But he had wider views. He desired the diffusion of a sound Christian
education, and did the best that could be done by one man to promote it,
by spending his private fortune in founding St. Paul’s school, which he
characteristically left in charge of a body of laymen. He longed to see a
widespread preaching in the vernacular, and believed that the bishops
should show an example in this clerical duty. It is probable that he
wished the whole service to be in the vernacular, for it was made a charge
against him that he taught his congregation to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in
English. Besides, he had clearly grasped the thought, too often forgotten
by theologians of all schools, that the spiritual facts and forces which
lie at the roots of the Christian life are one thing, and the intellectual
conceptions which men make to explain these facts and forces are another,
and a much less important thing; that men are able to be Christians and to
live the Christian life because of the former and not because of the
latter. He saw that, while dogma has its place, it is at best the alliance
of an immortal with a mortal, the union between that which is unchangeably
divine and the fashions of human thought which change from one age to
another. For this reason he thought little of the Scholastic Theology of
his days, with its forty-three propositions about the nature of God and
its forty-five about the nature of man before and after the Fall, each of
which had to be assented to at the risk of a charge of heresy. “Why do you
extol to me such a man as Aquinas? If he had not been so very arrogant,
indeed, he would not surely so rashly and proudly have taken upon himself
to define all things. And unless his spirit had been somewhat worldly, he
would not surely have corrupted the whole teaching of Christ by mixing it
with his profane philosophy.” The Scholastic Theology might have been
scientific in the thirteenth century, but the “scientific” is the human
and changing element in dogma, and the old theology had become clearly
unscientific in the sixteenth. Therefore he was accustomed to advise young
theological students to keep to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed, and let
divines, if they liked, dispute about the rest; and he taught Erasmus to
look askance at Luther’s reconstruction of the Augustinian theology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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