Volume Iii Part 21 (1/2)

'Audacter dicam', says St. Hierome, 'c.u.m omnia posset Deus, suscitare virginem post ruinam non potest.'

One instance among hundreds of the wantonness of phrase and fancy in the Fathers. What did Jerome mean? 'quod Deus membranam hymenis luniformem reproducere nequit?' No; that were too absurd. What then?--that G.o.d cannot make what has been not to have been? Well then, why not say that, since that is all you can mean?

Serm. XIX. Rev. xx. 6. p. 183.

The exposition of the text in this sermon is a lively instance how much excellent good sense a wise man, like Donne, can bring forth on a pa.s.sage which he does not understand. For to say that it may mean either X, or Y, or Z, is to confess he knows not what it means; but that if it be X. then, &c.; if Y. then, &c.; and lastly if it be Z. then, &c.; that is to say, that he understands X, Y, and Z; but does not understand the text itself.

Ib. p. 185. B.

Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons, compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her child, &c.

Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's a.s.sertion here would be extravagant.

Serra. x.x.xIV. Rom. viii. 16. p. 332.

Ib. p. 335. A.

But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.

If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers a.s.signed a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural.

But if G.o.d made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects--yet still our only mirror--to contemplate all we can of G.o.d, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.

For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself as man 'in genere', we have to look into ourselves, and there we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence ([Greek: nous]) from being ([Greek:t on]), with the will as an accompaniment, but not from it as a cause,--in order, though not necessarily in time, precedent. This is true filiation.

The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict ident.i.ties, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and coeternally.

For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is involved in the very idea of G.o.d, one of whose intellectual definitions is, the 'synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi inclusive, quoad se,' of all conceivable 'ant.i.theses;' even as the best moral definition--(and, O! how much more G.o.dlike to us in this state of ant.i.thetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!)--is, G.o.d is love.

This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards the moral.

For what is love? Union with the desire of union. G.o.d therefore is the cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue.

Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action.

Now will is the true principle of ident.i.ty, of selfness, even in our common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one G.o.d.

There are three Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is totally all in each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own minds, but can understand by no a.n.a.logy.

For ”the wind ministrant to divers at the same moment”--thence, to aid the fancy--borrows or rather steals from the mind the idea of 'total 'in omni parte',' which alone furnishes the a.n.a.logy; but that both it and by it a myriad of other material images do enwrap themselves 'in hac veste non sua,' and would be even no objects of conception if they did not; yea, that even the very words, 'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in all languages that answer to them, suppose this trans-impression from the mind, is an argument better than all a.n.a.logy.

Serm. x.x.xV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341.

Ib. p. 342. B.

First then, for the first term, 'sin,' we use to ask in the school, whether any action of man's can have 'rationem demeriti;'