HKB
LEIGHTON.
There is nothing in religion farther out of Nature's reach, and more remote from the natural man's liking and believing, than the doctrine of Redemption by a Saviour, and by a crucified Saviour. It is comparatively easy to persuade men of the necessity of an amendment of conduct; it is more difficult to make them see the necessity of Repentance in the Gospel sense, the necessity of a change in the principle of action; but to convince men of the necessity of the Death of Christ is the most difficult of all. And yet the first is but varnish and white-wash without the second; and the second but a barren notion without the last. Alas! of those who admit the doctrine in words, how large a number evade it in fact, and empty it of all its substance and efficacy, making the effect the efficient cause, or attributing their election to Salvation to a supposed Foresight of their Faith and Obedience.--But it is most vain to imagine a faith in such and such men, which being foreseen by God, determined him to elect them for salvation: were it only that nothing at all is future, or can have this imagined futurition, but as it is decreed, and because it is decreed by God so to be.
COMMENT.
No impartial person, competently acquainted with the history of the Reformation, and the works of the earlier Protestant Divines, at home and abroad, even to the close of Elizabeth's reign, will deny that the doctrines of Calvin on Redemption and the natural state of fallen man, are in all essential points the same as those of Luther, Zuinglius, and the first Reformers collectively. These Doctrines have, however, since the re-establishment of the Episcopal Church at the return of Charles II., been as generally [72] exchanged for what is commonly entitled Arminianism, but which, taken as a complete and explicit Scheme of Belief, it would be both historically and theologically more accurate to call Grotianism, or Christianity according to Grotius. The change was not, we may readily believe, effected without a struggle. In the Romish Church this latitudinarian system, patronized by the Jesuits, was manfully resisted by Jansenius, Arnauld, and Pascal; in our own Church by the Bishops Davenant, Sanderson, Hall, and the Archbishops Usher and Leighton: and in the latter half of the preceding Aphorism the reader has a specimen of the reasonings by which Leighton strove to invalidate or counterpoise the reasonings of the innovators.
Passages of this sort are, however, of rare occurrence in Leighton's works. Happily for thousands, he was more usefully employed in making his readers feel that the doctrines in question, scripturally treated, and taken as co-organized parts of a great organic whole, need no such reasonings. And better still would it have been, had he left them altogether for those, who severally detaching the great features of Revelation from the living context of Scripture, do by that very act destroy their life and purpose. And then, like the eyes of the Indian spider,[73] they become clouded microscopes, to exaggerate and distort all the other parts and proportions.--No offence then will be occasioned, I trust, by the frank avowal that I have given to the preceding passage a place among the Spiritual Aphorisms for the sake of the Comment: the following Remarks having been the first marginal note I had pencilled on Leighton's pages, and thus (remotely, at least) the occasion of the present work.