s well
as learned observations. Nor can I find anything worthy an objection
against him, as some of the censorious part of the world pretend; who
would have you believe it a mere burlesque upon Moses, and destructive
to the notion of original sin, wherefore by consequence (say they)
there could be no necessity of a Redemption, which, however, I think no
necessary consequence; but, for my part, either the great veneration
I have for the doctor's extraordinary endowments, or else my own
ignorance, has so far bribed me to his interests that I can, by no
means, allow of any of those unjust reflections the wholesale merchants
of credulity, as well as their unthinking retailers, make against him.
It is true, in the seventh chapter he seems to prove that many parts of
the Mosaic history of the creation appear inconsistent with reason,
and in the eighth chapter the same appears no less inconsistent with
philosophy; wherefore he concludes (as many fathers of the Church have
done before him) that the whole rather seems to have been but a pious
allegory." Dr. Burnet took the meaning of much of the Bible to be but
a "pious allegory," and, as such, he strove to popularize it with the
clergy. We do not believe that he intended to enlighten any but the
clergy. He foresaw the "flood of fierce democracy," and, like other
able men with vested rights in the ignorance of the people, he strove to
temporize, to put off still further the day of Christianity's downfall.
We place him in this biographical niche not because he dashed into the
fray, like bold Hobbes or chivalrous Woolston, and took part in the
battle of priestcraft because he thought it was right, but rather
because he was a Freethinker in disguise, longing for Episcopal honors;
yet, by one false step (the publishing of "Archaeologia," ) lost an
archbishopric, and gave the authority of a great name to struggling
opinion. His accession to our ranks was a brilliant accident. He died,
at the age of eighty years, in 1715. After his demise, two works were
translated (and published,) both expressive of his liberal views. The
first, "On Christian Faith and Duties," throwing overboard the whole of
the speculative tenets of the Bible, and giving practical effect to the
morals taught in the New Testament, without striving to refute, or even
apparently to disbelieve, their authority, but advising the clergy to
treat them as a dead letter. The other posthumous treatise was, "On the
State of th