Cromartie Alan. Sir Matthew Hale, 1609-1676: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History) (ENG)

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Hole's 'latitudinarianism

159

approaching the divine. The Atonement was an interesting truth, vouched

for by holy writ, and a striking testimony to God's transcendent goodness;

it was not, from the human point of view, the essence of Christ's work.

Christ's nature was of secondary concern, compared to his role as the

bringer of ethical truth.

The Discourse itself had suggested a useful ambiguity in Christian

experience of God: 'there is some kind of motion in us, which though it be

the work of the Creator in the first giving of it, and again his work in

quickening reviving and enabling of it, yet he is pleased to require it of us

and to expect it of

us'.

At the time of the Discourse, it still seemed

important to see this motion as an unearned gift, as well as a duty God

imposed on man; in the papers now at Lambeth, the latter aspect is

predominant, almost to the exclusion of the former. The covenant of grace

is treated as an offer of salvation on 'condition' of 'evangelical obedience',

by which he meant an effort to obey the law of Christ.

Religion is

depicted as a simple moral law, 're-published' and greatly clarified by

Christ, but known to the virtuous heathens, who believed it and were

saved. The purpose of this chapter is to show how these virtually deist

beliefs could nonetheless be experienced as an orthodox Protestant faith.

One major intellectual influence was obviously the figure of John Selden.

Selden was often felt to be only very dubiously Christian, but Hale

defended his sincerity, assuring Richard Baxter that 'Selden was an earnest

professor of the Christian faith, and so angry an adversary to Hobbes that

he hath rated him out of the room'.

Hale's mentor certainly strikes the

modern reader as highly secular in thought and deed: an irreverent anti-

clerical gifted with pungent wit, who lived in a scandalous menage d trois

with the Earl and the Countess of Kent. In fact, as a previous chapter

attempted to explain, his moral philosophy was based on a clearly theo-

logical position. God was the linch-pin of his legal thought, because

human laws were contracts, and God alone could see to it that contractual

agreements were kept.

Considered as a Christian theologian, his major contribution was his

re-evaluation of the Jews. De jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam

Ebraeorum, the most elaborate of all his efforts, considered the relation-

ship between Jewish and natural law. Most puritans felt deep respect for

every Old Testament practice. Although the ceremonial law had of course

been abrogated, Jewish arrangements might be normative as God's own

Hale, Discourse, 243.

Hale, Works, I, 256, 292. Compare Hale, Discourse, 294. On the rise of explicit talk about

'conditions', see C. F. Allison, The rise ofmoralism: the proclamation of the Gospel from

Hooker to Baxter, 1966.

Baxter, Reliquiae, III, 48.

160 Religion

proclamation of natural moral rules. This was the possibility that Selden's

work effectively denied. A natural law, he thought, was known to every-

body who was in moral health; the Jewish law, by contrast, the law

declared specifically to a single race, was really just a local or 'civil' law

system. Not even the command to keep the sabbath had any power over

Christian folk. The liberating character of Selden's masterpiece can be seen

from an enthusiastic letter that the future Cambridge Platonist Ralph

Cud worth (1617—88) had felt inspired to send him in 1643:

under the Christian state, there is scarce any thing of ius divinum besides the

universal and catholic law of nature, excepting only the nomos tes pisteos, the law

of faith. The sabbath I have long satisfied myself in, which I think never a jot the

more moral ... because it hath a place in the Jewish decalogue and you have

already taught the world what the ius gentium of religion is [he means the law that

binds upon the Gentiles], in your incomparable discourse, upon the precepts of

Noah .. ,

God was certainly the author of much of Jewish law, but only as the

monarch that the Hebrews had happened to choose; he acted in precisely

the same way, by virtue of a contract with his people, as any human

governor making locally authoritative rules.

If Selden's full significance is to be understood, he must be seen from a

Calvinist perspective. The people of Israel, in Calvinist eyes, were the

'type' of the community of faith, prefiguring in many ways the institutions

of the Christian church. Its members could hope for salvation by virtue of

the atoning work of Christ, as they were included in the scope of the

'covenant of grace'.

For Calvin and for Calvinists, the laws that God

made for the Jews had set them apart as his church; Selden believed, by

contrast, that the Jews were no more than God's state. Their peculiar

relationship with God, initially established by a contract, was just another

political arrangement. But to deny, as Selden did, that Jewish law was ever

'ius divinum', any more than Babylonian or even common law, was to

break down the barrier dividing grace and works. There was salvation,

Selden thought, outside the Jewish state, the Biblical example being the

Gentile Job.

The implication, for a Calvinist, was that there was salva-

tion outside the Christian church. The Table talk made this idea explicit:

[the Jews] held that themselves should have the chief place of happiness in the

other world, but the Gentiles that were good men should likewise have their

portion of

bliss

there too. Now by Christ the partition wall is broken down and the

gentiles that believe in him are admitted to the same place of bliss as the Jews. And

Bodleian Library, MSS Selden supra 109, fo. 270.

Calvin, Institutes

the Christian Religion, tr. John Allen, vol.

pp. 465-88.

Selden, Opera, I, 747-50.

Hale's

latitudinarianism' 161

why should not that portion of happiness still remain to them who do not believe

in Christ, so they be morally good.

The intended effect of this teaching was probably to undermine the basis

of clerical power. If even the most minimal of Christian dogmatic beliefs

was not a precondition for salvation, then particular forms of church

government were surely indifferent things. He went out of his way to

discredit the Laudian theory that episcopal succession was essential to the

church.

To be out of communion with bishops was not fatal to the soul,

so excommunication had no intrinsic force. The secular authorities might

choose (as the people of England had done) to punish excommunicates

with various civil pains, but this was a matter determined by secular law.

The massive De synedriis, his last, unfinished work, expanded on a crucial

fact uncovered by De jure naturali.

Expulsion from the synagogue was

compatible with access to the Temple. This showed that biblical 'ex-

communication' was actually a civil penalty (expulsion from the day to day

society of Jews) as opposed to a spiritual sanction. Presbyterians and

Laudians and papists were equally mistaken in assigning the clergy such

power.

The specifically Christian revelation was much reduced in content and

importance. The church's primary duty was to reinforce the teachings that

were known through natural law. As Selden once complained: 'the things

between God and men are but a few, and those forsooth we must be told

often of, but the things between man and man are many, those I hear not of

above twice a year .. .'

It may seem rather puzzling that such an attitude

appealed to a pious Sabbatarian like Hale. The priorities of Selden, so

frankly secular, appear as an open departure from any traditional faith.

But seen from another angle, his writings satisfied a puritan need by

heightening the significance of ordinary life. The law of the Jews was

established by God, but the laws that were made by the English played

precisely the same role: they were in fact a duty, religious in authority and

content, that a people could establish for

itself.

As the Scottish presbyterian

Robert Baillie reported from the Westminster Assembly, 'this man is the

head of the Erastians; his glory is in the Jewish learning; he avows every

where that the Jewish state and church was all one, and that so in England

it must be, that the parliament is the church.'

In attacking ius divinum, he

seemed to raise all other laws to the level of a known divine command.

Selden himself was probably aware that this sacralisation of secular things

Selden, Table talk, 123.

Selden, Opera, II, 440, 1130.

Ibid.,

I, 5, 488.

Selden, Table talk, 106.

Letters

and

journals

Robert Baillie, ed.

Laing, Edinburgh 1861, vol. II, pp. 265-6.

There

is a

helpful discussion

Erastianism as

religious theory

William M. Lamont,

Godly

rule:

politics and

religion

1603-60, 1969, pp. 106-31.

162 Religion

was a covert means to secularise the sacred, but Hale was not equipped by

temperament to recognise this hazard in his mentor's attractive ideas.

Between the Discourse and the later papers, Hale felt a rather different

influence. The minimal religion of William Chillingworth emerged from

controversy about the 'rule of faith'.

His book The religion of Protestants

a safe way to salvation (1638) was aimed against the arguments of a Jesuit

called Knott, who had ably expounded the problems raised by appeals to

the Bible alone. Knott stressed the need for some authority to give infallible

interpretations, not least by defining the boundaries of the canon of

scripture

itself.

The answer that Chillingworth gave had numerous disturb-

ing implications: he denied the possibility of infallible knowledge of

Christ. No conceivable chain of reasoning was stronger than the weakest

of its links, and papists could give no infallible grounds for the infallibility

they claimed for the Roman church. Religious truth could not be proved

with the exactness known in mathematics but believers could become at

least 'morally certain' that the Bible was indeed the word of God. This

purely 'moral' certainty, compelled by the book's historical credentials,

was nothing but a rational conviction, analogous to belief in Julius Caesar,

or in a town that we have never seen.

Knott had additionally pointed out that the Bible was a most uncertain

rule. A generalised assent that the scriptures were the standard of the truth

had been no help to Protestants in their bitter internal debates. The answer

to this damaging objection was to minimise the doctrines that were neces-

sary to faith. Not only were they very 'plain and easy', but they were all

available in the Gospel according to Luke.

God has less interest in correct

beliefs than in the effort to discover them: 'I am fully assured that God does

not, and therefore that man ought not to require any more of any man than

this,

to believe the Scriptures to be God's word, to endeavour to find the

true sense of it, and to live according to it.'

God's purpose for his

creatures is that they should be purely rational. He therefore 'desires only

that we believe the conclusion, as much as the premises deserve, that the

strength of our faith be equal or proportionable to the credibility of our

motives to it.'

It was a deplorable error to hold 'that it is in vain to believe

the Gospel of Christ with such a kind or degree of assent, as they yield to

other matters of tradition'.

Of course this was exactly what most of his

English contemporaries (including the young Hale) had always found it

natural to assume. He was reducing faith to the fruit of a specialised

branch of historical knowledge.

Chillingworth

see

Robert

Orr,

Reason

and

authority:

the

thought

William

Chillingworth, Oxford 1967; Robert Martin Krapp, Liberal Anglicanism

1636—47:

historical essay, Ridgefield, Conn., 1944.

Chillingworth, Religion,

111.

Ibid., 376.

Ibid., 36.

Ibid.,

37.

Hales 'latitudinarianism' 163

For Chillingworth, this was an easy step, as his own preferred religion

was that of his godfather Laud. An unmediated personal experience of

grace had little part in his religious life. He had briefly been a papist, and

approved of the Laudian emphasis on ritual, so his religious sympathies

were more complex than they seem. The minimum conditions for salvation

were liberal by almost any standards, but it was still desirable that high

church attitudes should be adopted, including, for example, the notion that

the clergy were sacrificing priests.

A most important influence was

Grotius, who combined very similar rationalist ideas with a great admir-

ation for the ways of the Laudian church.

It was easy for a puritan,

however, to overlook this side of Chillingworth. In a reader like John

Tillotson, whose famous book The rule of faith (1666) restated Chilling-

worthian ideas, the upshot was an ethical religion: a minimalist theology,

indifferent to the church's sacraments, reducing Christianity to the vehicle

of some 'plain and easy' truths.

Hale came to feel, as Chillingworth had done, that knowledge of Christ

was like knowledge of Julius Caesar;

that God's expectations of man

were proportioned to what his creature could reasonably know; and that

the essential content of the Bible, once it had been established as the

morally certain truth, was a perfectly unambiguous ethical message, quite

readily accessible to even the simplest of minds. One way to examine this

shift is to look at his treatment of knowledge in relation to saving faith.

According to the Discourse, faith is a kind of knowledge, and knowledge

of the deity is bound to engender love.

'It is true', Hale admits, 'that

education, instruction and discipline may make us know these truths

speculatively, and yet our soul [be] not affected with them: but the convic-

tion,

which is wrought with the power of the spirit, is not so thin and

jejune a union of these truths to the understanding but deeper and more

radicated .. ,'

This 'deeper and more radicated' knowledge, surpassing a

mere speculative assent, involves a literal union with Christ, a union with

an atoning saviour, not with the truths that he was born to bring. This

union results in a double imputation: Christ bears the consequences of the

sins of the elect, while they receive the benefit of his unspotted and

transcendent merits.

The same cluster of themes can be detected in a manuscript probably

Ibid.,

Preface.

Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans,

and

Puritans: seventeenth century essays,

1987,

98n.; Baxter,

The

Grotian religion discovered,

1658, for a

perceptive contemporary

attack.

Lambeth 3485,

lOv. On the

varieties

certainty,

see

Barbara

Shapiro, Probability

and

certainty

seventeenth century England, Princeton 1983.

Hale,

see

esp.

pp.

180-93.

Hale, Discourse,

240

Ibid.,

240.

Ibid.,

268-9.

164 Religion

dating from the 1650s.

Some kinds of knowledge are inadequate, for the

devils themselves of course 'believe and tremble' (James ii 19).

Hale also

quite flatly denied, against the spirit of his later thought, that mere

self-

preservation can motivate true faith: if

do anything that is good upon this

account only to save my own soul it is plain I love my own soul better than

I love God.'

The essence of Christ's mission, in this piece, is to save the

sinner by imputed merit,

a process which involves 'a union of concretion,

a kind of incorporation of the believer into Christ'.

Though knowledge alone may be powerless to cause this saving union

with Christ, it is enough to justify the Almighty in damning those who

make no act of faith. One of Hale's favourite texts, at every stage of his

development, was St Paul's alarming claim (Romans i 20) that 'the invisible

things of him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are

made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without

excuse'.

As Hale once frankly put it 'though the light of nature do not

afford sufficient to save a man, yet the sin against that light will be

sufficient to condemn a man.'

An essay of the early 1660s, headed 'reason

not a sufficient guide in matters of faith', explored this unattractive

paradox. He stressed that 'the very proposing of the gospel is so rational

that the non-submission to it is a thing deserving to render vengeance to

them that obey not the gospel.'

However, mere 'proposal' of the truth

created 'assent' and not faith: 'though truth proposed under natural

demonstrations may create and justly challenge an assent for the very

devils themselves convinced by the evidence they saw acknowledged him to

be the Christ yet that assent is but preparatory to a supernatural faith

expressed by reception of Christ .. ,'

Hale envisaged this 'proposal'

taking Chillingworthian form; he likened purely rational conviction to

knowledge of the existence of Julius Caesar.

The new idea of moral

certainty was still to be distinguished from a proper saving faith. This

apparently unchanged view was subverted by a liberal concession. It was

intimately connected, like a great deal else in his development, with a sense

of the regularity with which God could be expected to behave: 'the

submission to the gospel upon rational grounds is never deserted by God

but he affords his spirit to produce either concomitantly or subsequently

grace to produce supernatural faith and conversion .. ,'

Human beings

Lambeth 3483. The reverse end

the volume

occupied

by a

false start

at a

sequel

Lambeth 3481,

treatise written in 1651.

Lambeth 3483,

Ibid.,

89v.

Ibid.,

34v., 67.

Ibid.,

99.

Hale, Discourse, 118, 229.

Lambeth 3480, 235v. These words were probably written

1657;

all events,

uses

'1657 circumvolutions'

the sun as

figure plucked out

the air (fo. 227v.).

Lambeth 3506, 104.

Ibid.,

103v.

Ibid.,

104v.

Ibid.,

104.

Hale's 'latitudinarianism' 165

would always be saved if they reasoned correctly, although they could

never be saved by reason alone.

At the liberal extreme in Hale's late writings is an undated essay of 'the

triumph of faith over the world'. Faith is a mere species of knowledge 'but

some things are of such a nature as being once truly and firmly believed or

known, carry a man out to action, and such are especially the knowledge

or belief of such things as are the object of our fears or of our hopes.'

This was actually compatible with a point to be found in the Discourse; z.

knowledge of God, once achieved, would naturally result in strict obedi-

ence to his law.

But the Discourse had stressed that such knowledge was

not to be arrived at in purely rational ways. His piece on the triumph of

faith now abandoned this view. The method by which the world was

overcome was by 'rectifying our judgements and removing those mistakes

that are in us concerning the world and our own condition'.

He was

unmoved by the thought of the trembling devils:

to say this is but a historical faith, and that the devils have as much, they believe

and tremble, and they do as fully assent to divine truths as any can do, yet it avails

them not, concludes nothing; the reason is evident, because the salvation which is

to be obtained the faith which is the instrument to attain it, concerns them not.. .

There was a close connection between changes in the character and

changes in the object of a truly Christian faith. Instead of uniting himself to

an atoning saviour, so as to gain the benefit of an imputed grace, the

believer was now envisaged as assenting to some 'truths'. To believe in

Jesus Christ was really to have faith that Christ was the authorised teacher

of natural law. Hale's most considered summary of his later religious ideas

was a short general 'Discourse of religion', which he sent to Richard Baxter

as a kind of legacy.

This last word on the subject stressed that 'religion'

in some form was almost universal, 'so appropriate to the humane nature

that there are scarce any sort of men, but have some religion'.

A mark of

God's great goodness was provision 'in all ages and among all nations' of

'some means and helps to discover unto them, though in different degrees,

some principal sentiments of true religion'.

These means and helps were very various: they included the voice of

conscience, the works of nature and of providence, and also those 'men in

all ages, of great wisdom, observation, and learning, which did instruct the

more ignorant in this great concernment, the rudiments of natural

Hale, Works, II, 110.

Hale, Discourse, 240.

Hale, Works, II, 112.

Ibid.

111. Contrast (about the devils) the non-puritan Calvinist Daniel Featley, Clavis

mystica: a key opening divers difficult and mysterious texts of Scripture, 1636, p. 343;

Sedgwick, Bowels, 406.

Hale, Judgement, Preface.

Hale, Works, I, 288.

Ibid.,

288.

166 Religion

religion'.

In spite of all these helps, the truth was very easily corrupted, so

God had devised a 'more fixed and permanent means' by which to achieve

the same ends.

This means was intended for all, whatever their natural

talents, so 'there is not nor indeed may not be any great difficulty in the

attaining of a true saving knowledge of the Christian religion'.

Hale

presupposed, in fact, that the Bible's useful content must be intuitively

plausible. A reader armed with such a principle was bound to discover a

message that accorded with the moral ideas he brought to the Biblical text.

Hale thought there were 'agenda' and 'credenda', things to be done and

things to be believed, but the latter boiled down to believing that Christ

was sent by God. This was shown clearly by another piece, 'A brief

abstract of the Christian religion', described by Richard Baxter as 'one of

his later writings'.

Its most interesting feature was its frank degradation

of belief to nothing but a motive for good works:

if those to whom this message of the Gospel of Christ should be published, should

yet not believe the same, nor yet believe that Jesus was the true Messias, or that his

doctrine was the true and real message of Almighty God to the world it could never

be expected that they would obey this heavenly command, nor return to God, or

the duty they owed him; he did therefore require of all persons that were of

understanding, to whom the Gospel should be published, that they should believe

it to be true .. .

If, as Hale claimed, the function of credenda was merely to give credibility

to Jesus Christ's account of natural law; and if the same 'natural religion'

was available in substance to all men at all times, then it was only

reasonable to suppose that virtuous pagans could be saved. The biblical

example, for Hale as for Selden, was Job. One manuscript treats Job, in an

orthodox Calvinist spirit, as profiting from the covenant of God with

Abraham (and therefore from the covenant of grace):

this rescue of Job from the idolatrous practices of the times and place wherein he

lived as likewise of his four friends we attribute it to the grace and goodness of God

who although he made not that special covenant with the descendant of Nahor as

he did with Abraham in whose seed all the nations of the earth were to be blessed,

yet even in the virtue of that covenant his goodness extended even to those that

were not visibly parties to it.

It should be noted, even here, that grace has been directed to producing a

life of good works. Job's blessedness derives from the covenant of grace,

but consists in a simple religion such as the light of nature might suggest.

The notion of a covenant 'of grace' is attenuated further at the end of

Ibid., 289.

Ibid., 288-9.

Ibid., 291.

Printed Hale, Discourse, 461-72. For

the

date

see

Baxter's preface.

Hale, Works, I, 255. « Lambeth 3488, 178v.

Hales 'latitudinarianism' 167

another late work, the very wide-ranging manuscript that deals with 'the

nature of laws'.

This also discussed the salvation of virtuous pagans:

though the ordinary condition of covenant was faith as well as repentance to as

many as were capable of it, yet tis without warrant to exclude all from that general

benefit which were invincibly uncapable of performing it for how could they

believe unless they had heard and therefore it seems to stand with the wisdom and

goodness and intention of God that [there should be] some other method of

communicating that benefit and none more probable than the sincere and indus-

trious walking according to the natural law.

The covenant of grace, at this late stage in Hale's development, had lost

almost all of its meaning. Once it referred to God's free undertaking to save

a number of his sinful creatures by virtue of the sacrifice of Christ. Now it

referred instead to the 'conditions' (penitence and faith) that humans were

expected to fulfil. The covenant of grace, unlike the former covenant of

works, took a sincere endeavour for the deed (C. F. Allison has christened

this the 'lowered market' doctrine), but the sincere endeavour was to be

generated by the sinner.

Once God had been presented as offering rewards for human effort, it

was hard to resist extending the point to the moral efforts of the virtuous

pagans. They were governed by the same laws as the Christians, and had at

least a dim and imperfect awareness of the behaviour that God required.

The doctrine of Christ was 'the most universal, perfect, effectual, explicit

publication of the law of nature that ever was or can be given',

but it was

known and 'at least in great measure' fulfilled by philosophers like Socrates

and Zeno.

The difference between their beliefs and Christianity was one

of degree, not of kind; Christians were not so much better as better

informed.

Reading such passages, with their edifying praise for the plainness and

simplicity of Christian theological essentials, it is hard to imagine Hale

wrestling with the details of predestinarian dogma, as we know he con-

tinued to do. A religion that demands 'sincere endeavour', in accordance

with the lowered market doctrine, a religion in which faith is reduced to

the conclusion of a rational train of thought, seems to have parted

company with the orthodox Calvinist past. In the terms of the Discourse,

the change had been profound; 'faith of recumbency', a supernatural gift,

was replaced by a 'faith of assent', the product of a natural operation.

What was unchanged, as we shall see, was a sense of man's dependence

upon God.

In the pages of the Discourse, as the previous chapter showed, God's

Probably written in 1668. Discussed above, pp. 90-94

Hargrave 485, 88v.

Allison,

Rise

ofmoralism,

100. <* Hargrave 485, 79.

Ibid.,

899.

168 Religion

influence on natural man (as opposed to the elect) was routed through the

intellect alone. He could manipulate the will, however, using his detailed

knowledge of his creature, by giving it an 'object' it was certain to find

irresistible. The manuscript 'De Deo' expands upon this view, by speaking

of a 'knowledge which some do ... call scientia conditionata'. This was 'a

knowledge what a free agent would do under such and such an objective

motion, though he were not predetermined by the divine will'.

He was

aware, however, that this might turn the whole of history into no more

than a well-designed machine, the Creator being 'an attendant purely'

upon the doings he had fore-ordained.

He found this possibility abhor-

rent, both in the natural and the moral world, and all his later works, on

science as well as religion, are concerned to depict the Almighty as more

than a Clockmaker God.

The agent of involvement was the spirit, a force that he came to

associate with merely natural light. An interesting transitional piece, dating

from after 1655, discusses the 'invisible church' of Christ.

Hale thought

this body probably includes the infants and virtuous pagans who have

never had a chance to hear the Gospel. The means by which Christ rules

this scattered group is by an 'immediate influence of grace', not just the

'light that enlightens every man that cometh into the world' (John i 9), but

a 'distinguishing appropriate quality or tincture added to it more than if

not different from [the natural

light]'.

As another essay put it, with a

revealingly defensive touch,

those that truly fear God have a more secret guidance from a higher wisdom than

what is barely human; namely, by the spirit of truth and wisdom, that doth really

and truly, but secretly, prevent and direct them. And let no man think this is a piece

of fanaticism. Any man that sincerely and truly fears Almighty God, relies upon

him,

calls upon him for his guidance and direction, hath it as really as the son hath

the counsel and direction of his father.

The survival of the workings of the spirit as a central feature of Hale's

religious ideas posed both a private and a public problem. He needed to

find ways to reconcile this spiritual influence both with a low-key ethical

religion, and also, in an age obsessed by the crimes of real or imaginary

'fanatics', with the requirements of public order.

He accomplished this, in essence, by identifying God's aid to the faithful

with the ordinary promulgation of natural law. Selden's De jure naturali

had suggested a medium by which the moral law was to be known, a

medium which made available those principles traditionally said to have

Hale, Works,

369. 'Objective' means 'pertaining

to an

object'.

Lambeth 3492, 223v.

Lambeth 3507, 117-122v.

The

volume

entitled 'contemplationes

... ab

anno 1655'.

Lambeth 3507, 119v.-120.

Hale, Works,

II, 31.