United States or Botswana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He then goes on to disprove the truth of a story spread about by Tindal, concerning the beating in his garden of a man named Segar.
"Well, if thou wilt know," said Ambrose, pushed hard, "there is one Master William Tindal, who hath been doing part of the blessed Evangel into English, and for better certainty of its correctness, Master Michael was comparing it with his Arabic version, while I overlooked the Latin." "O Ambrose, thou wilt surely run into trouble.
As to chronological and physical errors, which seemed to endanger the infallibility of the Scriptures, a bishop had met the argument by saying, reasonably enough, that in the Bible God speaks according to the conceptions of those to whom he speaks, and that it is not the business of Revelation to rectify their opinions in such matters. Tindal made this rejoinder:
Is not every body freely allowed to believe whatever he pleases, and to publish his belief to the world whenever he thinks fit, especially if it serves to strengthen the party which is in the right? Would any indifferent foreigner, who should read the trumpery lately written by Asgil, Tindal, Toland, Coward, and forty more, imagine the Gospel to be our rule of faith, and confirmed by parliaments?
It contained the "Letter from a Country Attorney to a Country Parson concerning the Rights of the Church," and the philosopher Le Clerc's appreciative reference to Tindal's work in his Bibliothèque Choisie. Nevertheless, Queen Anne had given Tindal a present of £500 for his book, and told him that she believed he had banished Popery beyond a possibility of its return.
It is believed, that he found his way into "The Dunciad," and that he is immortalised there among the "Canaille Ecrivante;" the line Where Tindal dictates and Silenus snores, is taken to be Pope's description of him. Gordon died in 1750; at the same time as Dr.
Tindal, however, despite the Tory reaction, continued to write on the side of civil and religious liberty, keeping his best work for the last, published within three years of his death, when he was past seventy, namely, Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel a republication of the Religion of Nature . Strange to say, this work, criticised as it was, was neither presented nor burnt.
Associated with the literary side of this great and bitter conflict a side only too much ignored in the discreet popular histories of the English Church are the names of Delaune, Defoe, Tindal, on the aggressive side, of Sacheverell and Drake on the defensive; each party, during the heat of battle, giving vent to sentiments so offensive to the other as to make it seem that fire alone could atone for the injury or remove the sting.
"The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something of his own." After all, Tindal and the censurers of Young may be reconcilable.
What other subject, through all art or nature, could have produced Tindal for a profound author, or furnished him with readers? It is the wise choice of the subject that alone adorns and distinguishes the writer. For had a hundred such pens as these been employed on the side of religion, they would have immediately sunk into silence and oblivion."
Word Of The Day