It is otherwise when we break through the restraints of the modern individualism, and strive to enter into that literal identification of Christ with Christians which is so frequent with St. Paul. If, instead of saying that Christhadour human nature, we could put our thought into this form,—"Hewas(andis) our human nature,"—if we could suppose our type of being not merely represented in him as a sample, but concentrated in him as a whole,—we should read its essentials and destination in his biography: his predicates would be its predicates: and in his sorrows and sanctity itmight undergo purification. Humanity thus made into a person would then be the corresponding fact to Deity embodied in a person: both would beIncarnations,—essential Manhood and essential Godhead,—co-present in the same manifested life. In the ordinary conception of the doctrine of two natures, Christ is represented, we believe, asaman; in the mode of thought to which we now refer, he appears asMan. The difficulties which arise in the attempt to carry out this form of thinking are evident enough, even to those who know nothing of the Parmenides of Plato. Indeed, they are rendered so obtrusive by our modern habits of mind, that even a momentary seizure, for mere purposes of interpretation, of that older intellectual posture, scarcely remains possible to us. The apprehension of it, however, is indispensable to one who would appreciate the mediatorial theology of Christendom,—a theology which never could have sprung up if our present conceptualist and nominalist notions had always prevailed, and which, ever since their ascendency in Europe, has been driven to deplorable shifts of self-justification. The parallel between the first and second Adam, the fall and the restoration, the death incurred and the life recovered, acquire new meaning for those who thus think,—that as the incidents of Adam's existence becomegenericbydescent, so the incidents of Christ's existence are generic bydiffusion; that if in the one we see humanity at head-quarters intime, in the other we see it at head-quarters incomprehension; so that, like an atmosphere which, purified at nucleus, has the taint drawn off from its margin, our nature is freed from its sickliness in him. It becomes intelligible to us in what sense we are to take refuge in him as our including term, to find in him an epitome of our true existence, to die (even to have died) with him, to suffer with him, to be risen with him, to dwell above in him. On the assumption of such a union, his life ceases to be an individual biography; what is manifested in him personally, becomes true of us universally; and it is as if we were all—like special examples in a general rule, or undeveloped truths in a parent principle—virtually presentin his dealings with evil and with God. It is evident, that in this view his mediation has no chasm to cross, no foreign region to enter, but is an inseparable predicate of his own personal acts. The facility of conception afforded by this method is betrayed by Mr. Campbell's resort to an analogous hypothesis as a mere illustrative help to the mind. Witness the following striking passage:—
"That we may fully realize what manner of equivalent to the dishonor done to the law and name of God by sin an adequate repentance and sorrow for sin must be, and how far more truly than any penal infliction such repentance and confession must satisfy Divine justice, let us suppose that all the sin of humanity has been committed by one human spirit, on whom is accumulated this immeasurable amount of guilt; and let us suppose this spirit, loaded with all this guilt, to pass out of sin into holiness, and to become filled with the light of God, becoming perfectly righteous with God's own righteousness,—such a change, were such a change possible, would imply in the spirit so changed a perfect condemnation of the past of its own existence, and an absolute and perfect repentance, a confession of its sin commensurate with its evil. If the sense of personal identity remained, it must be so. Now, let us contemplate this repentance with reference to the guilt of such a spirit, and the question of pardon for its past sin and admission now to the light of God's favor. Shall this repentance be accepted as an atonement, and, the past sin being thus confessed, shall the Divine favor flow out on that present perfect righteousness which thus condemns the past, or shall that repentance be declared inadequate? Shall the present perfect righteousness be rejected on account of the past sin, so absolutely and perfectly repented of? and shall Divine justice still demand adequate punishment for the past sin, and refuse to the present righteousness adequate acknowledgment,—the favor which, in respect of its own nature, belongs to it? It appears to me impossible to give any but one answer to these questions. We feel that such a repentance as we are supposing would, in such a case, be the true and proper satisfactionto offended justice. Now, with the difference of personal identity, the case I have supposed is the actual case of Christ, the holy one of God, bearing the sins of all men on his spirit,—in Luther's words, 'the one sinner,'—and meeting the cry of these sins for judgment, and the wrath due to them, absorbing and exhausting that Divine wrath in that adequate confession and perfect response on the part of man which was possible only to the infinite and eternal righteousness in humanity."—p. 143.
The case which our author here presents as an aid to the imagination was to Luther the literal reality; to whom, accordingly, Christ was "the one sinner,"without"the difference of personal identity," which is here so innocently slipped in, as if it were of no consequence. Christ, in the Reformer's view,washumanity,ourhumanity; and the grand function and triumph of faith is to feel ourselves included in him, to merge our individuality, sins and all, in his comprehending manhood and atoning obedience. Hence the stress which Luther lays on "the well-applying the pronoun"our, in the phrase, "who gave himself for our sins"; "that this one syllable being believed may swallow up all thy sins." The effect of this realism on the theology of Luther has not been sufficiently remarked. We believe it to be the key to much that is obscure in his writings, and the secret source of his antipathy to the Calvinistic type of the Reformation. Absorption of Manhood into Christ,—distribution of Godhead into humanity,—these were the correlative parts of his objective belief,—Atonement and Eucharistic Real Presence: and neither in themselves nor in their correspondence can they be appreciated, without standing with him at the point of view which we have endeavored to indicate.
Whether mediatorial religion shall continue to include in its scheme some provision fordealing with God on behalf of men, will mainly depend on the successful revival or the final abandonment of the old realistic modes of thought. Mr. Campbell's compromise with them, taking refuge with them for illustration while disowning them in substance, answers nological or theological purpose at all. If he follows out the natural tendencies and affinities of his faith, he must rest exclusively at last in the other half of the doctrine, which exhibits thedealing with man on behalf of God. In this best sense mediatorial religion is imperishable, and imperishably identified with Christianity. The Son of God, at once above our life and in our life, morally divine and circumstantially human, mediates for us between the self so hard to escape, and the Infinite so hopeless to reach; and draws us out of our mournful darkness without losing us in excess of light. He opens to us the moral and spiritual mysteries of our existence, appealing to a consciousness in us that was asleep before. And though he leaves whole worlds of thought approachable only by silent wonder, yet his own walk of heavenly communion, his words of grace and works of power, his strife of divine sorrow, his cross of self-sacrifice, his reappearance behind the veil of life eternal, fix on him such holy trust and love, that, where we are denied the assurance of knowledge, we attain the repose of faith.
It is at all times difficult, even for the wisest, to describe aright the tendencies of the age in which they live, and lay down its bearings on the great chart of human affairs. Our own sensations can give us no notice whither we are going; and the infinite life-stream on which we ride, restless as it is with the surface-waves of innumerable events, reports nothing of the mighty current that sweeps us on, except by faint and silent intimations legible only to the skilled interpreter of heaven. It is something, however, to have the feelingthat we are moving, and to be awake and looking out; and perhaps there never was a period in which this consciousness was more diffused throughout society than in our own. No one can look up and around at the religious and social phenomena of Christendom, without the persuasion that we are entering a new hemisphere of the world's history,—a persuasion corroborated even by those who disclaim it, and who insist on still steering by lights of tradition now sinking into the mists of the receding horizon. Wherever we turn our eye, we discover some symptom of an impending revolution in the forms of Christian faith. The gross materialism and absolute unbelief diffused for the first time among vast masses of our population; the fast-spreading (and, as it appears to us, morbid) dislike to look steadily at anything miraculous; the extensive renunciation, even among the religious classes on the Continent, of historical Christianity; the schisms and ever-new peculiaritieswhich are weakening all sects, and, like seedlings of the Reformation, are obscuring the species, by multiplying the varieties, of opinion; the revived controversies, penetrating all the great political questions of the age, between the ecclesiastical and civil powers,—are not the only indications of approaching theological change. That very conservatism and recoil upon the high doctrine of an elder time, which is manifest in every section of the Christian world, is a confession by contrast of the same thing. For opinion does not turn round and retreat into the past, till it has lost its natural shelter in the present, and dreads some merciless storm in the future. The outward strength which the older churches of our country seem to be acquiring arises from the rallying of alarm and the herding together of trembling sympathies; and though fear may unite men against external assaults upon institutions, it cannot stop the decay of inward doubt. It would seem as if Christianity was threatened by the mental activity which it has itself created; as if the intellectual weapons which have been forged and tempered by its skill were treacherously turned against its life. It is vain, however, to strike a power that is immortal; nothing will fall but the bodily form cast for a season around the imperishable spirit.
Protestantism, with all its blessings, has after all greatly disfigured Christianity, by constructing it into a rigid metaphysical form, and setting it up on a narrow pedestal of antiquarian proof;—by destroying its infinite character through definitions, and developing it dogmatically rather than spiritually;—by treating it, not as an ideal glory around the life of man, but a logical incision into the psychology of God. The wreck of systems framed under this false conception will but leave the pure spirit of our religion in the enjoyment of a more sacred homage;—you may dash the image, but you cannot touch the god.
In the following remarks we shall seek to make this evident;—to show what principles of religion in general, and of Christianity in particular, may be pronounced safe from the shocks of doubt. In times of consternation and uncertainty,it behooves each one to look within him for the heart of courage, and around him for the place of shelter, and to single out, amid countless points of danger, some refuge immutable and eternal. With this view, we propose to trace an outline of Christian truths which we consider secure and durable as our very nature;—a chain of granite points rising, like the rock of ages, above the shifting seas of human opinion. In doing so, we shall be simply delineating Unitarian Christianity, according to our conception of it;—expounding it, not as a barren negation, but as a scheme of positive religion; exhibiting both its characteristic faiths, and something of the modes of thought by which they are reached.
I. In thefirstplace,We have faithin theMoral Perceptions of Man. The conscience with which he is endowed enables him to appreciate the distinction between right and wrong; to understand the meaning of "ought," and "ought not"; to love and revere whatever is great and excellent in character, to abhor the mean and base; and to feel that in the contrast between these we have the highest order of differences by which mind can be separated from mind. And on this consciousness,—the basis of our whole responsible existence,—no suspicion is to be cast; no lamentation over its fallibility, no hint of possible delusion, is to pass unrebuked; it is worthy of absolute reliance as the authoritative oracle of our nature, supreme over all its faculties,—entitled to use sense, memory, understanding, to register its decrees, without a moment's license to dispute them. That Justice, Mercy, and Truth are good and venerable, is no matter of doubtful opinion, in which peradventure an error may be hid;—is not even a thing of certain inference, recommended to us by the force of evidence;—is not an empirical judgment, depending on the pleasurableness of these qualities, and capable of reversal, if, under some tyrant sway, they were to be rendered sources of misery. The approval which we award to them is quite distinct from assent to a scientific probability; the excellence which we ascribe to them is not identical with their command of happiness, but altogether transcends this, precedesit, and survives it; the obligation they lay upon us is not the consequence of positive law, human or divine, or in any way the creature of superior will; for all free-will must itself possess a moral quality,—can never stir without exercising it,—and cannot therefore give rise to that which is a prior condition of its own activity. And if (to pursue the thought suggested above) we could be snatched away to some distant world, some out-province of the universe, abandoned by God's blessed sway to the absolutism of demons, where selfishness and sensuality, and hate and falsehood, were protected and enjoined by public law, it is clear that, by such emigration, our interests only, and not our duties, would be reversed; and that to rebel and perish were nobler than to comply and live. The discernment of moral distinctions, then, belongs to the very highest order of certainties; it has its seat in our deepest reason, among the primitive strata of thought, on which the depositions of knowledge, and the accumulations of judgment, and the surface growths of opinion, all repose. As experience in the past has not taught it, experience in the future cannotunteachit. The difference between good and evil we cannot conceive to be merely relative, and incidental to our point of view,—variable with the locality and the class in which a being happens to rest,—an optical caprice of the atmosphere in which we live;—but rather a property of the very light itself, found everywhere out of the region of absolute night; or, at least, a natural impression, belonging to that perceptive eye of the soul, through which alone we can look out, as through a glass, upon all beings and all worlds; and if any one will say that the glass is colored, it is, at all events, the tint of nature, shed on it by the ineffaceable art of the Creator. The modes in which we think of moral qualities are not terrestrial peculiarities of idea, like foreign prejudices; the terms in which we speak of them are not untranslatable provincial idioms, vulgarities of our planetary dialect, but are familiar, like the symbols of a divine science, to every tribe of souls, belonging to the language of the universe, and standing defined in the vocabulary of God.The laws of right are more necessarily universal than the physical laws of force; and if the same agency of gravitation that governs the rain-drop determines the evolutions of the sky, and the Principia of Newton would be no less intelligible and true on the ring of Saturn than in the libraries of this earth,—yet more certain is it that the principles of moral excellence, truly expounded for the smallest sphere of responsibility, hold good, by mere extension, for the largest, and that those sentiments of conscience which may give order and beauty to the life of a child, constitute the blessedness of immortals, and penetrate the administration of God. This is what we intend, when we insist on implicit faith in the moral perceptions of man. They are to be assumed by us as the fixed station, the grand heliocentric position, whence our survey of the spiritual universe must be made, and our system of religion constructed. Whatever else may move, here, as in creation's centre of gravity, we take our everlasting stand. Whatever else be doubtful, these are to be simply trusted. The force of certainty by which nature and God give them to the conscience exceeds any by which, either through the understanding or through external supernatural communication, they mightseemto be drawn away. No revelation could persuade me that what I revere as just, and good, and holy, isnot venerable, any more than it could convince me that the midnight heavens are not sublime.
There is nothing to move us from this position, in the objection, that different men have different ideas of right and wrong, and that the heroic deeds of one latitude are regarded as the crimes of another. This moral discrepancy is, in the first place, infinitely small in proportion to the moral agreement of mankind, so that it is even difficult to find many striking examples of it; and when the subject is mentioned, everybody expects to hear the self-immolation of the Indian widow, and other superstitions of the Ganges, adduced as the standing illustrations. What, after all, are these eccentricities of the moral sense, compared with the scale of its common consent? As well might you deny the existence of an atmosphere,because you have found the air exhausted from a pump! Where is the nation or the individual, without the rudiments, however imperfectly unfolded, of the same great ideas of duty which we possess ourselves?—where the language, in which there are no terms to denote good and evil,—the just, the brave, the merciful?—where the tribe so barbarous as not to listen, with earnest eye, to the story of the good Samaritan? And if such there were, should we not call them a people but little human (inhuman), and deem them, not the specimens, but the outlaws of our nature? Moreover, the variances of moral judgment are usually only apparent and external. The action which one man pronounces wrong and another right, is not the same, except upon the lips: enter the minds of the two disputants, and you will find that it is only half taken into the view of each, and presents to them its opposite hemispheres; no wonder that it shows the darkness of guilt to the one, and the sunshine of virtue to the other. And accordingly, these differences actually vanish as the faculty of conscience unfolds itself, and the scope of the mind is enlarged. Like the discrepancies in the ideas which men have of beauty, they exist principally between the uncultivated and the refined: and the well-developed perceptions of the best in all ages and countries visibly agree. Nay, while yet the discordance lasts, it introduces no real doubt: for heaven has established a moral subordination among men, which reveals the real truth of our own nature. Do we not always see, that the lower conscience bows before the higher;—that the heart, without light or heat itself, may be pierced, as with a flash, by a sentiment darted from a loftier soul, and own it to be from above;—that, simply by this natural allegiance of the lesser to the nobler, classes and nations and sects are raised in dignity and moral greatness;—that they, and they only, have had any grand and sublime existence in the history of the world, who have been gifted with power to create a new religion,—a fresh development of what is holy and divine;—and that every one so endowed has always gathered around him the multitudes ever prayingto be lifted above the level of their life, and blessing the benefactor who wakes up the consciousness of their higher nature? And if so, the generaldirectionof the moral sentiment is the same, however its intensity may vary: and the irregular indications which it gives are not due to any inherent vacillation, but to the disturbing causes which deflect it from the celestial line of simplicity and truth.
We keep our foot, then, on this primitive foundation,—faith in the moral perceptions of man. We say, that we know what we mean, when we affirm that a being is just, pure, disinterested, merciful; that these terms describe one particular kind of character, and one only; that they have the same sense to whomsoever they are applied, and are not to be juggled with, so as to denote quite opposite forms of action and disposition, according as our discourse may be of heaven or of earth; that whenever they lose their ordinary and intelligible signification, they become senseless; and that what would be wrong and odious in any one moral agent, can be, under similar relations, right and lovely in no other. These positions, which we take to be fundamental, are in direct contradiction to the theological maxims with which most churches begin;—viz. that human nature is so depraved that its conscience has lost its discernment, sees everything through a corrupted medium, and deserves no trust; that it may surrender its convictions to anything which can bring fair historical evidence of its being a revelation;—in other words, that it may be right to throw away our ideas of right, and, in obedience to antiquarian witnesses, suppose it holy in God to design and execute a scheme which it would be a crime in man to imitate. These principles are defended by the assertion, that the relations of the Divine and the human being are so different as to destroy all the analogies of character between them. The only tendency, both of this defence and of the principles themselves, is to absolute scepticism;—toatheistical scepticism, inasmuch as our propositions respecting God, if not true in the plain human sense, are to us true in no other, and representnothing; tomoral scepticism, inasmuch as, the sentiments of conscience being exposed to distrust, and all its language rendered unsettled, the very ground on which human character must plant itself is loosened; the rock of duty melts into water beneath our feet, and we are cast into the waves of impulse and caprice.
II. We have Faith in theMoral Perfection of God. This indeed is a plain consequence of our reliance on the natural sentiments of duty. For it is not, we apprehend, by our logical, but by our moral faculty, that we have our knowledge of God; and he who most confides in the instructor will learn the sacred lesson best. That one whom we may call the Holiest rules the universe, is no discovery made by the intellect in its excursions, but a revelation found by the conscience on retiring into itself; and though we may reason in defence of this great truth, and these reasonings, when constructed, may look convincing enough, they are not, we conceive, the source, but rather the effect, of our belief,—not the forethought which actually precedes and introduces the Faith, but the afterthought by which Faith seeks to make a friend and an intimate of the understanding. Does any one hesitate to admit this, and think that our conceptions of the Divine character are inferences regularly drawn from observation,—not indeed observation on the mere physical arrangements, but on the moral phenomena, of our world,—from the traces of a regard to character in the administration of human life? We will not at present dispute the conclusion; but, observing that the premises which furnish it are certainmoralexperiences, we remark that the very power of receiving and appreciating these, of knowing what they are worth, belongs not to our scientific faculty, but to our sense of justice and of right. On a being destitute of this they would make no impression; and in precise proportion to the intensity of this feeling will be the vividness and force of their persuasion. And is it not plainin fact, that it is far from being the clear and acute intellect, but rather the pure and transparentheart, that best discerns God? How many strong and sagacious judgments, of coolest capacity for the just estimate of argument, never attain to any deep conviction of a perfect Deity! Nay, how much does scepticism on this great matter seem to be proportioned, not to the obtuseness, but rather to the subtlety and searchingness of the mere understanding? But when was it ever known that the singularly pure and simple heart, the earnest and aspiring conscience, the lofty and disinterested soul, had no faith in the "First fair and the First good"? Philosophy at its ease, apart from the real responsibilities and strong battle of life, loses its diviner sympathies, and lapses into the scrupulosity of doubt, and from the centre of comfort weeps over the miseries of earth, and the questionable benevolence of heaven; while the practically tried and struggling, with moral force growing beneath the pressure of crushing toil, look up with a refreshing trust, and with worn and bleeding feet pant happily along to the abodes of everlasting love. The moral victor, flushed with triumph over temptation, feels that God is on his side, and that the spirit of the universe is in sympathy with his joy. Never did any one spend himself in the service of man, and yet despair of the benignity of God. Our faith, then, in the Divine perfection, forms and disengages itself from the deeps of conscience: and the Holiest that broods over us solemnly rises—the awful spirit of eternity—from the ocean of our moral nature.
It is in conformity with this doctrine of themoralorigin of our belief in the first principles of religion, that to every man his God ishis best and highest, the embodiment of that which the believer himself conceives to be the greatest. The image which he forms of that Being may indeed be gross and terrible; and others may be shocked, and exclaim that he trusts, not in a Divinity, but in a Fiend: but will the worshipper himself perceive and acknowledge this?—will he not indignantly deny it?—will he not eagerly vindicate the perfection of the Deity he serves? He can do no otherwise; for he discerns nothing more sublime, and cannot be convincedthatthatis low which stands at the summit of his thoughts. This uniform phenomenon in the history of religion could not exist, if human faith were an inference of intellectual origin. There would be nothingthento prevent some men, in their reasonings on the probable character of God, from assigning to that character a placebeneaththeir own conceptions of what is most excellent; and amid the infinite varieties of speculation, many forms of this opinion would undoubtedly arise. Let any one, then, who dissents from the account which we have given, ask himself this question: Why is it, that to discover a blemish in a divinity is the same thing as to renounce faith in him; and that, even in pagan times, toassail the characterof the gods was the constant mark of anunbelievingage? Is it not clear that, by a constraining necessity of our being, we are compelled to regard the godlike and the perfect as identical, and to look to heaven through the eye of our moral nature? The Intellect alone, like the telescope waiting for an observer, is quite blind to the celestial things above it,—a dead mechanism dipped in night,—ready to serve as the dioptric glass, spreading the images of light from the Infinite on the tender and living retina of Conscience.
If, then, there is no discernment of Deity except through our moral sense, the importance of confiding in the perceptions of that sense,—of rendering our consciousness of them vivid and distinct,—and the corresponding mischief of distrusting and repudiating these our appointed instructors,—become evident. Faith in the human conscience is necessary to faith in the Divine perfection: andthisagain is the needful prelude to the belief in any special revelation. For, unless we are first assured of the truth and excellence of God, we cannot tell that his communications may not deceive us, giving us false notices of things, and agitating us with illusory hopes and fears. This might be apprehended from a Being of undetermined benevolence and integrity: and that this idea of amendacious revelationhas never seriously entered the minds of men, is a strong proof of theirnatural and necessary faith in the rectitude and goodness of the Divine Administrator of creation. This Moral Perfection of God being assumed as a postulate in the very idea of a Revelation, no system of religion which contradicts it can be admitted as credibleon any terms.
Now the whole scheme of Redemption, as it is represented in the popular theology, appears to us to fall under this condemnation. Under thenamesof Justice, Sanctity, Mercy, it ascribes to the All-perfect a course of sentiment and of practice which—it is undeniable—no other moral agent, placed in analogous relations, could adopt without the deepest guilt. The Holiness of God, so often adduced to justify the severities of this scheme, we would yield to no one in earnestly maintaining; believing, as we do, that his abhorrence of moral evil is absolute and everlasting, his resistance to it real and true, and his love of excellence simply infinite as his nature. But purity of mind does not express itself by implacable vengeance against the impure, or oblige its possessor to engage himself in physically smiting them,—much less limit him through all eternity to this mode of administration. Rather does it incline away from a treatment which too often adds only torment, and removes no guilt,—which makes no advance towards the blessed dispositions it loves,—which fevers and parches instead of cooling and melting the passions of a culprit nature. It is a coarse and wretched error to suppose that anguish is a specific for sin, to the incessant infliction of which the Sinless is bound. God never departs indeed from his devotion to the laws of goodness, and his design of calling wider and wider virtue into existence: but he pursues them with the fertility of his infinite free-will;—now by the severities of his displeasure,—now by the openness of his forgiveness,—now by the solicitations of his love. His purpose, as one whose perfection is not merely spotless, but active and productive, cannot be, as some Christians seem to say, the penal publication of his personal offence against the insulters of his law, but the spread and cultivation throughout his spiritual universe of pure and high affections:and whenever the new germs of these appear in the garden of the Lord, no vernal sunshine or summer dews can more gently cherish the bursting flower, than does his mercy foster the fair and early growth. The assertion that God cannot pardon and recall to goodness till he has expended his tortures upon the evil, seems to us a plain denial of his moral excellence. Theologians speak as if there were some crime, or at least some weakness, in the clemency which freely receives a repentant creature into favor; as if the mercy which exacts no penalty, when penalty is no longer needed, were an amiable imbecility of human nature, which only a loose-principled and unholy being can exercise! as if absolute unforgiveness were the perfection of sanctity! True, this is disclaimed in words; and the Eternal Father is called merciful, for remitting the sinner's doom and transferring the burden of his guilt to a victim divine and pure. But surely this disclaimer is more insulting to our moral sense than the accusation. For, either this transference of righteousness and guilt is a mere figure of speech, denoting only that, from the death on Calvary, God took chronological occasion to pass his own spontaneous pardon, and set up the cross tomark the dateof his volition; or else, if the vicariousness be not this mere pretence, it describes an outrage upon the first principles of rectitude, a reckless disregard of all moral considerations, from the thought of which we are astonished that all good men do not recoil.
We press once more the question which has never been answered: How is the alleged immorality of letting off the sinner mended by the added crime of penally crushing the Sinless? Of what man—of what angel—could such a thing be reported, without raising a cry of indignant shame from the universal human heart? What should we think of a judge who should discharge the felons from the prisons of a city, because some noble and generous citizen offered himself to the executioner instead? And if this would be barbarity below, it cannot be holiness above. Moral excellence and beauty, we repeat, are no local growths, changing theirspecies with every clime; nor are the poisonous weeds of this outer region the chosen adornments of paradise. The principles of Justice and Right embrace all beings and all times, and, like the indestructible conception of space, attach themselves to our contemplation of objects within the remotest infinitude. It is no more possible that what would be evil in man should be good in God, than that a circle on earth should be a square in heaven. Having faith, then, in the absolute perfection of our Creator, we dare ascribe to Him nothing which revolts the secret conscience He has given us.
III. The relation which thus subsists between the human conscience and the Divine excellence leads us to avow, in the next place, afaithin thestrictly Divine and Inspired Character of our own highest Desires and best Affections. We do not mean by this, that these affections are of miraculous origin; that their appearance breaks through any regular law; or that they do not belong to our own nature so as to form an integrant part of its history; or that they do not arise spontaneously within it, but require to be precipitated upon it from without. They are as much properties of our own minds, as our selfishness and sin: we areconsciousof them, and so they cannot but be parts of our personality.[25]But in admitting them to behuman, I do not deny that theyaredivine: in regarding them as indigenous to our created spirit, I do not treat them as foreign to the Creator's; nor is there any inconsistency in believing them to be simultaneously domesticated with both. That which isincluded withinthe mind of man, is nottherefore excluded fromthe mind ofGod; much less is it true that occurrences agreeable to the order of nature are, by that circumstance, disqualified from being held the immediate products of the Heavenly Will. The Supreme Cause, so far from being shut out by his own secondary causes and natural laws, has now at least no residence, no activity, no existence, except within them; He covers, penetrates, fills them; thinks, speaks, executes, through them, as the media of his volition: andHisenergy andtheirsnot onlymay coincide, but evenmust coalesce. He is not to be brought down from his universal dominion to the rank ofone ofthe physical causes active in creation, doing that only which the others have left undone. Will any one stand with me by the midnight sea, and, because the tides in the deep below hang upon the moon in the heavens above, forbid me to hear in their sweep the very voice of God, and tell me that, while they roll untired on, He sleeps through the silent vault around me?It is by the law of gravitation that the planets find an unerring track in the desert space; and is it false, then, that He "leadeth them forth with his finger," and bids us note, in pledge of his punctuality, that "not one faileth"? Is there any error in ascribing the very same event at one time to gravitation, at another to God? Certainly not; for this is but one of the forms of his personal activity. And it is the same in the world of Mind; its natural laws do not exclude, but, on the contrary, include, the direct Divine agency: and thoughmythought, or hope, or love, cannot beyours, they may yet be God's; not emanations from the God without us, but inspirations of the God within. Why should we start to think that there is a part of us which is divine?—why image to ourselves a distant, external, contemplative God, seeing all things and touching nothing, gazing on the unconscious evolutions of things, as the retired Mechanist of nature?—why enthrone Him in the inertness of dead space, without even a sacred function there, and exclude Him from the tried, and tempted, and ever-trembling soul of Man? If we found Him not at home in the secret places of strife and sorrow, vainly should we wander to seek Him in the colder regions of nature abroad. We have no sympathy with any system which denies the doctrine of a Holy Spirit; which discerns nothing divine in the higher experiences of human nature; which owns no black abyss and no heavenly heights in the soul of man, but only a flat, common, midway region, neither very foul nor very fair,—well enough for the streets of traffic, but without a mount of vision and of prayer. Nothing noble, nothing great, has ever come from a faith which did not deeply reverence the soul, and stand in awe of it as the seat of God's own dwelling, the presence-chamber of his sanctity,—the focus of that infinite whispering-gallery which the universe spreads around us.
Nor can we doubt at what point of our own nature we must stand, in order to hear the voice and feel the inspiration of the Eternal. The pure in heart—each in proportion to his purity—see Him. Our Conscience, our MoralPerceptions, as we have seen, are our only revealers of God. In proportion to their clearness do we discern Him; and behind the clouds that obscure them, He becomes dim, and vanishes away. The aspirations of duty, the love of excellence, the disinterested and holy affections, of which every good heart is conscious, constitute our affinity with Him,—by which we know Him, as like knows like: they are the expression of his mind, the pencil of rays by which He paints his image on our spiritual nature. God is related to our soul, like the sun in a stormy sky to the windowed cells in which mortals live; and as we sit at our work in the chamber of conscience or of love, the burst of brilliancy or the sudden gloom within reports to us the clear-shining or the cloud of the heaven without. Nor can any philosophy, falsely so called, permanently expel this conviction from the Christian heart. Every devout and earnest mind naturally feels that its selfishness and sin are of the earth, earthy,—the most offensive of all attitudes to God,—the infatuated turning of the back to Him: and, on the other hand, welcomes the fresh glow of pure Resolve, the heart-felt sob of Penitence, the glorious Courage that slays Temptation at his feet,—each as the gracious gift of a divine strength, and the authentic voice of the Inspirer, God. By this natural faith (natural, however, only to the Christian mind) we are prepared to abide; and, with the Apostle Paul, to own ourselves, not without deep awe, the very temple of the Holiest.
IV. We have said, that in the Conscience and Moral Affections we have ouronlyrevealers of God. Let it be understood that we mean our onlyinternalrevealers of Him; the only faculty of our nature capable of furnishing us with the idea and belief of Him, with any perception of his character, and allegiance to his will. We mean to state that, without this faculty, the bare intellect, the mere scientific and reasoning power, could make no way towards the knowledge of divine realities; could never, by any system of helps whatsoever, be trained or guided into this knowledge, anymore than, in the absence of the proper sense, theearof the blind can be taughtto see; and that nature, life, history, miracle, notwithstanding their most sedulous discipline, would leave us utterly in the dark about religion, except so far as they addressed themselves to our consciousness of what is holy, just, beautiful, and great. But we donotmean to state that the Moral Sense can stand alone, dispense with all outward instruction, and supply a man with a natural religion ready made. Nor do we mean that the every-day experience of man, and the ordinary providence of God, are enough, without special revelation, to lead us to heavenly truth. And we are therefore prepared to advance another step, and to say, that, while regarding the human conscience as the only inward revealer of God, we havefaithinChristashis perfect and transcendent outward revelation. We conceive that Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, not topersuadethe Father, not toappeasethe Father, not to make a sanguinarypurchasefrom the Father, but simply to "showus the Father"; to leave upon the human heart a new, deep, vivid impression of what God is in himself, and of what he designs for his creature, man; to become, in short, the accepted interpreter of heaven and life. And this he achieved, in the only way of which we can conceive as practicable, by a new disclosure in his own person of all that is holy and godlike in character,—startling the human soul with the sudden apparition of a being diviner far than it had yet beheld, and lifting its faith at once into quite another and purer region. If it be true, as we have ventured to affirm, that to every man his God is hisbest, you can by no means give to his faith ahigher God, till you have given to his heart abetter best,—till you have touched him with a profounder sense of sanctity and excellence, and purified and enlarged the perceptions of his conscience. Nor can you dothis, except by presenting him with nobler models, with the living form of a fairer and sublimer goodness, visibly transcending every object of his previous reverence. No verbal teaching, no didactic rules, can transform any man's moral taste, and place before his mental view a lovelier andtruer image of perfection: as well might you hope, by definition, and precept, and book-wisdom, to train an artist with a soul like Raffaelle, or an eye like Claude. But only give the glorious model to the mind,producethe most finished excellence and harmony, and our instinctive sympathy with goodness feels and discerns it instantly, and, though unable to conceive it inventively beforehand, recognizes it reverently afterwards. And so Christ, standing in solitary greatness, and invested with unapproachable sanctity, opens at once the eye of conscience to perceive and know the pure and holy God, the Father that dwelt in him and made him so full of truth and grace. Him that rules in heaven we can in no wise believe to beless perfectthan that which is most divine on earth; of anythingmore perfectthan the meek yet majestic Jesus, no heart can ever dream. And, accordingly, ever since he visited our earth with blessing, the soul of Christendom has worshipped a God resembling him,—a God of whom he was the image and impersonation;—and,therefore, notthe God of which philosophy dreams,—a mere Infinite physical Force, without spirituality, without love, chiefly engaged in whirling the fly-wheel of nature, and sustaining the material order of the heavens, and weaving in the secret workshop of creation new textures of life and beauty;notthe God of which natural theology speaks, the mere chief of ingenious mechanicians, more optical, and dynamical, and architectural, than our most skilful engineers,—a cold intellectual Being, in the severe immensity and immutability of whose mind all warm emotions are absorbed and dissolved;notthe God of Calvinism, creating a race with certain foresight of the eternal damnation of the many, and against the few refusing to relax his frown except at the spectacle of blood;—but the Infinite Spirit, so holy, so affectionate, so pitiful, whom Jesus felt to be in him as his Inspirer; who passes by no wounds of sin or sorrow; who stills the winds and waves of terror, to the perishing that call on him in faith; who stops the procession of our grief, and bids bereaved affection weep no more, but wait upon the voice that even the dead obey;who scathes the hypocrite with the lightning of conviction, and permits the penitent to wash his feet with tears; who reckons most his own the gentlest follower, that rests the head and turns up the trustful eye on him; and bends that look of piercing love upon the guilty which best rebukes the guilt. Jesus has given us a faith never held before, and still too much obscured, in theaffectionatenessof the Great Ruler; has made Him our own domestic God, whose ample home encircles all, leaving not the solitary, the sinner, or the sad without a place in the mansions of his house; has wrapped us in the Divine immensity without fear, and bid us claim the warm sun in heaven as our Paternal hearth, and the vault of the pure sky as our protecting roof.
We have spoken of Christ's personal representation, in his own character and practical life, of the spirit of the Divine Mind, and have explained how in this way we believe that he has "shown us the Father." This, however, is not all. Hisdirect teachings, perfectly in harmony with his life, confirm and extend its lessons; and we listen, with venerating faith, to his inimitable exposition of all divine truth. Purity of soul makes the most wonderful discoveries in heavenly things, and is indeed the pellucid atmosphere through which the remoter lights of God are "spiritually discerned." As we have said, the knowledge of him which any mind (be it of man or of angel) may possess, is just proportioned to its sanctity: and our Messiah, having the very highest sanctity, was enabled to speak with the highest and most authoritative knowledge, and was inspired to be our infallible guide, not perhaps in trivial questions of literary interpretation, or scientific fact, or historical expectation, but in all the deep and solemn relations on which our sanctification and immortal blessedness depend. And both to his person and to his teachings do the miracles of his life, the tragedy of his crucifixion, and the glory of his resurrection, articulately call the attention of all ages, as with the voice of God. In every way we discern in Christ the transcendent revelation of the Most High. We are told, that this is todishonor Christ. We think it, however, a more glorious honor to him, to be thus indissolubly folded within the intimacy of the Father's love, than to be blasted by the tempest of his wrath; nor could we ever trust and venerate a God who—like the barbarians in the judgment-hall—could smite that meek lamb of heaven with one rude blow of vengeance.
V. But we hasten to observe, finally, thatwe have faithinHuman Immortality, as exemplified in the heavenly life to which Jesus ascended. To assure us of this great truth, it were enough that Jesus assumed and taught it; that it was his great postulate, essential to the development of his own character, and to all his views of the purposes of life,—an integrant part of his insight into human responsibility and his version of human duty. For ifhedid not teach the reality of God in this matter, sure we are that none else has ever done so; and most of all, that the sceptics who doubt the heavenly futurity have no claim to take his place as our instructors. For if this hope were a delusion,whowould the mistaken be? Will any one tell me, that the voluptuary, who, from abandonment to the body, cannot imagine the perpetuity of the spirit;—that the selfish, who, looking at the meanness of his own nature, sees nothing worth immortalizing;—that the contented Epicurean, who, in prudent quietude of sense and sympathy, finds adequate satisfaction in this mortal life;—that the cold speculator, who looks at the fouler side of human nature, and, showing us on its features the pallor of sensualism or the hard lines of guilt, deems it less fit for the duration of the angel than for the extinction of the brute;—that these men areright; while Christ, who walked without despair through the deepest haunts of sin, with faith that succumbed not to wretchedness and wrong, but stood up and conquered them; who embraced our whole nature in his love, and displayed it in its perfectness; who lived and died in its utmost service, with prayers and tears and blood; to whom our most bindingaffections cling almost with worship as the holiest glory of our world;—thathecould be under a delusionhere?—that when, sinking in trustful death, he laid his meek head to rest on the bosom of the Father, he was cast off, and dropped on the cold clod?—that he sobbed into the Infinite by night with a vain love that met no answer?—that God rather takes part in his providence with the mean-souled, the cynic, the morbid, the selfish? Thereisno greater impossibility than this, on which evidence can fall back. Nay, we confess that, even apart from his doctrine, the mere mortal history of Christ would have settled with us the question of futurity. For the great essential to this belief is a sufficiently elevated estimate of human nature: no man will ever deny its immortality who has a deep impression of its capacity for so great a destiny. And this impression is so vividly given by the life of Jesus,—he presents an image of the soul so grand, so divine,—as utterly to dwarf all the dimensions of its present career, and to necessitate a heaven for its reception. At all events, it is allowable to feel this, when we see that this natural sequel was actually and perceptibly appended; that this "Holy One of God could not see corruption," but rose, above the reach of mortal ill, to the world where now he welcomes the souls of the sainted dead. That other life we take to be a scene for the mind's ampler and ampler development, apart from those animal and selfish elements which now deform and degrade it by their excess. And this alone, if there were nothing else, would render it a life of awful retribution. For to the wicked, what is this loss of "the natural man," but total bereavement and utter death of joy?—what to the good, but a glad and sacred birth?—to the one, a Promethean exile on a mid-rock in the ocean of night, under the bite of a remorse that gnaws impalpably, felt always, but never seen,—to the other, a welcome to the loving homes of the blest, amid the sunshine of the everlasting hills? Yet precisely because we believe in Retribution, do we trust in Restoration. The very abhorrence with which a man's better mind everlooks upon his worse, while it inflicts his punishment, begins his cure: and we can never allow that God will suspend this natural law impressed by himself on our spiritual constitution, merely in order to stop the process of moral recovery, and specially enable him to maintain the eternity of torment and of sin. And so, beyond the dark close of life rise before us the awful contrasts of retribution; and in the farther distance, the dim but glorious vision of a purified, redeemed, and progressive universe of souls.
Here, then, are our Five Points of Christianity, considered as a system of positive religious doctrine, viz.:—1st. The truth of the Moral Perceptions in man,—not, as the degenerate churches of our day teach, their pravity and blindness; 2dly. The Moral Perfection of the character of God,—in opposition to the doctrine of his Arbitrary Decrees and Absolute Self-will; 3dly. The Natural awakening of the Divine Spirit within us,—rather than its Preternatural communication from without; 4thly. Christ, the pure Image and highest Revelation of the Eternal Father,—not his Victim and his Contrast; 5thly. A universal Immortality after the model of Christ's heavenly life; an immortality not of capricious and select salvation, with unimaginable torment as the general lot, but, for all, a life of spiritual development, of retribution, of restoration.
To theMoraldoctrine which, in our view, the Gospel conjoins with this religious system, it is impossible for us at present to advert. Suffice to say that, with Paul, we exclaim, "notLaw, butLove":—love to God, to Christ, not simply for what they have done for us, but chiefly for what they are in themselves;—nothing like the narrow-hearted gratitude for an exclusive salvation, but amoralaffection awakened by their holiness, rectitude, truth, and mercy,—by the sublimity and spirituality of their designs, and the sanctity and fidelity of their execution: love also to man, looking to him not merely as a sentient being who is to be madehappy, but as a child of God, who is to be raisedinto some likeness to the Divine image; as a brother spirit, noble in nature, even though sinful in fact, glorious as an immortal in the eye of God, though disfigured by this world's hardship or contempt.
Does any one ask,where we getour system of faith and morals? What are the principles of reasoning which we apply to nature and Scripture to extract it thence? The reply would require a volume of exposition. Suffice it to say, that we think we have full warrant for this belief from the Scriptures of the New Testament, with which alone we conceive that Christians have any practical concern; that, in interpreting these Scriptures, we follow the same rules which we should apply to any other books; that not even could their instructions make us false to that sense of right and wrong which God has breathed into us; that if they taught respecting him anything unjust or unholy, we should not acceptit, but rejectthem; and that, as to the points of faith on which we have dwelt, some receive these truths because they were taught by Christ; others receive Christ because he taught these truths.
On this faith we desire to take our stand, with the firmness, but without the ferocity, of the first Reformers. Opposing churches tell us, we "are so frigid"! Why, it is the very thing our own hearts had often said to us; for there is nothing that so promptly rebukes the coldness of our nature as the warmth of our faith. We do not, however, much admire this mutual criticism of each other's temperature; and strongly suspect the reality of that earnestness which prides itself on its own intensity. We must not propose to assume any artificial heats, in order to spite and disprove this frequent accusation; but be resolved, in an age diseased with pretence, to remain realities, to profess nothing which we do not believe, to withhold nothing whereon we doubt, to affect nothing which we do not feel, to promise nothing which we will not do; holding, with Paul, that simplicity and sincerity are truly the godliest of things. With Heaven's good help, may we bear our testimony thus; deeming it a small thingto be judged by man's judgment; and, with such light and heat as God shall put into our hearts, delivering over our portion of truth to generations that will give it a more genial welcome. There is greatness in a faith, when it can win a wide success or make rapid conquest over submissive minds. There is a higher greatness in a faith that, when God ordains, can stand up and do without success;—unmoved amid the pitiless storms of a fanatic age; with foot upon the rock of its own fidelity, and heart in the serene Infinite above the canopy of cloud and tempest.
1. Ωριγενους Φιλοσοφουμενα η κατα πασων αιρεσεων ελεγχος.Origenis Philosophumena sive omnium hæresium refutatio. E codice Parisino nunc primum ediditEmmanuel Miller. Oxonii: e Typographeo Academico. 1851.2.Hippolytus and his Age; or the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome under Commodus and Alexander Severus; and Ancient and Modern Christianity and Divinity compared.ByChristian Charles Josias Bunsen, D.C.L. In Four Volumes. London. 1852.
1. Ωριγενους Φιλοσοφουμενα η κατα πασων αιρεσεων ελεγχος.Origenis Philosophumena sive omnium hæresium refutatio. E codice Parisino nunc primum ediditEmmanuel Miller. Oxonii: e Typographeo Academico. 1851.
2.Hippolytus and his Age; or the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome under Commodus and Alexander Severus; and Ancient and Modern Christianity and Divinity compared.ByChristian Charles Josias Bunsen, D.C.L. In Four Volumes. London. 1852.
When a stranger knocks at the gate of the Clarendon Printing-house, and presents his petition for aid, the University of Oxford maintains its national character for good-natured opulence,—gives its money and signs its name, without very close inquiry into the case. The documents are really so respectable that there cannot be much amiss; and a venerable institution, well known to be fond of the house, cannot be expected to go trudging through the back-lanes of history, and exposing its nostrils in the purlieus of heresy, in order to identify a literary petitioner, evidently above all common imposture. So it supplies all his wants upon the spot, dresses him handsomely, and sends him out into the world as its worthy (though eccentric) friend, the catechist of Alexandria. The introduction, being left at the Prussian Legation, fallsinto the hands of no stay-at-home benefactor, but of one who knows the by-ways of human life, and has an ear for the dialects of many a place. M. Bunsen—as Oxford might have remembered—is not unacquainted with Egypt; and no sooner does he raise his eyes from the credentials to the person of the stranger, than he discovers him to be no disciple of the Alexandrine Clement; recognizes the accent of the West; is reminded of the voice of Irenæus; and, finally, being even more familiar with the Tiber than the Nile, detects a Roman beneath the mask of Origen. We do not in the least grudge the friend of Niebuhr the honor of a discovery which no one could turn to more effectual account; but every English scholar must feel mortified that theImprimaturof our great Ecclesiastical University should appear on a title-page manifestly false; that the first reader should see at a glance what the learned proprietors had missed; and that theirEditio Princepsof a recovered monument of Church antiquity should be superseded within a year or two of its publication. They are not principals, it is true, but only secondaries to the Editor, in the commission of this error: still, a lay bibliographer might reasonably expect, in resorting for aid to so renowned and reverend a body, that his own judgment would be kept in check; and their very consent to issue the work impliessomecritical opinion of its value, as derived from age and authorship. Whether they are called upon to adopt at once M. Bunsen's proposed title-page, and substitute the name of Hippolytus for that of Origen, we will not say; but that the present title gives the book to the wrong author, seems placed beyond the reach of doubt.
M. Emmanuel Miller, one of the curators of the National Library in Paris, was the first to make himself acquainted with the contents of this work, and to appreciate their importance. Among the manuscripts under his care was one on cotton paper of the fourteenth century, which had been brought from Mount Athos in 1842, by M. Mynoïdes Mynas, a Greek agent employed by the French government to search the neglected treasures of that celebrated spot. Thesuperscription, "On all Heresies," was not inviting; but on turning over the leaves, some lines, unknown before, of Pindar and of another lyric poet, were found and copied; and the value of these excerpts being ascertained, M. Miller's attention was directed to the body of the treatise containing them. The treatise had already been described, in theMoniteurof the 5th of January, 1844, as a Refutation of all Heresies, in ten books, but with the first three missing, as well as the conclusion of the whole; and he soon became aware, that, of the three missing books, the first already existed, and had been printed under the name of "Philosophumena," in the editions of Origen's works. Its very title is found in the manuscript at the end of the fourth book, and denotes that the portion of the work there concluded completes the sketch of philosophical systems, which the author prefixes to his account of ecclesiastical aberrations; and there are mutual references, backwards and forwards, between the printed book and the manuscript, which leave no doubt that the latter is a sequel to the former. The Editor, therefore, has very properly reprinted the "Philosophumena" as the commencement of the newly recovered work; which thus exhibits a regular plan, and consists of two parts, viz.: first, four books,—of which the second and third are lost,—expounding the Pagan philosophies, especially the Greek, from which, the author contends, the various heresies of Christendom are mere plagiarisms; then six books, containing an account, in an order prevailingly historical, of thirty or thirty-two heresies, supported by extracts from their standard writings, and wound up in the recapitulary book at the end by the writer's own profession of faith. Now who is the author?
Not Origen; for, as Huet had already remarked respecting the "Philosophumena," the writer speaks of himself in terms implying an episcopal position; and, in the ninth book, he gives an account of transactions in Rome, extending over many years, in which he was evidently an eyewitness and an actor. While the scene is thus laid at a distance from Origen's sphere, and the date also of the personal matter runsback into his boyhood, the cast of the theological doctrine is wholly different from his; for instance, in a certain "Treatise on the Universe," to which the author refers as his own, and of which a fragment is preserved, the penal condition of the wicked after death is said to be immutable;[26]but Origen, it is well known, taught a doctrine of final restoration. Add to this, that no such work as the present is attributed to Origen by any ancient witness, and the case against his name may be regarded as complete.
The evidence which disappoints this claim narrows also our choice of others. The personal transactions to which we have referred took place at Rome, while Zephyrinus and his successor, Callistus, presided over the Christian community there, that is, during the first twenty years of the third century. We must, therefore, look for our author among the metropolitan clergymen of that period. Still closer is the circle drawn by the fact, that the writer largely borrows from the treatise of Irenæus on the same subject; and, though vastly improving on that foolish production, and copiously contributing fresh materials, betrays the general affinity of thought which unites the stronger disciple with the feebler master.
The problem then being to find a pupil of the Bishop of Lyons among the ecclesiastics of Rome, at the beginning of the third century, two names are given in as answering the conditions,—those of Hippolytus, a suburban clergyman, and of Caius, whose charge lay within the city itself. In order to vindicate the claim of the first, it has been necessary for M. Bunsen to prove that his locality is right; and that the "Portus Romæ," of which he was bishop, was not, as Le Moyneand Cave had groundlessly supposed, the Arabian "Portus Romanus" of the district of Aden, but the new harbor made, or at least enlarged, by Trajan, on the northern bank of the Tiber, immediately opposite to Ostia. That he suffered martyrdom there, and was buried in a cemetery on the Tiburtine road, is generally admitted, on the evidence of Prudentius, who has left a poem describing his memorial chapel on that spot, and of a statue of him, seated in a cathedra, which was dug up there three hundred years ago, and now stands in the library of the Vatican. It is certainly perplexing to find Jerome avowing ignorance of the see over which he presided, if, for a quarter of a century, he was active at the centre of the Christian world; and not less so to discover in Rome itself, nay, in a Pope, or his transcriber, at the end of the fifth century, the impression that his scene of labor had been in Arabia; and under the influence of these facts it has been supposed that though, coming to Italy, he had fallen among the martyrs of the West, he ought to be reckoned among the bishops of the East. On the whole, however, the reasons preponderate in favor of his residence, as "Episcopus Portuensis," within the presbytery of Rome. The title itself is an old one, still always assigned to some dignitary of the curia, and, no doubt, deriving its origin from the time when the Northern Harbor of the Tiber—of which in the ninth century, scarce a trace was left—was a flourishing emporium. The name of Hippolytus is associated by tradition with the spot; it is given, our author assures us, to a certain tower, near Fiumicino; and in the eighth and ninth centuries, a basilica of St. Hippolytus was restored at Portus by Leo III. and IV. An episcopal palace still remains. By acute and skilful combinations, effected with evidence scanty as a whole, and suspicious in every part, M. Bunsen has endeavored to reproduce the historical image of Hippolytus. His office of "bishop" implied simply the charge of the single congregation at Portus; the members of that congregation were the "plebs" committed to his supervision; the city or village in which they lived was his diocese. His vicinity to the greatcapital drew him, however, into a wider circle of duties. For while Rome itself was divided into several ecclesiastical districts, each of which had its own clergyman and lay deacons, the suburban bishops were associated with these officers to form a committee of management, or presbytery, presided over by the metropolitan. By his seat at this board, he was kept in living contact with all the most stirring interests of Christendom, which, wherever their origin might be, found their way to the imperial city, and more and more sought their equilibrium there. At a commercial seaport, his own congregation would largely consist of temporary settlers and mercantile agents, Greek brokers, Jewish bankers, African importers, to whom Italy was a lodging-house rather than a home; and by the continual influx of foreigners he would hear tidings of the remotest churches, and carry to the clerical meetings in the city the newest gossip of all the heresies. Possibly this position, with its opportunities of various intercourse, may have contributed to form in him the agreeable address, and faculty of eloquent speech, which tradition ascribes to him; and induced him to commence the practice of writing with studious care the homilies which were to be delivered in the congregation. At all events he is the first of whom we distinctly hear as a great preacher. His period extends, it is supposed, from the reign of Commodus (180-193) to the first year of Maximin (235-6); and so brought him into the same presbytery-room with five popes,—Victor (187-198); Zephyrinus (201-218); Callistus (219-222); Urbanus (223-230); and Pontianus (230-235); with the last of whom he shared, in the last year of his life, a cruel exile to Sardinia, and returned only to fall a victim to fresh informations, and suffer martyrdom by drowning in a canal. It cannot be denied that, in order to recover this picture of Hippolytus, and still more in order to fix his literary position, the materials of evidence have to be dealt with in somewhat arbitrary fashion, and theirlacunæto be filled by conjecture. Prudentius, for instance, is called as an historical witness, yet convicted of fable in much of what he says. His poemdeclares that at one time Hippolytus had supported Novatus in his attempt to close the gates of repentance against theLapsi, but had been reconciled to the catholic doctrine before he died. He must in this case have joined in the opposition raised by Novatianus (in 251) to the election of Cornelius to the papacy, and have died in the Decian persecution, which continued till the year 257. Moreover, the painting seen by the Spanish versifier on the walls of the memorial chapel introduces us to so ridiculous a story, as only to show how completely the martyrological legends had already escaped all the restraints of history. In this fresco the mythical fate of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, is transferred to the Roman presbyter: he is represented as torn to pieces by horses; while the faithful follow to pick up his limbs and hair, and sponge away the blood upon the ground. If the sanctuary exhibiting this scene received the martyr's remains from their original resting-place as early as the time of Constantine,—and such is our author's opinion,—into what a state of degradation had the history of Hippolytus sunk in three quarters of a century! And if already memorial painting could thus impudently lie, how can we better trust the statue, admitted to be later still? Yet this statue, on whose side is a list of the writings of Hippolytus, is appealed to in determining the martyr's written productions, as the painted chapel in evidence of facts in his personal career. We fully admit the success of M. Bunsen in eliciting a possible result from a mass of intricate and tangled conditions, and presenting us with a highly interesting personage. But perhaps, as the venerable image of the good bishop has grown in clearness before his eye, and attracted his affection more and more, the very vividness of the conception may have rendered him insensible to the precariousness of the proof. Ecclesiastical fancy, in its unrestrained career, has torn his personality to pieces, and left thedisjecta membraso rudely scattered on the strand of history, that we almost doubt the power of any critical Æsculapius to restore him to the world again.
At the same board of church councillors with Hippolytussat another λογιωτατος ανηρ,[27]the presbyter Caius; and as an urban clergyman, he would be more constantly there than his suburban brother, separated by a distance of eighteen miles. To form any living image of him from the scanty notices of him which begin with Eusebius and end with Photius, is quite impossible. In one respect only do the personal characteristics attributed to him distinguish him from the bishop of Portus. He was a strenuous opponent of the peculiarities favored by the Christians of Lesser Asia, and especially of the claims to prophetic gifts, and the appeal to clairvoyant skill, by Montanus and his followers. With one of these, by name Proclus, he held a disputation; from which Eusebius has preserved a passage or two, showing, in conjunction with the title, not very intelligibly assigned to him, of "Bishop of the Gentiles," that he belonged to the most advanced anti-Jewish party in the Church, lamented the grossness of the popular millenarian dreams, vindicated the apostolic dignity of the Roman against the pretensions of the Eastern Christianity, and disowned the Epistle to the Hebrews. This feature in the figure of Caius, though constituting the distinction, does not, however, necessarilyopposehim to Hippolytus, whose attitude towards the Montanists may not have been very different, but only less positively marked. Still the suspicions directed against the two men are of an opposite kind: with Hippolytus, the difficulty is to set him clear of sympathy with Montanism;[28]with Caius, to prevent his being classed with its unmeasured opponents, the Alogi.[29]And a report even reaches us, that among the Chaldean Christians there exists, or did exist in the fourteenth century, a controversial treatise of Hippolytus against Caius.[30]
Between these two men, so similar in position, and not, perhaps, unused to sharp argument face to face, springs up, at the end of all these ages, a rival claim to property in the "Refutation of all the Heresies." The chief counsel for Hippolytus, besides our author, are the eminent Professors Jacobi, Duncker, and Schneidewin,—all, we believe, belonging to the Neander school of theology; and as the last two are about to edit the work anew, and probably to give it its final form, their opinion of its authorship may be expected to prevail. The other side, however, advocated by Dr. Fessler, is sustained by perhaps the greatest of living historical critics, F. C. Baur, representative of the much-abused Tübingen school. Into so intricate a question we might be excused for inviting our readers, had we anything fresh to offer towards its solution; but the chief impression we have brought from its study is one of astonishment at the extreme positiveness with which the learned men on either side affirm their own conclusion. A more equal balance of evidence we never remember to have met with in any similar research; and the faint and slender preponderance which alone the scale can ever exhibit, amusingly contrasts with the triumphant assertion, of both sets of disputants, that not a reasonable doubt remains. The leading points of M. Bunsen's case are these. A work "On all Heresies" is attributed to Hippolytus, and in no instance to Caius, by Eusebius, Jerome, Epiphanius, and Peter of Alexandria, at the beginning of the fourth century. Such a book was still extant in the ninth century; for Photius, the celebrated patriarch of Constantinople, has given us an account of its contents in the journal and epitome of his studies which he has left us. On comparing his report with the newly discovered book, the identity of the two works is established in some important respects: thenumberandconcluding termof the series of heresies are the same; they both of them include materials taken from Irenæus, while reversing his order of treatment. Further, in the newly found treatise reference is made by the author to other works of his, in which he has discussed certain points of early Hebrewchronology in proving the antiquity of the Abrahamic race. Now, Eusebius was acquainted with a certain "Chronicle" of Hippolytus, brought down to the first year of Alexander Severus; and such a chronicle, in a Latin translation, is found in Fabricius's edition of Hippolytus, only that its list of Roman emperors terminates, not with the beginning, but with the end, of Severus's reign. It has, however, in common with our work, a peculiar number of tribes,—viz. seventy-two, derived from Noah. Thus, the author of the "Heresies" and of the "Chronicle" would appear to be the same, and, according to Eusebius, to be Hippolytus. Lastly, both in our new work, and also in a book called the "Labyrinth," written against some Unitarians of the second century, reference is made to a treatise "On the Universe," which the author mentions as his own production. By printing a fragment of this last in his edition of "Hippolytus," Fabricius has shown to what name all three should, in his judgment, be set down; and that they cannot be given to Caius is rendered evident by the occurrence, in the fragment, of certain Apocalyptic fictions inconsistent with his rejection of the Book of Revelations. Moreover, the list of works on the statue of Hippolytus includes a disquisition "Against the Greeks and against Plato, orRespecting the Universe."