theologians-from-scotland

"It is easy for the fool, especially the learned and scientific fool, to prove that there is no God, but, like the murmuring sea, which heeds not the scream of wandering birds, the soul of humanity murmurs for God, and confutes the erudite folly of the fool by disregarding it."

"He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny found only in Christianity."

"How peculiar is that policy, which reckons on the perpetuity of an Empire in the East, without the aid of religion…will flourish forever in the heart of Asia, by arms or commerce alone!"

"No arguments unaccompanied by the influences of the Holy Spirit, can convert the soul from sin to God; though even to such conversion, arguments are, by the agency of the Spirit, rendered subservient."

"Dr. Campbell, writing in the middle of the last century, held that a word which had not appeared in any book written since 1688, or which was to be found in the works of living authors only, should not be deemed in present use; but in these days of change words go and come more rapidly."

"All art is founded in science, and the science is of little value which does not serve as a foundation to some beneficial art. On the most sublime of all sciences, theology and ethics, is built the most important of all arts, the art of living. The abstract mathematical sciences serve as a groundwork to the arts of the land-measurer and the accountant; and in conjunction with natural philosophy, including geography and astronomy, to those of the architect, the navigator, the dialist, and many others. Of what consequence anatomy is to surgery, and that part of physiology which teaches the laws of gravitation and of motion, is to the artificer, is a matter too obvious to need illustration. The general remark might, if necessary, be exemplified throughout the whole circle of arts, both useful and elegant. Valuable knowledge, therefore, always leads to some practical skill, and is perfected in it. On the other hand, the practical skill loses much of its beauty and extensive utility which does not originate in knowledge. There is, by consequence, a natural relation between the sciences and the arts, like that which subsists between the parent and the offspring."

"Hastie (1882) appealed to the "twin branches on the same original Aryan stem"—in this case the ancient Greek and modern Indie cultures—in order to suggest that the Church could extinguish the "tenacious survival of the old Aryan world" in modern India just as Paul had extinguished "the brighter and fairer Hellenism" in the ancient West (25-26)."

"In 1882, William Hastie, principal of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland's institu- tion in Calcutta, in letters he addressed to "educated Hindus" about their religion, consid- ered that "no pen has yet adequately depicted all the hideousness and grossness of the monstrous system." Hastie was well aware that Hindu idolatry originated from the same Aryan stem as that of the Greeks. But the latter had been "recalled from their idolatrous errors," while India remained "the most stupendous fortress and citadel of ancient error and idolatry, . . . paralleled only by the spirits of Pandemonium," a country whose reli- gion consisted of "senseless mummeries, loathsome impurities and bloody barbarous sacrifices." It has "consecrated and encouraged every conceivable form of licentiousness, falsehood, injustice, cruelty, robbery, murder," and "its sublimest spiritual states have been but the reflex of physiological conditions in disease" (24-33)."

"The roots of human wrongdoing reach far deeper than mere ignorance or social malformation."

"Hell is an element of any religion which is morally healthy."

"... since the Sacred Book is a phenomenon of religion in general, and as isolation is a fruitful source of wrong judgment in the historical investigation of ideas and institutions, we decline to detach our Sacred Book from similar books of its class in other faiths of the world. Now, in surveying the history of religion, I seem to detect four negative truths about the Sacred Book. (i) Not every religion possesses a sacred book. (ii) The sacred book does not lie beside the cradle of the faith in question. (iii) No religion lives by its sacred book alone. And (iv) no sacred book can be judged apart from the specific ethos of the faith out of which it rose and for which it exists."

"Gamaliel had a reputation for mildness and moderation, but his brilliant young pupil flung himself with fanatical zeal into the task of stamping out the new heresy of the Nazarenes."

"'The theology of the gospels!' some will exclaim in dismay, 'and we verily thought the gospels were a refuge from theology!'"

"It is certain, higher powers are not to be resisted; but some persons in power may be resisted. The powers are ordained of God; but kings commanding unjust things are not ordained of God to do such things; but to apply this to tyrants, I do not understand. Magistrates in some acts may be guilty of tyranny, and yet retain the power of magistracy; but tyrants cannot be capable of magistracy, nor any one of the scripture-characters of righteous rulers. They cannot retain that which they have forfeited, and which they have overturned; and usurpers cannot retain that which they never had. They may act and enact some things materially just, but they are not formally such as can make them magistrates, no more than some unjust actions can make a magistrate a tyrant. A murderer, saving the life of one and killing another, does not make him no murderer: once a murderer ay a murderer, once a robber ay a robber, till he restore what he hath robbed: so once a tyrant ay a tyrant, till he makes amends for his tyranny, and that will be hard to do. [...] The concrete does specificate the abstract in actuating it, as a magistrate in his exercising government, makes his power to be magistry; a robber, in his robbing, makes his power to be robbery; an usurper in his usurping makes his power to be usurpation; so a tyrant in his tyrannizing, can have no power but tyranny. As the abstract of a magistrate is nothing but magistracy, so the abstract of a tyrant is nothing but tyranny. It is frivolous then to distinguish between a tyrannical power in the concrete, and tyranny in the abstract; the power and the abuse of the power: for he hath no power as a tyrant, but what is abused. [...] It is altogether impertinent to use such a distinction, with application to tyrants or usurpers, as many do in their pleading for the owning of our oppressors; for they have no power, but what is the abuse of power."

"Presumably those who profess and call themselves Christians believe their religion to be in some sense true; but in what sense? ... The truth of the Christian faith is the truth of a faith, or a way of life which shows itself true ... for those who live it."

"The two men who lived there were father & son – that his name was Maretts [perhaps Maritz] ... We gave him some tracts which he received with great pleasure – observing this we asked if he had a bible, he feelingly answered no, and that when he was last in the Cape about two years ago he was about purchasing a bible, but he found he had not as many dollars with him as would pay for it. Mr. Moffat immediate brought his octavo bible from which he preached and presented it to him. He hugged the bible in his arms with the apparent affection as if it has been his own child. I mentioned that it would show him the way to heaven, which he said he believed it would do. Nothing which I witnessed on the journey delighted me more than the manner in which the father and son acted towards this copy of the scriptures. After the evening worship was over they carried the treasure in triumph to their home."

"Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle."

"The "marvellous Merchiston" (so he was known to the populace of his day) was born at Merchiston Castle in 1550. The period in which his birth and boyhood fell is the most momentous in the national history, and it determined and gave their peculiar character to his fundamental conceptions of human life and destiny. At the date of his birth the controversy had already begun which was eventually to cleave in twain the history of the Scottish people. The issue whether Roman Catholicism or Protestantism was to prevail was already joined. In 1546, four years before Napier was born, was condemned by the Church and burned as a heretic, and in the same year Cardinal Beaton, the principal agent in his death, was assassinated. In 1547 John Knox began his mission which, after an interval, he was to see crowned with success. During the first ten years of Napier's life the struggle between the two religions was virtually settled. Between the years 1550 and 1560 the country was distracted by civil war, one party being for the old religion and alliance with France, the other for Protestantism and alliance with England. The contest ended in the victory of the Protestant party, and in 1560 a Convention of the Estates set up Protestantism as the national religion. It is in youth that the strongest and most permanent prepossessions and prejudices are formed, and we may trace the origin of Napier's abiding horror of the Church of Rome to the air which he breathed in the opening years of his life. ...it came to be his burning conviction that the salvation of mankind was bound up with the overthrow of the Papacy."

"What set Napier to work on creating tables which were to enable multiplication to be performed by a process of addition? What first gave him the idea of any such thing? ...there is a peculiarity in the form of his investigations which gives us a useful clue. He usually frames his propositions as though they applied exclusively or at all events specially to sines. Now it is evident that all that concerns logarithms must relate to numbers generally, and that their being sines has no bearing on the matter. Hence his confining his work to sines must indicate that he set out with the idea of working on them only, and that it was only at a later stage and perhaps incidentally that he realised that his results could with like advantage be applied to numbers generally. I conclude from this that his original idea was only to construct tables that would enable the product of two sines to be readily ascertained. If I am right in this, the suggestion may well have come to him from his familiarity with the well known trigonometrical formula:— \sin A \sin B = \frac{1}{2} ({\cos(A - B) - \cos(A + B)})"

"Napier, the explorer of the secrets of nature, passed among his countrymen for a trafficker with Satan. Even to-day a certain mystery surrounds the figure of the Laird of Merchiston. ...In Scotland, as in other countries, the universities were exclusive centres of intellectual activity, and the studies at the universities were under the sole dominion of the Church, which naturally laid its ban on investigations that might imperil its own teaching. By his isolation Napier is thus wrapped in a certain mystery, and the mystery is deepened by the fact that we know so little of him, and what we know is at times strangely incongruous with the main preoccupations of his life."

"In the Descriptio the author published only so much of the reasoning on which his calculations rested as was necessary to enable the mathematical world to appreciate the nature and use of the tables which are to be found there. Indeed, we find Napier expressly stating in it that he does not propose to publish to the world the manner in which the tables were calculated until he finds that they have justified their existence by their acknowledged usefulness. The Descriptio therefore bears evidence of being written all at one time, to serve as an introduction and guide to the tables which were printed with it."

"We have also taken care to have printed some Studies on the above-mentioned Propositions, and on the new kind of Logarithms, by that most excellent Mathematician Henry Briggs, public Professor at London, who for the singular friendship which subsisted between him and my father of illustrious memory, took upon himself, in the most willing spirit, the very heavy labour of computing this new Canon, the method of its creation and the explanation of its use being left to the Inventor. Now, however, as he has been called away from this life, the burden of the whole business would appear to rest on the shoulders of the most learned Briggs, on whom, too, would appear by some chance to have fallen the task of adorning this Sparta. Meanwhile (Reader) enjoy the fruits of these labours such as they are, and receive them in good part according to your culture. Farewell, Robert Napier, Son"

"It may surprise the reader to find this honour claimed for the Inventor of Logarithms, who has hitherto been regarded only on his throne of science, and that by the limited number capable of appreciating his genius. The celebrated historian and philosopher [David Hume] who pronounced him to be the greatest man his country ever produced, founded, probably, none of that estimate upon his theological merits; and more recent authors, ranking high among the historians of Christianity and theological learning in Scotland, have omitted to illustrate their subject with the most efficient example they could have found."

"Several years ago (Reader, Lover of the Mathematics) my Father, of memory always to be revered, made public the use of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms; but, as he himself mentioned on the seventh and on the last pages of the Logarithms, he was decidedly against committing to types the theory and method of its creation, until he had ascertained the opinion and criticism on the Canon of those who are versed in this kind of learning. But, since his departure from this life, it has been made plain to me by unmistakable proofs, that the most skilled in the mathematical sciences consider this new invention of very great importance, and that nothing more agreeable to them could happen, than if the construction of this Wonderful Canon, or at least so much as might suffice to explain it, go forth into the light for the public benefit."

"The undoubted fact that Napier worked for some twenty years at the invention of logarithms before he published his first book relating to them is, to my mind, decisive upon this point. It must have been a slow and gradual evolution, even though that which remains furnishes so few traces of the earlier efforts. Is it then possible, out of what he has left us and out of the circumstances of the times, to read the history of this evolution to reconstitute the process of discovery by deciphering the half-effaced records of its growth?"

"All that Napier has left us on the subject of logarithms is contained in two short books, the one known as the Descriptio, published in 1614, and the other known as the Constructio, published after his death in 1619. Internal evidence as well as the distinct statement of his son, who published the Constructio, make it clear that it was in fact written many years before the Descriptio, and it represents in many passages an earlier stratum of thought. ...Napier saw and approved of a translation into English of the Descriptio, and about twenty-five years ago an excellent translation of the Constructio was published in Edinburgh."

"The invention of logarithms came on the world as a bolt from the blue. No previous work had led up to it, nothing had foreshadowed it or heralded its arrival. It stands isolated, breaking in upon human thought abruptly without borrowing from the work of other intellects or following known lines of mathematical thought. It reminds me of those islands in the ocean which rise up suddenly from great depths and which stand solitary with deep water close around all their shores. In such cases we may believe that some cataclysm has thrust them up suddenly with earth-rending force. But can it be so with human thought? Did this discovery come as a revelation to Napier, bursting on him as a light from Heaven, or was it the result of slow growth, the evidences of which are now obliterated, like those rocks whose abrupt sides are due, not to sudden and isolated disruption, but to the denudation which has carried away the neighbouring rocks, which, while they remained, testified to the gradual upheaval of the whole?"

"Writing about the middle of the eighteenth century, David Hume proclaimed John Napier of Merchiston as 'the person to whom the title of a great man is more justly due than to any other whom his country ever produced.' This judgment of Hume is the more remarkable, seeing he was himself naturally disposed to exalt literature above science. ...when he awarded the first place among his countrymen to Napier... it was doubtless from an enlivened conviction that his work had been of greater service to humanity."

"The Constructio was evidently written at several different times. The order of its contents is peculiar, and there are to be seen in it evidences of different stages of the discovery. Its object was to explain fully the mode in which he had calculated the Tables and incidentally the reasoning on which they were based, but there are no historical references to the way in which he originally arrived either at the idea of a Table of Logarithms or at the method of constructing it."

"In 1563, the year of his mother's death, John was sent to the University of St. Andrews, the mother university of Scotland. He was only thirteen, but this was the usual age at which lads then entered the universities."

"From every line of his descent talent seems to have flowed in upon John Napier."

"It is probable... that the greatest inventor in science was never able to do more than to accelerate the progress of discovery, and to anticipate what time, "the author of authors," would have gradually brought to light. Though logarithms had not been invented by Napier, they would have been discovered in the progress of the algebraic analysis, when the arithmetic of powers and exponents, both integral and fractional, came to be fully understood. The idea of considering all numbers, as powers of one given number, would then have readily occurred, and the doctrine of series would have greatly facilitated the calculations which it was necessary to undertake. Napier had none of these advantages, and they were all supplied by the resources of his own mind. Indeed, as there never was any invention for which the state of knowledge had less prepared the way, there never was any where more merit fell to the share of the inventor."

"He was born in the year 1550, at Merchiston, the seat of his forefathers, near Edinburgh; four years after the birth of Tycho, fourteen before Galileo, and twenty one before Kepler."

"I Have undertaken to write the Life of John Napier, of Merchiston, a man famous all the world over, for his great and fortunate discovery of Logarithms in Trigonometry, by which the ease and expedition in calculation, have so wonderfully assisted the Science of Astronomy, and the arts of practical Geometry and Navigation. Elevated above the age in which he lived, and a benefactor to the world in general, he deserves the epithet of Great. Napier lived in a country of proud Barons, where barbarous hospitality, hunting, the military art, and religious controversy, occupied the time and attention of his contemporaries, and where he had no learned society to assist him in his researches."

"It may seem extraordinary to quote Lilly the astrologer, with respect to so great a man as Napier; yet as the passage I propose to transcribe from Lilly's Life, gives a picturesque view of the meeting betwixt Briggs and the Inventor of the Logarithms, at Merchiston near Edinburgh, I shall set it down in the original words of that mountebank knave: "I will acquaint you with one memorable story related unto me by John Marr, an excellent mathematician and geometrician... When Merchiston first published his Logarithms, Mr. Briggs, then reader of the Astronomy Lectures at Gresham College in London, was so surprised with admiration of them, that he could have no quietness in himself, until he had seen that noble person whose only invention they were: He acquaints John Marr therewith who went into Scotland before Mr. Briggs purposely to be there when these two so learned persons should meet... He brings Mr. Briggs up into My Lord's chamber, where almost one quarter of an hour was spent, each beholding other with admiration before one word was spoken: at last Mr Briggs began. "My Lord, I have undertaken this long journey purposely to see your person, and to know by what engine of wit or ingenuity you came first to think of this most excellent help unto Astronomy, viz. the Logarithms; but My Lord, being by you found out, I wonder nobody else found it out before, when now being known it appears so easy." He was nobly entertained by the Lord Napier, and every Summer after that, during the Laird's being alive, this venerable man Mr. Briggs went purposely to Scotland to visit him.""

"It is fit, that men should be taught to aim at higher and more permanent glory than wealth, office, titles or parade can afford; and I like the task, of making such great men look little, by comparing them with men who resemble the subject of my present enquiry."

"He was distant and isolated from the great arena of letters; cooped up within the narrow limits of desolate Scotland, and encircled with savage sights and sounds of civil discord, above which the name of God was howled by those whose hands were red with murder. When we regard his times, and observe the influence that for so long a period of his life, the war of religion exercised over his intellectual exertions, the wonder is, not that his great contemporaries of the continent became distinguished before him, but that after all he should have extricated his mind from so many toils, and have placed himself by a single effort—though one like the spring of a roused lion—at the side of the astonished demi-gods of science, who had been unconscious of their rival."

"Among other persons of distinction, who united themselves to him [the earl of Montrose, in support of the royalists and Charles I of England], was Lord Napier of Merchiston, son of the famous inventor of the logarithms, the person to whom the title of GREAT MAN is more justly due, than to any other whom his country ever produced."

"Napier presented his concept of logarithms as a boon to mankind for, as he pointed out, working with logarithms reduces the drudgery of numerical computations enormously."

"Napier's book required the intensity of concentration that had allowed Newton to conceptualize his remarkable vision of a universe governed by a pervasive law of gravitation; yet, while Newton's book was packed with tedious geometric axioms, it was probably much more enjoyable to compose than Napier's mind-numbing treatise which consisted of thousands of laborious calculations of the logarithms of numbers."

"David Stuart & John Minto in "Account of the Life of John Napier of Merchiston," The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (1787) Vol.6"

"SIR, AS the writings of Archimedes were addressed of Sicily, who had perused and relished them, so I do myself the honour, to address to Your Majesty, the following account of the Life, Writings, and Inventions of our British Archimedes..."

"As the accuracy of astronomical observation had been continually advancing, it was necessary that the correctness of trigonometrical calculation, and of course its difficulty, should advance in the same proportion. The sines and tangents of angles could not be expressed with sufficient correctness without decimal fractions, extending to five or six places below unity, and when to three such numbers a fourth proportional was to be found, the work of multiplication and division became extremely laborious. Accordingly, in the end of the sixteenth century, the time and labour consumed in such calculations had become excessive, and were felt as extremely burdensome by the mathematicians and astronomers all over Europe. Napier of Merchiston, whose mind seems to have been peculiarly turned to arithmetical researches, and who was also devoted to the study of astronomy, had early sought for the means of relieving himself and others from this difficulty. He had viewed the subject in a variety of lights, and a number of ingenious devices had occurred to him, by which the tediousness of arithmetical operations might, more or less completely, be avoided. In the course of these attempts, he did not fail to observe, that whenever the numbers to be multiplied or divided were terms of a geometrical progression, the product or the quotient must also be a term of that progression, and must occupy a place in it pointed out by the places of the given numbers, so that it might be found from mere inspection, if the progression were far enough continued. If, for instance, the third term of the progression were to be multiplied by the seventh, the product must be the tenth, and if the twelfth were to be divided by the fourth, the quotient must be the eighth; so that the multiplication and division of such terms was reduced to the addition and subtraction of the numbers which indicated their places in the progression. This observation or one very similar to it was made by Archimedes..."

"The discovery might certainly have been made by men much inferior either to Napier or Archimedes. What remained to be done, what Archimedes did not attempt, and what Napier completely performed, involved two great difficulties. It is plain that the resource of the geometrical progression was sufficient, when the given numbers were terms of that progression; but if they were not, it did not seem that any advantage could be derived from it. Napier, however, perceived, and it was by no means obvious, that all numbers whatsoever might be inserted in the progression, and have their places assigned in it."

"Even the sagacity of their author did not see the immense fertility of the principle he had discovered; he calculated his tables merely to facilitate arithmetical, and chiefly trigonometrical computation, and little imagined that he was at the same time constructing a scale whereon to measure the density of the strata of the atmosphere, and the heights of mountains; that he was actually computing the areas and the lengths of innumerable curves, and was preparing for a calculus which was yet to be discovered, many of the most refined and most valuable of its resources. Of Napier, therefore, if of any man, it may safely be pronounced, that his name will never be eclipsed by any one more conspicuous, or his invention superseded by any thing more valuable."

"That his invention was the greatest boon genius could bestow upon a Maritime Empire is a truth universally felt, and which no person is better qualified to appreciate than your Majesty. It is a proud reflection for Britain, that she does not owe to a stranger the creation of that intellectual aid which renders your Majesty's Fleets as free and fearless in Navigation as they have ever been in battle."

"Napier considered the synchronized motion of two points, each moving on a straight line, the one with constant velocity, and the other with a decreasing velocity proportional to the distance remaining to a fixed point, the initial velocity being the same. In modern notation his model may be written as"

"Rather curiously, his works of greatest scientific interest, the Descriptio and Constructio have been most neglected. The former was reprinted in 1620, and also in Scriptores Logarithmici, besides being translated into English. The latter was reprinted in 1620 only. This neglect is no doubt largely accounted for by the advantage for practical purposes of tables computed to the base 10, an advantage which Napier seems to have been aware of even before he had made public his invention in 1614."

"You have then (kind Reader) in this little book most amply unfolded the theory of the construction of logarithms, (here called by him artificial numbers, for he had this treatise written out beside him several years before the word Logarithm was invented,) in which their nature, characteristics, and various relations to their natural numbers, are clearly demonstrated."

"Napier also invented a calculating device known as Napier's bones in 1617 and made common use of decimal multiplications and divisions. The device itself does not use logarithms, but rather is a convenient tool to reduce multiplication and division to a sequence of simple addition and subtraction operations. The method employed by Napier's bones was based on Arab mathematics and Fibonacci's Liber Abaci."