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Now Watch Our Great Illuminated Divines
But perhaps I had better pass over our divines in silence and not
stir this pool or touch this fair but unsavory plant, as a kind of men
that are supercilious beyond comparison, and to that too,
implacable; lest setting them about my ears, they attack me by
troops and force me to a recantation sermon, which if I refuse, they
straight pronounce me a heretic, For this is the thunderbolt with
which they fright those whom they are resolved not to favor. And
truly, though there are few others that less willingly acknowledge the
kindnesses I have done them, yet even these too stand fast bound to me
upon no ordinary accounts; while being happy in their own opinion, and
as if they dwelt in the third heaven, they look with haughtiness on
all others as poor creeping things and could almost find in their
hearts to pity them; while hedged in with so many magisterial
definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit and
implicit, they abound with so many starting-holes that Vulcan's net
cannot hold them so fast, but they'll slip through with their
distinctions, with which they so easily cut all knots asunder that a
hatchet could not have done it better, so plentiful are they in
their new-found words and prodigious terms. Besides, while they
explicate the most hidden mysteries according to their own fancy- as
how the world was first made; how original sin is derived to
posterity; in what manner, how much room, and how long time Christ lay
in the Virgin's womb; how accidents subsist in the Eucharist without
their subject.
But these are common and threadbare; these are worthy of our
great and illuminated divines, as the world calls them! At these, if
ever they fall athwart them, they prick up- as whether there was any
instant of time in the generation of the Second Person; whether
there be more than one filiation in Christ; whether it be a possible
proposition that God the Father hates the Son; or whether it was
possible that Christ could have taken upon Him the likeness of a
woman, or of the devil, or of an ass, or of a stone, or of a gourd;
and then how that gourd should have preached, wrought miracles, or
been hung on the cross; and what Peter had consecrated if he had
administered the Sacrament at what time the body of Christ hung upon
the cross; or whether at the same time he might be said to be man;
whether after the Resurrection there will be any eating and
drinking, since we are so much afraid of hunger and thirst in this
world. There are infinite of these subtle trifles, and others more
subtle than these, of notions, relations, instants, formalities,
quiddities, haecceities, which no one can perceive without a Lynceus
whose eyes could look through a stone wall and discover those things
through the thickest darkness that never were.
Add to this those their other determinations, and those too so
contrary to common opinion that those oracles of the Stoics, which
they call paradoxes, seem in comparison of these but blockish and
idle- as 'tis a lesser crime to kill a thousand men than to set a
stitch on a poor man's shoe on the Sabbath day; and that a man
should rather choose that the whole world with all food and raiment,
as they say, should perish, than tell a lie, though never so
inconsiderable. And these most subtle subtleties are rendered yet more
subtle by the several methods of so many Schoolmen, that one might
sooner wind himself out of a labyrinth than the entanglements of the
realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Occamists, Scotists.
Nor have I named all the several sects, but only some of the chief; in
all which there is so much doctrine and so much difficulty that I
may well conceive the apostles, had they been to deal with these new
kind of divines, had needed to have prayed in aid of some other
spirit.
Paul knew what faith was, and yet when he said, "Faith is the
substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen,"
he did not define it doctor-like. And as he understood charity well
himself, so he did as illogically divide and define it to others in
his first Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter the thirteenth. And
devoutly, no doubt, did the apostles consecrate the Eucharist; yet,
had they been asked the question touching the "terminus a quo" and the
"terminus ad quem" of transubstantiation; of the manner how the same
body can be in several places at one and the same time; of the
difference the body of Christ has in heaven from that of the cross, or
this in the Sacrament; in what point of time transubstantiation is,
whereas prayer, by means of which it is, as being a discrete quantity,
is transient; they would not, I conceive, have answered with the
same subtlety as the Scotists dispute and define it.
They knew the mother of Jesus, but which of them has so
philosophically demonstrated how she was preserved from original sin
as have done our divines? Peter received the keys, and from Him too
that would not have trusted them with a person unworthy; yet whether
he had understanding or no, I know not, for certainly he never
attained to that subtlety to determine how he could have the key of
knowledge that had no knowledge himself. They baptized far and near,
and yet taught nowhere what was the formal, material, efficient, and
final cause of baptism, nor made the least mention of delible and
indelible characters. They worshiped, 'tis true, but in spirit,
following herein no other than that of the Gospel, "God is a Spirit,
and they that worship, must worship him in spirit and truth"; yet it
does not appear it was at that time revealed to them that an image
sketched on the wall with a coal was to be worshiped with the same
worship as Christ Himself, if at least the two forefingers be
stretched out, the hair long and uncut, and have three rays about
the crown of the head. For who can conceive these things, unless he
has spent at least six and thirty years in the philosophical and
supercelestial whims of Aristotle and the Schoolmen?
In like manner, the apostles press to us grace; but which of them
distinguishes between free grace and grace that makes a man
acceptable? They exhort us to good works, and yet determine not what
is the work working, and what a resting in the work done. They
incite us to charity, and yet make no difference between charity
infused and charity wrought in us by our own endeavors. Nor do they
declare whether it be an accident or a substance, a thing created or
uncreated. They detest and abominate sin, but let me not live if
they could define according to art what that is which we call sin,
unless perhaps they were inspired by the spirit of the Scotists. Nor
can I be brought to believe that Paul, by whose learning you may judge
the rest, would have so often condemned questions, disputes,
genealogies, and, as himself calls them, "strifes of words," if he had
thoroughly understood those subtleties, especially when all the
debates and controversies of those times were rude and blockish in
comparison of the more than Chrysippean subtleties of our masters.
Although yet the gentlemen are so modest that if they meet with
anything written by the apostles not so smooth and even as might be
expected from a master, they do not presently condemn it but
handsomely bend it to their own purpose, so great respect and honor do
they give, partly to antiquity and partly to the name of apostle.
And truly 'twas a kind of injustice to require so great things of them
that never heard the least word from their masters concerning it.
And so if the like happen in Chrysostom, Basil, Jerome, they think
it enough to say they are not obliged by it.
The apostles also confuted the heathen philosophers and Jews, a
people than whom none more obstinate, but rather by their good lives
and miracles than syllogisms: and yet there was scarce one among
them that was capable of understanding the least "quodlibet" of the
Scotists. But now, where is that heathen or heretic that must not
presently stoop to such wire-drawn subtleties, unless he be so
thick-skulled that he can't apprehend them, or so impudent as to
hiss them down, or, being furnished with the same tricks, be able to
make his party good with them? As if a man should set a conjurer on
work against a conjurer, or fight with one hallowed sword against
another, which would prove no other than a work to no purpose. For
my own part I conceive the Christians would do much better if
instead of those dull troops and companies of soldiers with which they
have managed their war with such doubtful success, they would send the
bawling Scotists, the most obstinate Occamists, and invincible
Albertists to war against the Turks and Saracens; and they would
see, I guess, a most pleasant combat and such a victory as was never
before. For who is so faint whom their devices will not enliven? who
so stupid whom such spurs can't quicken? or who so quick-sighted
before whose eyes they can't cast a mist?
But you'll say, I jest. Nor are you without cause, since even among
divines themselves there are some that have learned better and are
ready to turn their stomachs at those foolish subtleties of the
others. There are some that detest them as a kind of sacrilege and
count it the height of impiety to speak so irreverently of such hidden
things, rather to be adored than explicated; to dispute of them with
such profane and heathenish niceties; to define them so arrogantly and
pollute the majesty of divinity with such pithless and sordid terms
and opinions. Meantime the others please, nay hug themselves in
their happiness, and are so taken up with these pleasant trifles
that they have not so much leisure as to cast the least eye on the
Gospel or St. Paul's epistles. And while they play the fool at this
rate in their schools, they make account the universal church would
otherwise perish, unless, as the poets fancied of Atlas that he
supported heaven with his shoulders, they underpropped the other
with their syllogistical buttresses.
And how great a happiness is this, think you? while, as if Holy
Writ were a nose of wax, they fashion and refashion it according to
their pleasure; while they require that their own conclusions,
subscribed by two or three Schoolmen, be accounted greater than
Solon's laws and preferred before the papal decretals; while, as
censors of the world, they force everyone to a recantation that
differs but a hair's breadth from the least of their explicit or
implicit determinations. And those too they pronounce like oracles.
This proposition is scandalous; this irreverent; this has a smack of
heresy; this no very good sound: so that neither baptism, nor the
Gospel, nor Paul, nor Peter, nor St. Jerome, nor St. Augustine, no nor
most Aristotelian Thomas himself can make a man a Christian, without
these bachelors too be pleased to give him his grace. And the like
in their subtlety in judging; for who would think he were no Christian
that should say these two speeches "matula putes" and "matula
putet," or "ollae fervere" and "ollam fervere" were not both good
Latin, unless their wisdoms had taught us the contrary? who had
delivered the church from such mists of error, which yet no one ever
met with, had they not come out with some university seal for it?
And are they not most happy while they do these things?
Then for what concerns hell, how exactly they describe
everything, as if they had been conversant in that commonwealth most
part of their time! Again, how do they frame in their fancy new
orbs, adding to those we have already an eighth! a goodly one, no
doubt, and spacious enough, lest perhaps their happy souls might
lack room to walk in, entertain their friends, and now and then play
at football. And with these and a thousand the like fopperies their
heads are so full stuffed and stretched that I believe Jupiter's brain
was not near so big when, being in labor with Pallas, he was beholding
to the midwifery of Vulcan's axe. And therefore you must not wonder if
in their public disputes they are so bound about the head, lest
otherwise perhaps their brains might leap out.
Nay, I have sometimes laughed myself to see them so tower in
their own opinion when they speak most barbarously; and when they humh
and hawh so pitifully that none but one of their own tribe can
understand them, they call it heights which the vulgar can't reach;
for they say 'tis beneath the dignity of divine mysteries to be
cramped and tied up to the narrow rules of grammarians: from whence we
may conjecture the great prerogative of divines, if they only have the
privilege of speaking corruptly, in which yet every cobbler thinks
himself concerned for his share. Lastly, they look upon themselves
as somewhat more than men as often as they are devoutly saluted by the
name of "Our Masters," in which they fancy there lies as much as in
the Jews' "Jehovah"; and therefore they reckon it a crime if "Magister
Noster" be written other than in capital letters; and if anyone should
preposterously say "Noster Magister," he has at once overturned the
whole body of divinity.
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