May 15. 1833
Wicliffe — Luther — Reverence for Ideal Truths — Johnson the Whig — Asgill — James I.
Wicliffe’s genius was, perhaps, not equal to Luther’s; but really the more I know of him from Vaughan and Le Bas, both of whose books I like, I think him as extraordinary a man as Luther upon the whole. He was much sounder and more truly catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to the Caro Noumenon, or symbolical Body, the Rock that followed the Israelites.
Whitaker beautifully says of Luther;—Felix ille, quem Dominus eo honore dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos.
There is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only. Now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself superior. If it were possible to conceive God in a strict sense, that is, as we conceive a horse or a tree, even God himself could not excite any reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a tiger or a beautiful woman. But reverence, which is the synthesis of love and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man, towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery to you now—your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. It is the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power.
Samuel Johnson1, whom, to distinguish him from the Doctor, we may call the Whig, was a very remarkable writer. He may be compared to his contemporary De Foe, whom he resembled in many points. He is another instance of King William’s discrimination, which was so much superior to that of any of his ministers, Johnson was one of the most formidable advocates for the Exclusion Bill, and he suffered by whipping and imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson’s Works; and what party in this country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs!
A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout. In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch without adhering.
Asgill evidently formed his style upon Johnson’s, but he only imitates one part of it. Asgill never rises to Johnson’s eloquence. The latter was a sort of Cobbett-Burke.
James the First thought that, because all power in the state seemed to proceed from the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;—as if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and fruit were all contained in the seed. The constitutional doctrine as to the relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in two words this:—He is a representative of the whole of that, of which he is himself a part.
Notes
1 Dryden’s Ben Jochanan, in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was born in 1649, and died in 1703. He was a clergyman. In 1686, when the army was encamped on Hounslow Heath, he published “A humble and hearty Address to all English Protestants in the present Army.” For this he was tried and sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. An attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders, but this failed through an informality. After the Revolution he was preferred.—ED.