[British Critic, Oct. 1838]
It has been long observed, and lamented, that rich as our theology is, both in writers and in works, we have very few large systematic treatises for the use of our clergy and of divinity students, such as abound in other religious communities. We have no ecclesiastical historian as Fleury or Mosheim, no fully furnished polemic as Bellarmine, and no dogmatic writer whom we can compare to Petavius or Vasquez. Pearson’s Work indeed on the Apostles’ Creed is a methodical treatise, but not even the lapse of nearly three centuries has given us a standard expositor of the Thirty-nine Articles. Our theology has proceeded in another direction. As a living writer has observed, it has been called forth by the pressure of external and occasional circumstances. For the most part it has not been the production of men detached from secular connexions, or blessed with the solitude of the cloister,—men who lived for the completion of great works, and whose employments were determined from within; but of those who had the charge of parishes or dioceses, or were confronted with opposition, or stimulated by contemporaneous events. There are indeed some great exceptions, such as Pearson’s Comment, already mentioned, Bingham’s Antiquities, and Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium;—but on the whole our divines have written, because they were obliged to write, and so far as they were obliged. They have written answers to particular assailants, have grown out of pamphlets into folios, and, like great musicians, have worked out profound movements from subjects which the chance of the moment offered. Thus the works of Jewell, Bramhall, Horsley, and Waterland, are in great measure the gradual increase of controversy with a disputant, developing itself in fresh and fresh replies, handling and elaborating the same matter again and again. Hooker is almost all through his writings engaged with Travers, Cartwright, or their fellows; Bull in his more considerable works with Petavius, Episcopius, or Luther. Stillingfleet often requires a comment in the words of adversaries for his illustration. Leslie is controversial from first to last.
This peculiarity of English divinity has its advantages and its evils. There is in consequence vastly more character and life in it than in the divinity of other schools. Men wrote because they felt,—when their feelings were excited, and their hearts thrown open. About Hooker there is the charm of nature and reality; he discourses, not as a theologian, but as a man; and we see in him what otherwise might have been hidden, poetry and philosophy informing his ecclesiastical matter. In spite of his method and exactness, he preaches as well as proves, and his discussions are almost sermons. Bull, again, is, beyond his other traits, remarkable for discursiveness. He is full of digressions, which can only be excused because they are so instructive and beautiful. If he is often rhetorical, he is never dry; and never tires, except from the abundance of his matter. The same remark applies mutatis mutandis to Pearson’s Vindiciæ and Wall’s Infant Baptism. These are certainly advantages, and yet the advantages are not less. Works which have been called forth by particular circumstances require a knowledge of those circumstances to understand them. The late Bishop Lloyd used to say with much truth, that if we did but know the respective occasions which led St. Paul to write his Epistles, we should at once have the best of comments upon them. The case is much the same as regards our theological writers. A knowledge of the history of their times is one main step towards understanding them. This is a considerable difficulty in the way of making use of them. They are uninviting on first taking up, as requiring some effort of mind in the reader, as alluding to matters of which perhaps he knows little, or as plunging at once into a subject of which he has to learn the rudiments. Again, it is difficult to find in them any particular point which we may want to see discussed. We cannot be sure that the subject will be exhausted, or if so, in what order; before we can make them books of reference, we must have mastered them from beginning to end. And then moreover the most important parts often come in by the bye, where one would least expect it, like the treasures of nature, lying in veins and clefts of the rock, not sorted and set out to advantage as in a market. All this has a tendency to perplex the mind of the student; and in fact nothing is more common than to hear it asked by clergymen, when urged to give attention to theology, “Where am I to begin? how am I to get into the subject? I open a book, and read some pages, and shut it in despair of making anything of my experiment.” And even when a student has mastered some great work of our theology, the idea of its subject left upon his mind is often not more complete and adequate than that (to use a familiar illustration) which a ride across country gives of the relative position and importance of the tracts passed over, or which a stroll along green lanes affords of the lie of the neighbouring fields and villages. An experienced eye will be instructed, but a stranger will be at once enchanted and perplexed, and will either recollect little of what has passed before him, or will regard it as a picture rather than a reality.