CHAPTER CCXLII.

FARTHER REMARKS UPON THE EFFECTS OF SCHISM, AND THE ADVANTAGES WHICH IT AFFORDS TO THE ROMISH CHURCH AND TO INFIDELITY.

—_Io non ci ho interresso Nessun, nè vi fui mai, ne manco chieggo Per quel ch'io ne vò dir, d'esservi messo. Vò dir, che senza passion eleggo, E non forzato, e senza pigliar parte; Di dirne tutto quel, ch'intendo e veggo._

BRONZINO PITTORE.

One cause why infidelity gained ground among the middle and the lower classes was, that owing to the increase of population, the growth of the metropolis, and the defects of our Church Establishment, no provision had been made for their religious instruction. Every one belonged to a parish, but in populous parishes a small part only of the parishioners belonged to the Clergyman's flock; his fold in very many places would not have contained half, and in some, not a tenth of them; they were left therefore as stray sheep, for false shepherds and for the wolf. This was the main cause of the increase of dissenters among us, and their increase occasioned an increase of infidelity. Many of their ministers and more of their students, revolting against the monstrous doctrines of Calvinism, past from one extreme to the other, more gradually indeed than their brethren have done in Germany, in Geneva and in New England, for they halted awhile on Arian ground, before they pitched their tents in the debateable land of Socinianism, where not a few of them afterwards crossed the border. The principle of Nonconformity itself led naturally to this consequence; it scornfully rejected that reasonable and well-defined submission to authority required by the Church of England, which is the true Catholic Church; and thus it encouraged and indeed invited tutors and pupils at their Academies to make their own immature and ill-instructed reason the test of all truths. A good and wise man has well remarked that “what men take for, or at least assert to be, the dictates of their conscience, may often in fact, be only the dictates of their pride.” With equal truth also he has said that he who “decides for himself in rejecting what almost all others receive, has not shewn himself at least in one instance to be a ‘wise man;’—he does not ‘know that he is a fool.’”

This cause was continually operating upon their students and younger ministers during the latter half of the last century. It was suspended first by the missionary spirit, which called forth a high degree of enthusiasm, and gave that feeling its most useful direction, and secondly by the revival of political Puritanism, as soon as the successors of the Parliamentary Divines thought themselves strong enough to act as a party in the state, and declare war against the Establishment. But as in that time, so in a greater degree at present, the floating population who by no fault of their own are extra-parochial as to all purposes of church-worship and religious instruction, are as much endangered by facility of change, as the students used to be by their boasted liberty of choice. Sectarian history might supply numerous examples; one may be related here for the extraordinary way in which it terminated. I know not from what community of Christians the hero of the tale strayed over to the Methodists, but he enjoyed for awhile the dream of perfection, and the privilege of assurance as one of their members. When this excitement had spent itself, he sought for quietness among the Quakers, _thee'd_ his neighbour, wore drab, and would not have pulled off his hat to the king. After awhile, from considering, with them, that baptism was a beggarly element, he passed to the opposite extreme; it was not enough for him to have been sprinkled in his infancy, he must be dipt over head and ears in the water, and up he rose, rejoicing as he shook his dripping locks, that he was now a Baptist. His zeal then took another direction; he had a strong desire to convert the lost sheep of Israel; and off he set from a remote part of the country to engage in single controversy with a learned Rabbi in one of the Midland counties. Tell it not in Duke's-Place! Publish it not in the Magazine of the Society for converting the Jews!—The Rabbi converted him: and if the victor in the dispute had thought proper to take the _spolia opima_ which were fairly lost, the vanquished would have paid the penalty, as he conceived himself in honour and in conscience bound. He returned home glorying in his defeat, a Jew in every thing but parentage and the outward and visible sign. The sons of the synagogue are not ambitious of making converts, and they did not chuse to adopt him by performing the initiating rites. He obtained it however from a Christian surgeon, who after many refusals, was induced at length in humanity to oblige him, lest, as he solemnly declared he would, he should perform it upon himself.

They who begin in enthusiasm, passing in its heat and giddiness from one sect to another, and cooling at every transition, generally settle in formalism where they find some substantial worldly motives for becoming fixed; but where the worldly motives are wanting, it depends upon temperament and accident whether they run headlong into infidelity, or take refuge from it in the Roman Catholic church. The papal clergy in England have always known how to fish in troubled waters; and when the waters are still, there are few among them who have not been well instructed in the art of catching gudgeons. Our clergy have never been in the same sense, fishers of men.

In an epigram written under the portrait of Gibbon, as unquotable at length, as it is unjust in part of the lines which may be quoted, the face is said to be

—the likeness of one Who through every religion in Europe has run And ended at last in believing in none.

It was a base epigram which traduced the historian's political character for no other reason than that he was not a Whig; and it reproached him for that part of his conduct which was truly honourable,—the sincerity with which, when ill-instructed, he became a Roman Catholic, and the propriety with which, after full and patient investigation, he gave up the tenets of the Romish church as untenable. That he proceeded farther, and yielded that which can be maintained against the Gates of Hell, is to be lamented deeply for his own sake, and for those in whom he has sown the seeds of infidelity. But the process from change to change is a common one, and the cases are few wherein there is so much to extenuate the culpability of the individual. It was not in the self-sufficiency of empty ignorance that Gibbon and Bayle went astray; generally the danger is in proportion to the want of knowledge; there are more shipwrecks among the shallows than in the deep sea.

During the great Rebellion, when the wild beasts had trampled down the fences, broken into the vineyard and laid it waste, it is curious to observe the course taken by men who felt for various causes, according to their different characters, the necessity of attaching themselves to some religious communion. Cottington, being in Spain, found it convenient to be reconciled to the Romish church; the dominant religion being to him, as a politician, the best. Weak and plodding men like Father Cressey took the same turn in dull sincerity: Davenant because he could not bear the misery of a state of doubt, and was glad to rest his head upon the pillow of authority; Goring from remorse; Digby (a little later) from ambition, and Lambert, because he was sick of the freaks and follies of the sectaries.

Their “opinions and contests,” says Sir Philip Warwick, “flung all into chaos, and this gave the great advantages to the Romanists, who want not their differences among themselves, but better manage them; for they having retained a great part of primitive truths, and having to plead some antiquity for their many doctrinal errors and their ambitious and lucrative encroachments, and having the policy of flinging coloquintida into our pot, by our dissentions and follies, they have with the motion of the circle of the wheel, brought themselves who were at the Nadir, to be almost at the Zenith of our globe.”

In no other age (except in our own and now from a totally different cause) did the Papists increase their numbers so greatly in this kingdom. And infidelity in all its grades kept pace with popery. “Look but upon many of our Gentry,” says Sanderson, (writing under the Commonwealth,) “what they are already grown to from what they were, within the compass of a few years: and then _ex pede Herculem_; by that, guess what a few years more may do. Do we not see some, and those not a few, that have strong natural parts, but little sense of religion turned (little better than professed) Atheists. And other some, nor those a few, that have good affections, but weak and unsettled judgements, or (which is still but the same weakness) an overweening opinion of their own understandings, either quite turned, or upon the point of turning Papists? These be sad things, God knoweth, and we all know, not visibly imputable to any thing so much, as to those distractions, confusions and uncertainties that in point of religion have broken in upon us, since the late changes that have happened among us in church affairs.”

The Revolution by which the civil and religious liberties of the British nation were, at great cost, preserved, stopt the growth of popery among us for nearly an hundred years: but infidelity meanwhile was little impeded in its progress by the occasional condemnation of a worthless book; and the excellent works which were written to expose the sophistry, the ignorance, and the misrepresentations of the infidel authors seldom found readers among the persons to whom they might have been most useful. It may be questioned whether any of Jeremy Bentham's misbelieving disciples has ever read Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, or the kindred work of Skelton which a London bookseller published upon Hume's _imprimatur_.