JOHN SMITH AND HIS SELECT DISCOURSES.

IN

N the life and opinions of Whichcote, which we formerly reviewed,* the new movement of thought in Cambridge is seen taking its rise. It is found springing partly out of a fresh activity of the philosophical spirit wearied with the aridities of the exhausted scholasticism, and quickened by the revived study of Plato, and partly out of a re-action against the religious bigotries of the time, which in their violence and intolerance had disgusted the higher minds at the universities. The religious aspect of the movement is, in the first instance, more conspicuous than its philosophical character and affiliation. Whichcote's relations to the religious parties of his time come into more direct view than his relation to the speculative influences, which, beyond doubt, he also greatly modified. In other words, he is more prominently the rational religious thinker than the Platonic philosopher.

The explanation of this is easy. Religion masked every other interest in the seventeenth century. Both politics and philosophy, although they had broken the ecclesiastical yoke, and were seeking emancipation, had not yet accomplished it. In order to get a hearing for themselves, they had studiously to court theology, and assume a religious side; or at least to pay deference-if it were only as with Bacon, the deference of respectful distance-to what was still held to be the queen of the sciences. The philosophical attitude of Bacon is

• Sec Contemporary Review for October, 1871.

*

the least involved with religion. Even Descartes is more theological, and professes to hold his theories only with the approval of the church. But the most striking illustration of the dominance of the religious spirit is Hobbes himself. Essentially hostile as his writings are to the foundations of religious belief, they are everywhere pervaded with a religious tone and colouring. The "Leviathan" in many of its chapters is a perfect mosaic of scriptural quotations. The very title itself, and the titles of its several books, are biblical. It cheats the ear with religious phrases, and the solemnity of a religious purpose, which it breaks to the intelligence with its merciless logic. The difference in this respect between Bacon and Hobbes is curious and interesting. Bacon, in acknowledging the supremacy of theology, excludes it from the circle of rational knowledge and inquiry. He treats it with an assumed humility-a grand air of respect, which has always struck us as having a touch of mockery in it; while at the same time he bows it out of the court of the sciences as something altogether transcending nature and reason. Hobbes, on the other hand, mixes his politics, philosophy, and religion inextricably together. We cannot get at the one without the other, or separate them without destroying his whole intellectual system. In this respect Hobbes was the truer child of his age. How men were to live together at all-how society was to be formed and the state constituted? were in the seventeenth century still identical with the questions how men were to live together as religious beings? what dogmas they were to profess? what mode of worship they were to observe? And so religion naturally took the front in every new movement of thought.

But further, it is to be remembered that Whichcote himself, with his friends and followers, were all clergymen of the Church of England. They were fellows or heads of colleges; they were preachers in the university. All their teaching, accordingly, took a religious turn. They were philosophers in the interests of Christianity. It was their instincts of rational Christian defence at once against the bigotries and the atheisms-as they believed them to be―of their time, which drove them in search of a deeper, more comprehensive, and more inspiriting philosophy.

There are sufficient traces of such a philosophy in Whichcote, although they lie behind other phenomena more prominently marked. His general view of religion as "a seed of a deiform nature "-implanting and strengthening within us all lofty and pure aspirations, and rationally elevating and sweetening the whole nature in communion with God-is essentially Platonic. So also is the whole turn

* Dedication of his "Meditations" to the Sorbonne.

of his thought in its diffusive ideality, his love of the abstract rather than the concrete, and even his nicety of verbal and argumentative definition. We are told that "he set young students much on reading the ancient philosophers, chiefly Plato, and Tully, and Plotinus." Tuckney accuses him, after he came to be a lecturer at Emmanuel, of laying aside in a great measure all other studies, and betaking himself to "philosophy and metaphysics." The chief objection to his preaching was its moral and philosophical character in contrast to that doctrinal style which Puritans have curiously always considered to be more identical with the simplicity of scriptural truth. He, in his turn, confesses his obligations to "philosophers," and the good which he had got from them in the "use of all those principles that derive from God and speak him in the world." He defends with some warmth and jealousy his favourite studies; but at the same time it never occurs to him to put them in front of, or in place of, religion. The chief point in his vindication is the consistency which he has found between them and the main points of Christianity. "I have sometimes publicly declared," he says, "what points of religion I have found excellently held forth by them; and I never found them enemies to the faith of the gospel." The religious interest is first with him, and the philosophical only second.

The speculative character of the movement becomes more prominent with its advance. The younger minds that Whichcote led and influenced are less affected by the accidental relations of religious party, and the conflicts of religious dogma amidst which he himself moved, and which gave the primary bias to his teaching. They take up the same questions in their broader spiritual aspects—their more generalized and philosophical shape. John Smith is a Platonist, not only, like his master, because he has found in the study of the Platonic writings certain principles coincident with his own enlarged Christian thoughtfulness, by the light of which he is able to rebuke the narrowness or expose the falsehood of those whom he designates. "lazy and loose Christians;" but because from the beginning he has more or less taken up his line of thought from Plato, or the writings of the Neo-Platonic school. Moreover, the questions which occupy him are more directly philosophical. They touch those general principles or relations of thought out of which all philosophy comes, whether it takes a religious or an irreligious form. The essence of Divine knowledge-in what it consists-the ultimate springs of our rational and spiritual life, out of which arise respectively Superstition, Atheism, Theism,-the nature of Revelation, and the true idea of

* Burnet's Hist. of his Own Time, vol. i. p. 340.

Righteousness;-such are the questions to which his "Discourses" are devoted. Religious in the highest sense, they yet involve in their mere statement the primary data of all philosophy; and Smith, we shall find, handles them as a preacher indeed-for the discourses were intended for oral delivery-yet with a freedom, loftiness, and amplitude of grasp, which stamps him pre-eminently as a Christian philosopher.

Of Smith's life unhappily we know little or nothing. In some respects the most remarkable of all the Cambridge school-the richest and most beautiful mind, and certainly by far the best writer of them all-he died at the early age of thirty-four. There was nothing to tell of a career so brief, and which never seems to have passed beyond the precincts of the University. He is a thinker without a biography. Two friends,-John Worthington, who edited his "Discourses," and Simon Patrick, who preached his funeral sermon in the chapel of Queen's College, where he himself had discoursed with such marvellous eloquence,-have given us some sketch of his character, but left much to be desired even in this respect. There is elevation and beauty, but also a good deal of indistinctness, in the picture which they draw. The lines are grand but wavering, and lose themselves, after the manner of the time, in vagueness and generality; yet here and there there are touches of affectionate felicity, which, in the case of Patrick in particular, break into downright bursts of tearful tenderness over the loss of so much genius and goodness. Quando ullum invenient parem, is the key-note of all he says, and the pressure of the painful thought interrupts the flow of his panegyric with the most honest exclamations of grief. Who can think of his gracious lips, his profitable and delightful converse, his cordial love, without a sigh and a tear, without saying, 'Ah! my father;' 'Ah! his glory?"" A recent writer* has said that in all the literature of the period with which he is acquainted, he has "not met with a more pathetic production than this funeral sermon. The artistic skill is not great, but there is an expression of genuine feeling throughout, with an occasional outbreak of honest grief which produces an effect above all art." This is quite true, and the fact is equally creditable to Patrick and the friend whom he and the University so deeply mourned.

John Smith was a native of Northamptonshire, where his father seems to have been a small farmer. He was born at Achurch, near Oundle, in that county, in the year 1618. Before his birth, Patrick

* Mr. Mullinger, of St. John's College, who, in a small volume, entitled “Cambridge Characteristics in the Seventeenth Century," has touched, but only very slightly, upon our subject.

says, "his parents had been long childless, and were grown aged." He was sent to Cambridge in 1636, and entered, as Whichcote had before him, at Emmanuel College. We would infer from this that his father, like many of his class, especially in the midland districts of England, had Puritan leanings, and sent him to the well-known Puritan Foundation to be trained in the true gospel of Protestantism. At this time Whichcote was a Fellow and Tutor in the College; and he is supposed also to have commenced his influence as a preacher. He was nine years older than Smith; and it is expressly stated by Worthington that he became tutor to the young and probably somewhat friendless undergraduate from Northamptonshire. This is one of the few facts embodied in Worthington's rhetorical "Address to the Reader," prefixed to the original edition of the "Discourses." It is also implied in his statement, that the tutor's comparative wealth was freely given to assist his pupil. His words are :—

"I knew him (the author of the 'Discourses') for many years, not only when he was Fellow of Queen's College, but when a student in Emmanuel College, where his early piety, and the remembering his Creator in those days of his youth, as also his excellent improvements in the choicest parts of learning, endeared him to many, particularly to his careful tutor, the Fellow of Emmanuel College, afterwards Provost of King's College, Dr. Whichcote; to whom, for his directions and encouragements of him in his studies, his seasonable provision for his support and maintenance when he was a young scholar, as also upon other obliging considerations, our author did ever express a great and singular regard."*

Smith took his Bachelor's degree in 1640, and his Master's four years later; and in the same year in which he became Master, or in 1644, he was chosen a Fellow of Queen's College. The explanation. given of his not having received a Fellowship in his own College is, that by the statutes no more than one Fellow could be admitted from any one county, and that the Fellowship open to a Northamptonshire graduate was filled up at the time Smith became eligible. It was at this time, our readers will remember, that Whichcote returned to Cambridge, after a brief absence, and was appointed Provost of King's College. We have no trace of further personal relations betwixt the former Tutor and his pupil; but they, no doubt, renewed their old intercourse, and it is easy to imagine the enthusiasm with which a mind like Smith's would regard Whichcote's growing influence over the youth of the University. Smith's success, again, could scarcely have been less acceptable to his former teacher; while the discourses which he delivered in the chapel of Queen's must have been among the most powerful stimulants of the higher and more expansive thoughtfulness which was rapidly springing up

* Acress to the Reader.