Scriptures, and thus led their congregations to feel and see the same. Here is Donne's authority (_Deus non est ens_, &c.) for what I have so earnestly endeavored to show, that _Deus est ens super ens_, the ground of all being, but therein likewise absolute Being, in that he is the eternal self-affirmant, the I Am in that I Am; and that the key of this mystery is given to us in the pure idea of the will, as the alone _Causa Sui_.

O! compare this manhood of our Church divinity with the feeble dotage of the Paleyan school, the 'natural' theology, or watchmaking scheme, that knows nothing of the maker but what can be proved out of the watch, the unknown nominative case of the verb impersonal _fit--et natura est_; the 'it,' in short, in 'it rains,' 'it snows,' 'it is cold,' and the like. When, after reading the biographies of Walton and his contemporaries, I reflect on the crowded congregations, on the thousands, who with intense interest came to their hour and two hour long sermons, I cannot but doubt the fact of any true progression, moral or intellectual, in the mind of the many. The tone, the matter, the anticipated sympathies in the sermons of an age form the best moral criterion of the character of that age.

Ib. E.

His name of Jehova we admire with a reverence.

Say, rather, Jehova, his name. It is not so properly a name of God, as God the Name,--God's name and God.

Ib. p. 169. A.

Land, and money, and honour must be called goods, though but of
fortune, &c.

We should distinguish between the conditions of our possessing goods and the goods themselves. Health, for instance, is ordinarily a condition of that working and rejoicing for and in God, which are goods in the end, and of themselves. Health, competent fortune, and the like are good as the negations of the preventives of good; as clear glass is good in relation to the light, which it does not exclude. Health and ease without the love of God are plate glass in the darkness.

Ib. p. 170.

Much of this page consists of play on words; as, that which is useful as rain, and that which is of use as rain on a garden after drouth. There is also much sophistry in it. Pain is not necessarily an ultimate evil. As the mean of ultimate good, it may be a relative good; but surely that which makes pain, anguish, heaviness necessary in order to good, must be evil. And so the Scripture determines. They are the _wages of sin_; but God's infinite mercy raises them into sacraments, means of grace. Sin is the only absolute evil; God the only absolute good. But as myriads of things are good relatively through participation of God, so are many things evil as the fruits of evil. What is the apostasy, or fall of spirits? That that which from the essential perfection of the Absolute Good could not but be possible, that is, have a potential being, but never ought to have been actual, did nevertheless strive to be actual?--But this involved an impossibility; and it actualized only its own potentiality.

What is the consequence of the apostasy? That no philosophy is possible of man and nature but by assuming at once a zenith and a nadir, God and 'Hades'; and an ascension from the one through and with a condescension from the other; that is, redemption by prevenient and then auxiliary grace.

Ib. p. 171. B.

So says St. Augustine, 'Audeo dicere', though it be boldly said, yet I
must say it, 'utile esse cadere in aliquod manifestum peccatum', &c.

No doubt, a sound sense may be forced into these words: but why use words, into which a sound sense must be forced? Besides, the subject is too deep and too subtle for a sermon. In the two following paragraphs, especially, Dr. Donne is too deep, and not deep enough. He treads waters, and dangerous waters. N. B. The Familists.

Serm. XVIII. Acts, ii. 36. p. 175. Ib. B.

I would paraphrase, or rather lead the way to this text, something as follows:--

Truth is a common interest; it is every man's duty to convey it to his brother, if only it be a truth that concerns or may profit him, and he be competent to receive it. For we are not bound to say the truth, where we know that we cannot convey it, but very probably may impart a falsehood instead; no falsehoods being more dangerous than truths misunderstood, nay, the most mischievous errors on record having been half-truths taken as the whole.

But let it be supposed that the matter to be communicated is a fact of general concernment, a truth of deep and universal interest, a momentous truth involved in a most awe-striking fact, which all responsible creatures are competent to understand, and of which no man can safely remain in ignorance. Now this is the case with the matter, on which I am about to speak; 'therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ!'

Ib. p. 176. A. B. C.

True Christian love not only permits, but enjoins, courtesy. God himself, says Donne, gave us the example.

Ib. p. 177. A. C. E.

All excellent, and E. of deeper worth. All that is wanting here is to determine the true sense of 'knowing God,'--that sense in which it is revealed that to know God is life ever-lasting.

Ib p. 178. A.

Now the universality of this mercy hath God enlarged and extended very
far, in that he proposes it even to our knowledge; 'sciant', let all
know it. It is not only 'credant', let all believe it; for the
infusing of faith is not in our power; but God hath put it in our
power to satisfy their reason, &c.

A question is here affirmatively started of highest importance and of deepest interest, that is, faith so distinguished from reason, 'credat' from 'sciat', that the former is an infused grace 'not in our power;' the latter an inherent quality or faculty, on which we are able to calculate as man with man. I know not what to say to this. Faith seems to me the coadunation of the individual will with the reason, enforcing adherence alike of thought, act, and affection to the Universal Will, whether revealed in the conscience, or by the light of reason, however the same may contravene, or apparently contradict, the will and mind of the flesh, the presumed experience of the senses and of the understanding, as the faculty, or intelligential yet animal instinct, by which we generalize the notices of the senses, and substantiate their 'spectra' or 'phænomena'. In this sense, therefore, and in this only, I agree with Donne.