Читать книгу The Existence and Attributes of God - Stephen Charnock - Страница 6

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This long since promised and greatly expected volume of the reverend author upon the Divine Attributes, being transcribed out of his own manuscripts by the unwearied diligence of those worthy persons that undertook it,4 is now at last come to thy hands: doubt not but thy reading will pay for thy waiting, and thy satisfaction make full compensation for thy patience. In the epistle before his treatise on Providence, it was intimated that his following discourses would not be inferior to that; and we are persuaded that, ere thou hast perused one half of this, thou wilt acknowledge that it was modestly spoken. Enough, assure thyself, thou wilt find here for thy entertainment and delight, as well as profit. The sublimeness, variety, and rareness of the truths here handled, together with the elegancy of the composure, neatness of the style, and whatever is wont to make any book desirable, will all concur in the recommendation of this. What so high and noble a subject, what so fit for his meditations or thine, as the highest and noblest Being, and those transcendently glorious perfections wherewith he is clothed! A mere contemplation of the Divine excellencies may afford much pleasure to any man that loves to exercise his reason, and is addicted to speculation: but what incomparable sweetness, then, will holy souls find in viewing and considering those perfections now, which they are more fully to behold hereafter; and seeing what manner of God, how wise and powerful, how great, and good, and holy is he, in whom the covenant interests them, and in the enjoyment of whom their happiness consists! If rich men delight to sum up their vast revenues, to read over their rentals, look upon their hoards; if they bless themselves in their great wealth, or, to use the prophet’s words (Jer. ix. 23), “glory in their riches,” well may believers rejoice and glory in their “knowing the Lord” (ver. 24), and please themselves in seeing how rich they are in having an immensely full and all‑sufficient God for their inheritance. Alas! how little do most men know of that Deity they profess to serve, and own, not as their Sovereign only, but their Portion. To such this author might say, as Paul to the Athenians, “Whom you ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts xvii. 23). These treatises, reader, will inform thee who He is whom thou callest thine, present thee with a view of thy chief good, and make thee value thyself a thousand times more upon thy interest with God, than upon all external accomplishments and worldly possessions. Who but delights to hear well of one whom he loves! God is thy love, if thou be a believer; and then it cannot but fill thee with delight and ravishment to hear so much spoken in his praise. David desired to “dwell in the house of the Lord,” that he might there behold his beauty: how much of that beauty, if thou art but capable of seeing it, mayest thou behold in this volume, which was our author’s main business, for about three years before he died, to display before his hearers! True, indeed, the Lord’s glory, as shining forth before his heavenly courtiers above, is unapproachable by mortal men; but what of it is visible in his works—creation, providence, redemption—falls under the cognizance of his inferior subjects here. And this is, in a great measure, presented to view in these discourses; and so much, we may well say, as may, by the help of grace, be effectual to raise thy admiration, attract thy love, provoke thy desires, and enable thee to make some guess at what is yet unseen; and why not, likewise, to clear thy eyes, and prepare them for future sight, as well as turn them away from the contemptible vanities of this present life? Whatever is glorious in this world, yet (as the apostle, in another case) “hath no glory, by reason of the glory that excels” (2 Cor. iii. 10). This “excellent glory” is the subject of this book, to which all created beauty is but mere shadow and duskiness. If thy eyes be well fixed on this, they will not be easily drawn to wander after other objects: if thy heart be taken with God, it will be mortified to everything that is not God.

But thou hast in this book, not only an excellent subject in the general, but great variety of matter for the employment of thy understanding, as well as enlivening thy affections, and that, too, such as thou wilt not find elsewhere: many excellent things which are out of the road of ordinary preachers and writers, and which may be grateful to the curious, no less than satisfactory to the wise and judicious. It is not, therefore, a book to be played with or slept over, but read with the most intent and serious mind; for though it afford much pleasure for the fancy, yet much more work for the heart, and hath, indeed, enough in it to busy all the faculties. The dress is complete and decent, yet not garish nor theatrical; the rhetoric masculine and vigorous, such as became a pulpit, and was never borrowed from the stage; the expressions full, clear, apt, and such as are best suited to the weightiness and spirituality of the truths here delivered. It is plain he was no empty preacher, but was more for sense than sound, filled up his words with matter, and chose rather to inform his hearers’ minds than to claw any itching ears. Yet we will not say but some little things, a word, or a phrase now and then he may have, which, no doubt, had he lived to transcribe his own sermons, he would have altered. If in some lesser matters he differ from thee, it is but in such as godly and learned men do frequently, and may, without breach of charity, differ in among themselves: in some things he may differ from us too, and, it may be, we from each other; and where are there any two persons who have in all, especially the more disputable points of religion, exactly the same sentiments,—at least, express themselves altogether in the same terms? But this we must say, that though he treat of many of the most abstruse and mysterious doctrines of Christianity, which are the subjects of great debates and controversies in the world, yet we find no one material thing in which he may justly be called heterodox (unless old heresies be of late grown orthodox, and his differing from them must make him faulty), but generally delivers, as in his former pieces,5 what is most consonant to the faith of this and other, the best reformed churches. He was not, indeed, for that modern divinity which is so much in vogue with some who would be counted the only sound divines; having “tasted the old,” he did not desire “the new,” but said, “the old is better.” Some errors, especially the Socinian, he sets himself industriously against, and cuts the very sinews of them, yet sometimes almost without naming them.

In the doctrinal part of several of his discourses thou wilt find the depth of polemical divinity, and in his inferences from thence, the sweetness of practical; some things which may exercise the profoundest scholar, and others which may instruct and edify the weakest Christian. Nothing is more nervous than his reasonings, and nothing more affecting than his applications. Though he make great use of schoolmen, yet they are certainly more beholden to him than he to them; he adopts their notions, but he refines them too, and improves them and reforms them from the barbarousness in which they were expressed, and dresseth them up in his own language (so far as the nature of the matter will permit, and more clear terms are to be found), and so makes them intelligible to vulgar capacities, which, in their original rudeness, were obscure and strange even to learned heads.

In a word, he handles the great truths of the gospel with that perspicuity, gravity, and majesty, which best becomes the oracles of God; and we have reason to believe, that no judicious and unbiassed reader but will acknowledge this to be incomparably the best practical treatise the world ever saw in English upon this subject. What Dr. Jackson did, to whom our author gave all due respect, was more brief and in another way. Dr. Preston did worthily upon the Attributes in his day; but his discourses likewise, are more succinct, when this author’s are more full and large. But whatever were the mind of God in it, it was not his will that either of these two should live to finish what he had begun, both being taken away when preaching upon this subject. Happy souls! whose last breath was spent in so noble a work, praising God while they had any being (Psal. cxlvi. 2).

His method is much the same in most of these discourses, both in the doctrinal and practical part, which will make the whole more plain and facile to ordinary readers. He rarely makes objections, and yet frequently answers them, by implying them in those propositions he lays down for the clearing up the truths he asserts. His dexterity is admirable in the applicatory work, where he not only brings down the highest doctrines to the lowest capacities, but collects great variety of proper, pertinent, useful, and yet, many times, unthought‑of inferences, and that from those truths, which however they afford much matter for inquisition and speculation, yet might seem, unless to the most intelligent and judicious Christians, to have a more remote influence upon practice. He is not like some school writers, who attenuate and rarefy the matter they discourse of to a degree bordering upon annihilation, at least, beat it so thin, that a puff of breath may blow it away; spin their thread so fine, that the cloth, when made up, proves useless, solidity dwindles into niceties, and what we thought we had got by their assertions, we lose by their distinctions. But if our author have some subtilties and superfine notions in his argumentations, yet he condenseth them again, and consolidates them into substantial and profitable corollaries in his applications; and in them his main business is, as to discipline a profane world for its neglect of God, and contempt of him in his most adorable and shining perfections, so likewise to show how the Divine Attributes are not only infinitely excellent in themselves, but a grand foundation for all true divine worship, and should be the great motives to provoke men to the exercise of faith, and love, and fear, and humility, and all that holy obedience they are called to by the gospel; and this, without peradventure, is the great end of all those rich discoveries God hath in his word made of himself to us. And, reader, if these elaborate discourses of this holy man, through the Lord’s blessing, become a means of promoting holiness in thee, and stir thee up to love and live to the God of his praise (Ps. cix. 1), we are well assured that his end in preaching them is answered, and so is ours in publishing them.

Thine in the Lord,

Edw. Veel.

Ri. Adams.