Inspired by the BBC's A House Through Time, we're pleased to introduce a new blog series which focuses on a single book from its very beginnings to its place on the shelves at the Library of Innerpeffray today. The first post, which looks at the author and content of the work selected, comes from Kelsey Jackson Williams, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling.
Despite his name, John
Scott (1638/9-1695) was no Scot. The son
of a “sufficient grasier” – according to the snobbish antiquary Anthony Wood –
Scott was born at Chippenham in Wiltshire and while still young was sent to
London to serve as an apprentice (in what trade we are not told). He did not relish the life his father had
laid out for him, though, and after three years of drudgery he gave up his
apprenticeship and entered New Inn Hall, Oxford, in December 1658 at the age of
nineteen, rather older than the ordinary undergraduate of his day and something
akin to what we might now call a “mature student”.
Scott flourished at
university, especially enjoying logic and philosophy, but left without taking a
degree, perhaps due to a lack of funds. The
next decade of his life is a blank.
Again according to Wood, he was engaged in “some mean employment” which
ultimately led him into holy orders.
From 1678 onwards he served in a series of increasingly prominent roles
in the City churches: rector of St. Peter-le-Poer, prebend of St. Paul’s,
Lecturer and Reader at St. Bartholomew-the-Great, and Rector of St.
Giles-in-the-Fields, “at all which places he obtained a great name, and was
much resorted to for his most admirable way of preaching”.
It was Scott’s skill
as a preacher which allowed the Wiltshire lad to rise through the ranks of the
Anglican Establishment. In an era when
preaching was a highly prized skill and the fashionable citizens of London
would flock to whichever church could boast the most eloquent orator in its
pulpit, such abilities could catapult even an obscure priest into the
limelight. Unlike many of his
contemporaries, however, Scott was no politician. He toed the political line, whether under the
Stuarts or William and Mary, expressed a conventional and relatively mild
dislike for James VII and II’s Catholicism, and would have “been a bishop, had
not some scruples hindered him”. The
funeral sermon preached by his friend Dr. Zacheus Isham upon Scott’s death
painted a portrait of an altogether blameless man, most memorable “for his
Kindness, and Humanity, and amicable Disposition, and Affability, and
pleasentness of Temper, and Condescension, and Sincerity, and readiness to do
all good Offices for any that had recourse to him”.
But despite these
accomplishments, Scott was most known, in his own lifetime and after, as a
devotional writer. Chief amongst his
works was The Christian Life, from its
Beginning to its Consummation in Glory, the first part of which was
published in 1681, with a much-expanded second edition appearing 1683-1687, and
which by 1730 had reached its ninth printing.
The volume under discussion in this series of blog posts is part two,
volume two of the second edition.
The subject of this
volume of Scott’s expansive work is succinctly set out on its title page, which
states that within “that Fundamental Principle of Christian Duty, the Doctrine
of our Saviours Mediation, is Explained and Proved”. The six hundred-odd folio pages which follow set
this forth in copious detail, laying out the necessity of Christ’s mediation
between the devout Christian and their God, and exploring the nature and extent
of that mediation – Christ’s “Kingdom” – through a close reading of the
relevant Biblical passages. In the thorny
windings of Scott’s reasoning we can see an echo of the young Oxford logician
and metaphysician at work in the mature priest:
Considering therefore how much
we are governed by our sense in this
state of our Apostacy, it was doubtless a wonderful wise contrivance of God,
who is a pure Spirit, to assume to
himself some sensible matter, that
therein by presenting himself to our outward
or inward sense, he might strike the
deeper aw on us, and thereby the more effectually rule and govern us (p. 568).
Such arguments were part and
parcel of late-seventeenth century Anglicanism’s larger project of explaining
Christianity to an increasingly skeptical world. As Scott had written earlier, “we cannot
certainly distinguish what is done by the Spirit
from what is done by our natural Reason
and Conscience co-operating with him . . . it is not to be expected that
we who know so little of the nature and
intercourse of Spirits should be able
to render a clear and distinct account of it” (pp.
80-81). Ultimately, then, the Christian Life was more than just a
devotional manual, it was the work of a philosopher grappling with the nature
of belief and straining against the physical bonds of his own body to explore
the metaphysical world of consciousness and the Divine. “For alas! our minds are naturally so vain and stupid, so giddy, listless, and inadvertent, especially in spiritual
things which are abstract from common
sence” (p. 85) that these philosophical wrestlings were necessary for belief to
survive at all.
- Kelsey Jackson Williams
University of Stirling
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