HKB
in hazard of these consequences--if this be no punishment;--words have no correspondence with thoughts, and thoughts are but shadows of each other, shadows that own no substance for their anti-type!
Of such an outrage on common-sense, Taylor was incapable. He himself calls it a penalty; he admits that in effect it is a punishment: nor does he seek to suppress the question that so naturally arises out of this admission;--on what principle of equity were the innocent offspring of Adam punished at all? He meets it, and puts-in an answer. He states the problem, and gives his solution--namely, that "God on Adam's account was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue the punishment"! "The case" (says the Bishop) "is this: Jonathan and Michal were Saul's children. It came to pass, that seven of Saul's issue were to be hanged: all equally innocent, equally culpable." [Before I quote further, I feel myself called on to remind the reader, that these two last words were added by Jeremy Taylor without the least grounds in Scripture, according to which*, (2 Samuel, xxi.) no crime was laid to their charge, no blame imputed to them. *Without any pretence of culpable conduct on their part, they were arraigned as children of Saul, and sacrificed to a point of state-expedience. In recommencing the quotation, therefore, the reader ought to let the sentence conclude with the words--] "all equally innocent. David took the five sons of Michal, for she had left him unhandsomely. Jonathan was his friend: and therefore he spared his son, Mephibosheth. Here it was indifferent as to the guilt of the persons" (Bear in mind, reader, that no guilt was attached to either of them!) "whether David should take the sons of Michal or of Jonathan; but it is likely that as upon the kindness that David had to Jonathan, he spared his son; so upon the just provocation of Michal, he made that evil fall upon them, which, it may be, they should not have suffered, if their mother had been kind. Adam was to God, as Michal to David."[115]
This answer, this solution proceeding too from a divine so pre-eminently gifted, and occurring (with other passages not less startling) in a vehement refutation of the received doctrine on the express ground of its opposition to the clearest conceptions and best feelings of mankind--this it is that surprises me! It is of this that I complain! The Almighty Father exasperated with those, whom the Bishop has himself in the same treatise described as "innocent and most unfortunate"--the two things best fitted to conciliate love and pity! Or though they did not remain innocent, yet those whose abandonment to a mere nature, while they were left amenable to a law above nature, he affirms to be the irresistible cause, that they one and all did sin! And this decree illustrated and justified by its analogy to one of the worst actions of an imperfect mortal! From such of my readers as will give a thoughtful perusal to these works of Taylor, I dare anticipate a concurrence with the judgment which I here transcribe from the blank space at the end of the Deus Justificatus in my own copy; and which, though twenty years[116] have elapsed since it was written, I have never seen reason to recant or modify. "This most eloquent Treatise may be compared to a statue of Janus, with the one face, which we must suppose fronting the Calvinistic tenet, entire and fresh, as from the master's hand: beaming with life and force, witty scorn on the lip, and a brow at once bright and weighty with satisfying reason:--the other, looking toward the "something to be put in its place," maimed, featureless, and weather-bitten into an almost visionary confusion and indistinctness."[117]