UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 3 1822 02399 4809 " iliiiiiliiii 3 1822 02399 4809 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA BY THE SAME AUTHOR SOME NINETEENTH - CENTURY SCOTSMEN. Being Personal Recollections by William Knight, LL.D., Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the UniTcrsity of St. Andrews. Demy 8vo, cloth, gilt top, price 10s. 6d. COLLOQUI A PERIPATETICA DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS BEING NOTES OF CONVERSATIONS WITH THE LATE JOHN DUNCAN, LL.D. Professor of Hebrew in the New College, Edinburgh WILLIAM KNIGHT, LL.D. Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Saint Andrews SIXTH EDITION, ENLARGED OLIPHANT, ANDERSON & FERRIER EDINBURGH AND LONDON MCMVII TO THE REVERKNn ALEXANDER WHYTE. D.D. OF ST. GEORGE'S UN1TEI> FREE CHURCH, EDINBURGH THIS SIXTH EDITION OF DR. Duncan's COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIC A IS INSCRIBED BY THE EDITOR WILLIAM KNIGHT. Malvern, ScJ>t. 1907.' •^^ CONTENTS. PAGE Prefatory Note ,,.... xi Preface to Third Edition xix Biographical Sketch of Dr. John Duncan . xxxiii COLLOQUIA PERTPATETICA. Philosophical Scepticism and Theology . 1 Nature and Origin of EWl .... 8 The Creed within a Creed 8 Conservatism and Theology . 8 Calvinism .... 9 High Calvinism 10 Biblical Landmarks of Theology 10 Charity .... 11 Optimism .... 1] Arianism .... . 12 Facts 12 Eclecticism .... 13 Scotch Psalms and Paraphrases 13 A'Kempis .... 14 Three Synthetic Unities . 14 Individuality 15 Sceptics and Evidence . . „ . . 16 The Gospel, and the permission of Evil . 17 The "Te Deum " 17 Merit . . . 18 John Owen .... 19 Progress .... . 20 Faith and Knowledge . 20 St. Paul at Athens . 20 Metaphysics and Theology • . 21 Creation and Design , 22 Pantheism . ■ . . 9 . ^ 22 iii IV CONTENTS. Plato ami Aristotle Sir William Hamilton and the Infinite George Caniphell . Opposite Errors Luther and Melancthon Dr. Chalmers Morell . Open Questions Necessitarianism . Freewill and Synergia Aquinas Uses of Speculation Adam and Christ . Unburied Speculations Liturgies Anthropomorphism Gratia Irresistibilis Truth, and the Search for Truth : Lessin Consider the Lilies Systems of Theology : Heresy Scotch Sects only Parties Augustine and Calvin Satan .... Ghosts .... Angels and Image-Worship The Legal and the Ethical Ethicism : Mr. Maurice . The Gospels and Epistles The Calmness of Divine Power The Augustiuian Theory of Evil Evil Deism, and the Problem of Being God and Creation . Mansel's Doctriue of Nescience Carlyle .... China, Russia, etc. English Poets and Prose Writers Aquinas' Hvmn on the Eucharist 26 27 27 27 27 28 29 29 29 31 32 33 33 33 3i 34 35 36 37 38 38 39 40 40 42 43 44 45 46 48 49 49 51 51 52 53 57 CONTENTS. The Person of Christ ..... Apollos, etc. .... . . Tlie Primitive Church Service, etc. . The Adiaphora .... ' . Natural Theology, the Philosopliy of Theism, etc. Controversialists : value of Concession The Legal Element : Religious Terms Ferme on the Epistle to the Romans The Classification of Knowledge Tlie Telegraphic Age ..... Biographies : William Law .... Fervour ....... Plymouthism ...... Presbyterianism ...... Knowledge of God in the Son .... Revolutions of Cliaracter : the New Birth The Supernatiu'al — Historical Evidence , Protestant Dissent ..... Theocratic Law ...... Union with Christ : Justification and Sanctification Conversion to God, etc. ..... Conscience, and the Atonement Kantism : the Doctrine of Merit Sincerity and Responsibility .... Calvinism and Arminianism .... The Freedom of the Will .... The Eternal Logos ..... Conversation between Dr. D. and V. V. on Human Nature, the Trinity, Conscience, etc Christ : the Trilcmma . Two kinds of Ignorance : Transcendentalism and Anthropopathy The Divine Mauifoldness Western Christendom, and Justification Uses of Shallow Minds . The Theanthropos .... Culture and tlie Chief End of Man . The Abstract and the Concrete 5S 6S 59 61 62 70 70 72 72 73 73 74 7.0 75 75 70 78 80 81 82 85 86 88 90 92 93 96 96 109 110 111 111 112 113 113 115 vi CONTENTS. FAO£ Expression of Feeling 317 The Humourists . 118 Chryaostora .... . 118 The Fathers and the Folios . 119 The Ritualist and Seceder 120 The best Translations of the Bible . 120 ^Esthetic Religionism . 120 Intolerance .... 122 Idolatry .... 122 The Fall, and its Antecedent . 123 The Mean between Extremes . 124 Salvation of the Jews 125 The Poetry of the Bible . 127 Ontologia Tripartita 128 Queries in Sir William Hamilton's 1 'hilosojihy 129 Law and Gospel . 130 Criticism and Testimony 130 Hegelianism .... 131 Photography 132 A Symbol .... 132 Intellectuality minus Spirituality 133 Progress relative . 134 Man and other Worlds . 134 Speculative Study . 136 Free Will, etc. 136 Scotch Divines 137 Aversion to Systematic Theology 137 The Acts of the Apostles 138 Defective Consciences 139 Memory . 139 Sociology 139 Rousseau . 140 Preaching 141 The Unsayable . 141 Pantheism . 142 Sin and Grace , 142 The Lord's Table . , 142 Power of Cliristianity < 143 UUJ>J TEN T S. Vll P&UE The Stream of Doctrine 143 " Fulfil Yourself " . 143 Reverent Thought .... 143 The Logician and Intuitionalist 143 The Evidences .... 144 Death and Immortality . 145 The Biblical and the Ecclesiastical . 145 Creeds and Codes .... 146 Development .... 146 Miracle ..... 147 Religious movements 148 Transcendentalism : the Fall . 148 Pride 149 Calvinism and Univer.salism . 149 Devil-Worship .... 150 The Pelagian and Arminian . 151 Love and Need .... 151 Christ's Errand into the World 151 ADDITIONAL COLI .OQUIA. Archbishop Whately 153 Wesley's Hymns . 153 Anthems — Chanting . . 154 Frederick Denison Maurico Delitzsch ..... . 154 . 154 Visitations of Truth . 165 Mysteries .... . 155 Nature's Praise of God . 155 Creation and Providence . . 155 Scottish Puritan Episcopalians . . 156 Hyper-Calvinism and Armiuianiaii: . 156 Terminology .... . 156 Ultras , 156 The Hebrew Language . 157 Reason in God .... . 157 Love, Individual and Univer-sul . 157 The Epistle to Philemon . . 157 viii CONTENTS. »AGa St. Paul . 157 Patristic Discussion ou the Person of Christ = 158 Synod Libraries . 158 Mastricht .... , , . 158 John Gill and Hyper-Calvinism . 158 Tracts ■ , . 159 A Double Symbol ...... . 159 Dr. Love ........ . 160 The Resurrection of the Body .... . 160 How and \Yhat ...... . 161 Antinomies, Antagonisms ..... . 161 A Present Heaven ...... . 161 Baxter . 161 Matthew Henry ..... . 161 Bengel ........ . 162 Poole . . 162 Halybiirton . 162 Preaching ....... . 163 Truth in Love . 164 To what Preaching the whole Church's heart beat responsive 161 Arminianism and Antinomi.inism . 164 Tlie Trinity ....,,. . 165 ADDITIONAL COLLOQUIA. (Sixth Edition.) Doctrine, Experience, Practice . . . . 167 Joy 167 Sunset, and Sunrise 167 Truth between Errors ...... 168 The Human Will 168 Calvinism . . ...... 168 Theoloi/:'mes, or Theological Speculations . 169 False Humility 169 Sin, and Self 169 The Bible and Theology 170 GONTEi\TS. ix PAGE Canons of luterpretatiou 170 Apologists and Heralds . 170 The Gospel and History 170 Extremes . 171 Responsibility 171 Love .... . 171 Love the Bond of Union . 175 All Things are Yours 176 Forgiveness . 178 The Miraculous 178 Two Altars . 178 The King of Glory 179 The Love of God . 179 The Words of Christ . 179 The De Civitate Dei 180 Religion and Ethics 180 John Foster .... 180 Reminiscences 181 INDEX Ul PREFATORY NOTE. ' I ''HIS volume requires a brief note in explaiiiv tion. During part of the summers of 1869 and 1860, Dr. Duncan and I lived under the same roof in a seaside Fifeshire village. I was the constant companion of his waking hours. I had just left the philosophical classes of the University, and begun the study of theology ; and day by day our conversations turned to those questions where Philosophy and Theology meet : — the relations of the Infinite and finite, the nature of our knowledge of God, the human will in its relation to the Divine, and anthro- pology generally ; — while I Avas ready, from admiration at once of his intellect, his learning, and his character, to treasure almost everything he said. Of these conversations I took rapid pencil-notes at the moment, and wrote them out in ink afterwards ; and many memorable words fell from his lips during these months of familiar intercourse and discussion. Now that wo can hear him no more, I regret that I did xii PREFATORY NOTE. not carry out the notion that I had when these jottings were first taken down, of submitting them to himself for revision. But they were written in a style of short-hand intelligible only to myself, and years have passed without my encountering the labour of transcription. Any who pursue them now will, I dare say, forget the youthful hero-worship which led to such an effort to preserve his sayings, when they re- member that he has left no published work behind him. The reluctance of one, who had so much to communicate to all who would listen, to commit his thoughts to Avriting, was remarkable. And while many causes contributed to it, his humility was not the least of these. One who knew so many books, could not be induced to add another to the pile, unless he could say something which had not already been said. But with him has perished a breathing library of wisdom. What are now published are memoranda of Dr. Duncan's table-talk and conversations out- of-doors, while wandering by the sea-beach and in the woods of Wemyss. He was Aristotelic in more respects than one ; and many of his friends associate his most rememberable sayings with walks protracted as long as the listener could be persuaded to receive. Necessarily these " Colloquia" are utterly mis- PREFATORY NOTE. xiii cellaneous, and range over many aspects of many themes. I had thought of arranging them in something like order, under headings or in sec- tions ; but have found it impracticable. Some of his most characteristic sayings must have been left out of any such arrangement, being reducible to no special class of questions. The sequence of the thought will sometimes be scarcely apparent, but my MS. notes are often extremely disj ointed. As the links of connection between successive subjects were mainly my own remarks, when first written out it seemed a work of superriuity to fill up the gaps. A sentence which was interjected in the conversation has, however, been occasionally in- serted, but only where it seems helpful to the understanding of Dr. Duncan's remarks. I need hardly add that there is no "conversation" given in full. This fact will explain the frequent chasms and breaks in the continuity of his talk, and also its occasional repetitions. Only a part of what I have in MS. is now published. It always seemed to me that Dr. Duncan needed a quasi-antagonist to bring out his most characteristic sayings. He had to feel that he was clearing up a labyrinth, or imparting in- struction, or exposing a sophism, or meeting one who differed from him, but Avas on the same track of inquiry, before his mind was stin-ed to full activity and productiveness. xiv PREFATORY NOTE. Dr. Duncan was essentially a modern Rabbi He gave forth his sayings with the slow and measured emphasis of a Master to disciples. In familiar conversation it was the same as in the class-room. His thoughts natiu'ally took an aphoristic form ; and sometimes they were less utterances for others than audible soliloquy. But brevity and sententious fulness always cha- racterised them. The tliought might penetrate to that shadowy region where language almost breaks down in the eflPort, as he put it, " to say the unsayable ;" but, as he condensed the thought, or rather enshrined it in some short compact aphorism, the influence of Aristotle was apparent. His own eulogy of that great master of the precise (see pp. 23 and 57) might with strictness be applied to himself He never used superfluous phrases, and some of his sentences sparkle like cut crystal in their clearness. He was a schoolman in his love of distinctions, and refined shades of meaning — at times super- subtile for other minds. One of Ids colleagues, who taught philosophy in Edinburgh, and whose mind was the exact antithesis of his, once re- marked, that " when he held up Dr. Duncan's subtile distinctions, often so scholastically exact, before the steady light of consciousness, they usually vanished in mist." But the Rabbi's mind Avas of another order from his critic's. He was a passionate lover of systematic thought PREFATORY NOTE. xv and a " master of sentences." A strong logician, with a keen sense of the unfathomable, he had an equal relish for the clear and the indubious ; and however high he soared, he tried to put the results of all his thinking within the framework of intelligible propositions. In him we might say (as he would have said of another), that the Patristic, the .Scholastic, and the Puritan, were finely blended ; while the Philosophic underlay these three, and broke through the crust of re- ceived convictions, in jets of most delicate insight ; and his love for the " Biblical con- crete "* coloured and moulded them all. There Avere flashes of quaintest medisevalism, with " modern touches here and there," in all his deep analyses of the data of human Faith and Knowledge ; and though a schoolman, the classic gloAV had not died away from his language as it did from the style of Lombard and Aquinas. It is scarcely possible for any memorial of Dr. Duncan to do full justice to the many-sided- ness of his nature. Of many we feel that their writings are better than themselves ; his spoken words most imperfectly shadowed forth the uniqueness of the man. The most common- place remark in conversation his mind took up, and returned, as it were, to the speaker, lit, brightened, vivified by the glow it had caught at the fire within his spirit ; while the patience * S.(*p. 71. xvi PREFATORY NOTE. he showed to others, who returned him his own original remarks reduced to commonplace, was equally characteristic of the man. He never made men feel the sense of an interval between them and him, because, in his humility, he was himself unaware of its existence. His life re- mains to be written ; and his friends, with the pupils who sat at his feet, and reverenced his character, mil be glad to know that an extended Memoir of him is in course of preparation. The biography of one who was at once a philoso- pher and a scholar, a theologian and one of the humblest of Christians, should be an invalu- able gift to this age. This little volume is a mere collection of fragments — Deep-sea Soundings, we may call them. They skirt the margin of many great questions, and enter the very heart of others. Casually, and sometimes fitfully, the plummet is let down ; and, while the water is deep, you feel that he has either touched the bottom, or re- ported why he cannot reach it. In all our conversations, he made no attempt to draw out an exhaustive chart of theological doctrine. He had a very distinct theological map of his own. The territory laid down on that map had a clear boundary-line, and the sceptre of Augustine ruled over it. But there were frontier lands into which he occasionally went, and he would draw no strict line of do PREFATORY NOTE. xvii marcation. As to philosophy, he always avowed himself to be without a system ; and yet there will be found, even in these pages, scintillations at least of a fuller speculative system than he allowed to be possible. There was so much of the philosophical sceptic in Dr. Duncan, along with tender est religious faith and humblest love (a union in which he resembled Pascal), that he had almost a disin- clination to try to exhaust a speculative pro- blem ; and, after sounding here and sounding there, he turned from it to where he found securer footing — the revelation which God has made to us in history, and in His Son, William Knight. Dundee, May 1870. PKEFACE TO THIRD EDITION. VfHiLE I thought this little work might be valued by the former pupils and friends of Dr. Duncan, I was quite unprepared for the sympathetic interest which it has awakened in very diverse quarters. Letters have been received on the subject from men holding the most opposite extremes of opinion, widely separated from each other in intellectual atti- tude and religious sympathy, to whom these fragments of thought have been more than usually interesting. This has been due as much, I believe, to what they indirectly suggest, as to ivliat they directly contribute to the solution of those problems with which they deal. A collection of miscellaneous sayings, on some of the deepest questions of human inquiry, by one who has thought profoundly and reverently, has also a certain biographic value; and the glimpses of character which they yield may explain one half of the interest Avhich these slight and discursive fragments have av/akened. XX PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. Many may still regret that my intention of submitting the notes of his conversation to Dr. Duncan's personal revision was never carried out. I am now satisfied, however, that had it been done during his lifetime, and especially in his later years, this little book would in all pro- bability never have seen the light ; for such was his dislike to notoriety that, under some sudden morbid impulse, he might have tossed the MSS. into the fire. In several of the critical notices of the earlier editions, there have been exceedingly happy characterisations of Dr. Duncan; and from one of these I make the following ex- tract: — "The Hebrew professor was remarkable for many literary peculiarities ; inter alia, for expressing emphasis by iteration ; for a royal liberty which, as master of no one knows how many tongues, he took in coining new words ; for uttering sentences distinguished at once by classic eloquence, epigrammatic terseness, and daring originality; for the subtlety of his distinctions; and for the unbounded range of his thoughts. Morally, the man was as remark- able as he was mentally. There was about him a singular combination of tolerance and intoler- ance. His was an intense, keen-tempered soul. He was not soft, sentimental, addicted to vague indiscriminate charity. He could hate, as well as love (not men, hoy.'ever) ; there were certain PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION, xxi things he could not bear, as well as many things he could bear, which, to ordinary religionists, are utterly intolerable. He was very decided, and yet very catholic. All these qualities are abundantly illustrated in this book." About a year ago, immediately after the publication of the first edition, I sent to Professor Brown of Aberdeen, who is writing an extended me- moir of Dr. Duncan, some farther notes of his conversation, along with the other memorials of him, which I possessed; adding to these a brief sketch of the Professor, from a student's point of view. This latter I called " Eeminis- cences, in memoriam." On hearing that a third edition of the " Colloquia " was called for, Dr. Brown has kindly returned to me this sketch that it may be inserted in the preface. It is now printed as originally written. REMINISCENCES. It has rarely been the privilege of any church to number amongst its teachers a more remarkable man than Dr. Duncan. But his finest characteristics were never seen at first sight. Although "A man Whom no one could have passed without remark," his social peculiarities, his life in a world of liis own, and his very singular humility, xxii PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. prevented many, even of his friends, from discerning his real greatness. There was in him a rare union of powers usually dissociated or opposed ; though, while manysided, he was not versatile. His knowledge of the history of human opinion, and his accumulation of out- of-the-way learning, was singularly great, but this was allied (to an extent which it seldom is) with originality of insight and power of criticism. He was in no sense burdened with his learning. The intuitional element in his nature was as highly developed as the logical ; while his acute- ness and penetration were balanced by an extreme delicacy and gentleness of spirit towards those with whom he might happen to differ. The blending of a large and loving catholicity, with a righteous intolerance of all evil, and of all he judged erroneous was equally noteworthy. His humour was keen and varied, and his sympathy with the dark and sombre side of things not less so. In short, it is not the language of exaggera- tion, but of simple truth, to say that his intellect was massive, luminous, and searching ; his humanity large, genial, humorous, sunny ; and his heart very tender, and Iximble as a child's. He had an omnivorous intellectual appetite (too discursive and indiscriminate at times), and his powers of retention were equally vast. His endowments were of the rarest order; and had he PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION, xxiii cultivated these to the utmost possible intensity^ especially had he discipliued himself to follow a plan in the accjuisition of knowledge, and curbed that fatal tendency to niiscellaneousness, into which so many scholars fall, he would have been recognised as a power amongst his contempo- raries, as well as among his friends and pupils. No doubt the very desultoriness of his learning, and the strange raids he made into the least cultivated lands of knowledge, gave a quaint colour to his erudition. It removed him from the sphere of other men, and endowed him with the authority of a Rabbi; whUe the very fact that he had not considered it worth while to commit any of his thoughts to writing, gave him additional power as a peripatetic. His auditors (and especially his pupils) felt that they had a curious library of wisdom before them; and though the arrangement of the folios was very miscellaneous, he had only to begin to prelect, and his hearers recognised that a master was addressing them. His appointment to the chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Literature in the New College, Edinburgh, was a notable gain to the Church in Scotland. Amid the stir and haste of our modern life, his antique learning, his devout scholarship, his aloofness from much that tran- spired around him. his verj'- eccentricities, became a fine link of connection with the Christian xxiv PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. cloisters of tlie past, and with the quiet of mediaeval times. His learning had nothing of the modern type. He suggested Melancthon, Erasmus, or Scaliger, rather than the graduate of Oxford. It was not alw.iys verbally accurate. In his quotations from the Fathers and Schoolmen (and his con- versation was full of these), he frequently altered phrases, improving upon the original. And he could never give a full statement of the opinions of other men. His mind was much more retentive and critical, than reproductive. He once said to me, " I cannot state the opinions of any other man : I can only tell you what I thought of them when I read them." In the class-room he was wont to dissei-tate, rather than to teach. Not that he deemed the minutiae of HebreAv grammar and construction too trivial for academic tuition, but from the fulness of his own mind, and, it must be added, its irregularities and eccentricities, he could not abide constraint, and would have wandered away in two days from the best formed plan of academic work, supposing him to have ever devised a plan at all. Miscellaneousness cha- racterised all that he said or did. But this very desultoriness in the work of his class had another source. Not to allude to the fluctuations of his own health and subjective experience, he felt that the work of his Chair PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION, xxv was altogether secondary in the course of study which fitted men for the Christian ministry. He was exceedingly solicitous about the per- sonal religion of his students, and repeatedly suspended the ordinary work of the class that he might revert to topics connected with the religious life. On more than one occasion I heard him speak of the risk of turning the duties of his Chair into a mere discipline in philology, so as to justify Rowland Hill's taunt that "Divinity halls were manufactories of dried tongues." His own mental wanderings in diverse lands of thought fitted him to be the guide of the perplexed — not so much by giving them the solutions at which he had arrived, as by rousing their own natures to deal with the problems, alike reverently, hopefully, and patiently. Bat the great themes on which he used to dilate so easily (and ever to illumine as he spoke), lie dealt -with more as topics for the intellect to handle than for the heart to ponder. I used sometimes to think, after listening for hours to his wonderful talk, in which thoughts of deepest penetration were exjDressed with a scholastic precision, of which he seemed to hold the secret, that his own mind rather seized the successive ideas as they were borne towards it, or let them drop as intellectual products, with which his mind had done its work, than that xxvi PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. his heart was at the moment thrilled hy them, Not that his own heart was not profoundly moved by everything he said. But he had long ago passed through the phases of experience he was delineating, and while he often looked back upon them, and delighted to recall " the Avay by which he had been led," his glance at his own past history was a purely mental retrospect. Even in soliloquising on his experience, and prescribing a cure for himself (which he often did aloud), it was the keen and eager intellect that you observed seizing the phenomena (it might be the morbid phenomena) of his own experience, rather than the heart, that was at work. Perhaps this was one explanation of the ter- rible dejection into which he was sometimes plunged. I remember the sadness of his lament one day, " My mind is alternating between flushes of over-excitement and times of debility." These flushes of over-excitement took shape in. the most singular attempts to analyse his own experience, which he himself pronounced mor- bid ; while in the "times of debility" his spirit sunk so low, that his only utterance was, " My giieved soul doth consolation shun," repeated and repeated with a terrible emphasis of sorrow. His humility was one of the most remarkable of his many characteristics. It led to an exag- PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION, xxvii gerated depreciation of himself at times, and it assuredly kept him from committing his thoughts to writing. Few men, so far above the ordinary rank and file of men, have had so mean and so unworthily disproportionate an opinion of them- selves. He was usually reckoned one of the most absent of men ; and stories are afloat by the score which have the very slenderest foundation in fact. One day when I was with him at his house in Elder Street, a gentleman who had come in told him some stories of himself, which he (the narrator) believed to be true ; and after listening with more than usual patience, the Rabbi denied their authenticity. His visitor concluded with the story of the pinch of snuff on the windy day, when going out to preach near Aberdeen, and said, "You'll at least admit. Dr. D., that that one is true." He replied, with a quiet sarcasm, the edge of which failed to pierce the obtuseness of his critic's imagination, "Well, I have heard that one so often, that I begin at times to imagine myself that there must be some truth in it ! " It is not easy, either in few or in many words, to estimate the influence of Dr. Duncan's life on his friends and pupils, or over his church and the college where he taught. That influ- ence — the simple impress of his individuality, the lesson of "plain living and high thinking," of xxviii PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. wide scholarship and of saintly life, was intense and very tender while he lived, and it has not ended with his death. He has gone from us, but he is still with us. His memory is ever green, and his work undying. There are some features of his character which will be so much more fitly described by those of his own standing in the Church, to whom the task of delineation naturally belongs, that I do not venture to refer to them, further than to say, that his whole character was tem- pered, mellowed, and beautified, by the deep realities of the Christian life — of which even the detached sayings of this book aff'ord abun- dant proof. I have only to add to these Reminiscences that while it would be sheer impertinence in an editor to criticise the philosophical position assumed by one, whose thoughts and tentative speculations on the highest of all subjects he has tried in part to reproduce, it would not be difiicult to indicate the many unbridged chasms, the solutions only partially adequate, the lacunce of thought and of reasoning, in the course of these disjointed fragments. And they would never have been presented to the world but for the belief that the slightest or the most idiosyn- cratic notions of a vigorous thinker and a great man are of more lasting value to other minds PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION, xxix than scores of treatises which profess exhaust- ively to solve those questions which Dr. Dun- can, in his modesty, only sounded and passed by. Cultivated men do not expect or desire an echo of their own opinions, in the works of others. They value most a reverent interpret- ation of Truth from a point of view quite un- like their own. It is to be hoped that further memoxials of the late Professor will yet be rescued from obli- vion. It is truer of himself than of Chalmers, of whom he made the remark, " We have lost much of him for want of a Boswell. Many of his best sayings are gone for ever."* And it is somewhat curious to find another great man, who had remarkable conversational powers, and who has exercised strong influence over con- temporary thought, saying in a letter to a friend, "I sometimes wish I had a shorthand writer, who could take down what I say in conversation with such men as I have been lately talking to. I cannot dictate, and I find that the idea of writing for printing, kills the life of my thoughts."! This was peculiarly true of Dr. Duncan. The gloAving freshness of his thoughts, and that lustre of language which gave such a charm to his conversation, departed * See p. 27. t Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, Letters to the Bishoo of Argyle, second series, p. 30. XXX PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION. entirely from him whenever he lacked the stimulus of another living presence to which he could imjDart it. Perhaps also, like some other men most competent to teach, while absolutely indifferent to fame and reputation, he was re- luctant to submit to the drudgery of authorship ; and great as was his regard for the folios, he looked down with something akin to disdain upon the mania for writing books. The thinkers, and those who possessed the gift of articulate speech, seemed to him mightier men than the scribes. It may be questioned if he ever felt any incitement towards authorship, or was, for one moment, the victim of literary ambition. Wliile there was more knowledge to be gathered, and much work to be done, and attainment was endless, why should he begin to write about matters on which he still was learning ? And yet it is impossible not to regret this reluctance on his part. I asked him repeatedly to put his thoughts on the Supernatural, and on the Essence of Christianity, into a brief essay or series of essays ; urging as a motive the theo- logical crisis at which we had arrived, and the new phases of old questions which historical criticism had recently disclosed. He always answered that he could talk, but could not write, and that enough had been already said in books ; that the world was full of them. As it is, his life and character are the main PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION, xxxi legacy he has left to his friends and students. And if these " Colloquia Peripatetica " serve to perpetuate in any degree the remembrance of what he was, their preservation will be justified, and my aim accomplished. W. K. Newport, Fife, October 1871. EIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH OF DE. JOHN DUNCAN. r^URINGr the quarter of a century which ^^ ended in 1870, there might have been seen almost daily in the streets of Edinburgh, during the winter months, an old man of sin- gular apj)earance and mien; short of stature, and spare in figure, with head usually bent, and eye that either drooped or gazed wistfully abi-oad, as if recognising a reality behind the illusions of sense ; the expression of his face one of lonely abstraction, with lines indicative of many a struggle with the darker side of things ; more like an apparition from a mediaeval cloister, than a man of the nineteenth century. His pathetic look and generally uncouth appearance were sure to attract the notice of the passer-by. That man was not only a characteristic figure araong the celebrities of Edinburgh, but really one of the most noticeable men of his time. He was the late professor of Hebrew in the College of the Free Church ; the learned, ori- ginal, eccentric, profound, yet child-like Rabbi Duncan. To estimate the character and genius of one xxxiv BIOGBAPHIGAL SKETCH OF so many-sided, yet so unlike his contemporaries, critically to measure him as a man and a theo- logian, and to assign him his place in the long roll of religious men in Scotland, " who being dead yet speak," is a task from which any pupil of his may reasonably shrink. The ordinary difficulties of criticism are enhanced in the case of one Avho has left scarcely a fragment of writing behind him ; and whose conversations, prelections, and occasional discourses, as they survive in the memory of friends and pupils, are virtually the only data which afford mate- rials for judgment. Besides, his saintly char- acter, his quaint and curious erudition, his poly- glot Avisdom, and that deep guileless heart of his (so humble and tremblingly conscientious), with the manifold intensity of his spiritual life, seemed to remove him from the category of men who are to be measured by common standards. His defects were patent enough ; and he does not stand forth, even in the religious firmament, as a star of the first magnitude. As a theologian, he was rather a great possibility, than a great realisation. The work of his long life was a gigantic torso. And yet there was a fascina- tion in his very incompleteness. It gave a peculiar charm to his character; a greater charm than is usually found in men of more completely balanced power. Those who knew him most intimately feel that a critical estimate of his merits and his defects — of what he did and Avhat he failed to do — can only be arrived at by the impartial verdict of the next generation. Its great men are the greatest gifts God DR. JOHN DUNG AN. xxxv sends to the world. "They are fire-pillars," says Carlyle, " in this dark pilgrimage of man- kind : they stand as heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what stiU may be." As such, many a Scottish churchman will remember the late Professor of Hebrew, — altogether a monumental man, to be thought of with reverent affection, as one who still "rules us from his urn." We have had many religious writers in Scotland, who have bequeathed volumes to posterity, to live for a longer or a shorter time. We have had few intense theological influences, the record of whose greatness is found in the legacy of thought, emotion, and impulse which they have commu- nicated, — men whose days were in the purest manner consecrated to wisdom, careless of the awards of fame. To the task commonly assigned to the critic, I make no pretension : but, around the slender thread of the story of Dr. Duncan's life, I may weave some fugitive criticism, as its course is traced. He was born at Gilcomston, Aberdeen, of very humble parentage, in the year 1796. His father was a working shoemaker ; his mother, a devout woman, was a blacksmith's daugh- ter. He was a sickly child ; and, althougb he reached his threescore years and ten, had never much physical stamina, but struggled with bodily infirmities all along. His life was early imperilled by an illness which cost him the sight of one eye ; and so he began his singular career as a one-eyed boy, with the other exeep- xxxvi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF tionally acute, a sort of physical prophecy of a peculiarity in liis mental build as a man. His mother died when he was only six years of age; and his father — a stern Caledonian, hard, aus- tere, and often tyrannically passionate — wishing to make his son follow his own trade, put him early to work; but, whether from unwillingness, or awkwardness of hand, he could not succeed. We are thankful for that defect in the hand- ling of tools which prevented John Duncan from being only a distinguished Aberdeen shoemaker. While his fingers refused to accommodate them- selves to the use of the awl and knife, and the monotony of stitcliing, his juvenile mind was busy with hopes and dim imaginings, which opened up vistas in the future, more inviting than the results of the deftest handicraft. Very early he showed a passion for learning, and in some illness is recorded to have offered up the boyish prayer, " Oh that God would spare me till I get the red cloakie " (alluding to the gown worn by college students). Like Dante, he had frequent moods of abstraction in his youth, and would burst into " fits of laughter apropos of nothing" ! His father's severity was such, that once the boy cried out, " Kill me, father, kill me at once;" and in his indignation at parental injustice, he made a will in these laconic terms, " Omne matri, nihil patri." In these days, with abundance of annual spirit, irascible, impetuous, and strong-willed, he ^yas tender-hearted withal, and could not tolerate an act of cruelty on the part of his companions. At the age of nine he was sent to the Gram- DJl JOHN DUNCAN. xxxvii mar School of Aberdeen (one of the best semi- naries of the kind in Scotland), where he remained five years ; and even then the great problems of the Universe, which occuijied so much of his future thought, dawned upon the growing boy. Stumbling prematurely upon a work on Chris- tian Evidence, the notion of Time, as "an eternal present " in the mind of God, flashed upon him ; and he used often to tell his friends and pupils in later years, how he then abhorred the man who had ridiculed this notion in his book : an early indication of a mental tendency which rapidly increased. The bent of the specu- lative doctrinaire is seen in that youthful abhor- rence. At the age of twelve, he was detected with a copy of Ariosto concealed under the bench in school — evidently a miscellaneous reader from the fii'st. During holiday time he herded cattle in the country. Two years later he gained a small bursary, and went to the university. Of the period of his undergraduate life (when most youthful minds begin to show what is in them, and give promise of their future), we have the disappointing record, that he " made no mark, was treated as a dolt, when called up was never prepared, and was uniformly reprehended for his negligence;" but the classes which chiefly tend to evoke the powers of the student, and which might have been expected to do most for young Duncan, were then ill taught. In these years of seeming negligence, however, his faculties must have been developing in the very richest manner. His ahm mater did little for him. He found more to stimulate him while xxxviii BIOGBAPHIGAL SKETCH OF he wandered in the country, or on the links by the sea-shore. But his mental habits were most desultory. Miscellaneousness characterised all that he did as a youth, as well as in maturer years. Systematic study was a fetter which he could not brook. The waywardness and eccentricity of his pursuits arose, however, from a certain kingli- ness of spirit. Odd eccentric being that he was, he could scarcely fail to look with a mea- sure of indifference on the formal prelections of the class-room ; not with contempt, but with dissatisfaction bordering on indifference. His constitutional want of method increased his aversion to the set rules of college discipline and study. That absence of mind, which has characterised many illustrious scholars, was excessive in him ; and while in his later years it developed into a brilliant irregularity, and most refreshing disregard of all conventional commoniDlaces, it was, doubtless, injurious to his usefulness, as well as to his mental balance and completeness. In 1811, he graduated at Marischal College, and began the study of theology. For three years he was enrolled a divinity student, in connection with one of the dissenting sects — " Tlie Constitutional Associate Presbytery" — teaching at the same time in the parish school of Pitsligo ; the pupils of which, however, he could not manage. During this period, as for- merly, he was on the whole an idle youth — aAvkward, unready, and helpless in manner, in- tensely wide-awake, insatiable even in his DB. JOHN DUNCAN. xxxh mental curiosity — an interesting, original, most fertile -brained procrastinator. In 1816 he left the Secession, and joined the Established Church of Scotland. There is no doubt that this change was due to his preference at that time for a national and established Church to the isolation and precariousness of dissent. The controversies of the seceding body were too small for him, their petty polemics irksome and distasteful ; while, on the other hand, his very desultory habits had rendered him un- acceptable to the leaders of that little sect. His father endeavoured to prevent his joining the Establishment, even warning the divinity professors against receiving his son as a student ; and the filial piety of young Duncan must often, in these years, have struggled with the demands of reason and of freedom — so repressed and misunderstood had he been at home. "When he presented himself for enrolment in the divinity-class of the University, the pro- fessor said, " I suppose your father and you have been quarrelling and abusing one another]" "We did quarrel," replied the youth; " but I never in my life abused my father." It is a noticeable fact connected with his college life, that, while that father (hard to the last as Aberdeen granite) was on his deathbed, the son watched beside him, night by night, with filial devotedness. Four years were spent by him (1817 to 1821) in the divinity classes of the Established Church at the University of Aberdeen. There he came under the influence of the excellent Dr, Mearns, a man who seems to have guided him, xl BIOGEAPHIGAL SKETCH OF in part at least, out of the intellectual chaos In which he entered his class ; though I doubt if he did more than impress upon the ardent student a fresh reverence for the system which he taught. To the very end of his life, Duncan retained that speculative restlessness which made him often return to the verge of the atheistic " slough of despond." I do not think that he had studied Spinoza in those days. Possibly he scarcely knew the system at all ; though he afterwards described these years of unrest as a time when he was " a Spinozist." He afterwards found a key, by which to inter- pret a period full of gropings and tentative solutions, in the system of that remarkable man, who has given the most rigorous shape to modern Pantheism. I cannot help thinking, however, that Dr. Duncan sometimes read his earlier experiences under the light of a subse- quent and maturer philosophical discipline. If he was lifted out of the " pantheistic slough " by the prelections of Dr. Mearns, we must sup- pose that the pantheism of these three years was of a cruder and less coherent type, than that which we find in the philosophical ethics of the Jew of Amsterdam. It is idle to inquire whether the exi)erience, of which he has left so interesting a record, was one in which he had reached the "lower stage" of materialistic atheism, or whether he remained a Spinozist, The two systems are, in their ultimate essence, identical. If all is God, there is no God to the theist. And the problem whicli haunted, fas- cinated, and stimulated Duncan in these years DB. JOHN DUNG AN. xli was simply the problem of Being — of ultimate ExisLeuce, aud of our own relation to this mysterious Universe, which girdles us with its darkness. He was not then, or at any time, a systematic student of the thoughts of other men, aud may never have read a word of Spinoza. He worked at the problem altogether from within. Dr. Mearns seems to have impressed his pupil chiefly by his devotional spirit, by his " prayers addressed to Jehovah as a great King." The dignity, the elevated, grave, and reverent manner of the man would be itself a powerful academic influence. It was doubtless his personal character, far more than the dog- matic scope of his lectures, which impressed his students. But during his attendance on these lectures, Duncan's creed seems to have taken shape so far. The general fluidity of opinion in which he had lived gave place to what had at least a theistic basis ; and he tells us that he " danced on the brig of Dee w^ith delight, when he was convinced that there was a God." It is, however, difiicult to say whether, during his university career, he attained to a fixed belief in the truth of Revelation, which was never afterwards seriously disturbed ; or. whether he found only temporary repose to a restless speculative tendency, which reappeared continually afterwards. The fact, that at this stage of his career he leant to the Sabellian doctrine of the person of Christ, is a proof that the speculative element was as yet too stron^ to permit of repose in the orthodox system of xlii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF theology. The connection between the theory of Sabellius and the pantheistic doctrine of emanation is evident; and probably, during the four years of his divinity studies, while laying the foundation of his future learning in philosophy, theology, and literature, he regarded that theory as intellectually the most consistent. Languages and metaphysics, the " twin pas- sions of his mental life," at this time absorbed his whole attention ; especially the former. In Hebrew he greatly delighted, and formed a class for the teaching of it, while himself a student of divinity. All the while he retained an overflowing enthusiasm for sport, often in- dulging in wild frolic, enlivening his student supper parties with the eccentricities of dulse- roasting,* and peppering his companions with the debris. A queer, humorous, erratic youth — dreamy at times, intensely resolute at others — we find him dictating Latin discourses to help weaker students, and receiving in compen- sation the reward of a frugal tea and supper ; cheerfully enduring the privations of bad food and insufficient clothing; always ready for a dialectic sparring on the side of heterodoxy, and fond of paradoxes ; as frequently absent from the prelections of his professor as present ; a frolicsome, hilarious lad ; his natural joyous- ness of temperament not soured by morbidity. In 1819, he was appointed master of a sub- scription school at Stonehaven. Here we have a repetition of the Pifcsligo experience, in an exaggerated form. The scholars would often * Dulse, au edible seaweed. DR. JOHN DUNCAN. xliii assemble, and no master appear. He would be found by a deputation of his pupils at his lodg- ings, quite unconscious of the hour. Absent and odd, unable to preserve order, he would sometimes " whip a boy, and then give him a halfpenny to hold his tongue." Finding little help to his nature in the Sunday teacliing of the Stonehaven parish church, he spent that day usually in the woods, or by the shore. In 1822, shrinking from entering the church, he was induced to go to Darlington, in Yorkshire, as usher in a Quaker school ; but his residence there was of short duration. His Scotch pecu- liarities, his absence of mind, and inveterate want of punctuality, were fatal to success. The French teacher of the school quarrelled with him and challenged him to a duel ; which (mirahile didu !) was accepted ; but, happily for himself and others, an encounter was prevented. Leaving Darlington, he went to Edinburgh — too proud to return to Aberdeen — and earned a precarious subsistence by teaching, and writ- ing a little Latin for a medical man. Failing in Edinburgh, he found his way back to his native city, and began to work as a teacher of languages. In March 1823, he removed to Udny, twelve miles north of the city, where he remained for two years, pursuing a somewhat lonely path of scholarship, " thirsting for learn- ing, always for its own sake," and without a spark of the scholar's pedantry and vanity. During all these years of " pedagogal drud- gery," he shraiik from taking license to preach, his doctrinal views being widely at variance d xliv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF with the Westminster Confession of Faith. At length, in 1825, he accepted the articles, very much as Stillingfleet and Paley had advo« cated their adoption, as articles of peace. His nature was not yet roused to moral earnestness. His first sermon, after obtaining license, was delivered in the West Church, Aberdeen, on the text, " Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God." Of that sermon he afterwards said, it was " tremendously bad," yet he " wished he had it now." It was, we are told, "a fascinating picture of the Man Christ Jesus as the Flower of Humanity, the Perfection of human beauty, the Archetypal ' Son of God,' into whose spirit whoso drinks, and whose bright example whoso copies, becomes himself so far forth a son of God." The loss of this sermon all must deplore. It must have contained a remarkable delineation of a phase of truth which lies very near the root of Chris- tian evidence ; and the form which it would assume in the hands of Dr. Duncan, at that stage of his career, would be most instructive, could we " have it now." It was shortly after becoming a preacher in Aberdeen that he awoke to religious earnest- ness, under the joint influence of C. Malan of Geneva, and his biographer (then his student friend). Dr. Brown. For the particular steps of the process we refer to the biography, where they are fully detailed.* They present us with the picture of a strong man suddenly arrested, * Li/e of the late John Duncan, LL.D. Edin., 1873. DR. JOHN DUNCAN. xlv struck down in his mid career of linguistic studji and speculative daring, by the realities of the unseen world ; and may be often quoted as a proof of the genuineness of such a process, whatever be our theory of its method or rationale. Of the period in question, however, there are many data unsupplied. We should have liked to know the precise way in which a nature such as Duncan's yielded to the acceptance of the evangelical system. We are not satisfied with a mere chronicle of the result ; that a powerful mind gave its assent to a certain scheme of doc- trine, and that in consequence the dormant life awoke, responsive to the toueh of God. Some natures which have given a similar assent, have never been roused to moral life ; and many a spirit has sprung to life disowning the system to which Duncan gave intellectual assent. Had he been able to write of his own experience, as Augustine did, he would doubtless have sup- plied these missing links, and filled up the lacuncB which we so much deplore. We hear of questions put to him as to his personal sanc- tity ; and on his making the admission, which all men with any self-knowledge must make, he was told that without its doctrines Christianity was nothing. But we want to know on what evidence the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism appealed to his intellect, as they seem to have done in the course of this sudden mental revo- lution. We have some details of his conversa- tion with the friends to whom he traced his awakening, but these do not cast light on the process. The way in which Malan of Geneva xlvi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF dealt with the men he sought to influence, was far from satisfactory. He tried to guide them through a rehgious process, as a physician car- ries his patients through the stages of a disease. Perhaps the occasional morbidity, the want of sunshine in the after life of Duncan, was due to the mfluence of this period. What arrested him, in the interviews he had with the Gene- van minister, was the constant and unwavering faith in which Malan seemed to live. He ad- mitted that he was "overstrained:" but his dogmatism was not repulsive. Years after- wards, he said, " He felt that all the Christians around him were sceptics like himself, but here was a man who could say, 'I know, and am sure.' He was the first gentlemanly, intellec- tual, and altogether pleasant dogmatist I had met, and I was greatly attracted to him." When Malan's sentence, " See, you have the Word of God in your mouth," ^^ flashed through him like a shock of electricity," it is important to note what " the great thought " was, the seed, he tells us, of all that he had in his old age. It was, " that God meant man to know His mind." The central feature of his experience was the conviction that God was addressing him, with a living Voice, with the immediacy of a direct appeal. His previous state was really one of indifference, owing to his pre- occupation with linguistic studies and philoso- phical speculations. His idea of the relation of God to the universe and to human souls, was that of a vast Superintendent, not that of a divine Parent or a ceaselessly appealing Oracle DE. JOHN DUNCAN. xlvii Bnt as the clouds parted above him, he dis cerned the light of the Omnipresent, and heard the voice of the Eevealer. His awakening was the discernment of a truth, to the reality of which he had been oblivious for years, and the response of his heart to the divine appeal fol- lowed naturally. But the entire passivity of spirit, which followed in the wake of this expe- rience, is noteworthy. " Next day," he said, " as I sat down to study, and took my pen in my hand, I became suddenly the passive recipient of all the truths which I had heard and been taught in my childhood. I sat unmoving for hours, and they came and preached themselves to me. There was no investigation, but the presentation of the truth to me, passive^ In this experience, it is e"\ddent that what had subdued him was the apprehension of God addressing him with a right to command, and with a A^oice of immediate entreaty, through the historical Word, before which his spirit trembled, and awoke. Deeply interesting, however, as is the record of this crisis in his life, the way in which Mai an tried to help him to discover whether he was regenerate or not, by the use of a series of syl- logisms, is more tlmji deceptive. If one's con- viction of the reality of that fact has no deeper ground than the clearness of eye with which one sees that a certain conclusion follows from a premiss, it is sure to be evanescent. To be of any present worth, and permanent value, it must arise out of a fact of consciousness, and be a reality of experience, not the mere conclusiori xlviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF of an argumentative process. The influence of Malan over Duncan was curiously strong ; and though it helped him at a time when he stood in need of guidance ab extra, it was not an un- mixed influence for good. The tendency to construct syllogisms regarding spiritual states, and to stand morbidly in doubt of the char- acter of those states until they seem warranted by special texts, or inferences deduced from Scripture statements, may deprive the heart of sunshine, and introduce many a note of fitful- ness, irresolution, and despondency into the spiritual life. But the result of the change which Duncan underwent gave unmistakable evidence of its deep interior reality. The new tenderness of spirit, the fine edge which his conscience gained, the clear moral perception, and the elevation of character which ensued, were distinctive marks of its genuineness. And one of its most noticeable features was its suddenness. Though all his past experience led up to it by stages as normal, if less calculable, than those by which his future issued from it — so that its instantaneousness was more appa- rent to spectators, than real to the subject him- self — still, contrasting it with similar crises in the lives of others, it was one of those swift upheavals of experience, Avhich attest the agency of a higher Power working on the spirit of man. The greater number of moral revolutions are toilsome and tardy processes ; but the reality of sudden changes, and their genuineness (as attested by the subsequent life), is a matter of well-authenticated history. It is related of t.he DR. JOHN DUNCAN. xlix late Professor Conington (one of the most accomplished scholars of this century, and a man of very different character from Duncan's), that in the thirtieth year of his life " A change passed over the tenor of his thoughts in re- lation to religious truth, a change which was sudden as it was complete and enduring. As he described it himself, a sense of the reality of eternal things was instantaneously borne in upon him while he was engaged in one of his ordinary occupations. For some weeks his mind was agitated and unstrung by the overwhelming consciousness of the imme- diate presence of the terrors of the unseen world. He was unable to take any interest in, or even to give sustained attention to, any sub- ject not directly affecting the momentous ques- tions which engaged his thoughts. He could not even read the New Testament in Greek, apparently because the language suggested associations which for the time being had be- come repugnant to him." This was, doubtless, an unnatural and over- strained experience ; and, while it gave place by degrees to a calmer attitude, he never en- joyed absolute repose. On his deathbed his old perplexities returned ; doubts very similar to those Avhich were a life-long trouble to Dr. Duncan. They concerned his personal relations to God. As was natural, after this revolution of spirit Duncan's preaching was peculiarly highflown. He dealt with the greater mysteries of the gospel, and preached that those who believed 1 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF them were regenerate. That was, as he aftei'- wards said, the defect in the teaching of his instructor, Malan, He became popular with the evangeUcal minds in Aberdeen, and less so with his old friends. His pugnacity of charac- ter showed itself in a too intense reprobation of his former position, and of all that seemed to resemble it; and in the keen incisive manner in which he defended minute theoretical points of dogmatic truth. The sharp and sudden recoil of his nature from its former attitude towards Revelation, and his throwing all speculation aside, brought with it a corresponding evil, which attended him during all his subsequent life. He never fairly determined the respective limits of the provinces of Reason and Faith, or conquered Rationalism by a deeper reasonable- ness. He leapt into the fastnesses of ortho- doxy for safety. The education of human souls is carried on in ways so diverse, that it is scarcely possible for one to say how another ought to act, at a particular crisis ; and probably, at this stage, Duncan did the right thing for himself. But he, doubtless, incurred a risk through his atti- tude of prostrate reverence, when questions of evidence, which he had not definitely solved, arose in his mind. One reason why he has contributed nothing to their solution is, that he thus vaulted into orthodoxy, instead of fighting his way into it, stoge by stage. Though he had " lived in most of the heresies," he has told us little of the way in which he was enabled to discover their unsatisfactoriness. No one in DE. JOHN DUNCAN. li Scotland in our day was more fitted by natural endowment to be a Christian Apologist of the first rank ; but while he employed his under- standing with marvellous power in defence of the truth, he did not " give unto reason the things that were reason's," with the same ex- plicitness that he gave its own to faith. In none of his addresses, or recorded sayings, has he explained his idea of the relation in which the reason of man stands to Eevelation. That Revelation is addressed to the rational nature as well as to the heart. Necessarily, it aj)peals to reason ; and yet the treatment of the record must be very diffex-ent from the way in which the reason would deal with a direct announce- ment made to it by a living voice. There are few problems, amongst the many Avhich Dr. Duncan was qualified to take up and discuss, the neglect of which we more thoroughly regret than this — viz. the relation of human Eeason to the contents of Revelation. Between rationalistic and empirical theology, there is assuredly a via media, which may be a via sacra, for wliich many search in vain. Dr. Duncan's disinclina- tion to open up questions, which his recognition of an ah extra authority had closed, is, in the interests of Christian science, greatly to be regretted. As the years advanced, the fervid emotions of 1826 naturally cooled, and he gradually doubted the reality of his awakening to life. " All that began in sincerity," he said, " went away, and I preached assurance when the thing was gone : it began in sincerity, but was con- lii BIOGBAPHIGAL SKETCH OF tinued in hypocrisy." Along with some frienda he established a daily devotional meeting, but attendance at it give him little help ; he lamented that he " had been a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, and by persisting in that empty vapouring had seared his con- science." A diseased introspective subjectivity took all brightness out of his life. We find him living under " the commination of the law;" in ceaseless anxiety as to whether he was regenerate or not ; deriving some comfort from the command, " Ye must be born again," — "because must implies may!" — going to friends and unburdening his state of mind with painfully excessive unreserve ; telling us that the voice of his depravity prayed against the Holy Ghost, while he prayed for the Holy Ghost; balancing the question distractingly, unable to come either to a negative or a posi- tive conclusion ; and his scholastic habit of subtle distinctions coming to the front, while he confessed that he heard his depravity pray- ing by an elicit act of his nature, while his will prayed for the Spirit by an iviperate act! But who can read without sad emotion the passage in which he described his state to a friend ] — " I ran away into the brick-kilns that were near, and went down on my knees, and I prayed thus : ' Lord, I have broken Thy law, and I have not believed in Thy Son, and I have refused Thy Holy Spirit ; and if Thou shouldst now cast me into hell, all holy beings would say, Righteous art Thou, Lord, when Thou judgest. But Lord, for Thy mercy sake, DR. JOHN DUNCAN. liii give me Thy Holy Spirit, that I may believe in Thy Son.' " When at this time, and in later life, he came to his friends, and told them of his state, he seemed to seek relief in the act of unburdening himself. He took a strange delight in unre- served disclosures of his state; and telling others of his helplessness, he tried to teach them by means of it. He was at this time profoundly influenced by the apostolic but eccentric Dr. Kidd of Aber- deen ; a man of authoritative manner and odd irascibility — a sort of northern Edward Irving. His weird force of character, epigrammatic power, and semi-oracular sayings, overawed Duncan ; whilst the way in which supernatural truth had laid its strong hand upon him and mastered him, appealed powerfully to the youth- ful preacher. As a living influence this was wholly beneficial. We cannot say so much for the theological writers which chiefly moulded him at this period. Late in life he owned that the writings of Dr. Love, Dr. Owen, and Her- mann Witsius " especially had influence upon him j " and probably these writers gave a dis- tinct cast or bias to his theological studies, which he afterwards (in part) regretted. By degrees, he began to doubt the reality of the experiences he had undergone ; and the ex- tremely disastrous eff'ect of trying to determine the relation in which a man stands to God by the use of a syllogism, received a signal illus- tration from this stage of his career. His late experience had been real and profound — far Uv BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH OF more real and profound than the subject of it ever knew, — but when he went back upon it and tried to explain it to himself, his analysis was superficial. His attempt to express an inner and transcendent fact, in the language of a reasoned theology, held up to his own gaze as a conclusion from unquestionable data, was of necessity a failure. And by degrees it bred an unreality which he most bitterly lamented. The first fervours had died away, and he went on talking and discoursing of facts, which had for the speaker, at the moment, no subjective reality. This led him faultily to question the genuineness of the whole process he had un- dergone. His error lay in regarding the phenomena of the inner life as fit subjects for the manipulation of the intellect. He sought for certain fruits, which should evidence the awakening of the divine life within him ; and not finding any, of the precise phase which his own higli ideal led him to expect, he doubted the very relation in which his spirit stood to God, and God to him. This distrust of the witness of the spirit within him, was curiously kindred to (if it was not a part of) his distrust of the human consciousness in general, as a witness to objective truth. His philosophical system — so far as he had one — was based on a theological postulate ; and to the very end of his life he could not trust the deliverance of his own consciousness, but underpropped his religious psychology by a datum of theology. In addition, the severe and agonising fea- tures of his own awakening to religious life DR. JOHN DUNG AN. Iv left their impress on his whole future. Most truly he was ' all his lifetime subject unto bond- age,' and had few entire days of inward sun- shine. While he understood the more tran- quil processes of the divine life, and loved to describe them to others, he was himself un- familiar with the gentle rain, and the peaceful reahsation of the infinite Presence within him. The cataclysm of his conversion cast a shadow over all his future career. The scorching light and glory of the divine Character had humbled him to the dust ; while his exceedingly beauti- ful humility, and the tenderness of his con- science, which shrank from the least iota of unreality, made him prefer to linger long about the doors, reluctant to enter into the sunshine and liberty of sonship in God's house. There were also physical causes, and temperamental ones, which intensified this result. After the first upheaval of his life, he re- mained, for some time, in Aberdeen, visiting the city poor, and conducting religious services — not by any means popular. He also con- tinued to attend the meetings of the University Theological Society, and in his speeches there began to develop those views on Jehovism and Abrahamism, which he loved to unfold to his students in later years. In addition, he seems about this time to have commenced a course of weekly lectures in the Gaelic Chapel of Aberdeen on the Confession of Faith, getting, however, no farther, than to the chapter on " the fall of man." A vacancy occurring in St. An- drew's Chapel, Dundee, Duncan's friends were Ivi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF induced to bring his name before the congre- gation. He preached, but was unsuccessful. His visit to Dundee, however, led to his being asked to preach to the rural congregation wor- shipping at Persie, in the parish of Bendochy, a few miles north of Blairgowrie in Perthshire. As the church was at the very southern ex- tremity of the parish — a long narrow strip of sixteen miles, by one and a half, with a popu- lation of a thousand souls — a small chapel had been built at Persie for the accommodation of the northern parishioners. To this country charge Mr. Duncan was "called" in 1830; and there he laboured as a chapel minister for' ten months, appreciated by thoughtful hearers, but disliked by others from his outspoken de- nunciations of worldliness and lax morality. His eccentricities increased during his resi- dence at Persie. He visited his parish on a pony ; but absorbed with abstract problems, or reading a classic author as he rode, he often allowed the animal to carry him whithersoever it would. He was scandalised by the frivolities of the place, and spent much of his time in the needed work of religious reformation. With all his oddities, his moral penetration was keen ; and many instances are recorded of his tact in embodying "udse advice in acute sayings — a power which ripened marvellously towards the close of his life. He was fond of recalling the ten months he spent in this semi-highland parish. Long afterwards he said : — " Persie gave me a high estimate of the rural mind as compared with the urban. When DR. JOHN DUNCAN. Mi I went to Glasgow the people complained that they did not understand me, that I preached metaphysics. Now they understood me at Persie, — only, I had to speak Saxon to them ; if I spoke Latin to them they did not under- stand. And I came to this conclusion, that the urban mind gives itself up to a vast variety of subjects, but superficially to each ; while the rural mind gives itself to a few, but goes more intensively into them." A Glasgow merchant, an admirer of his gifts, having heard Mr. Duncan preach at Persie, determined to have him brought to Glasgow. He preached as a candidate in Anderston Chapel, and failed ; but was afterwards elect- ed assistant to the Eev. Mr. Clark, of the Gaelic Chapel. Here he was not popular, but he gained what was better than popularity. His influence was intense, within its narrow range. Haunted by the notion that his message might be " all lies," he enters the pulpit, he tells us, with that temptation to combat, " pale and trepid-enough looking, I dare say." But, as he proceeds in the delivery of his message, his temptations vanish, as did Luther's. He becomes controversial in his preaching, " sar- castically so ; " going to hear a minister of note in the forenoon, and " in the afternoon refuting what he had said." This he afterwards re- gretted, saying, " Age rubs down a good deal the controversial spirit of a man ; " and of the divine against whom he had preached he makes the fine observation, " Dr. • opened hia mouth, and out came a torrent of the purest Iviii BIOGRAPEIGAL SKETCH OF Saxon." His friends and admirers steadily in- creased, and at length resolved to have hira ordained, if possible, to the charge of a congre- gation of his own. A church building associa- tion having resolved to erect twenty new churches in Glasgow, agreed, that if Mr. Dun- can's friends would put one down in a necessi- tous part of the city, they would aid them by a grant of money. This was done; Milton Church was built ; and Mr. Duncan ordained in April 1836. At his ordination, when the usual queries were put to him by the Moderator, in reply to the question whether " zeal for the glory of God, and not worldly motives, was the chief inducement to enter into the holy minis- try 1 " he said, with a tremulous falter (which all who knew liim can well realise), " I ho;pe it is so." Next year he was married to Miss Janet Tower, of Aberdeen. How much he needed help and guidance in the management of his temporal affairs, will be easily understood from the recital of his eccentricities, and his incurable want of punctuality. Over and over again, standing on the quay at Greenock, waiting for a steamer to take him up or down, he would go into the wrong vessel, and entering the cabin begin to read, oblivious of everything. On the steamer stopping, he would helplessly ask, " Are we at Glasgow ? " (where perhaps he had to preach at a fixed hour). "Glasgow, sir! you're at Rothesay." Nothing disconcerted, he would just step into the next boat for Glasgow, and resume his studies by the way. DR. JOHN DUNG AN. lix But these irregularities in his social habits, latterly quite incurable, were really blame- worthy. His friends used to regard them as curious and humorous foibles ; but his want of method and indifference to engagements, his violation of the customs of society, and habit- ual absence of mind, brought their own penal- ties with them. That they lessened his imme- diate influence is undoubted ; that they seriously interfered with his mental completeness and spiritual balance is unquestionable ; that they in part contributed to his depression is equally true. They superinduced a tendency to violent extremes ; leading him to absorb himself at one time in study — to the utter neglect of the duties he owed to those around him, as well as to his own health — and then to plunge into religious exercises which were unseasonably prolonged. He laboured in Milton Church for four years, gathering around him a small but discerning flock ; occasionally startling them by his higher flights, acute sayings, and eccentric ways ; keeping up such prejudices as a marked dislike to the eating of blood, founded on the prohibi- tion in the book of Acts ; sufi"ering a severe bereavement in the death of his wife and in- fant child, a sorrow which crushed but mel- lowed his spirit; inditing verses to his first- born ; pursuing his studies in an utterly irregular manner, with no set hours for any- thing ; his books kept in such orderly disorder, that the only thing which made him angry was the attempt to dust and to replace them — on Ix BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF which occasions he said he "would sooner dwell in a wilderness than have his books touched;"' full of mirth at times, saying to his friends at supper, " Let us see noAV who will tell the merriest story ;" telling a friend that the one thing in the world which made him glad was, '• that the glory of the Lord would endure for ever, that the Lord would rejoice in His works ;" founding a class for teaching Hebrew to young ladies, and exacting as his only fee, that each person taught should teach another person Hebrew. About this time — 1839 — his attention having being long directed to the state of Israel, he made a formal offer of his services to a com- mittee of the Church of Scotland as its agent to promote Christianity amongst the Jews, whether at home or abroad. The offer was cordially accepted. But a vacancy meanwhile occurring in the Hebrew Chair of the Univer- sity of Glasgow, he became a candidate for the post. His mode of appHcation is probably unparalleled in the annals of professorial candi- dature. Knowing no one competent to bear tes- timony to his efficiency, he ventured to become his own witness-bearer ; and his letter of appli- cation, addressed to the Principal of the Uni- versity, with his accompanying profession of attainments, is altogether unique. To the Principal he said, " If I fail, I shall be cheered by the consideration that Sparta has found a better man. If honoured by the choice of the Faculties, I shall strive to evince my gratitude by constant remembrance of the adage 'Spar- DR. JOHN DUNG AN. Ixi tarn quam nadus es, ooma.' " In his profession of attainments, he said, *'' Being placed in the somewhat untoward position of a person who feels more conscious of fitness to grant certifi- cates, than cognisant of individuals from whom it would beseem him to receive them, I adven- ture to submit the following profession of acquirements in the department of Oriental learning." Then followed a list of Eabbinical grammarians and commentators, references to Chaldean, Arabic, Persian, Sanscrit, and Ben- gali literature, and all Hebrew, concluding with an offer to " present himself, along with any others, for competitive examination by any man throughout the world, wliether Christian or Jew." He was unsuccessful in his candidature ; but in the following year his own University conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., in testimony to his rare and curious learning. The idea of going abroad to labour among the Jews now filled his mind. A deputation from the Church of Scotland had been sent to the Continent, to fix the place Avhere they might commence missionary operations with greatest chance of success. The illness and detention of two members of the deputation in Hungary, — with certain consequences to which it led, — decided the committee to select that country, while they chose Dr. Duncan as the first and the fittest man for the work. He spent another winter at home, however, teach- ing Hebrew classes in Edinburgh and Glasgow, with a view to prepare those who were after- wards to follovv^ him. In 18-il, he was set kii BIOORAPEIGAL SKETCH OF apart to the office ; and set out with his wifo — he had just married a second time — and two students. They went by the Ehine to May- ence, and thence by Eatisbon to Vienna ; had difficulties to encounter owing to the Austrian jealousy of foreigners ; but reached Pesth in safety, in August 1841, Already a beginning had been made, in the work on which they were bent, by the detention in Buda, through severe illness, of Dr. Keith, one of the depu- tation previously sent out. Through a curious combination of circumstances, he had won the sympathy and secured the influence of the Archduchess, a most excellent lady, of unaffected piety; and it was largely owing to her that the operations of the mission in Hungary were carried out unmolested, for so long. After Dr. Duncan's arrival, divine service was commenced in a humble dwelling, Hungarians and others attending, along with British residents, partly from religious interest, partly also from a desire to improve then- English speech. He at once sought out the clergy of Buda (Lutheran and Eeformed), and, as their conversation was car- ried on in Latin, his mastery of that language, and the classic purity of his style, attracted the native pastors. His learning and his character combined, his moderation, forbearance, and mis- sionary tact, soon won the hearts of these men; and he speedily saw that he could hope to in- fluence the Jews only through the Protestant Church of the country, and that therefore new life must, in the first instance, be infused into it He saw that Hungarian Protestantism was, DB. JOHN DUNCAN. Ixiii to a large extent, a political institution ; and in one of his letters to the church at home, he made this apt remark, " When truth ceases to live in the hearts of living men (its proper dwelling), the books which contain it become the cemeteries of dead truth, which reposes there ' in hope of a blessed resurrection.' " Feeling the organic unity which connected the church of the Reformation with that of his own land, he appealed to the younger branch, " Eekindle the lamp that kindled ours." His own influence began slowly to tell upon the clergy of the district, while, aided by his two assistants, he laboured with zeal and wise dis- cretion in the Scottish mission. He did not, however, accomplish much amongst the Jews themselves : " The only good," he candidly writes, " I have found from discussion, is that of prevent- ing them from despising the practical argument of our example." " You will see that our pro- gress must be slow amongst a people among whom our only holds are, their wish to learn our language, curiosity to scan our habits, and ascertain, if possible, the cast of mind of per sons who profess to live according to the Bible." His candour in not colouring his success by the least exaggeration is most noticeable ; since the tendency to present the results of labour in their most flattering aspects is a well-known temptation to the missionary. The arrival of other missionaries, en route for Constantinople, cheered his heart ; and he had the satisfaction of seeing some (both Jews and Hungarians) Ixiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF helped by himself and his coadjutors, toward-? a clearer intelligence and a higher style of life. After little more than a year, however, his health began to suffer, and he was ordered to leave Hungary and winter in Italy. He re- paired to Leghorn, where there were a good many Jews, and where he spent nearly two years. His success as a missionary toward the race of Israel was again disappointing ; but he found scope for general work amongst the English residents and visitors. Returning to Pesth for the same reason which had driven him from it (the fluctuations and delicacy of his health), he spent a short time with his old friends and colleagues, saw much of the noble Archduchess, taught her English, and guided her in religious matters. In 1843, the Disruption of the Scottish Church took place ; and a professor of Oriental Languages was required in Edinburgh, in connection with the Free Church. Having left the Establishment with his brother missionaries, Dr. Duncan was elected to this office, and re- called from the foreign field, to devote the remaining years of his life, to the work of the professoriate. In that Free Church College he became a peripatetic teacher of wisdom to hun- dreds of S3^mpathetic minds amongst the theological students. He taught without inter- mission, for more than a quarter of a century, in the New College. It must be admitted that ho was not successful as a teacher of languages ; l:»ut it was part of the duties of his office to give cxegetical instruction in Sacred Literature ar/J DR. JOHN DUNCAN. Ixv the characteristics of Old Testament Thought ; and, on these subjects, flashes of deepest intel- lectual insight were often intermingled with the tenderest devotional spirit. He accomplished far more, however, by his personal influence and marvellous conversational powers than by academical prelection. He never lectured, in the ordinary sense of that term. He could not bear the drudgery of composition. All his finest thoughts, and the happiest expression of them, came out in oral speech. He was himself aware of this ; and the desultoriness of his mind, Avith his utterly unmethodical habits, prevented him from ever finishing any written composition he began. He even disliked the trammel of reading from manuscript ; and if he commenced a lecture in that fashion, he soon cast the writing aside, as an artificial restraint. Far nobler utterances came forth unpremedi- tated, from the fulness of a spirit inspired by its subject, than he could ever have elaborated in the silence of his study. Grand prophetic soul, a true seer of these later days, obtaining curious glimpses of truth behind the veil, and burdened till they were disclosed to others, what had he — whose soul Avas lit and glowing with interior fire — to do with the tardy process of writing " dissertations " ! The zeal of his Father's house consumed him ; and nothing delighted him more than to pour forth to sympathetic listeners the truths on which his own mind had fastened, and in which he had found spiritual nutriment. "I have often thought," wrote one of his Ixvi BIOGEAPHIGAL SKETCH OF colleagues at Pesth, " that if our staid forms of theological training had admitted of his being turned, along with his students, at a given hour, twice a week, into the Princes Street Gardens, there to walk, talk, and discuss to- gether in perfect freedom, — content sometimes to get nothing, at other times obtaining glimpses into vistas of thought sufficient to last a life- time, — there would have been inaugurated the greatest school of theological learning in modern Europe. The admirable mixture of the logical, the ideal, and the experimental in his theology would have secured this result." It may be questioned whether so vast a result could have been secured by such a pro- cess. But there is no doubt that it was as a peripatetic teacher that Dr. Duncan's peculiar talent found its natural outlet ; and had the experiment been tried, a whole generation of Scottish theologians might have formed associa- tions with these gardens, resembling those which Greek students of wisdom formed with the groves of the Academy. As the most Socratic Scotchman of his generation, he might have done more by this means to advance reli- gious thought within his church, than any other living influence could have effected. Many curious stories are told by his students, connected with these years of academic labour. His eccentricities increased rather than dimi- nished ; while the influence of his character deep- ened, and his power as a guide in theological inquiry, and in spiritual analysis, Avas more re- cognised from year to year. This period was DR. JOHN DUNCAN. Ixvii doubtless the most fruitful in Dr. Duncan's life ; a life, to the ordinary eye — judging re- sults by conventional standards, and easily chronicled success — comparatively wasted ; but, in its indirect stimulus and suggestiveness, one of the few great influences of modern times. It cannot be said that his career, as a professor, was a conspicuous success. Tested by the purely academic standard, it was even a con- spicuous failure. But Dr. Duncan was, in every sense, an exceptional man ; and the work which he did, in an irregular manner, could never have been done by a more symmetri- cal and academic preceptor. His method of tuition was often, as a matter of course, as irrelevant as his own studies were. His feeble- ness in carrying out his best purposes was almost childish. But, while the influence of his professoriate as a discipline in Hebrew literature was almost nil, the spirit which breathed from the man himself, and the light thrown out by him incidentally on the meaning of the Hebraic economy — in short, the influence of his charac- ter and genius — was superlatively great. His devotional spirit touched his students, and moulded many of them, in ways of which they were scarcely conscious. His introductory prayer, sometimes protracted through a large part of the class hour, often revealed so many of the heights and depths of spiritual character, that it was better than the lecture which should have occupied its place. His prayers, uttered in slow, measured, reverential tones, had (says one of his students) " all the solemnity without Ixviii BIOGEAPHIGAL SKETCH OF the formality of a liturgy," The intense reality and urgency of his devotions, was a lesson in the spirit of prayer, and an aid to its practice. At the weekly religious service, conducted jointly by professors and students, no addresses were more powerful, no prayers more helpful, than Dr. Duncan's. His mere presence in the class-room, the senate, and the college quad- rangle, was a living influence for good. No one could look on that countenance with its grand impressive lines, or contemplate his character so simple yet so deep— in which the revere-iice of the scholar was blent with the humility of the child — or witness his saintly "walk and conversation," without feeling that he presented to his students a better, because a living, evi- dence of the supernatural, than the apologetic treatises which other men wrote. His mode of lecturing resembled that of the German University Professors rather than the Scotch. After the solemn preamble of his opening service, if he was dealing not with ?. question of grammatical construction but with the word of an ancient Prophet, or any of the weightier problems of religious thought, the noble antique face — more and more impressive as the years advanced, and the almond tree flourished — would liglit up with that radiance, which the human countenance often shows when the light comes to it from the soul within. With uplifted finger, he would speak ; rising from his chair, or walking about his class-room in front of the benches, half communing with himself in audible soliloquy, half prelecting t-o DR. JOHN DUNCAN. Ixix his audience. Ideas seemed borne upon him from afar, and light after light would break upon the horizon of his hearers' vision ; while his whole frame and figure kindled with the enthusiasm of the thoughts that visited him, — thoughts which almost refused to be confined within the framework of speech. Yet, when the glow of the moment died away, he would (says one who has photographed him more liappily than any other) " lean back on his chair, and after taking a pinch of snuff, sum up all he had said in a happy aphoristic sentence." He united, in a most remarkable manner, the characteristics of many types of the theological mind. He was a Patristic-Scholastic-Puritan ; intensely scholastic, fond of the most subtle analyses and distinctions, but continually break- ing through the syllogistic trammel, by a flight into the clear empyrean of spiritual vision. Sometimes, says the student-friend above referred to, " in the course of a discussion he would from time to time utter an exclamation of adoring wonder, or a cry of aspiration. Some- times, when his understanding ran riot in inter- minable subtleties, his heart abruptly stopped him." The minor incidents, which illustrate the manner of the man during these years in Edinburgh, are more significant than many of the larger events which occupy men of affairs, the leaders of ecclesiastical action and party in their time. Throughout this whole period he was constantly uttering memorable sayings ; and " while he wrote little on paper, he v/rote much on living minds, in spok'eu M^ords, full of Ixx BIOGBAPHIGAL SKETCH OF light and fire. None was ever more prodigal of himself in talk than he. He was no builder of a system that might perpetuate his name. He Avas a sower of seed." And "everything he said," adds the same recorder, " most truly conveyed the impression of the boundlessness of truth." The extraordinary fluctuations of his spiritual health during these years in Edinburgh, were largely due to physical causes — his utter irregu- larity, and want of self-control. A student's question would interest him, and the good man would walk on for hours, discussing the pro- blem started, wholly oblivious of engagements at home, and not permitting his unlucky questioner to leave him. It was not un- common for a servant to find him in the morn- ing reading in his study, where he had sat all through tlie night. If, by his own desire, the gas were turned low at a fixed hour, as a warning, he would read on till it was ex- tinguished, retire to bed in the dark, and rise late, scarcely in time for his class. I have known him spend hours over the advertisements of a foreign continental newspaper, when he ought to have been otherwise engaged. He could do nothing in an orderly fashion, but demanded long irregular stretches of work and of rest; a Aveek of entire linguistic absorption ; a day or two devoted to metaphysics ; another week of exclusive religious exercises ; again an irregular stretch of novel reading, and news- paper dissipation. It is easy to see, that his absorption in any book which casually came in DB. JOHN DUNG AN. Ixxi Lis way, liis so often flowing with the current of passing interests instead of resisting it, and then wakening up to perceive that he had wasted time and lost opportunities of useful work, would throw an acutely sensitive nature like his into misgivings and self-reproaches, which in their turn become excessive and morbid. Yet all his failings were half lovable. You could never feel angry with him because of any of them, although you might judge him severely enough. During his professoriate, his chief extra- academical interest, beyond occasional preach- ing (in which his powers were never fully displayed, from his tendency to be prolix), was the Free Chuixh mission to the Jews. His occasional addresses in the General Assembly, after the Jewish report was read, contain some of his most felicitous sentences. In one noble passage, he thus apostrophised the Jew — " Poor Jew ! guardian of the ancient archives of divine relation, thou art thyself a library of most grand, varied, solemn, and touching lessons, from eldest time to this youngest day," The House of Israel lay always near his heart. He could never resist any Avandering Jew who appealed to him for alms. He was often cheated by the beggars ; enjoying, he tells us, " an inward cachination at the thought that people did not know that I allowed myself to be cheated with my eyes open, that I might gain an opportunity of stealing away a pre- judice or two." On his advancing infirmities, his declining Ixxii BIOGRAPHICAL BKETGE OF years, and his final farewell, it is unnecessary to enlarge ; as some things remain to be said, as to his character as a whole, and the chief lessons of his life. It is impossible to discuss, by ordinary critical methods, the theological and philosophical position of one who told us that he had no "system" to offer; and whose opinions on the details of theological science are obtainable only through the fragments of lectures and discourses, preserved by many friends, and presenting the man from nearly opposite points of view. Some of these opinions, however, reveal noticeable points of divergence from tlie views of his contemporaries. 1. Intellectually, the man was distinguished, amongst his peers, for manysidedness of literary and philosophical, as well as theological, know- ledge. His acquisitive powers were enormous ; the range of his studies was almost encyclo- pedaic ; his mental appetite insatiable ; and the stores amassed very heterogeneous and dis- orderly. His culture was rooted in distant centuries. Its prevailing voice was of the past ; although its grey antique colour was brightened every here and there by unexpected flashes of the modern spirit. There was scarcely a pro- blem, in the range of human inquiry, on which he had not something to say ; and, if he had not studied it, his extemporised remark, when the question was started, was always suggestive. But it could not be said of him, as of so many scholars, that "omniscience was his foible," Modesty kept him from all pedantry, and he was never elated by his attainments. He was DR. JOHN DUNG AN. Ixxiii conscious of power, but that consciousness was held in check by an overmastering humiUty, All his friends bear consenting testimony to his singular insight into the core of great questions, and to his capacity of presenting his thoughts in a luminous, and even highly artistic form, clothing them in the raiment of terse sententious English speech. Indeed, his powers as an aphorist recommended many of his most disputable opinions, by the exceed- ing beauty of their form. As a thinker he was not averse to "open questions;" on the contrary, he often talked of the nudtitude of unsolved problems which he ever carried about Avith him. It was, indeed, curious to ob- serve the tenacity with which he clung to certain dogmas (theologemes, he used to call them), and tlic openness to conviction v/hich he displayed in reference to otliers. His intellectual candour was not so great as his utter guilelessness of spirit, his straightforward simplicity, and his transparent purity of purpose. Every one felt that his soul had no twist, though his intellect may have been aberrant at times, and his mental tenacity often obstinate. There are some of his pupils who entertain a far brighter memory of his moral qualities than of his intellectual vision. Others, who were not powerfully af- fected by his special type of spiritual character, felt that he had the unmistakable stamp of real greatness, in his perfect freedom from all that is petty in character. No man ever heard a word of gossip from John Duncan. His charity rejoiced in the good alone ; it thought no evil ; Ixxiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF wliile it hoped all things. You could not conceive him the victim of envy, any more than of per- sonal ambition. He was superior to every form of jealousy or touchiness, free from all small-mind- edness or suspicion of others ; and, from the least wise of his friends, he could take rebuke as humbly as a child. With all his depression and frequently morbid experiences, he had a bright, sunny, humorous soul. His talk some- times sparkled with wit ; he revelled in the humourists ; and, like the best of them, he had a heart full of pathos and tenderness. His appreciation of the beautiful, except in character and literary style, was not great. For pictorial and plastic art, or even for the sublime and beautiful in external nature, he had no keen eye ; nor had he a musical ear. His indiffer- ence to the glories of earth and sky, and all " the sweet influences " of the seasons, was in- deed surprising. Probably they had no glory to him, " by reason of a glory that excelled." In his declining years, however, he said, " I am soon to leave this beautiful world, and I am only coming to see its beauty now that I am going to leave it : but I am anxious to carry away as perfect a calotj^pe of it as possible ; and therefore I gaze with unwearied delight upon the trees, and flowers, and the blue sky, and the faces of men." 2, In addition to these characteristics, mental and moral, Dr. Duncan's life bore conspicuous witness to the realities of religious experience. Not that the apparent suddenness of his interest in things divine, or the process he then under- DR. JOHN DUNCAN. Ixxv went, or, in truth, many of the features of his subsequent life, were altogether commendable. He did not live in a habitually healthful atmo- sphere of feeling. He chose the pathway of a peculiar experience, though he would have been the last to wish that all men should follow him, or should have to undergo a similar convulsion. Still, in the midst of our modern disquiet, our fierce disputes and barren controversies, with so much commonplaceness in the religious world, its occasional harshness, querulousness, and egotism, it is much to be able to point to so conspicuous an embodiment of the Christian character ; a man, the genuineness of whose experience none can question, and from whose life all may learn. Nevertheless, it is true that he was " all his lifetime subject unto bondage." His spirit did not live in the sunshine. Though he would have appreciated Luther's saying, "I sit and sing, like a bird on a tree, and let God think for me," he never entered into the core of that experience. Further, his spiritual surrender before Csesar Malan was not simply prostration before God, it was also submission to a human system, and to a fervent but one-ideaed reli- gious director. But the right attitude of human souls to their Maker, at a crisis of spiritual de- velopment, has but a very faint parallel in the relation between patients and the physician to whom they have recourse for the cure of phy- sical maladies. 3. When we pass, however, from his intel- lectual and spiritual characteristics, to judge of Dr. Duncan as a religious thinker, and assign him / Ixxvi BIOQRAPHIGAL SKETCH OF his place as a theologian, our estimate is by no means so high as in the former case. In his renunciation of philosophy, he was the victim of one of the most curious kinds of self-decep- tion. He was dissatisfied with the ordinary ' apologies ' for Christianity ; and being unable to give a reason for his faith, he committed philosophical suicide, virtually giving up the problem of human knowledge in despair. All that I ever heard Dr. Duncan say, and all that I have read or heard of his sayings to others, convinces me that he leapt of a sudden into the theological fastness, and did not reason his way thitherwards. It is impossible to say that this may not have been the best procedure for him- self at the time ; but it must be pronounced unsafe for the majority of men, in itself unphi- losophical, and usually fatal to tranquillity of mind and heart. " I am a philosophical sceptic," said he, " who have taken refuge in theology." Now, no philosophical sceptic can take a rational refuge in theology ; because all theology must, consciously or unconsciously, have a rational starting point. Dr. Duncan stood in almost chronic doubt of the trustworthiness of the human faculties. He failed to see that his craving for something which should satisfj^ him as to the reliability of these faculties was not merely a case of circular reasoning, but also an utterly abortive longing, and its realisation a hopelessly Utopian dream. He wished to rise above the deliverances of his own nature, and attain to certitude by falling back on a heavenly Oracle. But the assurance that such an oracle DE. JOHN DUNG AN. Ixxvii exists, must rest on verifiable evidence ; and the whole theory of evidence, the ' grammar of religious assent,* was left by our modern school- man an unsolved problem to the last. He tried to renounce philosophy, but could not do so. Brought back as ancilla domini, after being banished from the house as a witness to its Lord, its office is illegitimate, and its power to discharge the handmaiden's duty absolutely nil. Willing or unwilling, the theologian must have a philosophy, which is simply the rationale of Revelation ; and he who begins, by discarding it as the vestibule to the edifice of religious thought, must in the end have a bad and ill- built house, unsymmetrical, nay, without either door of entrance or window for outlook, — a mere crypt for the imprisoned intellect. 4. I have remarked that his intellectual was not so conspicuous as his moral candour. As a critic of religious systems this was specially noticeable. It was his habit, often, to judge of a treatise or system of religious opinion from isolated passages, which contained, as he thought, the essence of the whole. His power of grasp- ing the root of a system, from a single phase of it, was often marvellous ; approaching to a sort of spiritual divination. But he was sometimes led astray by his very success in this divination. I know that he frequently gathered the facts, on which he based his critical judgments of contemporary religious phenomena, from reviews of books, rather than from the treatises them- selves. He seldom read any volume, with the central thought of which, in a similar system, he Ixxviii BIOGRAPHIGAL SKETCH OF was already familiar, to the end. He luxuriated so much in his power of scholastic analysis, that he often proceeded to weigh a system in the critical balance, before he had completely mastered its genius, by intellectual and moral receptivity. It was a rare delight to him to seize, and hold up a system to the sunlight, analysing it with precision and often with strokes of delicate humour, while he described it with epigrammatic terseness. But I often thought that he was less anxious to diagnose its contents accurately, than to dissect and ex- pose its flaws acutely. One of the best illus- trations of this is his almost total misinterpret- ation of the drift and genius of the writings of Mr. Maurice, to which the Cambridge professor replied in one of his latest writings. 5. As a preacher, he was never popular ; but some of his most distinctive features were mani- fested in the pulpit. Every listener felt how intense was the hold which the truth had over the speaker. He was as one held captive ; not one who had, after long search, discovered sundry truths ; but one on whom Truth had laid her strong hand ; and who was therefore not a constructor of sermons, but a messenger, a voice. He invariably lost the consciousness of self, and of his audience, in the fervid utter- ance of his message. He was no preacher of bare doctrine, but of doctrine lit up with the blaze of experience ; doctrine in v/hich he had lived, and was living, and with which he sought to vitalise his bearers. His pulpit teaching was very unequal, as all preaching is. But DR. JOHN DUNCAN. Ixxix with him, far more than witli most of his con- temporaries, it was the habitual utterance of one who had " taken the shoes from his feet," feeling that the place was " holy ground." No logical order ran through his discourse. Its paragraphs, and even the sentences sometimes, wanted the consecutiveness of a cumulative argument. It was not a stream swollen by tributary rills of corroborative thought. It con- tained no rhetorical flights ; though it had passages of austere and stately beauty, — his words chiselled as by the sculptor's hand. Flashes of genius shot through it here and there ; but its power lay in its moral intensity, its spiritual fire, and the pathetic appeals of one who spoke, because he could not keep silence, because he believed, and had experienced. Many rich morsels of his criticisms on living preachers are known to his friends. Perhaps the finest is the following characterisation of two of the most remarkable preachers of their day in Edinburgh, Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Gordon : — " They were both one-ideaed preachers ; but I used to compare the one to a showman, and the other to a huntsman. Dr. Chalmers was the showman, and his idea was the showman's box, which he set down before you, and said, 'Here's the idea.' Then he took it up in his hands, and turned it, and showed it in every possible way ; ' This is the top of it, and this is the bottom ; this is its front, and this is its back ; this is the outside, and this is the inside ; so there you have the whole idea.' Dr. Gordon was the huntsman, and his idea was the fox Ixxx DR. JOHN DUNCAN. which he asked you to help him to catch ; * You cannot see it yet, but we shall search the thicket, and make sure to find it. It is some- where in this cover ; let us first beat for it on the right, next let us turn and beat the bushes on the left. It is not in either ; let us now beat straight in front. Sniff! sniff! we have got on the right scent, we shall soon catch it now, it must be very near — Ho! there it is at last ! look, that is it, the idea,' — and he closed the book just the moment before you had caught it !" What chiefly impressed many of Dr. Duncan's friends both in his character and in his preach- ing, was the intense, ever-burning, or smoulder- ing fire of enthusiasm for the glory of God, and the longing to realise it in his own experience. In prostrate humilitj^ he regarded himself as less than nothing and vanity : and his utmost ambition was to be a doorkeeper in the house of his God, to help forward, as an unworthy instrument, that * kingdom ' which was dearer to him than his life. The two biographies, the Memoir and the Recollections, will serve to per- petuate the story of his life, and the leading characteristics of this modern ' Scottish Pascal :' and many a student of theology will visit, with reverence and a solemn heart, the grave in the Grange Cemetery of Edinburgh, where his dust reposes beside that of his colleagues, ' in hope of a blessed resurrection.' Beside his tomb, the grand and simple lessons of his life seem to find a living voice ; for it may be said of him, as truly as of any of his contemporaries and colleagues in religious thought and work, that ' being dead, he yet speaketh.' COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. [PHiiiOSOPiiiCAL Scepticism and Theology.] I AM a philosophical sceptic, who have taken refuge in Theology. I ascend to God. Reason, in some way unknown to me, " over- leaps itself." I agree with the Transcendental- ists in this ; and if we are " made in the image of God," we can reach and positively apprehend Him in whose image we are made. I postulate God, and out of this postulate any philosophy I have emerges. [It is altogether deductive then ?] It is deductive from that point. If we do not assume God, and reason downwards from that assumi^tion, I douht we shall never rise to Him at all. Once a man has said his " credo," and especially if his creed has been christened, he may build his philosophy as high as heaven. The tendency of all my thinking is not to look upwards from man to God, but downwards from God to man, [But, as Ave are not divine, how do you get up in the first instance ?] I cannot tell you ; only, I am up. Proljably it is by instinct. Say, if you choose, that rea- son has overleapt itself. I find that I cannot 2 COLLOQUIA FEBIPATETIGA. bridge the gulf between the creature and a Creator, the many and the One, in my ascentj so I endeavour to do so in my descent. [But you must ascend in some way, before you can descend.] I must start from theology ; for I am a born jMlosojMcal sceptic, but once I am theological I am sceptical no more. But 1 only part company with the sceptic by recovering my philosophical faith, on a theological basis. [Well, but you take this theological faith as the final utterance of your own nature, when consciousness is analysed ?] No ', it is not the verdict of my own nature, it is something higher than that. You tell me that this or that is the voice of Nature, and that we can't help believing it. But does this Reidist solution really satisfy any man 1 The belief may be false, though we cannot help believing it 1 May not some malign being, a xaxohaiiJ^m, have created us, or such a demiourgos as the Gnostics believed in. Can't-help-myself-ism is to me a very shallow philosophy. But if I am " made in the image of God," my philosophy is under-propped by theology, and the truth of what my nature avers is guaranteed to me. [But who guarantees you this fact, from which you start? Must you not fall back, after all, upon the consciousness, lit up by evidence from without ? The very nature you turn from is our ultimate court of appeal, and so you reason in a circle.] No : there is no circle ; for God is appre- hended within the soul of man, as the archetype GOLLOQUIA PElilPATETICA. 3 of existence. We do not infer his being from what we are. We cannot rise to Him tlms. But He is himself Avithin us. His voice, not the voice of consciousness, may be heard. But, Revela- tion aj)art, I am a sceptic, i.e. I am a })hiloso- phical sceptic. Sextus Empiricus was long my delight. I used to read the ancient sceptics and dogmatists, just to pit one against another in glorious war, and strove to beat them all to the dust, like so many ninepins. Sextus himself was the ball amongst the ninepins. A good history of previous philosophies is to be found in his treatise Ilgos rovg fj,a&rific/,Ti7.ouc, just be- cause he was himself a sceptic. [The Nature and Origin of Evil.] I CANNOT get out of the meshes of Augus- tinianism on the privative nature of sin. Evil is a defect, just as death is a privation, the loss of Avhat once was, and therefore of what is needful for health and completion of existence. Inanimation is the negation of life, and what death physical is to the body — viz. the with- drawal of life — sin is to the soul, the withdrawal of its life. God is not the author of sin, because sin has no author. Sin is an off-cutting, a de- generacy, a cancer, or corruption consequent on privation. And just as a new chemistry begins on the death of the body, the chemistry of in- animates ; for want of a better, I take this crude analogue of physical death and dismemberment, upon which a new chemistry supervenes, to shadow forth the nature of sin I observe that Julius Miiller disowns the Angus- 4 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIC A. tinian doctrine. But how does he save himself from Manichoeism 1 It was to escape from Manichseism that Augustine adopted his theory. That theory is certainly necessary to support the strong position of Rutherford in his work, De Frovidentia, that God is the author of all entitive acts. He that affirms that must be a decided Augustinian ; for no pious man could affirm that God is the author of sin. As dark- ness is the privation of light, and death the absence of life, sin is the privation of good. [You used * the symbol of a cancer that would consume all existence, if it had the free range of the universe. Is it easier to conceive the origin of a defect under the symbol of disease, than of a positive revolt 1] No. But I used that symbol to suggest more strongly the notion of the privative nature of evil, as against a merely negative conception ; and of a privative effect in a being created with a moral nature and essential activity. [By " essential activity" do you mean " free- will 'M] Well, "activity" is a more generic word than freewill. But perhaps the phrase, " moral nature and essential activity," is a tautology, for the one may involve the other. But the use of the latter term instead of the word " freewill " keeps us clear of a knotty controversy. ... I would not object to say that sin is first priva- tive, and then positive ; but its privative nature is its profoundest ; and when profoundly looked at does not sin appear more awful on that than * In a previous conversation. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 5 on any otlier tlicory of it 1 For it appears in its essential nature as absolute malitia, which, if unchecked, would go to the extinction of all being, and of God himself. There is no doubt that all sin designs deicide. All sin is directed against universal being. It is primarily against God, inferentially against all being. It seeks to slay Being at the root. [It is not so consciously.] No. But this is very much because of the sinner's notion of God being false. He would not kill the God of his own fancy. He would only kill the God that is. [But if the wrongdoer is not conscious that his sin designs deicide, he cannot be responsible for its being so, even if it is so.] A man is not conscious of this till he gets familiar with the character of God, and the closer he comes to God, the more will his sin appear to him to attempt a virtual deicide. All transgression is ambitious, and if it could suc- ceed it would scale tlie universe and dethrone its monarch. But as to its essence and its origin, beyond this that I have said, it always seems to me that our speculations are directed to find the rationale of the only irrational thing in the universe, and of the only thing tliat has no cause. Suppose it to have one ; well, is not that causal volition of the creature a sin, equally with all that follows from it 1 If so, whence came it? From God ? firi y'ivoiro' If not from God, whence ? From naught. [That is, you break the causal nexus.] 0/ course I do, as regards the sin. It is cause- 6 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. less and irrational. It is monstrosity — a thing horrible in a God-made universe, just because it is causeless. [We must distinguish between the act of sin, and the sin that is in the act. The power to act, and the act itself which is morally colour- less as an act {achis purus), must be caused. Is it only the moral quality that you reckon un- caused 1] Yes. I don't suppose that any good thing is causeless, though done by the creature, its moral quality is not causeless. It is only evil that has no cause, and hence its enormity. [But do you not weaken the sense of responsi- bility by the theory that the evil per se is cause- less? And can you split up our actions into two parts, and considering them on the one hand simply as acts, and on the other as moral phenomena, regard them as so far caused, and so far uncaused f\ Certainly ; I agree with Rutherford that God is the author of all entitive acts. But He is not the author of sin ; and as He is the author and source of the creature. He is by implication the author of all that His creature does, and therefore of evil, if evil be anything positive. Again and again I come back to it, " Nemo de me quiBrat efficientem causam malse voluntatis : non enim est efficiens sod deficiens ; quia nee ilia effectio est, sed defectio." * I am still drawn to Augustine, for all that Miiller has to say against him. He Avas a philosopher, while a Manichee, and as a philosopher he held fast to * Aug. De Clvit. Dei, xii. 7. — Ed. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 7 the causal nexus : but, on renouncing Manichse- ism, he admitted its violation. And I don't see how, if you hold fast to the causal nexus, you can account for the entrance of evil ; or rather you can show that it could not enter. [Is not causation altogether a mystery 1 Have we any right to affirm that the nexus between volitions is broken on the introduction of evil ?] We must do so, or become Manichosan, and charge its entrance upon God. I suppose, however, that ManichiBism was a revolt in the interest of morality, against the immorality of an antecedent pantheism. I am inclined to think that a pantheistic scheme of absorption, or nihilism, must have preceded Zoroastrianism, which was a speculative advance upon the ibrmer system. And Manichseism was only a revived Zoroastrianism ; it was just the intro- duction of the Persian philosophy into Christi- anity. For Ormuzd was a perfectly good being ; but as evil existed as a fact (and hold- ing fast by this was the moral element in Mani- chiieism), and as the caiisal nexus could not he broken, there must be an entirely and eternally bad being, to produce the evil. I believe that it was in the interest of morals that this revolt was determined both in the first principles of the system, and in its virtual tendency. The later system was a revolt from a grosser sys- tem. Manichseism was not a retrograde but a progressive movement, for, with all its absur- dities, it sought in Ormuzd a being morally perfect. We can see how a purer ethic might 8 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. arise from this position. There is at least oiie being absolutely good. ... It is note- worthy that pantheism, by abolishing moral distinctions, is closely allied to polytheism — pantheism, the creed of the refined ; polytheism, the religion of the herd. [The Creeh within tub Creed.] I'M first a Christian, next a Catholic, then a Calvinist, fourth a Paedobaptist, and fifth a Presbyterian. I cannot reverse this order. [Some one suggested that these were like circles within each other, the first the widest and the best.] I like better to think of them as towers rising one above the other, though narrowing as they rise. The first is the broadest, and is the foundation laid by Christ ; but we are to build on that foundation, and, as we ascend, our out- look widens. [Conservatism and Theology.] THERE is a progressive element in all things, and therefore in religion ; though I am much more of a conservative in Theology than in Philosophy, or in Politics, or in anything else. There we have a "foundation laid." But Ave have no political Bible, no philosophical Scrip- tures, no scientific infallible writings. And yet we are now in an older age of the world than the apostolic. It is a nastake to look to the Fathers as our seniors. They were our juniors. The Church has advanced wonderfully since its COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 9 foundation was laid. Polycarp would have stood a bad chance in an examination by John Owen. I think I could have posed him myself. Finest devout men these old Christians were. But what did they do ? They came together, and prayed, and read a great deal of Scripture, and sang, and talked, and went away again, and fell to tent-making : then came back, and read, and prayed, and sang, and so forth. And yet the conservative element is always good. Eacli age needs some men to go back into antiquity, and jealously to guard its trea- sures, that they be not lost ; and this is always good if we are not bigotedly conservative — i.e. blind to progressive light. It is true that to many the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehends it not. But there is a destructive school of progress that I cannot endure. It would simply destroy the past to make way for itself. Conservatism alone, and by itself, is obstructive ; Neoterism alone, and by itself, is destructive. [Calvinism.] nrHERE'S no such thing as Calvinism. The ■^ teachings of Augustine, Remigius, Anselm, and Luther, were just pieced together by one remarkable man, and the result baptized with his name. Augustine taught and developed the doctrine of salvation by grace and the Divine election ; Itemigius, particular redemption ; Anselm, the doctrine of vicarious atonement ; and Luther, that of justification by faith. 10 GOLLOQUIA PERIPAT ETICA. [High Calvinism.] I THINK I'm a high Calvinist. I have no objection to the heigld of the Calvinists ; but I have objections to the miserable narrowness of some, the miserable narrowness. As Calvinism rises to the infinite, it can't be too high. But it must not be like a single pillar rising up to heaven, not even like a steeple, but a church. And I have no objection to the crypts below. There is a subterranean region underneath our creeds ; only I'm satisfied if they rise up to the light. [Biblical Landmarks of Theology.] A GOOD way of determining the progressive landmarks of Theology might be by selecting typical texts to describe the points made emphatic by the principal teachers of the Church. Thus, to take only six. I would connect the name of Athaimsius with the words, " Go ye into all the world, teaching and bap- tizing, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost : " Augustine, with the words, "By grace are ye saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;" "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which he shed on us abundantly ; " etc. : Anselm, with the words, " Christ suffered for our sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God :" Rc- migius, " I am the good shepherd ; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. My GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. 11 sheep hear my voice," etc. : Liither, " Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Clirist, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law ; for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified:" and Calvin, "Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath chosen us in him before the founda- tion of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love." [Chabity.] I MUST be charitable, but I must have a radix to my charity. The dyaTrjj must be based upon the mang. [Optimism.] YOU call it the correlative of Theism. Well, I would say, beware of making the one the entrance to the other. I have all my life been hanging about the doors, but I have not yet gone in. I think we may be content to remain still at the door a little longer ; a little longer, till we're done with the darkness. [The aphorism that " repentance is better than innocence," was quoted as the kernel of Dr. Bruce's preachuig, and as affording one ray of light as to the permission of evil and the theory of optimism.] Well, there is great truth in that. I have no objection to Dr. B.'s kernel. But I find that kernel enclosed in a shell, and the shell is, " as far as man is concerned." B 12 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. [AUIANISM.] T 'VE been in all the heresies but two. I've -■- lived in them all, without exception, but in two, with which I have never had any affinity. These are Arianism, and .* Arianism is a very meagre patchwork. If we are to be saved, it must be by God, or by man (and how grandly by the God-man). But that it should be by one, neither God nor man, neither one nor other, not part of both, nor wholly both, nor wholly one of the two, but wholly neither, and, therefore, with no real affinity with either of them ; — that system has no attractions for me. Let who choose go to it. I cannot, and never could. [Facts.] I AM becoming more and more in love with a good bone of fact. I've been too specula- tive and abstract all my life, and I am now, in my old years, seeing the wisdom of clinging to the facts, — the bones. The mystical dreamer and the abstract mind both shun the facts, and in consequence the mystic often becomes a flabby molluscous sort of creature. There are some Christians whom I could describe only as soft pulpy molluscs. And yet their mollusc lives are curious. See the limpet's suction. So some of the most curious spiritual creatures cling to that rock, which is Christ. You may kick them, and they'll only cling the firmer ; ay, and with some of them, it is only the knife, or * My notes are here defective. I cannot recall the second heresy. — Ed. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 13 death by stoning, that will remove them from " that Rock." There's a law of compensation ever3'where. [Eclecticism.] TN one sense, I am not an Eclectic ; in ■'- another sense I am. I cannot huddle systems and bits of systems into a mass, apart from their organic connections, and the vital relations of Truth with Truth. I cannot merely juxta-place, and leave the dogmas in a row. But, on tlie other hand, there is nothing in this world completely false. There is no whole lie that I know of but the Sceptic's ; and even his is not utterly a lie, or it would never have existed. Undoubtedly all errors are abused truths. But then half a truth is also at the same time half a lie. Now I don't like halves. Give me entireties, unities, wholes. T [Scottish Psalms and Paraphrases.] HERE is fine poetry in some of our Scotch paraphrases. " So days, and years, aud ages past, Descending down to night, Can henceforth never more return Back to the gates of light." That is very fine poetry. But it was born in Hellas, and never visited Judea. Now we are to sing the songs of Sion. " Gates of light ! " I begin to think of Aurora, fair daughter of the dawn ! On the whole, I prefer the Psalms to the Paraphrases and Hymns. They call them paraphrases or translations — and queer trans- 14 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. lations some of them are. If they had given me translations, I would have let them keep their paraphrases to themselves. But George Buchanan's psalms are magnificent ; perhaps the finest translations that we have. They are literal, and yet imaginative. Yet he errs some- times by being ultra-classical, as when he ad- dresses God " Eex Olympi." The Eoman Church, even, would have used his psalms, had not their author been a heretic. So one of the popes (Urban VITI.) said. They found nothing amiss in the doctrine introduced — only the book was the production of a heretic. A miserable reason ! It's the best compensation for heresy to turn a heretic's book to a good purpose. Buchanan would have got great advancement in the Church, had he only truckled to them. What a contrast to Erasmus, his illustrious brother in scholarship. Poor Erasmus truckled all his life for a hat. If he could only have been made a cardinal ! You see the longing for it in his very features, and can't help re- garding him with mingled respect and pity. But few men do justice to Erasmus. [A'Kempis.] A FINE fellow, but hazy, and weak betimes. He and his school tend (as some one has well said) to make humility and humiliation exchange places. [Three Synthetic Unities.] I HAVE three synthetic unities : — (1.) The Trinity in unity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 15 (2.) The dual unity in the person of Christ the God-man. (3.) The manifold unity of the Mystical Union, Christ and his Church. I am disposed to consider the mystical union as something midway between the Incarnation of Christ and the Regeneration of his Church. It is the connecting-link, and therefore neither the one nor the other. It is Christ becoming incarnate to regenerate man, and so commencing the process with his Incarnation. Then the mystical union began. From that it dates. [Individuality.] INDIVIDUALITY is the basis of all noble -*- character. I like to see a good block of it in all men. But there is an ultra-individual- ism which may be a very bad thing. A man who does not feel the tie of a common con- nection with his race, who is not like the vulgar herd of us, may find a greater difficulty in ad- mitting our common depravity. And a man who does not feel this keenly, but who feels, as it were, cut off from his kind by force of his individuality, may find a stumbling-block in the doctrine of a common atonement, tlie very same for all of us. But we are not only all indebted to another, but the same provision is made for the general mass of the race, and for the most marked individual in it. And unity is as great and as wonderful as variety and individuality are. There's a tree. It is diverse from every other tree, yet it is a unity, and it came from a seed- ling, which connects it with the genus tree and 16 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. with its own species : and so the umbilicus is a wonderful thing. The race is one, till it is severed. God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth. [Sceptics and Evidence.] I DO not wonder that there are infidels, be- cause the two greatest facts in our religion seem to be a denial of all moral government whatever. 1st, That the guilty, and the fear- fully guilty, should be freely pardoned ; and 2d, That the only perfect innocent in the universe should be the greatest sufferer in the universe. But how does Socinus get over this latter fact ? The fact is unquestioned that he did suffer, and the fact is unquestionable that he was innocent. JVhy then did he suffer? if not vicariously. Was it for an example of patience ] All that for a sample ! But it is a truth, becoming more and more evident to me as time passes, that " no man can call Jesus Lord, but by the Holy Ghost ; " and I am prepared to prove it. For what is it to call Jesus Lord 1 It is to worship him. Either, then, Christ is God, or he is not. If he is not, and if \ve worship him, we are idolaters. And how can a man be absolutely certain that he is no idolater, or worshipper of man, in worslnpping one who was essentially man, whatever else he was '\ He cannot, unless he is taught it from above. . . The Jewish mind is essentially fixed in the notion that we Christians worship three gods, and that one of them is a man, and therefore that we are idola- ters. In discussing theology with the Hungarian Jews, I never could get this driven out of them. GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 17 [The Gospel and the Permission of Evil.] THE Gospel is not a mere remedial system. Christ came into the world that we might have life, and that we might have it more abundantly. Mark, inPiaaoTi^ox;. There's deep significancy there. It would not suffice merely to give us back the thing we had lost. That would be much, and more than we deserved, but not enough for God to give, because not an advancement to man, and an increase to his glory. And, I would say it reverently, but without hesitation, it is a good thing that Adam fell, because what he lost is much more than found, or rather, something superlatively better has been found. There's your optimism now ; and in this connection I agree with John Bruce in his repentance doctrine. Repentance is better than innocence ; not abstractly, but so far as man is concerned. Augustine says, " Bonum est mala fieri." My principles lead me to " Bonum est ut mala permissa sint ;" not, you observe, " usque permissa sint," for that would abolish the eternal distinction between good and evil. But, though I tremble while I utter it, " bonum est ut mala sint." [TuE *'Te Deum."] THE " Te Deum " is a grand piece of writing > by far the finest fragment of post-apostolic devotion. I am particularly fond of these lines — " Thou art the King of Glory, Christ. Thou art the Everlasting Son of the Father. When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man, thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb. When thou 18 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of Heaven to all be- lievers." The Te Deum must be very old. It was sung at Augustine's ordination, but it is much older. I think Hilary of Poictiers was possibly the author. No one can tell the influ- ence of that hymn during the fourteen centuries it has been in use. But one of the finest de- votional pieces I know occurs in the "Missale Romanum." It is in the " Mass of the Presancti- fied" for Good Friday, in which the refrain occurs — "Quid feci tibi populo meol" It is clear to my mind that the service of the Low Mass preceded the dogma, and perhaps it was so also in the High Mass. In one respect the Scottish Episcopal communion-office is more ob- jectionable than the Roman, for it leaves out the " nobis " of the Missale Romanum. There are magnificent prayers in the missal. They are chiefly relics of a very early and much purer age ; and many a good Romanist gets on very well in his Church by the help of these alone. [Merit.] THE Council of Trent says that Christ merited that we should merit. Thus there is no merit that is not ultimately resolvable into that which is meritoriously causal of all merit. They say that if you deny that the saints have merit, you're a heretic. But if you deny that Christ's merits merited their merit, you're a heretic too ; which, as John Owen says, is all that many good Protestants would contend for Bellarmiue was not the worst kind of Papist — GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 19 far from it; but he always raises a desperate cuttle-fish confusion about him, and then puts out his claw and drags. Priest G- of L is just a modern edition of Bellarmine. He preaches, "so rich are the merits of Christ, that- they put into us the capacity of meriting." They merit that we merit. It is a merit of congruity, not of condignity, that they contend for, and they admit that gratia prima must assist us all. Now, since Bellarmine and he deny the merit of condignity, and so do we, we are in the main at one. But what this merit of congruity is I have never been able to see, nor do I expect ever to see. [John Owen.] JOHN OWEN has vigorous thoughts, but the baldest style I know. But better rough speech than an oleaginous style. If rough it may arrest. In Owen were combined the Pat- ristic, the Reformed, and the Puritanic. He was a scholar, and had a fine subadum judicium. He was a good student of texts. But oh, he moves clumsily. He moves like a whale. Robert Hall called his works a " continent of mud." He utterly lacked the aesthetic, which Hall valued highly ; but he is a good specimen of the Patristic Scholastic Puritan ; and he is great in spiritual analysis. If you read him on the " Mortification of sin," you must prepare yourself for the scalpel. He is at the head of a school of divines. Halyburton and Witsius were decided Owenians. They are minor men, and you more easily get at their centre. 20 GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. [Progeess.] WE need a more fonvard moving Christianity, with more of the '7rXri^o:po^ia ':ri(rTiug in it ; which is not " in full assurance of faith," but " in the full sail of faith," — bearing right on with the wind ; all canvas up. W [Faith and Knowledge.] ''E must mark the difference between minds wishing to "add to their faith know- ledge," and minds wishing to drag all faith to the bar of knowledge — the difference between wishing to found faith upon philosophy, and to deepen faith by philosophy. We must analyse our faith as far as we can. No rational man Avill resist that. And we must systematise all our knoAvledge. We must keep our faith orderly, by rational methods, while we " give unto Faith the things that are Faith's." Philo- sophy was born a pagan, but she may become Christian, and should be christened " Mary." She may be proud to sit at Jesus' feet. Hellas coming to Judea's Messiah is a rarely beautiful sight. But Judea is also the better of going to Greece. For what is our New Testament system but Hebrew thought in a Greek clothing ] The Hebrew affords the concrete matter, but it puts on the raiment of the Greek form. [St. Paul at Athens.] TWO things strike me in that wonderful sermon of Paul at Athens. His consider- ate tact in recognising all the good he found GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 21 in Athens ; and how he hii J the axe to the root of the tree of Attic pride. The Athenians prided themselves on four things — (1.) That they were autochthons. Paul tells them that " God made the world and all things that are therein.'" (2.) Their grand temple architecture. Paul tells them " The Lord of heaven and earth dwelleth not in temples made with hands." (3.) Their distinction from all " barbarians." " He hath made of one blood all nations of men." (4.) Their chronology and grand antiquity. " He hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." Why ! that's what they had been all wrangling about since the days of Herodotus. [Metaphysics and Theology.] THEEE is a very close affinity between a metnphysical Philosophy and Theologj^ Plato has great affinities with Christianity, and so have all the succeeding Platonists more or less, especially our own Cambridge men in the I7tli century. But many a so-called Christian teacher is not better than a second-rate heathen moralist, nor half so good. He dilutes the essence with so much water. Plato almost anticipated St. Paul's " Oh, wretched man that I am ! " The ancient moralists were far better theologians than either the Priests or the Poets ; (Pindar, however, takes some noble flights). Seneca used to be a great favourite of mine, but the Platonist is nearer of kin to the Christian than the Stoic is, as most of the Fathers allowed. 22 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. [Creation and Design.] \/'0U say that Design never leads to the -^ Infinite, and it never yields the idea of creation. I Avould add that it never gives me the Infinite, because it never gives me creation. If I reach the fact of creation I reach the In- finite ; for the infinite Power alone is creative. The origin of an atom, equally with that of the Universe — {i.e. what I may call the Universe, but then ray universe may be God's atom) — gives me the notion of Power that is truly and perfectly infinite. [Pantheism.] PANTHEISIVL has a curious natural affinity with man, when he realises his connection with the Universal Life, 'Ec alrifj sg/iiv. We live within God's omnipresence, and we have come from Him. There is something in Pan- theism so deep that naught in bare Deism can meet it. Deism is not so deep. And Pan- theism may well keep the house, till a stronger than Deism comes to take possession of it. In Jesus Christ I find the only solution of the mystery. He was not one with the race, though kindred to it. I admit that Pantheism is a vulgar scheme at bottom ; yet the least vulgar and most pious minds will often talk pantheistically, and perhaps they must do so ; (I'm fond of the caveats :) just as those most remote from anthropomorphism very often talk most anthropomorphically. And the most tran- scendental minds can easily aff"ord this. You GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 23 will find them talking either very abstractly or very concretely. In the poets, in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomson, you find much Panthe- istic language, but no Pantheism. I was a Spinosist for three years. The ONE was then the ALL to me. But I had to throw the system to the winds that I might live. I believe there are many good Pantheists, but conscience has no speculative warrant in the system of Pan- theism And yet I think that the system is an emphatic admission, or rather pro- clamation, that there is a secret in the Universe that belongeth unto God, unfathomed and fathomless by men. [Plato and Aristotle.] In the Cave under Macduff's Castle, Wcmyss. THAT'S a wonderful illustration of Plato's about the cave, and the shadows on the wall. A better symbol of the contrast between the permanent and the transitory could not be found : the moving shadows seen, while that of which they are the adumbration is not seen. But as a writer I prefer Aristotle to Plato. Aristotle's Greek is very amazing. It is the exadest Greek I know. He is by far the com- pactest and most precise writer we have, in any literature. He is the beau ideal of the precise. Two things I wonder at in Aristotle — the ex- tent of his acquirements, and the exactitude of his writing. He had gone over the encyclo- ' posdia of knowledge. And the "Organon" is marvellous Greek. So is the "Nicomachean 24 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. Ethics." He is not so great I think in his " Metaphysics," either in the matter or its form. — I sometimes wonder if we have much of his Esoteric — those peripatetic disclosures to the initiated. It is mostly the exoteric I suppose. But if that was the exoteric, what must the esoteric have been! His aesthetic doctrines too have not yet been superseded, though they have been supplemented. And we have a curious fragment of liis own poetry, a piece ts^} ' A^iTrii. It is Smollett-like ; very like Smollett's " Ode to Independence." But I never could love Aristotle. Admiration is the beginning, middle, and end of my feeling towards him. He could see, but could not soar. He could see, I sup- pose, as far as a mason could see into a wall that he had built, and that is a good deal farther than other people see into it. Plato, on the other hand, I love. He is more of the mystic, and he soars sublimely. Plato goes peering up, often into cloudland ; yet I like to follow him into the mist, for when I don't see through it, I generally think he does. It is a good thing to go up now and then into the mist, if we do not, like Ixion, embrace the cloud. . . , Philip of Macedon had been a wise man in getting such a tutor as Aristotle for Alexander. The tutorship may account a little for the greatness of both men. Each benefited the othar. But what a petty ambition was that of the ward ; and what a low Empire compared with the tutor's, in worth and duration both. To con- quer the world ! Alexander ]\Iagnus was, after all, Alexander Parvus too. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 25 [Sir W, Hamilton and Knowledge of the Infinite.] T HAVE never read Sir William ; yet we ■*- have many affinities, I think. I cannot now make use of a new terminology. He has one of his own, very good, I suppose ; but I have my own. We met only once at Fairlie. I greatly enjoyed his conversation. He bothered me that day about the contradictions in the four evangelists. He gave a list of them ; but I told him I thought the whole matter a very small affair. I think I hold a theory of Ignor- ance not essentially different from his. But it is no new thing to hold a theory of Ignorance. It is a theological commonplace. I sometimes wish Sir William were still alive, that I might have a talk with him about Positives and Nega- tives, and my own Positivo-negative . For, so far as I can see, there is nothing in his doctrine of Faith and Knowledge different from this, that there is a distinction between the comprehension and the oj;prehension of things. The rest I take to be a dispute about the two different meanings of the word " know." I do not hum the Infinite, says Sir William, excepting nega- tively. We know only the finite ; but in the consciousness of our inability to transcend the finite, we are inspired with a belief in the uncon- ditional and the infinite, and we positively believe in it. Well, I say, we do know it, only not comprehensively but apprehensively, as surely as we know the reality of Finite Sub- stance. We cannot compass either of them in thought, but we knoio that they are. We appre- 26 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. hend, or know, the positive fact of their exist- ence. Now, I say, if this be all that Sir Wil- liam meant (and we are agreed so far), why deviate from common parlance, and say we do not know them '\ The common consciousness of men is the same as that to which Sir W. appeals. And if the majority of men (I mean of the uneducated) express themselves by saying that they know, why should not 11 I admit that we do not comprehend the noumenal, only the phe- nomenal. Yet we hioio that the noumenal is. You may say you attain to the one by positive knowledge, and to the other, in the collapse of knowledge, by positive faith. I say I want a common term for both, and that I find this in the word " know." Well, we just speak dif- ferent languages about the same old problem, as if Sir William spoke in Greek and I in old Saxon. A new philosophy very often just speaks a new dialect ; very often it is a mere question of vocabulary and nomenclaturing ! Yet I won't give up my positivo-negative. I cannot exhaust the infinite in thought ; that is, I am unable by the negation of it to exhaust a positive. ... It would seem, then, that my "scimus" is wider than Sir William's, and my " ignoramus" narrower. I maintain that we do know the infinite as a positivo-negative, or we have no basis for revelation ; or, I would state it thus, we are not properly ignorant of it as a positive, we are only nescient. Ignorance is a defect, nescience is not a necessary defect. Christ was nescient, but not ignorant ; for the latter is that beyond which there is a better — GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETICA. 27 not only absolutely but relatively ; better that is, for that particular state. Now there is a better state than nescience absolutely ; but not relatively to man. [George Campbell.] WHEN at the Grammar School in Aberdeen, I got hold of a volume of George Camp- bell's, in which he ridicules, as lamentable folly, the notion that to God there is no past, present, or future — to Him all are one. I remember well how I abhorred George Campbell for that. I thought it the most magnificent thought I had ever met with. [Opposite Errors.] OPPOSITE errors have generally a common T^Ojrov -^iZhoi;. Legalism and antinomi- anism rise from a common root of error, just as Materialism and Idealism respectively ignore the balance of the universe, and that " all things are double, one against the other." [Luther and Melancthon, IF a subject could be split up into twelve separate points, and also compressed into one, Luther Avould take the one, Melancthon the twelve. [Dr. Chalmers.] CHALMERS was not a widely-read divine, but as a practical thinker and teacher of the heart he was unrivalled. We have lost much of him for want of a Boswell. Many of c; 28 GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. his best sayings are gone for ever. As a man of erudition he might have been better. As a heaven-taught man, he needed little. Though not well read, all his reading passed through the alembic of his own mind. What he took in from without never came forth undigested. . . . . But Chalmers never could understand the real difficulty of the Edwardean contro- versy. It was very poor insight in him to imagine that he had settled the controversy. He and I often talked of Edwards and Philo- sophical Necessity. He never could see that there was a third thing between Necessity and Contingency — viz. Liberty. Chalmers was not a speculative thinker ; but he was especially great in all questions where the heart aids the intellect. A minister once told me of the fine rebuke he got from him. He had visited a man on his deathbed who was delirious, and returning home met Chalmers. "Well," said he, " did you pray with himi" " No ; he was delirious ; but I prayed with the family." " Ah ! you did very wrong, sir. Who knows but that some old train of thought might have been stirred up by the tones of a familiar voice ? You did very wrong, sir." In that region Chalmers was one of the greatest men of our century. [In reference to a Living Preacher.] HE Morelled too much for me. That is a very shallow book of Morell's on Religion, He may call it the philosophy of religion ; but I doubt if it is anytliing else than cloudification. GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 29 [Open Questions.] T WOULD not put Augustine's doctrine of evil -*- into the Church's creed. I have no right to impose it on others. I tliink it is an essential. But into the " credo" I do not thrust it. Systematic theology has a wide margin round it, where we must have the prohabilia placed ; but the creed should have none. A narrow theology, founded on the theologian's idiosyncrasies, is, after all, no theology at all. [Necessitarianism .] T DISSENT from Jonathan Edwards' doctrine, -^ because he hazards a speculation on will qua will, and therefore in reference to all will, divine and human. It is fatal to establish a necessary chain throughout every will in the universe. Tlie Divine acts are free. They are necessary, I maintain, qua moral, though free qua will. But I am a determinist as much as Edwards. [Free "Will and Synergia.] A RMINIANISM and Antinomianism have a ■^^ common ■rgwroi' -^ivbog. Antinomianism says that we (to use the words of Towne) are Christ-ed and God-ed. Arminiauism says that half of the work is God's and half is man's. Calvinism asserts that the whole is God's, and the whole is man's also. The second scheme robs God ; the first fanaticises man ; the third is the juste milieu, and stands midway between two ultras. I admit moral power in the will, against the Antinomians, and claim it; I abjure power, against the Arminians, and disown it. The Arminian synergia is first, unconsciously, 30 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. atheistic ; and then, consciously, enthusiastic. It first exckides and denies God, and then attributes to Him and to man an act of fanati- cism. It would be better to abolish the word synergia, for it is associated with a contro- versy, on one side of which I take a decided stand. But I have no objection to use it, as it contains a truth. Allow my caveat, and I'll use your word. There is a true and a false synergia. That God works half, and man the other half, is false; that God works all, and man does all, is true. God hi^ysT to diXnv ; man &i>.ii xat hi^ysl I have my theologou- menon, or philosophical speculation on the will — that it is set free from the bondage of antecedence and consequence as these reign in Nature. The nexus in the two spheres is not identical. We might even say with Pope — God, "... binding Nature fast in Fate, Left free the Human Will." And yet I am a determinist ^^dth EdAvards, as against Whitby; while I am an assertor of free- dom with Whitby, as against Edwards. The free will which I concede and maintain is just the reasoris postulate for the dictamina of conscience. But as to the causal nexus being entirely broken, or as to our poAver of origination — what Sir W. Hamilton would regard as proximate in the con- science as to the will, is amongst my ultima duhia. And, after all, my theologeme " de voluntate " is amongst the 999 unsolved things Avhich I ever carry Avith me I grant the existence GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. 31 of "remote power" as a condition of respon- sibility ; but this power is inoperative until quickened by the ray from above. We differ in fundamentals if you hold a full sw^yua, as was maintained in the synergist controversy. But the problem as to what this remote power, which conditions responsibility, is, is a meta- physical one ; and I think that, as metaphy- sicians, we shall be compelled to fall back, after all, on some such statement as the apostle's, " Work out your salvation, for it is God that worketh in you." Arminianism I regard as fanatical in its denial of second causes. [Aquinas.] I'VE set myself to be a Thomist commentator. " Deus voluit hoc propter illud, sed non propter illud voluit hoc Deus," says Aquinas. The " hoc propter illud " is the subject-matter of the divine volition. God has willed, e.g., that the universe, with all its history, evil in- cluded, should illustrate the divine glory; "hoc propter illud." But the "illud" is not the motive cause of the " hoc." He has not directly willed the history of the universe for the sake of his glory. There is a relation of p-opterty between the two things as the objects of divine volition. There is much more in this distinc- tion of Aquinas than meets the eye at first glance ; though the vulgar mind will call it a distinction without a difference.* * I give the quotation as Dr. Duncan gave it. The only passage in Aquinas to which I can trace it, is the sentence in the Summa Theologice, pars prima, quaist. xix., art. 5, 32 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. [Uses of Speculation.] WE may reverentially, and for solemn ends, speculate on the origin of evil ; and these may be purely practical ends. We may hope to get gleams of light, fugitive rays striking downwards. It is not a bad sign of a man, but the reverse, that he continues reverentially to gaze into this question and ponder the mystery. As to the " sitting apart, holding no form of creed, but contemplating all," thoughtful men usually do this for a time. The end does not always justify the means ; but perhaps this may be true, that though the unrest is not a good thing in itself, out of it God brings good, and in some cases it may be the only way to the highest good. Yet we shrink from our children going down into that into which we went and emerged. We fear they may not emerge. [Is there faith in such shrinking ?] At least it is a very natural shrinking, and God does not lead us all by the same way. We have no right to suppose beforehand that others need the baptism that we were bap- tized with. A was a great man, and not the least part of this greatness was his con- fession, " There may be many an easier way of obtaining rest than the way by which I have reached it." Discipline in philosophy is often a pathway to God, why should it be less so than any other kind of discipline 1 and yet its great value is in being a handmaiden, ancilla Domini. You might think I was caring greatly for it. "Vult ergo hoc esse propter hoc, sed non propter hoc vult hoc." — Ed, COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA, 33 But what I want is to disencumber the creed, and to christen the philosophy. [Adam and Christ,] MY Theanthropology has only two texts — " God made man in his own image, in the image of God created He him ;" and " God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law." Therefore, theologically, there are only two men, Adam and Christ. What an honour has been put upon the vo'Mi under which Adam was, and man is, that under it also Christ should be. [Unburied Speculations.] I HAVE no patience with C 's Hades. I have a hundred such speculations, all very good for myself. But I have buried them when done with them, and never unearthed them since for others. They lie in heaps in one common grave, and mother earth is on them. What does he mean by unearthing his to the gaze of men ? [Liturgies.] IN forgetting our Directory we are too little liturgical j and if the Church were very spiritual it would need no liturgy. We have far too many preaching prayers ; many good ministers preach to God. The best of our fore- fathers were more anti-erastian than anti-epis- copal, and more opposed to a bad liturgy than anti-liturgic. I do not wonder that the desire for forms of prayer is returning. I could say nothing against the use of a liturgy, as a catliolic 34 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. question, for all the churches ; but I am definite against confinement to it ; and as for us in Scotland, I am opposed to it in any form at present. But a good liturgy forms a fine com- mon bond for the churches. I remember, when in Leghorn, hearing a very painful sermon from the Bishop of ; and on leaving the church a friend remarked, " I'm thankful he can't spoil the prayers." [ANTHROrOMORPHISM.] "\ X /"E cannot exhaust the significance of that * * sentence, " Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." God must be anthropo- morphic, or anthropopathic in his communica- tions. He tells us that He is infinitely unlike us ; but when he is to speak to man he must do so anthropomorphically ; and he has done so, even more lowlily than we ourselves need habi- tually conceive of him. It was in accommoda- tion to the infancy of the world, when men spake, and thought, and understood as children — and because so many always do so in aU ages. But if we are " in the image " of God, we are to Him, as the shade is to the substance. It is an exceeding high mystery, but I think that the positive notion of the Infinite, which we all have, is a hint to us of that " image." [Gratia Irresistibilis.] T 'VE tried to discover if there be any difference -*■ between the Jansenist's and the Calvinist's " irresistible grace." But the Calvinists did not adopt the term " gratia irresistibilis " for them- COLLOQUIA PEIUPATETIGA. 35 selves. Maestriclit shows tliat it was their opponents who charged them with it ; and so, says M., though it is not our term, or what we would say, we have no objection to the phrase, til at gratia is irresistibilis, and yet I hold that in another sense gratia est resistibiUs et resisti- tur. But I do not think there is any material difference between the Calviuist and Janseuist doctrine. [Truth, and the Search for Truth : Lessing.] T THINK that both Fenelon and Leighton ■*• (the Scotch bishop) v/ere men constitution- ally afraid of the full blaze of the truth. They were naturally timorous men. They wished to possess the full truth, but they v/alked too warily, because they looked upon the truth from the sentimental rather than from the moral side. [Is it not possible to be too ambitious to pos- sess the whole truth 1] Never. [I mean ambitious to see all its sides at once, or too speedily. May we not pay the penalty of that ambition which overleaps itself ?] Well, I like that prayer of Newman's, the subtile devout man : " I do not ask to see The distant scene ; one step enough for me. " We may apply it to the search for, and the acquisition of, truth. But we must get to the centre speedily — to that Rock on which we maj build. I fear I may not understand Lessing aright ; but if I do, that saying of his, which is 36 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. so much praised,* contains the essence of all devilry. It may amount to the willingness to be eternally without God. It is delight in the mere activity of the faculties that is chosen, the search that is fearless and free, unimpeded and irrestricted. To be left alone for ever to pursue the endless chase, cut oif from the eternal Being, would be to me the horror of horrors. [But Lessing does not wish the pursuit with- out reaching the goal, the chase without the prey. He only prefers the intelligent discovery of truth to a blind reception of it.] Well, I would add to his maxim. Teach thou me, else I had rather have "the truth" at once. Did the woman who lost the piece of money think the search for it better than the finding of it ] " Prove all things," says the Apostle, adding, " hold fast that which is good." But, according to Lessing, we should prove all things, but hold fast nothing. It would be a loss to him to get possession of the truth. In short, Lessing's maxim is the maxim of eternal revolt and independence ; and the wish to be as God contains within it a prayer for estrangement from God. [Consider the Lilies.] THERE are times when I cannot lest in the ethical, when I cannot find any satisfaction * " Did the Almighty, hokliDgin his right hand truth, and in his left, search after truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but without hesita- tion, I could request, search after truth." — Ed. COLL QUI A PEBIPATETICA. 37 in historical facts. The very evangel satisfies me not. I cannot read my Bible, and I cannot pray. But I go out into my garden to consider the lilies how they grow. M;^ /MB^i/jbvari, they seem to preach : — Carking care, away ! [Systems of Theology : Heresy.] /^UR systems of theology are a bondage, and ^~^ must remain a bondage till they ai'e adopted on rational conviction. And yet very often these very dogmas are cheerfully adopted by those who once rent them asunder as fetters. Systematic truth is systematic error to me, if I ignorantly and unconvincedly bind myself to it ; and all real fetters should always be broken. But earnest and good men usually come to see that what they once found to be fetters, are the cords and bands of a man — the girders of his strength. It is a monstrous thing that that horrible word " heresy " is now used on all occasions so freely, and applied so recklessly to all error. All error is not heresy. Amesius, in his book, De Conscientia, starts the question, " an Arminianis- mus heresis sit 1 " But people will use this word, and scatter firebrands, arrows, and death, as recklessly as if they were in sport. Heresy is a work of the Jlesh, and no man can be charged with it, even on a fundamental, till, after faithful admonishment, he persists in it, hiowing that he does so. No man can be de- posed from the church catholic for doctrinal heresy. He may be suspended from this or that individual church, but not cut off from the universal church of Christ. For, note — " Who 38 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. can understand his errors 1 " And it is too often forgotten that no man can be charged with an opinion which is only the valid conse- quence of the doctrines he holds, if that conse- quence is by him disowned. You cannot deal judicially with a man for a logical blunder, though you may deem him intellectually weak or confused. There is no indefectible connection between the theoretical and the practical, nor between an axiom and its sequences. I mean, that though the one may entail the other, a man is not to be held chargeable with both, if he explicitly disowns either. [Scotch Sects only Parties.] I OFTEN think that our church errs in taking it for granted (indirectly at least) that the fervour and life that characterised the beginning of its history Avill remain with it, without ex- periencing an ebb of the tide. There are tides in all things ; and the great wave of Divine Bless- ing seems to keep ebbing and floAving amongst the churches. But that is a fine saying of Sack of Bonn, in his History of the Scottish Chtirch — " In Scotland there are no sects, only parties." That is a fine testimony from a foreigner. Sometimes you see most truly from a distance. He meant we should not dignify our differences by the name of "sects ;" we are only parties in one great sect — the species of a genus. [Augustine and Calvin.] A UGUSTINE was greater on the whole than ■^*- Calvin. Calvin is the more complete ; no COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 39 thanks to him for that, for Calvin was standing on Augustine's shoulders, Augustine on his own feet. In Calvin you see great amplitude of mind, and great common-sense clearness ; far less metaphj^sical profundity, and far less of the subdued Platonic fervour which you find in Augustine. I think of the two men together as " the pigmy on the giant's back ; " though Calvin after all was no pigmy. [Satan.] IT is a strange thing that so fine a spirit is let loose to do so much mischief, but he is only "the prince of the power of the air," not of the power of the spirit. I believe there may be more devils than men. They are legion, and go in companies, so far as we can gather from the hints of Scripture. I think each temptation that assails a man may be from a separate devil. And they are not far off; probably our atmo- sphere was the place of their original banishment. And there they live, — air-princes. But mark, they have no power over the innermost spirit ; nay, they can have no knowledge of the secrets of the heart of man. No single heart-secret is known to any single devil. These are known only to the Searcher of the hearts, who is also their Maker. Some good Christians disquiet themselves by forgetting this. I would say that our adversarj'- can look and hear, see and listen, and make inferences. He has only a phenomenal knowledge, and that not perfect. He is but a creature, and cannot know the secrets of the universe. It ought to comfort all 40 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. men that only our Maker knows our constitu- tion. . . . [Ghosts.] BUT what do you think of ghosts 1 For my part, I neither believe nor do I disbelieve in them. A man essaying to demonstrate their impossibility gives evidence of possessing an awfully phenomenal mind, (which thing is my abhorrence. / abhor a mere phenomenaKst). The credulous and facile mind may believe almost anything as to the supernatural ; but the incredulous and merely critical mind is often as crass and stolid as the other. Now, why should ghosts not exist a priori ? There is no reason against them. If Providence is, they may be. They may belong to the unseen cosmical system, or to a part of it. As to the facts a posteriori, each one must satisfy himself. [He told some remarkable ghost-stories.] [Angels and Imagk-Worship.] I BELIEVE it is mercy that our eyes are shut to save us from angel-worship ; for I so believe in the ministry of angels, that I do not know but if I saw them I might be led to give them homage. The distinction between latria and doulia might then appear. And if in the upper w^orld we shall see the " angel that came and ministered unto Him," I think the whole church will be greatly interested in that angel. We must beware, in this matter of the intervention of angels, of two extremes — of a vulgar credulity and a presumptive incredulity. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 41 We live in an age in Avhich we should say it may be so ; and neither that it must be so, nor that it cannot be so. I'm fond of the caveats. Why should they not be delegated to interfere ? Some subordinate agents between God and man there surely are. And if there be a hierarchy rising upwards to the throne, and Him who sits on it, may not the angels be often sent to minister to those on the earth who need their succour? My homage to the supernatural would lead me to believe in angels, even though I had no revelation on the subject ; and every suggestion of the unseen is precious, every door opening into it. And ah ! Protestant as I am, even image-worship does appeal to a part of man's nature. There is an old stone of granite by the roadside, as you wind up the hill at old Buda, upon which a worn and defaced image of our Saviour is cut, which I used often to pass. Below the granite block are the words — " vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est ullus dolor sicut dolor mens." The thorough woe-begoneness of that image used to haunt me long: that old bit of granite — the beau-ideal of human sorrow, weakness, and woe-begoneness. To this day it will come back upon me, and always with that dumb gaze of perfect calmness — no complaining — the picture of meek and mute suffering. The memory of it comes up fresh as wlien I first looked upon it ; and yet it is a purely human feeling, it is not spiritual. [Why condemn the emotion? It is only the homage that is to be restrained.] 42 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. I can only say I'm a Protestant, and dislike image-worship, yet never can I get that statue out of my mind. So, too, when in Italy I saw the crucifixes by the roadsides, I felt they were not Protestant ; but I could never pass them without a very tender reminiscence. By the way, the Eomisli devotee is wrong only in going to the wrong priest ; and both the traveller, and the vicar to whom he travels, have very bad optics. [The Legal and the Ethical.] I BELIEVE that the school of theology, to- wards which many fresh minds are apt to drift, is near of kin to that which they would very much wish to shun, — to wit, the harshness of Bradwardine. In Bradwardine and Twisse, the lawj'er threatens to swallow up the ethicist, as conversely, in Mr. Maurice's system, the ethi- cist devours the lawyer. In Jonathan Edwards and the New Englanders we have a fine union of moral law and moral ethic. Holiness and justice are respectively the aesthetic and the moral elements of law ; and, with all his rigour, Edwards is supremely moral. Yet he was not fully cognisant (though not wholly unaware) that he held within his system a species of very high and refined internal pantheism. In a hypertheistic system sin must equally vanish as in the atheistic ; and Edwards has in other treatises unconsciously developed this internal pantheism more fully. I have never entered the door of either supra- or infra-lapsari;in Cal- vmism. But Maurice's system is pure illegality. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 43 It will never go down with the lawyers ; it upsets their science entirely. Bare ethic, with- out law, is the ethic of Jehovah alone, and his co- equals, living together in the one tie of ayd'jrriy where there are no subjects. This ayd'Ttri might be the bond of union on Olympus amongst co-equal gods, were polytheism true ; (though it was not even so much as imagined on the ancient Olympus). But whenever subjects ap- pear beneath the sovereign, obligation enters, I can understand the fact I have heard, that Sir W. Hamilton disliked the theology of Mau- rice. He was an advocate. No lawyer is likely to fall into a sentimentalism about laAV. It's a serious matter to be under law and to be at the bar, and to feel the solemn rigour of juris- prudence. And the end of punishment is not, I think, primarily to reform the punished, but to vindicate the law. [But is not such a vindication blank, if the final end of it is not the reclamation of the transgressor 1] Not necessarily ; but the reclamation is also attempted, it is also provided for. Goethe said once, all tlie course of Providence goes to show that the God of Providence is the same as the severe Jehovah of the Hebrews. . . . [Etiiicism : Mr. Maurice.] PAUL'S Christianity, and his anti-christianity, had a common principle lying at their root — viz. " the law is good ;" and I do not find in Paul the least affinity with that system which would merge law in ethics. He never set him- 44 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. self up as the equal of his Maker. But this is the natural upshot of the sentimental system lately revived in England. The law of fealty, the law which says "thou shalt," does not exist for the Supreme himself. Duty {qua moral) is for the creature and Creator alike; and in this we oppose Mr. Mansel out and out ; but {gua law), it is for the creature only. I do not charge Mr. Maurice with all the conse- quences of his system, but I proclaim these consequences. A man may veer far from the centre, and yet his error never ripen into a heresy ; and this heresy (if it be one) has not yet founded a sect. If it does found a sect, in time the doctrine will be seen to develop its full issues ; as a half-truth generally ripens into a manifest lie, and then, at its full deve- lopment, the sect is near its deatL [The Gospels and Epistles.] T HAVE certainly more of the Pauline Epistles •'■ than of the four Gospels in my nature, though the latter are our foundation. Paul was from first to last a man of law ; and the Pauline relations of law and gospel have taken a very deep hold of me. Paul, too, has more variety than any of the Apostles. He has his own distinctive features, and he has a good deal of the Johannean and the Petrine besides. And honest James was like one of the old prophets risen again. He reads just like a prophet. "The tongue is a fire, a Avorkl of iniquity." " Can the fig-tree, my brethren, bear olive- berries, or the vine figs 1 " " Go to, now, ye rich COLLOQUIA PEKIPATETIGA. 45 men, weep for your miseries," etc. etc. He had to write in the same strain to " the twelve tribes scattered abroad," as Joel and the rest of old. The Jews had not improved much. They are a strange people. I have often pitied Moses, for he had a stiff rebellious race to manage. Yet I feel that I, with many others, have been disproportionately Pauline. These Epistles presuppose the Gospels (having been sent to those churches that possessed the materials of the latter). Hence, though, for the balancing of truth, there is nothing like the Pauline letters ; for vitality and fresh- ness, there is nothing like the facts of the Gospel ; and were I a younger man, and to begin my studies again, the four Gospels would bulk more prominently in my attention than they have done. The bearing of the life, death, and teaching of Christ, on the whole economy of God's government, — that is the Pauline sphere. With his own nature rooted in Christ, Paul sur- veys the relations which He bears to the universe. John, again, with the eagle eye, is content to gaze, and to rest gazing, on "the light, which is the life of men." John was an intense intuitionalist. His Gospel and first Epistle, taken together, make a good apologeti- cal manual. His Epistle gives the philosophy of the Gospel. [The Calmness op Divine Power.] T'VE sometimes thouglit that God's greatest ^ power is best seen in the most silent awaken- ings of the spirit of man. So it is in natural 46 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. tilings ; the daily course of the earth, silent and sure, with no jolt, or start forwards ; so in all our vital acts. God acts in all of these directly. If our vital acts were in our ovvn power, we should not live a moment ; — why should it be otherwise in the spiritual sphere, where the soul often awakens quietly at the touch of God 1 Let us never imagine that tumultuous changes, stormy upheavals of the will, reveal His presence more markedly than the gentle whispers of His voice. He is not far from any one of us ; for, li/ ahrw iCfLsv. [Augustine's Theory of Evil.] I DO not say it is altogether made out, but it is maxime probabile. I believe it, and I believe it is essential to Augustinianism, i.e. Augustinianism falls, if it foils. Yet I Avon't make it an article of the common faith, or place it in the creed. It is so high a theologoumenon. God's will is not bound up by the causal nexus, i.e. His will quci will ; as moral it is necessarily holy. But I am keenly anti-Edwardean in his assertions as to will in general (including there- fore the Divine). I am even Pelagian in refer- ence to the Divine will, qua will : at least I am purely libertarian. As to sin, I am, and must remain, an Augustinian. Yet when I speculate long upon it, my head reels in mental vertigo. Sin is not a positive entity. [It is nothing noumenal or substantial, else it would be a creature. It is phenomenal only.] It is less than nothing, infinitely less than nothing, the algebraical >. I can realise it COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 47 to myself only by faint analogies. Death is not a positive thing. It is the absence of life. Dark" is the withdrawal of light ; cold, the absence of heat ; rest, the cessation of movement. They are disj^arates, and there are analogous disparates ; though, I admit, faint adumbra- tions. Yet sin, as I have said, is a cancer, which, if it could spread unchecked, would eat up all being, and dethrone God 'himself. [Would you say that as it is only the vital force within the human frame that presences it from decay, by perpetually replenishing it with new material, — so it is the life of God v. ithin the universe that preserves it from that defec- tion which constitutes sin ?] Undoubtedly it is God's upholding that preserves us from sin. It is what I call the chemistry of life that keeps us out of the range of the chemistry of death. So it is a communicated " gratia" that keeps us out of the range of the " delapsus." If God with- draws this (which He is not obligated to re- tain), we fall " de." We experience the " want of original righteousness." This want is clearl}^ privative. But the other term made use of by our Westminster divines — viz. the "corruption of the whole nature," — is not so easily seen to be merely privative. But it may denote the new chemistry v/hich supervenes at death, and destroys the body, which supervention is due to the prior and clearly privative fall. Yet we must remember that a dead animal is not the same as dead unorganised matter. ... Do not the majority of ethical writers ignore the 48 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. fall? I do not say deny it, but ignore it. Plato did not ; for lie, in striving after the ■/.rz7.o%aya&6v^ felt that he was once, in some pre- existent state, what he wished to be in this life. And so all noble Platonists feel that — *• Trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home." Plato had a glimmering of the jenseits. [Evil.] \ HELL is no blot in God's universe. [Is that not just the optimist doctrine ^lich you neither affirm nor deny 1] No : I do not say this is the best of all fossihU universes. I cannot know that for certain. But I say that there is no blot in this universe, so far as God is concerned. [But if there is a blot at all, must not God be concerned with it in some way, if he is the creator of the creature who has made the blot 1] That he is concerned with evil, I deny not. He has proved his concern with it, both by his law, by its punishment, and his intervention to deliver from it. But He has not allowed his universe to be blighted. Sin and death are monstrous anomalies. It was never intended that we should either die or sin. And that the spirit and the body should separate, or the soul separate from God, is only tolerated for the sake of a reunion, through the grander union of the Theanthropos with man. [After a long conversation on this mystery] — COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 49 All ! tliiiik now of the infinite God looking down all this time on our babblings in the dark. [Deism A^^D the problem of Being.] T SUPPOSE there are few pious Deists. I -*■ presume there are some, but few. Lord Herbert of Cherbury was certainly pious after a sense. But you see men cannot love a God that is misunderstood. Spinoza was a pious man ; so was Novalis. But a God that is mis- conceived is not likely to be often in "all a man's thoughts." There are minds to whom,' though they are atheists, the problem of being is interesting for evermore, and draws them into an attitude of reverent pondering. Through- out the three years of my experience of it, I was for ever theologising on my atheism. What are we 1 where are we ? whence, and whitherwards ? and for what end are we here 1 what is the hour on the clock of the universe ? and so forth. Human life, death, and destiny, are for ever interesting to the atheist who thinks. There are some minds in the Christian church who are theoretical theists but practical atheists. It is an awful thing that practical atheism, " without God in the world." It is worse than theoretical error ; and I have known theoretical atheists (pantheists at least), who were believers in God at heart. Let us not judge persons. [God and Creation.] POSTULATE God (let the belief be gained as you will, only gained), then creation, in 50 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. the strict sense of the term, must follow. 1 do not mean that God is under a necessity to create, but that what exists must be his creation. For, if not, then I can conceive a more perfect being than God — to wit, such a creator ex nihilo. But God is, by hypothesis, the most perfect, the all perfect ; therefore this perfection of creation is his. [This is just reading out analytically the con- tents of your postulate, for in assuming God you assume infinite perfection.] Yes, but it is well that we analyse the postu- late thus. He is more perfect than we can con- ceive. We can conceive this, and this is a per- fection, therefore, a fortiori, is this perfection His. And the power to create an atom is a far mightier perfection than indefinite arrange- ments of design in the created matter of an indefinitely great universe. [But creation is not ex nihilo into existence : for is it, not to our conception only, but also really true, ex nihilo nihil 1] Yes, the materies rei can never be produced or summoned out of the vacuum of the nihil. I own we cannot conceive creation. [And when we try to think it, our thought immediately glides into the notion of evolution or emanation — the invisible becoming visible, as vapour condensing in a cloud.] Still we must believe in that which transcends conception, or we cannot be theists. [Is the doctrine of an eternal materia prima, necessarily, I mean logically, destructive of theism 1] GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 51 I consider it to be so : though I know some theists hohl it contradictorily ; as they think, to escape a greater contradiction. But I see no refuge from pantheism, except in a doctrine of creation ex nihilo. I admit that after creation has taken place, we may have only the record of evolution in things material, though not in things spiritual. [Hansel's Doothine op Nescience.] T REPUDIATE Mansel's doctrine of our igno- ■^ ranee of God. It is deadly, both in morals and religion. If I have no knowledge of the Infinite, qua moral ; and if there be not a relation between us, (man's moral nature the typal, God's moral nature the archetypal), how can there be any intercourse between God and man 1 There could be no communion where there was no community of nature. But I go farther ; I say that in the moral region it is not the typal and the archetypal (it is so in the intellectual), but it is identity — not a pantheistic uniformitj^, never- theless an identity of nature. [Carlyle.] T AM no v/orshipper of Force. I see nothing •*• to admire in mere power, i.e. in its quantity apart from its quality. Carlyle's earnestness is very touching and noble ; but it seems to me that, according to his teaching, if you could conceive an omnipotent devil, you ought to worship him as much as Israel's Jehovah. [So that he is in one sense a modern Mani- chee f[ 52 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA, I suspect so. And an omnipotent militia of darkness would be the very horror of horrors. . . . The connection between Carlylism and despotism I see, but the link is nowhere explicitly avowed. Carlyle is sometimes difla- cult to understand, and very difficult to judge. Why did he call Chalmers the last of the Chris- tians ? I suppose he forgets what he has written elsewhere. Hero-worship ! ah well, he and I have to meet a strange hero yet — Qdmroc — the greatest that I know of, next to Him who over- came him. Carlyle has great faith in the devil, but I suspect he always appreciates quantity of being and of power more than quality Have you observed how Christianity takes up the fragmentary truth that lies in the demono- logical and the spirit-inhabited 1 We Christians have lost nothina: that could be retained in the old mythologies. And perhaps these beliefs in spiritual presences in nature are but the linger- ing mist of patriarchal tradition concerning the spirit-world. [China, Russia, etc.] TT is a strange thing that is going on in -*■ our day, the rise of Christian communities outside the Christian Church. What their Christianity may consist of we do not exactly know. The Chinese rebels, for example : they all accept the Scriptures, they receive the ten commandments, and are iconoclasts. But it is most difficult to get accurate information re- garding them. And the Indian mind has been wonderfully stirred since the days of Rammohun COLLOQUIA PERIPATETWA. 53 Roy. His " Precepts of Jesus " was a great gift to India, a fine basis. But I wish he had ad- vanced from these, as the first disciples did. The providence of God is bringing Western Asia into prominence just now (1859). We do not know what new pathways are to be opened up for His truth. And I have great interest in the future of Russia. I think there may be a magnificent career yet before that people. Their Peter was a great man, slightly mad ; a magnificent savage, still a savage. He was a noble fellow to go as a workman amongst the wild carles. But had it not been for that Genevese Lefort, he might have gone on like one of the old Czars before him. Lefort put into his mind the notion of visiting Western Europe. A despotism would be the very perfection of government, if we could get so good a sovereign always that his simple will might be absolute law. But this is im})ossible ; and the next best thing is what we have in England — limited constitutional monarchy. The autocrat should be the best originator. In the theocracy of the Jews we have the germ of a despotism under the law of liberty. But it was too perfect for corrupt humanity, and the 'xoXiri'ia of the New Testament is better than it, though the spirit of the theocracy cannot die. [English Poets and Prose Writers.] WORDSWORTH is very grand at times. He is a better Platonist than many of the philosophers. But I cannot worship nature as he does. [It is Nature's spirit he worships, the Uni- 54 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. verse, as "haunted for ever by tlie Eternal Mind"] But what do you make of these lines ? " One impulse from a vernal wood Will teach yon more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can." That's not true. He had not read many folios. " A vernal Avood" may steep you in senti- ment, and make you cease from thinking at all, but it can't teach you in my sense of the word. T daresay he saw those " humanities " in the wood that he had put into it. But I don't see how he could extract them, if he had not put them in. Yet I suppose he only wished to make a truth emphatic by contrast ; and we must not forget the saying, " Consider the lilies how they grow." But what do you think of Coleridge 1 To me, when I cannot follow him, there is always a fine ring, like bell-chimes, in his melody ; not unlike our best nursery rhymes, for it is curious the fine cadences we get in the nursery. I like Coleridge's " Kubla Khan " for its exquisite cadence. That whole passage be- ginning — " In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree : Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Thi'ough caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea " — has a most fascinating melody. I don't know what it means, but it's very fine. In Southey, too, you meet with flights of fine wild melody, COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 55 though it is rather rhythmical prose than poetry that Southey has written. Much poetry only amounts to rhetorical prose, as much prose is non - versified poetry. The conterminous limits are difficult to adjust ; but we must add a third region to that of simple prose and poetry. Tennyson sometimes comes nearer to Shakespeare than any of our moderns Sir Philip Sidney is a Avriter too little known. His "Defence of Poesy" is one of the finest pieces of prose we have — rich as Milton's, with more precision. And Milton's prose is as much worth study as his poetry — sturdy strength, with a grand roll about it. Milton, Sir T. Browne, Hooker, and Taylor, are each great Avriters of various types. The Elizabethan English is largely founded on the Italian of the sixteenth century (the Decameron was a good deal read at that time in England) ; and in it you have neither the purity of the Old Saxon nor the baldness of the Anglo-Saxon. Hobbes founded his excellently terse style, to a great degree, upon the Italian of the six- teenth century. The English is really a most noble language, capable of expressing almost anything, if men only knew its capabilities and the secret of its strength and beauty. But I do not like all the stock models of English. Dr. Adam Clark is one of the best masters of English prose — in this respect, that his style is the most perfect blending of the Saxon and the Latin that I knoAV of.* It is neither * I retain this reference to Adam Clark, because my shorthand notes are explicit in their mention of him, and 56 COLLOQUIA PEEIPATETIGA. Swiftean nor Defoean in its Saxon, nor John- sonian in its Latinity. You never feel that either element is in the least too prominent, or at all defective. And I like old Herbert's prose. That " Country Parson " of his is a fine piece of writing. Carlyle, too, when he keeps to genuine English, when his historical narra- tive (as in some parts of his " French Revolu- tion") is vigorously sustained, has done a great deal to display the capabilities of English prose. But he often Avrites sheer gibberish, according to the classical tests. And when- ever a man becomes cloudy in his words, be sure that his thought has grown shadowy too. . . . I am fond of the French writers for their clearness. They are not always, or often, pro- found ; but you always know what they mean. You see to the bottom of the well. French literature has not originated much, but it is admirable as a means of popularisation, and good as a vehicle for humour. Voltaire is perhaps the greatest master of wit that ever lived. His style, too, is the finest in French literature. He grounded it, I think, on Pascal's, who wrote most noble French. Voltaire's comedy of "Nanine" I like much. It is senti- mental, but thoroughly good. Jean Jacques is poor compared with him. Rousseau strained not of Dr. Samuel Clarke. I may, however, have mis- taken Dr. Duncau on this point, and would unhesitatingly insert the name of the author of the " Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God," if his style of WTiting was such as unmistakably to justify the high praise ac- corded above. — Ed. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 57 after show and effect. ... As to writing, in this age of magniloquence I would advise every one to be very careful to use no more words than are necessary to express thought. Aim at the Aristotelic. Some men seem desirous of adumbrating their thoughts by their words. They inoculate their thought, and often with a virus. Some writers — word-fanciers — seem first to have secured a good stock of terms, if with the " curiosa felicitas," so much the better; and then they consider how they may best fit them into a sentence ! But the result is like that of a word-fancier's essay I once read, and a friend asked, " Is it not deep 1" I answered, " Not deep, but drumlie." Now the drumlie often looks very deep, ... I always recom- mend Aristotle for his clearness. There is no writer like him for using no more words than he had thoughts. He is the very model of the precise and the full together. The School- men lost this. Aquinas is far behind his " Philosophus" in this. But he is much subtiler. Subtility is the main feature of scho- lasticism. [Aquinas's Hymn on the Eucharist.] SUMUNT boni, sumunt mali." They do no such thing. This doctrine is my ab- horrence. There is an eternal difference. The latter take only the shell, and miss the kernel. [Aquinas means no more, for he adds — " Sorte tamen inaequali, Vitoe vel interritus. "] 58 GOLLOQUIA PERIFATETIGA. But the "sumere" is not applicable to the " mali." I canuot concede that. And so — " Ecce pauis augelorani, Factus cibus viatorum, Vere panis filiorum ! " It is twt angels' food. They never tasted it. It is ours. And if you minish that truth, you may eviscerate half the significance of redemp- tion. " He took not on Him the nature of angels," but our nature, and therefore this food is ours. [The Person of Christ.] nPHE person of Christ is not sufficiently ■^ studied or contemplated by the majority of modern theologians. Very many Protestants are Nestorian without knowing it. It is not so with the Catholics. You Avill never find a Roman priest wandering from the Catholic faith on the person of Christ, or in reference to the Trinity. [How do you account for that '?] It is probably because the idler Protestants have engrossed themselves with the one doc- trine of justification, and made it bulk too largely, forgetting its foundation. There are fundamentals beneath justification. The person of Christ is fundamental. Justification, and all else connected with it, is grounded on moral law. Sin had been committed, and satisfaction must be made, made in tlie nature that had sinned, and the sinning must be the suffering nature too. Therefore Christ became man ; but as atonement by man was impossible, and by GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 59 the created nature impossible, it was made by the God-man. Now, justification by faith is the meeting point of many doctrines, a rallying centre of theology ; but it is not the foundation doctrine. The Reformers are not to blame for this inattention to the person of Christ ; they were fuller than the majority of their successors. Nor are the Protestant Schoolmen, either of Geneva or of Holland, to blame. It must have crept in in an unlearned age, when the doctrine of justification began to be looked upon as a radical and special doctrine rather than as a meeting point and centre of other doctrines. It is true that scarcely any of us in Scotland give due prominence to the Incarnation. [Apollos, etc.] A POLLOS (avjij XoyiKog, not eloquent, but an •^*- intellectual man, a ratiocinative thinker, somewhat of the type of Philo-Judseus) closely resembled Paul, whose principal aim as a writer seems to be to unfold the whole unity of the Divine plan. Isaiah I take to be the most Pauline of the Old Testament men ; Ezekiel the most Petrine ; and, diverse as they are in many respects, I know no man more Johannean than Moses. His meekness is closely allied to the Johannean love. [The Primitive CnuRCii Service, etc.] A AyHAT is our warrant for preaching from * * texts ? or for the excessive amount of doctrinal preaching that abounds 1 There was 60 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. little doctrinal preaching till the heresies came. Before that the disciples came together, and read, and prayed, and exhorted one another. Their words Avere hortatory, not doctrinal. They read the Scriptures, and said, " Let's be Christians," and partook of the Sacrament, and sang, and went home. A modern Glassite meeting-house is, after all, the nearest approach to the primitive style of worship. I don't say / it is therefore the best ; for times change — God changes them ; and we must change with them. And as the heresies exist, doctrinal teaching is a necessity. But we have too much of it in our pulpits ; doctrinal preaching is one thing, doctrinal teaching is another. ... I in- sist very strongly on Christian teaching in the household, and on the necessity of stated family worship. We are Romish if we substi- tute the church service for the altar at home. If the call to religious meetings is made more important than the call to daily household prayer, in what does it differ from the call to matins and vespers 1 but we might have a more varied domestic service, as well as a fuller church service, Hymnologies are of great use ; but we should have a better selection of hjonns. We might have portions of Scripture translated into verse besides the Psalms, keeping as faith- fully to the original as the Psalms do. But wlmt I would prefer would be tlie singing of prose. For example — " We have a strong city. Salvation hath God appointed for walls and bulwarks." What a tine passage to be sung ! If 1 were musical, I could almost improvise on COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 61 that. Handel would have done it. In Rome they have plenty of singing ; they sing in their very pilgrimages. [Did you hear the Sistine music at Rome t] No, and I would not care to hear it, for they are neither men, women, nor children, that sing it. ... Our Scotch collection of paraphrases is not good as a whole, nor are they bad as a whole. A few men (none of them poets) merely recast the old paraphrastic hymns of Wesley, Watts, and Doddridge, and the result is our " paraphrases." They are often too classical, often commonplace, and some are both ultra- classical and commonplace. The two best hymns in Christendom, in my opinion, are the Te Deum and the Veni Creator Spiritus. [NON-ESSENTIALS. ] IT'S exceedingly foolish, but exceedingly com- mon, for men to put the ahtuipcr^a into the place of the essentiaUa. For example, I am a strong poedobaptist ; but I favour immersion in theory ; and if I built churches, I would build for immersion. R>ut it is an adiaphoron. It is strange that you so often find good theo- logians straining at a gnat, and swallowing camels. So, too, standing when singing is the best attitude. Musical men say it is the best posture for the voice ; and I say it is the most reverential attitude for the worshipper. So is kneeling at prayer. But our churches are not built for it. That is, on the whole, a pity ; but it is altogether an adiaphoron. M 62 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. [Natural Theology, the Philosophy of Theism, ETC.] ANSEL. We and the Eationalists together must fall on him. He makes religion irrational. Now, I believe in reason, and respect it as the creature of God, and a ladder which leads to him, though I am doubtful of the philosophies. [That is, you believe in it as an organ on, Init not as a revelation ; as an eye, but not aa a light q It is certainly more of an instrument of discovery, than a discoverer. At least I do not think it has discovered much. It is of use to show its own impotence, and of use to welcome a revelation. [In order to welcome it, it must be itself a light. Is it not the lesser light which rules the night, and revelation the greater which rules the day ]] All light is from the Father of Lights. [But are not reason and faith two separate powers of apprehension, by which we lay hold of the object appealing to them, as in that sym- bol of the brother and sister, one blind and the other deaf, each deprived of a sense, but each aiding the other by the sense it possesses ■?] They are not equally balanced powers. I think faith has the start of reason from the first. But what I maintain as to reason is, that though it is a power, it is a barren power, which can produce nothing till revelation descends to meet it. Its efforts in tlie construction of philoso- phies (much as I value it) are, I think, nil. It's GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. 63 not pliilosopliy I reject, it's the pile of specula- tions. Is a pliilosophy of the universe compe- tent to man ? that's always the question with me. If it is, it hasn't yet been. I still discover that there is a great deal of the philosophical sceptic in me. [But you have admitted the validity of the Scotch philosophy of common-sense.] I concur in the main with Eeid and Stewart, in the results of their common-sense philosoj^hy, but 7iot philosophically. I believe in axioms (including the mathematical and logical laAvs) ; in the Senses, which report to me the external world ; in Objectivity (in- cluding the existence of other minds besides my own) ; in Testimony (and under this I rank the evidences of a historical Kevelation) ; and in the syllogistic nexus ; and besides these I don't know that I believe in anything else. Common sense I believe in, but not in a philosophy of common sense. [Where, then, do you place the theistic faith ? You have not a category of intuitions.] The belief in God presses multifariously upon man. It is not wise to say, " This is its origin;" or " No, that is its origin." It is not here, or there ; it is everywhere. [But what is its root ?] It is an instinct. I believe man was made in the image of God, and that he still retains part of that image, it being indestructible. There is a knowledge of God Mdiich all men have, and a knowledge of Him which is only possible to the ^ccivri zr/V/g. But on the " natural 64 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. theologies " I'm always inclined to look with a measure of suspicion. I agree with their truths, but not with their method of probation. There is a hole in it somewhere. Does not Mansel do the very reverse 1 He is doubtful of that which is reached, but not dissatisfied with the method of proof. [But you cannot be a philosophical sceptic, and save theology ; will not Scxtus be able to dis- turb the axiom, " man is made in the image of God," if you overthrow all philosophy, and do not admit an apprehensive intuition of God ?] I cannot reach that b)^ philosophy which God gives by inspiration. Faith in Himself seems to be due to a y^^iGiun rou dylov ; and, if " the anointing which we have received of Him aliideth in us, we need not that any man teach us." I often fear that if we do not concede enough to the operation of the Holy Spirit in this matter, we ■will not do much for psychology either. The attempt to make too much of logical deductions is just ultimately to make too little of them. And as for a logical proof of the Divine exist- ence, I am convinced that when the faith is more than parrotism and traditionalism, the Spirit of God has had more to do with it than some orthodox divines are willing to admit. And if so, there must be some terrible falsity in that which says that all conviction must be due to demonstration. [But joii do admit an intuition of the In- finite 1] Well, I affirm that reason overleaps itself j that is the best phrase we can get for it. But GOLLOqUlA PERIPATETICA. G5 our intuition or intuitive knowledge of God cannot be defined. You need not ask me to tell you what it is, for I tell you I cannot, and that no man can. [An explanation could only be given by the logical faculty, the faculty of definitions, and you cannot explain ultimates. But logic can clear away mists, and clarify our intuitions.] Yes ; but it gives us riddle upon riddle; most puzzling antinomies. I contend for a notion of the Infinite, positivo-ncgative let us call it. If mankind had not a notion of the infinite, they could not talk of it either affirmatively or negatively. I do not suppose that Sir William would have denied me these two things — that you cannot get quit of the idea of the Infinite, and that you cannot get quit of the idea that it is. [If it be a mere notion or idea, we may carry the notion with us as part of our permanent mental furniture, without any guarantee that it has a counterpart beyond us. It needs an intuition to carry you out into the domain of the objective.] Well, I think that the escape from the prison-house of the Ego is due to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. You see I fall back on the X^'"^!^"' '^"'^ v.yk-j. And note, in reference to the knowledge of God, that you must not pre- dicate of the abstracts what is predicable only of the concretes. For example, it is true of infinity and finity that the one contradicts the other, but not of the Infinite and the finite. But don't you feel that in almost all our philosophies we put the concrete fact into the alembic, and in* 60 GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. stead of getting the essence, we only get the caput mortuum ? For instance, ask Jonathan Edwards, " Wliat is virtue V and he answers you, " The love of universal being." Now, Edwards was not a mere speculator, but that sentence of his is the caput mortuum of " Tliou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and mind, and strength." And I think you get the essence by faith. [Or by devotion.] Well, you are taught it in the near Presence. .... And so philosophy seems to me to be a necessity, and the philosophies to be failures. [You honour the process, but reject the product.] I honour the process, and greatly honour the producers. And as to the product, moder- ated sceptic though I am, I value Aristotle for his clearness, and Plato for his depth. And the science of Logic has a most noble aim. It is a majestic problem to give the shape to all thinking, without the thinlcing itself: and in this, in comparison with what Aristotle has left, very little has been added. Yet Aristotle no doubt made partial use of an antecedent logic. ... As to our knowledge of matter, I always fluctuate between these two positions — whether the mind in perception has a dii'ect knowledge of the qualities, or only a sensation with an ac- companying belief in the object. Both systems give me objectivity. And there is a truth in Berkeley's system, which I do not think Reid saw. He is right in the main against Berkeley ; but there may be a very vulgar Reidism. Eeid is COLLOQUIA PEEIPATETIGA. 67 right against a certain Berkeleyism,ancl Berkeley is right against a certain type of Reidism. I was for a long time under the fascination of the Bishop of Cloyne. But I found that the narrative of the six days' creation, if I accepted it as in any sense historical, gave ray Berkeleyism a stab. Before raan appeared upon the scene, the world did not exist in his thought ; and before the world was, how could it exist in the Divine thought 1 [Berkeley would say, that is just what he contends for. It didn't then exist. Thought preceded its existence, and its existence is de- pendent on thought.] That I do not deny, but I do not think it is inconsistent with what I also affirm, that the existence of creation before man appeared proves that the world of matter is independent of his thought ; and if there was a time when matter was created, it seems then to have passed out of the subjective into the objective. But I think that Berkeley's was a profounder as well as a sub tiler mind than Eeid's, and after all Hume gives me a deeper analysis than Eeid. I abhor the Humist philosophy, but Hume goes beneath the can't-hclp-myself-ism of Reid. He is scep- tical of Eeid's dogma. Why cannot I help myself 1 And I do not see that Sir William's doctrine of immediate perception helps me to get rid of my scepticism. I must get hold of an absolute or universal truth, and the objectivity that I reach through the immediate perception of matter may be true for me, but may be no more. It may have no universal validity. G8 GOLLOQUIA FERIPATETICA. What I desiderate is a truth which I shall know to be absolutely universal. [But all knowledge is relative to the knower, and its character must differ with the charac- teristics of the knower ?] Nay ; that this table is a trapezium is not true to my mind and false to yours, or possibly false to my mind. It is true for all mind throughout the universe. / would despise hu- manity, tvere it not so. [But you have gone up to the region of mathematical axioms.] Well, I want to know if these hold good for every mind in the universe ; and I want to know the same in reference to the faiths I live by, for I must despise humanity if it is not so ; and I say that I can only find this if I am made in the image of God, [But that fact transcends experience. By what ladder do you reach it ?] You may say it's a flight. But I think experience suggests it, when it is communi- cated with by Kevelation. And Plato was on the track of this truth in his archetyi^al ideas. ]\'ty mind tends that way, I cannot tell you whence this conviction comes, but I have reached it. I do not know that its origin can be told. [Is it not partly through the innate notion of God which survives, and partly by the tradition of time, and partly by immediate in- spiration ?] But you bring in again the philosophy which I cast out. COLLOQUIA FEBIFATETIGA. G9 [I appeal to intuition, to testimony, and to that "^piGiMi ro\J ayiciu.^ I do not know anything of its ultimate ration ale ; but I haA^e sufficient evidence for it, and it is the starting point with me. [But we are in search of a principle, deeper tliau Eeid's, valid for every mind.] If I am made in the image of God, my nature has a universal element in it. And yet, I think, if the mind dwells long on the inti; macy of God with the soul, as made in his image, and still more as re-made in the image of Christ, it approaches very near to a practical pantheism; and if it dvv'clls over long on the thought of its distance from the infinite as a creature, it is not far from the verge of a practical atlieism. And it is a great matter to correct ultras by combina- tions. In^Eden, I suppose, there would be the closest sense of intimacy, with the greatest sense of distance. . . . The greatest of the antinomies is between the finite and the infinite, but you cannot say they contradict each other, since they arc relatives. But how much more satisfactory is it, in this high region, to get a text from one of those men who saw less through a glass than we do ! Well, Paul told the Athenians, 'Ei^ auru) ^w/xsv, xa/ -/.ivov/jbida xai sfffih. Mark the force of that sv auTw ; the finite is within the infinite, and Paul was not long of reminding them of their own hajjpy guess, " we are his offspring." Now take this, and come down with it to the sphere of reason, and it casts a light upon those questions with which otherwise we are bafiled. Although I don't 70 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. think you can get up by means of reason, yet when you come down with the lamp of faith into the sphere of reason, you perceive some truths that you saw not before. Now the image of God in man is such an image as fits man for communion with God, mind with mind ; for two minds (or one mind and a mil- lion) can act and react upon each other directly. When one human mind acts upon another, is it not the activity of the one that stirs the activity of the other 1 [CONTEOVERSIALISTS.] TRUE concession is not only the strength of polemic, but a positive accession to truth. Controversialists should always begin by con- cession. It is courteous, and therefore concili- ates. There is sometimes a razor-like sharpness between truth and error ; sometimes they shade into each other ; and the truth often lies in the via media between opposite errors. When I cannot find out the medium, I ahvays try to find the two extremes. The mere controversialist, who would always be in the thick of the fight with error, is no more worthy of respect than the pugilist. The controversial minds are like the lean cattle of Egypt ; they are very greedy, and are none the fatter for their feeding. [The Legal Element. Eeligious Terms.] T SUSPECT that, after all, there is only one ■'■ heresy, and that is Antinomianism. It is one thing to contemplate the relations of a sub- ject under law, and another to be under law as G GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 71 a subject. vEstheticcal religion seems always disposed to kick at the curse of the law, and the theologians in whom the sentimental has extin- guished the jurisprudential, have not fully understood the nature of sin. I don't think that Maurice properly acknowledges sin ; it is only vitiosity. I take it, too, than men of his cast of mind will be averse to, but would be greatly the better of, the material expressions of Scripture. The mind which has a bias towards the ideal side, is itself not in harmony with the biblical concrete ; which we should, in all cases, frequently consult, or we will be working away at the production of internal distilled essences. And I cannot help thinking that there is much unholy philanthropy in that type of the theolo- gical mind. You find it in a very noble man, John Foster. I cannot think his mind a healthy one; and that essay of his on " The aversion of men of taste," etc., I dislike excessively. You do no good by changing the vocabulary of religion. If you change the words, you change the thoughts. They won't translate. Tlieie are no synonyms to be found in the dictionary of the Spirit. The more I study language, the more I am convinced of this, that particular shades of thought are wedded to particular words. If you disuse the words, you lose the thought. If you cut the one, you wound the other ; they are dermis and epidermis. I find that my best words are Scriptural, my next best ecclesiastical. Take the anthroiioniorphisms of Scripture. It indicates a most fastidious narrowness to object to use the strongest of them. A man is often 72 COL LO QUIA PERIPATETICA. most at rest as regards the ideas in question wlien he deliberately adopts this mode of speech, knowing it to be inadequate, but contentedly using it as the only one that is possible to him. There is no use in guarding against misconstruc- tion, for it is admittedly imperfect, and yet better in its imperfections than the bare literality that Avould dispense with it. In this, too, the letter kills, and the spirit gives life ; and, after all, we must be either anthropopathic in our thoughts of God, or sceptic. [Ferme on the Epistle to the Romans.*] "VrOU here see Aristotle and Quintilian com- *~ bined, working away at St. Paul. Look at his " adjuncta" and " isagoga;" and yet some fine rhetorical flashes. It is verj'^ fine to meet with a modern Schoolman, keeping to his quiddities, but pious withal. He must take a logical knife and dissect the Gospel offer to mankind ; but he off"ers it fully, only cutting it up because he thinks it better to offer it piecemeal than in the mass. Ferme must have known Ramus, if he did not knoAV Aristotle. These old theo- logical systematisms were good. I don't want to pull down the old structures, but the old house is sadly in need of a good fresh fire in it. [Classification of Sciences.] T NEVER tiied to turn my mind into an index -*■ to an Encyclopa3dia; and it is that which is sought in the classification of the sciences — not * Analysis logica in Ei^istohcm Apostoli Pauli ad Umnanos. Edin. 1651. — Ed. GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 73 of course a Britanuica, but a Metropolitana. A methodised index to knowledge is a large con- ception, but no one man can produce it. It is not possible perfectly to classify all that is at this time known ; each classifier would have his own encyclopaedia, for it must be the subjective know- ledge of the knower that he classifies. It is just a question of beads and a string. Let us first get the beads anyhow, as the sections of know- ledge are mastered, and then we may try to string them together methodically. The Telegraphic Age.] I DON'T much care for all the world becoming next-door neighbours. And we are drifting, drifting, drifting into an awfully materialistic and utilitarian age. I do not like to think of railways in the heart of mountains. They are taking them into Greece, and tunneling Olym- pus ! What a strange thought for a man with any classic reverence in him ! They'll be water- ing the engines at Hippocrene ! [Biographies — William Law.] THERE are three biographies of which I never tire : — Augustine's, Bunyan's, and Halyburton's. The first is by far the deepest, the second the richest and most genial, and with Halyburton I feel great intellectual congruitj^ He was naturally a sceptic, but God gave that sceptic great faith. His book against the Deists, in which he deals wisely with Lord Herbert, is a scholastic prosecution of Owenian principle, There are very strange combinations in some 74 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. men. There was William Law, a mystic, and in his mysticism at times a Christian pantheist, and strongly opposed to imputation. Yet he spoke, as with the sound of a trumpet, upon the practical. The mystical and the practical are seldom so united as they were in him. He in- dulged in extraordinary speculations — viz. that matter was " subconcreted" to prevent the angels from seeing into the heart of it. But in practical appeals he is a very Luther. No two men spoke with the sound of a trumpet as did Luther and William Law, the English mystic. They were Boanerges. [Fervour.] IV/TYSTICISM is not altogether false. Mys- '^*-*- ticism only errs when it enters into the province of logic, to destroy it ; as logic errs when it trespasses on the domain of intui- tion, to fetter it. Whenever we Avorship, we acknowledge that there is a region above us, at once known and unknown, half-clear and half-dark. And I have no fear of the results of religious fervour in worship. Aberrations gene- rally correct themselves in time. It is the total want of fervour that is lamentable. In any other region fervour is welcomed by men ; why not in the sphere of religion 'J Why should any Christian, and especially any Christian teacher, hold himself aloof from fervid movements ? Some of us are perhaps unnaturally calm and cold. And the magnitude of our subject justifies a greater, rather than sanctions a less, fervour than ordinaiy. There is a good deal of warmth COLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. 75 in the religious life of our time. I anticipate that it may spread over a Avido area just now. I question if it will grow as much in depth. [Plymoxtthism.] '"PHE Plymouth Brethren assert that there •^ should be no sects, because there is no visible church ; nevertheless they add one. I [Presbyterianism.] T is strange that all Christendom becomes Presbyterian on an ordination day. [Knowledge of God in the Son.] OUR knowledge of God is apprehensive, never comprehensive ; but it is real and presentative, not ideal and representative. Yet it is through the Son that we directly and immediately perceive the Father. If we have seen the Son, we have seen the Father also. But we cannot truly see the Son, without also seeing the Father in him. We dare not separate the personality of the divine essence. The Father's nature is, in a real sense, adum- brated to man in the Son. And I do not believe in any direct vision of the Father in the future, except as through the Son, and with the Son. I cannot concur with the notion of the School- men, " ultima beatitudo non potest esse nisi in visione divinse essentise."* To see "in speculo essentise" is impossible to the creature. To comprehend the relations subsisting between the created and the Creator, we must first make • Aquinas, Sum.. Tlieol. fritin sec. qu. iii. § 8. F 76 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. a leap out of our creaturehood. But as to the Son, as "the express image" of the Father, I have at times a glorious high gleaming of the truth, that " lu Him all the Father shone, substantially expressed." There is nothing possible to the one nature that is not possible to the other, except the necessity of abiding on the Throne. But this is so high a theologeme that it vanishes soon. It is granted to the intuition of faith, but cannot be propo- sitionally worded. And so it is with all high intuitions. They gleam on us ; but they are the distilled essence of distillations ; and if you try to seize them and detain them for examina- tion, straight they evanish in cloud. They won't allow you to dissect them, because you cannot get them near the dissecting table. They often arise on me in the meditation of a text ; and that which most of all suggests them, is the life and words of Jesus Christ. [Revolutions of Character.] I DO not understand the aversion of the scientific mind to believe in sudden changes of character. When you have to deal with the human will and the Divine will, you have two incalculable, incommensurable forces, which no doctrine of " averages" can compute. There are shocks and cataclasms in the moral region quite unknown in the physical, and of which the earthquake and volcano are poor analogies. When C. Malan said to me, on an ever-to-be- remembered day, " You have got God's word in your mouth," I felt as if a flash of spiritual COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 77 electricity had then passed through me. But the old nature asserted itself right in the face of that word, and refused for a while to receive the death-wound. I sat all day on a seat ; I could neithet speak nor think. I lay passive ; all my past life and thoughts seemed to rush through me. I had the feelirjg that, could I have taken them down, there were materials in that day's thoughts for a lifetime's meditation ; and yet that they were not mine, for I seemed not to think, but to be thought upon. Now that must not be an infrequent experience. The shock, when all that is within rises up and re- fuses to be slain, accompanied too with a desire to be slain by the only bloodless Conqueror, till at length the soul yields, and dies that it may live. That moment, when I Avas conscious of a revulsion against my renovation, has entered as a fact into all my subsequent theologising. But there is not always pain at the liew/- birth of the soul. God forbid that my way of coming to him should be at all a common one. If a man feels, as I then felt, what sin really designs, that it really designs deicide, his mind may indeed stagger for a time. It is just because _God is usually " not in all our thoughts," that this is not realised. I own that my conscience does not feel this so strongly as my intellect dis- cerns it. . . . I would be bound to love God for what He is in Himself, even while his very nature was inflicting punishment on myself. I believe I would be morally bound for ever to adore the justice that banished me. And I would not deny that hopeless love is still the devil's duty. 78 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. [The SuPERNATUKAii : Histoeical Evidence.] T AM not conscious of the supernatural. 1 -'- am only conscious of the natural, of facul- ties and states. But I hnow a great deal more. I am cognisant or apprehensive of a great deal more than I am conscious of. In short, I " know " more, using that common word in its catholic signification, and not in that of any particular school. [Surely we are conscious of the supernatural as the antithesis of the natural ?] But that is only the caput mortuum again. It is only as a fact attested that the super- natural has any hold over me. The miraculous is a question of fact, not of philosophy ; of testimony, not of speculation — and God can testify as well as man. He can be his own witness-bearer. How are we to know that a miracle has taken place, admitting that it can? Not otherwise than by testimony. All fact is vouched for either by the report of our own senses, or by testimony. Philosophy and criticism can do a great deal to purify the matter objected to us, but they cannot bear evidence. In the case of the miraculous, the senses can- not now aid us, because the age of miracle is past ; but testimony is sufficient for me. The prophet or evangelist, seeing the miracle, or hearing the voice, had evidence which satisfied him. I have not his consciousness, and cannot tell how he felt in presence of these exceptional phenomena. I have no right to speak of it. He may have felt just as I do when supernaturally Wrought upon. But I cannot tell. He speaks COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 79 as one having authority to speak of matters of which I am necessarily ignorant. But our only test of the genuineness of this inspiration is the evidence of result. Two men, Isaiah and Bouddha, claim inspiration. I cannot know the subjective conditions of either. The result, the record, is our only criterion, for the in- spired man alone can know what it is to be inspired. [Then you may have critical tests by which to judge ; and a standard, in the result which re- mains — the revelation which stands the test.] Well, I suppose the Scriptures, as a series of documents, are their own best witness-bearers. But the Christian evidence is marvellously cumu- lative. I believe that what our modern men call the "internal evidence" is by far the deepest. But it is incommunicable. Can you describe Light ? There is no doubt that we cannot explain our reception of Christianity. It is too deep for explanation. But we may say it comes to us along the plane of fact, as distinguished from that of the pure reason. The reason enters into three things : axioms, primitive be- liefs, and the syllogistic nexus. Facts, again, have evened (eveniunt). Mathematical axioms, primitive beliefs, and syllogistic vincula, have not evened. This distinction has some value. Of Christianity itself we say evenit. It is a great historical fact ; if we reject it we must explain it, to vindicate the rejection ; we must find its source in natural causes, and this you cannot do. You can trace the stream so far, and then its waters issue from a hidden fountain-head. 80 COLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA, Then look at Judaism. It is a deposit, not a growth. The Shemitic mind is more receptive than imaginative. It seems to have received a gift from above, and preserved it, for it was not creative like the Greek mind. And yet was not Greece, with all her vivid intellection, grop- ing after something in the dark, till it received it from Judea ? And if criticism is to account for everything, it must account f^r Israel's God, and show the genesis of that. / say that the whole character of Hebrew history attests the supernatural, and if you add the two nobler chapters from the book of history — the life of Jesus Christ, and the story of the Christian church — destructive criticism has a good deal to account for ! Some minds admit the possi- bility of miracle, but doubt if it has ever been substantiated ; because they say they must first know the boundaries of the natural before they can predicate of an event that it is supernatural. But this is really withdrawing their concession as to the possibility of a miracle ; because, no matter what the force of the testimony, you might always plead that the margin line of the natural was yet unknown. In short, it is the barren admission that God could work a miracle, but could do nothing hy it — could not authen- ticate a revelation thereby. [Feotestant Dissent. ] A X TE Protestants are all Dissenters. It is * ^ necessary to vindicate our dissent, but as necessary for those in the Protestant estab- lished Churches to remember that they are dis- COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 81 Bcnters from the Church of Rome ; — dissenters but not schismatics. Rome was schismatic in forcing us out. And it would be well for Christendom, if all the members of Christ's catholic church would endeavour to preserve the unity of the spirit, and think oftener of the many and major points in which they agree, than the few and minor ones ih which they differ. [The Theocracy.] IN a theocracy God is King, and sin is crime. Sin, which is made crime by the -theocratic law, is both sin and crime. It is sin as against the Lord of the whole earth, and crime as against the King. Now, if all sin was visited with death under the theocracy, if all sin were theocratic crime, no flesh could live ; so holy is God, so sinful is man. For example, Divorce is always sin against Him who made man and woman one pair ; but it was not always made theocratic sin, for the law was so regulated as to prevent the rise of unbridled divorce ; always Sipeccatum contra Deum, it was not always a crimen contra regem. Wherever ^ecca/a are at the same time crimina, it is excision from the presence of the Lord, and no flesh could stand that. Every crimen was a peccatum, but every peccatum was not a crimen. Every criminal was eo ipso re- sponsible to God for his peccata, not every pec- cator responsible for crimina. There are three main heads of Mosaic Law — 1. Law Moral ; for which there is strictly no theocratic punishment. " Thou shalt love thy 82 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. neighbour," etc. If a Jew did not do that, ha sinned a sin deserving punishment. But he could not be stoned for it. There was no theo- cratic punishment. 2. Law Ceremonial ; which had a double re- lation — -first, to the law moral ; second, to the law judicial. Tliis ordained that sacrifices were to be brought for sin. But these could not atone for a^a^r/a; for Adonai was injured, whenever any of his creatures were injured. 3. Laio Judicial, civil jurisprudence. . . . Now, how far have we to do with the Judaical law ? Is it obligatory except on the Hebrews 1 Certainly we have not to do with the Mosaic law in its Sinaitic form. There is certainly an abrogation of that. It was but for a time. Yet the moral law of Adonai is eternally obli- gatory : and in room of the laws of Sinai, we have positive Christian institutions for all time to come. These are the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, which are to remain in the Christian Church " till the end of the con." [Justification and Sanctification.] " TF Christ be in you," says an apostle, " the -*• body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is alive because of righteousness." It is a fathomless depth, that of our union with Christ, which I cannot yet see far into. It is clear enough that we, by believing in Christ, die, and that we die in the very act of faith. But there is a point which I would like to see into, but which I do not yet see into — viz., the condem- nation of sin, in the death of Christ. Christ COL LO QUIA PERIPATETIGA. 83 " condemned sin in the flesh." I think we run away with one-half of the truth on this point, and Rome runs away with the otlier half (we, i.e. the post-reformers, for I don't charge the Reformers themselves with it). The death of Christ, when sin lay upon him, was, I think, the condemnation of all that so lay upon him, with the pardon of their persons, and the execution or destruction of their sins. Condemnation of sin to death goes along with the adjudication of persons to life. Christ died for the destruc- tion of sin, but for the salvation of the unjust. But I would like to understand more thoroughly the force of the condemnation of sin in the flesh of Christ. " He that hath sufi"ered in the flesh, hath ceased from sin." I do not under- stand that saying yet. When our sins were laid upon our Lord, what took place was a condem- nation of them. The sins of his disciples were then sentenced to be destroyed. So you see how intimately our justification and our sancti- fication are connected; and our justification, when we apprehend it deeply enough, is the virtual execution of our sins. It is the sen- tence of God to slay our sins, and to save our persons. And here we stand between two ultras. It is the evil extreme of Romanism, that it deprives sanctification of its legal grounds ; and it is the evil of an ultra-Protestantism that it stops short at the act of justification, or omits the very close nexus between it and sanctifica- tion ; the connection is not insisted on so much as the distinction. The judicial sentence passes into eff'ect, and all that passes in our sanctifica- 84 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. tion is adjudicated in our justification. It takes place personally in our union to Christ, but it is all virtually contained in the life and death of Christ himself, God's pardon of our persons, and the execution of our sins, both take place in our being (as the apostle says) " crucified with Christ ; " nor can I ever consider justifi- cation and sanctification farther separated than as a legal sentence, and the actual execution of it. , . . Christ came to " condemn sin in the flesh ;" and that the Law could not do, because it was " weak through the flesh." But the lav/ could always say of sin that it was a moral evil ; and so it becomes an important question, in what sense it could not condemn sin? The apostle also tells us that " the strength of sin is the law." The law, therefore, which is its strength, cannot condemn it. It denounces it, and is wroth against it. But it cannot destroy it. Eather the opposite. The law may pass sentence on the wrong-doer, and even place him under the ban of the empire ; as in that old German sentence of outlawry, " We turn thee forth upon the ways of the world, and no man can sin against thee." But I have no doubt that when Christ "made his soul an off'ering for sin," the sentence then went forth that all sin atoned for was to be put out of being, out of existence. . , . That justification precedes sanctification is another of the ultraisms of modem Protestantism. I cannot receive that doctrine. Faith precedes justification, but re- generation causally precedes faith. It is there- fore very important to remark initially that all OOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 85 flows from Christ and our union to Him. The only difficulty with rae is why glorification does not immediately take place on our union with Christ, because the immediate point of union with Christ should be perfect holiness and blessedness. But God has so planned it that there must be an order in the development of our lives. Wisest God says, no — This must not yet be so ; and the Christian has to realise (what it is sometimes very hard for him to realise) that he is now " seated with Christ in heavenly places," while he is fighting away upon the earth. The transition "from grace to glory" is not greater than is the transition " from nature to grace." [CONVEKSION TO GoD, ETC.] WHEN men come to adopt a stereotyped manner of recognising God, or of con- version to Him, you may be sure there is some human conceit in it. There was Nathaniel, a man truly awakened, who had not heard the facts of the life and death of Christ ; and as to Cornelius, I think he was a ^aivhg ap^gwrog before Peter saw him : " He feared God and wrought righteousness," and " his prayers and alms came up as a memorial before God. This is not affirmable of him unless he was "justified." The same reasoning which would lead me to doubt that Cornelius was justified, would lead me to believe that the seventh chapter of the Romans was the description of an irregenerate 86 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. man ; and Peter's errand to Cornelius, to show him " the things commanded of God," presents no difficulty on the other side. His words are very significant : " Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him." How dim must the ground of the faith of thousands have been for centuries. .... I preach a free gospel to every man, or I don't preach the gospel at all, but I know that its acceptance without the help of the Spirit is an impossibility. I am not going to hinder a man from attempting an impossibility. I would never forbid him to try his strength to come to God, while \ hold that he cannot do so without the help of the Spirit. Calvinism is not inconsistent with a free gospel. I would like to see a divine arise, in whom Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Boston were thoroughly welded into one. [Conscience and the Atonement.] WE are asked to throw aside every theory of the Atonement, and repose in the fact. But I cannot receive the Atonement as a blank mystery, though it is ultimately inscrutable and incognisable, as are all great truths. I speak with trembling, but I doubt that the fact of an Atonement would not be clear to me apart from its reasons and relations. God announces to conscience the principles upon which it can rest. Can God be just, and pardon me 1 I must know the consistency between these two things, before I believe in COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 87 their union ; and I don't think I go farther than the Scripture carries me. It seems to me a terrible thing to say that there was no in- trinsic necessity for Christ's death, for then we virtually say that he died for sin that he need not have died for ; and it seems to me that we have the softer theology who affirm he did not, and could not. And I think that to die for the sake of sinners whose sin is not actually taken away, would be a clear waste of moral action. So that we must either with the Calvinist deny the universal extent of the Atonement, or with the Socinian eviscerate its meaning. And I think that Magee, in his book on the Atone- ment, has sold himself into the hands of the Calvinists, though he is ever bringing in a salvo against them. Does God pardon as a mere sovereign 1 He either pardons arbitrarily, or he pardons on the ground of some atonement. Now I hold that conscience demands that vicariousness which history and experience bring before us. This is the very antithesis of Kantism. Kant may be right as regards the con- science in its crude and unenlightened state. For conscience is out of order through the fall. But conscience quickened by contact with the divine word demands a satisfaction which man has not rendered, and is unable to render. It is also true that the healthy conscience re- pudiates the legal element when separated from the moral ; it repudiates justification divorced from sanctiftcation. 4:^ justification that left us as it found us, conscience would disown. What it demands and approves is not an ex- 88 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. trinsic act, but an intrinsic fact. Christ came that I might have life, and this includes both a justified and a sanctified life. [How does conscience demand vicariousness 1] Conscience asserts that a gratuitous lyardon would not be just. If I appeal to conscience rigorously, it tells me that it would be un- righteous to give men a blank pardon. It cries out for restitution of some sort, and expiation of some sort. And again, while con- science proclaims the fact that man's nature is out of order, and that it cannot rectify its own disorder, experience attests the fact tluit the image of God, wrested from us at the fall, is in the process of restoration through Jesus Christ. The evidence to the individual is the congruity of that which Christ brings to him, -with his nature, and its power to rectify his disorder ; and the congruity between the restored Divine image within and the Divine image without, is vouched more by faith than by consciousness. Kant is of too individualising a tendency in morals. He does not recognise the unity of the race in either of its representatives, — either in the first man, or in the second. But the umbilicus refutes him ; we are all united, both in our degeneracy through one man, and in our recovery through Another. [Merit and Demerit.] 1>^ANT has ventured on some false correla- -^^ tions. As sin implies demerit, virtue he thinks implies merit. Kanfs correlate is my disparate. The first two, sin and demerit, are GO.LLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 89 annexed to each other by a moral necessity; while the latter virtue (obedience) has for its sequel not merit but happiness, and they are related not necessarily but de pado. Kant omits the fact that we are in a state of forfeiture of good, and deserve evil. Merit is not neces- sarily annexed to obedience. Merit exists only when there is inherent good. Now there is no inherent good in the volitions of any creature, but only in the volitions of God. There is no sufficiency within the will to ensure the creature's standing. If so, the creature cannot stand without the divine upholding ; and must fall on the withdrawal of that upholding, while the upholding is not a matter of right, but of sovereignty. There can be no claim of rights on the creature's part, and no impugning of the divine justice, should the creature be " left " to the freedom of its own will, as the Westminster divines put it. [But this suspends the destiny of the uni- verse upon acts of Divine volition ; is it not better to connect these with an " immutable and eternal morality"]] It is a holy will that rules the universe — a will in which loving-ldndness is locked up, to be in due time displayed. It is a solemn thing that we and all creatures are at the disposal of pure will ; but it is not merely free will, it is the free will of the holy Lord Jehovah, and therein it is distinguished from the abstractness and apparent arbitrariness of mere will. For the theology of this, I may have been learning more, as time has run on ; but for the principle 90 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. of its inmost nature, I believe that God taught it me during those three days in Aberdeen, when my will surrendered at discretion. I was taught the error of the will's independency through a most terrible experience. I learned the Divine sovereignty once for all, as by a flash of lightning, and a mournful tranquillity came down. I felt that / was blamable every way. The spirit was broken ; and I remembered that the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart : and I looked up, and lo ! the burden was gone. [Insincerity and Responsibility.] " T T E'S at least sincere" is a common saying, -■- -^ in defence of a man whose opinions or actions may be very far astray, and it exonerates the man from the change of hypocrisy. Of course that is something. It is "a soul of good " {if you will) " in things evil." I doubt not that the present Pope is a very sincere Palmist ; and I believe that Torquemada was a very sincere inquisitor; and some of the Scribes and Pharisees had a zeal according to the law, and "touching its righteousness" might have been " blameless." But that he has acted con- scientiously does not prove that a man has done his duty. In other matters, sincerity is not held to be the equivalent of duty. If a man is sincere in his debts, that won't exonerate him. Now, if a man misconstrues what God reveals, though he is sincere in a measure, he is blameworthy to the extent of his light. God has spoken to men in his Word. How COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 91 would a man take the calling of his word in question? He could not tolerate that, but would justly resent it. And though God bear long with us, he must deal with us as a father with suspicious or heedless children. And our not giving heed to what God says is a most serious aggravation of our sin. Its first ele- ment is our not yielding to him, our want of filial submission. The creature's first duty is to be what God made him. His next duty is to do what God ordains. He is -directly respon- sible for these things. He is only secondarily responsible for inquiry. But the great want in all men who inquire is the want of a simple love of truth, and the want of the " single eye." A man sees double because of his preposses-'* sions. . . . Brougham, in his lecture on respon- sibility for belief, never denied that man is re- sponsible for the act of inquiry. He never denied that truth-seeking is a duty ; and that impar- tiality in inquiry is a duty. He admits that man is bound to inquire, and to inquire honestly ; but he denies that man can be forced to believe, because belief is just the result of evidence pre- sented to the mind. But he denies what I afiirm, that we are bound to believe on the authority of God, whenever we have reason to believe that God has really spoken. [Would not almost every one do so, if con- vinced that God has spoken 1 It is that fact which they find it so hard to believe.] No. I believe that such is the bent of the human spirit away from God, that it will not come unto the light which it knows to be light, G 92 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. just as it often does what is evil while it knows what is good. Paul's confession as to the contrary power within the will is true also of the intellect, which the will leads as well as follows. [Calvinism and Arminianism.] TT may be, as Arminians impute to Calvinism -*• what we deny, that conversely we contro- vert an Arminianism which they deny ; and so the two parties ma}'^ be really nearer than the controversy would always indicate. The con- troversy is sometimes merely one of emphasis : where the emphasis is to be laid ; Avhat is major, and what minor. But often it is much deeper. The fact is, however, that the Calvinist affirms a grace of God towards his own children, which the Arminian denies towards any creature ; so that Calvinism is an intensive exhibition of Divine grace, while Arminianism presents us with an extensive and diffusive one. . . . What is it that the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian attri- bute to subjective grace (grace in the soul of man) distinct from moral suasion, that is not enthusiastic — a sort of spiritual galvanism 1 They neither allow enough to man nor enough to God. They divide the process in a most arbitrary fashion : one half they give to God, the other half to man ; but are these two inde- pendent 1 does the one not permeate and per- vade the other 1 We hold that the process is not halved and separately shared, but united and conjunctly shared. The whole is God's, COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 93 the whole is also man's. The rh diknv is wholly man's ; the Bvi^yeia rh 6iXiiv is wholly God's. In the fallen nature, the elective faculty re- mains undestroyed. Its destruction would be the destruction of humanity ; and though we are in one sense passive in regeneration, in another sense we are not. We yield our wills up to the active svi^jsia of the Higher will. [The Nature of Fbee Will.] IT is foolish to dismiss the question of Free will, as an insoluble problem of meta- physics. Let no man despise a metaphysical problem. Some say " That is metaphysical," as if it was therefore unpractical or foolish, because insoluble. But to deride such a ques- tion, is to deride what is to some minds (and I own it is to mine) the very deepest chord with- in it. It is like saying to a man of a sensitive nervous organisation, " Noav become a muscular Christian at once ! " The will is a metaphysi- cal question, and is not an utterly hopeless puzzle, though it is also a practical question, vitally practical. My metaphysical position consists in having no theory as to the nature of freedom, but maintaining the fact, while I dis- own and repudiate four ultra theories; two pairs of opposites, one pair on either side of the con- troversy. I disown the liberty of independ- ence. I disown the liberty of indifference. I maintain that the will's freedom is less than these theories assert it to be. On the other side, I disown the " freedom from co-action ' 94 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. without the will (external bondage), and free- dom from co-action within the will (internal bondage), as too meagre. I maintain that the freedom of the will is more than these theories concede. I thus stand between two pairs of ultra theories. The liberty, which is the ground of accountability, is more than freedom from re- straint, whether it be within or without the will itself. It is less than the liberty of independ- ency, and less than the liberty of indifference. Independency is just Epicureanism. Disown that and the theory of indifference, and what remains but that the will's agency is elective and selective % Man makes an election. God Is^emotely the cause of that action's causality (the cause of its causality, mark), and b, fortiori of its good ; and yet, Avhile he is so, he does not, V in being so, take away that freedom of will which might end in a bad volition. God's hi^yi/a is not galvanism, it is a vitalising act. There is a saying of the good Eutherford, diffi- cult for us to acquiesce in, but true I think in principle, to this effect : The permission of sin is adorable, the actual fact of sin is abominable. As to the permissio, there would certainly have been no display of some of the Divine attributes had sin not been. They would have been con- served for ever in the depths of the adorable Godhead. The reality of sovereign love toward rebellious children could not have been dis- played without a fall. This is the basis of a modified optimism. ... In a certain sense I am a tremendous free-wilier. My predestina- tion is all free will. God created the universe COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 95 for his glory and the manifestation of his attributes. He might have lived without a universe beneath Him. If the universe has a necessary ground of existence, it must be both eternal and infinite. It is therefore fundamental in theology that creation was for the manifestation of the Divine perfection. But I shrink from assuming that these perfec- tions must necessarily have been displayed. The Divine perfections do not necessitate any act, but they qualify and condition every Divine act. ... As to the Divine Will, I am vehemently anti-Edwardean. His system of determinism leads to the necessity of creation. I inferred this when I first read his treatise on the will, and I find it carried out in his other treatise on God's chief end in creation. But my position is much more a theologeme than a philosophical postulate. And yet, if you sub- stitute Jehovism for necessitarianism (which is proximately Providence and virtually pre- destination), very many difficulties are mitigated. And after all, necessitarianism in the brain can do little harm to the man who in heart relishes the Sermon on the Mount, e.g. Chalmers. I do not say that the theory of philosophical neces- sity is innocuous. I believe it is noxious. But look at the Edwardean theology, omitting this, its metaphysical blot. It was steeped in the affections. That will keep any man safe amid intellectual aberration, and prevent it telling on his life. In the Edwardean Ethics you see a fine moral stoical Christianity in conjunction with the finest affections. ^ 96 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIC A. I [The Eternal Logos.] HAVE long thought that without an eter- nal Logos you must have an eternal cosmos ; and I therefore suspect that a mono- personal Theism is impotent against the Panihust. So that, since the controversy has passed from its old atheistic phases, I doubt if either Deist, or Socinian, or Mahommedan, will be able to cope with the Pantheist. In short, I doubt if any but a Trinitarian can do so adequately. [How does the admission of an eternal Logos negative an eternal cosmos *?] I don't so clearly see it as I feel it. But if God had not always a Son, he must have always had a world ; and if he had always a Son, personality, and conscious life, with re- ciprocal love, must have always existed. We, at least, get out of the nirvana, or the Indian sleep of Brahm. Besides, the doctrine of an eternal Logos harmonises with the notion of a Deity essentially active, and perfect within him- self. Notes of a Conversation between Dr. Dun- can and V. v., October 1861 ; V. V.'s re- marks being within brackets, thus [ ]. T GOT no rest to the sole of my foot till I -■' rejected all speculation. What I rejected was not the tendency to speculate, but the pile of speculations. [But if a tendency remains, a fresh pile mu.st accumulate 1] COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 97 Well, but what can you make of it % What can you reach 1 Have you got a philosophy 1 It would be very strange if Sextus Empiricus, with all his arguments to destroy philosophies, could not get one to destroy yours. [My philosophy is just the constitution of my nature : I must fall back on that : I have no other court of appeal.] Well, you can't help believing. I do not wish to shake your faith in that. To weaken confidence in human nature is criminal. But I always think that the Reidist conclusion, " I can't help believing it," is incomplete, without some reason in the nature of things. The " make of my constitution " is a testimony to its Maker, and I want to get out of myself, and beyond myself. Do you not see that Avithout this you are in miserable bondage to a can't- help-myself-ism ? [Well, I just can't help it, and you can't take me higher. I cannot conclude otherwise than that my nature affirms rightly, and that its Maker is good and true.] But you must reach a belief in something out of yourself. Conscience is not produced by me ; and it testifies to another beyond me. Conscience is the voice of a lawgiver. I think we get out of ourselves, to a rock higher than we are, if we follow conscience to its source. I affirm that conscience testifies to law, to moral law ; and that not in the secular sense in which the physicists use it, nor in the sectarian sense in which the mathematicians use it, but in the primitive moral sense in which the lawyers use 98 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. it, as the expression of an authoritative will. The naturalists have no right to the term law, if they do not admit that they have stolen it from the lawyers. There is no such thing as a " law " of nature, except in a figurative sense. The laws of nature do not lead me beyond my own generalising mind, but moral law does ; for if there be not another above me, my Law- giver, then there is no law for me. You see I wish to get beneath the voice of my nature, to the Maker of my constitution. [If, from " the make of our constitution," you reach its Maker, and are able to infer his character, does that not enhance rather than diminish the difficulty of the entrance of evil into his universe 1] How so ? Evil is a fact, but not an entity. It is not a " thing " at all. It is a minus quality, like a deficit in a merchant's ledger. If it were a positive entity, I think we could say that either it could not enter into the universe at all, or else that God directly created it. It is a mystery how it ever entered a perfectly good universe, and appeared amongst beings created perfectly good (and therefore without even its germs), while their Creator had no share in its •production. It is a product, and the product of the creaturely will, but it is a negative quantity. And if it had not entered, we could not have seen how God could do a greater thing than permit it — viz. put it away ; the greatest Divine act, I believe, ever done in the universe : and the few rays of light that Scripture gives us as to the former are always connected with the GOLLOQUIA FERIPATETIGA. 99 latter. Christianity does not tell me all I would like to know — it does not meet all my specula- tions ; but while it enlightens my reason as to my duties, it gives me sufficient light as to the ultimate mysteries, to prevent their paralysing me altogether. I should lilce to know if you ad- mit that we are fallen creatures. If we are now what we were made, the demiourgos must either be a very poor being, or a very melancholy crea- ture. Do you admit that we are fallen creatures? [There are contrarieties within us now that I can scarcely think necessary to our constitu- tion. They seem to point to a better state from which we have declined, and to which we may yet return.] Yes ; they are both historic and prophetic. But there is more than contrariety — there is anarchy. The world of mankind has cast off allegiance to its King. And what do you take the present state of the world to be ? Why, we are under the ban of the empire. Don't think that because sin is merely privative, it is less horrible than if it were positive, or less terrible in its consequences. It is privative of good to man, and of communion with God. And yet God, having a design of saving man- kind (all or some is another question), has placed the whole human race under a system of long- suffering kindness ; while they are nevertheless in the state of condemned criminals under the King's reprieve — allowed, it is true, the best of prison fare ; and, under the moral philosophers' keeping, the prison is not quite so dirty as it might otherwise be. 100 COLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. [The moral philosophers have been more than prison warders ; they have been prophets and teachers to humanity.] I don't think they have done much more than keep the prison clean, and do effective police work, and that is not an ignoble task. I am not de- spising one of them. And I had rather be a jailor in the house of my God, than dwell in the tents of wiclcedness. But come, let us turn from this. I must take you, my friend, to the centre of all things. You have read the Gospels. Well, can you conceive anything more beautiful than the character of Jesus Christ 1 [No.] Is it not the perfection of humanity ? [It is.] Could you have invented it ? [No.] Could the four Evangelists have invented iti [I think not.] No ; the inventor would be greater than the invention. Jesus Christ, then, is the perfection of humanity, its ideal made real. AVhence then came this perfection'? Did a Jewish human nature realise its own perfection 1 [That it was from above I doubt not ; but it is the unity of the Son with the Father in that human life which I cannot conceive. Practically I realise, and admit that He was divine.] Conceive ! Conceive that unity between Father and Son 1 What do you mean 1 We cannot conceive it, and we have no theory regarding it. Let us look at the various hypotheses that have been started ; and amongst COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 101 thein you may be disposed to place the Atha- nasian ; but that I take to l)e not one, but a denial of all hypotlieses, affirming the incom- prehensibility of the union, and denying all the explanations of it. Every hypothesis is the root of a heresy. First, in Athanasianism, there is a denial of Tritheism, and a denial of Sabel- lianism. What does Sabellius make of his attempt to theorise] n /ioi-as irXarvvkToa. y'syovi roidg. That is a perfectly barren saying. It casts no light on the mystery, but verges to- wards a heresy. Now consider the attestations of Scripture. No one can read the Old Testa- ment witliout seeing that that book is strictly Monotheistic. No one can say that Jesus and his apostles did not preach a Monotheistic doctrine. Yet when Jesus Christ and his apostles went about preaching, they said many things which were staggering to a monopersonal Monotheism ; and some divines in their inter- pretations of Christ's words have fallen into a tritheistic Theism. But the propositions to which a Christian assents have been clearly and concisely stated by a not very religious person, Dean Swift, thus : — There are three, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost ; The Father is different from the Son, and from the Holy Ghost. The three are one. [That statement does not include the word '*' person."] Well, it is not used in Scripture, except in one passage, " the express image of his 102 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. person." I affirm that three persons of men are three heiyigs of men, and three persons of angels would be three beings of angels. But to affirm this of the Divine nature would be Tritheism. And so I am forced to the conclusion that the word "person," as applied to God, must bo different from that word as applied to man. But what that is I do not know, because I am not God. You will see that there is a mystery about the doctrine of God, which we would need ourselves to be God to know, and the light of glory will not dissipate that mystery. [But it is on the resemblance of personality in God and man, that you found the great postulate that man is made in the image of God. Is not the one doctrine the equivalent of the other, and both the basis of all revelation 1] Well, the natures resemble. But the arche- type and the type are not identical. Man is like unto God, made in his image, but God is also infinitely unlike man. I see no contradic- tion between these two, and I am precluded from all deductive reasonings, founded upon that word " person" (such as, because three persons in man are three beings, three persons in God are also three beings), because I abjure an absolute iden- tity or commonness of nature between God and man. [But since you hold that man's nature is in the image of God's, and the centre of man's nature is his personality, must not personality be the same in both ?] Similar, but not the same. It is surely enough that the type resemble the archetype COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 103 without being identical vnih. it. If identical, the difference would vanish, like Hegel's seyn = nichts. As to the Divine personality, my propositions are twofold — first, that the Divine Being or essence is truly and properly one; and second, that tlus unity is not in- compatible with a moral threefoldness ; and I find that this is described by the personal pronouns in Scripture. It is the attempt to clear up the mystery further that I attack ; every intelligible explanation I reject. I don't know what the Divine personality is ; but I know that it is not as this, or that, or the other theory would try to make it out. It is not Tri- theistic, and it is not Sabellian. But I cannot know it unless I were to know the modus of the eternal generation, and the spiration of the Holy Ghost, i.e. become God myself. It is be- yond the reach of definition then, as an Athan- asian once said to an Arian, who had asked him to explain eternal generation : " Tell me how God is, that we may both go mad." And I am strongly of opinion that it is not only not re- vealed, but that it is not revealahle. And there may be much that is not cognisable by finite minds, with which nevertheless the glory of God's character is concerned, and with which the redemption of the world is upbound ; while God may simply tell us that it is so. Sabel- lianism does violence to the Scripture texts. Scripture continually uses the personal pronouns, implying that the Father is God, that the Son is God, and that the Holy Ghost is God, which Sabellianism admits ; but then, while trying to 104 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. make the trinal unity intelligible, it makes the acts of the Three unintelligible ; it makes the atonement an unintelligibility, for how could an Infinite Being make an atonement to himself under another condition or relation? Sabel- lianism makes one phase of the Divine nature atone to another phase of it. [I was going to say that Sabellianism might fit in to another theory of the atonement.] What theory] Athanasianism is just the negation of all possible theory on the subject of Christ's person ; and so, too, of his work. All the heresies are just explanations of the mystery. What theory ? [I was thinking of the atonement of Love, the Divine nature not requiring an offering to be made to it, but offering itself.] But to what purpose ? For what end 1 Did Christ subject himself for no purpose to an ignominious death % [No.] Well, for what purpose ? [To bless, and to save ; and that by the mere impulse of love itself] Admitting that the death of Christ was sub- stitutionary, I can see great love in it ; but otherwise, I can't see love in it at all. Take away the substitution, and all that remains for me is this : " Jesus tried to make us good; but, good man, he failed." This end, in view, is glorious when combined with the other end, but melancholy when you take it alone. [But if he failed, he failed on both theories.] No : his intention was, on the one theory, to COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 105 make the world good ; that has been a failure. But on the other (which, again, I say is no theory), he finished his work ; and secured the ultimate destruction of sin in those in Avhom the experiment of making them good is for the present most imperfectly successful. But to return to the personality of God and man, it comes to this, that with all simplicity of mind we must receive God's propositions, that three persons of men are three beings, three persons of angels are three beings, the three persons in God are not three beings : so that, in theologising, I have risen to the word " person," and found in it a certain uniqueness of meaning, which is an induction from Scripture texts ; leaving the mystery which is round about it as an ultimatum which I cannot use in deductive reasoning. But I need some word to express the distinction within the Divine nature, and I find the personal pronoun " He," and a personal act, " He will send." Now Tritheism gives a false ex- planation, so does Sabellianism ; Athanasianism gives none : and anything that starts up as an explanation is tlierefore to be rejected. No ; you only think you conceive the Divine unity. You cannot really conceive it. Meditation on it leads us up to propositions which have come out of the mouth of Him whom we cannot comprehend, and whom to comprehend would imply the possession of Godhead. And the relations subsisting between the persons of the Godhead I know not, and have no expectation of ever knowing. I don't think Gabriel knows, and I don't think he can. 106 COLLOQUIA FEBIPATETICA. [Do you extend this principle to the relations subsisting between the Divine nature and the universe 1] Necessarily ; and all the schemes in explana- tion err by attempting to define the undefinable. Pantheism, for example, stumbles over the pro- blem, and abolishes the relation in the attempt to explain it. [How do you meet Pantheism ?] Pantheism will not account for the facts of biblical history. It cannot explain the life of Jesus Christ, without explaining it away. And Pantheism will not account for the phenomena of conscience. God must be distinct from the cosmos, or conscience is all a lie. [Is it the mere voice of conscience that you oppose to Pantheism]] No ; but conscience is the great root of Theism, and it leads within the veil, because the tree that springs from it breaks through phenomena. It is something supernatural within the natural, and there is no separating these two spheres, if you are true to psycho- logy. The web of the natural and the super- natural are so woven together in the soul, that they cannot be untied. [It is easier to dethrone Pantheism than to establish the opposite truth.] If you overthrow the one, you establish the other. There is no resting-place between them. If we find that there are beings with conscience and will ; and, more especially, if we find that some of these are had, and if we admit the full force of moral evil in the will, as the antithesis COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 1U7 of good, Pantheism cannot account for that antithesis. A monistic scheme of the universe must minimise evil, or reason it away. You admit, I suppose, the reality of moral evil ? [Yes.] And its personal taint you do not deny % [No.] Being under law, you are under a lawgiver, and the law is not self-imposed. In the physi- cal region, law is only metaphoric, but in the moral it asserts that you are the subject of an extrinsic authority. Your reason tells you that obligation implies an obliger. [But is not the use of the word "law" in theology also metaphoric, and does it not arise from the notion of human law ?] You reason in a circle. What is the foundation of human law 1 Either God or the hangman, [No ; it may be the naturally destructive consequences of crime,] Why then, if that be all, can society inter- pose to punish 1 Suppose there be no eternal and immutable law of Duty, what right have criminal courts, or Lords and Commons (from , whom they derive power), to try me for crime and punish me 1 [There may be a tacit agreement founded on expediency.] What tacit agreement is there between the Sultan and his subjects'? Under a despotism there is no room for pactions, tacit or explicit ; and civil power, with right to punish, arose, not by consent of the people, but from a despotic assumption, or from transmitted authority. You H 108 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. may gather, both from history and from con- sciousness, that law is the emanation of the will of a Superior having authority. Kant saw clearly that moral law implied a lawgiver. I can see no daylight whatever as to law without this assumption. Even the so-called physical laws are to me incomprehensible without a lawgiver. [A physical law without a lawgiver is just a succession of sequences.] That doctrine is the abortion of modern pliilosophy, though it is as old as the fall. To thrust all noumena out of our system of the universe, is to give up philosophy in despair. [You have given up the philosophies as failures.] I renounce the phenomenal schemes by abid- ing fast in the region of the noumena. I begin with the greatest noumenon — God. And caus- ality is a noumenal fact ; causes and effects are phenomena. I see and hear causes and effects, and they fall within the circle of experience; but I never saw and never heard a noumenon. Yet they are more real, because more abiding, than that which we can see and hear. WeU, I think you will admit that the Cause of Con- science must be moral. The distinction between right and wrong must be in my Maker, unless I made myself. And in affirming the moral nature of man, you abolish Pantheism, because you indirectly affirm the moral nature of God. Conscience is imperative, and that very impera- tiveness it has belongs to it as a manifestation of God's will. What can be more imperative than will 1 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 109 [Suppose we say a manifestation of his nature rather than of his will ?] But it is both. It is at once a revelation of his character and of his law. Ethics without law is as bad in theology as law without ethics. And so far as conscience is ethical, it is a mani- festation of God's nature in man ; so far as it is law, it is a manifestation of his will. A purely legal system, which would be arbitrary legality, or a purely ethical system, which would put aside all legality and make us in a measure equals to associate with God — legal equals — are opposite extremes. Both systems lead to atheology. People seldom see the issue of the latter system — the purely ethical. But, while it ignores the legal element, it leads to a system of legal equality between God and man, or to a doctrine of which that is the logical end. If the legal is sunk in the ethical, duty vanishes. We may still say it is a beautiful and fitting thing to exercise love to God and man, and the opposite is excessively ugly and unbecoming; but there's an end of it. We cannot call the want of holiness sin and crime. For this we require the legal element. But then the legal is a part of human nature, and jurisprudence is a science. . . . [Christ: the Trilemma.] /''"^HRIST either deceived mankind by con- ^-^ scions fraud, or he was himself deluded and self-deceived, or he was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable. no QOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. [Two Doctrines of Ignorance.] "X^fE may ask ourselves, Is it our duty to * ^ philosophise 1 If not, we may again ask, Is it our interest 1 For duty and interest may go hand in hand. My philosophising has done me two good things — it has exercised the faculties, and taught me their limits I find that there may be two doctrines of ignorance — the one of which may minify, if it does not nullify, the second. The one cuts man off from God hopelessly, and deprives me of my two great texts — the first declaring our original (the terminus a quo) — " God made man in his own image ; " the second announcing our destination (the terminus ad quern) — " the new man, which is renewed in righteousness after the image of Him that created him." But the other doctrine of Ignorance is a lesson on the limits of our faculties, and abases the pride of the intellect. As interpreted against the Pantheist and ultra-ontologist, I am inclined to think that Sir William Hamilton's argu- ments are either true or contain the truth. But I cannot do without transcendentalism as the corrective of anthropopathy ; nor without anthropopathy as the corrective of transcend- entalism. And do you not feel that when you have fully imbibed one great Truth, or phase of the truth, you experience a recoil from it towards what is almost its antagonist error, till at length a middle point is reached — not the zero of indifference, but the larger whole, in which extremes are lost ? For example, dwelling on the incommunicable perfections of GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. Ill God, you must cither allow the thought of them to wither up the intellect, or surrender yourself fibsolutely to the anthro2)opathic lan- guage of Scripture, which you feel, while you surrender yourself to it, to be altogether inadequate. You feel that there has been a GMy/Mrd^adii in the Scriptures divinely appro- priate to man's nature. And you will find that the common sense of common people generally hits the true medium between tran- scendental notions and a gross anthropopathy. They never think that God has literal eyes, nor that He is only transcendental Substance. Transcendentalism is the denial of that which renders man's knowledge an inferior kind of knowledge. Anthropopathy is the withholding of that which renders God's adorable infinity a superior and distinct thing from man's finity. . . . [The DrviNE Manifoldness.] 'T^HEEE are innumerable moulds in God's -*■ world. Why do we coop up Divine grace within narrow man-made channels, and say, this is the way God has worked and will work 1 His greatness is noways dipslayed more illustriously than in the spreading out of his gifts in a thousand difi'erent ways. There is a manifoldness in his operation that surely per- tains to the beauty of his holiness. [Western Christendom and Justification.] T T is a significant fact that the whole Western ■■• Church lost the doctrine of justification by 112 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. faith, from the Apostles' clays to Luther's, by confounding justification with sanctification. All the Fathers knew tli,at we were saved through the cross, but none of them apprehended the grounds of our justification : and thus I think it was that many of them lost peace of conscience. Even Augustine, clear and pellucid as he is as to grace, in opposition to Pelagian merit, con- templates grace in us reigning in our sanctifi- cation. We learn from this great fact that the deepest life of godliness may co-exist with muddled doctrine. But that is no argument in favour of obscurity, [Uses of Shallow Minds.] I LIKE the clear shallow men sometimes ; especially I like to listen to their preach- ing. Even the humdrum theology has its uses. Though there are many things their optics can- not reach to, these good men sometimes clear away morbidity, and they are always to be preferred to the cuttle-fish divines. It is possible to find a luxury in darkness, and a highly subtile kind of self-indulgence may keep many a man away from the light of God and the peace of Jesus Christ. And there is sometimes a be- witching fascination in melancholy. When one is tremendously introverted, " the grieved soul will consolation shun," and the eff'ort to get out of it may be just another phase of it. You then need to have rebuke administered ; and at these times I would not go to hear a genius preach, not even a Chrysostom ; I prefer to listen to very clear and very simple words from GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 113 one who knows how to " rebuke with all faith- fulness." [The Theanthropos.] nPHE Theanthropos is the centre of all things: -'■ the centre of the Trinity, the central figure in history, the centre towards which the human heart gravitates, and in the heart of man its centre. This elevates man, and proclaims the worth of his original nature. " He took not on Him the nature of angels;" and probably one reason why the angels that fell not were *' con- firmed," was that they might be ministering spirits to men. [CULTTTBE, AND THE CHIEF END OP MaN.] nPHE cultivation of the human faculties is not ^ man's chief end. I would say the retention and exertion of all the faculties was the chief end of the unfallen creature. [Is that not the same thing ?] No ; I say retention, because man was made in the image of God, and that Avas made perfect, all that was necessary was its retention by exercise. [But if made perfect, was it not conserved by that very perfectness ]] No; nothingbut immutabilityinsures that, and immutability is a Divine perfection. In a creature it is a contradiction in terms, and would not be perfection. My Thomism leads me to believe in a perpetually present " gratia" upholding the creature, or the creature's fall. Immutability alone insures impeccability, or an eternal pac- tion made by the Immutable, a purpose of God 114 GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIOA. to conserve. An angel wotild have no merit in loving the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, to all eternity; and would groAv a devil by pride if he either ceased to do so or claimed any merit for doing his duty ; though to be and to do good are praiseworthy. I distinguish merit from praiseworthiness. Now, we either merit, or we do not. I have no sym- pathy with that cuttle-fish method of affirming and denying the same thing at the same time — denying merit ex condigno, and affirming it ex congrito. Rome asserts that we have no merit ex condigno, but affirms it ex congruo, because it says Christ merited that we should merit. [But you affirm and yet deny that we have a knowledge of God ; you affirm and yet deny that the will is free.] As to the first, I affirm that we have a knowledge of one kind, but not of another land ; but I do not affirm that we have, and yet have not, the same kind of knowledge. As to the second, I affirm that the will is free, while I deny that it is uninfluenced by motives in its free volitions. But Rome asserts that we do not merit, and yet that we do merit. That's a direct contradiction, for it is of the same nature that the thing is first denied and then affirmed. ... As to the end of human action, I say that to cultivate human nature is only a part of it. It is our duty to cultivate the faculties ; but, first of all, it is our duty not to have any sin. The law demands that you be Avhat God made you, and that you perceive you cannot be; and yet you admit that the lawis good. GOLLOQUIA PEIUPATETIGA. 115 My first concern is to get quit of sin, or to know how God has provided for my extrication ; and I defy man or angel to free themselves from guilt without an atonement, and to free themselves from dej^ravity without regeneration. When you have got over these two things, 1 think we may attend to the cultivation of the faculties. [But suppose you broaden the idea of culture so as to include the rectification and readjust- ment of the whole nature, and the increase of its powers to " the measure of the stature of the perfect"?] You either cannot, or need not. The with- drawal of its disability, and the removal of its stain, must precede the free use of my nature for the glory of God. And if these are effected, what remains but that I, a being made in God's image, have to love Him and ray fellow creatures'? Is not that the sum of it ? And there's an infinity in Him whom we love supremely, as well as an indefinity in those we must love after Him, There Avould come a time in eternity when we would be tired of the enjoyment of God, if there was not an infinity in Him ; if there was any bottom to that ocean, or any shore around it. [The Abstract and the Concrete.] 'X'HE love of Being in general is a cold and -■- barren kind of love. The generaUty is too vague to touch the heart : but specify, in- dividualise, and the o1)ject becomes visible to the heart, and the command instinct with life. 116 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. and you can love. I cannot comprehend the infinite, eternal, and unchangeable Being, with- out being myself infinite, eternal, and unchange- able ; but I can actively apprehend them with- out being so ; and I can apprehend them uni- tively — i.e. apprehend that I am united to that Infinite and Eternal Being. Reason does over- leap itself. [You think it goes, per saltum, at one bound, over all barriers, and reaches the tHvine, and does not ascend by the steps of a ladder ?] A ladder ! There can be no ladder to the Infinite. You are no nearer it at the top of it than at the foot. [No ; but we speak in a figure, of the ladder of analogy. And is not Christ our ladder to the Infinite ?] Yes ; if we have seen Him, and know Him, we have seen and known the Father also. But there can be no revelation through Him, if we have not first apprehended the Infinite God, as a person. [If we look at its moral and spiritual aspects, and not to its historical phenomena, may we not say, that the Incarnation is really the direct ladder to the Infinite ? We may have a ladder in the moral, though not in the intellectual sphere.] But how do we interpret the Incarnation 1 How do you know that the man Christ Jesus is also God, unless you have first got hold of the Infinite, by the condescension of the Infinite itself? My Bible tells me " no man can call Jesus Lord, but by the Holy Ghost ;" and my GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 117 philosophy tells me the same, that there must be a spiritual revelation of this fact before it is credited. But it is the great glory of God's Revelation that it. has changed our abstracts into concretes ; the infinite existence into the "lam" of the Old Testament — the personal Jehovah; the infinite love into the personal Christ ; and Jonathan Edwards could not have done better than translate his philosophical virtue, or, " love of being in general," into the sura of the ten commandments : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart," etc. I speak to the heart surely when I say, that the infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, alone, will not satisfy it. The holy, the just, and the good, are needed. We must concrete our ab- stracts. [Expression of Feeling.] IT is most uncharitable to judge of a man's reverence by its expression. It may be a mere matter of temperament. The average mind cannot easily be taught to make allow- ances for temperament, because it cannot ap- preciate its opposite types. Now the Saxon character is naturally repressive of emotion. The Celtic is naturally expressive of feeling ; and the different types of the Celt, the French, the Gaelic, the Irish, express their feelings differ- ently. They are all capable of strong emotion. The Celtic nature is almost never apathetic. But with the Frenchman it becomes " a scene •,'^ with the Gael, pathos ; with the Irishman, humour, or pathos dashed with humour. 118 COL LO QUI A PERIPATETIGA. [The Humourists.] T HAVE a great regard for the Humourists, ■*■ for tliey are generally men of a tender heart. Both Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood were great men, especially the author of " The Song of the Shirt." He had a good head and a fine heart. That song of his is better than many a sermon I've heard. " Punch," too, is an acute censor, generally right in his castigations ; a censor, but not censorious. When those who should lay the axe to the root of the tree won't do it. Providence raises up a buffoon, who preaches many a most rememberable sermon. [Chrtsostom.] /^HRYSOSTOM, the rhetorical St. John, had ^^-' a curious affinity with the apostle ; and in the John of the Gospel he saw the Boanerges. He begins his homilies on John most pictori- ally. " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 'Axouffar? tw? ^fovr/^s/, says Chrysostom. Hear how he thunders ! * As Bengel says, at the same place, " This is the thunder brought down to us by a son of thunder." Chrysostom is the Christian Demosthenes. It is worth learning Greek only to read the golden-mouthed John. And what a noble life was his ! There is a dis- solute Byzantium, here is the uncompromising bishop ; and almost daily did he preach in that * The only parallel passage I find in Chrysostom is the following : — " t) ixkv odv Ppovrr] KarairXi^Trei t4s r,fJL€Tipai \f'vx^s darifiov ^x'^^<^<'- '''W VXW" — Horn, in Joan. I., §2.— Ed. GOLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 119 city those glorious sermons of liis. I do not know what the bishops of the East do now, hut John Chrysostom was in his cathedral daily, preaching to crowded audiences, and he did not spare the lash, or fear to rebuke court vices. He came down upon the empress, the clergy, and the populace alike. His work Avas prior to that of Augustine (though they were contem- poraries), and the doctrine of grace in its rela- tion to ifree will had not yet been fully studied; and thus, though no Pelagian, in his expository ethics he often talks Arminian-like. But his Christology kept him right. On the person of Christ he speaks out with the voice of a trumpet. At his death he exclaimed, "That's glorious! that's glorious ! " clapped his hands, and ven- tured to die. [The Fathers and the Folios.] I AM going to read Origen again, carefully, some day, for I don't think justice is done to him. Philo-Judseus, Clemens Alex- andrinus, and Origen, were three remarkable Alexandrines. I'm particularly fond of the miscellaneous thinking of the " Stromata" of Clement, and of Tertullian. There are excellent things in Tertullian, but terribly crabbed African Latin. There is far too little study of these men in this age of superficiality. I don't blame the age ; that is always a foolish thing to do. It has its function, and is probably fulfil- ling it. It is an age of diffusion, and theology is becoming popular ; but we must always have a conservative few who take care of the folios. 120 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. A man is not at liberty to live altogether out of his own age in theology ; but when the church catholic has stamped a work with its peculiar seal, all theologians must become familiar with that work. [The Eitualist and Seceder.] THE cultus of the ritualist, and of the old Scotch Seceder, are at opposite extremes. In the one we have the external form, often without the internal spirit. In the other we have the internal element, without the smallest regard to its outward form. But it is the ghost and the body together that make the man, [Translations of the Bible.] THE three best translations of the Bible, in r my opinion, are, in order of merit, the English, the Dutch, and Diodati's Italian ver- sion. As to Luther's, he is admirable in render- ing the prophets. He says either just what the prophets did say, or that which you see at once they might have said. [jEsthetic Religionism.] A MERELY aesthetic religion (such as that of '^*- Goethe, and all worshippers of the beau- tiful) is a miserable substitute for piety ; and it never stands the tear and wear of time, espe- cially in the midst of great sorrows. It is the offspring of sentiment divorced from law ; and that is an illegal divorce. The want of the legal is ■ a fatal blot in theology, and a practi- cal danger in religion. It will lead to a crude COLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. 121 philanthropy, to moonlight views of God's government of the world. It has often led to a hazy latitudinarianism, or, to what is even worse, an exaggerated Antinomian evangelism : great raptures and gross viciousness going together; men thinking that they are so spiritual that with the body they may do what they like. But the aesthetic in religion must not be eradi- cated ; it must be supplemented. [How would you counteract its excess ?] By the realisation of the moral in God, and the sense of sin in man — the sinner feeling that he is in the presence of a holy God — that is the only , cure for its exaggerations, ^^sthetic religionism is at bottom the bringing of religion to God, in- stead of bringing the soul to God to get religion. It is thus that men make a God of religion, instead of allowing religion to remain a worshipper of God. Let a man be in the presence of the most - beautiful things which the universe contains, or be thrilled by that perfection of moral beauty which Scripture yields him, and then come to God in prayer, and he will find that the beauty he had realised has passed upwards through the sublime, and been lost in the majestic holiness. Is the aesthetic snare still felt % Well then, God says. There's my Law : " The soul that sinneth it shall die." Bring in conscience. If we lose conscience, we lose dignity : we become pulses, not men. The mere poetry of religion by itself weakens the soul. It is the i^hovfj preferred to the &^,T^. The "Tabula" of Cebes was far better than it. . . . And yet there is an aesthesis in all that God does, as well as in all that he is. 122 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. God is an sestlietic being. Let me never forget that fact. The exceeding beauty of the floral world alone proves a certain similarity between the sesthetical nature of man and that of God. And the work of the Son, his very humiliation was beautiful, as well as true, and good. It is fair and lovely exceedingly to look upon. But the pursuit of holiness as so much personal adornment is a very subtile snare. I have been humbled by the detection of it. All such de- tections pain and lancinate the soul. [How would you deal with it in another?] I would say to him, Let the effort to clothe yourself with the raiment of the beautiful be changed into an effort to strip yourself. Humble yourself, and think of the Law. [Intolerance.] THE vague cloudy men are always talking against intolerance. Why, our very calling is to be intolerant ; intolerant of proved error, and knoAvn sin. The evil is that we are not intolerant enough, though, at the same time, we are not benevolent enough. A man, however, must have a clear eye and a large heart, before he has a right to be intolerant either towards concrete error or concrete sin. At the abstract he may hit as hard as he likes. Propositions don't feel pain. [Idolatry.] THE fact that everywhere man makes for himself a God after his own image, is a suggestive hint of the counter-truth that God COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. 123 made man in his image. Idolatry is but man'a helpless effort to get back to God, in whose image he was made ; a proof of that which Augustine says so well — " Fecisti nos ad Te, et inquietum est cor nostmm, donee requiescat in Te." * [The Fall, and its Antecedent.] 1\ /r AN ever is, and must remain, a volent, or ^^ ^ cease to be man. This much is man's indefectible prerogative. Yet this is neither a power of independency, nor is it a liberty of indifferency, though what it is I know not, and therefore cannot define it. Motives always sway the will in every choice and in every volition ; but I won't admit that, given the motives, you can tell the result infallibly, or even that the result is infallibly certain ; that, for example, given the temptations of Satan, the fall of Adam was necessary. There is an indefinable power lodged in the will, which is its own causality. It was the abuse of our freedom that led to the fall. But it is not absolute pravity, but (de- pravity, that resulted. All would be dark if the former had ensued. A shadow would then run upwards to the very throne of God ; but if the latter be the case, the darkness is only par- tial. Pravity would charge it upon God ; depravity brings it down to man. And thus, though depraved, we are morally responsible. We could not be totally depraved and remain responsible. For, if man became sin, then, sure enough, he would be unsalvable. Christ did • Conf. I. I 124 GOLLOQUIA PEBIPATETIGA. not die for sin. He could not do that. He died for something deeper than sin. A lady once said to me, " The more I see of myself, I see nothing so properly mine as my sin." I said to her, "Well, you do not see deep enough. There is something far more properly yours than your sin ; and your sin is improperly yours. It is a blot in your being, which, if you do not get quit of it, will never cease to be unnafural to you. No ; the image of God is more properly yours, though you had no share in the production of it." Very many pious people do not rise high enough in their anthro- pology. They ascend to the fall, and forget the higher fact that we fell from a height, where we were fitted to dwell, and where we were intended to remain. And Jesus Christ has come that he might raise us even higher than that height, and make us sit in the "super-celestials" A\dth Himself. [The INIean between Extremes.] A MAN states a truth Avhich may be one- sided. I state its counter-truth, anxious to escape from the one-sidedness of error. It is a strange thing that middle station between opposites. It is more than a juste milieu. It is the key-stone of an arch, which pro]3s the two sides ; and, sure enough, it is no contradic- tion, if your juste milieu contradicts the two extremes. The key-stone of an arch is not an- tagonistic to the two sides it supports. Being itself neither the one nor the other, it upholds both. COLLOQUIA PERIPATETICA. 125 [Salvation of the Jews.] I T was necessary that Christ should be a Jew. ■'• Had He not been of the Abrahamic line of descent, there Avould have been no connection between the Old and the Xew Testaments ; and thus alone has He been able to fulfil the whole law. The Adamic is very shadowy without the Abrahamic and the Sinaitic. Christ Avas a Jew first, a Cosmopolitan afterwards. [What is the exact force of Christ's being " made under the law" ?] He was made under the whole law of Israel, all law moral, and all law positive, that he might do away with the law ceremonial, and simplify the law moral and the law positive. And, observe, we must all become Jews. That nation retains its hold of the world. There is an Israelitic naturalisation for us all. Salvation is of the Jews ; and metaphorically we must all become Jews — i.e. we must enter into the Jewish heritage, and reverence the channel in which all our great blessings have come down to us. Why Christ preferred the humanity of the seed of Abraham no man dare say ; but since he has done so, in this channel flow his gifts to the whole world. We are thus related not only to the God-man, but to the God-man Jew : and hence the abolition in Him of all the obligations of the ceremonial law (and of the moral law as " a covenant of works"), and the admission of Gentiles into the family of Abraham. The Abrahamic humanity being chosen in preference to any other, thereafter, " in thee, and in thy seed, shall. all the families of the earth be blessed." 126 COLLOQUIA PERIPATETIGA. " If ye be Christ's," said the apostle, "then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise." ... In the incarnation, Christ took our flesh, that he might give us his spirit : and so, on our becoming Christians, we, in a theo- logical sense, lose our personality, because there is but one ffw/ia ; we have no separate net. Life's Nobler Penalties. By the Rev. GEORGE H. MORRISON, M. A., Author of "The Gentle Art of Making Happy," "St. Columba," etc. Crown 8vo, elegant binding, price Is. net. The Master of the Science of Right Living. By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS, D.D. Crown 8vo, decorated binding, price Is. The Majesty of Calmness. By WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN, Author of "The Kingship of Self- Control." Crown 8vo, decorated binding, price l3. The Kingship of Self- Control. Individual Problems and Possibilities. By WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, price iB. These Three: Faith, Hope, Charity. By Mrs. A. R. SIMPSON, Author of the "Scottish Songstress," etc. Crown 8vo, antique p.^per, ornamental cloth binding, price l8. ; or in white Japanese vellum, gilt edges, Is. Gd. Right Living as a Fine Art. A Study of Channing's Symphony as an Outline of the Ideal Life and Character. By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS. Crown 8vo, antique pnper, ornamental binding, price Is. Daily Thoughts for a Year. From the Letters of Samuel Rutherford. Selected by EVA S. SANDEMAN. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, printed in black and red, price Is. The Rapture of the Forward View. By J. HARRY MILLER, M.A. (Edin.). Crown 8vo, on featherweight paper, daintily bound, price Is. net, postage ijd. Edinburgh and London: OLIPIIANT, ANDERSON, & FERRiER. 3 3o / SRLF Gen. Coll. BR96 .D85 1907 Duncan, John, 1796-1870 colloquja peripajejjca — DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS : BEING NOTES OF CONVERSATIONS AA 000 635 902 •>-«■■;«■ :;fc.-:? ,-:;<^^ . ! ■»'• ■ ■■ ■>. 'tl.^r ;''5A;U ::iR.1 ^^«^M.:. llllHiiiilMilllMlliii».^.x ^^