70. The sermons of Donne have sometimes been praised in late times. They are undoubtedly the productions of a very ingenious and a very learned man; and two folio volumes by such a person may be expected to supply favourable specimens. In their general character, they will not appear, I think, much worthy of being rescued from oblivion. The subtlety of Donne, and his fondness for such inconclusive reasoning, as a subtle disputant is apt to fall into, runs through all of these sermons at which I have looked. His learning he seems to have perverted in order to cull every impertinence of the fathers and schoolmen, their remote analogies, their strained allegories, their technical distinctions; and to these he has added much of a similar kind from his own fanciful understanding. In his theology, Donne appears often to incline towards the Arminian hypotheses, which, in the last years of James and the first of his son, the period in which these sermons were chiefly preached, had begun to be accounted orthodox at court; but I will not vouch for his consistency in every discourse. Much, as usual in that age, is levelled against Rome: Donne was conspicuously learned in that controversy; and though he talks with great respect of antiquity, is not induced by it, like some of his Anglican contemporaries, to make any concession to the adversary.[130] [130] Donne incurred some scandal by a book entitled Biathanatos, and considered as a vindication of suicide. It was published long after his death, in 1651. It is a very dull and pedantic performance, without the ingenuity and acuteness of paradox; distinctions, objections, and quotations from the rabble of bad authors whom he used to read, fill up the whole of it. It is impossible to find a less clear statement of argument on either side. No one would be induced to kill himself by reading such a book, unless he were threatened with another volume. |Of Jeremy Taylor.|