in the mingled light and darkness, the approach of night, he hailed in them the hopeful twilight which was to grow into perfect day. In a "Country essay for the practice of church government," prefixed to his sermon before Parliament, he repeatedly condemns all enforced con formity and punishment of heretical opinions by the sword. "Heresy," says he, " is a canker, but it is a spiritual one; let it be prevented by spiritual means: cutting off men's heads is no proper remedy for it." That Owen should have renounced Presbytery, in the intolerant and repulsive form in which it was at this time presented to him, is not to be wondered at; but that he recoiled equally far at every point from all the essential and distinctive principles of that form of church government is a statement which many have found it more difficult to believe. At the same time, no reasonable doubt can be entertained that the government of Owen's church at Coggeshall was decidedly Congregational; and if that church in any degree corresponded with the counsels which Owen addressed to it in his next publication, it must have been pre-eminently one of those to which Baxter alludes in that honourable testimony, "I saw a commendable care of serious holiness and discipline in most of the Independent churches." The publication to which we refer is "Eshcol; or, Rules of Direction for the Walking of the Saints in Fellowship according to the order of the Gospel, 1647." The rules are arranged into two parts,-those which relate to the duty of members to their pastors, and those which specify the duties of members to each other. They are designed to recall men from debates about church order to the serious, humble performance of those duties which grow out of their common fellowship in the gospel. Amid its maxims of holy wisdom it would be impossible to discover whether Owen was a Congregationalist or a Presbyterian. "Eshcol" was the work of Owen as a pastor; in the following year he was once more to appear as a theologian and Christian polemic, in a work on which he had long been secretly engaged,-"Salus Electorum, Sanguis Iesu; or, the Death of Death in the Death of Christ." The great subject of this treatise is the nature and extent of the death of Christ, with especial reference to the Arminian sentiments on the latter subject. It is dedicated to the Earl of Warwick, the good patron who had introduced Owen to Coggeshall, and warmly recommended by two Presbyterian ministers as "pulling down the rotten house of Arminianism upon the head of those Philistines who would uphold it." Owen himself makes no secret of having devoted to it immense research and protracted meditation. He had given it to the world after a more than seven-years serious inquiry, with a serious perusal of all that the wit of man, in former or latter days, 1 Owen's Sermons, fol. ed., p. 229. • The names of these ministers are, Stanley Gower and Richard Byfield. had published in opposition to the truth.' It is not without good reason, therefore, that he claims a serious perusal in return: "Reader, if thou art as many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again,-thou hast had thy entertainment: farewell." The characteristic excellencies of Owen's mind shine out in this work with great lustre ;-comprehension and elevation of view, which make him look at his subject in its various relations and dependencies, united with the most patiently minute examination of its individual parts,—intellectual strength, that delights to clear its way through impeding sophistries and snares,soundness of judgment, often manifesting, even in his polemical writings, the presence and power of a heavenly spirit, and "expressing itself in such pithy and pregnant words of wisdom, that you both delight in the reading, and praise God for the writer."" Owen does not merely touch his subject, but travels through it with the elephant's grave and solid step, if sometimes also with his ungainly motion; and more than any other writer makes you feel, when he has reached the end of his subject, that he has also exhausted it. In those parts of the present treatise in which he exhibits the glorious union and co-operation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the work of redemption, and represents the death of Christ as part of the divine plan which infallibly secures the bringing of many sons unto glory, he has shown a mastery of argument and a familiarity with the subject-matter of revelation, that leave even the kindred treatise of Witsius far behind. Many modern Calvinists have, indeed, expressed a doubt whether, in thus establishing the truth, he has yet established the whole truth; and whether his masterly treatise would not have more completely exhibited the teaching of Scripture on the relations of the death of Christ, had it shown that, in addition to its more special designs, and in harmony with them, it gave such satisfaction to the divine justice as to lay a broad and ample foundation for the universal calls of the Gospel. It is quite true that the great object of the book is to prove that Christ died for the elect only; and yet there are paragraphs in which Owen, in common with all Calvinists worthy of the name who hold the same view, argues for the true internal perfection and sufficiency of the sacrifice of Christ, as affording a ground for the indiscriminate invitations of the Gospel, in terms as strong and explicit as the most liberal Calvinist would care to use. This great work was the occasion of much controversy; and it is worthy of especial notice, that it was the first production that turned towards Owen the keen eye of Richard Baxter, and brought the two great Puritans at length to measure arms.* 1 Address to the Reader. 2 Gower's Attestation. 3 Book iv. ch. i. sect. 1. The controversy was protracted through many treatises, particularly on the Eventful and anxious years were now passing over the land, in which the long struggle between prerogative and popular right continued to be waged with various success; and at length Owen beheld war brought almost to his door. The friends of Charles, having suddenly risen in Essex, had seized on Colchester, and imprisoned a committee of Parliament that had been sent into Essex to look after their affairs. Lord Fairfax, the leader of the Parliament's forces, had in consequence been sent to recover Colchester and deliver the committee, and for nearly ten weeks maintained a strict siege before its walls. Coggeshall, being not far distant, was chosen as the head quarters of the general; and intercourse having been begun between him and Owen, it became the foundation of a lasting friendship, which, we shall soon find, was not without important fruits. At the close of the ten weeks' siege, of which Owen describes himself as having been an "endangered spectator," he preached two sermons; the one to the army at Colchester on a day of thanksgiving for its surrender, and the other at Rumford to the Parliamentary committee on occasion of their deliverance. These were afterwards published as one discourse on Hab. i. 1–9.1 But in the course of a few months, Owen was called to officiate in circumstances unspeakably more critical. Charles I. had been brought to trial before the High Court of Justice, on the charge of being a traitor, tyrant, and murderer; and, in execution of its daring judgment, beheaded before the gates of Whitehall. On the day following this awful transaction, Owen preached by command before Parliament; and the manner in which he discharged this unsought and perilous duty, it has been not unusual to represent as one of the most vulnerable points in his public life. His sermon, which is entitled, "Righteous Zeal Encouraged by Divine Protection," is founded on Jer. xv. 19, 20, "I will make thee unto this people a fenced brasen wall; and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee, and to deliver thee, side of Baxter, in the appendix to his " Aphorisms on Justification," in his "Confession of Faith," and in his " Five Disputations of Right to the Sacraments;" and, on Owen's part, in a small treatise," Of the Death of Christ," &c., and in the close of his "Vindiciae Evangelicæ." Various technical distinctions were introduced in the progress of the discussion,-such as, whether the death of Christ was "solutio ejusdem, or only tantundem." The frequent bandying of these and similar scholastic phrases, in the theological controversies of the age, caught the ear of the author of "Hudibras," and served him at times as matter for ridicule :— "The question, then, to state it first, Is, Which is better, or which worst,- Neal, iii. 407. Asty, p. viii. Canto fil saith the Lord," a passage which obviously gave him ample opportunity for commenting on recent events. It is remarkable, however, that there is throughout a systematic and careful confining of himself to general statements, the most explicit allusion to the event of which, doubtless, every mind at the moment was full, being in that twoedged sentence, "To those that cry, Give me a king, God can give him in his anger; and from those that cry, Take him away, he can take him away in his wrath;" and the charge founded on this constrained silence, from the days of Owen to our own, is that of selfish and cowardly temporizing. Even one eminent Scottish historian, dazzled, we presume, by the picture of his own Knox, with Bible in hand, addressing Mary, and of other stern presbyters rebuking kings, imagines one of these to have occupied the place of Owen, and with what fearless fidelity he would have addressed those august commoners, "even though every hair of their heads had been a spear pointed at his breast." "1 But is there not a considerable amount of undue severity in all this? In all likelihood those who had demanded this service of Owen blamed him for an opposite reason, and hoped that this theologian of high renown and untainted reputation would, in the hour of their extremity, have surrounded their daring act with something more than the dubious sanction of his ominous silence. But to ascribe his silence to cowardice, is to assume that he secretly regarded the destruction of Charles as an indefensible act of crime. And was this necessarily Owen's judgment? It was surely possible that, while believing that the party which had brought Charles to the scaffold had violated the letter of the constitution, he may also have believed that it was in righteous punishment of one whose whole career as a monarch had been one long conspiracy against it, and who had aimed, by fourteen years of force and perfidy, to establish despotism upon the ruins of popular liberty. He may have thought that treason was as possible against the constitution as against the crown, and to the full as criminal; and that where a king rejected all government by law, he could no longer be entitled to the shelter of irresponsibility. He may have looked upon the death of Charles as the last resource of a long-tried patience, the decision of the question, Who shall perish? the one, or the million? We do not say that these were actually Owen's sentiments, but it is well known that they were the thoughts of some of the purest and loftiest minds of that earnest age; and if Owen even hesitated on these points, on which it is well known Milton believed," then silence was demanded, not only by prudence, but 'M'Crie's Miscellaneous Works, p. 502 land. Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Defence of the People of Eng by honesty, especially in a composition which he himself describes as, "like Jonah's gourd, the production of a night:" 2 Whatever opinion may be formed of Owen's conduct in the matter of the sermon, there are few, we imagine, that will not look on the publication of his "Discourse on Toleration," annexed to the sermon, and presented to the Parliament along with it, as one of the most honourable facts in the public life of this great Puritan. The leading design of this essay is to vindicate the principle, that errors in religion are not punishable by the civil magistrate, with the exception of such as in their own nature, not in some men's apprehensions, disturb the order of society.1 To assert that this great principle, which is the foundationstone of religious liberty, was in any sense the discovery of Owen, or of that great party to which he belonged, is to display a strange oblivion of the history of opinions. Even in the writings of some of the earliest Reformers, such as Zwingle, the principle may be found stated and vindicated with all the clearness and force with which Owen has announced it; and Principal Robertson has satisfactorily proved, that the Presbyterian Church of Holland was the first among the churches of the Reformation formally to avow the doctrine, and to embody and defend it in its authoritative documents. Nor is it matter of mere conjecture, that it was on the hospitable shores of Holland, and in the bosom of her church, that English fugitives first learned the true principles of religious liberty, and bore them back as a precious leaven to their own land. It is enough to say of Owen and his party, that in their attachment to these principles they were greatly in advance of their contemporaries; and that the singular praise was theirs, of having been equally zealous for toleration when their party had risen to power, as when they were a weak and persecuted sect. And when we consider the auspicious juncture at which Owen gave forth his sentiments on this momentous subject, his influence over that great religious party of which he was long the chief ornament and ruling spirit, as well as the deference shown to him by the political leaders and patriots of the age, it is not too much to say, that when the names of Jeremy Taylor and Milton, and Vare and Locke are mentioned, that of John Owen must not be forgotten, as one of the most signal of those who helped to fan and quicken, if not to kindle, in England, that flame which, " by God's help, shall never go out;' who, casting abroad their thoughts on the public mind when it was in a state of fusion and impressibility, became its preceptors on the rights of conscience, and have contributed to make the principles of Owen's Sermons, fol. ed., p. 291 Hess, Life of Zwingle, pp. 148, 159-161. M'Crie's Miscellaneous Works, p. 473. Robertson's Charles V., iv. 131. M'Crie's Miscellaneous Works, p. 474 |