religion, for I never approved any sort of persecution one moment of my life. But ’tis in this country that I have learned to have a right notion of religion — an advantage that can never be too much valued. Being a studious man, it was very natural for me to write some books, which I have done, partly in English and partly in French, for the space of twenty years. The only advantage I have got by them is that they have not been unacceptable, and I hope I have done no dishonour to the English nation by those French books printed beyond sea, in which I undertook to make our English learning better known to foreigners than it was before. I have said just now that I took refuge in England. When I consider the continual fear I was in, for a whole year, of being discovered and imprisoned to force me to abjure the Protestant religion, and the great difficulties I met with to make my escape, I wonder I have not been a stupid man ever since.” (Dated April, May, June, 1731).
De la Roche felt such a revulsion against cruel and unreasoning Popery, that he yielded to the temptation of disparaging every doctrinal system, however scriptural, confining himself to the watchword, “Honesty is Religion.” We must admit that Christianity (or acquaintance with Christ) promotes godliness, and that godliness promotes honesty, and that the advancement of honesty is one of the grand and intentional effects of implanting Christian faith in a human soul; but under the plausible motto, “Honesty is religion,” the scriptural partnership of “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption,” might be renounced, in defiance of the warning contained in the Thirteenth Article of the Reformed Churches of France, “Nous croyons qu’ en celui Jesus Christ tout ce qui etoit requis à notre salût nous a été offert et communiqué. Lequel, nous étant donné à salût, nous a été quant à quant fait sapience, justice, sanctification, et redemption, en sort qu’en declinant de Lui on renonce à la misericorde du Père, ou il nous convient avoir notre refuge unique.”
The society which De la Roche frequented was unfriendly to Bible religion. He tells us[1] —
“Mr. Bayle was a friend of mine; I was personally acquainted with him; he was a not positive Atheist. A person of great probity told me that he died an Atheist; I had rather say at most that he died with doubts about the existence of God. And I own that ’tis a deplorable thing to have doubts about such an important article. Once I spoke to him of the phenomena of nature, whereupon he told me that it was impossible for an Atheist to answer the arguments for the existence of God, taken from those phenomena. From whence, then, proceeded his doubts? — He could not apprehend that a Being infinitely just and holy should permit all the disorders, all the crimes and wickedness, that have prevailed at all times among men. Political wars, and persecutions on account of religion which have been so frequent, appeared to him to be insurmountable objections. It does not appear to me that the disorders of mankind can elude the argument for the existence of God, which the phenomena of nature afford us. Yet it must be owned that those disorders have chiefly contributed to Atheism. And therefore preachers (and also men in power) should use their utmost endeavouts in all countries to make virtue and honesty more universal than they are.”
Another of his unstable companions was Dr. Samuel Clarke, on whom he wrote a panegyric in the Literary Journal (vol. iii. art. 13), concluding thus:—
“What I have said of Dr. Clarke does not proceed from any great favours received or expected from him. And what can a layman expect from a clergyman, especially considering that I knew well enough that Dr. Clarke would die rector of St. James’s, because he followed the doctrine of the primitive Fathers, for whom we have a due veneration? I never was of Dr. Clarke’s opinion about the Trinity, and I told him so, more than once. He never was displeased with it in the least. Let us bear with one another in theological matters, and always remember that Honesty is Religion.”
At the same time our author expresses his disapprobation of signing, without believing, doctrinal articles, in the following allusion to Vossius: “A clergyman, well acquainted with Isaac Vossius, told me that one day he asked that Prebendary of Windsor, what was become of a certain person; he has taken Orders, replied Vossius; he has got a living in the country, sacrificulus decipit populum, Did Vossius take holy orders for no other reason but to live an easy life? Is it not a deplorable thing that a man, who believes nothing, should subscribe Thirty-nine Articles of Faith?”
De la Roche compiled several chapters in his Memoirs of Literature by culling from the Minutes of the French Synods all the decisions that might provoke a smile, and also by digging up anecdotes of scenes in those assemblies of the Church of his fathers which were not for edification. But the suggestion that deliberative Church-courts should be abolished for such reasons implies a similar suggestion as to free
- ↑ Literary Journal (1731), vol. iii. p. 116. I have taken the liberty to abridge this article.
