Answer of an unbeneficed clergyman of the diocese of Dublin, to the admonition of a person well known to him and others, most falsely & wickedly styling himself a beneficed clergyman of the established church : wherein his sophistical and absurd support of the recent miracles is exposed / [Caesar Otway].

  • Otway, Caesar, 1780-1842.
Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Answer of an unbeneficed clergyman of the diocese of Dublin, to the admonition of a person well known to him and others, most falsely & wickedly styling himself a beneficed clergyman of the established church : wherein his sophistical and absurd support of the recent miracles is exposed / [Caesar Otway]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    it has shrunk from fair investigation, and has been disproved as miraculous. And if God has given cures to certain Roma- nists, he has given such cures according to the course of nature, not against it. You proceed to warn us in opposing these mi¬ racles, not to wound Christianity through the sides of the Ca- tholic Church (as you are pleased to call Popery.) Who, Sir, are the Wounders ? Not we, but such as you, such as Cobbett, such as Doctors Doyle and Murray, such as Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire, who have all formed a confraternity to strike the greatest wound that ever was inflicted on the Scripture miracles, by attempting to put them on the same footing with Popish. We, clergymen of the Established Church, do hold that there is as broad a line of distinction, as wide as that between a feigned Purgatory and a real Heaven 5 between Popish prodigies and Scripture miracles j marking out the one as human lies, and the other as divine incontrovertible truths. You say, “ that in the gospel miracles and the Hohenlohe pro¬ digies there is the closest possible resemblance 5 in circumstances an almost absolute uniformity, in the alleged ends the same ap¬ parent counsel and design of the divine benignity.” How can you say this ? Dare you presume to say the wonders which bishops Murray and Doyle attest—the curing of two nervous women, of diseases that have just as suddenly, in exactly similar cases, given way to the workings of excited imagination 5 dare you, Sir, have the impiety to hold, that these have the closest resemblance to the mighty miracles of Jesus ? the raising of the dead, the feeding of the multitude, the stilling of the storm ! The miracles of individual healing Jesus and his disciples performed to confer, confirm, or increase the faith of indivi¬ duals. But the mighty deeds by which he attested his divine mission, in the open day, in the front and face of his enemies, were above, beyond, and so contrary to natural causes or effects, that no imagination, no operation of art or science, or deceit, could either imitate or invent the like. You then proceed to say, that it is absurd and impious in a minister of the Church of England to impugn these manifesta¬ tions of the divine power (as you are pleased to call them.) And why do you say that it is absurd ? because, forsooth, we subscribe to the thirty-nine Articles, in one of which itis declared, that the Homilies contain good and wholesome doctrine. And who denies this? Sir, wedo not, but I know of old you do deny that these Homilies contain good and wholesome doctrine. They are, indeed, most approved and excellent expositions of scrip¬ ture truth, written by the bright and fresh, and vivid and day- springing lights of the Reformation But still they were unin¬ spired men. We subscribe to their general doctrines as most sound and saving. But that is no reason why we should believe every word they record. The Homilies are not our scripture. Yet