The Scottish Philosophy [32]
was at that time, and, indeed, for the greater part of the period from 1712 to 1729, under prosecution before the ecclesiastical courts for teaching doctrines inconsistent with the Confession of Faith. It appears from the charges brought against him, and from his shuffling and vacillating explanations (he was often in a shattered state of health), that he took a favorable view of the state of the heathen; that he was inclined to the doctrine of free- will; he maintained that punishment for original sin alone was not just; he held that rational creatures must necessarily seek their chief good, -- always under subserviency to the glory of God, who cannot impose a law contrary to his own nature and to theirs, and who cannot condemn any except those who seek their chief good in something else, and in a different way than God has prescribed: but the special charge against him was, that he denied that Jesus Christ is a necessarily existent being in the same sense as the Father is. The lengthened process {52} concluded with the General Assembly declaring, in 1729, that Mr. Simson was not fit to be intrusted with the training of students for the ministry. It does not appear that young Mr. Hutcheson ever threw himself into this agitation on the one side or other, but it doubtless left its impression on his mind; and this, I rather think, was to lead him to adopt, if not the doctrine, at least some of the liberal sentiments of Simson; to keep him from engaging in religious controversy, and to throw him back for certainty on the fundamental truths of natural theology and the lofty morality of the New Testament.
To the teaching of Simson the historians of the Church of Scotland are accustomed to trace the introduction of the " New Light " theology into the pulpits both of Scotland and Ulster. But there were other and deeper causes also at work, producing simultaneously very much the same results all over the Protestant Continent of Europe, and in England both in the Church and among Non-conformists. It was a period of growing liberality of opinion, according to the view of the rising literary men of the country. It was a time of doctrinal deterioration, followed rapidly by a declension of living piety, and in the age after of a high morality, according to the view of the great body of earnest Christians. In the preceding age, Milton, Newton, and Locke had abandoned the belief in the divinity of Christ, and the great Church of England divine of that age, Samuel Clarke, was defending the Arian creed, and setting aside the Reformation doctrine of grace. Francis Hutcheson, by this time a preacher, writes from Ireland to a friend in Scot land, in 1718, Of the younger ministers in Ulster: "I find by the conversation I have had with some ministers and comrades, that there is a perfect Hoadley mania among our younger ministers in the north; and, what is really ridiculous, it does not serve them to be of his opinions, but their pulpits are ringing with them, as if their hearers were all absolute princes going to impose tests and confessions in their several territories, and not a set of people entirely excluded from the smallest hand in the government anywhere, and entirely incapable of bearing any other part in the prosecution but as sufferers. I have reason however, to apprehend that the antipathy to confessions is upon other grounds than a new spirit of charity. Dr. Clarke's work (on the Trinity), I'm sufficiently informed, has made several {53} unfixed in their old principles, if not entirely altered them." Hutcheson never utters any more certain sound than this on the religious controversies of his day. It is evident that his mind is all along more inclined towards ethical philosophy and natural theology. It is interesting to notice that, in 1717, he wrote a letter to S. Clarke stating objections to his famous " Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God," and that he received a reply, both of which are lost. We are reminded that, about four years before this, Joseph Butler, then a youth of twenty-one, at a dissenting academy,
To the teaching of Simson the historians of the Church of Scotland are accustomed to trace the introduction of the " New Light " theology into the pulpits both of Scotland and Ulster. But there were other and deeper causes also at work, producing simultaneously very much the same results all over the Protestant Continent of Europe, and in England both in the Church and among Non-conformists. It was a period of growing liberality of opinion, according to the view of the rising literary men of the country. It was a time of doctrinal deterioration, followed rapidly by a declension of living piety, and in the age after of a high morality, according to the view of the great body of earnest Christians. In the preceding age, Milton, Newton, and Locke had abandoned the belief in the divinity of Christ, and the great Church of England divine of that age, Samuel Clarke, was defending the Arian creed, and setting aside the Reformation doctrine of grace. Francis Hutcheson, by this time a preacher, writes from Ireland to a friend in Scot land, in 1718, Of the younger ministers in Ulster: "I find by the conversation I have had with some ministers and comrades, that there is a perfect Hoadley mania among our younger ministers in the north; and, what is really ridiculous, it does not serve them to be of his opinions, but their pulpits are ringing with them, as if their hearers were all absolute princes going to impose tests and confessions in their several territories, and not a set of people entirely excluded from the smallest hand in the government anywhere, and entirely incapable of bearing any other part in the prosecution but as sufferers. I have reason however, to apprehend that the antipathy to confessions is upon other grounds than a new spirit of charity. Dr. Clarke's work (on the Trinity), I'm sufficiently informed, has made several {53} unfixed in their old principles, if not entirely altered them." Hutcheson never utters any more certain sound than this on the religious controversies of his day. It is evident that his mind is all along more inclined towards ethical philosophy and natural theology. It is interesting to notice that, in 1717, he wrote a letter to S. Clarke stating objections to his famous " Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God," and that he received a reply, both of which are lost. We are reminded that, about four years before this, Joseph Butler, then a youth of twenty-one, at a dissenting academy,