CHURCH AND STATE.-CLASSIFICATION.—CLERGY. state of the services of the ablest men. He is to debase and enfeeble the community which he governs, from a nation into a sect. In our own country, for example, millions of Catholics, millions of Protestant Dissenters, are to be excluded from all power and honours. A great hostile fleet is on the sea; but Nelson is not to command in the Channel if in the mystery of the Trinity he confounds the persons. An invading army has landed in Kent; but the Duke of Wellington is not to be at the head of our forces if he divides the substance. And, after all this, Mr. Gladstone tells us that it would be wrong to imprison a Jew, a Mussulman, or a Budhist, for a day; because really a government cannot understand these matters, and ought not to meddle with questions which belong to the Church. A singular theologian, indeed, the government! So learned that it is competent to exclude Grotius from office for being a SemiPelagian, so unlearned that it is incompetent to fine a Hindoo peasant a rupee for going on a pilgrimage to Juggernaut. LORD MACAULAY: Gladstone on Church and State. We think that government, like every other contrivance of human wisdom, from the highest to the lowest, is likely to answer its main end best when it is constructed with a single view to that end. Mr. Gladstone, who loves Plato, will not quarrel with us for illustrating our proposition, after Plato's fashion, from the most familiar objects. Take cutlery, for example. A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve will certainly not shave so well as a razor, or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting which should also be a bank would, in all probability, exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company which should also be an infant society would, we apprehend, light the streets ill and teach the children ill. On this principle we think that government should be organized solely with a view to its main end; and that no part of its efficiency for that end should be sacrificed in order to promote any other end, however excellent. LORD MACAULAY: Gladstone on Church and State. CLASSIFICATION. What is set down by order and division doth demonstrate that nothing is left out or omitted, but all is there. LORD BACON. Hardly is there a similarity detected between two or three facts, than men hasten to extend it to all others. SIR W. HAMILTON. In nature it is not convenient to consider every difference that is in things, and divide them into distinct classes: this will run us into particulars, and we shall be able to establish no general truth. LOCKE. 115 Supposing, however, that something like moderation were visible in this political sermon, yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world, in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind. ployment of human agency in the completion Discouragements and Supports of the Ministers of the gospel in this quarter of the globe resemble the commanders of an army stationed in a conquered country, whose inhabitants, overawed and subdued, yield a partial obedience: they have sufficient employment in attempting to conciliate the affections of the natives, and in carrying into execution the orders and regulations of their Prince; since there is much latent disaffection, though no open rebellion, a strong partiality to their former rulers, with few attempts to erect the standard of revolt. ROBERT HALL: Address to Rev. Eustace Carey. He [the country parson] is not witty, or learned, or eloquent, but holy:-a character Hermogenes never dreamed of, and therefore he could give no precepts thereof. GEORGE HERBERT. We hold that God's clergy are a state which hath been, and will be as long as there is a church upon earth, necessary, by the plain word of God himself: a state whereunto the rest of God's people must be subject as touching things that appertain to their souls' health. HOOKER. It cannot enter any man's conceit to think it lawful that every man which listeth should take upon him charge in the church; and therefore a solemn admittance is of such necessity that without it there can be no church polity. HOOKER. Let it therefore be required, on both parts, at the hands of the clergy, to be in meanness of estate like the apostles; at the hands of the laity, to be as they who lived under the apostles. HOOKER. There is nothing noble in a clergyman but burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor any. thing poor in his profession but idleness and worldly spirit. LAW. The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belongs to intellectual superiority. LORD MACAULAY. It is better that men should be governed by priest craft than violence. LORD MACAULAY. Bishops are now unfit to govern, because of their learning. They are bred up in another law; they run to the text for something done among the Jews that concerns not England. 'Tis just as if a man would have a kettle and he would not go to our braziers to have it made as they would kettles, but he would have it made as Hiram made his brass-work who wrought in SELDEN. Solomon's Temple. God is the fountain of honour, and the conduit by which he conveys it to the sons of men are virtues and generous practices. Some, indeed, may please and promise themselves high matters from full revenues, stately palaces, court interests, and great dependences. But that ing in their profession, unspotted in their lives, which makes the clergy glorious, is to be knowactive and laborious in their charges, bold and vice in the face, though never so potent and resolute in opposing seducers, and daring to look illustrious; and, lastly, to be gentle, courteous, and compassionate to all. These are our robes and our maces, our escutcheons and highest titles of honour. SOUTH. But as there are certain mountebanks and quacks in physic, so there are much the same also in divinity. SOUTH. It is a sad thing when men shall repair to the ministry not for preferment but refuge; like malefactors flying to the altar only to save their lives. SOUTH. The truth is, mankind have an innate propensity, as to other errors, so, to that of endeavouring to serve God by proxy;-to commit to some distinct Order of men the care of their religious concerns, in the same manner as they confide the care of their bodily health to the physician, and of their legal transactions to the lawyer; deeming it sufficient to follow implicitly their directions, without attempting themselves to become acquainted with the mysteries of medicine or of law. For man, except when unusually depraved, retains enough of the image of his Maker to have a natural reverence for religion, and a desire that God should be worshipped; but, through the corruption of his nature, his heart is (except when divinely purified) too much alienated from God to take delight in serving Him. Hence the disposition men have ever shown to substitute the devotion of the priest for their own; to leave the duties of piety in his hands, and to let him serve God in their stead. This disposition is not so much the consequence, as itself the origin, of priestWHATELY: craft Errors of Romanism. | Comedy was satirical. Satire is best on the living. It was soon found that the best way to depress an hated character was to turn it into ridicule; and therefore the greater vices, which contemptible. Its passion, therefore, became in the beginning were lashed, gave place to the ridicule. Every writing must have its characteristic passion. What is that of comedy, if not ridicule? Comedy, therefore, is a satirical poem, representing an action carried on by dialogue, to excite laughter by describing ludicrous characters. See Aristotle. BURKE: Hints for an Essay on the Drama. Comedy... should be mere common life, and not one jot bigger. Every character should speak upon the stage, not only what it would utter in the situation there represented, but in the same manner in which it would express it. For which reason, I cannot allow rhymes in comedy, unless they were put into the mouth and came out of the mouth of a mad poet. LORD CHESTERFIELD: Letters to his Son, Jan. 23, 1752. It is not so difficult to fill a comedy with good repartee as might be at first imagined, if we consider how completely both parties are in the power of the author. The blaze of wit in The School for Scandal astonishes us less when we remember that the writer had it in his power to frame both the question and the answer; the reply and the rejoinder; the time and the place. He must be a poor proficient who cannot keep up the game when both the ball, the wall, and itself not to have any beauty in it at the same the racket are at his sole command. COLTON: Lacon. time that they would be considered as the greatest men of the age for having interpreted it. Comedy is a representation of common life, beautiful poems that have been composed by They will look with contempt on the most in low subjects. DRYDEN. In comedy there is somewhat more of the worse likeness to be taken, because it is often to produce laughter, which is occasioned by the sight of some deformity. DRYDEN. any of their contemporaries; but will lock themselves up in their studies for a twelvemonth together, to correct, publish, and expound such trifles of antiquity, as a modern author would be condemned for ADDISON: Tatler, No. 158. In the name of art as well as in the name of virtue, we protest against the principle that the Men of the strictest morals, severest lives, world of pure comedy is one into which no and the gravest professions, will write volumes moral enters. If comedy be an imitation, upon an idle sonnet, that is originally in Greek under whatever conventions, of real life, how is or Latin; give editions of the most immoral it possible that it can have no reference to the authors; and spin out whole pages upon the great rule which directs life, and to feelings various readings of a lewd expression. All which are called forth by every incident of life? that can be said in excuse for them is, that their If what Mr. Charles Lamb says were correct, works sufficiently show they have no taste of the inference would be that these dramatists did their authors, and that what they do in this not in the least understand the very first prin-kind, is out of their great learning, and not out ciples of their craft. Pure landscape-painting of any levity or lasciviousness of temper. into which no light or shade enters, pure portrait-painting into which no expression enters, are phrases less at variance with sound criticism than pure comedy into which no moral enters. But it is not the fact that the world of these dramatists is a world into which no moral enters. Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, Jan. 1841. The sentimental comedy still reigned, and Goldsmith's comedies were not sentimental. COMMENTATORS. There is another kind of pedant, who, with al Tom Folio's impertinences, hath greater superstructures and embellishments of Greek and Latin, and is still more insupportable than the other, in the same degree as he is more learned. Of this kind very often are editors, commentators, interpreters, scholiasts, and critics; and, in short, all men of deep learning without common sense. These persons set a greater value on themselves for having found out the meaning of a passage in Greek, than upon the author for having written it; nay, will allow the passage ADDISON: Tatler, No. 158. Shallow pedants cry up one another much more than men of solid and useful learning. To read the titles they give an editor, or collator of a manuscript, you would take him for the glory of the commonwealth of letters, and the wonder of his age, when perhaps upon examination you find that he has only rectified a Greek particle, or laid out a whole sentence in proper commas. They are obliged indeed to be thus lavish of their praises, that they may keep one another in countenance; and it is no wonder if a great deal of knowledge, which is not capable of making a man wise, has a natural tendency to make him vain and arrogant. ADDISON: Spectator, No. 105. I have often fancied with myself how enraged an old Latin author would be should he see the several absurdities in sense and grammar which are imputed to him by some or other of these various readings. In one he speaks nonsense; in another makes use of a word that was never heard of; and indeed there is scarce a solecism in writing which the best author is not guilty of, if we may be at liberty to read him in the words of some manuscript which the laborious editor has thought fit to examine in the prosecution of his work. ADDISON: Spectator, No. 470. We want short, sound, and judicious notes upon Scripture, without running into commonplaces, pursuing controversies, or reducing those notes to artificial method, but leaving them quite loose and native. For, certainly, as those wines which flow from the first treading of the grape are sweeter and better than those forced out by the press, which gives them the roughness of the husk and the stone, so are those doctrines best and sweetest which flow from a gentle crush of the Scriptures, and are not wrung into controversies and commonplaces. LORD BACON. Others spend their lives in remarks on language, or explanations of antiquities, and only afford materials for lexicographers and commentators, who are themselves overwhelmed by subsequent collectors, that equally destroy the memory of their predecessors by amplification, transposition, or contraction. Every new system of nature gives birth to a swarm of expositors whose business is to explain and illustrate it, and who can hope to exist no longer than the founder of their sect preserves his reputation. DR. S. JOHNSON: Rambler, No. 106. Scholiasts, those copious expositors of places, pour out a vain overflow of learning on passages plain and easy. LOCKE. Of those scholars who have disdained to confine themselves to verbal criticism few have been successful. The ancient languages have, generally, a magical influence on their faculties. "fools called into a circle by Greek They were invocations." The Iliad and neid were to them not books, but curiosities, or rather reliques. They no more admired those works for their merits than a good Catholic venerates the house of the Virgin at Loretto for its architecture. Whatever was classical was good. Homer was a great poet, and so was Callimachus. The epistles of Cicero were fine, and so were those of Phalaris. Even with respect to questions of evidence they fell into the same error. authority of all narrations, written in Greek or Latin, was the same with them. It never crossed their minds that the lapse of five hundred years, or the distance of five hundred leagues, could affect the accuracy of a narration;-that Livy could be a less veracious historian than Polybius;-or that Plutarch could know less about the friends of Xenophon than Xenophon himself. Deceived by the distance of time, they The seem to consider all the Classics as contemporaries; just as I have known people in England, deceived by the distance of place, take it for granted that all persons who live in India are about the health of an acquaintance at Calcutta. neighbours, and ask an inhabitant of Bombay It is to be hoped that no barbarian deluge will ever again pass over Europe. But should such a calamity happen, it seems not improbable that some future Rollin or Gillies will compile a history of England from Miss Porter's Scottish Chiefs, Miss Lee's Recess, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall's Memoirs. LORD MACAULAY: On the Athenian Orators, Aug. 1824. They show their learning uselessly, and make a long periphrasis on every word of the book they explain. DR. I. WATTS. The commentator's professed object is to explain, to enforce, to illustrate doctrines claimed WHEWELL. as true. of taste, of metaphysics, of morals, with far The spirit of commentation turns to questions more avidity than to physics. WHEWELL. COMMERCE. I am wonderfully delighted to see such a body of men thriving in their own private fortunes, and at the same time promoting the public stock; or, in other words, raising estates for their own families by bringing into their country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous. Nature seems to have taken a particular care to disseminate her blessings among the different regions of the world with an eye to this mutual intercourse and traffic among mankind, that the natives of the several parts of the globe might have a kind of dependence upon one another, and be united together by their common interest. ADDISON: Spectator, No. 69. There are not more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of nature, find work for the poor, and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great. . . . Trade, without enlarging the British territories, has given us a kind of additional empire: it has multiplied the number of the rich, made our landed estates. infinitely more valuable than they were formerly, and added to them an accession of other estates. as valuable as the lands themselves. ADDISON. You will be convinced, Sir, that I am not mistaken, if you reflect how generally it is true, that commerce, the principal object of that office, flourishes most when it is left to it-elf. Interest, the great guide of commerce, is not a blind one. It is very well able to find its own way; and its necessities are its best laws. BURKE: Speech on the Plan for Economical Reform, Feb. 11, 1780. |