The Press. — London, England, 1855-06-23 00:00:00

- 598 A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination. By J. B. Mozley, 8.D., Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. London : Murray. Ix strong contrast to the wordy, nerveless Burnett Treatise noticed in our columns last week is this masterly argument by Mr. Mozley, on St. Augustine's doctrine of Pre destination. The design is to fully set forth that doctrine, as it is to be collected from a diligent study of Augustine's writings, to exhibit the leading views which have been held upon it from his day to the present time, and hence to discuss and elucidate those per plexing problems which have most severely exercised the minds of divines and meta physicians, and which Milton describes the fallen angels as unable to solve, finding " No " end in wandering mazes lost." Mr. Mozley states the whole case of what he calls " contradictory truths " with masterly force and clearness. He shirks no difficulty. He has no positive system of his own to set up, and he is, therefore, enabled to say that all systems for the reconcilement of ideas essentially conflicting are imperfect, and never can be established by human reasoning. On the contradiction between our ideas of the Divine Power and of human free will it is said : The two ideas of the Divine Power and free will are, in short, two great tendencies of thought inherent in our minds, which contradict each other, and can never be united or brought to a common goal ; and which, there- fore, inasmuch as the essential condition of absolute truth is consistency with other truth, can never, in the present state of our faculties, become absolute truths, but must remain for ever contradictory tendencies of thought, going on side by side till they are lost sight of and disappear in the haze of our conceptions, like two parallel straight lines which go on to infinity without meeting. With equal explicitness is stated the diffi culty of reconciling the fact of sin in the world with our conceptions of the Divine Power and Divine Goodness : God wills the salvation of men on the condition that they are good, which will, if they are bad, is not opposed to the evil of their punishment. The evil of punish ment, then, is here accounted for, and made to agree with the Divine Power, because made to agree with the Divine Will; but what account is given of the evil of that sin which is the reason of punishment? This evil is passed over altogether. Yet it is a plain evil which takes place in the universe, and we must either say that the will of God is opposed to it or not ; the former alternative being appa rently inconsistent with the Divine Power, the latter with the Divine Goodness. The difficulty put off at one stage thus meets us at another; and an evil remains which we eannot without impiety assert not to be opposed to the Divine Will, and the existence of which therefore is incon sistent apparently with the Divine Power. The argument that evil is only apparent in the world, which has found so much favour with some philosophers and some philosophic divines in our day, is rejected by Mr. Nlozley as inconsistent, not only with Scripture, but with human consciousness and the facts of existence : Understanding sin, then, in the sense of depravity and wickedness, the general fact of human sinfulness in this sense certainly requires some law of sin in our nature as its explanation; such a law as is asserted in the doctrine of original sin. But while such a fact must be allowed as a proof of the doctrine of original sin, it must at the same time be remembered, that the assertion of general de. pravity and wickedness is a very grave assertion to make respecting the human race. It is an assertion, however, w'iich rests on a ground of actual observation and expe rience, confirmed by the authority of Scripture, and is true in two different ways. First, every man is depraved in the sense of having vile, selfish, and proud desires, which have a certain power over him, and occupy and fill his mind with sufficient strength and frequency to constitute a depraved condition of mind. A certain tendency to evil is indeed no more than what is necessary to constitute a state of trial, and does not show depravity or corruption in the moral being. But it is evident that evil desire, in the degree in which it exists in human nature, is more than such a tendency as this, and is in itself a disease ; inasmuch as men feel it as some thing sinful in itself, independent of its gratification. Teat even the best of men, with this strength of evil desire residing in him, by a perfectstandard, and it must be seen that he is a corrupt being, whom we can only think of at all as good by a kind of anticipation, regarding this as a transient condition of mind, of which he is one day to be relieved. In the sense, then, of having concupiscence, which hath of itself the nature of sin, all mankind are depraved. Secondly, the generality of mankind are depraved in the sense of actual bad life and conduct; as the former was a fact of inward experience, this latter being a fact of obser vation. The wickedness of the generality of mankind was acknowledged even by the heathen, and has been gene rally admitted. It is proved, therefore, in the only way in which a general fact admits of being proved, viz., by large, THE PRESS. general, and consentient observation ; observation, more over, which, when once made, keeps its ground, and meets with comparatively little contradiction. It is, moreover, strongly asserted in Scripture, which refers to it, however, as a known and ascertained fact, rather than professes to reveal it in the first instance. Such being the case, it is evident., even supposing particular persons should say that their own observation had been otherwise, that their indi vidual testimony is no counterbalance to the general ob servation of mankind. Human suffering is regarded in the same way as a great fact beyond all dispute : The common spectacle of human misery, however, has, in fact, impressed the religious portion of the world in all ages, Christian or l'agan, in the latter way ; and the general feeling of mankind has connected it with some deep though undefined root of sin in the human race. The great mysteries of God's foreknow ledge and man's free will ; of the existence of sin and of Divine Omnipotence ; of human misery and of the Divine Goodness ; being admitted, Mr. Mozley's conclusion is, that no reasoning can reconcile thorn, and that they must be received as " contradictory truths ": Upon this abstract idea, then, of the Divine Power, as an unlimited power, rose up the Augustinian doctrine of Pre destination and grace ; while upon the abstract idea of free will, as an unlimited faculty, rose up the Pelagian theory. Had men perceived, indeed, more clearly and really than they have done, their ignorance as human crea tures, and the relation in which the human reason stands to the great truths involved in this question, they might have saved themselves the trouble of this whole contro versy. They would have seen that this question cannot be determined absolutely, one way or another; that it lies between two great contradictory truths, neither of which can be set aside, or made to give way to the other; two opposing tendencies of thought, inherent in the human mind, which go on side by side, and are able to be held and maintained together, although thus opposite to each other, because they are only incipient, and not final and complete truths ;—the great truths, I mean, of the Divine Power on the one aide, and man's free will, or his originality as an agent, on the other. And this is, in fact, the mode in which this question is settled by the practical common sense of mankind. For what do the common phrases em ployed in ordinary conversation and writing upon this question—the popular and received modes of deciding it whenever it incidentally turns up—amount to but this solution ? Such phrases, I mean, as that we must hold man's free will together with God's foreknowledge and predestination, although we do not see how they agree ; and other like formulae? Such forms of language for de ciding the question evidently proceed upon the acknow ledgement of two contradictory truths on this subject, which can not be reconciled, but must be held together in inconsistency. They imply that the doctrine of predesti nation and the doctrine of free will are both true, and that one who would hold the truth mils: hold both. The plain natural reason of mankind is thus always large and com prehensive—not afraid of inconsistency, but admitting all truth which presents itself to its notice. It is only when minds begin to philosophise that they grow narrow—that there begins to be felt the appeal to consistency, and with it the temptation to exclude truths. Then begins the pride of argument, the ingenuity of construction, the " carrying out " of ideas and principles into successive consequences, which, as they become more and more remote, and leave the original truth at a distance, also carry the mind of the reasoner himself away from the first and natural aspect of that truth, as imperfect and partial, to an artificial aspect of it as whole and exclusive. This is a passage worthy of any of our great masters of thought, and carries the mind back to the massive ideas and nervous expression of Barrow (much less read at the present day titan he deserves to be) and Butler. But at the same time we cannot think the phrase " contradictory truths " a happy one. It is a solecism in language. Irreconcileable truths the mind may form some conception of, but the very notion of contradictory truths it instinc Lively rejects. In one of the passages quoted above, these " contradictory truths " are better described as " parallel straight lines which go on to in " finity without meeting " In such lines there is nothing contradictory or opposing. But a more correct image may be drawn from mathematics. There are the lines of the hyperbola and its assymptotes. Nakedly stated, it seems incredible that lines could approach each other to infinity without meet ing, yet this is demonstrably true. Were it not, however, in the class of mathematical truths, which can be stated and established point by point, it would he thought as irre concileable with reason as any of the great mysteries rather inconsiderately termed by Mr. Mozley " contradictory truths." In other parts of his Essay Mr. Mozley draws a distinction between what he terms ab solute and imperfect truths. Of such truths we have only a half conception—such, for ex ample, as eternity in regard to time, and in finity in regard to space. Of this class of truths in philosophy, upon which the doctrine SATURDAY, of fatalism is raised, there are two mainly conspicuous : First, the maxim that every event must have a cause, and, secondly, the idea of the Divine Power; the first being a physical, the second a religious assumption, but both alike forming premises from which a scheme of absolute neces sity in human actions is logically inferred. On our idea of Divine Omnipotence he remarks : But what is this truth of the Divine Power or Omnipo tence, as we apprehend it? Does it belong to the class of full and distinct, or of incomplete truths? Certainly to the latter, for there appears at once a coin ter truth to it, in the existence of moral evil which must be referred to some cause other than God, as well as in that sense of our own originality to which I have just alluded. The Divine Omnipotence, then, is a truth which we do not under stand—mysterious, imperfect truth, and, therefore, cannot be used b 3 the predestinarian as the premises of an abso lute doctrine, but only as that of an indefinite or condi tional one. Elsewhere he says of the idea of the Divine Power entertained by St. Augustine and his school : They commenced with an assumption, which no modern philosopher would allow, that the Divine Power must be au absolutely unlimited thing. That the Divine Power is not liable to any foreign control is a principle which every one must admit who believes properly in a Deity ; but that there is no intrinsic limit to it in the possibilities of things would not be admitted, in the present state of philosophy, in which this whole subject is properly under stood to be out of the range of human reason. The Divine Omnipotence must be admitted practically and in every sense which can be wanted for the purpose of religion ; but we have not faculties for speculation upon its real nature. This is just, and here the subject must rest- We must be content with admitting the con ception of the Divine Power for all practical purposes, without attempting to say (which would be highly unphilosophical, and, we think, unscriptural) that there are no necessi ties in things which may have a tendency to thwart or limit that power. When we speak of the Divine Omnipotence indeed, consideration will show that we ex press what must be an imperfect idea; for we can conceive of no power which is absolutely free from any kind of control in its exercise. It is not irreverence to say that God must be bound by the laws of His own Being. If All- Good he could not be unjust. Though free to work all His will, that will must be in harmony with His Being. The language of Scripture on the subject of Predestination is, Mr. Mozley thinks, very naturally inconsistent, as no positive assertion on the subject can be made : Were the nature of all troth such as that it could be ex pressed—that is, put into statement or proposition, to the effect that such is or is not the case, explicitness and con sistency would be always requisite for language ; because real expression is necessarily explicit and consistent with itself. All intelligible truths—matters of fact, for example —are capable of expression, and, therefore, in the case of such truths, explicit statement is necessary, and contradic tion is ruinous. But it is not the case that all truth can be expressed. Some troths of revealed religion cannot be stated without contradiction to other truths, of which reason or the same revelation informs us, and, therefore, cannot be stated positively and absolutely without becoming, in the very act of statement, false. The truth of absolute predestination cannot be stated without contradiction to the Divine Justice and man's free agency. It belongs, then, to that class of truths which does not admit of statement. It is an imperfect truth— that is, a truth imperfectly apprehended by us. There is a tendency, as has been said, to a truth on this subj ect; hut this tendency never becomes a conclusion ; and an idea which is true, as far as it does advance, never does ad- vance to any natural limit. The intellect stops short and rests in suspense, not seeing its way, and the line of thought, though it may admit of such a completion as will make it a truth, is not a truth yet, and cannot be made a proposition. lint with respect to this kind of truth which is only in tendency, and does not admit of statement, if anything is to be said at all, such contradictory or double language only can be employed as Scripture does employ on the subject of predestination. Consistent language would do more than indeed the very reverse of what was wanted, inas much as it 'mild state positively. Inconsistency could certainly be avoided by saying nothing at all,hnt that mode of avoiding inconsistency could not be adopted here, be cause there is a defective and incomplete truth to be ex pressed in some such way as is practicable. In the concluding chapter the author has some most impressive and beautiful passages on the value of tolerance in all controversy. But, lie says Such is the imperfection even of the human mind, that under Providence, a certain narrowness of judgment often works for good, and seems to favour practical energy and zeal. This is true. The most philosophic minds are usually wanting in energetic action. To spe.