St. Paul and Protestantism, with an Essay on Puritanism and the Church of EnglandArnold, Matthew
Religion
St. Paul and Protestantism, with an Essay on Puritanism and the Church of England
Arnold, Matthew
Church of England -- Controversial literature; Paul, the Apostle, Saint; Protestantism; Puritans
So when Hooker says most truly: 'Our belief in the Trinity, the
co-eternity of the Son of God with his Father, the proceeding of the
Spirit from the Father and the Son, with other principal points the
necessity whereof is by none denied, are notwithstanding in Scripture
nowhere to be found by express literal mention, only deduced they are
out of Scripture by collection;'--when Hooker thus points, out, what is
undoubtedly the truth, that these Church-doctrines are developments, we
may add this other truth equally undoubted,--that being _philosophical_
developments, they are developments of a kind which the Church has never
yet had the right conditions for making adequately, any more than it has
had the conditions for developing out of what is said in the Book of
Genesis a true philosophy of nature, or out of what is said in the Book
of Daniel, a true philosophy of history. It matters nothing whether the
scientific truth was there, and the problem was to extract it; or not
there, and the problem was to understand why it was not there, and the
relation borne by what was there to the scientific truth. The Church had
no means of solving either the one problem or the other. And this from
no fault at all of the Church, but for the same reason that she was
unfitted to solve a difficulty in Aristotle's _Physics_ or Plato's
_Timæus_, and to determine the historical value of Herodotus or Livy;
simply from the natural operation of the law of development, which for
success in philosophy and criticism requires certain conditions, which
in the early and mediæval Church were not to be found.
And when the movement of philosophy and criticism came with the
Renascence, this movement was almost entirely outside the Churches,
whether Catholic or Protestant, and not inside them. It worked in men
like Descartes and Bacon, and not in men like Luther and Calvin; so that
the doctrine of these two eminent personages, Luther and Calvin, so far
as it was a philosophical and critical development from Scripture, had
no more likelihood of being an adequate development than the doctrine of
the Council of Trent. And so it has gone on to this day. Philosophy and
criticism have become a great power in the world, and inevitably tend to
alter and develop Church-doctrine, so far as this doctrine is, as to a
great extent it is, philosophical and critical. Yet the seat of the
developing force is not in the Church itself, but elsewhere; its
influences filter strugglingly into the Church, and the Church slowly
absorbs and incorporates them. And whatever hinders their filtering in
and becoming incorporated, hinders truth and the natural progress of
things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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