THEOLOGICAL BOOKS.
WHEN religion is exciting so much attention as to furnish a frequent sub- ject for novelists, it naturally follows that the more regular modes of in- culcating its topics will increase. For some time past the influx of theo- logical works has been steadily increasing upon us, and, as we have more than once intimated, to an extent sometimes inconvenient to a lay journal, from the difficulty of handling subjects involving doctrinal controversy, as well as from the technical character of many of the publications. In the present week, three works are before us that pass beyond the usual limited boundary of religions books.
1. Memoir and Sermons of the Reverend Dr. Bennie. 2. Popery Subversive of Christianity, by the Reverend W. G. Cookesley. 3. The Unity of God's Moral Law, by the Reverend A. J. Maclean.
1. Dr. Bennie was a minister of the Established Church of Scotland, who rose rapidly by means of his pulpit eloquence, and died last year. He was born at Glasgow, in 1797 ; and at eleven years old entered Glasgow University, when he had better have been kept at school; for, according to his own account, it prematurely forced him into competition with older students, and without any benefit : he did not attain prizes in the earlier classes, nor quit college till 1820, having remained there eleven or twelve years. He left the University, however, with the highest honours it could bestow ; and he preached " with much acceptance in Glasgow and the neighbouring country." In April 1822 he became assistant minister at Shettleston, on the "unanimous application of the congregation"; in the following August he was elected assistant and successor at a chapel in Glasgow. By 1824 his reputation for eloquence had i spread so far that he was appointed to the third charge of the town of Stirling; in the year following he was translated to the second ; and in 1827 to the first charge, —a situation of high preferment in the Church of Scotland, "and which previously, it is believed, had never been held by so young a man." When, in 1835, a vacancy took place in Lady Yester's Church, Edin- burgh, he was presented to that charge ; he was appointed one of the Deans of the Chapel Royal in 1841 ; and in 1845 his University conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He died in the autumn of 1846, of a stomach complaint; probably brought on by over exertion and ne- glect of himself.
A man who attained such rapid and continuous promotion, chiefly, it
would seem, by his pulpit reputation, and sometimes through the ordeal of election contests, must have been endowed with great popular attractions. It appears, indeed, that "persons of superficial observation spoke of him as a mere orator, looking upon the acceptance which his sermons met as a proof of the triumphs of mere address" • while others, who "were always abstemious of their praise," considered him as only a rhetorician. Great allowance must be made for a posthumous and unrevised work. This volume has been published at the request of Dr. Bennie's con- gregation ; only two of the Discourses bad been printed before ; and though the preacher carefully wrote his sermons, he went over the sub-
ject again in his mind, so that probably he made oral improvements which fleeted away in the delivery. Making all these allowances, we in- cline to agree with those who were "always abstentious of praise." The general characteristic of the sermons is rhetorical. Abstract the mode, and there is little or nothing left, except in a few discourses on purely moral subjects. The theological studies of Dr. Bennie, and the manner in which he turned his reading to account, are dwelt upon in the pre- fatory memoir; and his industry, both in study and parochial duty, ap- pears to have been great. From his discourses, we should infer that his reading lay rather among preachers and illustrators of Scripture than in that species of original learning which furnishes the pabulum of the divine. Dr. Bennie seems to us to have occupied himself with the finished articles of others, rather than to have dog in the original quarries for raw materials. Hence he wants that distinct cha- racter which any particular kind of scholarship imparts to the mind— and which is perhaps seldom found out of the Anglican and Romish Churches. Elfftreement by means of amplification, variety, and rhe- torical art, seems to us the characteristic of Dr. Bennie's Discourses ; differing in degree and in address, rather than in kind, from the sermons of many other Presbyterian or Dissenting ministers. Even the per- sonification in which Dr. Bennie deals is very frequent among the Non- conformist preachers, though he may manage that common practice with more grace. Take this picture, from a sermon on the text in which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews refers to the Jewish custom of the city of refuge, and which the Scottish divine applies to Christ, drawing a comparison between the man-slayer under the Law with the sinner ander the Gospel.
" There is a striking resemblance in the danger of their condition. The man- slayer was liable to be put to death by the avenger of blood. There was there- fore no time for delay, not a moment to be lost. A few minutes and his life- blood might smoke on the spot where he stood. The danger of the sinner is equally terrible and urgent. lie has broken the law, and incurred the penalty. There hangs over him a black cloud of condemnation; and if it be not broken up and scattered, he will, he must perish. Men, it is true, are naturally insensible bo their spiritual state; and while the insensibility continues, they resemble a dreamer on the brow of a beetling precipice or the edge of a raging furnace.
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But the moment their real condition is understood, there is an end to further security and delay. See the man-slayer in Judea, after committing the fatal deed 1 1 he full horror of his case has rushed upon his mind. You do Lot need to tell him to flee. He is beyond the reach of your voice before you have time to speak. He is already on the refuge-road. He waits not to bid farewell to friends, or to change his apparel. His field is unploughed, his harvest onreaped: no matter. He has a father to bury on the morrow, or the marriage of a son to cele- brate: no matter. ' Skin for skin, yea, all that a man bath, will he give for his life.' Under an all-compelling excitement, he hurries on. He fixes his eye on the city of refuge; he strains every nerve to reach it; he pauses not till its pro- tecting gates close upon his worn and wearied steps."
Like Whitefield, Dr. Bennie was accustomed to make use of his reading or the incidents of actual life in his sermons. The following travestie of Campbell's " Soldier's Dream " seems to go a shade beyond fair appropriation.
" We sometimes see the influesce of hope strikingly displayed in human life, in reference to temporal things. Take thee-rase-of a captive on a distant and inhos- pitable shore. file iron on his Limb enters into his soul. The proud tones of op- gmion grate upon his ear. Every object wounds—every association grieves kin. But if he 113113 the hope of freedom, how sweet it isl How fondly dues his fancy dwell on his own native Lod I and how swiftly does the most valueless trinket lead his thoughts back to its rallies and hills! Or take the case of a soldier fighting the battles of his country on foreign plains: wearied and worn with the toils of war, he lays him down at the close of day to rest, and then busy memory softens his hard pillow with many a fond vision of days long past; he sees the fields of his youth in their beauty, and looks ou the cottage that shel- tered his childhood; the bleat qf his mountain-goats and the strain of the corn- reapers come sweetly on his ear; and though these visions pass away, yet are they the creations of a hope which gilds the gloom of many a solitary hour, and lightens the burden of many a painful march.* 2. The Six Sermons by the Reverend W. G. Cookesley are not so strik- ing.= example of the Anglican school of preaching as Dr. Bennie's are of the Presbyterian or Dissenting style; but, for the purpose of a compara- tive sample, they offer a sufficient contrast to those of the Scottish divine, in their plainness of language and their measured tone, even when deal- ing with controversial topics which are 'apt to excite the ire of theo- logians. Their sullject is those particular principles of Popery towards which there is an evident leaning in a part of our Church ; and this also gives them a distinct object, and a unity that no miscellaneous sermons can attain. Three of the questions considered are the Atonement, the Eucharist, and the Worship of the Virgin and Saints ; where Pdpery is attacked for the unscriptural manner in which the merits of Christ are hidden under devices of man's invention, either presumptuous or idolatrous. Confession, Absolution, and Prayers for the Dead, are de- nounced for their religious presumption, and their worldly pblicy and
moral mischiefs ; the Pope's Supremacy is considered both scripturally and historically ; and the series concludes with a sermon on Unity, ia which the common Protestant view of the question is enforced.
Novelty was not to be looked for in discourses on a question which has employed the sharpest and most learned wits of Christendom for three centuries, especially when the stimuli of party zeal and secular ambition were superadded to theological jealousy and religious enthusiasm. Nei- ther does Mr. Cookesley appear to aim at anything more than to warn those who listen to him against the errors of Romanism, and to put on record his own convictions of the truth. This has rendered his treat- ment somewhat curt; but it has also popularised it, by confining hint to the more salient proofs. The Six Sermons may be recommended as a plain exposition of the leading Scriptural arguments against Romanism, with an occasional aid from ethics or history. The hest-handled subject is the Supremacy : that on Unity is rather a species of outside war. The pre- tended-unity of Romanism is a topic fit for the most consummate satirist:
Aristophanes would have revelled in it. The feeling of Mr. Cookesley is very Anti-Papal : the zealous Protestant will find no half-compromises or honied words in Popery Subversive of Christianity.
3. The Reverend Mr. Macleane's Unity of God's Lam is not in name a series of sermons, but such is in reality the character of the work. The subject is one perfectly appropriate to a continuous set of lectures; and the writer's treatment is more like the pulpit than the study, in his frequent quotations of texts, and the serious character of his composition; while the division into chapters gives the pause which is produced by the c inclusion of each single sermon. Tne object of Mr. Macleane's book is to vindicate the Mosaic law against the opinions of Jeremy Taylor, Warburton, and many other divines, as well, we believe, as the large mass of thinkers upon the sub- ject. The author maintains that the moral code of the Old Testament was of the same character as the New, though not so fully developed, or rather, such prominence was not given to some of the milder vir- tues. He also holds that " the immortality of the soul" (but the Scrip- tural doctrine is rather " the resurrection of the body ") was revealed under the Mosaic dispensation ; which, moreover, he argues, required faith, and an obedience in the spirit of love and righteousness, not a mere formal submission to a ceremonial law. Hence the conclusion of the author, which lends its title to the book, the unity of God's law. The question requires a very accurate definition, and a more logical treatment than Mr. Macleane bestows upon it, before it can be satis- factorily discussed. That a very important part of the Mosaic moral code was not superseded, but survived the Christian dispensation, and became one with it, does not admit of dispute. A person has nothing to do but walk into a church, where he will see the Commandments occupy- ing the same place with the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, to satisfy him- self upon this point : the devotional books of any denomination of Chris- tians will lead to a similar conclusion. It is also easy enough to pick out isolated passages from individual writers that would bear interpreta- tion of a more catholic and loving character than the Mosaic code and the Jewish practice display. But this is not a true way of arguing the: ques- tion. Almost anything, cognate to the theme, may be deduced from a comprehensive writer, by picking out some single sentence and interpret- ing it by our lights and our views. The true conclusion is to be drawn from the whole code, and the apparent understanding of the people ; not from scattered passages in particular authors, that might be derived from observation, or struck out by deep feeling, though on some points the writers might be inspired. On such large grounds, we think the Mo- saic law will be found harsh, exclusive, and short (at the very least) in its moral doctrines, and such as no mere development from itself could ever have advanced into the mild and pure system of Christian ethics. Take for example the sexual relation ; and we need only look to the Mosaic law of divorce, and the permitted polygamy of the patriarchs, to feel the vast moral difference between the old dispensation and the new. The purity of this relation seems to bea law, too, which unassisted reason does not readily discover, or at least obey. Yet we have merely to con- sider Asia, or the ancient world, to see its vast importance upon family and social life, as well as upon national character. The dialectical quality of The Unity of God's Lam is not of a re- markable kind. The unsound nature of the general view will to some extent affect the subordinate arguments ; but we drink there is little skill shown in the plan and disposition of the parts, or in the treatment of the subject. Some of the particular arguments are clever,—as the exposi- tion of the formal dead-letter character of the Jews at the time of the Ad- vent ; others only specious,—as in the attempt to meet the harsh exclusive character of the Jewish people, their permitted sensuality, and the cruelty of the Hebrew history. One leading argument, that the moral doctrines were there in the Bible, and the Jews culpable for not finding them oat, seems weak, and also to cut two ways. The inspired writers, in the scattered passages that are brought to maintain Mr. hlacleane's view, spoke incidentally, as they saw but dimly; and if their meaning is mat- ter of dispute with our lights, it could not be very clear to the Jews. Their national punishments were for idolatries and consorting with fo- reigners. Mr. Macleane's literature is scholarly ; but the book derives its character from its subject, which necessarily involves many theological points, and travels over a wide Scriptural field.
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