the edition have been served in the same way. The Religious Tract Society republished them recently in 'Selections from the Writings of Lord Bacon,' (no date; bad plan; about 1863, I suppose). No omissions were made, so far as I find.
I never believed that Bacon wrote this paper; it has neither his sparkle nor his idiom. I stated my doubts even before I heard that Mr. Spedding, one of Bacon's editors, was of the same mind. (Athenæum, July 16, 1864). I was little moved by the wide consent of orthodox men: for I knew how Bacon, Milton, Newton, Locke, &c., were always claimed as orthodox until almost the present day. Of this there is a remarkable instance.
Among the books which in my younger day were in some orthodox publication lists—I think in the list of the Christian Knowledge Society, but I am not sure—was Locke's 'Reasonableness of Christianity.' It seems to have come down from the eighteenth century, when the battle was belief in Christ against unbelief, simpliciter, as the logicians say. Now, if ever there were a Socinian[1] book in the world, it is this work of Locke. 'These two,' says Locke, 'faith and repentance, i.e. believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and a good life, are the indispensable conditions of the new covenant, to be performed by all those who would obtain eternal life.' All the book is amplification of this doctrine. Locke, in this and many other things, followed Hobbes, whose doctrine, in the Leviathan, is fidem, quanta ad salutem necessaria est, contineri in hoc articulo, Jesus est Christus. For this Hobbes was called an atheist, which many still believe him to have been: some of his contemporaries called him, rightly,
- ↑ I use the word Socinian because it was so much used in Locke's time; it is used in our own day by the small fry, the unlearned clergy and their immediate followers, as a term of reproach for all Unitarians. I suspect they have a kind of liking for the word it sounds like so sinful. The learned clergy and the higher laity know better: they know that the bulk of the modern Unitarians go farther than Socinus, and are not correctly named as his followers. The Unitarians themselves neither desire nor deserve a name which puts them one point nearer to orthodoxy than they put themselves. That point is the doctrine that direct prayer to Jesus Christ is lawful and desirable: this Socinus held, and the modern Unitarians do not hold. Socinus, in treating the subject in his own Institutio, an imperfect catechism which he left, lays much more stress on John xiv. 13 than on xv. 16 and xvi. 23. He is not disinclined to think that Patrem should be in the first citation, where some put it; but he says that to ask the Father in the name of the Son is nothing but praying to the Son in prayer to the Father. He labours the point with obvious wish to secure a conclusive sanction. In the Racovian Catechism, of which Faustus Socinus probably drew the first sketch, a clearer light is arrived at. The translation says: 'But wherein consists the divine honour due to Christ? In adoration likewise and invocation. For we ought at all times to adore Christ, and may in our necessities address our prayers to him as often as we please; and there are many reasons to induce us to do this freely.' There are some who like accuracy, even in aspersion.
