that one of his parents asked him, when he was and to conceive Him as filling the infinite extent of 'All are but parts of one stupendous whole, The followers of Spinoza built their pernicious The next subject that engaged the studies of Clarke was a Defence of the Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul, in reply to Mr Henry Dodwell and Collins. He also translated Newton's Optics into Latin, and was rewarded by his guide, philosopher, and friend, with a present of L.500. In 1709 he obtained the rectory of St James's, Westminster, took his degree of D.D., and was made chaplain in ordinary to the queen. In 1712 he edited a splendid edition of Cæsar's Commentaries, with corrections and emendations, and also gave to the world an elaborate treatise on the Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity. The latter involved him in considerable trouble with the church authorities; for Clarke espoused the Arian doctrine, which he also advocated in a series of sermons. He next appeared as a controversialist with Leibnitz, the German philosopher, who had represented to the Princess of Wales, afterwards the queen consort of George II., that the Newtonian philosophy was not only physically false, but injurious to religion. Sir Isaac Newton, at the request of the princess, entered the lists on the mathematical part of the controversy, and left the philosophical part of it to Dr Clarke. The result was triumphant for the English system; and Clarke, in 1717, collected and published the papers which had passed between him and Leibnitz. In 1724, he put to press a series of sermons, seventeen in number. Many of them are excellent, but others are tinctured with his metaphysical predilections. He aimed at rendering scriptural principle a precept conformable to what he calls eternal reason and the fitness of things, and hence his sermons have failed in becoming popu *Stewart's Dissertation, Encyclopædia Britannica. [Natural and Essential Difference of Right and Wrong.] lar or useful. 'He who aspires,' says Robert Hall, tosh, that Dr Clarke was a man eminent at once as 'to a reputation that shall survive the vicissitudes a divine, a mathematician, a metaphysical philoof opinion and of time, must aim at some other cha-sopher, and a philologer; and, as the interpreter racter than that of a metaphysician.' In his prac- of Homer and Cæsar, the scholar of Newton, and tical sermons, however, there is much sound and the antagonist of Leibnitz, approved himself not admirable precept. In 1727, Dr Clarke was offered, unworthy of correspondence with the highest order but declined, the appointment of Master of the Mint, of human spirits.' vacant by the death of his illustrious friend, Newton. The situation was worth £1500 a-year, and the disinterestedness and integrity of Clarke were strikingly evinced by his declining to accept an office of The principal thing that can, with any colour of such honour and emoluments, because he could not reason, seem to countenance the opinion of those who reconcile himself to a secular employment. His deny the natural and eternal difference of good and conduct and character must have excited the admi- evil, is the difficulty there may sometimes be to deration of the queen, for we learn from a satirical fine exactly the bounds of right and wrong; the allusion in Pope's Moral Epistle on the Use of variety of opinions that have obtained even among Riches (first published in 1731), that her majesty understanding and learned men, concerning certain had placed a bust of Dr Clarke in her hermitage in questions of just and unjust, especially in political the royal grounds. The doctor duly frequented matters; and the many contrary laws that have been the court,' says Pope in a note; but he should made in divers ages and in different countries conhave added,' rejoins Warburton, with the inno- cerning these matters. But as, in painting, two very cence and disinterestedness of a hermit.' In 1729, different colours, by diluting each other very slowly Clarke published the first twelve books of the Iliad, and gradually, may, from the highest intenseness in with a Latin version and copious annotations; and either extreme, terminate in the midst insensibly, and Homer has never had a more judicious or acute so run one into the other, that it shall not be possible commentator. The last literary efforts of this inde- even for a skilful eye to determine exactly where the fatigable scholar were devoted to drawing up an one ends and the other begins; and yet the colours may Exposition of the Church Catechism, and preparing really differ as much as can be, not in degree only, but several volumes of sermons for the press. These entirely in kind, as red and blue, or white and black: were not published till after his death, which took so, though it may perhaps be very difficult in some nice place on the 17th of May 1729. The various talents and perplexed cases (which yet are very far from ceand learning of Dr Clarke, and his easy cheerful curring frequently) to define exactly the bounds of disposition, earned for him the highest admiration right and wrong, just and unjust (and there may be and esteem of his contemporaries. As a metaphy- some latitude in the judgment of different men, and the sician, he was inferior to Locke in comprehensive- laws of divers nations), yet right and wrong are neverness and originality, but possessed more skill and theless in themselves totally and essentially different; logical foresight (the natural result of his habits even altogether as much as white and black, light and of mathematical study); and he has been justly their youth to steal, may, as absurd as it was, bear darkness. The Spartan law, perhaps, which permitted celebrated for the boldness and ability with which he placed himself in the breach against the Neces- much dispute whether it was absolutely unjust or no; sitarians and Fatalists of his times. His moral because every man, having an absolute right in his doctrine (which supposes virtue to consist in the own goods, it may seem that the members of any regulation of our conduct according to certain fit- society may agree to transfer or alter their own pronesses which we perceive in things, or a peculiar if it could be supposed that a law had been made at perties upon what conditions they shall think fit. But congruity of certain relations to each other) being Sparta, or at Rome, or in India, or in any other part inconsequential unless we have previously distin- of the world, whereby it had been commanded or guished the ends which are morally good from those allowed that every man might rob by violence, and that are evil, and limited the conformity to one of murder whomsoever he met with, or that no faith these classes, has been condemned by Dr Thomas should be kept with any man, nor any equitable com Brown and Sir James Mackintosh. His specula-pacts performed, no man, with any tolerable use of tions were over-refined, and seem to have been co-his reason, whatever diversity of judgment might be loured by his fondness for mathematical studies, in forgetfulness that mental philosophy cannot, like physical, be demonstrated by axioms and definitions in the manner of the exact sciences. On the whole, we may say, in the emphatic language of Mackin-power to make falsehood be truth, though they may *See Brown's Philosophy and the Dissertations of Stewart and Mackintosh. Warburton, in his notes on Pope, thus sums up the moral doctrine: Dr Clarke and Wollaston considered moral obligation as arising from the essential differences and relations of things; Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, as arising from the moral sense; and the generality of divines, as arising solely from the will of God. On these three principles practical morality has been built by these different writers. Thus has God been pleased,' adds Warburton, to give three different excitements to the practice of virtue; that men of all ranks, constitutions, and educations, might find their account in one or other of them; something that would hit their palate, satisfy their reason, or subdue their will. But this admirable provision for the support of virtue hath been in some measure defeated by its pretended advocates, who have sacrilegiously untwisted this threefold cord, and each running away with the part he esteemed the strongest, hath affixed that to the throne of God, as the golden chain that is to unite and draw all to it.'-Divine Legation, book i among them in other matters, would have thought that such a law could have authorised or excused, much less have justified such actions, and have made them become good: because 'tis plainly not in men's alter the property of their goods as they please. Now if, in flagrant cases, the natural and essential difference between good and evil, right and wrong, cannot but be confessed to be plainly and undeniably evident, the difference between them must be also essential and unalterable in all, even the smallest, and nicest and most intricate cases, though it be not so easy to be discerned and accurately distinguished. For if, from the difficulty of determining exactly the bounds of right and wrong in many perplexed cases, it could truly be concluded that just and unjust were not essentially different by nature, but only by positive constitution and custom, it would follow equally, that they were not really, essentially, and unalterably different, even in the most flagrant cases that can be supposed; which is an assertion so very absurd, that Mr Hobbes himself could hardly vent it without blushing, and discovering plainly, by his shifting expressions, his secret self-condemnation. There are therefore certain necessary and eternal differences of things, and certain fitnesses or unfitnesses of the application of different things, or different relations one to another, not depending on any positive constitutions, but founded unchangeably in the nature and reason of things, and unavoidably arising from the differences of the things themselves. DR WILLIAM LOWTH. took up Hoadly's works with warmth, and passed a Toland and Tindal, prompt at priests to jeer, DR WILLIAM LOWTH (1661-1732) was distinguished for his classical and theological attainments, and the liberality with which he communicated his stores to others. He published a Vindication of the Divine Authority and Inspiration of the Old and New The truth, however, is, that there was nothing Testaments (1692), Directions for the Profitable Read-whatever in Hoadly's sermon injurious to the estaing of the Holy Scriptures, Commentaries on the Pro-blished endowments and privileges, nor to the disphets, &c. He furnished notes on Clemens Alexandrinus for Potter's edition of that ancient author, remarks on Josephus for Hudson's edition, and annotations on the ecclesiastical historians for Reading's Cambridge edition of those authors. He also assisted Dr Chandler in his Defence of Christianity from the Prophecies. His learning is said to have been equally extensive and profound, and he accompanied all his reading with critical and philological remarks. Born in London, Dr Lowth took his degrees at Oxford, and experiencing the countenance and support of the bishop of Winchester, became the chaplain of that prelate, a prebend of the cathedral of Winchester, and rector of Buriton. DR BENJAMIN HOADLY. DR BENJAMIN HOADLY, successively bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and Winchester, was a prelate of great controversial ability, who threw the weight of his talents and learning into the scale of Whig politics, at that time fiercely attacked by the Tory and Jacobite parties. Hoadly was born in 1676. In 1706,* while rector of St Peter's-le-Poor, London, he attacked a sermon by Atterbury, and thus incurred the enmity and ridicule of Swift and Pope. He defended the revolution of 1688, and attacked the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience with such vigour and perseverance, that, in 1709, the House of Commons recommended him to the favour of the queen. Her majesty does not appear to have complied with this request; but her successor, George I., elevated him to the see of Bangor. Shortly after his elevation to the bench, Hoadly published a work against the nonjurors, and a sermon preached before the king at St James's, on the Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ. The latter excited a long_and vehement dispute, known by the name of the Bangorian Controversy, in which forty or fifty tracts were published. The Lower House of Convocation * Hoadly printed, in 1702, A Letter to the Rev. Mr Fleetwood, occasioned by his Essay on Miracles. In the preface to a volume of tracts published in 1715, in which that letter was reprinted, the eminent author speaks of Fleetwood in the following terms: This contains some points, relating to the subject of miracles, in which I differed long ago from an excellent person, now advanced, by his merits, to one of the highest stations in the church. When it first appeared in the world, he had too great a soul to make the common return of resentment or contempt, or to esteem a difference of opinion, expressed with civility, to be an unpardonable affront. So far from it, that he not only was pleased to express some good liking of the manner of it, but laid hold on an opportunity, which then immediately offered itself, of doing the writer a very considerable piece of service. I think myself obliged, upon this occasion, to acknowledge this in a public manner, wishing that such a procedure may at length cease to be uncommon and singular.' cipline and government of the English church, even in theory. If this had been the case, he might have been reproached with some inconsistency in becoming so large a partaker of her honours and emolufor open immoralities, though denying all church authority to oblige any one to external communion, or to pass any sentence which should determine the condition of men with respect to the favour or displeasure of God. Another great question in this controversy was that of religious liberty as a civil another related to the much debated exercise of right, which the convocation explicitly denied. And private judgment in religion, which, as one party meant virtually to take away, so the other perhaps unreasonably exaggerated."* The style of Hoadly's controversial treatises is strong and logical, but without any of the graces of composition, and hence they have fallen into comparative oblivion. He was author of several other works, as Terms of Acceptance, Reasonableness of Conformity, Treatise on the Sacrament, &c. A complete edition of his works was published by his son in three folio volumes; his sermons are now considered the most valuable portion of his writings. There can be no doubt that the independent and liberal mind of Hoadly, aided by his station in the church, tended materially ments. He even admitted the usefulness of censures to stem the torrent of slavish submission which then prevailed in the church of England. The first extract is from Hoadly's sermon on The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ, preached before the king on 31st March, 1717, and which, as already mentioned, gave rise to the celebrated Bangorian controversy. [The Kingdom of Christ not of this World.] If, therefore, the church of Christ be the kingdom of Christ, it is essential to it that Christ himself be the sole lawgiver and sole judge of his subjects, in all points relating to the favour or displeasure of Almighty God; and that all his subjects, in what station soever they may be, are equally subjects to him; and that no one of them, any more than another, hath authority either to make new laws for Christ's subjects, or to impose a sense upon the old ones, which is the same thing; or to judge, censure, or punish the servants of another master, in matters relating purely to conscience or salvation. If any person hath any other notion, either through a long use of words with inconsistent meanings, or through a negligence of thought, let him but ask himself whether the church of Christ be the kingdom of Christ or not; and if it be, whether this notion of it doth not absolutely exclude all other legislators and judges in matters relating to conscience or the favour of God, or whether it can be his king * Hallam's Constitutional History of England. dom if any mortal men have such a power of legislation and judgment in it. This inquiry will bring us back to the first, which is the only true account of the church of Christ, or the kingdom of Christ, in the mouth of a Christian; that it is the number of men, whether small or great, whether dispersed or united, who truly and sincerely are subjects to Jesus Christ alone as their lawgiver and judge in matters relating to the favour of God and their eternal salvation. The next principal point is, that, if the church be the kingdom of Christ, and this kingdom be not of this world,' this must appear from the nature and end of the laws of Christ, and of those rewards and punishments which are the sanctions of his laws. Now, his laws are declarations relating to the favour of God in another state after this. They are declarations of those conditions to be performed in this world on our part, without which God will not make us happy in that to come. And they are almost all general appeals to the will of that God; to his nature, known by the common reason of mankind, and to the imitation of that nature, which must be our perfection. The keeping his commandments is declared the way to life, and the doing his will the entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The being subjects to Christ, is to this very end, that we may the better and more effectually perform the will of God. The laws of this kingdom, therefore, as Christ left them, have nothing of this world in their view; no tendency either to the exaltation of some in worldly pomp and dignity, or to their absolute dominion over the faith and religious conduct of others of his subjects, or to the erecting of any sort of temporal kingdom under the covert and name of a spiritual one. contrary to the interests of true religion, [Ironical View of Protestant Infallibility.] [From the Dedication to Pope Clement XI., prefixed to Sir R. Steele's Account of the State of the Roman Catholic Religion throughout the World"] Your holiness is not perhaps sware how near the churches of us Protestants have at length come to those privileges and perfections which you boast of as peculiar to your own: so near, that many of the most quick-sighted and saracious persons have not been able to discover any other difference between us, as to the main principle of sii doctrine, government, worship, and discipline, bas mais e, namely, that you cannot err in anything you determine, and we never do: that is, in other words that you are infallible, and we always in the mic We cannot but esteem the advantage to be exceedingly on our side fallibility without the absurd peaming to it, g The sanctions of Christ's law are rewards and punish-in this case; because we have a the benefits of inments. But of what sort! Not the rewards of this world; not the offices or glories of this state; not the pains of prisons, banishments, fines, or any lesser and more moderate penalties; nay, not the much lesser negative discouragements that belong to human society. He was far from thinking that these could be the instruments of such a persuasion as he thought acceptable to God. But, as the great end of his king dom was to guide men to happiness after the short Thus, the synod of Durse wise merring deciimages of it were over here below, so he took hissions public thanks Amg an every time motives them that place where his kingdom first be years offered up with the u. in the gan, and where it was at last to end; from those re-magistrates in that count, the AURS & D wants and punishments in a future state, which had relation to this world; and to show that his kingdom was bot of this world, all the sanctions which he thought it to give to his laws were not of this world at all of England is vested with all authority, and justly challengeth all obedience. If one crosses a river in the north, there it stands thus: The church of England is not enough reformed; its doctrines, worship, and government, have too much of antichristian Rome in them. But the kirk of Scotland hath a divine right from its only head, Jesus Christ, to meet and to enact what to it shall seem fit, for the good of his church. Thus, we left you for your enormous unjustifiable claim to an unerring spirit, and have found out a way, unknown to your holiness and your predecessors, of claiming all the rights that belong to infallibility, even whilst we disclaim and abjure the thing itself. As for us of the church of England, if we will believe many of its greatest advocates, we have bishops in a succession as certainly uninterrupted from the apostles, as your church could communicate it to us. And upon this bottom, which makes us a true church, we have a right to separate from you; but no persons living have a right to differ or separate from us. And they, again, who differ from us, value themselves upon something or other in which we are supposed defective, or upon being free from some superfluities which we enjoy; and think it hard, that any will be still going further, and refine upon their scheme of worship and discipline. Thus we have indeed left you; but we have fixed ourselves in your seat, and make no scruple to resemble you in our defences of ourselves and censures of others whenever we think it proper. We have all sufficiently felt the load of the two topics of heresy and schism. We have been persecuted, hanged, burned, massacred (as your holiness well knows) for heretics and schismatics. But all this hath not made us sick of those two words. We can still throw them about us, and play them off upon others, as plentifully and as fiercely as they are dispensed to us from your quarter. It often puts me in mind (your holiness must allow me to be a little ludicrous, if you admit me to your conversation), it often, I say, puts me in mind of a play which I have seen amongst some merry people: a man strikes his next neighbour with all his force, and he, instead of returning it to the man who gave it, communicates it, with equal zeal and strength, to another; and this to another; and so it circulates, till it returns perhaps to him who set the sport agoing. Thus your holiness begins the attack. You call us heretics and schismatics, and burn and destroy us as such; though, God knows, there is no more right anywhere to use heretics or schismatics barbarously, than those who think and speak as their superiors bid them. But so it is. You thunder out the sentence against us. We think it ill manners to give it you back again; but we throw it out upon the next brethren that come in our way; and they upon others: and so it goes round, till some perhaps have sense and courage enough to throw it back upon those who first began the disturbance by pretending to authority where there can be none. law in London, but afterwards turned his attention to divinity, and in 1680 took orders. As chancellor of the cathedral of Connor, he distinguished himself by several disputations with Catholic divines, and by the boldness with which he opposed the pro-popish designs of King James. Nevertheless, at the revolution, he adopted a decisive tone of Jacobitism, from which he never swerved through life. Removing to London, he was chiefly engaged for several years in writing controversial works against quakers, Socinians, and deists, of which, however, none are now remembered, besides the little treatise of which the title has been given, and which appeared in 1699. He also wrote many occasional and periodical tracts in behalf of the house of Stuart, to whose cause his talents and celebrity certainly lend no small lustre. Being for one of these publications obliged to leave We have not indeed now the power of burning the country, he repaired in 1713 to the court of the heretics, as our forefathers of the Reformation had. Chevalier at Bar le Duc, and was, well received. The civil power hath taken away the act which con- James allowed him to have a chapel fitted up for tinued that glorious privilege to them, upon the re- the English service, and was even expected to lend monstrance of several persons that they could not a favourable ear to his arguments against popery; sleep whilst that act was awake. But then, every- but this expectation proved vain. It was not pos thing on this side death still remains untouched to sible for an earnest and bitter controversialist like us: we can molest, harass, imprison, and ruin any Leslie to remain long at rest in such a situation, man who pretends to be wiser than his betters. And and we are not therefore surprised to find him rethe more unspotted the man's character is, the more turn in disgust to England in 1721. He soon after necessary we think it to take such crushing methods. died at his house of Glaslough, in the county of Since the toleration hath been authorised in these Monaghan. The works of this remarkable man nations, the legal zeal of men hath fallen the heavier have been collected in seven volumes (Oxford, 1832), upon heretics (for it must always, it seems, be exer- and it must be allowed that they place their author cised upon some sort of persons or other); and amongst very high in the list of controversial writers, the inthese, chiefly upon such as differ from us in points ingenuity of the arguments being only equalled by the |