HUTCH IN SON I ANS

“The name of Hutch in son i ans,” says Jones of Nayland, who, with Bishops Horne and Horsley, was the most distinguished of those who bore the name, “was given to those gentlemen who studied Hebrew, and examined the writings of John Hutch in son, Esq., [born at Spennythorpe, in Yorkshire, 1674,] and became inclined to favour his opinions in theology and philosophy. The theological opinions of these divines, so far as they were distinguished from those of their own age, related chiefly to the explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, [see Note L. to Dr. Mill’s five Sermons on the Temptation of Christ,] and to the manner in which they confirmed Divine revelation generally, by reference to the natural creation. The notion of a Trinity, it was maintained, was the token from the three agents in the system of nature, fire, light, and air, on which all natural light and motion depend, and which were said to signify the three supreme powers of the Godhead in the administration of the spiritual world. This led to their opposing Newton’s theory of a vacuum and gravity, and to their denying that most matter is, like the mind, capable of active qualities, and to their ascribing attraction, repulsion, ., to subtle causes not immaterial. In natural philosophy they maintained that the present condition of the earth bears evident marks of an universal flood, and that extraneous fo ils are to be accounted for by the same catastrophe. They urged great precaution in the study of cla ical heathen literature, under the conviction that it had tended to produce pantheistic notions, then so popular. They also looked with some suspicion upon what is called natural religion, and to many pa ages of Scripture they gave a figurative, rather than a literal, interpretation.—See Jones’s Life of Bishop Horne . The learned and pious Park hurst was a Hutch in son i an; and his peculiar opinions not a little influenced his etymological conjectures, though in no way interfering with his orthodoxy and sound scholarship.