The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Chapter 5 of 6
Life of Bishop Hacket1
Life of Bishop Hacket1
Ib.
p. 8.
Yet he would often dispute the necessity of a country living for a
London minister to retire to in hot summer time, out of the sepulchral
air of a churchyard, where most of them are housed in the city, and
found for his own part that by Whitsuntide he did rus anhelare,
and unless he took fresh air in the vacation, he was stopt in his
lungs and could not speak clear after Michaelmas.
A plausible reason certainly why A. and B. should occasionally change
posts, but a very weak one, methinks, for A.'s having both livings all
the year through.
Ib.
p. 42-3.
The Bishop was an enemy to all separation from the Church of England;
but their hypocrisy he thought superlative that allowed the doctrine,
and yet would separate for mislike of the discipline. ... And
therefore he wished that as of old all kings and other Christians
subscribed to the Conciliary Decrees, so now a law might pass that all
justices of peace should do so in England, and then they would be more
careful to punish the depravers of Church Orders.
The little or no effect of recent experience and sufferings still more
recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a
man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on
account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be
indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal in those who did not
think them indifferent, — how doubly criminal must the imposition have
been, and how tenfold criminal the perseverance in occasioning
separation; how guilty the imprisoning, impoverishing, driving into
wildernesses their Christian brethren for admitted indifferentials in
direct contempt of St. Paul's positive command to the contrary!
Index p. 2
Hacket's Sermons
Serm. I. Luke ii. 7.
Moreover as the woman Mary did bring forth the son who bruised the
serpent's head, which brought sin into the world by the woman Eve, so
the Virgin Mary was the occasion of grace as the Virgin Eve was the
cause of damnation. Eve had not known Adam as yet when she was
beguiled and seduced the man; so Mary, &c.
A Rabbinical fable or gloss on Gen. iii. 1. Hacket is offensively fond
of these worse than silly vanities.
Ib.
p. 5.
The more to illustrate this, you must know that there was a twofold
root or foundation of the children of Israel for their temporal being:
Abraham was the root of the people; the kingdom was rent from Saul,
and therefore David was the root of the kingdom; among all the kings
in the pedigree none but he hath the name; and Jesse begat David the
king, and David the king begat Solomon; and therefore so often as God
did profess to spare the people, though he were angry, he says he
would do it for Abraham's sake: so often as he professeth to spare the
kingdom of Judah, he says he would do it for his servant David's sake;
so that ratione radicis, as Abraham and David are roots of the
people and kingdom, especially Christ is called the Son of David, the
Son of Abraham.
A valuable remark, and confirmative of my convictions respecting the
conversion of the Jews, namely, that whatever was ordained for them as
Abrahamidæ
is not repealed by Christianity, but only what
appertained to the republic, kingdom, or state. The modern conversions
are, as it seems to me, in the face of God's commands.
Ib.
I come to the third strange condition of the birth; it was without
travel, or the pangs of woman, as I will shew you out of these words;
fasciis involvit, that she wrapt him in swaddling clouts,
and laid him in a manger. Ipsa genitrix fuit obstetrix, says St.
Cyprian. Mary was both the mother and the midwife of the child; far be
it from us to think that the weak hand of the woman could facilitate
the work which was guided only by the miraculous hand of God. The
Virgin conceived our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, and
therefore she had not the pangs and travel of woman upon her, she
brought him forth without the curse of the flesh. These be the
Fathers' comparisons. As bees draw honey from the flower without
offending it, as Eve was taken out of Adam's side without any grief to
him, as a sprig issues out of the bark of a tree, as the sparkling
light from the brightness of the star, such ease was it to Mary to
bring forth her first born son; and therefore having no weakness in
her body, feeling no want of vigor, she did not deliver him to any
profane hand to be drest, but by a special ability, above all that are
newly delivered, she wrapt him in swaddling clouts. Gravida, sed
non gravabatur; she had a burden in her womb, before she was
delivered, and yet she was not burdened for her journey which she took
so instantly before the time of the child's birth. From Nazareth to
Bethlem was above forty miles, and yet she suffered it without
weariness or complaint, for such was the power of the Babe, that
rather he did support the Mother's weakness than was supported; and as
he lighted his Mother's travel by the way from Nazareth to Bethlem
that it was not tedious to her tender age, so he took away all her
dolour and imbecility from her travel in child-birth, and therefore
she wrapt him in swaddling clouts.
A very different paragraph indeed, and quite on the cross road to Rome!
It really makes me melancholy; but it is one of a thousand instances of
the influence of Patristic learning, by which the Reformers of the Latin
Church were distinguished from the renovators of the Christian religion.
Can we wonder that the strict Protestants were jealous of the
backsliding of the Arminian prelatical clergy and of Laud their leader,
when so strict a Calvinist as Bishop Hacket could trick himself up in
such fantastic rags and lappets of Popish monkery! — could skewer such
frippery patches, cribbed from the tyring room of Romish Parthenolatry,
on the sober gown and cassock of a Reformed and Scriptural Church!
Ib.
p. 7.
But to say the truth, was he not safer among the beasts than he could
be elsewhere in all the town of Bethlem? His enemies perchance would
say unto him, as Jael did to Sisera, Turn in, turn in, my Lord,
when she purposed to kill him; as the men of Keilah made a fair shew
to give David all courteous hospitality, but the issue would prove, if
God had not blessed him, that they meant to deliver him into the hands
of Saul that sought his blood. So there was no trusting of the
Bethlemites. Who knows, but that they would have prevented Judas, and
betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver unto Herod? More humanity is
to be expected from the beasts than from some men, and therefore she
laid him in a manger.
Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove otherwise, I should have
inferred from these Sermons that Hacket from his first boyhood had been
used to make themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on all
the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had found abundant
nourishment for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities in the
study of the Fathers and glossers; and remained a
junior soph
all
his life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a
triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in
offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the
dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the
Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a
traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on
the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in
it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its
overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as
the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on
the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that
stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war!
Ib.
Serm. II. Luke ii. 8.
Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the
great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the
other gods which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not
please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was
a god not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention.
Here
, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and
Suetonius — above all, of Tacitus and Pliny — outweigh in my mind the
positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same
ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by
Tertullian
2
.
Ib.
Serm. III. Luke ii. 9.
But our bodies shall revive out of that dust into which they were
dissolved, and live for ever in the resurrection of the righteous.
I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of
this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant,
Thou fool! not that, &c
. I have at times almost been tempted to
conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine
disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and
therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists'
to
the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens;
for so Tarsus was called.
And was there no symptom of a commencing relapse to the errors of that
Church which had equalled the traditions of men, yea, the dreams of
phantasts with the revelations of God, when a chosen elder with the law
of truth before him, and professing to divide and distribute the bread
of life, could, paragraph after paragraph, place such unwholesome
vanities as these before his flock, without even a hint which might
apprize them that the gew-gaw comfits were not part of the manna from
heaven? All this superstitious trash about angels, which the Jews
learned from the Persian legends, asserted as confidently as if Hacket
had translated it word for word from one of the four Gospels! Salmasius,
if I mistake not, supposes the original word to have been bachelors,
young unmarried men. Others interpret angels as meaning the bishop and
elders of the Church. More probably it was a proverbial expression
derived from the Cherubim in the Temple: something as the country folks
used to say to children, Take care, the Fairies will hear you! It was a
common notion among the Jews, in the time of St. Paul, that their angels
were employed in carrying up their prayers to the throne of God. Of
course they must have been in special attendance in a house of prayer.
After much search and much thought on the subject of angels as a diverse
kind of finite beings, I find no sufficing reason to hold it for a
revealed doctrine, and if not revealed it is assuredly no truth of
philosophy, which, as I have elsewhere remarked, can conceive but three
kinds:
the infinite reason;
the finite rational; and
the finite
irrational — that is, God, man, and beast.
What indeed, even for the
vulgar, is or can an archangel be but a man with wings, better or worse
than the wingless species according as the feathers are white or black?
I would that the word had been translated instead of Anglicised in our
English Bible.
The following paragraph is one of Hacket's sweetest passages. It is
really a beautiful little hymn.
By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur
in the angels' message to set out the majesty of the Son of God: and I
beseech you observe, — all you that would keep a good Christmas as you
ought, — that the glory of God is the best celebration of his Son's
nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but
rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed, without riot,
without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride and vain
pomp, in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were
round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but
frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered
outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss
rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the
people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanctity
of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in
want! This is the glory of God shining round, and the most Christian
solemnizing of the birth of Jesus.
Index p. 2
Sermons on the Temptation
As the Temptation is found in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and
Luke, it must have formed part of the
Prot-evangelion
, or
original Gospel; — from the Apostles, therefore, it must have come, and
from some or all who had heard the account from our Lord himself. How,
then, are we to understand it? To confute the whims and superstitious
nugacities of these Sermons, and the hundred other comments and
interpretations
ejusdem farinæ
, would be a sad waste of time. Yet
some meaning, and that worthy of Christ, it must have had. The struggle
with the suggestions of the evil principle, first, to force his way and
compel belief by a succession of miracles, disjoined from moral and
spiritual purpose, — miracles for miracles' sake; — second, doubts of his
Messianic character and divinity, and temptations to try it by some
ordeal at the risk of certain death; — third, to interpret his mission,
as his countrymen generally did, to be one of conquest and
royalty; — these perhaps — but I am lost in doubt.
Index p. 2
Sermon on the Transfiguration
Luke IX. 33.
I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren,
my kinsmen according to the flesh.
Rom. ix. 3.
St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he
speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a
transient passion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse, — an
impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and
not completed by an act and confirmation of the will, — as a striking
proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the
welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compassion
for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted
it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so
they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as
possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying
child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!'
Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine passage in
Shakspeare — Hotspur's rapture-like reverie — so often ridiculed by
shallow wits. In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing
weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the
moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the
infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the
present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might
inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden
sense of the depth of its moral strength.
Index p. 2
Sermon on the Resurrection
Acts II. 4.
Thirdly, the necessity of it: for it was not possible that he
should be holden of death.
One great error of textual divines is their inadvertence to the dates,
occasion, object and circumstances, at and under which the words were
written or spoken. Thus the simple assertion of one or two facts
introductory to the teaching of the Christian religion is taken as
comprising or constituting the Christian religion itself. Hence the
disproportionate weight laid on the simple fact of the resurrection of
Jesus, detached from the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption.
Ib.
St. Austin says, that Tully, in his 3 lib. de Republica,
disputed against the reuniting of soul and body. His argument was, To
what end? Where should they remain together? For a body cannot be
assumed into heaven. I believe God caused those famous monuments of
his wit to perish, because of such impious opinions wherewith they
were farced.
I
believe, however, that these books have recently themselves enjoyed a
resurrection by the labor of Angelo Mai
3
.
Ib.
And let any equal auditor judge if Job were not an Anti-Socinian; Job
xix. 26. Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my
flesh shall I see God, whom I shall behold for myself, and mine eyes
shall see, and not another.
This text rightly rendered is perhaps nothing to the purpose, but may
refer to the dire cutaneous disease with which Job was afflicted.
It
may
be merely an expression of Job's confidence of his being justified in
the eyes of men, and in this life
4
.
In the whole wide range of theological
mirabilia
, I know none
stranger than the general agreement of orthodox divines to forget to ask
themselves what they precisely meant by the word 'body.' Our Lord's and
St. Paul's meaning is evident enough, that is, the personality.
Ib.
St. Chrysostom's judgment upon it (having loosed the pains of
death) is, that when Christ came out of the grave, death itself
was delivered from pain and anxiety — . Death knew it held him captive whom
it ought not to have seized upon, and therefore it suffered torments
like a woman in travail till it had given him up again. Thus he. But
the Scripture elsewhere testifies, that death was put to sorrow
because it had lost its sting, rather than released from sorrow by our
Saviour's resurrection.
Most noticeable! See the influence of the surrounding myriotheism in the
dea Mors!
Ib.
Let any competent judge read Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, and
then these Sermons, and so measure the stultifying, nugifying effect of
a blind and uncritical study of the Fathers, and the exclusive
prepossession in favor of their authority in the minds of many of our
Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I.
Index p. 2
Hacket's Life of Lord Keeper Williams5
Prudence installed as virtue, instead of being employed as one of her
indispensable handmaids, and the products of this exemplified and
illustrated in the life of Archbishop Williams, as a work, I could
warmly recommend to my dearest Hartley. Williams was a man bred up to
the determination of being righteous, both honorably striving and
selfishly ambitious, but all within the bounds and permission of the
law, the reigning system of casuistry; in short, an egotist in morals,
and a worldling in impulses and motives. And yet by pride and by innate
nobleness of nature munificent and benevolent, with all the negative
virtues of temperance, chastity, and the like, — take this man on his
road to his own worldly aggrandizement. Winding his way through a grove
of powerful rogues, by flattery, professions of devoted attachment, and
by actual and zealous as well as able services, and at length becoming
in fact nearly as great a knave as the knaves (Duke of Buckingham for
example) whose favor and support he had been conciliating, — till at last
in some dilemma, some strait between conscience and fear, and increased
confidence in his own political strength, he opposes or hesitates to
further some too foolish or wicked project of his patron knave, or
affronts his pride by counselling a different course (not a less wicked,
but one more profitable and conducive to his Grace's elevation);-and
then is
floored
or crushed by him, and falls unknown and
unpitied. Such was that truly wonderful scholar and statesman,
Archbishop Williams.
Part 1. s. 61.
'And God forbid that any other course, should be attempted. For this
liberty was settled on the subject, with such imprecations upon the
infringers, that if they should remove these great landmarks, they
must look for vengeance, as if entailed by public vows on them and
their posterity.' These were the Dean's instructions, &c.
He deserves great credit for them. They put him in strong contrast with
Laud.
Ib.
s. 80.
Thus for them both together he solicits: — My most noble lord, what
true applause and admiration the King and your Honor have gained, &c.
All this we, in the year 1833, should call abject and base; but was it
so in Bishop Williams? In the history of the morality of a people,
prudence, yea cunning, is the earliest form of virtue. This is expressed
in Jacob, and in Ulysses and all the most ancient fables. It will
require the true philosophic calm and serenity to distinguish and
appreciate the character of the morality of our great men from Henry
VIII to the close of James I, —
nullum numen abest, si sit
prudentia
, — and of those of Charles I to the Restoration. The
difference almost amounts to contrast.
Ib.
s. 81-2.
How is it that any deeply-read historian should not see how imperfect
and precarious the rights of personal liberty were during this period;
or, seeing it, refuse to do justice to the patriots under Charles I? The
truth is, that from the reign of Edward I, (to go no farther backward),
there was a spirit of freedom in the people at large, which all our
kings in their senses were cautious not to awaken by too rudely treading
on it; but for individuals, as such, there was none till the conflict
with the Stuarts.
Ib.
s. 84.
Of such a conclusion of state, quæ aliquando incognita, semper
justa, &c.
This perversion of words respecting the decrees of Providence to the
caprices of James and his beslobbered minion the Duke of Buckingham, is
somewhat nearer to blasphemy than even the euphuism of the age can
excuse.
Ib.
s. 85.
— — tuus, O Jacobe, quod optas
Explorare labor, mihi jussa capessere fas est.
In our times this would be pedantic wit: in the days of James I, and in
the mouth of Archbishop Williams it was witty pedantry.
Ib.
s. 89.
He that doth much in a short life products his mortality.
'Products' for 'produces;' that is, lengthens out,
ut apud
geometros
. But why Hacket did not say 'prolongs,' I know not.
Ib.
See what a globe of light there is in natural reason, which is the
same in every man: but when it takes well, and riseth to perfection,
it is called wisdom in a few.
The good affirming itself — (the will, I am) — begetteth the true, and
wisdom is the spirit proceeding. But in the popular acceptation, common
sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Ib.
s. 92.
A well-spirited clause, and agreeable to holy assurance, that truth is
more like to win than love. Could the light of such a Gospel as we
profess be eclipsed with the interposition of a single marriage?
And yet Hacket must have lived to see the practical confutation of this
shallow Gnathonism in the result of the marriage with the Papist
Henrietta of France!
Ib.
s. 96.
"Floud," says the Lord Keeper, "since I am no Bishop in your opinion,
I will be no Bishop to you."
I see the wit of this speech; but the wisdom, the Christianity, the
beseemingness of it in a Judge and a Bishop, — what am I to say of that?
Ib.
And after the period of his presidency (of the Star Chamber), it is
too well known how far the enhancements were stretched. But the
wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood. Prov. 30-33.
We may learn from this and fifty other passages, that it did not require
the factious prejudices of Prynne or Burton to look with aversion on the
proceedings of Laud. Bishop Hacket was as hot a royalist as a loyal
Englishman could be, yet Laud was
allii nimis
.
Ib.
s. 97.
New stars have appeared and vanished: the ancient asterisms remain;
there's not an old star missing.
If they had been, they would not have been old. This therefore, like
many of Lord Bacon's illustrations, has more wit than meaning. But it is
a good trick of rhetoric. The vividness of the image,
per se
,
makes men overlook the imperfection of the simile. "You see my hand, the
hand of a poor, puny fellow-mortal; and will you pretend not to see the
hand of Providence in this business? He who sees a mouse must be
wilfully blind if he does not see an elephant!"
Ib.
s. 100.
The error of the first James, — an ever well-intending, well-resolving,
but, alas! ill-performing monarch, a kind-hearted, affectionate, and
fondling old man, really and extensively learned, yea, and as far as
quick wit and a shrewd judgment go to the making up of wisdom, wise in
his generation, and a pedant by the right of pedantry, conceded at that
time to all men of learning (Bacon for example), — his error, I say,
consisted in the notion, that because the stalk and foliage were
originally contained in the seed, and were derived from it, therefore
they remained so in point of right after their evolution. The kingly
power was the seed; the House of Commons and the municipal charters and
privileges the stock of foliage; the unity of the realm, or what we mean
by the constitution, is the root. Meanwhile the seed is gone, and
reappears as the crown and glorious flower of the plant. But James, in
my honest judgment, was an angel compared with his son and grandsons. As
Williams to Laud, so James I was to Charles I.
Ib.
Restraint is not a medicine to cure epidemical diseases.
A most judicious remark.
Ib.
s. 103.
The least connivance in the world towards the person of a Papist.
It is clear to us that this illegal or
præter
-legal and desultory
toleration by connivance at particular cases, — this precarious depending
on the momentary mood of the King, and this in a stretch of a questioned
prerogative, — could neither satisfy nor conciliate the Roman-Catholic
potentates abroad, but was sure to offend and alarm the Protestants at
home. Yet on the other hand, it is unfair as well as unwise to censure
the men of an age for want of that which was above their age. The true
principle, much more the practicable rules, of toleration were in
James's time obscure to the wisest; but by the many, laity no less than
clergy, would have been denounced as soul-murder and disguised atheism.
In fact — and a melancholy fact it is, — toleration then first becomes
practicable when indifference has deprived it of all merit. In the same
spirit I excuse the opposite party, the Puritans and Papaphobists.
Ib.
s. 104.
It was scarcely to be expected that the passions of James's age would
allow of this wise distinction between Papists, the intriguing restless
partizans of a foreign potentate, and simple Roman-Catholics, who
preferred the
mumpsimus
of their grandsires to the corrected
sumpsimus
of the Reformation. But that in our age this distinction
should have been neglected in the Roman-Catholic Emancipation Bill!
Ib.
s. 105.
But this invisible consistory shall be confusedly diffused over all
the kingdom, that many of the subjects shall, to the intolerable
exhausting of the wealth of the realm, pay double tithes, double
offerings, double fees, in regard of their double consistory. And if
Ireland be so poor as it is suggested, I hold, under correction, that
this invisible consistory is the principal cause of the exhausting
thereof.
A memorable remark on the evil of the double priesthood in Ireland.
Ib.
Dr. Bishop, the new Bishop of Chalcedon, is to come to London
privately, and I am much troubled at it, not knowing what to advise
his majesty as things stand at this present. If you were shipped with
the Infanta, the only counsel were to let the judges proceed with him
presently; hang him out of the way, and the King to blame my lord of
Canterbury or myself for it.
Striking instance and illustration of the tricksy policy which in the
seventeenth century passed for state wisdom even with the comparatively
wise. But there must be a Ulysses before there can be an Aristides and
Phocion.
Poor King James's main errors arose out of his superstitious notions of
a sovereignty inherent in the person of the king. Hence he would be a
sacred person, though in all other respects he might be a very devil.
Hence his yearning for the Spanish match; and the ill effects of his
toleration became rightly attributed by his subjects to foreign
influence, as being against his own acknowledged principle, not on a
principle.
Ib.
s. 107.
I have at times played with the thought, that our bishoprics, like most
of our college fellowships, might advantageously be confined to single
men, if only it were openly declared to be on ground of public
expediency, and on no supposed moral superiority of the single state.
Ib.
s. 108.
That a rector or vicar had not only an office in the church, but a
freehold for life, by the common law, in his benefice.
O
! if Archbishop Williams had but seen in a clear point of view what he
indistinctly aims at, — the essential distinction between the nationalty
and its trustees and holders, and the Christian Church and its
ministers
6
.
Ib.
s. 111.
I will represent him (the archbishop of Spalato) in a line or two,
that he was as indifferent, or rather dissolute, in practice as in
opinion. For in the same chapter, art. 35, this is his Nicolaitan
doctrine: — A pluralitate uxorum natura humana non abhorret, imo
fortasse neque ab earum communitate.
How so? The words mean only that the human animal is not withholden by
any natural instinct from plurality or even community of females. It is
not asserted, that reason and revelation do not forbid both the one and
the other, or that man unwithholden would not be a Yahoo, morally
inferior to the swallow. The emphasis is to be laid on
natura
,
not on
humana
. Humanity forbids plural and promiscuous
intercourse, not however by the animal nature of man, but by the reason
and religion that constitute his moral and spiritual nature.
Ib.
s. 112.
But being thrown out into banishment, and hunted to be destroyed as a
partridge in the mountain, he subscribed against his own hand, which
yet did not prejudice Athanasius his innocency: —
I have ever said this of Sir John Cheke. I regret his recantation as one
of the cruelties suffered by him, and always see the guilt flying off
from him and settling on his persecutors.
Ib.
s. 151.
I conclude, therefore, that his Highness having admitted nothing in
these oaths or articles, either to the prejudice of the true, or the
equalizing or authorizing of the other, religion, but contained
himself wholly within the limits of penal statutes and connivances,
wherein the state hath ever challenged and usurped a directing power,
&c.
Three points seem wanting to render the Lord Keeper's argument
air-tight; —
the proof that a king of England even then had a right to dispense,
not with the execution in individual cases of the laws, but with the
laws themselves in omne futurum; that is, to repeal laws by his
own act;
the proof that such a tooth-and-talon drawing of the laws did not
endanger the equalizing and final mastery of the unlawful religion;
the utter want of all reciprocity on the part of the Spanish monarch.
In short, it is pardonable in Hacket, but would be contemptible in any
other person, not to see this advice of the Lord Keeper's as a black
blotch in his character, both as a Protestant Bishop and as a councillor
of state in a free and Protestant country.
Ib.
s. 152.
Yet opinions were so various, that some spread it for a fame, that, &c.
Was it not required of — at all events usual for — all present at a
Council to subscribe their names to the act of the majority? There is a
modern case in point, I think, that of Sir Arthur Wellesley's signature
to the Convention of Cintra.
Ib.
s. 164.
For to forbid judges against their oath, and justices of peace (sworn
likewise), not to execute the law of the land, is a thing
unprecedented in this kingdom. Durus sermo, a harsh and bitter
pill to be digested upon a sudden, and without some preparation.
What a fine India-rubber conscience Hacket, as well as his patron, must
have had! Policy with innocency,' 'cunning with conscience,' lead up the
dance to the tune of '
Tantara
rogues all!'
Upon my word, I can scarcely conceive a greater difficulty than for an
honest, warm-hearted man of principle of the present day so to
discipline his mind by reflection on the circumstances and received
moral system of the Stuarts' age (from Elizabeth to the death of Charles
I), and its proper place in the spiral line of ascension, as to be able
to regard the Duke of Buckingham as not a villain, and to resolve many
of the acts of those Princes into passions, conscience-warped and
hardened by half-truths and the secular creed of prudence, as being
itself virtue instead of one of her handmaids, when interpreted by minds
constitutionally and by their accidental circumstances imprudent and
rash, yet fearful and suspicious; and with casuists and codes of
casuistry as their conscience-leaders! One of the favorite works of
Charles I was Sanderson
de Juramento
.
Ib.
s. 200.
Wherefore he waives the strong and full defence he had made upon
stopping of an original writ, and deprecates all offence by that maxim
of the law which admits of a mischief rather than an inconvenience:
which was as much as to say, that he thought it a far less evil to do
the lady the probability of an injury (in her own name) than to suffer
those two courts to clash together again.
All this is a tangle of sophisms. The assumption is, it is better to
inflict a private wrong than a public one: we ought to wrong one rather
than many. But even then, it is badly stated. The principle is true only
where the tolerating of the private wrong is the only means of
preventing a greater public wrong. But in this case it was the certainty
of the wrong of one to avoid the chance of an inconvenience that might
perchance be the occasion of wrong to many, and which inconvenience both
easily might and should have been remedied by rightful measures, by
mutual agreement between the Bishop and Chancellor, and by the King, or
by an act of Parliament.
Ib.
s. 203.
'Truly, Sir, this is my dark lantern, and I am not ashamed to inquire
of a Dalilah to resolve a riddle; for in my studies of divinity I have
gleaned up this maxim, licet uti alieno peccato; — though the
Devil make her a sinner, I may make good use of her sin.' Prince,
merrily, 'Do you deal in such ware?' 'In good faith, Sir,' says the
Keeper, 'I never saw her face.'
And Hacket's evident admiration, and not merely approbation, of this
base Jesuitry, — this divinity which had taught the Archbishop
licere
uti alieno peccato
! But Charles himself was a student of such
divinity, and yet (as rogues of higher rank comfort the pride of their
conscience by despising inferior knaves) I suspect that the 'merrily'
was the Sardonic mirth of bitter contempt; only, however, because he
disliked Williams, who was simply a man of his age, his baseness being
for us, not for his contemporaries, or even for his own mind. But the
worst of all is the Archbishop's heartless disingenuousness and
moon-like nodes towards his kind old master the King. How much of truth
was there in the Spaniard's information respecting the intrigues of the
Prince and the Duke of Buckingham? If none, if they were mere slanders,
if the Prince had acted the filial part toward his father and King, and
the Duke the faithful part towards his master and only too fond and
affectionate benefactor, what more was needed than to expose the
falsehoods? But if Williams knew that there was too great a mixture of
truth in the charges, what a cowardly ingrate to his old friend to have
thus curried favor with the rising sun by this base jugglery!
Ib.
s. 209.
He was the topsail of the nobility, and in power and trust of offices
far above all the nobility.
James I was no fool, and though through weakness of character an unwise
master, yet not an unthinking statesman; and I still want a satisfactory
solution of the accumulation of offices on Buckingham.
Ib.
s. 212.
Prudent men will continue the oblations of their forefathers' piety.
The danger and mischief of going far back, and yet not half far enough!
Thus Hacket refers to the piety of individuals our forefathers as the
origin of Church property. Had he gone further back, and traced to the
source, he would have found these partial benefactions to have been mere
restitutions of rights co-original with their own property, and as a
national reserve for the purposes of national existence — the condition
sine qua non
of the equity of their proprieties; for without
civilization a people cannot be, or continue to be, a nation. But, alas!
the ignorance of the essential distinction of a national clerisy, the
Ecclesia
, from the Christian Church. The
Ecclesia
has been
an eclipse to the intellect of both Churchmen and Sectarians, even from
Elizabeth to the present day, 1833.
Ib.
s. 214.
And being threatened, his best mitigation was, that perhaps it was not
safe for him to deny so great a lord; yet it was safest for his
lordship to be denied. ... The king heard the noise of these crashes,
and was so pleased, that he thanked God, before many witnesses, that
he had put the Keeper into that place: 'For,' says he, 'he that will
not wrest justice for Buckingham's sake, whom I know he loves, will
never be corrupted with money, which he never loved.'
Strange it must seem to us; yet it is evident that Hacket thought it
necessary to make a mid something, half apology and half eulogy, for the
Lord Keeper's timid half resistance to the insolence and iniquitous
interference of the minion Duke. What a portrait of the times! But the
dotage of the King in the maintenance of the man, whose insolence in
wresting justice he himself admits! Yet how many points, both of the
times and of the King's personal character, must be brought together
before we can fairly solve the intensity of James's minionism, his
kingly egotism, his weak kindheartedness, his vulgar coarseness of
temper, his systematic jealousy of the ancient nobles, his timidity, and
the like!
Ib.
'Sir,' says the Lord Keeper, 'will you be pleased to listen to me,
taking in the Prince's consent, of which I make no doubt, and I will
shew how you shall furnish the second and third brothers with
preferments sufficient to maintain them, that shall cost you nothing.
... If they fall to their studies, design them to the bishoprics of
Durham and Winchester, when they become void. If that happen in their
nonage, which is probable, appoint commendatories to discharge the
duty for them for a laudable allowance, but gathering the fruits for
the support of your grandchildren, till they come to virility to be
consecrated,' &c.
Williams could not have been in earnest in this villanous counsel, but
he knew his man. This conceit of dignifying dignities by the Simoniacal
prostitution of them to blood-royal was just suited to James's
fool-cunningness.
Part II. s. 74.
... To yield not only passive obedience (which is due) but active
also, &c.
'Which is due.' What in the name of common sense can this mean, that is,
speculatively? Practically, the meaning is clear enough, namely, that we
should do what we can to escape hanging; but the distinction is for
decorum, and so let it pass.
Ib.
s. 75.
This is the venom of this new doctrine, that by making us the King's
creatures, and in the state of minors or children, to take away all
our property; which would leave us nothing of our own, and lead us
(but that God hath given us just and gracious Princes) into slavery.
And yet this just and gracious Prince prompts, sanctions, supports, and
openly rewards this envenomer, in flat contempt of both Houses of
Parliament, — protects and prefers him and others of the same principles
and professions on account of these professions! And the Parliament and
nation were inexcusable, forsooth, in not trusting to Charles's
assurances, or rather the assurances put in his mouth by Hyde, Falkland,
and others, that he had always abhorred these principles.
Ib.
s. 136.
When they saw he was not selfish (it is a word of their own new
mint), &c.
Singular! From this passage it would seem that our so very common word
'selfish' is no older than the latter part of the reign of Charles I.
Ib.
s. 137.
Their political aphorisms are far more dangerous, that His Majesty is
not the highest power in his realms; that he hath not absolute
sovereignty; and that a Parliament sitting is co-ordinate with him in
it.
Hacket himself repeatedly implies as much; for would he deny that the
King with the Lords and Commons is not more than the King without them?
or that an act of Parliament is not more than a proclamation?
Ib.
s.154.
What a venomous spirit is in that serpent Milton, that black-mouthed
Zoilus, that blows his viper's breath upon those immortal devotions
from the beginning to the end! This is he that wrote with all
irreverence against the Fathers of our Church, and showed as little
duty to the father that begat him: the same that wrote for the
Pharisees, that it was lawful for a man to put away his wife for every
cause, — and against Christ, for not allowing divorces: the same, O
horrid! that defended the lawfulness of the greatest crime that ever
was committed, to put our thrice-excellent King to death: a petty
schoolboy scribbler, that durst grapple in such a cause with the
prince of the learned men of his age, Salmasius, , as Eunapius says of Ammonius, Plutarch's
scholar in Egypt, the delight, the music of all knowledge, who would
have scorned to drop a pen-full of ink against so base an adversary,
but to maintain the honor of so good a King ... Get thee behind me,
Milton! Thou savourest not the things that be of truth and loyalty,
but of pride, bitterness, and falsehood. There will be a time, though
such a Shimei, a dead dog in Abishai's phrase, escape for a while ...
It is no marvel if this canker-worm Milton, &c.
A contemporary of Bishop Racket's designates Milton as the author of a
profane and lascivious poem entitled Paradise Lost. The biographer of
our divine bard ought to have made a collection of all such passages. A
German writer of a Life of Salmasius acknowledges that Milton had the
better in the conflict in these words: 'Hans (Jack) von Milton — not to
be compared in learning and genius with the incomparable Salmasius, yet
a shrewd and cunning lawyer,' &c.
O sana posteritas!
Ib.
s. 178.
Dare they not trust him that never broke with them? And I have heard
his nearest servants say, that no man could ever challenge him of the
least lie.
What! this after the publication of Charles's letters to the Queen! Did
he not within a few months before his death enter into correspondence
with, and sign contradictory offers to, three different parties, not
meaning to keep any one of them; and at length did he not die with
something very like a falsehood in his mouth in allowing himself to be
represented as the author of the Icon Basilike?
Ib.
s. 180.
If an under-sheriff had arrested Harry Martin for debt, and pleaded
that he did not imprison his membership, but his Martinship, would the
Committee for privileges be fobbed off with that distinction?
To make this good in analogy, we must suppose that Harry Martin had
notoriously neglected all the duties, while he perverted and abused all
the privileges, of membership: and then I answer, that the Committee of
privileges would have done well and wisely in accepting the
under-sheriff's distinction, and, out of respect for the membership,
consigning the Martinship to the due course of law.
Ib.
That every soul should be subject to the higher powers. The
higher power under which they lived was the mere power and will of
Cæsar, bridled in by no law.
False, if meant
de jure
; and if
de facto
, the plural
powers
would
apply to the Parliament far better than to the King, and to Cromwell as
well as to Nero. Every even decently good Emperor professed himself the
servant of the Roman Senate. The very term
Imperator
, as Gravina
observes, implies it; for it expresses a delegated and instrumental
power. Before the assumption of the Tribunitial character by Augustus,
by which he became the representative of the majority of the
people, —
majestatem indutus est, — Senatus consulit, Populus jubet,
imperent Consules
, was the constitutional language.
Ib.
s. 190.
Yet so much dissonancy there was between his tongue and his heart,
that he triumphed in the murder of Cæsar, the only Roman that exceeded
all their race in nobleness, and was next to Tully in eloquence.
There is something so shameless in this self-contradiction as of itself
almost to extinguish the belief that the prelatic royalists were
conscientious in their conclusions. For if the Senate of Rome were not a
lawful power, what could be? And if Cæsar, the thrice perjured traitor,
was neither perjured nor traitor, only because he by his Gaulish troops
turned a republic into a monarchy, — with what face, under what pretext,
could Hacket abuse 'Sultan Cromwell?'
Footnote 1:
By Thomas Plume. Folio, 1676. — Ed.
return to footnote mark
Footnote 2:
Ea omnia super Christo Pilatus, et ipse jam pro sua
conscientia Christianus, Cæsari tum Tiberio nuntiavit.
Apologet, ii.
624. See the account in Eusebius. Hist. Eccl. ii.2. — Ed.
return
Footnote 3:
See
M. T. Ciceronis de Republica quæ supersunt. Zell.
Stuttgardt
