The English Church in the Eighteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 807 pages of information about The English Church in the Eighteenth Century.

The English Church in the Eighteenth Century eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 807 pages of information about The English Church in the Eighteenth Century.
his reticence about them.  ‘Let us,’ he writes, ’seek truth, but quietly, as well as freely.  Let us not imagine, like some who are called Freethinkers, that every man who can think and judge for himself, as he has a right to do, has therefore a right of speaking any more than acting according to freedom of thought.’  Then, after expressing sentiments which are written in the very spirit of Deism, he adds, ’I neither expect nor desire to see any public revision made of the present system of Christianity.  I should fear such an attempt, &c.’  It was accordingly not until after his death that his theological views were fully expressed and published.  These are principally contained in his ‘Philosophical Works,’ which he bequeathed to David Mallet with instructions for their publication; and Mallet accordingly gave them to the world in 1754.  Honest Dr. Johnson’s opinion of this method of proceeding is well known.  ’Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward; a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality, a coward because he had no resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.’  This is strong language, but it is not wholly undeserved.  There is something inexpressibly mean in a man countenancing the persecution of his fellow creatures for heterodoxy, while he himself secretly held opinions more heterodox than any of those whom he helped to persecute.  No doubt Bolingbroke regarded religion simply from a political point of view; it was a useful, nay, a necessary engine of Government.  He, therefore, who wilfully unsettled men’s minds on the subject was a bad citizen, and consequently deserving of punishment.  But then, this line of argument would equally tell against the publication of unsettling opinions after his death, as against publishing them during his life-time. Apres moi le deluge, is not an elevated maxim; yet the only other principle upon which his mode of proceeding admits of explanation is, that he wrote his last works in the spirit of a soured and disappointed man, who had been in turn the betrayer and betrayed of every party with which he had been connected.

What his motives, however, were, can only be a matter of conjecture; let us proceed to examine the opinions themselves.  They are contained mainly[161] in a series of essays or letters addressed by him to his friend Pope, who did not live to read them; and they give us in a somewhat rambling, discursive fashion, his views on almost all subjects connected with religion.  Many passages have the genuine Deistical ring about them.  Like his precursors, he declares that he means particularly to defend the Christian religion; that genuine Christianity contained in the Gospels is the Word of God.  Like them, he can scarcely find language strong enough to express his abhorrence of the Jews and the Old Testament generally.  Like them, he abuses divines of all ages and their theological systems in the most unmeasured terms.  It is almost needless to add that, in common with his predecessors, he contemptuously rejects all such doctrines as the Divinity of the Word, Expiation for Sin in any sense, the Holy Trinity, and the Efficacy of the Sacraments.

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The English Church in the Eighteenth Century from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.