38. These perplexities were not confined to protestant theology. The church of Rome, strenuous to maintain the tenets of Augustin, and yet to condemn those who did the same, has been charged with exerting the plenitude of her infallibility to enforce the belief of an incoherent syncretism. She had condemned Baius, as giving too much efficacy to grace; she was on the point of condemning Molina for giving too little. Both Clement VIII. and Paul V. leaned to the Dominicans against the Jesuits in this controversy; but the great services and influence of the latter order prevented a decision which would have humbled them before so many adversaries. It may, nevertheless be said that the Semi-pelagian, or Arminian doctrine, though consonant to that of the Jesuits, was generally ill received in the church of Rome, till the opposite hypothesis, that of Augustin and Calvin, having been asserted by one man in more unlimited propositions than had been usual, a reaction took place, that eventually both gave an apparent triumph to the Molinist party, and endangered the church itself by the schism to which the controversy gave rise. The Augustinus of Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, was published in 1640, and in the very next year was censured at Rome. But, as the great controversy that sprung out of the condemnation of this book belongs more strictly to the next period, we shall defer it for the present. |Socinus. Volkelius.| 39. The Socinian academy at Racow which drew to itself several proselytes from other countries, acquired considerable importance in theological literature after the beginning of the century. It was not likely that a sect, regarded with peculiar animosity, would escape in the general disposition of the catholic party in Poland to oppress the dissidents whom they had long feared; the Racovian institution was broken up and dispersed in 1638, though some of its members continued to linger in Poland for twenty years longer. The Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, published at Amsterdam (in the title-page, Irenopolis), in 1658, contains chiefly the works of Socinian theologians who belong to this first part of the century. The Prælectiones Theologicæ of Faustus Socinus himself, being published in 1609, after his death, fall within this class. They contain a systematic theology according to his scheme, and are praised by Eichhorn for the acuteness and depth they often display.[90] In these, among his other deviations from the general orthodoxy of Christendom, Socinus astonished mankind by denying the evidences of natural religion, resolving our knowledge even of a deity into revelation. This paradox is more worthy of those who have since adopted it, than of so acute a reasoner as Socinus.[91] It is, in fact, not very congenial to the spirit of his theology, which, rejecting all it thinks incompatible with reason as to the divine attributes, should at least have some established notions of them upon rational principles.