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He became one of the ministers of Edin., and was a member of the Westminster Assembly, in which he took a prominent part. A man of notable intellectual power, he exercised an influence remarkable in view of the fact that he d. in his 36th year. He was one of the most formidable controversialists of a highly controversial age.
Sermons against superstition were preached from every pulpit; and the two most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put themselves at the head of a host of controversialists who scattered pamphlets and tracts from every printing press.
The present Vicar, if he may so be termed, was an independent minister. These ministers, who alone were now permitted to minister, were of three kinds. Some were true Christians often very ripely spiritual ones who preached Christ, and let politics alone. Another class were virulent controversialists, who preached politics, and too often let Christianity alone.
Newman felt and admitted them, and of course they were forced on his attention by controversialists on both sides; by the Ultra Protestant school, whose modes of dealing with Scripture he had exposed with merciless logic and by the now eager Roman disputants, of whom Dr. Wiseman was the able and not over-scrupulous chief.
In the year 1522, we hear him thus speak of the manner, in which he tried at that time to penetrate into the spirit of these records: "In my youth I made as much advance in human learning as any one of my age, and when, six or seven years ago, I devoted my whole strength to the study of the Holy Scriptures, the philosophy and theology of the controversialists threw continual difficulties in my way.
In God the Father they had a protector; in God the Son an ever present friend; in God the Holy Ghost a spiritual guide; and, therefore, they defended the doctrine of the Trinity, not because it was in the Augsburg Confession, but because, in their judgment, it fitted their personal experience. And yet the Brethren were not controversialists.
Savages more frequently smear their fetich-stones with red paint than daub them with oil, but the latter, as we learn from Theophrastus's account of the 'superstitious man, was the Greek ritual. This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox Greek, the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian controversialists.
Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use the metaphor, "We must fight them with their own weapons." Very well; let those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Let us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons.
John to say that before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were false? There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.
In the long course of theological war for the last two centuries, it is hardly too much to say that miracles, as a subject for discussion, have been degraded and worn down from their original significance; vulgarised by passing through the handling of not the highest order of controversialists, who battered and defaced what they bandied about in argument, which was often ingenious and acute, and often mere verbal sophistry, but which, in any case, seldom rose to the true height of the question.
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