Andrew Martin Fairbairn

“ It is born of the love that loses the sense of personal distinctness and identity in the joy, not of absolute possession, but of being possessed. Boehme says that the processes of nature conceal God, but the spirit of man reveals Him; and how can it reveal a God it does not know? But the spirit that has never seen and touched Deity has never known Him or been so one with Him as to know Him as he knows himself. Here lives the very soul of Luther and the essence of all his thought. ”

“ Without the State there would be no medium for the Church to work in, no body for the soul to animate; without the Church there would be no law higher than expediency to govern the State, no ideal of thought and conduct, no soul to animate the body. Both Church and State therefore were necessary to the good ordering of society, and each was explained by the same idea. All human authority was the creation of God; His will had formed the State to care for the actual man, who was temporal, and the Church to care for the ideal man, who was immortal. ”

“ And if Rome lived in the dust of her ancient roads and the ruins of her temples, the Italian peoples and States seemed singularly suggestive of Greece. Their republics and tyrants, their civic life and military adventurers, their rich cities with their colonies and commerce, their rapid changes of fortune, their swift oscillations from freedom to bondage and from bondage back to freedom, their love of art and of letters, their mutual jealousies and ambitions were Greek rather than Roman ”

“ He believed in the unity of knowledge and the community of learning, placing the magistrate and the minister, the citizen and the pastor, in the hands of the same teacher, and binding the school and the university together. The boy learned in the one and the man studied in the other; but the school was the way to the university, the university was the goal of the school. In nothing does the pasdagogic genius of Calvin more appear than in his fine jealousy as to the character and competence whether of masters or professors, and in his unwearied quest after qualified men. ”

“ Moreover, by the easy acquisition of the wealth which lower races had accumulated, there was begotten in the Latin peoples so fierce and intolerant an avarice that their highest ambitions appeared ignoble, in contrast with the magnanimity and the enterprise of the Teutonic nations that became Protestant.
And just as the history of man's past lengthened and the earth around him broadened and with it his horizon, so the nature beneath him and the heavens above began by telling him their secrets to throw over him their spell. ”

“ If we read Boehme from this point of view, how splendid his dreams and how reasonable his very extravagances become! We are not surprised to hear him speak of the necessity of antitheses to all being, and especially to the life and thought of God, of evil being as necessary as good, or wrath as essential as love in God, who is the fundament of hell as well as of heaven, both the everlasting No, and the eternal Yes. He dwells in nature as the soul dwells in the body; there is no point in the body where the soul is not, no spot in space and no atom in nature where we can say, "God is not here." ”

“ If religion be moral then man must be free. And though his freedom may be incapable of rational proof yet it is a matter of conscious experience. This, indeed, may seem incompatible with Providence, which Aristotle conceived as general rather than particular, though we conceive it as a general made up of all particulars; but where philosophy is blind revelation may see, and it is better to trust it than to walk in darkness. The God who governs has created, and creation was willed in eternity, but happens in time, for Aristotle's idea of an eternal creation is sophistical. ”

“ In any case the figures witness to the fierceness of the fires that scorched the Reformed Church in France, and explain if they do not justify "its passion of religious hate," while they drew to it the pity and awakened for it the admiration of all its sister and daughter communities. To define policy and shape character in their own and other lands, for their own and later ages, has ever been the prerogative of the persecuted. And this prerogative the Huguenot has exercised as a splendid revenge. He had no opportunity of becoming a loyal citizen; the State would not allow him. ”

“ The life of Martineau was so essentially the life of the thinker, and was so typical of the century in which he lived and the society within which he moved, that he can be better understood through his spoken mind than through his outward history. ”

“ He believes that the universe needs no other governor than its Creator, whose word guides the whole and determines the nature, properties, and condition of each several thing. Pascal's famous definition of Deity, "a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere," is but an echo from Babelais. And he can, with the wisest of the ancients and the best of the moderns, speak of the "great Soul of the universe which quickens all things." ”

“ A constitution has a way of working in a fashion either better or worse than, considered à priori, would have seemed possible; and this because the people are ever a greater factor of harmony or disorder than the laws they live under. Hence, so long as Geneva was inspired by one spirit, the anomalies of the constitution did not breed discontent; but, when new energies and new ambitions awoke, these anomalies became fruitful of disaster to the State. So long as the Bishop and the people had common aims and interests, loyalty to both was easy ”

“ Hence the thought whose course we have to follow is thought in transition, dealing with the old questions, yet waking to the new, quickened by what is behind to enquire into what is within and foreshadow what is before. But, while the thought that is to concern us may thus be described as moving in the realm of our ultimate religious ideas, the thought that is not to concern us moves in the realm of political and social theory. ”

“ The Consistory may be described as Calvin's method for moralising through the Church the life of man and the State to which he belonged. He may in the manner of the jurist have imagined that regulation by positive law was the most efficient means of governing conduct; but if he legislated as a jurist, he thought and purposed as a Reformer. It is here, where injustice is easiest, that we ought to be most scrupulously just. Calvin was resolved, so far as he had power, to make the Church what it had not been but what it ought to be, an institution organised for the creation of a moral mankind. ”

“ Behind this the memory of men did not go, and into the darkness beyond the eye could as little penetrate as the vision of the man can trace the growth of knowledge in his own infant mind.
Now these differing conditions made it as natural that the Teutonic Renaissance should concern itself with the early Christian ideal as that the Latin should with the ancient classical literature; and, where they touched religion, that the one should be more occupied with its intellectual side and the other with its institutional; for where the Roman Empire had lived the Roman Church now governed. ”

“ No man ever clung with more tender intensity to the customs and beliefs that could be saved from the wreckage of the past. But he did his work as a Reformer the more thoroughly because he did it from nature rather than from choice. It is doubtful if in the whole of history any man ever showed more of the insight that changes audacity into courage. By the publication of his Theses he proclaimed a doctrine of grace that broke up the system which Europe had for centuries believed and obeyed. ”

“ Thought rises, like sense and instinct, from lower to higher forms. Heroic love, which desires the intuition of the truth, drives us ever upwards, that we may attain the perfect rest where understanding and will are unified.
Bruno's speculations were those of a poet as well as a philosopher; and were in various ways prophetic. His death by fire at Rome signified that Italy had neither the wit nor the will to understand men of his kind; that for her the Renaissance had run its course, so that men must pursue its problems elsewhere in the hope of a more satisfactory solution. ”

“ The heretic may be a man of irreproachable character; but if heresy be treason against the law, a character without reproach may aggravate rather than extenuate the crime. The man of imperfect morals may be too feeble of will to differ in opinion from the constituted authority, and his intellectual conformity may save him from the sentence which his moral weakness deserves. And time alone was needed to make it obvious how imperfectly Geneva could attain either unity of faith or purity of life by turning her Church into a city governed by positive law. ”

“ It is customary to distinguish the Renaissance, as the revival of letters, from the Reformation as the revival of religion. But the distinction is neither formally correct nor materially exact. The Renaissance was not necessarily secular and classical-it might be, and often was, both religious and Christian; nor was the Reformation essentially religious and moral-it might be and often was political and secular. Of the two revivals the one is indeed in point of time the elder; but the elder is not so much a cause as simply an antecedent of the younger. ”

“ The sects that rose within the Reformed Church, such as the Socinian and the Remonstrant, justified their schism as a protest against views which they described as equally dishonouring to God and belittling to man. But though Calvin's theology occasioned the hottest and bitterest controversies known to Christian history, yet it is here that his mind is least original and his ideas are most clearly derivative. Without Augustine we should never have had Calvinism, which is but the principles of the anti-Pelagian treatises developed, systematised, and applied. ”

“ And this unity signifies that order reigns in the universe; that its phenomena are connected; that individual things are yet not insulated; and this coherence implies that all are animated by a common life and moved by a common cause. And this cause must be as infinite as the universe; for an infinite effect can proceed only from an infinite cause, and such a cause can be worthily expressed only in such an effect. But there is no room for two infinities to exist at the same moment in the same place; and so the effect must be simply the body of the cause, the cause the soul of the effect. ”

“ Calvin is here at once a jurist and a scholar, but amid his grammatical, literary, and historical discussions-every phrase and idea interpreted being illustrated from classical authorities- he speaks his mind with astonishing courage concerning the qualities and faults of kings and judges, States and societies. He bids monarchs remember that their best guardians are not armies or treasuries, but the fidelity of friends and the love of subjects. Arrogance may be natural in a prince, but it does not therefore cease to be an evil. ”

“ With the latter, the great modern intellectual systems may be said to begin; and to it belong such names as Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz, Gassendi and Malebranche. But without the earlier century the later would have been without its problems and therefore without its thinkers. The preeminence of the one in religion involved the preeminence of the other in thought; for what exercises the spirit tends to emancipate speculation and raises issues that reason must discuss and resolve before it can be at peace with itself and its world. ”

“ Theodore Beza was head of College and Academy, or school and university, together; and Calvin himself was a professor of theology. The success of the College was great; the success of the Academy was greater. Men came from all quarters-English, Italians, Spanish, Germans, Russians, ministers, jurists, old men, young men, all with the passion to learn in their blood-to jostle each other among the thousand hearers who met to listen to the great Reformer. But France was the main feeder of the Academy ”

“ He conceived this universe as infinite, and so rejected the ancient scholastic idea of a limited nature with its distinctions and divisions of place, its here and there, its above and below, its cycles and epicycles. But the universe, which has no centre and therefore no circumference, has yet a unity for consciousness, and wherever consciousness is its unity appears. ”

“ With the new knowledge of nature came new hopes which looked more to the energies that were creating the future than to the authorities that had fashioned the past. Faith in man as man, and not simply as King or noble, as Pope or priest, was reborn ”

“ Erasmus is in Calvin's eyes the ornament of letters, though his large edition of Seneca is not all it ought to have been; but even Erasmus could not at twenty-three have produced a work so finished in its scholarship, so real in its learning, or so wide in its outlook.
What gives the book significance is the nature that shines through it; the humanist is a man with a passion for conduct, moral, veracious, strenuous, who has loved labour and bestowed it without grudging on the classical writer with whom he has most affinity. ”

“ And this conclusion is worked out in connexion with the moral doctrine that man is bound to act from love of virtue and horror of vice, and not from any hope of reward or fear of punishment, and so to act as to make all nature the better for his action. Reason, then, must conclude that the soul is mortal; but religion comes to our aid, and by teaching us to believe in the resurrection of the body resolves our doubts. Of this doctrine philosophy knows nothing, and so we can hold it only as an article of faith. ”

“ French Protestantism was more a lay than a clerical revolt; the men who led and who formed it were without the mental habits or the associations of the priest. At first indeed it was termed, just as if it had been imported from Germany, "the Lutheran heresy"; but the most notable of the early French martyrs, Louis de Berquin, was a pupil of Erasmus rather than of Luther. The men who made the psalms which the French Protestants loved to sing, were not of the priestly order, while their two most illustrious teachers were both jurists and scholars. ”

“ In Germany, where the main intellectual interest was theological and confessional, Martin Luther gave the people hymns that often sound like echoes of the Hebrew Psalter; Kepler, listening to the music which nature reserves for the devout ear, discovered the unity which moves through her apparent disorder; and Jakob Boehme, though but a cobbler, had visions of higher mysteries than the proud can see. The Netherlands proved their heroism in their struggle for independence, and their love of knowledge in the tolerant reasonableness that made them a home for the persecuted of all lands. ”

“ Hence, men who came to be known as "libertines," though they were both patriotic and moral and only craved freedom, rose and said, "This is an intolerable tyranny; we will not allow any man to be lord over our consciences." And about the same time Calvin's orthodoxy was challenged. Two Anabaptists arrived and demanded liberty to prophesy; and Peter Caroli charged him with heresy as to the Trinity. He would not use the Athanasian Creed; and he defended himself by reasons that the scholar who knows its history will respect. ”

“ It is as little soluble by the natural reason as the cognate question whether the world is eternal or created; in each case the problem as to the beginning holds the key of the problem as to the end. The Aristotelian Schoolmen had argued that the capacity of the soul to think the eternal and will the universal implied its immortality. But what is the soul? We cannot define it as thought percipient of the universal reason, for there can be no thought without ideas and no ideas without sense. The soul which lives within nature must develop according to natural law and in obedience to it. ”

“ Out of Luther's Reformation came the Church which bears his name; out of Zwingli's the Church which is specially termed the Reformed. This Church was born in Switzerland, but named in France; and the name signified that while it was a Church Protestant and Evangelical like the Lutheran, it was yet ancient and continuous like the Roman, able to change its form or accidents without losing its essence. Being Swiss by birth it was republican in polity and democratic in spirit, a Church freely chosen by a free people and capable of living amid free institutions. ”

“ The God with whom it started was not an abstract and isolated but a living and related Deity; and man it conceived sub specie aetermtatis, as a being whom God had made and ruled. The very limitation of its field was an enlargement of its scope; its primary datum was the Eternal God, and its secondary was the created universe, especially the man who bore the image of his Maker. This man was no mere individual or insulated unit, but a race- a connected, coherent, organic unity. The human being was local, but human nature was universal; before the individual could be, the whole must exist ”