others. Among these were Philo and the Gnostics, of whose philosophy we know but little, because few persons now feel an interest in such speculatious. The heresies of the Gnostics are, as most of your readers well know, frequently alluded to in the writings of John and Paul. Now as far as I can recollect, it seems that the speculations of these heretics were chiefly confined to the nature of spirit and soul, and more especially the Divine nature; and every one knows that the second principle in Plato's un- created Triad was called "The Word." Philo imported these notions into Judaism, and upon the figurative style of the Old Testament it was easy to graft any theories of this nature. "The Word" was found in this passage, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made," &c. This Word was soon made a second and living principle, both among philosophic Jews and speculating Christians; and hence the Gnostic phantom, of which so much has been said and written. As John in his Epistles argues against this phantom theory, as applied to the person of Christ, in his Gospel he opposes it as relating to the Divine Being, and says, “the Word was God." Perhaps we might preserve in our own language the Greek distinction of article and no article, by the following: "The Word was with the Deity, and was Deity."

These hasty remarks are submitted to those who have studied the subject closely; and to prevent weariness, I leave off sooner than I designed when I began to write. If such speculations suit the Monthly Repository, I may take a future opportunity of occupying its pages.

I

The Nonconformist. No. IX.

M. N.

Memoir of Wetstein. SHALL not perhaps be deviating from our objects, in bringing forward some particulars of the life and writings of John James Wetstein; a man who deservedly attracted a great Ideal of attention in his day, and who is in many respects entitled to our warmest esteem and gratitude.

There are few persons whose memoirs might furnish a more ample field for instruction as well as amuse

ment. Connected by the ties, not only of kindred taste, but of warm attachment, with the learned of almost all the countries of Europe (many of which he visited); the object of zealous and eager controversy there for nearly the whole of the first half of the eighteenth century; his history and cor. respondence must (if it could be fully brought before the public) constitute a great mass of interest, both as it regards himself, and the transactions of that period.

In his own person he fought a long and arduous battle in favour of the rising spirit of free and liberal criticism, and finally succeeded under the pressure of what might to most have appeared insuperable difficulties, in laying an ample foundation for the works of a series of critics, who have, in fact, done little more than follow his steps, and arrange, in the manner which he first pointed out and practised, the greater store of materials which have since been brought to light.

Wetstein sprang from a family long distinguished for its learning and industry, several members of it having occupied a very distinguished place in the literature of Europe.

The most celebrated was John Rodolph Wetstein, himself the son of a learned divine and professor of the same name. He was born and spent his life at Basle, the birth-place also of the subject of this memoir. In his 20th year he had stood a candidate for the Professorship of Greek, and after travelling through France, England and Holland, returned to his native place, where he was loaded with academic honours, published several very learned works, and continued, even under the pressure of great infirmities, (which overtook him early in life, and prevented him from reading or writing,) actively engaged in the duties of his situation, instructing numerous pupils in the arts of disputation and public speaking.

Another relation, John Henry Wetstein, had been some time established as a printer at Amsterdam. He was also a man of liberal education and a highlycultivated mind. His acquaintance and correspondence with the learned of almost every part of Europe, on literary and scientific subjects, was universal. In his trade he was also

highly distinguished, as one of the chief of that race of learned printers, which has almost become extinct; and his prefaces to the various works which he published, will remain ample monuments of his taste and erudition. The father of Wetstein was at the time of the latter's birth, iu 1693, pastor of the church of St. Leonard's, at Basle. He bestowed great pains on his son's education, and the result was most gratifying. Endowed by nature with a vigorous constitution and an active and powerful mind, Wetstein soon ran through the outline of his education. At eleven years he had passed through all the preparatory courses, and entered the University. In his 20th year he was ordained a minister, and on that occasion chose for his disputation the topic to which he never ceased to devote himself through life, and produced a learned disquisition on the text and various readings of the New Testament.

His situation was peculiarly favourable to the cultivation of this his chosen pursuit. The taste of his uncle, John Wetstein, who held the place of librarian, in the duties of which young Wetstein assisted him, inclined the same way, and he was thus able early to accustom his nephew to the task of collating and examining MSS., and exercising those powers of discrimination, which were so necessary to the studies which he delighted to cultivate.

The labours of the young theologian during this period of his life, were immense. He waded through the whole mass of Greek and Latin authors, ecclesiastical and profane, selecting all passages illustrative of the use of words and phrases in the sacred writings: he carefully perused the rabbinical books, from which so much information as to the customs and opinions of the Jews is collected in his great work: the various commentators and critics, the ponderous volumes of the Fathers were all diligently studied; and, in short, no labour was thought too heavy, which was endured in the cultivation of his darling pursuit.

But he did not content himself with these exertions at home. In his 21st year, he set out in pursuit of knowledge, and particularly in search fresh materials for the elucida the state of the sacred tex

passing some time in the different Swiss colleges and churches, he proceeded to France, where he enjoyed, through the literary celebrity of his family, the acquaintance of the most learned and distinguished men of the day. There he became intimately acquainted with such men as Montfaucon and Courayer; while in England, to which he next passed, he contracted a friendship, which continued through life, with Bentley, under whose inspection and assistance he employed a considerable time in the diligent collation of MSS. After again visiting Paris with the same object, he travelled through Holland and Germany, and returned to Basle in 1717. He was there chosen deacon of the church of St. Leonard's, a situation which he held with honour for nine years, till the bigotry and intolerance of his brethren drove him from it.

The cultivation of his critical studies, and opportunities for the collection of information on the subject, were, however, never neglected; and he was preparing to set out to Italy, in hopes of discovering some hitherto uncol. lated MSS., when his plans were frustrated by the commencement of those animosities and vexatious, which eventually deprived Basle of her brightest ornament, and shewed her to be the genuine inheritor of the spirit of those Reformers to whom she owed her foundation.

When one considers the structure which the Reformers (as far as their power extended) endeavoured to raise on the ruins of the one which they had so powerfully attacked; that violence, bigotry and savage intolerance, were not only "the first," but for a long time almost the only "fruits of that Reformation which professed to assert the right of private judgment in matters of religion, and to enlighten and humanize mankind;"* that the demolition of one fabric of cruel domination over the rights of conscience only ended, as far as the eye could then reach, in the establishment perhaps of a less imposing, but in many respects of a more galling, tyranny; that the seeds were then sown of discussions which deluged Europe, through a long-succeeding period, with blood and misery; that doctrines

• Roscoe's Leo X.

much worse in their practical tendency than those of Rome could ever be in any age short of the grossest barbarism, were enforced by the Reformers as the only conditions of salvation;it requires some calculation of the good effects which must result from any sort of successful resistance to tyranny, before we pronounce that Erasmus was wrong in doubting whether things were not changed for the worse; at least for a long period of contests between rival systems of bigotry and intolerance. The seeds of the Reformation had been long sown, and only waited a favourable opportunity to produce the happiest fruits; the harvest fell principally into the hands of a man who certainly very much accelerated its progress, but blighted many of its fairest prospects. As an overthrower of an old church, no one was better fitted for his situation; as a founder of a new one, no one worse: strenuously insisting in the one character, for the right of private judgment; in the other, no violence seems to have been thought by him and several of his associates, as too great to be used in propagating their own dogmas.*

The wounded vanity of the Augustine friart at the preference of another order, (the Dominican,) for the emolument of dispensing indulgencies, perhaps stimulated his beneficial exertions in the cause of religious liberty, against the Roman See; but the same attachment to his order certainly led him to make the dogmas of St. Augustine (which had long been a source

"Others abused fire, they water. Those that knew better things ought to have done better; neither were they actuated by a good spirit, that could lead the wanderer into a ditch, instead of setting him in the right way; that could drown the infected, instead of trying to heal him; or burn the blind, instead of restoring him to light." Brandt's Hist. Reform. I. p. 57.

I am aware of the doubt which Robertson has raised on this point, Hist. Charles V. Book ii. ; but giving all the weight which I think is due to his argument, it does not amount to any thing like a refutation of the opinion which, as he observes, "almost all historians, Popish as well as Protestant, have admitted."

Brandt's Hist. Ref. II. p. ; Traité de la Cause du Péché, par D. Tolen, Ch. v. The extravagant pitch to which Beza and

of controversy with the same Dominicans) the foundations of his faith, and to defend so zealously, as the pillar of his creed, the doctrine that justification was by faith, and not by works; and even, as his disciple Armsdorf expressed it, "that good works were an impediment to salvation." And thus was the Protestant cause blasted in its infancy, by being indelibly impressed with the foul stain of doctrines, some of which (pushed as they afterwards were to a higher pitch of extravagance by his associates and successors) I think we may safely call as abhorrent to all just and consolotary notions of the Divine perfections, and as mischievous in their moral tendency, and in the way they were inculcated, as any which he overturned.

The Swiss churches had always been celebrated for the zeal with which they had followed up the tenets of the early Reformers, as methodized by Calvin, and afterwards explicitly defined by the Synod of Dort; and the spirit of bigoted attachment to these dogmas was firmly rooted among the clergy at Basle, when the suspicion of Wetstein's heterodoxy, whether well or ill founded, and the bold innovation which he meditated upon the sanctity of the received text, brought it into play, and aroused all the evil passions of his orthodox brethren: but their persecutions were rendered doubly vexatious to him, by the circumstance of Frey, (who had been his tutor and his friend, who had encouraged him in his undertakings, and had even stimulated him to think for himself on disputed points of doctrine,) being one of the first, in his character of Theological Professor, to join in the cry which was raised, and afterwards to declare himself his most violent and inveterate enemy. His precise motives for this conduct it is not easy exactly to discover, but it is probable that the dread of censure, the certain difficulties and worldly inconveniences, to say the least of them, which appeared

others carried this doctrine, was certainly afterwards opposed by the Lutherans; but Luther himself "would not allow good works to be considered either as the conditions or means of salvation, nor even as a preparation for receiving it." Maclean, Note Mosh. Eccl. Hist. II. p. 170. * Mosheim, II. p. 172.

on the side of heterodoxy, (while on the other were all the honours and rewards which pious zeal could bestow on the defenders of the faith,) induced this mean-spirited man to desert the opinions which he had professed and instilled into his pupil, and like other converts from similar motives, to conceal the insincerity of his heart and the hollowness of his professions under the mask of violent and overacted zeal.*

An interesting account of all the proceedings of this man is contained in the Prolegomena of Wetstein's 1st Volume of the New Testament, which I cannot do more than briefly touch upon. It is quite clear that he had not only encouraged Wetstein in his critical labours, but had also prompted him to a disregard of the fixed and narrow system of theology of the schools of Calvin, and the decisions of the Synod of Dort, and encouraged him in an investigation for himself of the evidences on which so delicate a subject as that of the doctrine of the Trinity rested. +

At the earnest request of his rela

"Fanaticos homines, qui sunt insanabiles, non curo; at vehementer dolui, etiam ministros verbi divini hoc furore corripi, et cum velint esse legis doctores, nescire quid dicant, neque de quibus affirment; aut potius, ut populo placerent et ministros alios suspectos redderent, sibi vero viam ad munera ecclesiastica sternerent, ita simulare. De hac re sæpe et serio cum Cl. Frey egi, eumque enixis precibus per Deam immortalem obtestatus sum, ut ad Conventuin nostrum veniret, et sua autoritate atque prudentia, ne quid porro innovaretur, suaderet. Respondit; consilia Conventûs esse lenta, et recta monentem plerumque nihil aliud efficere, nisi ut sibi invidiam et suspicionem conflet." Wetst. Prolegom. I. p. 204.

† Aliquando cum me non satis expedirem ex multis locis, quæ ingenti numero pro Trinitate probanda vulgo afferuntur, et consilium ejus expeterem, fassus est plurima in medium proferri, quæ parum ad rem facerent, hanc autem regulam indicavit, ut in examine singulorum locorum omnia tentarem, et primo alias aliorum interpretationes adhiberem, vel etiam ipse excogitarem; si postea deprenderem, illas non procedere, nec iis quæ præcedunt, nec iis quæ sequuntur cohærere recepta interpretatione posse. Ibid. p. 190.

in

tions, and with the concurrence, and indeed under the advice of Frey, Wetstein had ventured on the publi cation of a small portion of his labours, as a specimen of the great work which he contemplated. This immediately attracted the attention of the learned; the orthodox took the alarm; the freedom with which the decisions of Beza and others were canvassed, the knowledge that the received text (particularly in passages on which the true faith mainly rested,) would not bear the test of impartial criticism, and that in the hands of Wetstein imposture was not likely to meet with support, roused up all the exertions of his brethren to smother the labours of the humble deacon of St. Leonard's on their first appearance. Reports were industriously spread, with the usual exaggerations, of the heretodoxy of the author, and the clergy at length presented a petition to the Council, praying the suppression of a book which, they observed, could do no good, and might do a great deal of harm. + The Council, however, was more moderate: Wetstein determined to persist, and in 1780 published his Prolegomena. The work soon spread over Europe, and every where excited the warmest interest. It was now impossible to prevent the dissemination of truth: the battle had been fought: it was plain that the world would not be content with the sanction of great names to accumulated error; and the enemies of Wetstein were now reduced to the necessity of venting their spite by persecuting his person. A new remonstrance was exhibited to the Council, which was as unsuccessful as the first; each outdo the other in zeal for the severest zealous pillar of orthodoxy strove to dogmas of Calvin; and Wetstein and

Oserois je joindre à ce conseil une petite plainte, sur la manière dont vons traitez plusieurs grands hommes, entr' autres Beze, dans vos Prolégomènes. Je conois bien des gens, que cela a mis de mauvaise humeur; et peut-être que des semblables vivacités ont été de grand cause du mal.-Letter of Turrettin from Geneva, Prolegom. 210.

+Summa judicii nostri hæc est; laborem illum in Nov. Test. edendo tum levem, et non necessariam, tum periculosum esse.