[British Critic, vol. 18, April 1836.]
In this volume Mr. Le Bas has added to those claims upon the gratitude of Churchmen, which he has successively made of late years, by stimulating at once and supplying the thirst for ecclesiastical history, ignorance of which may safely be accounted one of the most deplorable evils of this time. No one can judge of the exact measure of evil in a deficiency, who is not aware that there is any deficiency at all. Those, then, who know nothing whatever of the history of Christianity in past times, whose insight into the course of Providence for 1800 years is confined to some slight acquaintance with chronology, or with the names of such sects and parties as prevail de facto in this day, wilt remain contented with the present platform of things, and will take every event in the ecclesiastical world as it comes, without capacity or anxiety to form any definite judgment about it. To them one opinion about existing matters is as good as another, and none good for much, except it be to afford subject for conversation, or lead to this or that immediate secular result. Ecclesiastical changes or movements ate regarded merely as they affect local or personal interests or political parties. But let a man know ever so little of the history of former times, and he will at once discern, if he has any portion of a serious and thoughtful mind, that he is under a course or dispensation of things, as truly though not as visibly divine, as the Jewish; that no event which happens to the Church stands by itself, but arises from the past, influences the future, and bears upon the eternal destinies of thousands upon thousands. Under these circumstances the real condition both of himself and of his generation is brought home to him; he and they are like travellers on a desert without sun or landmark, chart or compass; they do not know how they came there, or whither they are tending, so that every step is fearful lest it should be in the wrong direction. For instance, at present we are evidently working out principles and events of three centuries old, elements of good and evil, which have to be sifted, separated, repressed, fostered, as the case may be, and have employed in this very work our great Divines and Churchmen ever since. Popery and Puritanism are still alive and struggling for the ascendancy, and must be resisted by the same measures, or at least on the same principles, on which Whitgift or Hooker resisted them in their day; and, if we do not know their faces when we fall in with them, and are surprised and over-reached in consequence, it will assuredly not be for want of opportunities of information, if we would employ them.
A curious and almost incredible instance of this exceeding ignorance as regards facts, is afforded by certain strange and not unfrequent mistakes in our treatment of standard authors, viz. in citing, as their own, not their own text, but the positions which they have undertaken to refute, and building an argument thence as if on the vantage-ground of their authority. It has been confessed by the representatives of the late respected Mr. Scott, of Aston Sandford, that for years and years his “Force of Truth” contained as Hooker’s a passage of Cartwright’s which Hooker had undertaken to refute; and another modern writer might be named who is open to the charge of having, in all innocence, taken a similar liberty with the same great divine. Again, it is said that the popular duodecimo editions of Pascal’s Thoughts contain passages which he had quoted, we believe from some French author, for the sake of refuting. Now it is no great crime to mistake Bull for Pearson, or Cave for Bingham, or Basil for Chrysostom, but to mistake Augustine for Pelagius, or Hooker for Cartwright, certainly does require an explanation, and total and self-satisfied ignorance is the kindest explanation we can suggest. Writers now-a-days open the volumes of our old divinity, not to know their contents or gain instruction from them, but to see if there be any thing there which will tell in favour of their own views. They turn over the pages, and, if any passage strike them as apposite, down it goes in their note-book, and is forthwith published without any solicitude about its why or whereabout, its history, its parentage, its occasion, or its context.
Mistakes about the Middle Ages afford another pregnant evidence both of our ignorance of history and of our resignation under it. A Turkish Minister, on the news of a battle between Russians and Persians, is said to have asked his informant, “what it was to the Sublime Porte whether the dog beat the hog or the hog the dog?” And like his is the indolent superciliousness with which a pseudo-protestantism regards the dealings of God with his Church through a whole decade of centuries. Were it not that we cannot help dating our letters 1836, it might be suspected that we thought Christianity a few hundred years old, or that, like the Persian monarch, by dipping our head into water and lifting it out again, we had annihilated long periods which once had an existence. Or, as the other alternative, we seem to deny, that the Gospel had ever really a beginning, or Christianity founders; as if it had existed as an opinion, or rather as a hundred discordant opinions, from time immemorial, derived from a volume written in English, and set up in types, and sold in Earl Street, Blackfriars, from time immemorial. The fact that it has existed and been dispensed in divers times and places is above the reach of our present religionists. Certainly they would feel indignant at being confused with their ancestors of four centuries since, nay with the witch-finders and astrologists of a more recent date; yet they feel no conscience at throwing together in one the eras, persons, and exploits of more extended and not less eventful periods. The respective characteristics of this or that series of Popes, the varying relations of Church and State in this or that country, the differences of ecclesiastical policy between an Henry and an Edward, are subjects quite beyond the range of their sensibilities; and they are satisfied that Popery being one and the same in all times, what happened in one century may be fairly fastened in condemnation upon the character of the next.