HIS VICE-CHANCELLORSHIP. LXTII
light after another, leaving you at length in midnight darkness. An accomplished modem writer has pointed out a mortifying identity between the dogmas of our modern Pantheists and those of the Bhud- dists of India.^ It would be easy to show that the discoveries of our modern Neologists and Rationahsts are in truth the resurrection of the errors of Biddle, Smalcius, and Moscorovius.^ Again and again, in those writings, which have slumbered beneath the dust of two centu- ries, the student meets with the same speculations, supported by the same reasonings and interpretations, that have startled him in the modem German treatise, by their impious hardihood.
You pass into the body of this elaborate work through one of those learned porticoes in which our author delights, and in which the his- tory of Socinianism is traced through its many forms and phases, from the days of Simon Magus to his own. No part of this history is of more permanent value than his remarks on the controversial tactics of Socinians; among which he especially notices their objection to the use of terms not to be found in Scripture ; and to which he replies, that " though such terms may not be of absolute necessity to express the things themselves to the minds of believers, they may yet be neces- sary to defend the truth from the opposition and craft of seducers;" — their cavilling against evangelical doctrines rather than stating any positive opinions of their own, and, when finding it inconvenient to oppose, or impossible to refute a doctrine, insisting on its not being fundamental. How much of the secret of error in religion is detected in the following advice : " Take heed of the snare of Satan in affect- ing eminency by singularity. It is good to strive to excel, and to go before one another in knowledge and in light, as in holiness and obe- dience. To do this in the road is difficult. Many, finding it impos- sible to emerge into any consideration by walking in the beaten path of truth, and yet not able to conquer the itch of being accounted Tiveg f/.syaXoi, turn aside into by-ways, and turn the eyes of men to them by scrambling over hedge and ditch, when the sober traveller is not at all regarded."^ And the grand secret of continuing in the faith grounded and settled, is expressed in the following wise sen- tences: "That direction in this kind which with me is instar om- nium, is for a diligent endeavour to have the power of the truths professed and contended for abiding upon our hearts ; — that we may not contend for notions, but what we have a practical acquaintance with in our own souls. When the heart is cast indeed into the mould of the doctrine that the mind embraceth, — when the evidence and ne-
' Vaughan's Age and Christianity, pp. 79-82.
2 Princeton Theol. Essays, First Series. Essay on the Doctrines of the Early Socinians.
' Preface, pp. 64, 65, quarto ed.
LXrV LIFE OF DR OWEN.
cessity of the truth abides in us, — when not the sense of the words only is in our heads, but the sense of the things abides in our hearts, — when we have communion with God in the doctrine we contend for, — then shall we be garrisoned by the grace of God against all the assaults of men." ^
This secret communion with God in the doctrines contended for was the true key to Owen's own steadfastness amid all those winds of doctrine which unsettled every thing but what was rooted in the soil. We have an illustration of this in the next treatise, which he soon after gave to the world, and in which he passes from the lists of con- troversy to the practical exhibition of the Gospel as a life-power. It Was entitled, " On the Mortification of Sin in Believers ;" and contains the substance of some sermons which he had preached on Eom. viii. 13. He informs us that his chief motives for this publication were, a wish to escape from the region of public debate, and to pro- duce something of more general use, that might seem a fruit " of choice, not of necessity;"' and also, " to provide an antidote for the dangerous mistakes of some that of late years had taken upon them to give directions for the mortification of sin, who, being unacquainted with the mystery of the gospel and the efficacy of the death of Christ, have anew imposed the yoke of a self-wrought-out mortification on the necks of their disciples, which neither they nor their forefathers were ever able to bear."^ We have no means of knowing what were the treatises to which Owen here refers ; but it is well known that Baxter's mind at an early period received an injurious legal bias from a work of this kind ; nor is even Jeremy Taylor's " Holy Living" free from the fault of minute prescription of external rules and " bodily exercise, which profiteth little," instead of bringing the mind into immediate contact with those great truths which inspire and trans- form whatever they touch. Nor have there been wanting teachers, in any age of the church, who
" do but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Wliile rank corruption, miuing all within, Infects unseen."