[?] “In Opuscula at B.O., N has note: ‘only partly JHN.’ N’s list at the B.O. gives ‘possibly R.F. Wilson, co-author.’”—Blehl.
[British Critic, vol. 26, October 1839.]
We do not intend here to make any formal examination of Mr. Taylor’s work, though the first part of it figures in the heading of the article. It is not yet finished; and we are not sure where it will end, and what turns and windings it will pursue meanwhile. We see many marks of inconsistency in him already, as might be expected in one who is rather writing against something which he dislikes than possessed of any particular liking for any thing very definite instead of it. His second fasciculus has in some points contradicted his first; and his first contradicts itself. He may be considered then at present under a course of self-refutation; and perhaps like some wonderful performers in a less dignified line, he may finish his exhibition by eating up himself, and save us the trouble of undertaking him. At first we had proposed to leave him for the present to his own tender mercies, and wished him no worse enemy than himself. We consider we understand his position in the controversy perfectly well; he has come to the light of day in his own time, as leaves in the spring; and in his own time he will become sear, crumple up and drift, as other treat theologians, who for a while have been in request during the pending controversy. We had intended then to reserve him; but being not quite sure he will keep, we shall say just a very little now upon his first part, and that because it was our intention otherwise to notice a composition, the subject of which is closely connected with what he has selected for his special animadversion in the writings of the Fathers.
The life of Nicolas Ferrar attracts us, by all the eloquence of facts, to certain saintly principles and practices, from which Mr. Taylor would fain frighten us, by all the eloquence of words. The latter gentleman indeed is an alarmist of the first water; nor does he diminish his claims to be considered so, because he writes in a professedly candid tone, and with sufficient freedom from the alarm he seeks to inspire to be able to cultivate the graces of style. He does, undoubtedly, evidence considerable talent all through his work; what, indeed, but a consciousness of power, and a desire, like Milo, of showing it, could have induced him to undertake any thing so difficult as the particular thesis in which he has indulged in his first number? Any candid person, on hearing what it is, will feel at once that victory, under such circumstances, is not necessary to make a great general. On such a field of battle it is a great thing to have fought; it is a great thing to have retreated safely. It is a feather in the cap even to have hit upon such a position, that is, in the case of a Protestant; for we believe it is not new ground to Romanists. This ground is no other than this, that Christianity, as exhibited in the Church of Rome during what are sometimes called the dark ages and downwards, is, in what the writer considers its essential characters, an improvement upon the Christianity of the Primitive Church; not meaning thereby the Church of the fifth or sixth centuries, but of the age of Ignatius and Cyprian. We have no wish to be thought to misrepresent, which certainly will be our lot, if we do not forthwith back up this statement with some quotations from the author; which shall now be done.
“What, then, I am peculiarly desirous to place in a conspicuous position, is the fact that, instead of a regular and slow development of error, there was a very early expansion of false and pernicious notions, in their mature proportions, and these attended by some of their worst fruits. This, then, is the very point and hinge of our argument; and in making good the weighty allegation, I shall use not only all requisite diligence of research, but, as I trust, a strict and conscientious impartiality. It may be, indeed, that later writers express themselves in more fulsome terms, or in worse taste than the earlier, and it may be that the popes and saints of the middle ages exhibit less acquaintance with the classic models of style than was the boast of the well-taught doctors of the third and fourth centuries; but in the substance of their religious system, and in extent of moral obliquity, they do not, I venture to say, a whit surpass them.”—p. 66.
“This, then, is the gist of our present argument—that there is absolutely nothing in the ripe popery of the times of Saint Dominic, (certain elaborate modes of proceeding excepted,) which is not to be found in the Christianity of the times of Cyprian or of Tertullian.”—p. 71.
“There is no degradation of the intellect, no bondage of the moral sentiments, no fatal substitution of forms for realities; there is no ineffable drivelling belonging to the middle age monkery, that may not be matched, to the full, in the monkery of the bright times of Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine.”—p. 99.