the object represented by them, which we worship by means of the image, as if the object itself was before us. Thomas Aquinas, and many others after him, expressly teach "that the same acts and degrees of worship which are due to the original, are also due to the image. They think an image has such a relation to the original, that both ought to be worshipped by the same act; and that to worship the image with any other sort of acts, is to worship it on its own account, which they think is idolatry." On the other hand, those who adhere "to the Nicene doctrine think that the image is to be worshipped with an inferior degree" of homage; and "that otherwise idolatry must follow; so that, whichever of the two schemes be adopted, idolatry must be the consequence, with some or other of the advocates for this worship." SECTION II. PART IV. when image-worship began, that of relics followed, as an accessary. The enshrining of relics (in his zeal for which Julian IV., about the year 620, distinguished himself) made the most excellent sort of images, and they were thought to be the best preservative possible, both for soul and body. No presents were considered as of more value than relics; and it was an easy thing for the popes to furnish the world plentifully with them, especially after the discovery of the catacombs, which was a subterraneous place where many of the Romans deposited their dead. It is observed by historians, that the demand for relics was exceedingly great in the ninth century, and that the clergy employed great dexterity in satisfying that demand. In general, some persons pretended to have been informed in a dream, where such and such relics were to be found, and the next day they never failed to find them. As the most valued relics came from the East, the Greeks made a gainful traffic with the Latins for legs, arms, skulls, jawbones, &c., many of them certainly of Pagans, and some of them OF THE RESPECT PAID TO RELICS IN not human; and recourse was some THIS PERIOD. If so much respect was paid to the images of saints, we shall not wonder that even more account was made of their relics, which bear a still nearer relation to them; and if an invisible virtue, viz. all the power of the saint, could be supposed to accompany every separate image of any particular saint, they could not hesitate to ascribe the same to every relic of him, even the cloth or rags that had belonged to him, and the very earth on which he had trod. A superstitious respect for relics, and especially for the true cross of Christ, is observed to have advanced much in the sixth century; and many persons then boasted of having in their possession the real wood of that cross. And 1 Burnet on the Articles, p. 294. (P.) Art. xxii. Ed. 4, p. 216. times had to violence and theft, in order to get possession of such valuable treasure." 2 We may form some idea of the value that was put upon some relics in that superstitious and ignorant age, from the following circumstance, and this is only one instance of great numbers that might be collected from history. Boleslas, a king of Poland, willing to show his gratitude to Otho, the third emperor of Germany, who had erected his duchy into a kingdom, made him a present of an arm of St. Adalbert in a silver case. The emperor was far from slighting the present, but placed it in a new church which he had built at Rome in honour of this Adalbert. He also built a monument in honour of the same saint.3 2 Mosheim, II. p. 141. (P.) Cent. ix. Pt. ii. Ch. iii. Sect. vi. 3 Sueur, A. D. 1000. (P.) The greatest traffic for relics was during the Crusades; and that many impositions were practised in this business, was evident from the very pretensions themselves; the same thing, for example, the skull of the same person, being to be seen in different places, and more wood of the true cross of Christ than, they say, would make a ship. In this the Greeks had the same advantage that the Romans had by means of the catacombs, which contained a sufficient quantity of bones, to which it was easy to give the names of celebrated Christian martyrs; and, at a distance from Rome, no inquiry could be made concerning them. crease grace and merit, to fright away devils, to still winds and tempests, to secure from thunder, lightning, blasting, and all sudden casualties and misfortunes; to stop all infectious dis orders, and to cure as many others as any mountebank ever pretended to do. Who that had money would choose to be without such powerful preservatives? The fathers of the Council of Trent appointed relics to be venerated, but, with their usual caution, they did not determine the degree of it. This great abuse was effectually removed in all Protestant churches at the Reformation, though many other things equally near to the first principles of Christianity were left to the sagacity and zeal of a later period. Besides all this, a happy method was thought of by Gregory I., or some other person of that age, to multiply the virtue of relics, without multiplying Among the Catholics the respect for the relics themselves; for, instead of relics still continues, though, with the giving the relic of any saint, he con- general decrease of superstition, this tented himself with putting into a box must have abated in some measure. a piece of cloth, which was called bran- The Holy Land is still a great mart for deum, which had only touched the these commodities. Haselquist says, relics. It is said, that, in the time of that the inhabitants of Bethlehem Pope Leo, some Greeks having doubted chiefly live by them, making models of whether such relics as these were of the holy sepulchre, crosses, &c. Of any use, the Pope, in order to convince these there was so large a stock in them, took a pair of scissors, and that Jerusalem, that the procurator told him on cutting one of these cloths, blood he had to the amount of fifteen thoucame out of it.1 sand piastres in the magazine of the convent. An incredible quantity of them, he says, goes yearly to the Roman Catholic countries in Europe, but most to Spain and Portugal. Many are bought by the Turks, who come yearly for these commodities.2 We cannot wonder at the great demand for relics, when we consider the virtues that were ascribed to them by the priests and friars who were the vendors of them in that ignorant age. They pretended that they had power to fortify against temptations, to in 1 Basnage, Histoire, I. p. 305. (P.) 2 Travels, p. 149. PART V. THE HISTORY OF OPINIONS CONCERNING THE STATE OF THE DEAD. THE INTRODUCTION. body. other than a property of a living man, and therefore as what ceased of course I THINK that I have sufficiently when the man was dead, and could not proved, in my Disquisitions relating be revived but with the revival of the to Matter and Spirit, that, in the Scriptures, the state of death is repre- Accordingly, we have no promise of sented as a state of absolute insensi- any reward, or any threatening of bility, being opposed to life. The punishment, after death, but that doctrine of the distinction between which is represented as taking place soul and body, as two different sub- at the general resurrection. And it is stances, the one material and the observable that this is never, in the other immaterial, and so independent Scriptures, called, as with us, the of one another, that the latter may resurrection of the body (as if the soul, even die and perish, and the former, in the meantime, was in some other instead of losing anything, be rather place), but always the resurrection of a gainer by the catastrophe, was ori- the dead, that is, of the man. If, ginally a doctrine of the oriental therefore, there be any intermediate philosophy, which afterwards spread state, in which the soul alone exists, into the Western part of the world. conscious of anything, there is an But it does not appear that it was ever absolute silence concerning it in the adopted by the generality of the Jews, Scriptures; death being always spoken and perhaps not even by the more of there as a state of rest, of silence, learned and philosophical of them, and of darkness, a place where the such as Josephus, till after the time of wicked cease from troubling, but where our Saviour; though Philo, and some the righteous cannot praise God.1 others, who resided in Egypt, might have adopted that tenet in an earlier period. Though a distinction is made in the Scriptures between the principle, or seat, of thought in man, and the parts which are destined to other functions; and in the New Testament that principle may sometimes be signified by the term soul; yet there is no instance, either in the Old or New Testament, of this soul being supposed to be in one place and the body in another. They are always conceived to go together, so that the perceptive and thinking power could not, in fact, be considered by the sacred writers as any This is the sum of the argument from the Scriptures, and comes in aid of the arguments from reason and the nature of things, which show the utter incapacity of any connection between substances so totally foreign to each other, as the material and immaterial principles are always described to be; things that have no common property whatever, and therefore must be incapable of all mutual action. I think I have shown that, let the immaterial principle be defined in whatever manner it is possible to define it, the supposition of it explains no one pheno 1 See [Rutt's Priestley] Vol. II. pp. 60, 354–364. menon in nature; there being no more those of breathing and moving; and conceivable connection between the we might just as well inquire where powers of thought, and this imma- the latter had been in the interval of terial, than between the same powers apparent death, as where the former and a material principle; and for any had been at the same time. thing that appears, our ignorance concerning the nature of this principle should lead us to suppose that it may, just as well as that it may not, be compatible with matter. There is, indeed, an imperfect mental process going on during sleep; but this seems to be in proportion to the imperfection of the sleep; for when it is perfectly sound, and the brain probably completely at rest, there is no more sensation or thought than during a swoon or apparent drowning. Or, if there had been sufficient evidence of uninterrupted thought during the soundest sleep, still it might be supposed to depend upon the powers of life, which were still in the body, and might keep up some motion in the brain. All that can be said is, that we can see no relation between the principle of sensation and thought, and any system of matter; but neither do we perceive any relation which matter bears to gravity, and various other properties, with which we see that it is, in fact, endued. The same great Being, therefore, that has endued matter with a variety of powers, with The only proof of the power of which it seems to have no natural thought not depending upon the body, connection, may have endued the living in this case, would be the soul being human brain with this power of sen- afterwards conscious to itself, that it sation and thought, though we are not had been in one place, while the body able to perceive how this power should had been in another. Whereas, in result from matter so modified. And dreams we never have any idea but since, judging by experience, these that of our whole-selves having been powers always do accompany a certain in some different place, and in some state of the brain, and are never found very different state, from that in which except accompanying that state, there we really are. Upon the whole, thereis just the same reason why we should fore, there can be no more reason to say that they necessarily inhere in, think that the principle of thought and belong to, the brain in that state, belongs to a substance distinct from as that electricity is the necessary the body, than that the principle of property of glass, and magnetism of breathing and of moving belongs to the load-stone. It is constant concomi- another distinct substance, or than tancy, and nothing else, that is the that the principle of sound in a bell foundation of our conclusions in both belongs to a substance distinct from cases, alike. the bell itself, and that it is not a power or property, depending upon the state into which the parts of it are occasionally put. There is not, in fact, any one phenomenon in favour of the opinion of the soul being a separate substance from the body. During life and health, How men came to imagine that the the sentient powers always accompany case was otherwise, is not easy to say, the body, and in a temporary cessation any more than how they came to imof thought, as in a swoon, apparent agine that the sun, moon, and stars drowning, &c., there never was an in- were animated, and the proper objects stance in which it was pretended that of adoration. But when once, in consethe soul had been in another place, and quence of any train of thinking, they came back again when the body was could suppose that the effects of the revived. In all these cases, the powers heavenly bodies, and of the other inof sensation and thought are, to all animate parts of nature, were owing appearance, as much suspended as to invisible powers residing in them, or to something that was not the object common sense, in this respect, cannot of their external senses, they might be determined. It appears, however, easily imagine man to have a principle that there were some Christians who of a similar kind; and then it was easy enough to advance one step farther, and to suppose that this invisible principle was a thing independent of the body, and might subsist when that was laid in the grave. did so, and that in Arabia this doctrine was held by some so late as the third century. For we are informed that they maintained that the soul perishes with the body, but that it will be raised to life again, by the power of God, at the resurrection. It is said, however, that they were induced to abandon this opinion by the arguments and influence of Origen.1 It was a long time, however, before men got quite clear of the idea of the necessary connection between the corporeal and the spiritual part of man. For it was long imagined that this in- It was in Arabia also that we find visible part of man accompanied the the opinion of Christ having no proper body in the place of its interment, divinity of his own, but only that of whence came the idea of the descent the Father residing in him, and that of the soul, shade, or ghost, into some he had no existence at all before his subterraneous place; though after- appearance in this world. This opinion wards, by attending to the subject, is likewise said to have been confuted and refining upon it, philosophers be- by Origen.2 Du Pin says, that Tatian gan to think that this invisible part of also held the opinion of the Arabians man, having nothing gross or heavy in with respect to the soul.3 its composition, might ascend rather It is to be regretted that we have than descend, and so hover in some no farther accounts concerning these higher region of the atmosphere. And Christians. Christians, having an idea of a local heaven, somewhere above the clouds, and of God and Christ residing there, they came in time to think that the souls of good men, and especially of martyrs, might be taken up thither, or into some place adjoining to it, and where they might remain till the re surrection. SECTION I. OF THE OPINIONS CONCERNING THE DEAD IN the second and third centuries, The Ecclesiastical historians call them philosophers; but the system which they held was fundamentally different from that of any other philosophy in those times. It cannot, however, be supposed that this opinion was peculiar to these people. Jewish Christians, at least, must have retained it, and probably as long as they continued to subsist. But we have no distinct account of their opinions, or of anything relating to them. They were not writers themselves, and those that were had little intercourse with them, or value for them. Whenever the Jews received the opinion of the separate existence of the soul, it was in the imperfect state above mentioned. For they held that there was a place below the earth, which they called paradise, where the souls of good men remained; and they distinguished this from the upper paradise, where they were to be after the resurrection. The Christians borrowed 1 Euseb. Hist. L. vi. C. xxxvii. I. p. 299. (P.) See [Rutt's Priestley] Vol. II. p. 375. 2 Ibid. L. vi. C. xxxiii. p. 297. (P.) |