Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Theology

Forced terms of art did much puzzle sacred theology with distinctions, cavils, and quiddities; and so transformed her to a mere kind of sophistry and logomachy.

[Dr. Johnson] much commended Law’s Serious Call, which he said was the finest piece of hortatory theology in the language.

Theology is the comprehension of all other knowledge, directed to its true end, i.e., the honour and veneration of the Creator and the happiness of mankind.

Theology would truly enlarge the mind were it studied with that freedom and that sacred charity which it teaches; let this, therefore, always stand chief.

In fact, the real students of Scripture, properly so called, are, I fear, fewer than is commonly supposed. The theological student is often a student chiefly of some human system of divinity, fortified by references to Scripture, introduced from time to time as there is occasion. He proceeds—often unconsciously—by setting himself to ascertain, not what is the information or instruction to be derived from a certain narrative or discourse of one of the sacred writers, but what aid can be derived from them towards establishing or refuting this or that point of dogmatic theology. Such a mode of study surely ought at least not to be exclusively pursued. At any rate, it cannot properly be called a study of Scripture.

There is, in fact, a danger of its proving a great hindrance to the profitable study of Scripture; for so strong an association is apt to be established in the mind between certain expressions, and the technical sense to which they have been confined in some theological system, that when the student meets with them in Scripture he at once understands them in that sense, in passages where perhaps an unbiassed examination of the context would plainly show that such was not the author’s meaning.