This was the age of reasoners, of earnest thinkers, who had this peculiar to them, that they showed a strong disposition to discard from the sphere of reason every thing that was incapable of analytic examination, or of logical demonstration. They did wonders in anatomizing the human mind as a surgeon would the human body. But their philosophy, highly valuable in itself, was still more highly injurious, inasmuch as all those subjects-that infinite experience, and wide vital play of human naturewhich could not be brought within its compass, were by its doctors virtually dismissed as futile. Revelation, however, though justly subjected in its lowest groundworks to the verifying test of this philosophy, is really one of the subjects out of its reach. Once tested as to its authenticity, it opens a new world of its own. It was natural, therefore, that its highest claims should have been disallowed, whilst the philosophic school alluded to was ascendant. Without referring to infidel writers, it is certain, that those of eminence of this period who professed themselves to be believers, narrowed greatly the Christian faith, in order to make their profession good. The minds of these authors were so fully possessed of, so embraced round by their philosophy, that it was only by including religion within its domain, that it could find a lodgment in their understandings. Christianity was robbed completely of its spirit, of its energies, of all its diviner aspects, by this compression, by this confinement. It was surmounted by philosophy, and took the rather appearance of a philosophical, than of a revealed creed. In a word, the effect produced, though not intended, by the serious conscientious philosopher of the eighteenth century, was, if the expression may be allowed, to unrevelationize revelation. Of these Locke stands at the head, and it is not consequently surprising to find Voltaire claiming him as an anti-christian author: for, though personally an humble believer, the tendency of his works, as the prince of infidels perceived, was to introduce a mode of thinking and reasoning, which, had it much longer prevailed, would have banished faith and religious aspiration of every kind from the earth. As it was, Locke's influence was strongly perceptible in the religions books of the time. How thin, flat, and cold is the English theology-can it be called theology?-of this period! Tillotson and Burnet among our clergy, and Addison among our laywriters, show it in all the unctionless elegance and propriety of its philosophic good sense. Throughout Europe, here and there only an exception being noticeable, the mental level was the same. Reason, or rather reasoning and taste were cultivated-but there was no elevation of thought; and especially spiritual themes, and spiritual reflections, which belong peculiarly to revelation, which constitute the substratum itself, the very inward essence of the Bible, were, as by common tacit consent, consigned over to silence, or, perhaps, with contempt, regarded as the fantastic illusions of a diseased brain. Turretini partook largely of the temper of the age he lived in. He was the great philosophizer of Christianity. Treating of the Christian religion under philosophic points of view, in the form of academic exercises, as he exclusively did, his orthodoxy was but a body of doctrines without a spiritual soul, without the warmth-of-heart affections to give it life; and, by his example, he doubtless prepared the way for others to reduce this rigid magisterial orthodoxy within more philosophical limits still. Two facts well illustrate the character of Turretini as a theologian, and the character also of the epoch. 1st, He entered into consultation with Tillotson, Wake, and some German divines, to devise means for bringing about a doctrinal and ecclesiastical uniformity between all the Protestant churches and sects of Europe. The very idea of this shows a willingness to make great sacrifices,sacrifices which would have been equivalent to a neutralization of the most important doctrines, from which the divisions he sought to heal have sprung-to a neutralization, indeed, as an attentive consideration of the project will show, of Christianity itself. For does the proposal, let the reader determine, of a common agreement in theological questions between widely-separated churches, denote a desire to promote Christian charity and unity; or does it betoken the subsiding of every specific conviction into a wide generality of assent about Christianity, which, however specious it may be in superficial theory, must nullify in practice the power of the Gospel altogether? The kind of union, also, such a proposal tends to, would it not be the foundation, as it has hitherto been the only one, for a superstructure of sacerdotal dominion and tyranny? And is it really good for any thing else? The bare contemplation of the scheme of agreement by one occupying the position of Turretini, affords a strong proof that the distinctive tenets of Calvinism as opposed to the later views of Arminius, were already held but in very low estimation in Geneva. 2d, A Confession of Faith called the Consensus, drawn up at the Synod of Dordrecht, had been formally adopted by the Genevan Church, and by those of some other of the Swiss cantons, as expressive of the fundamental tenets of their creed. In fact, it held the same place in the Church of Geneva that the thirty-nine articles did in the Church of England. It determined all her most essential doc. trines, was the base on which her teaching rested, and by defining what was, it excluded thereby very sufficiently what was not to be taught within the precincts of the national establishment. This Consensus was, during the time of Turretini, and chiefly by his influence, abolished. The act itself was accomplished in a clandestine illegal manner, very characteristic of the period, and of the men who performed it. The immediate object was to bring about the uniformity we have just spoken of. It appears by documents we have seen-especially some letters from Archbishop Tillotson to Turretini that the king of England and the king of Prussia were anxious to effect this purpose, and a suppression of confession was considered as the first necessary step towards it. Such suppression would, however, have excited a good deal of popular comment and resistance, had it been openly avowed. The Genevan clergy, therefore, asserted, that they did not intend by any express law to abrogate the Consensus, but merely to lay it aside by a resolution come to, inter parietes, by their own body, as superfluous; the Catechism, they declared, of Calvin announcing the same doctrines, and being quite sufficient to secure their preservation. But after the stronger defence was removed, the weaker one was only suffered to remain standing for a season, to mask further operations. And the consequences of this first breach made in the constitution of the national church were, as might have been expected, most baneful. A door was, by this measure, thrown open to every latitudinarian interpretation of Scripture; and in a very short time after it took place, the theology of Genevan divines had declined from the high absoluteness of Calvinism into Socinian equivocations. There is a tradition in Geneva, to which credit is attached by many whose opinions are of great weight, that about this time a society, composed of the most eminent and learned men of that city, was secretly formed for the express purpose of reducing Christianity, in practice, to within what they called the limits of sound reason. Of course, we should pay no attention to this tradition, being unsupported by any direct authentic evidence, if the story had not reached us from many quarters, and been insisted on as true, by persons who are in the best position to preserve traditionary information. In a little republic, too, like Geneva, where all the families know each other from father to son, any remarkable fact may be much better traditionally handed down through two generations only, than it could be in larger communities. The society in question had at its head a very distinguished man, with whose name, nevertheless, the majority of our readers are probably unacquainted,-Abouzit, a celebrated geometrician, who, though he has produced few works, enjoyed during his life a high European renown. Sir Isaac Newton considered him a worthy umpire in a dis.. pute between himself and Liebnitz; and it was in deference to his judgment that our great astronomer changed an opinion he had expressed touching the eclipse observed by Thales in 585 before the Christian era. Abouzit seems to have united all suffrages. Voltaire always spoke of him with the highest admiration. Among his countrymen the esteem he com manded amounted to veneration; and, by all accounts, he was as amiable and excellent in all the private relations of society as he was accomplished and profound. When such a man puts himself at the head of such a society, we may be sure that his motive is pure. It was through a warm, mistaken philanthropy, that he, and others no doubt worthy to be associated with him, formed the project we have mentioned. They considered the mysteries and miracles of Christianity so to disfigure and vitiate its pure morality, that they determined, without shocking the public prejudices, quietly, by the influence they could so sensibly exert in all the high places of the little republic, to purge these spots practically out of it. And that they succeeded to a great extent in their design, the facts we have in continuance to record will show. After the death of Turretini, two names which have fallen into merited obscurity, meet us in the history of the Church of Geneva-Jacob Vernet, and Jacob Vernes. Both these persons lived and wrote in the heart of the eighteenth century, and were active and effective men of their day. From the works of the former, who was a disciple of Turretini, it is evident that he had adopted Socinian views. He was a professor and pastor. Vernes, also a pastor, and a man of wealth, whose amiable manners and cultivated mind gained him many friends, and made him very popular, was decidedly, if not avowedly, Socinian. These two men are the last doctors of the Genevan Church of whom any record or memory exists down to the last twentyfive years. Very ordinary individuals themselves, they have borrowed some lustre from the great authors with whom they lived in intimacy, or with whom they corresponded. Vernet exchanged frequent letters with Montesquieu, whose great work on the Esprit des Lois was published under his superintendance at Geneva. With Voltaire also, and with Rousseau, he had frequent intercourse. He had the honour of being lampooned by the philosopher of Ferney, and between him and the wretched Jean Jacques there passed many letters of hypocritical sensibility and base prevarications on both sides, on the subject of christian doctrines. Vernes was still more conspicuous for his connexion with these illustrious men. He was the intimate friend of Voltaire, was the oft-invited guest at Ferney; and he who had taken for his motto Ecrapez L'Infame, used to call this ordained minister of the gospel his "dear priest," his " amiable pastor." With Rousseau, however, Vernes had chiefly to do. At first a friend to this most eloquent of sophists and unhappy of men, he attacked him afterwards with great virulence on the Confession of Faith of the Savoyard vicar in the Emelius. Hence Rousseau's excommunication from the Protestant Church of his native city, and hence his celebrated Lettres de La Montagne, which throw so much light on the character of the Genevan clergy of that day. To prove the Socinianism of Vernet and Vernes-or, if those who tread actually in their steps should like the word better, their Arianism-one has but to glance over the works of these pastors. In a volume of dissertations on doctrinal subjects, entitled Opuscula Selecta Theologica, Vernet endeavours to make it appear, that the dogma of original sin was not known to the ancient Hebrews. He maintains that it was not till the Jewish nation fell into the hands of ignorant teachers, who introduced various superstitions and fabulous traditions among them, that this doctrine found a place in their creed. He alleges that the Targum, which appeared in the time of Herod, first spread the opinion that "it was by the malice of the Serpent that the inhabitants of the earth were subject to death," but that none but the vulgar believed the fable." He then goes on with the most conceited self-sufficiency to insist, that Tertullian and St Augustine were quite mistaken on this point; and that their mistake arose from a misrepresentation of certain passages of St Paul's Epistles. In another disquisition, De Deitate Christi, this same M. Vernet affirms, that the doctrine of the Trinity has no countenance in the Bible, and is to be traced to its origin in the obscure metaphysics of Plotinus, who announced it first to the world, towards the close of the third century, in a work entitled Of the Three Primordial Substances. Many other assertions of a like Socinian stamp might be cited from the writings of this person; but, in order to be brief, we will merely refer our readers to his catechism, and to that of his col league Vernes. In neither of these catechisms is the deity of Christ acknowledged. It is, on the contrary, denied, by being, in the most marked and striking manner, omitted, when the nature and birth of the Messiah are explained. There is a design, however, to hide this denial of the Godhead of Christ in both of these treacherous expositions of the Christian creed. Words with many meanings, and many shades of meaning, are used; but never, when the divinity of the Saviour is in question, the right word -the plain one in which no subterfuge can lurk. The bad faith of Vernet especially, the subdolous manner in which he strove to insinuate, unobserved, his heretical opinions into the public mind, is seen in a fact which might be esteemed insignificant, if it did not, with a multitude of other small traits of a similar kind, betray the cautious aggressiveness, with which he and his brother pastors sought to Socinianize the church of which they were the sworn ministers and ostensible guardians. In the first edition of his catechism just alluded to, there is a section entitled-Of the Divinity of Christ, in which, nevertheless, this divinity is denied; in the second edition, this title is changed into The Divine Nature of Christ; and in the third and last edition, the same section, its former title being suppressed, is headed thus: Of the Names and Offices of Jesus Christ. The pastors had probably more than one motive for concealing the purpose they entertained, but their chief motive for the secrecy with which they pursued it, was this-that a large portion of the inhabitants of Geneva were then strongly attached to the orthodox doctrines. The revocation of the edict of Nantes bad brought to that city numbers who had fled from persecution in France, and their descendants still clung with so much ardour to the creed for which their fathers had suffered, that it would have been highly imprudent to have roused their suspicions as to what was going on. The works of the pastors being, most of them, written in Latin, were out of their reach. This made the clandestine plan to Socinianize the church more easy. A few ordinary artifices and prevarications, thus sufficed to blind the people, till the people became, in a short time, as indifferent to religious truth as the clergy were hostile to it. There can be no doubt that the French philosophy of the eighteenth century, contributed much towards corrupting the doctrine of the Geneva divines. This infidel school of socalled philosophy told, for many reasons, with more effect upon Geneva, than upon any other place out of France; Geneva is close upon the French frontier-the language of her inhabitants is French. She was, as the real head of the federal cantons, neither so insignificant-so adjective, if the term may be used—a country, (as Belgium might then have been considered,) as to have felt but passively the ruling influences of the age; nor had she in herself those counter influences to put forth, which would have preserved her from subservience to the mental superiority of her great neighbour. She had been lately renowned-her old renown kept her up in the eye of the world-she had pretensions literary, philosophical-she was regarded as the nurse of letters, as well as of freedom-she had during the existing generation produced Bonnet and Rousseau. In a word, she was just in that position of quasi eminence that fitted her to receive willingly, with all the pride and conceit of an inferior imitating a superior, the fullest second-hand impression of French philosophy. She had no single great man within her walls, and, what was worse, many clerical pretenders to literary fame; and above all, her Christianity, which would have been the only effective antagonist of the infidel philosophy, had capitulated-had made with it terms of peace. One is not surprized, then, to find Geneva at this period the pet city of the French philosophers. As a republican city, she would have been, at any time, the proper object of their laudation, if her religion had not revolted them. But when they could call her the philosophie city as well as the republican city, she was exactly the example they sought for, to illustrate their principles. Voltaire invented legends about China, to show how civilized, how moral, how happy, a nation might be without Christianity. We may imagine, then, with what eagerness he and his co-mates, not having to travel this time to the Celestial empire for an example, seized upon an instance, as they deemed, close by them, which went to exhibit Christianity on the decline abated almost to a mere name; whilst philosophy and freedom throve only the more on that account, among a contented, flourishing, and highly instructed people. This at least was the view which the philosophers took of Geneva; it was to this view that she owed the praises they lavished upon her; and certainly the fact that they did so praise her, that they did hold her up as an illustration of the virtue of their own antichristian principles, is a strong proof that she merited this evil distinction. In a letter of Voltaire to D'Alembert, dated September 23, 1763, we find this expression-" I will never pardon you for not having returned by Geneva; you would have been delighted to see the accomplishment of all your predictions;" and in another letter in 1768, to the Marquis of Villevielle, he writes-" Be assured there are not twenty persons in Geneva who do not abjure Calvin as heartily as they do the Pope." D'Alembert's celebrated article in the Encyclopædia, however, entitled Geneva, the materials for which-we must bear in mind this significant circumstance were furnished him by a Genevan pastor, named Mouchon, is much bolder, and more decisive. In this article, from which we here insert an extract, D'Alembert gives a fearful picture of a fallen church, aud shows the joy of the French philosopher in contemplating it. After having lauded Geneva as the philosophic city, the Encyclopedist notices an inscription on her Hotel de Ville, in which the Pope is designated as Antichrist, upon which he exclaims " In our days there is no Antichrist." He then goes on thus: "We must not think that the Genevese entertain the prevalent opinions on those articles of religion elsewhere deemed most important. Many of them believe no longer in the divinity of Jesus Christ; and hell, one of the principal points of our creed, is discarded from that of many of their pastors. It would be, according to them, to outrage the Deity, to imagine that this Being, so full of justice and benevolence, were capable of punishing our faults by an eternity of torments. They maintain that we should never literally interpret those parts of the sacred volume, which appear to wound humanity and reason. To say all in a word, several pastors of Geneva have no other religion than that of a perfect Socinianism. They reject all mysteries, and believe that the first principle of true religion is to propose nothing to belief which shocks our reason:-thus, when they are pressed on the necessity of revelation, a dogma so essential to Christianity, they substitute the word utility, which seems to them less hard and positive; in this they are not orthodox, but they are consistent with their own principles. Respect for Jesus Christ and the scriptures, is perhaps the only thing which distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism." Calvin, disciple of Christ, hear this! Thy church, erewhile the glory of the Reformation, is now gloried in by infidels! Her name is struck out from the records of Christ's faithful witnesses, to be inscribed in the very Bible of unbelievers! How scarlet is the bare fact ! How it startles and shocks! How damning it is in its own light! It speaks louder and more eloquently than a thousand accusers! The venerable company-so are the society of pastors at Geneva called -published a paper, which they called a declaration, in answer to D'Alembert's article. They deny therein the truth of the account he gives of their doctrines; but in terms so vague, and susceptible of so many constructions, that their declaration really declares nothing, and leaves the charge against them in full force. This document must inspire every reader with the most painful contempt for those who drew it up ; and yet with pity at the embarrassment of men of general respectability of character, who had placed themselves in such a position, that they dared not be frank and true either towards infidels, or towards orthodox Christians. M. Vernet, subsequent to this declaration, undertook to confute, in a more complete manner, the assertions of D'Alembert. He wrote two disputatious volumes with this purpose; but he really only very imperfectly contradicts a few of the least important of the Encyclopedist's allegations. The |