The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-04-10 00:00:00

DEAN STANLEY ON CALVIN, GALILEO,

AND SHAKESPEARE.

On Friday afternoon in last week, Dean Stanley delivered
an address at Dundee, under the auspices of the University
Club, on the subject of the mutual relations ef Religion,
Science, and Literature, the following report of which is
from The Times :

The Dean, who was enthusiastically] received, said '
that in dealing with this somewhat dry subject he had
thought it best, partly for his own convenience, partly
for their pleasure, to place it before them in a concrete
form. Great ideas and great doctrines, and the
mutual relation of these doctrines were best under-
stood—or, at any rate, best appreciated, when they
appeared before us in flesh and blood. And he
proposed, therefore, to select examples of theology,
science and literature, three great men, who were a few
years ago accidentally brought to mutual relationship
by the fact that then three anniversaries were
celebrated at the same time in their three re-
spective countries—Calvin, Galileo, and Shakes-
peare. It was his intention to speak of these great
men as the representatives of theology, science, and
literature, but chiefly with the view of showing the
relation in which all the three stood to thereligioue and
moral advancement of mankind, which was the one
point which united together these three great branches
of thought. He spoke first of Calvin, the great French
or Swiss reformer. What good has he left behind him?
While he lived, and for 100 years after his death, there
was no theologian in Protestant Europe whose name
could be compared with his for weight and authority.
It was an argument in itself, far more than Luther or
Melancthon or Zuinglius ; he was the theologian of the
Reformation. Geneva is the only city in Europe
besides Rome that has a religious ecclesiastical sound
in its very name. Whatever theology sprung up in Great
Britain at that time came straight from them. The
English Puritans and Nonconformists, the Preshyte-
rians of Scotland, whether Established or Free or
united, all owe their existence more or less to Calvin.
But the fame of Calvin is no longer what it was, and the
reason is that Calvin threw his whole strength into one
particular phase of Christian belief and of Christian
practice. He saw straight before him, but only in
one direction. He was the most splendid of partisans,
but still a partisan. He was the founder of a parti-
cular school or sect of belief. He was not the pro-
raoter of truth and goodness for their own sake. This
is the first lesson which we draw from Calvin. But
it would be doing great injustice to Calvin and to our-
selves, and it would be to miss one main part of the
lesson which his appearance taught us, if we did not
acknowledge the lasting benefits we owed to him.
He was not no speaking of the great ability and
the candour and good sense of his controversies, be-
cause they, had been expounded by Greek writers of
the same kind, and were not peculiar to himself
even at that time. He confined himself to two
points in which he stood pre-eminent. The first which
he would notice was in the truth contained in his doc-
trines. Nothing is more useful for men who are edu-
cating themselves, nothing more profitable for theolo-
gical study than to endeavour to find out what is the truth
that lies at the bottom of doctrines in opinions with which,
as commonly expressed, we feel ourselves constrained
to disagree. Such is the case with the doctrine of pre-
destination, which is at the root of all that is peculiar
in what we call Calvinism. There has been so much
exaggeration, so much folly talked concerning it, that
we are sometimes inclined to think of a thing alto-
gether passed by. But the truth itself which it VMS
intended to convey is one which never will be alto-
gether put out of:ihe world. It is, that there is an
overruling Providence which guides our steps in life
without our perceiving it—that there is a power
greater than ourselves, without which we cannot move
or act; that this Providence leads us through mys-
terious paths to our very highest good; that whatever
we have good or excellent in ourselves or others comes
from this higher Power. This is the true doctrine of
Predestination—a doctrine which many think mere
Fatalism, but which in itself is perfectly certain and
most important ; and the merit of Calvin is, that though
he may have pushed it to excess, yet he hoped to pre-
serve it in the world and hand it on to us. They
might remember that a great writer of our own time as
unlike Calvin as it is possible to conceive has recorded
solemnly that this doctrine of Predestination, so under-
stood, was in his judgment unquestionably and indis-
pensably necessary. He meant Thomas Carlyle. When
in his history of Frederick the Great he said this he
meant, and at the bottom of his heart Calvin also
meant to tell us that we are each and all of us instru-
ments in the hands of the Supreme Government for
working out His will—links in the chain of a long.
enduring Providence with a work before us to do, for
the sake of doing which each one of us was sent into
the world. There was a second benefit of Calvin's
appearance which also ought to be looked for in
connection with any form of theology which claimed
to be considered—what was its worth and practical
result? When, on the 27th of May, 1564, Calvin
passed away from the midst of his many followers,
he would have been surprised at hearing that
already there were born—one sixty days, one thirty
days before—two men whose fame as far outshone
his as the sky is above the earth, and as the whole
earth is wider than any single sect or party. Yet so
it was. In that saline year of 1564 in which Calvin
died were born into the world—one, an interpreter for
all future time of the stars of heaven—Galileo, the
father of astronomy, on the 17th of February, at
Florence; the other, the interpreter of all future ages
of human nature, our own Shakespeare, on the 23rd of
April at Stratford-on-Avon. Of these two, he would
first speak of Galileo. In his ease as in Calvin's he
left on one side the direct benefits of his scientific dis-
coveries. He would confine himself to the moral and
religious benefits of Galileo's appearance which
brought theology into relation with science, and
science into relation with theology. It is certain that
by revealing it to us the vast infinity of space he re-
vealed to us in a sense in which it was never under-
stood before the Infinity of the Universe, and, there-
fore, the Infinity of God. The immeasurable nature
of God was a doctrine which had, in a certain sense,
been known before, but it received an enlargement,
an extension, far beyond conception when for the
first time mankind was made to feel that the stars
were not mere spangles in the sky, but worlds like
our own, that the distance between them was to be
counted not by thousands, but by millions and mil-
lions of miles. The order, the intelligence, the supreme
will which guides all these vast systems then became
known to man as it hal never been known to him be-
fore. When he discovered for the first time that the
common impression of the sun rising and setting was
contrary to fact—when he discovered that it was the
sun which stands still and the earth which moves—a
thrillof horror ran through Christendom. Most natural,
no doubt* was this alarm. But it was seen, thank God,
that it was unfounded, and so have been all like alarms
since. The cause of religion had not lost, but gained by
the triumph of the cause of science. The Bible has gained,
not lost, by being disencumbered with the false theory
which fastened it to the false system of philosophy.
Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for his opinions.
His opinion was declared to be heresy. Even a learned
class like the Jesuits in their first edition of Newton's
"Principia " were obliged to say that they could not
venture to accept his opinion as true because it had
been solemnly condemned by the Pope. But now
even the Pope and the Jesuits have given way, and
one of the best observatories of Europe, where Galilee's
principles are carried out witiithe best success, is the
i
observatory of Father 6ecclu n the Jesuit College at
Rome. The short visit that Milton paid Galileo in
his youth stimulated the English poet. It showed
that science was not so far removed from poetry nor
poetry from acienee as in this scientific age one some-
times was apt to imagine. And this led him to the third
illustrious man of whom he had to speak. In the same
year, 1564, was born the greatest of all poets—William
Shakespeare. Here, again, he did not dwell on the
mere pleasure or the mere instruction they received
from his writings. He did not enter into criticism of
his plays. What he proposed to ask was—What is
the moral value of such a man to his country and to
the .world. The first benefit of his life which they
all derived from his instruction was in the fact that
he was, as he had already said the acknow-
ledged interpreter of human nature. It was for
this that they admired him, that they read him, that
they placed him on a height above all other poets of
any age or nation. It had been sometisles said that
there were large classes of men who by their professions
were shut out from any thing but a partial view of
human nature ; but the clergy saw the weak side of it
—lawyers chiefly the dark side of it; physicians, it
was sometimes said, saw more than any other class.
But here at any rate was a man who was endowed with
an insight into every part of it. There is hardly a
shade of feeling, hardly a thought of character. which
he has not weighed and balanced and represented before
us. Our admiration of such a gift is a testimony to us
of the vast importance of that wide branch of the
highest kind of theology which consists of insight into
and understanding of the varieties of human character
and human nature. It is a living comment—a host of
comments—on the text "Judge not, and ye shall not
be judged." lit is a thorough widening out of the text,
"Judge righteous judgment." If we are right in our
admiration of Shakespeare, then we cannot sufficiently
prize the largeness of heart, and breadth of mind, and
keenness of tact which give his works their character-
istic value. There was mach idle talk in the present
day about secular and religious matters. Was there
any one who would venture to shut out from any
scheme of education the writings of Milton and Shakes-
peare? Is there any one who will be able to say that
the writings of Milton or Shakespeare are not in the
highest sense religious, if by religious we mean that
which gave a higher, a wider idea of the nature of
God, and a deeper and clearer insight into the nature
of man? No! The greatest theologians were the
greatest writers. In proportion as we were fed by
them would we close the religious difficulty with
the pureet of all the religions; and this led him
to speak of one more general lesson to be derived
from the greatness of Shakespeare's light. It was
this :—" We often asked in these days what any
sensible person we meet or hear of often is, what
were his opinions, to what religious denomination,
to what political party did he belong. We can aver
about such great men as Calvin or Galileo, that Calvin

was a Protestant of very peculiar opinions, and that
Galileo was a Roman Catholic and in some respects
compromised his opinion in order to keep well with
his Church. But we make these inquiries about
Shakespeare in vain. We say that he had a deep
sense of the awfulness and greatness of God, of the
tender and soothing influences of the Christian
faith. We say that the words of the Bible were most
familiar to him—that the words and rights of reli-
gious ordinances had a hold upon him, but more than
this we do not know. We should not be the worse but
the better Christians if by the study of his works we
were raised above those artificial boundaries which
divided man from man, nation from nation, party from
party.

- -
The Dean in conclusion said,—We thus come back
to the great subject with which we started, and ask
what those characters have told us of the mutual re-
lation of the three orders of knowledge which they re-
spectively represent. The main result surely is that
they form one whole theology which still remains the
queen of science and arts as she was supposed to be
in the middle ages. But it must be by welcoming
the fact that both science and literature are them-
selves essential elements of theology as theology is of
them. There is a literary side and a scientific side
of theology to be condueted on scientific principles
and literary principles, as also in all true
science and in all high literature there is a religious
side, for the pursuit of truth is religious and so i
the appreciation of the noble and the beautiful, and
thus the domain of religion must be enlarged by every
acquisition of scientific light and by every acquisition
of literary sweetness. Taken at their lowest Calvin
was but a violent polemic, and Galileo but a timid and
half-hearted student, and Shakespeare but an obscure
stageplayer, but, taken at their best, each one of them
was a philosopher, poet, and theologian. It was but
the other day that he saw a statement made at the
tercentenary of the famous University of Leyden. An
orator expressed his confident belief that theology was
doomed to rapid extinction, that its fall was demanded
with inexorable vigour, and that none would lament
that fall. He would not disparage anything that
proceeded from a university of such a name and
fame as Leyden, but he confessed that such a
declaration carried its own confatation with it.
Such statements might fill us with alarm as
to the higher and deeper thoughts of humanity, but
they saw from the terms of the expressions used by
speakers that they very often meant the very reverse
of what they expressed; that they meant only the
fall of a theology which they disliked, and the rise in
its place of some other theology which they desired.
When they found that the course of European politics
had been greatly purged and purified from the
rancour, persecution and inhumanity, perfidy and
cruelty, of the Thirty Years' War and the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew, that commerce had been set free
from the superstitous restrictions with which it was
fettered, and social life delivered from insane super-
stitions and witchcraft, then they might fairly say
that the tendency is not the secularization but the
Christianization of politics. Therefore the result
of all such harsh and exaggerated statements as
that he had quoted was to any reflecting and high-
minded man not to divorce science from religion, or
the Church from the State, but to endeavour to infuse
into religion whatever truth there was also in science
and to endeavour to infuse into the Church whatever
there was of grandeur and elevation in the State. It
WAS because the Universities of Europe, amid what-
ever imperfections they contained, had furnished and
furnished still a neutral, central, and elevated ground,
where the different churches and diverging classes
could be drawn together, and could aspire towards
higher things, that they deserved all the support and
all the forbearance that could be given them. In a
concluding sentence the Dean urged the formation
of a closer relationship between Dundee and St.
Andrew's.

On the motion of Sheriff Cheyne a cordial -rote of
thanks was accorded to the Dean.

DEAN STANLEY ON THE DIVISION or CHRISTENDOM.
Dean Stanley delivered a discourse on Sunday afternoon in
the parish church, Dundee, in the presence of one of the
largest congregations that ever assembed in the building.
Every available inch of space was occupied, and the heat
was so oppressive that two or three ladies were obliged
to be taken out. The Dean only preached the sermon,
the preliminary parts of the service having been con-
ducted by the Rev. Professor Charteris, of Edinburgh
University. The subject of the sermon was the words
from Corinthians, "Peace be with you." From these
words the Dean delivered an exceedingly impressive and
appropriate discouise. At the outset he stated that he
would speak on three points—peace with ourselves, peace
with one another, and peace with God. After reference to
the meaning of the words, " Peacebe with you," in ancient
and modern times, the dean dwelt more particularly on the
second head of his sermon. He stated that a word, a look,
a phrase, a form of expression not familiar in public or
ecclesiastical life, a point of honour so minute that no one
could see it but the parties concerned, a point of doctrine
so difilcut to state that they were lost in seeking words to
put it into shape—these had been enough to break up
families, to convulse kingdoms, and to divide Churches. The
great peacemaker desired them to remember as their first
duty that they should try if they could to see, not
the differences, but the resemblances; not the reasons
for contention, but the reasons for ageement. He
asked, how much of life as it was had been framed
on the principle that because it was impossible to
be at peace they should be at no pains to live peaceably with
any man, and should not rare if they quarrelled with every
man. Was it not much more reasonable, and wonld it not
save time, temper, life, and human souls it the apostle's
maxim were acted upon ?—" If it be possible, as much as lies
in you live peaceably with all men." The dean said the ori-
ginal meaning of the word pontiff was maker of bridges; and
whether they were pontiffs or whether they were not,
whether they were ministers or whether they were not, it
was their duty to endeavour to bridge over those gulfs which
isolated and distracted society. The dean concluded with
an effective peroration, urging the example of Christ's life.

DEAN STANLEY ON EARLY NORTHUMBERLAND
CHRISTIANITY.

On Tuesday evening Dean Stanley delivered an ad-
dress on this subject in the Victoria Hall, Sunderland,
in aid of the restoration of St. Bede's Church, which
is the oldest in the north. The mayor presided, and
there was a very large attendance. In the course of
his address he said their own Nonconformist brethren
and great revivalists might compare themselves with
their strange predecessors in the seventh and eighth
centuries. They might also look with forbearance and
even veneration on the old, settled, hereditary, na-
tional framework, which served as a vessel into which
they put their new wine without fear of it bursting.
Nay, might they not in their days have a co-opera-
tion between Oswold and Odin, between the represen-
tatives of the ancient, enlarged, and enlarging Church
of the Saxon King, and that stir and fire which came
from the far North or from the far West? Men were
continually saying that times would not allow such
and such a good thing to be done, but the answer is,
as it was in times gone, that time will bear what any
honest man has the courage to do and to say.