Education for Life. George Turnbull
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to do or not to do at our discretion is to be regarded as derived from GOD no less than the obligation to do or not to do; there are therefore laws which are purely permissive.
8. All dominion over things and persons derives from GOD.
9. All rights belonging to men by nature are inalienable by contract.
10. One who is in severe need has a right to other people’s property, exactly as if it had not been occupied by another.
11. Without divine inspiration no man becomes truly good, pious or brave.
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NOTE ON THE TEXT
The manuscript of Turnbull’s “The Religion of the State” is incomplete. It consists of two four-leaf quires, the first lacking the first leaf. We have therefore supplied the title, which is taken from Turnbull’s letter to Lord Molesworth, 14 May 1723, above, p. 13. In the manuscript, pages 3–16 are paginated, whereas the “Postscript” is unpaginated. We have included continuous pagination in our transcription. Although there is no explicit indication of authorship in the manuscript and the handwriting differs from that found in Turnbull’s letters, there are good reasons to think that the manuscript is a version of the “Small Treatise” Turnbull mentions to Molesworth. First, the manuscript is part of a collection of papers (AUL MS 3107/1–9) discovered at the University of Aberdeen in 1982 that illustrates various phases of the Aberdeen Enlightenment. The provenance of the manuscript thus points to an author who, like Turnbull, worked in Aberdeen during the course of the eighteenth century. Secondly, internal evidence points to the likelihood that Turnbull wrote the manuscript, notably the stylistic mannerisms that Turnbull derived from the writings of Shaftesbury and the use of quotation marks to enclose loose paraphrases of material cited from other writings. Moreover, the author’s emphasis on the use of reason in religion and the stress placed on practical morality are consistent with the view of religion expounded in Turnbull’s writings and reflect the religious preoccupations found in his roughly contemporaneous letters to Toland and Molesworth. Furthermore, the references to “the principles & offices of honesty & vertue” and to “sociality” (pp. 82, 84) speak to Turnbull’s interest in Cicero and the natural law tradition. Last, the attack on the blending of scholastic metaphysics with theology and the view of pedagogy advanced in the manuscript also resonate with Turnbull’s vision of a liberal education. We therefore believe that the manuscript can be identified as a copy of Turnbull’s “Small Treatise.”
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MS: AUL, MS 3107/6/14.
The Religion of the State
… if I cannot see reason to rely upon it, but reject it, what ever the consequences may be. To beleive is either no act of a reasonable mind at all, or it is an act of the judgment & understanding faculty. And therfore to beleive without seeing reason to bel<e>ive is to see without seeing, or understand without understanding. So that when I beleive a doctrine to be true, I see reason to rely upon the certainty of what it contains: & when I beleive it to be false, I must perceive good reason to reject & despise it. And in order to a reasonable reception or contempt of any proposition offered to my consideration all that is in my power to do is to rub up my intellect carefully & set it a canvassing the matter with all the strictness & attention I am capable of. And whatever be the effect of that it is as necessary and inevitable, as it is for mee to see green or yellow when such colours are realy presented to my sight. In one word faith must be either reasonable or unreasonable & when it is built upon no reasons it is most certainly sensless and unreasonable & there is no way to make it reasonable but by giving reason full power over it to let it out & keep it in warm it & cool it at his pleasure. Any other guide but reason & understanding must be something different from reason & understanding & consequently something that neither reasons nor understands & that of course can produce nothing that is either wise or reasonable.
This, my Freind, is the summ of the whole affair that concerns the nature of faith & the plain consequence of it is that in order to beleive with reason & judgment I must be convinced & that there is no possible way to promote any reasonable faith but by giving free reins to fair reasoning and argument <4>
So that for the magistrate to pretend to propagate any reasonable faith by cajolling its pretended admirers & affronting & persecuting those who
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neglect & despise it: Or to think that they can realy do any benefit to the reasons & judgements of men by these methods is just as wise as if they should take it in their heads to teach men merchandize & the affairs of trade by whipping & scourging them instead of excercising them to accompts & real trafeck: Or to make men see in the dark & while their eyes are shoot give right judgments of the objects around them. Men must be reasoned into opinions & whatever is not the effect of reason & judgment is not rational faith or intellectual persuasion.
And when we take a weiw of the faith or religion of the commons in any country, what is in it that deserves the name of rational? Is there any understanding or judgment connected with <it>? Are they the wiser or the more knowing for it? Or can their understandings indeed be said to be better furnished by all the Cathe<c>heticks which they have learned by rott? They are indeed early taught to hear & repeat certain awfull mysterious sounds with the profoundest reverence, and to look on others as the language of Devils & most incensing to heaven. But do they understand what they say or have they ever examined the meaning & intent of the sounds which they blindly worship? Men whose intrest lies at the stake may talk as bigly as they please of the diffusive light & knowledge which in these most illuminated times prevails even among the lowest herd of mankind by the happy dispensation <5> in which they are cheif. But there is no man that ever conversed with the Catechumans or innitiated pupills of any sect or exaimined any of the various systems of modern Theology so widely different among them selves but will clearly see that it is impossible for any of the commoner sort of mankind, who have not been tutored in metaphysical universities to understand one single article of all that from their earlyest times they have been inured to revere as most holy & divine. For my own part I have made the experiment in many instances & still it held. And it can not indeed be otherwise unless there may be knowledge & distinct perception without clear ideas; or clear ideas without the necessary means of attaining them.
The circumstances of mankind do not make slavery and misery necessary to any sort of men but the circumstances of mankind make it necessary that there be different degrees & conditions of men. And as it would be
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impossible to make distinct clearheaded scholars of several of these degrees of men especialy the lowest & labouring sort: so neither does their happiness require, but rather forbid it. And therefore I have ever thought schemes of doctrine to propagate principles of deep & abstruse divinity through all sorts of people, to say no worse of them, owing to a very unaccountable ignorance of the humane nature & the circumstances of mankind. It is true indeed the motives upon which these constitutions are framed pretend to look beyond this life & to take their rise from higher & nobler ends than any of the temporal intrests <6> of humane society. And indeed the souls of men & their eternal salvation are by far of greater moment than all the litle concerns of this brittle state: and to mind this life only would be a policy too narrow & confined considering the immortal nature of our better part. But can it be to fit us for heaven & eternal felicity, that such pains are taken to learn us our metaphysical cathechism by heart? Is it to prepare us for the society of angels & spirits of the most refined natures that we are sermonised so often with such venerable awfull overbearing mysteriousness about things tho we could understand them would neither make us wiser nor better; And that we must learn to repeat like parrots so many hard bewildring distinctions & divisions of persons properties