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Third Letter to Bishop Hoadly.

brilliant specimens of Law's irony. He does not, of course, deny that there is an invisible church, or a number of beings in covenant with God, who are not to be seen by human eyes;' but, he says, you might as well call all the number of people who believe in Christ and observe His institutions the invisible church as call them the order of angels or the church of seraphims. The acts which prove people Christians are visible. Our Lord, when He compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a net, which gathered fish of every kind, to the marriage of the king's son where the guests were good and bad, spoke of the Church as visible; and He never gave a hint that He founded two universal churches on earth-one visible, the other invisible.

How could the bishop think it possible that the committee could imagine him capable of hurting an invisible church? They might as well think him capable of arresting a party of spirits. But they did think his description of a church 'which was the only true account of Christ's Church in the mouth of a Christian' was directly opposed to the description of the Church given by Our Saviour, and was in disparagement of the 19th Article of the Church of England. The bishop says not, because he is only speaking of the invisible church. Supposing, then, anyone should affirm that there is a sincere, invisible Bishop of Bangor, who is the only true Bishop of Bangor in the mouth of a Christian, would Dr. Hoadly think this no contradiction to his right as bishop?

Again: Bishop Hoadly plainly set up his invisible church against outward and visible ordinances. But outward ordinances were as necessary to make men true Christians as outward acts of love were to make them charitable. In short, the world is divided upon the subject whether it be as safe to be in one external visible communion as in another, and the bishop comes in to end the

Third Letter to Bishop Hoadly.

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controversy. How? By skipping over the whole question, and laying down a description of the universal Church! He had been as well employed in painting spirits or weighing thoughts. The bishop thinks the main question is, whether this description is true and just. Supposing he had been describing an invisible king to the people of Great Britain, would the main question amongst the Lords and Commons be, whether he had hit off the description well? No; it would be, to what ends and purposes he had set up such a king, and whether the subjects of Great Britain might leave their visible, and pay only an internal allegiance to his invisible king. It was the same with the Church. He might erect as many churches as he pleased, if he only did it for speculative amusement, and to try his abilities in drawing; but if it was to destroy the distinction between the Church and the Conventicle, they could no more admire the beauty and justness of his fine description than he would admire a just description of an invisible diocese. Here was a visible bishop at a visible court solemnly preaching in defence of a church which can neither be defended nor injured. Though it was as invisible as the centre of the earth, and as much out of reach as the stars, he was pathetically preaching and publishing volumes, lest this invisible church, which no one knew where to find, should be run away with! With the same Christian zeal, he might at some other solemn occasion appear in the cause of the winds, desiring that they might rise and blow where they listed. If the Committee had so far forgotten the visible church of which they were members as to have engaged with him about his invisible church, the dispute would have been to as much purpose as a tryal in Westminster Hall about the philosopher's stone. It was very hard that when the bishop had an invisible church ready for them, they should have gone off to an article of the

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Third Letter to Bishop Hoadly.

Church of England which describes only an old-fashioned visible church, as churches went in the apostles' days! But, in point of fact, the Church of Christ was as truly a visible, external society as any civil or secular society in the world, and was no more distinguished from such societies by the invisibility than by the youth or age of its members.

The bishop founded his arguments on the saying of Our Lord: 'My kingdom is not of this world;' which does not describe what His kingdom is, but what it is not. was simply an answer to the question whether Christ was the temporal King of the Jews. Does it follow that because He was not, therefore His kingdom was invisible? Christ told His disciples that they were not of this world; is that an argument that they immediately became invisible? In a word, all the doctrines which the bishop founded on this little negative text had no more relation to it than if he had deduced them from the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis.

In the next chapter Law shows that the bishop's objection to Church authority would be equally applicable to all authority in the world-to that of a prince over his subjects, a father over his children, or a master over his servants; and, what is very rare in his writings, hints at his own. position as a nonjuror, turning against the bishop his 'Defence of Resistance.'

It is not necessary to follow Law in his defence of excommunication, or of the advantages of external communion, or on the true value of sincerity, and the true extent of private judgment, or on the reconcilement of his doctrines with the principles of the Reformation.

The specimens already given will, it is hoped, be sufficient to show that these three brilliant and well-argued letters were fully deserving of all the praise that they received.

Mandeville's Fable of the Bees.

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CHAPTER IV.

THE FABLE OF THE BEES.

IN 1723 Law published another controversial piece which fully sustained the reputation he had won by his Three Letters.' The circumstances which called it forth were these. In 1714, Dr. Bernard Mandeville, a physician, published a short doggerel poem, entitled The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest,' in which he described a hive of bees who grew wealthy and great by the prevalence of fraud and luxury; but having by common consent agreed to turn honest, lost thereby all their greatness and wealth. The moral is—

T'enjoy the world's conveniences,

Be famed in war, yet live in ease,
Without great vices is a vain

Eutopia seated in the brain;

Fraud, luxury, and pride must live,
While we the benefit receive.

The theory is a sufficiently startling one as it stands ; but, by way of improving matters, the author, nine years later, republished the poem with long explanatory notes, giving the full interpretation of the parable, under the title of the Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits.' Mandeville's work was a sort of caricature, or reductio ad absurdum, of the doctrines of those ethical philosophers who taught the morality of consequences, as opposed to the morality of principles. It was the extreme reaction against the doctrine of Lord Shaftesbury, who took the nobler

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Law's Remarks on the Fable of the Bees.'

view of ethics, but stated it in a rhapsodical, overstrained fashion, which had the appearance of unreality.

Taken by itself, Mandeville's so-called poem might have passed for a rather flippant and eccentric brochure, hardly worthy of serious notice. But Law, who never made an attack without very strong cause, perceived that it harmonised too well with the prevalent looseness both of sentiment and practice to be innocuous; and therefore, in the very year of its appearance (1723), he published his 'Remarks on the Fable of the Bees'-the most caustic of all his writings. It is hardly more than a pamphlet, but it is a perfect gem in its way, exhibiting in miniature all the characteristic excellences of the writer-a thorough perception of the true point at issue, and a close adherence to it, a train of reasoning in which it would be hard to find a single flaw, a brilliant wit, and a pure and nervous style. Whether the bees, thriving by their fraud, and ruined by turning honest, do or do not give a correct representation of human society-in other words, whether honesty is or is not the best policy—this is a question which Law does not care to discuss. Good Bishop Berkeley might think it worth while to enter into elaborate details to show, for example, that more malt was brought into the market to satisfy the demands of the sober than of the drunken.' But Law saw there was a deeper fallacy underlying Mandeville's paradoxes. If man was what Mandeville represented him to be-if virtue was, in its origin, what Mandeville said it was-it really made very little matter how masses of men throve best in society. That man was only an animal, and that morality was only an imposture-these were the principal doctrines which Mandeville, with more than fanatic zeal,' recommended to his readers; and on these points

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1 See Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, Dialogues I. and II. ; also 'Introduction' to Remarks on the Fable of the Bees, by F. D. Maurice, p. x.

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