Böhringer's Life of Wycliffe. Wycliffe that frank, impartial acknowledgment which was due to him, The following is Böhringer's idea of the mental history of the 'It does not seem probable that he passed through any very severe struggles, from the peculiarities of his disposition. We should rather suppose him to have become gradually freed from the thraldom of the age, to have progressed step by step toward his riper views of It was the external form of the Church and its evangelical doctrine. secular corruptions, which first forced itself irresistibly upon him. He then began to consider the Church as a whole, rather than in its visible and hierarchical relations. At length he reached the doctrinal points, not the old Christian dogmas, but those new Middle-age ones which the Church then held to be of most importance-the ecclesiastical purpose of the Sacraments, especially of the Communion.'-p. 596. In his general estimate of the character of Wycliffe, Böhringer marks especially his strong Biblical and rational tendency. 'Moreover, a religious and strong personality was necessary, in which these truths should become as it were living flesh and blood. A character which in its conscious repose on the truth and fidelity of divine grace has courage, from this immovable rock, to testify before the world, without fear of human authority, which could neither add Above all, a heart for the people of Christ;' to nor take from it. and this truly our Wycliffe never lacked. It is to him as much a necessity as a duty to 'save souls' whom he sees' entangled' and 'lost' This loving zeal for the safety of under ecclesiastical rule. souls dictated those pamphlets which have reference to the enlightenment of the people, and which compose the larger and later portion of his works. It impelled him, finally, to the translation of the Bible into the common tongue. Whatever be the subject occupying heart, mind, and hand,-the law of God, or its perversion by the inventions of man, the right of the nation to its undisturbed possession, or the struggle against the monks and against a secularized church-be the important question what it may, he makes it a matter of conscience to explain it to the people, and to assist them in recovering the early freedom in Christ.''-p. 593. There is yet another feature necessary to complete our picture of this Reformer: one possessed by other reforming spirits who have taken hold upon the inner life of their fellow-countrymen-his strong nationality, his patriotism and political zeal. Not that his influence in the latter respect was immediate, he would thus only have fallen into the same fault which he reproved in his opponents, the men of the ruling Church, but indirectly by the light often thrown upon State affairs by his Christian ideas. In this direction he worked in different ways. Taking, in ecclesiastical and political affairs, the position, we might almost say, of a consul to the Parliament and other nobles, a relation which has been not inaptly compared to that existing between Okkam and the Emperor Louis. With person, word, and pen he stands at the service of every national ecclesiastical movement. He was equally anxious to free both State and people from a hierarchy, for whose foundation he had vainly searched the Scriptures. In thus emancipating the State, and the spirit of the nation, he believed the Church to be best served, since it was occupied more with such matters than with its first duty-the preaching of the Gospel and the spiritual care of souls.'-p. 595. The following notice of what we may call the temper and thoroughness of Wycliffe's ultimate course as a Reformer is just and noteworthy. With regard to the defects and weaknesses of Wycliffe, that which appears to us most apparent is a want of moderation. In his thoughts and labours as a Reformer, we especially note this immediate contrasting of the divine and the human, the external and the internal. In the ecclesiastical condition of his time he acknowledges nothing but human inventions, existing in obvious contradiction to its earlier simpler state. To have the one or the other of such innovations removed would not satisfy him, the very foundation must be cleared. Of all the Middle-age Reformers he is by far the most radical.' The great fault of Böhringer's work is the cautiously neutral, and purely scientific tone which, for the most part, pervades it. The aim of the writer in general is, to acquit himself with all the calmness of a judge, and the case is often judged as though no great interest, nothing beyond the fate of certain small ingenuities which have grown up among polemics, were at stake. This indifferentism never made such men as Wycliffe, and it will never give us the biography of such men as it should be written. We do not of course want the one-sidedness of the partisan-but we do want a firm belief in the reality of truth, and in the fact that the tendencies of truth are on the side of humanity. Mr. Cowell's paper on Wycliffe is the essay to which the Stanhope prize was awarded in Oxford in 1857. The author is of Wadham College-one of Mr. Shirley's pupils we presume. Mr. Cowell's Essay-Conclusion. 421 But Mr. Cowell does not concern himself about authorities, touches nothing controversial, and discourses through his thirty handsomely printed pages in a very general and harmless manner. What thought there is in these pages is intelligent, but it is sadly beaten out, and overlaid with words. The style, indeed, is quite after the academic model- elongated, elaborately balanced, and so smoothed down and polished that you are in danger at every step of taking sound for sense. It is a style which young men at college are often at great pains to learn, and afterwards, if they ever come to anything, take quite as much pains to unlearn. Had Wycliffe written thus, he might have sent forth books at the rate of a cartload a month, and have done nothing.* Much that is now written about Wycliffe would, we suspect, be a sorry business in his estimation were he to revisit us. *We feel disposed, before we conclude, to offer a word or two more about Wycliffe's wardenship of Canterbury Hall. 1. In reply to Mr. Pratt's note in a preceding page (387), Mr. Shirley thinks it enough to say (p. 519), that 'Dominus was the ordinary style of a priest whenever there was no question of his degree.' Now it is true, that in documents of some length, and where the same name occurs frequently, the word Dominus, or Magister, might be given to a Master of Arts interchangeably-just as the name of Master or Doctor is given interchangeably to Wycliffe by Cunningham, in the paper which Mr. Shirley has printed, and where that writer describes the Reformer as Doctor for the first time. But this is something very different from the brief, formal, and official entry of a name in a register, or in a legal document. That this 'Whyteclyve's' name should appear in four archiepiscopal registers, and in the probate of his will, and in all these instances with the word Dominus, and never with the word Magister attached to it, is proof, if anything well can be, that he had no right to the title of Master, and was in fact a person who, though favoured with high patronage, finished his course apparently as the commonplace men of all time have done, leaving no trace of power behind him' (John de Wycliffe, a Monograph, 61); or who was, in the later words of Mr. Pratt, an ordinary man, who owed his promotion to some accident.' 2. But the following extract contains what Mr. Shirley describes as a 'cogent argument.' 'The Reformer was a Doctor of Divinity at the very latest in 1366, and before that was a Bachelor of Divinity for some time. In December, 1365, the warden of Canterbury Hall, in his deed of appointment, is styled Master of Arts; and in the statement of his cause before the Papal court, which must be dated 1368 or 1369, he is spoken of as a Bachelor of Divinity, that is to say, at a time when the Reformer was a Doctor, of at least two, and probably of five or six years' standing' (p. 527). It is natural to ask here-why the Wycliffe of Canterbury Hall must be always described by his proper degree, and the Whyteclyve of Mayfield never? For so, according to Mr. Shirley, the case stands! But this cogent argument' is worthless on other grounds. The notion that Wycliffe took his Doctor's degree at the latest in 1366 is a mere notion. We have shown that it is not proved. 3. The fact that Wodeford's explicit statement on this point does not appear to have been repeated for some time to come, will hardly appear strange, if we bear in mind that Canterbury Hall was a very small and a very poor foundation, affording scanty assistance to not more than a dozen persons; that Wycliffe showed himself, by his conduct, to be not much concerned about the issue of the suit; and that he soon rose to such a position as to render it absurd to attribute a career so potent to a cause so trivial. Men can now bestow their authorship upon him, whose narrowness and selfishness make it certain that they would have been found in the first rank of his traducers and persecutors had they lived in his time. Your fathers killed the prophets, and you build their sepulchres. He who cared so much about the duty of the hour, so little about the fame of the future, would look with small favour on the little disputations concerning the affairs of his life with which men having little real sympathy with his character have become disposed to employ themselves. His own life was a life of honest and self-forgetful labour, and the lives of other men rose in his estimation only as they were lives of that order. But it will, we trust, be seen from what precedes, that enough has been done in the time of the present generation, to ensure that the great English Reformer will have something like his due place in the history of Christian thought in the time to come. ART. V.-The Catechism of Positive Religion. Translated from the French of Auguste Comte. By RICHARD CONGREVE, M.A. London: John Chapman. 'PROFESSING themselves wise, they became fools.' Certainly these words, however applicable to many of the ancient philosophers, are equally so to many modern, and perhaps to the author of the Catechism of Positive Religion more than all. So puerile, so silly, so drivelling (if we knew of any stronger word we should use it), is this entire volume, both in conception and execution, that no other alternative is left for many of M. Comte's admirers than the unpleasant one of supposing that just when, in his own estimation, he had put the cope-stone on the system of Positivism,' and annihilated all the theologies,' he unluckily went mad, and that this volume of inanities is the sign and consequence thereof. For our own parts, we believe that when he composed this volume he was just as much in his senses as he ever had been,-at least for many a year. Plenty of the absurdities which make this volume so exquisitely foolish had long been held by M. Comte, and proclaimed in his previous writings; they are simply exhibited here with more startling flagrancy, and in combination with others of newer, but perfectly congenial character. His overweening vanity had long led him to the notion that his Positivism' was destined to revolutionize the whole world of thought, to annihilate theology in all its forms, and to banish God out of the world; or rather M. Comte greatly overrated. 423 to make man a sort of God himself. Long before the publication of this volume he had emulated the ridiculous blasphemy of Alphonso of Spain, and said that, so far from the works of nature being worthy of unqualified admiration, it was quite possible for M. Comte to suggest admirable improvements in them; that so far from the heavens declaring the glory of God, they declared no other glory than that of Hipparchus, Newton, and others who had discovered the laws of the celestial motions! These and such like things he said many years ago. One single characteristic, however, is sufficient to stamp him as a man utterly incapable of teaching or learning from experience-namely, his ever confident faith that his Positivism would soon explode God and all theologies' out of existence ! For if any one thing is plain from the history of all ages and nations, it is that man must have a God or Gods, will speculate as to the causes of things (which M. Comte 'positively forbids him), and will have a theology, let it be ever so false, sooner than have none; aye, and account it a thousandfold more precious than the most philosophical atheism that a thousand M. Comtes could construct, though they all laid their heads together. To hope, therefore, for the triumphs M. Comte with such prodigious vanity hoped for, and proclaimed to be his expectation long ago, showed a mind utterly incapable of learning the lessons of universal history; and if he deserves to be called 'mad' for his follies now, he equally deserved to be called 'mad' then. Even supposing atheism ever so true, all induction shows that it is a truth to which it would require many millions of years to make half a million of proselytes. In fact, spite of all the nonsense of this volume, M. Comte, when he composed it, was in one sense a little wiser than he was at an earlier period of his Positive speculations, for he learned at last to recognise the truth that the religious principle in man is indestructible, and demands, and must have its culture and development; and he has accordingly provided for it in the very queer way expounded in this volume. Though undisguised atheism is still his basis, be it known to the reader that he professes to found thereon a nobler religion than any yet preached among mankind; provides, in Collective Humanity, a new Supreme as the object of it, and rekindles the extinguished hopes of a heaven, (seemingly lost for ever,) by a charming possibility of posthumous, though of course unconscious, incorporation with his 'Grand Etre himself; or, as M. Comte calls it, by subjective immortality. But we are anticipating; we shall presently give, in his own language, a summary of his fantastical system. The truth is, that M. Comte's merits as a speculator have been prodigiously over-rated, and his followers are beginning to awake |