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Theology crushes us into nothingness by placing us in the presence of the infinite God; and then compensates by making us divine ourselves.
The central articles of the historic creeds practically disappear under Mrs. Eddy's treatment. Here, then, is a philosophy which will not bear examination, a use of Scripture which can possibly have no standing in any scholarly fellowship, and a theology which empties the central Christian doctrines of the great meanings which have heretofore been associated with them.
Confounding Theology with Superstition, or failing, at least, to discriminate duly between the two, M. Comte draws a vivid picture of the successive inroads which Science has made on the consecrated domain of Religion, and represents the one as receding just in proportion as the other advances.
It is, indeed, extremely difficult to state precisely what the philosophic theory of theology was in Greece and Rome, because the wide difference between the esoteric and exoteric doctrines, between the belief of the learned few and the popular superstition, makes it very difficult to avoid confounding the two, and lending to the former some of the grosser errors with which the latter abounded.
The Popular Science Monthly, from which the above expression in behalf of loyalty to truth was taken, is itself a striking illustration of disloyalty, and rigidly confines itself to the fashionable doctrines of the schools, excluding from its pages whatever differs from the prevalent scientific dogmatism, and while denouncing the dogmatism of theology, exhibiting itself a dogmatism equally blind, unreasoning and regardless of facts.
Yet the most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy, touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of Scripture. It hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the controversy then precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's adherence to Platonic studies instead of his devoting himself to theology.
But a purely religious war must be one to restore the attributes and prerogatives of manhood, to confirm primitive rights that are given to finite souls as fast as they are created, to proclaim the creed of humanity, which is so far from containing a single article of theology, that it is solely and distinctively religious without it, because it proclaims one Father in heaven and one blood upon the earth.
A second collegiate plan was brought before the legislature in 1732; but, having passed the Upper House, was seemingly not acted on by the Lower. This proposed college was intended to be placed at Annapolis and was to offer instruction in "theology, law, medicine, and the higher branches of a collegiate education."
And our Abbe was the more inclined to encourage her in this resolve that he did not love the Jansenists, and had a mind sufficiently imbued with theology to understand their errors. Certainly Clement showed no inclination to evil courses.
But he went a step beyond this. Hitherto the distinction had been uniformly insisted upon between what was Catholic and what was Roman; between what was witnessed to by the primitive and the undivided Church, and what had been developed beyond that in the Schools, and by the definitions and decisions of Rome, and in the enormous mass of its post-Reformation theology, at once so comprehensive, and so minute in application.
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