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I shall not now dwell upon this portion of ethical literature. Confining ourselves to the works of English moralists, the most conspicuous is one with which many persons here are, doubtless, familiar-the Rule of Conscience, of Jeremy Taylor, published in 1660: and this celebrated book, like the preceding labours of English divines on similar subjects, is a treatise on the leading doctrines of morality; the authority and attributes of conscience being made the basis of the system. As, by the effect of the Reformation, Casuistry became Moral Theology, so in agreement with the unbroken tradition of Christian speculation, Moral Theology was established on Conscience as one of its foundation stones.

The study of the authority of Conscience formed an important part of Moral Theology. Abelard in the twelfth century had already laid down the leading principles of this subject, by teaching that the fundamental principle of morality is the will of God revealed to us by means of our Conscience, as well as by means of the Holy Scriptures. Jeremy Taylor's view is nearly the same with this. Many of you may recollect the manner in which the noble work of which I have spoken, the Rule of Conscience, or Ductor Dubitantium, opens:-"God governs the world by several attributes and emanations from himself. The nature of things is supported by his power, the events of things are ordered by his providence, and the actions of reasonable creatures are governed by laws; and these laws are put into a man's soul or mind as into a treasure or repository: some in his very nature, some in after actions, by education and positive sanction, by learning and custom." And having thus stated his general view, Taylor proceeds to illustrate it with his usual copiousness of learning and fancy*. "So that it was well said of

* In the Notes to the De Obl. Consc. Prælect. II. Sect. 1, I have remarked that Taylor has, in this passage, borrowed from Sanderson. The expression that Conscience is under God and above man, has been already, (page 2) quoted from Perkins.

St Bernard, Conscientia candor est lucis æternæ, et speculum sine macula Dei Majestatis, et imago bonitatis illius: 'Conscience is the brightness and splendour of the eternal light, a spotless mirror of the Divine Majesty, and the image of the goodness of God.' It is higher which Tatianus said of conscience, Μόνον εἶναι συνείδησιν Θεὸν— Conscience is God unto us:' which saying he had from Menander:

Βροτοῖς ἅπασι συνείδησις Θεός.

And it had in it this truth, that God, who is everywhere in several manners, hath the appellative of his own attributes and effects in the several manners of his presence.

'Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris.'

"That Providence," he adds, "which governs all the world, is nothing else but God present by his providence: and God is in our hearts by his laws; he rules us by his substitute, our conscience." He then proceeds to illustrate this in his own way: "God sits there, and gives us laws; and, as God said to Moses, I have made thee a God to Pharaoh, that is, to give him laws, and to minister in the execution of these laws, and to inflict angry sentences upon him; so hath God done to us, to give us laws, and to exact obedience to those laws; to punish them that prevaricate, and to reward the obedient. And therefore conscience is called οἰκεῖος φύλαξ, ένοικος Θεός, ἐπίτοπος δαίμων, ' the household guardian,' 'the domestic God,' the spirit or angel of the place.'

Taylor's work is entitled Ductor Dubitantium; but this would have been a more proper title for the collections of Cases of his predecessors of the Romish Church, who pretended to direct the conduct of their disciples, without removing the ground of their doubts. The Rule of Conscience ought rather to be, the Medela Dubitationum—the remedy for doubts; that which brings the Christian's mind to peace and confidence, and to a clear insight into its proper

course. The moral teacher's doctrine should be the light of day, which gives us a full view of our path-not a hand stretched to us to guide us blindly in the dark; and such, in fact, Taylor has tried to make his book. It is mainly concerned in giving directions for the instruction and confirmation of conscience, and in laying down broad general principles of morality. And although cases of conscience, or questions which may be so termed, are introduced into the work with wonderful fertility of invention, and acquaintance with preceding writers, these cases are brought in only as illustrations of the principles which he is employed in expounding. The Rule of Conscience is, in truth, a treatise on the leading doctrines of Morality; the authority and attributes of Conscience being made the basis of the system.

Thus, at this period, we may consider the authority of Conscience, its divine commission, and its due place as the basis of sound Morality, to be fully established and recognized among the great writers of our own Church. The period of which I now speak, the seventeenth century, though darkened with calamities and afflictions, in this as in other countries, was not inglorious or unfruitful with regard to that great subject of human speculation with which we are here concerned. Many pious and thoughtful men, disciplined by the needs, and rendered serious and wise by the events, of the time, laid before the world the trains of thought and reasoning which had thus been suggested to their minds. Hooker and Selden, Hammond and Sanderson, Usher and Chillingworth, had enriched English literature with solid and valuable productions in the first part of the century; and when the Church and the Monarchy had shown the depth of their foundations by the violence of the storms which they had survived, the general aspect of the speculative world, at least in England, was one which appeared to tend to comparative repose all the great fundamental questions of religion, law, and government, having been fully debated, and, to a certain

extent, decided or brought to a compromise. I shall therefore here make a pause, and consider the point at which men's minds had now arrived as one of the epochs of the history of morals in this country. Casuistry, as we have seen, had been succeeded by Moral Theology:-the decision of cases by authority had been replaced by an exposition of reasons :— and these reasons were sought in the Word of God and in the Conscience of man. This, therefore, we might term the Epoch of the acknowledged authority of Conscience as the ground of Morality.

That this repose was of short duration, or rather, that the promise of it was never fulfilled, I shall soon have occasion to show. It will appear, too, that this idea of Conscience, as the basis and principle of Morals, has not even yet been completely and rigorously worked out into its systematic form and consequences. But these are parts of the

subject on which I must treat hereafter.

During the period of which we now speak, cases of conscience, discussed in the way which I have endeavoured to describe, had a strong interest, not for divines and speculative men only, but for all classes. Such discussions held somewhat of the place of the graver popular literature of the present day; being, like that, the expression of the natural effort which man, when his mental powers and tastes are cultivated, constantly exerts to reconcile practice with theory ;to understand what is, and to produce what ought to be. We find many evidences of this popularity of Casuistry in the seventeenth century. The very nature of the questions treated by Hall and Sanderson is a proof of this. son's decisions were for the most part delivered as answers to questions proposed to him by persons really troubled in their consciences. At the end of one of the most elaborate of his cases (The Case of Unlawful Love*) he says, "In all

Sander

* A question of the obligation of a promise of a second marriage made during the existence of the first.

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z this discourse, I take upon me not to write edicts, but to give my advice (being requested thereto by a reverend [ friend)"; and he adds that he cannot possibly be moved by personal considerations respecting the parties, since, SO God is my witness whom I desire to serve, I had not any intimation at all given me, neither yet have so much as the least conjecture in the world, who either of them both may be." Sanderson was much admired by his unhappy master, Charles the First. When he took leave of the king, in his last attendance on him, in the Isle of Wight, his majesty requested him to apply himself to the writing of cases of conscience: to which his answer was, that "he was now grown old and unfit to write cases of conscience." The king replied, "It was the simplest thing he ever heard from him, for no young man was fit to be a judge, or write cases of conscience."

The treatise De Juramenti Obligatione was translated into English by Charles, during his confinement in the Isle of Wight. And one of the accusations commonly made against that unfortunate monarch by his enemies is, that he cultivated and encouraged the study of Casuistry. But it is easy to find marks of popularity of the subject in other quarters. The treating such subjects in the vernacular language, instead of the language of the learned, was of itself an evidence that it had become the subject of attention with a more diffused and varied audience. In 1658, when, like the rest of the royalist clergy, Sanderson was in great poverty, Boyle engaged him by a salary to write Cases of Conscience. Edward Lord Denny, Baron of Waltham, afterwards Earl of Norwich, was the friend and patron of Perkins while alive, and bestowed kindness upon his family after his death; and the same person also gave to Hall, at an early period of his life, the living of Waltham Cross. The collection of Perkins's Works is dedicated to Lord Waltham, as Sanderson's Lectures are to Boyle.

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