Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/586

574 , Bishop Thirlwall evidently attributed, with Sophocles, to the Divine Mind, as a necessary incident of its omniscience. Perhaps we have an instance of this irony in our Lord's sorrowful promise to his two ambitious apostles, that they should indeed drink of the cup that he would drink of, and be baptised with the baptism with which he was baptised, though that would issue in a destiny very different from that which they craved for themselves. But it was in the destinies of cities, and of nations, and of empires, that Dr. Thirlwall saw, with a mixture between reverential awe and intellectual admiration, the most striking illustrations of this irony of Providence who sows the seeds of ruin in the very acts which seem to consummate success, and moulds the elements of a fresh career in the very heart of seeming failure. And the same thought evidently penetrated the bishop's theology. He was never severer than he was on the attempt to brand with heterodoxy the Bishop of Natal's criticisms on the finite and human elements in Christ's earthly life. How the divine and human could be blended in any life Dr. Thirlwall maintained to be a mystery which no one could fathom; but the way to fathom it was certainly not to deny Christ's true humanity, or to throw doubt over all statements which assume it. He saw clearly the irony of destiny which drives such orthodox excesses of zeal as these into inevitable heresies of denial, as he saw also the irony of destiny which drives almost as surely the excesses on the side of denial back into superstition. To Dr. Thirlwall, theology was a line of thought marking very inadequately a thread of practical divine guidance of which it was hardly possible to exaggerate the importance, but most easy to misunderstand the drift; and the history of Christian theology seemed to him full of the irony of providence, showing how error led to the assumption of infallibility, and dogmatism to the glorification of ignorance; how the neglect of the human side of Christianity issued in the degeneration of theology, and the neglect of the divine side, in the degeneration of man. We deduce these inferences as to Dr. Thirlwall's theology from hints scattered through several of the Bishop of St. David's charges during the last ten years; and certainly his general theologic conclusions corresponded strikingly with this fear of incurring the ironic nemesis which follows human dogmatism, for throughout the theological passages of these writings there runs a tone of speculative reserve and reverential liberalism which seems to be as much afraid of either presumptuous assertion or denial, as a nation ought to be of assuming that its prosperity is sound or a man that his happiness will be lasting. In Dr. Thirlwall there was an habitual desire to catch the judicial view even of faith and ecclesiastical history, a desire which is as rare in English bishops, as it should be useful to the English episcopate when in exceptional cases it is found. Dr. Thirlwall's was not the mind to lead men to believe, but to warn men against undue belief or undue doubt. And since it is even easier to be arrogant about divine things than about human, it will probably be long before such an influence as Dr. Thirlwall's shall be replaced among the higher authorities of the English Church. The glimmer of his judicial irony in dealing with over-confident spirits was always a beneficial influence, though it was not one of a kind which theologians particularly affect.

 

 