'Who know man does not live by joy alone,But by the presence of the power of God,'—
'Who know man does not live by joy alone,But by the presence of the power of God,'—
such must cast behind them the hope of any repose or tranquillity, save that which is the last reward of long agonies of thought; they must relinquish all prospect of any heaven, save that of which tribulation is the avenue and portal; they must gird up their loins and trim their lamp for a work which cannot be put by, and which must not be negligently done. 'He,' says Zschokke, 'who does not like living in thefurnished lodgings of tradition, must build his own house, his own system of thought and faith for himself.'"—p. 242.
The work of Mr. Greg derives its interest, not from anything in it that will be new to the studious theologian, but from the freshness and force with which it presents the results of the author's reading and reflection on both the claims and the contents of Scripture. Adopting the ordinary notion of "inspiration," as equivalent to a supernaturally provided "infallibility," he reviews and condemns the reasonings by which this attribute has been associated with the Bible; and decides that the mere discovery of a statement in the Scriptures is no sufficient reason for our implicit reception of it. Having cleared away this obstacle to all intelligent criticism, he pursues his way, chiefly under the guidance of De Wette, through the earlier literature of the Hebrews; and adds another to the many exposures of the humiliating attempts, on the part of English divines, to reconcile the cosmogony of Genesis with modern science; attempts which we should call obsolete, did we not remember that Buckland and Whewell are both living, and have not yet attained the episcopal bench. Mr. Greg adopts the views of which Baur is the best known recent expositor, but which Lessing long ago traced out, as to the gradual formation of the Hebrew monotheism; and shows the striking contrast between the family Jehovah of the Patriarchs and the universal God of the later Prophets. Whatever be the origin of the doctrine of a Messiah, and underwhatever varieties it appeared, it never pointed, the author conceives, to such a person as Jesus of Nazareth, or such a product as the Christian Church; and it is only by perverse interpretations, unendurable out of the field of theology, that any passages in the Old Testament can be made out to prefigure the events in the New. In the argument, therefore, between the early missionaries of the Gospel and the unconvinced Jews, Mr. Greg maintains that the latter were the more faithful to their sacred books. The phenomena of the first three Gospels are next examined sufficiently to explain the several hypotheses respecting the order and materials of their composition. The author rests on Schleiermacher's conclusion, that a number of fragmentary records of incident and discourse formed the groundwork, partly common, partly exclusive, of the triple Evangile. He thus removes us, in this portion of the Scriptures, from first-hand testimony altogether; and throws upon internal criticism the task of discriminating between the original and reliable elements on the one hand, and those on the other which did not escape the accidents of floating tradition and the coloring of later ideas. This delicate task the author attempts; and manifests throughout an acquaintance with the methods and models of the higher criticism, fully qualifying him to form the independent judgment which he sums up in these words:—
"In conclusion, then, it appears certain that in all the synoptical Gospels we have events related that did not really occur, and words ascribed to Jesus which Jesus did not utter; and that many of these words and events are of great significance. In the great majority of these instances, however, this incorrectness does not imply any want of honesty on the part of the Evangelists, but merely indicates that they adopted and embodied, without much scrutiny or critical acumen, whatever probable and honorable narratives they found current in the Christian community."—p. 137.
The peculiarities of the fourth Gospel are next dealt with: its apparent polemic reference to the gnosis of the first and second centuries; its absence of demoniacs and parables; thelength, the mysticism, the dogma of its discourses, and their uniformity of complexion with the historian's own narrative and reflections; the narrowness of its charity, and the apocryphal appearance of its "first miracle." Without questioning the probability that within the contents of this Gospel is secreted a nucleus of facts, Mr. Greg thinks the book so clearly imbued throughout with the writer's idiosyncrasy, as to be inferior in historical value to the Synoptics; and the discourses of Jesus, in particular, must be regarded as free compositions by the Evangelist. In our author's management of this subject there seems to us to be an unfavorable change. The style of thought peculiar to John, as well as that characteristic of Paul, lies out of the latitude native to him; and with every intention to be just in his appreciation, he fails, we think, to reach the point of sympathy from which the fourth Gospel should be judged. The realism of his mind makes him a better critic of the hard Judaical element of the Christian Scriptures, with its objective distinctness and its moral beauty, than of the more ideal Gentile ingredients, where a subjective dialectic traces forms of thought in the intense fires of spiritual consciousness.
In a separate discussion of the question of miracles they are restored to the subordinate position, as compared with moral evidence, assigned to them by the early Protestant divines. Adopting the position of Locke, that "the miracles are to be judged by the doctrines, and not the doctrines by the miracles," he can admit with the less pain his conviction, that, even in the instance of the resurrection of Jesus, the historical evidence is too conflicting and uncertain to bear the supernatural weight imposed upon it. He admits, indeed, that Jesusmayhave risen from the dead; the Apostles manifestly believed it; and that the marked change in their character and conduct, from despair to triumph, affords the strongest evidence of the sustaining energy of this belief. But, in our ignorance of the grounds of this belief, (the Gospels and book of Acts containing no correct or first-hand report of the facts,) it is impossible, he conceives, to form any rational estimateof their adequacy. In Mr. Greg's decision on this important point, we see the effect of his entrance on the problem of Christianity from the historical end. If, instead of addressing himself first to the Gospels which lie most remote from the source of the religion, and represent the latest and most constituted form of the primitive tradition, he had begun with the earliest remains of Christian literature, and traced the doctrine of the resurrection from the Epistles of Paul into the story of the Evangelists, we think he would have arrived at a different conclusion. In dismissing the testimony of Paul as "of little weight," he throws away the main evidence of the whole case. We can understand the critic who, having put the miraculous entirely aside, as logically inadmissible, makes light of the Pauline statements on this matter, and appeals to their writer's openness to impressions of the supernatural in proof of a certain vitiating unsoundness of mind. But one who, like our author, regards thisà prioriincredulity as an unphilosophical prejudice, and upon whose list of real causes, never precluded from possible action, supernatural power finds a place, cannot consistently condemn another for believing in concrete instances what he himself allows in the general; and put the Apostle out of court, on the plea that we have no evidence buthis assertionof his intercourse with the risen Christ. Is nothis assertionthe only evidence possible of a subjective miracle? and is there any ground for restricting supernatural agency to an objective direction? No doubt, facts presented to external perception have the advantage of being open to more witnesses than one; and if it be deliberately laid down as a canon, that in no case can any anomalous event be admitted on one man's declaration, we allow the consistency of refusing a hearing to the Apostle. But such a rule would only be an example of the futility of all attempts to reduce moral evidence to mathematical expression. Facts of the most extraordinary nature have always been, and will always be, received on solitary attestation; and if so, it makes no logical difference whether they be called "objective," or "subjective."A man has faculties for apprehending what passes within him, as well as what passes without; nor do we know any ground for trusting the latter which does not hold equally good for the former. If it be said that the reporter of a miracle not only announces what he sees or feels,—which we may accept on his veracity,—but proclaims its supernatural source,—which we may repudiate from distrust of his judgment,—the remark is perfectly just, only that it applies alike toalltestimony, and not exclusively to miraculous reports. Our disposition to receive the evidence of a witness assumed to be veracious, depends on our having the same preconceptions of causation with himself. In the ordinary affairs of life, this common ground is sure to exist, and therefore remains a mere latent condition of belief. But the slowness to admit a miracle arises from the failure of this common ground; and if the hearer reserved in the background of his mind, and in equal readiness for action, the same supernatural power to which the witness's assertion refers, he would feel no more temptation to incredulity than in listening to some matter of course. The reluctance to believe, is proof that his store of causation is limited to the natural sphere; and every phenomenon irreducible to this drops away from all hold upon his mind. As there is no such thing as a fact perceived without a judgment formed, so is there no belief in the attestation of a fact without reliance on the soundness of a judgment; and that reliance depends on the hearer having the same list of causes in his mind as the witness. If, then, Mr. Greg holds, with Paul, that the power exists whence a subjective miracle might issue, and if from the nature of the case such miracle must remain a matter of personal consciousness, why reject the Apostle's report of his experience? In choosing from among the causes which both parties admit, it cannot be denied that Paul alights upon that which,if there, gives the easiest and most certain explanation; and to find a satisfactory origin for his impressions and conduct in natural agencies is so difficult, that critics would never attempt it, but to escape the acknowledgment of miracle. On his own principles we do not seehow our author could excuse himself to the Apostle for rejecting his testimony; which does but communicate, in the only conceivable way, that which is allowed to be possible enough, and which best clears up the mystery of an astonishing revolution in personal character, and in the convictions of an earnest and powerful mind.
The whole question of miracles, however, loses its anxious importance with those who, like our author, would still, amid their constant occurrence, look to other sources for the credentials of moral and religious truth. If anything is positively and incontrovertibly known respecting the Apostles,—and in proportion as we trust the synoptical Gospels must we allow Mr. Greg to extend the remark to their Master,—it is this: that whatever powers they exercised, and whatever communications they received, were inadequate to preserve them from serious error; and from delivering to the world, as a substantive part of their message, a most solemn expectation which was not to be fulfilled. This fact, no longer denied by any reputable theologian, alone shows that, even in the presence of the highest Christian authority, the natural criteria of reason and conscience cannot be dispensed with. In the application of these to the teachings and life of Christ, our author finds, if not any truths of supernatural dictation, at least the highest object of veneration and affection yet given to this world.
"Now on this subject," he says, "we hope our confession of faith will be acceptable to all save the narrowly orthodox. It is difficult, without exhausting superlatives, even to unexpressive and wearisome satiety, to do justice to our intense love, reverence, and admiration for the character and teachings of Jesus. We regard him, not as the perfection of the intellectual or philosophic mind, but as the perfection of the spiritual character,—as surpassing all men of all times in the closeness and depth of his communion with the Father. In reading his sayings, we feel that we are holding converse with the wisest, purest, noblest Being that ever clothed thought in the poor language of humanity. In studying his life, we feelthat we are following the footsteps of the highest ideal yet presented to us upon earth. 'Blessed be God that so much manliness has been lived out, and stands there yet, a lasting monument to mark how high the tides of divine life have risen in the world of man!'"—p. 227.
We differ altogether from our author in his notion of inspiration, and his reduction of Christianity within the limits of human resource. But we must say, that while there is such an estimate as this of what Jesus Christwas, it is a matter of subordinate moment what is thought about the mode in which hebecame so.
By a process of "Christian Eclecticism," Mr. Greg draws forth from the Gospels the elements which he regards as characteristic of the religion of Jesus; distinguishing those which make it the purest of faiths from others which appear to him irreconcilable with a just philosophy. The doctrine of a future life is reserved for a separate discussion; the general result of which we know not how to describe, otherwise than by saying that the author discards all the evidence and yet retains the conclusion. All the arguments, metaphysical and moral, for human immortality, he condemns as absolutely worthless; he confesses that he has no new ones to propose; he affirms that all appearances, without exception, proclaim the permanence of death, the absence of any spiritual essence in man, and the absolute sway of the laws of organization; yet, on the report of that very "soul" within him, whose existence nature disowns, he holds the doctrine of a future existence by the irresistible tenure of a first truth. We do not wonder that the rigor with which Mr. Greg has pushed his principles through other subjects of thought should relent at this point, and refuse to cast the sublimest of human hopes over the brink of darkness. We respect, as a holy abstinence, his refusal to silence the pleadings of the inner voice. But we admire his faith more than his philosophy; and are astonished that he does not suspect the soundness of a scientific method which lands him in results he cannot hold. No scepticism is so fatal,—for none has so wide a sweep,—as thatwhich despairs of the self-reconciliation of human nature; which flings among our faculties the reproach of irretrievable contradiction; which sets up first truths against deductions, conscience against science, faith against logic. Ever since Kant balanced his Antinomies, and employed the gravitation ofPracticalreason to turn the irresolute scales of theSpeculative, this unwholesome practice has been spreading, of assuming an ultimate discordance between co-existing powers of the mind. In the language of rhetoric or poetry, in the discussion of popular notions on morals and religion, it would be hypercritical to complain of the antitheses of understanding and feeling,—sense and soul. But to an exact thinker it must be apparent that an ambidextrous intellect is no intellect at all; and that, were this all our endowment, the life of the wisest would be but a chase after mocking shadows of thought. The following words of our author, with all their tranquil appearance, describe a state of things which, were it real, might well strike us with dismay:—
"There are three points especially of religious belief, regarding which intuition (or instinct) and logic are at variance,—the efficacy of prayer, man's free-will, and a future existence. If believed, they must be believed, the last without the countenance, the two former in spite of the hostility of logic."—p. 303.
This is absolute Pyrrhonism, and though said in the interest of religion, is subversive alike of knowledge and of faith. The pretended "logic" can be good for very little, which comes out with so suicidal an achievement as thedisproof of first truths. The condition under which alone logic can exist as a science is the unity in the human mind of the laws of belief,—a condition which would be violated if any first truth contradicted another in itself, or in its deductions. The moment, therefore, such a contradiction turns up, a consistent thinker will either regard it as a mere semblance, and proceed to re-examine his premises, and test his reasoning; or he will treat it as real; and then it throws contempt on logic altogether, and relegates it into impossibility. In neither case can hisreliance incline to the logical side. Mr. Greg, however, sticks to his logic whenever, as in the two cases mentioned in the foregoing extract, it loudlynegativesa point of religious belief; and abandons it only where it restricts itself to cold and dumb discouragement. A bolder distrust ofhislogic, and a firmer faith in the logic of nature, would perhaps have harmonized the differing voices of the intellect and the soul, blending them in a faith neither afraid to think nor ashamed to pray.
Had our author been as familiar with the Catholic and Arminian divines, as with the literature of inductive science and Calvinistic theology, he would have known that there is a philosophy from which the religious intuitions encounter no repugnance; and would, at least, have noticed its offer of mediation between Faith and Reason. He is, however, entirely shut up within the formulas of a different school, which press with their resistance on his religious feeling in every direction, and produce a conflict which he can neither appease nor terminate. With an intellect entirely overridden by the ideas of Law and Necessity, no man can escape the force of the common objections to any doctrine of prayer, or of forgiveness of sin; and if those ideas possess universal validity, the very discussion of such doctrines is, in the last degree, idle and absurd. But what if some mediæval schoolman, or some impugner of the Baconian orthodoxy, were to suggest that, though Law is coextensive with outward nature, Nature is not coextensive with God, and that beyond the range where his agency is bound by the pledge of predetermined rules lies an infinite margin, where his spirit is free? And what if, in aggravation of his heresy, he were to contend that Man also, as counterpart of God, belongs not wholly to the realm of nature, but transcends it by a certain endowment of free power in his spirit? Having made these assumptions, on the ground that they were more agreeable to "intuitive" feeling, and not less so to external evidence, than the one-sidedness of their opposites, might he not suggest that room is now found for a doctrine of prayer? Not that any event bespoken and planted in the sphere of nature can be turned aside bythe urgency of desire and devotion; not that the slightest swerving is to be expected from the usages of creation, or of the mind; wherever law is established—without us or within us—there let it be absolute as the everlasting faithfulness. But God has not spent himself wholly in the courses of custom, and mortgaged his infinite resources to nature; nor has he closed up with rules every avenue through which his fresh energy might find entrance into life; but has left in the human soul a theatre whose scenery is not all pre-arranged, and whose drama is ever open to new developments. Between the free centre of the soul in man, and the free margin of the activity of God, what hinders the existence of a real and living communion, the interchange of look and answer, of thought and counterthought? If, in response to human aspiration, a higher mood is infused into the mind; if, in consolation of penitence or sorrow, a gleam of gentle hope steals in; and if these should be themselves the vivifying touch of divine sympathy and pity, what law is prejudiced? what faith is broken? what province of nature has any title to complain? And so, too, (might our mediæval friend continue,) with respect to the doctrine of forgiveness. If men are under moral obligation, and God is a being of moral perfection, he must regard their unfaithfulness with disapproval. Of his sentiments, the clear trace will be found in the various sufferings which constitute the natural punishment of wrong. These are incorporated in the very structure of the world and the constitution of life; and to persistence in their infliction, the Supreme Ruler is committed by the assurance of his constancy. They fasten on the guilty a chain which no pardon will strike off, but which he will drag till it is worn away.Not allthe divine sentiment, however, is embodied in the physical consequences. Besides this determinate expression of his thought, written out on the finite world, there is an unexpressed element remaining behind, in his infinite nature: on the visible side of the veil is the suggestive manifestation; on the invisible, is the very affection manifested. There is a personal alienation, a forfeiture of approach and sympathy,which would survive though creation were to perish and carry its punishments away; and would still cast its black shadow into empty space. This reserved sentiment, and this alone, is affected by repentance. But it is no small thing for the heart of shame to know this. The estrangement lasts no longer than the guilty temper and the unsoftened conscience; and when, through its sorrow, the mind is clear and pure, the sunshine of divine affection will burst it again. In this the free Spirit of God is different from his bound action in nature. Long after he himself has forgiven and embraced again, necessity—the creature of his legislation—will continue to wield the lash, and measure out with no relenting the remainder of the penalty incurred; and he that yet drags his burden and visibly limps upon his sin, may all the while have a heart at rest with God. And thus is retribution—the reaping as we have sown—in no contradiction with forgiveness,—the personal restoration.
How far such modes of thought as these would help to reconcile the conflicting claims,—and how they would stand related to Mr. Greg's terrible friend, "Logic," we do not pretend to decide. We refer to them only as possible means of escaping—at least of postponing—his desolating doctrine, that intuitions may tell lies; and in support of our statement, that his theoretic view lies entirely within the circle of a particular school,—a school, moreover, so little able to satisfy his aspirations, that he is obliged to patch up a compromise between his nature and his culture. The curious amalgamation which has taken place in England, of the metaphysics of Calvin with the physics of Bacon, has produced, in a large class, a philosophical tendency, with which the distinctive sentiments of Christianity very uneasily combine. The effacing of all lines separating the natural and moral, the limitation of God to the realm of nature, and the subjugation of all things to predestination, are among the chief features of this tendency, and the chief obstacles to any concurrence between the intellectual and the spiritual religion of the age.
If some of the elements in the early Christianity are toohastily cancelled by our author, there is one sentiment whose inapplicability to the present day he exposes with an irresistible force;—that depreciating estimate of life which, however natural to Apostles "impressed with the conviction that the world was falling to pieces," is wholly misplaced among those for whose office and work this earthly scene is the appointed place. The exhortations of the Apostles, "granting the premises, were natural and wise."
"But for divines in this day—when the profession of Christianity is attended with no peril, when its practice, even, demands no sacrifice, save that preference of duty to enjoyment which is the first law of cultivated humanity—to repeat the language, profess the feelings, inculcate the notions, of men who lived in daily dread of such awful martyrdom, and under the excitement of such a mighty misconception; to cry down the world, with its profound beauty, its thrilling interests, its glorious works, its noble and holy affections; to exhort their hearers, Sunday after Sunday, to detach their heart from the earthly life, as inane, fleeting, and unworthy, and fix it upon heaven, as the only sphere deserving the love of the loving or the meditation of the wise,—appears to us, we confess, frightful insincerity, the enactment of a wicked and gigantic lie. The exhortation is delivered and listened to as a thing of course; and an hour afterwards the preacher, who has thus usurped and profaned the language of an Apostle who wrote with the fagot and the cross full in view, is sitting comfortably with his hearer over his claret; they are fondling their children, discussing public affairs or private plans in life, with passionate interest, and yet can look at each other without a smile or a blush for the sad and meaningless farce they have been acting!... Everything tends to prove that this life is, not perhaps, not probably, our only sphere, but still anintegralone, andtheone with which we are here meant to be concerned. The present is our scene of action,—the future is for speculation and for trust. We firmly believe that man was sent upon the earth to live in it, to enjoy it, to study it, to love it, to embellish it,—to makethe most of it, in short. It is his country, on which he should lavish his affections and his efforts.Spartam nactus es—hanc exorna. It should be to him a house, not a tent,—a home, not only a school. If, when this house and this home are taken from him, Providence, in its wisdom and its bounty, provides him with another, let him be deeply grateful for the gift,—let him transfer to that future,when it has become his present, his exertions, his researches, and his love. But let him rest assured that he is sent into this world, not to be constantly hankering after, dreaming of, preparing for, another, which may or may not be in store for him, but to do his duty and fulfil his destiny on earth,—to do all that lies in his power to improve it, to render it a scene of elevated happiness to himself, to those around him, to those who are to come after him. So will he avoid those tormenting contests with nature,—those struggles to suppress affections which God has implanted, sanctioned, and endowed with irresistible supremacy,—those agonies of remorse when he finds that God is too strong for him,—which now embitter the lives of so many earnest and sincere souls; so will he best prepare for that future which we hope for, if it come; so will he best have occupied the present, if the present be his all. To demand that we love heaven more than earth, that the unseen should hold a higher place in our affections than the seen and familiar, is to ask that which cannot be obtained without subduing nature, and inducing a morbid condition of the soul. The very law of our being is love of life, and all its interests and adornments."—pp. 271, 272.
With all that is admirable in our author's book, he contemplates the whole subject from a point of view which exhibits it in very imperfect lights. He professes to treat of "The Creed of Christendom." Yet, in examining only the canonical Scriptures and the primitive belief, he totally ignores the "Creed" of the greater part of "Christendom," namely, of the Catholic Church. For it is only Protestants that identify Christianity with the letter of the New Testament, and settle everything by appeal to its contents. According to the olderdoctrine, Christianity is not a Divine Philosophy recorded in certain books, but a Divine Institution committed to certain men. The Christian Scriptures are not itssource, but its firstproduct; not its charter and definition, but its earliest act and the expression of its incipient thought. They exhibit the young attempts of the new agency, as it was getting to work upon the minds of men and trying to penetrate the resisting mass of terrestrial affairs. They are thus but the beginning of a record which is prolonged through all subsequent times, the opening page in the proceedings of a Church in perpetuity; and are not separated from the continuous sacred literature of Christendom, as insulated fragments of Divine authority. The supernatural element which they contain did not die out with their generation, but has never ceased to flow through succeeding centuries. Nor did the heavenly purpose—precipitated upon earthly materials and media—disclose itself most conspicuously at first; but rather cleared itself as it advanced and enriched its energy with better instruments. The sublimest things would even lie secreted in the unconscious heart of the new influence, and only with the slowness of noble growths push towards the light; for the noise and obtrusiveness of the human is ever apt to overwhelm the retiring silence of the divine. The disciples, who, when events were before their eyes, and great words fell upon their ears, "understood not these things at the time," are types of all men and all ages; whose religion, coming out in the event, is known to others better than to themselves. A faith, therefore, should be judged less by its first form than by its last; and at all events be studied, not as itonceappeared, but in the entire retrospect of its existence.
No doubt this doctrine of development is made subservient, in the Romish system, to monstrous sacerdotal claims. A priestly hierarchy pretends to the exclusive custody, and the gradual unfolding, of God's sacred gift. But sweep away this holy corporation; throw its treasury open, and let its vested right, of paying out the truth, be flung into the free air of history; gather together no Sacred College but the collectedages; appeal to no high Pontiff but the Providence of God;—and there remains a far juster and sublimer view of the place and function of a pure Gospel in the world, than the narrow Protestant conception. Christianity becomes thus, not the Creed of its Founders, but the Religion of Christendom, to be estimated only in comparison with the faiths of other groups of the great human family; and the superhuman in it will consist in this,—the providential introduction among the affairs of this world of a divine influence, which shall gradually reach to untried depths in the hearts of men, and become the organizing centre of a new moral and spiritual life. It is a power appointed—an inspiration given—to fetch by reverence a true religion out of man, and not, by dictation, to put one into him.
For this end, it would not even be necessary that the bearers of the divine element should be personally initiated into the counsels whose ministers they are.Philosophymust know what it teaches; butInspiration, in giving the intensest light to others, may have a dark side turned towards itself. There is no irreverence in saying this, and no novelty: on the contrary, the idea has ever been familiar to the most fervent men and ages, of Prophets who prepared a future veiled from their own eyes, and saintly servants of heaven, who drew to themselves a trust, and wielded a power, which their ever-upward look never permitted them to guess. Nay, to no one was this conception less strange, than to the very man who, in his turn, must now have it applied to himself. With the Apostle Paul it was a favorite notion, that the entire plan of the Divine government had been a profound secret during the ages of its progress, and was opening into clear view only at the hour of its catastrophe. Not only was theremore in itthan had been surmised, but something utterlyat variancewith all expectation. Its whole conception had remained unsuspected from first to last; undiscerned by the vision of seers, and unapproached by the guesses of the wise. Never absent from the mind of God, and never pausing in its course of execution, it had yet evaded the notice of all observers;and winding its way through the throng of nations and the labyrinth of centuries, the great Thought had passed in disguise, using all men and known of none. Nor was it only the pagan eye that, for want of special revelation, had been detained in darkness, or beguiled with the scenery of dreams. The very people whose life was the main channel of the Divine purpose did not feel the tide of tendency which they conveyed; the patriarchs who fed their flocks near its fountains, the lawgiver who founded a state upon its banks, the priests whose temple poured blood into its waters, and the prophets at whose prayer the clouds of heaven dropped fresh purity into the stream,—all were unconscious of its course; assigning it to regions it should never visit, and missing the point where it should be lost in the sea. Nay, Paul seems to bring down this edge of darkness to a later time; to include within it even the ministry of Christ and the Galilean Apostles; to imply that even they were unconscious instruments of a scheme beyond the range of their immediate thought; and that not till Jesus had passed into the light of heaven did the time come for revealing, through the man of Tarsus, the significance of Messiah's earthly visit, and its place in the great scheme of things. Paul, in claiming this as his own special function, certainly implies that, previous to his call, no one was in condition to interpret the secret counsels of God in the historic development of his providence. He feels this to be no reflection on his predecessors, no cause of elevation in himself; steward as he is of a mighty mystery, he is less than the least of all saints. He simply stands at the crisis when a conception is permitted to the world, which even "the angels have vainly desired to look into"; and though he mayseemore, heisinfinitely less than the Prophets and the Messiah whose place it is given him to explain. He is but the interpreter, they are the grand agencies interpreted. He is but the discerning eye, they are the glorious objects on which it is fixed.
In seeking, therefore, for thedivine elementin older dispensations, the Apostle would assuredlynotconsult the projectsand beliefs of their founders and ministers. In his view, the very scheme of God was to work through these without their knowing what they were about; to let them aim at one thing while he was directing them to another; to pour through their life and soul an energy which should indeed fire their will and flow from their lips intheir ownbest purposes, but steal quietly behind them forhis; so that what was primary with them was perhaps evanescent with him; while that which was incidental, and dropped from them unawares, was the seed of an eternal good. What Moses planned, what David sung, what Isaiah led the people to expect, was not what Heaven had at heart to execute. Even in quest of God's thought in theChristiandispensation, Paul does not refer to the doctrines, the precepts, the miracles of Jesus during his ministry in Palestine,—to the memorials of his life, or the testimony of his companions. He assumes that, at so early a date, the time had not yet come for the truth to appear, and that it was vain to look for it in the preconceptions of the uncrucified and unexalted Christ; who was the religion, not in revelation, but in disguise. If, therefore, any one had argued against the Apostle thus: "Why tell us to discard the law? your Master said he came to fulfil it. How do you venture to preach to the Gentiles, when Jesus declared his mission limited to the lost sheep of the house of Israel? No vestiges of your doctrine of free grace can be found in the parables, or of redeeming faith in the Sermon on the Mount";—he would have boldly replied, that this proves nothing against truths that are newer than the life, because expounded by the death, of Christ; that God reveals by action, not by teaching; that no servant of his can understand his own office till it is past; and that only those who look back upon it through the interpretation of events, can read aright the divine idea which it enfolds.
This view it was that made the Apostle so bold an innovator, and filled his Epistles with a system so different from that of the synoptical Gospels as almost to constitute a different religion. He had seized the profound and sublime ideathat, when men are inspired, the inspiration occupies, not their conscious thought and will, but their unconscious nature; laying a silent beauty on their affections, secreting a holy wisdom in their life, and, through the sorrows of faithfulness, tempting their steps to some surprise of glory. That which they deliberately think, that which they anxiously elaborate, that which they propose to do, is ever the product of their human reason and volition, and cannot escape the admixture of personal fallibility. But their free spontaneous nature speaks unawares, like a sweet murmuring from angels' dreams. What they think without knowing it, what they say without thinking it, what they do without saying it, all the native pressures of their love and aspiration, these are the hiding-place of God, wherein abiding, he leaves their simplicity pure and their liberty untouched. The current of their reasoning and action is determined by human conditions and material resistances; but the fountain in the living rock has waters that are divine. If this be true, then must we search for the heavenly element in the latencies rather than the prominencies of their life; in what theywere, rather than in what theythought to do; in the beliefs they felt without announcing; in the objects they accomplished, but never planned. We must wait for their agency in history, and from the fruit return to find the seed.
It is not peculiar to Mr. Greg that, in estimating Christianity, he has neglected, and even reversed, this principle. All who have treated of it from the Protestant point of view have done the same. They have assumed that the religion was to be most clearly discerned at its commencement; that the divine thought it contained would be, not evolved, but obscured by time, and might be better detected in ideal shape at the beginning of the ages, than realized at the end; that its agents and inaugurators must have been fully cognizant of its whole scope and contents, and set them in the open ground of their speech and practical career. In the minds of all Protestants the Christian religion is identified exclusively with the ideas of the first century, with the creed of the Apostles, with theteachings of Christ. The New Testament is its sole depository, in whose books there is nothing for which it is not answerable. The consequence is a perpetual struggle between untenable dogma and unprofitable scepticism. The whole structure of faith becomes precarious. If Luke and Matthew should disagree about a date or a pedigree; if Mark should report a questionable miracle; if John should mingle with his tenderness and depth some words of passionate intolerance; if Peter should misapply a psalm, and Paul indite mistaken prophecies; above all, if Jesus should appear to believe in demonology, and not to have foreseen the futurities of his Church,—these detected specks are felt like a total eclipse; affrighted faith hides its face from them and shrieks; and he who points them out, though only to show how pure the orb that spreads behind, is denounced as a prophet of evil. The peaceful and holy centre of religion is shaken by storms of angry erudition. Devout ingenuity or indevout acuteness spend themselves in vitiating the impartial course of historical criticism; neither of them reflecting, that, if the topics in dispute are open to reasonable doubt, they cannot be matter ofrevelation, and may be calmly looked at as objects of natural thought. It is a thing alike dangerous and unbecoming that religion should be narrowed to a miserable literary partisanship, bound up with a disputed set of critical conclusions, unable to deliver its title-deeds from a court of perpetual chancery, whose decisions are never final. The time seems to have arrived for freeing the Protestant Christianity from its superstitious adhesion to the mereletterof the Gospel, and trusting more generously to that permanent inspiration, those ever-living sources of truth within the soul, of which Gospel and Epistle, the speeches of Apostles and the insight of Christ, are the pre-eminent, rather than the lonely, examples. TheprimitiveGospel is not in its form, but only in its spirit, theeverlastingGospel. It is concerned, and, if we look toquantityalone,chieflyconcerned, with questions that have ceased to exist, and interests that no longer agitate. It often reasons from principles we do not own, and is tinged with feelingswhich we cannot share. Often do the most docile and open hearts resort to it with reverent hopes which it does not realize, and close it with a sigh of self-reproach or disappointment. With the deep secrets of the conscience, the sublime hopes, the tender fears, the infinite wonderings of the religious life, it deals less altogether than had been desired; and in touching them does not always glorify and satisfy the heart. We are apt to long for some nearer reflection, some more immediate help, of our existence in this present hour and this English land, where our enemies are not Pharisees and Sadducees, or our controversies about Beelzebub and his demons; but where we would fain know how to train our children, to subdue our sins, to ennoble our lot, to think truly of our dead. The merchant, the scholar, the statesman, the heads of a family, the owner of an estate, occupy a moral sphere, the problems and anxieties of which, it must be owned, Evangelists and Apostles do not approach. Scarcely can it be said that general rules are given, which include these particular cases. For the Christian Scriptures are singularly sparing of general rules. They are eminently personal, national, local. They tell us of Martha and Mary, of Nicodemus and Nathaniel, but give few maxims of human nature, or large formulas of human life: so that their spiritual guidance first becomes available when its essence has been translated from the special to the universal, and again brought down from the universal to the modern application. They are felt to be an inadequate measure of our living Christianity, and to leave untouched many earnest thoughts that aspire and pray within the mind. One divine gift, indeed, they impart to us,—the gracious and holy image of Christ himself. Yet, somehow, even that sacred form appears with more disencumbered beauty, and in clearer light, when regarded at a little distance in the pure spaces of our thought, than when seen close at hand on the historic canvas. It is not that the ideal figure is a subjective fiction of our own, more perfect than the real. Every lineament, every gesture, all the simple majesty, all the deep expressiveness, we conceive to be justified and demandedby the actual portraiture: our least hesitating veneration sees nothing that is not there. But the original artists' sympathy we feel to have been somewhat different from ours. They have labored to exhibit aspects that move us little; and only faintly marked the traces that to us are most divine. The view is often broken, the official dress turned into a disguise. The local groups are in the way; the possessed and the perverse obtrude themselves in front with too much noise; and the refracting cloud of prophecy and tradition is continually thrown between. So that the image has a distincter glory to the meditating mind than to the reading eye.
All this, oftener perhaps felt than confessed, is perfectly natural and innocent. It betrays the instinctive analysis by which our own affections separate the divine from the human. Paul was right in his principle, that in historythe divine element lies hid; is missed at the time, even by those who are its vehicle; and does not parade itself in what they consciously design, but lurks in what they unconsciously execute. It comes forth at "the end of the ages,"—the retrospect of fifty generations instead of the foresight of one. This doctrine is true of individuals, in proportion as they are great and good. They labor at what is most difficult to them, and make it their end; but their appointed power lies in what is easiest. They chiefly prize the beliefs and the virtues most painfully won; but their highest truth dwells in the trusts they cannot help, and their purest influence in the graces they never willed, or knew to be their own. And it is true in history; Paul himself signally illustrating the rule which he had applied to earlier times. He had found, as he supposed, the Providence of the Past, which all had missed, from Moses to Christ; but in his turn he missed, as we perceive, the Providence of the Future, from himself to us. The kind of agency which he anticipated for Christ bears no resemblance to that which his religion has actually exercised. The only fault we can find with Mr. Thom's admirable exposition is, that he attributes to the Apostle too distinct an apprehension of Christ as an impersonation ofmoral perfection; and supposesthe purpose of the Pauline Christianity to have been the establishment, as sole condition of discipleship, of reverential sympathy with the type of character realized in the Galilean life of Jesus. He says:—
"In contrast with such teachers" (the Ritual and the Dogmatic), "St. Paul, in our present chapter (1 Corinthians ii.), refers both to thematterand themannerof his own ministration of the Gospel. He did not teach it as aRhetorician, to attract admiration to himself, and give more lively impressions of Paul the Orator than of Christ the Redeemer from sin, nor as aPhilosopher, to raise doubtful questions on metaphysical subjects, and become the leader of a speculative school; but as the Apostle of Jesus Christ, he proclaimed to the hearts of men the practical and life-giving Gospel, that 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself'; that by the universal Saviour all distinctions were for ever destroyed, and the whole family of God to grow into the common likeness of that well-beloved Son,—for that now neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but the renewal of the affections after the image of the Lord. Where could an entrance be found for party divisions in a doctrine that professed nothing, that aimed at nothing, except to awaken the consciousness of sin within the heart, and, through trust in the God of holiness and love revealed in Jesus, to lead it to repentance and life? All who felt this love of Christ constraining them, cleansing their souls by the divine image that had taken possession of their affections, and, through the mercy it proclaimed, encouraging their penitence to look for pardon from their God, must, of necessity, be one communion; for this Gospel sentiment and hope could create no divisions amongst those who had it,—and those who had it not were outside the Christian pale, and, so far, could make no schisms within it. Now, whence comes this Gospel sentiment, this new principle of life? Were there any who had the exclusive power of communicating it? Did it require to be introduced by any intricate reasonings, by any subtle dialectics, which only the Masters in philosophy had at their command?Not so, says St. Paul;—it is a spiritual feeling, excited by moral sympathy, as soon as Christ is offered to the hearts that are susceptible of the sentiment;—and in whatever bosom there is not enough of the Spirit of God to cause that moral attraction to take place, neither philosophy nor outward forms, nor aught else but the divine image of goodness kept before the heart, can awaken the slumbering sensibilities which are the very faculties of spiritual apprehension, and which, as soon as they are alive, behold in Christ the solution of their own struggling and imperfect existence, their ideal and their rest. In regard to a sentiment so spiritual, a sympathy with the image of God, where is the possibility of introducing party divisions, and violating Christian unity? There can be but two parties,—those thathavethe sentiment, and those that have it not. All Christians constitute the one,—and as for the other, in relation to Christian unity, they are not in question. Such is the argument of St. Paul in this second chapter."—p. 30.
It may be quite true that the essential power of Christianity resides in the image, ever present to the heart of Christendom, of a God resembling Christ, and loving those who aspire to approach him through the same resemblance. But we cannot find any traces of such a conception in the writings of Paul. The "faith" on which he exclusively insisted would be very incorrectly defined, we conceive, as a reverence of Christ's character as morally like God. If we may judge from the negative evidence of his letters, he appears to have had no insight into the interior of his Master's earthly life, and no great concern about it. There is an entire absence of anymoralpicture of Jesus, who is presented in the Apostolic writings as an object, not of retrospective veneration, but of expectant reliance; not of admiring trust for personal qualities realized in a past career, but of hope grounded on his official destiny in the future.Onebeauty of his character is, indeed, appealed to in the Pauline writings, viz. his humility and self-renunciation;[54]but even this is recognized, noton historical, but on theocratic grounds; it is illustrated, not by anything in his life, but by the fact of his death, conceived as a voluntary postponement of his theocratic prerogatives, and an abrogation of his exclusive nationality. He was a "spiritual" object to the Apostle of the Gentiles, not from perception of the inner marks and graces of his spirit, but from his being invisible and immortal, reserved in heaven under external escape from the conditions of earthly life. Mr. Thom's doctrine is a happy development of modern truth from ancient error; but regarded as a mere interpretation, it perhaps sets down to the Apostle's account a just moral appreciation of the past, instead of an erroneous conception of the Providence of the future. The religion of Christ has assuredly turned out a very different phenomenon from anything that was anticipated at its origin. It was announced as a Kingdom; as the king did not come, it became a Republic. It was conceived as a State; it grew up into a Faith. It was proclaimed as the world's end; it proved to be a fresh beginning. It was to consummate the Law and the Prophets; and it confounded both. It was to cover Pagan nations with shame and destruction; it embalmed their literature, and was transformed by their philosophy. It was to deliver over the earth to the pure and severe Monotheism of the Hebrews; which, however, it so relaxed as to provoke Islam into existence to proclaim again the monarchy of God. Its subjects were to be gathered from the Jews and half-castes of the Eastern Synagogue; and its most signal glories have been among the Teutonic nations, and the then unsuspected continents of the West. In every element of its internal power, in every direction of its external action, it has burst all the proportions, left behind all the expectations, with which it was born; and how can we continue to try it by the standard of its origin? Are we to say, that, having promised one thing and become another, it is not of God? That might be well, if it hadfallen shortof its own professions,—disappointed us of dreams it had awakened of glory and delight. But if it has beenfar better than its word; if, instead of winding upthe world's affairs, it has given them a new career; if for Messiah's tame millennium we have the grand and struggling life of Christendom, and for his closed books of judgment the yet open page of human history; if for the earthly throne and sceptre of Christ, sweeping away the treasures of past civilization, we have his heavenly image and spirit, presiding over the re-birth of art, the awakening of thought, the direction of law, and the organism of nations; if from the dignity of outward sovereignty he has been raised to that of Lord of the living conscience, not superseding the soul, but exercising it with sorrow and aspiration; then, surely, in so outstripping itself, the religion should win a more exceeding measure of trust and affection. Had it only realized its first assurances, we should have thought it divine; since it has so much surpassed them, we must esteem it diviner. There is no reason for the common assumption that a religion must be purest in its infancy. It is no less surrounded then, than at each subsequent time, with human conditions, and transmitted through human faculties; and when delivered to the world, embodied in action or in speech, necessarily presents itself as a mixed product of divine insight and of human thought,—of the living present and the decaying past; a flash of heavenly fire on the outspread fuel upon the altar of tradition. So it is with the Scriptures of the New Testament; which are not the heavenly source, but the first earthly result and expression of Christianity, and which present the perishable conditions as well as the indestructible life of the religion. Only by the course of time and Providence can these be disengaged from one another, and the accidents of place and nation fall away. If there dwell in the midst a divine productive element, the further it passes from the moment of its nativity, the clearer and more august will it appear. It is like the seed dropped at first on an unprepared and unexpectant ground; which in its earliest development yields but a struggling and scanty growth, but each season, as another generation of leaves falls from the boughs, becomes the source, through richer nutriment, of fuller forms; till at length, whenit has spread the foliage of ages, making its own soil, and deepening the luxuriance of its own roots, a forest in all its glory covers the land, and waves in magnificence over continents once bare of life and beauty. So is it with the germ of divine truth cast upon the inhospitable conditions of history; it is small and feeble in its earlier day; but when it has provided the aliment of its own growth, and shed its reproductive treasures on the congenial mind of generations and races, it starts into the proportions of a Christendom, and becomes the shade and shelter of a world.
Much, therefore, as we value all attempts to illustrate the first records of Christianity, and to detach what was purely human and transient in its original form, we think that the religion itself cannot acknowledge the competency of such investigations to decide upon its claims. From a verdict on itsfirstworks, it has a right to appeal for judgment uponthe whole. It is the religion, not of John and Paul alone, but of Christendom; without a comparative estimate of whose moral and social genius, it can by no means be appreciated. The weakness and inadequacy of all narrower methods of defence will in the end drive the clergy to occupy this larger basis of operations. And the change will be not more favorable to the logic of their cause than to the charity of their disposition. So long as the Scriptures alone are taken as the standard, no more than one creed, at most, can be regarded as concurrent with the Christian faith. But when the entire existence of the religion through eighteen centuries is adopted as the measure, the very interests of advocacy themselves require that the best construction rather than the worst be put upon the errors and eccentricities of all churches within the compass of Christendom. The evidences would, in that case, be destroyed by exclusiveness, and widened in their foundations by comprehensiveness of temper; and the firmness of every disciple's faith and the energy of his zeal would become assurances, not of his limitation of mind, but of his largeness of heart. Instead of endless divisions, multiplied in the search after unity, we might hope to see the lines of separation becomeever fainter; and every test of Christianity withdrawn except that of moral sympathy with the spirit of Christ; a test which, as God alone can apply it, man cannot abuse; and according to which many that, in the ecclesiastic roll, have been first, shall be last, and the last first.
The Temporal Benefits of Christianity exemplified in its Influence on the Social, Intellectual, Civil, and Political Condition of Mankind, from its first Promulgation to the present Day.ByRobert Blakey. London. 1849.Small Books on Great Subjects.Edited by a few Well-Wishers to Knowledge. No. 19.On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity.London. 1851.The Connection of Morality with Religion; a Sermon, preached in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, at an Ordination held by the Lord Archbishop of Dublin, Sunday, September 21, 1851.ByWilliam Fitzgerald, A.M., Vicar of St. Ann's, and Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Dublin. London. 1851.
The Temporal Benefits of Christianity exemplified in its Influence on the Social, Intellectual, Civil, and Political Condition of Mankind, from its first Promulgation to the present Day.ByRobert Blakey. London. 1849.
Small Books on Great Subjects.Edited by a few Well-Wishers to Knowledge. No. 19.On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity.London. 1851.
The Connection of Morality with Religion; a Sermon, preached in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, at an Ordination held by the Lord Archbishop of Dublin, Sunday, September 21, 1851.ByWilliam Fitzgerald, A.M., Vicar of St. Ann's, and Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Dublin. London. 1851.
Of these works, the third treats theoretically, the others practically, of the relation of Christianity to human nature. The preacher seeks in the natural conscience for the moral ground and receptacle of revelation; while the historians trace its moral operation in society and life. Were both tasks perfectly performed, we should be furnished with a complete image of the religion at once in its idea and its expression; should be able definitely to compare its promise with its achievements and to submit it, as a whole, to philosophical appreciation. But the two halves of the subject are exhibited with very unequal success. It is much easier to show the intended than theactual influence of the Christian faith upon the character of its disciples,—to determine bya priorimethods what itmust be, than by ana posterioriinduction to estimate what ithas been, and is. Mr. Fitzgerald, as becomes a professor of ethical science, has well contended that the religion which he recommends from the pulpit is neither indifferent nor supercilious towards the morals which he teaches from the University chair,—but assumes their obligation, appeals to their authority, and, in its mode of reconciling the human will with the Divine, raises them into eternal sanctities. It addresses itself to man as a being already conscious of responsibility; and simply proposes to restore reason and conscience to that supremacyin factwhichof rightthey can never lose. How far has this aim been visibly realized? Are the traces of a Divine renovation clear upon the face of Christendom? Is there the difference between ancient Greece and modern England, or between the empire and the papacy of Rome, which might be expected between an unregenerate world and a regenerate? The historical answer to these questions is attempted by Mr. Blakey, with perhaps adequate resources of knowledge, but with so imperfect an apprehension of the requisites of his argument, that his book, though often instructive in detail, is altogether ineffective as a whole. He is content to select and enumerate the most salient and favorable points in the transition from ancient to modern civilization, and to set them down to the credit of Christianity; without care to disengage the action of concurrent causes, or to balance the account by reference to more questionable effects. A much finer analysis is needed, in order to draw from history its real testimony on this great matter; and nothing can well be more arbitrary, than to stroll through some fifteen centuries, and, gathering up none but the most picturesque and beneficent phenomena, weave them into a glory to crown the faith with which they co-exist. In Christendom, all the great and good things that are done at all will of course be done by Christians, and will contain such share of the religious element as may belong to the character of the actor or the age; but before you can avail yourself of themin Christian Apologetics, it must be shown that, under any other faith, no social causes would have remained adequate either to produce them or to provide any worthy equivalent. Because Charlemagne, after baptizing the Saxons in their own blood, displayed a better zeal by establishing cathedral and conventual schools,thereforeto put the horn-book of the liberal arts into the hand of his religion, while leaving the wet sword to stain his own; because chivalry blended in its vow "fear of God" with "love of the ladies,"thereforeto trace all loyalty and courtesy to the doctrine of the Church; because the mediæval schoolmen imported into every science the canons of Divinity, and decided between Realism and Nominalism on eucharistic principles,thereforeto give the priesthood all the honors of modern philosophy and intellectual liberty,—is, to say the least, very vulnerable logic and very superficial history. Of a far superior order is the little book "On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity." In a previous treatise, "On the State of Manbeforethe Promulgation of Christianity," the author had passed under rapid review the ancient systems of civilization,—stationary, progressive, aggressive; and having seized on their characteristic features, he now brings with him determinate points of comparison into his survey of the post-Apostolic times. The view which he spreads beneath your eye of the world, as it lay ready to afford a channel for the Christian faith, is remarkable for breadth and truth. Conducting you, with the wide picture in your mind, to the pure head-spring in Galilee, and keeping close to the stream as it descends and opens from these sequestered heights, he enables you to see, reach by reach, where it fertilizes and where it destroys; the new fields of life it enters, the old landmarks of habit it overwhelms. The author is not more familiar with the Christian Apologists and Fathers, than with the later Latin and revived Greek literature from Trajan to Aurelian; and by skilfully noting the moments when Pagan and Christian life not only stood in silent co-presence, but came into active contact, he brings out into clear relief the new type of character whichformed itself within the communities of disciples. That type is so strikingly original, its features so conspicuously express an order of passions and ideas strange alike to the Hellenic and the Italian races, as to betray the creative action of some vast moral power unborrowed from the established civilization. When the free Roman breaks the bread of communion with slaves,—when the slippery Syrian forswears lying and theft,—when the heedless Greek changes his eagerness of the moment into a living for eternity,—when a people ignorant of Stoic maxims display a contempt of torture and death sublimer than the ideal of the Porch,—an influence is plainly at work which has penetrated to hitherto unawakened depths of the human soul. The phenomenon is the more impressive, when regard is had to the materials from which the early Christian communities were gathered. It cannot be imagined that they were composed of elements particularly choice; and, indeed, amid the universal corruption of morals and exhaustion of wholesome life, it is difficult to conceive how, if the Christian doctrine had enforced a rigorous selection, instead of indiscriminately inviting innocence and guilt, any decent elements could have been collected. Without adopting Gibbon's contemptuous estimate of the body of primitive believers, we cannot doubt that it comprised very mixed ingredients; we know that it contained great numbers of the servile class, and very few whose station and culture gave them access to the higher ideas familiar to the schools of philosophy: yet from these unpromising sources arose a society, which, in severity of morals, in intensity of affection, in heroism of endurance, reversed the habits of the world to which they belonged. It seems to us an idle question for sceptical criticism to raise, whether the religion of Christ comprised in its teachings any ethical element absolutely new. If genius had conceived it all before, life had not produced it till now; and the more you affirm the philosophers' competency to think it, the more do you convict them of inability to realize it. But in morals scarcelycanthere be clear intellectual conception of principles not yet embodied in living character. As in the highest worksof art, the thing seen is far other than the thing imagined and described; not doctrines, but persons, are here the only expression of the truth; and till they appear, ethical forms are but as the human clay without the vital fire. In thestatementof thought, the early Christians, not excepting the Scripture writers, are rude and unskilled; and a taste formed from the study of Plato and Seneca may be offended by the rusticity of Mark, and the abruptness of Paul. But whoever can rise above the level of a merely intellectual critique, and embrace, with our anonymous author, thewholephenomenon of the first centuries of our era, will see a glow of self-denying faith, and a deep movement of conscience, affording manifest announcement of a new edition of human nature.
That edition has now been extant for many centuries; and is variously legible in the literature, the institutions, the private manners of Christendom. The Christian ideal of human life lies as an open book before us; yet as a book so various in its versions, and so overlaid with comments, that the fresh flavor of its language, and even the finer essence of its thought, are in danger of being lost. The actual Christianity of each successive age, and each contemporary nation, is the express result, not only in its dogma, but in its life, of two component terms,—a givenmatter, and a givenfacultyof faith. However full and constant the former may be in itself, the latter is perpetually variable with the knowledge and passions of the time, and the special genius of individual leaders; nor can this variation of insight in the mind fail to neutralize some portion of truth, and to give disproportionate magnitude to others. The data supplied by inspiration itself form no exception to this rule. Delivered into the charge of the human soul, they fall into the moulds of its recipient nature, take their immediate form from the laws of its life, and are reacted on from its independent activity. Theimmutablecustody of anything by a finite thinking subject, involves the most evident contradiction; the very contact with human intelligence reduces universal truth to partial, the permanent to the variable, the secure to the contingent. It is only in the essential Unityof Reason and Conscience in every age, that we find the means of correcting the aberrations and verifying the insight of all particular men. Not that we are to conceive of the human race collectively as one large person, of which individual minds are vital organs, and which has a necessary growth and development, entitling each century to boast of advance beyond its predecessors. We know of no spiritual units, of no personalities, except each single and separate will; nor do we find anything in their mutual relation which necessarily determines them to uninterrupted improvement, and excludes the encroachment of degeneracy and falsehood. Indeed, no sorrier product is there of human conceit and ignorance than the cant of "progress," which assumes that every newest phase of thought is wisest. But if all men are endowed with radically the same faculties, however various in their intensities and proportions, there is a court of appeal in permanent sitting, where the normal laws of intellectual and moral apprehension are administered against all provincial prejudices and transient verdicts of error. In the long run, the healthy perceptions of good eyes will outvote the discoloring effects of all ophthalmic epidemics, how obstinate and wide soever they may be. And the moral vision of mankind will no less vindicate its natural rights, by returning again and again into clear discernments, and settled admirations, and discharging the illusory forms and false tints of each separate age. To deny the ethical competency of the mind for this office,—to say that there is no power given for deciding what, among the claimants on reverence, is really noble, true, and good,—is, with all its pietistic pretences, an act of the profoundest scepticism, washing away, as a quicksand, the only rock on which any faith can be built. It is to treat the durable source of truth as evanescent and uncertain, and shut out the possibility of all religion. On the other hand, to set up and idolize the life and thought of any one time as an unquestionable rule for all times, and stereotype it for unmodified reproduction, is to treat the evanescent as the durable, and build on whatever stands above the water, heedless whether it be the quicksand or therock. Yet, strange to say, this particular superstition, and that general unbelief,—an apparent antithesis of error,—usually meet in the same mind, and constitute together the chief theology of most visible churches. Having deposed and insulted the eternal sanctities, they coax and flatter the letter of Scripture to accept the vacant throne, and exchange the holy modesty of its administration for a universal empire of pretence. They drain off the springs of inspiration at their fountain-head, and turn all history into a plain of sand, that they may magnify their Hebrew reservoir as the world's sole supply; forgetting that, when cut off from the running waters, the choicest store loses its fresh virtues, and the fairest lake, shut up without exit, turns into a Dead Sea. In contradiction of both errors, we shall assume that transitory elements cannot fail to mix themselves with the expression of the purest inspiration,—the horizon of human relations and expressible things around even the divinest soul being limited; and that, as the inspiration tries itself upon age after age, bringing into distinct consciousness now one side of truth and now another, it becomes more and more possible to find its essence and eliminate its accidents, to save its catholic beauties apart from its sectional distortions. The Christian ideal of life is not to be looked for in what is special to the Crusader or the Quaker,—to Puritan or Cavalier,—to Platonists of the second century or Aristotelians of the twelfth,—to Aquinas or Luther,—to John or Paul; but in such sentiment as was common to them all, and attached to them as citizens of Christendom. When this element is disengaged from all that encumbers it, it will be found pervading and animating still whatever is noblest in our modern life; while all that is narrow, and weak, and unworthy in the moral doctrine of our age, springs from a forced attempt to perpetuate the accidental modes of the Apostolic period.
Every one is sensible of a change in the whole climate of thought and feeling, the moment he crosses any part of the boundary which divides Christian civilization from Heathendom; yet of nothing is it more difficult to render any compendiousaccount. It is easy to enumerate in detail the phenomena which are modified or disappear; just as on entering a new physical region the travelling naturalist may register the new species of plants and animals, that, one after another, present themselves to his research. But these do not paint the scene before even the learned eye; they are the separate out-comings of a great life-thrill, into whose current their roots penetrate; the landscape, as a whole, speaks differently to the mind, and the whole heaven and earth seem pregnant with a thought unfelt before. To read off that thought, requires an apprehension the converse of the analytic vision of science. The same difficulty occurs when we endeavor to seize the latent principle of a natural realm of history. Such principle, however, there must be. Beneath all the moving tides of Christian thought there lie still depths that supply them all, and a centre of equilibrium around which they sweep. We believe that the fundamental idea of Christendom may be described to bethe ascent through Conscience into communion with God. Other religions have lent their sanctions to morality, and announced the Divine commands to the human will; but only as the laws of an outward monarch within whose sovereignty we lie, and who, ruling in virtue of his almightiness, has a right to obedience, ordain as he will. Other religions, again, have aimed at a union with God. But the conditions of this union, dictated by misleading conceptions of the Divine nature, have missed on every side the true level of human dignity and peace. Manichæism, deifying the antithesis of matter, takes the path of ascetic suppression of the body. The Indian Pantheist, imagining the Divine Abyss as the realm of night and infinite negation, strives to hold in the breath and sink into self-annulment. Plato, seeing in God the essence of thought, demands science and beauty, not less than goodness, as the needful notes of harmony with him, and appoints the approach to heaven by academic ways. The modern Quietists, worshipping a Being too much the reflection of their own tenderness, have lost themselves in soft affections, relaxing to the nerves of duty, and unseemly in the face ofeternal law. Christianity alone has neither crushed the soul by mere submission, like Mohammedanism; nor melted it away in the tides of infinite being, like Pantheistic faiths; but has saved the good of both, by establishing the union with God through a free act of the individual soul. Assigning to him a transcendent moral nature, sensitive to the same distinctions, conservative of the same solemnities, which awe and kindle us, it singles out the conscience as the field where we are to meet him,—where the bridge will be found of transit between the human and the divine. No fear or servility remains with an obedience consisting, not in mystic acts and artificial habits, but in the free play of natural goodness; and rendered, not in homage to a Supreme Autocrat, but in sympathy with a Mind itself the infinite impersonation of all the sanctities. Nor are any dizzy and perilous flights incurred by a devotion which meets its great Inspirer in no foreign heaven, but in the higher walks of this home life, and misses him only in what is mean and low. The place assigned in Christianity to themoralsentiments and affections has no parallel in any other religion. The whole faith is as an unutterable sigh after an ideal perfection. Holiness eternal in heaven, incarnate on earth, and to be realized in men,—this is the circle of conceptions in which it moves. Its very name for the Inspiration which mediates all its work, expresses the same thing. It is not simply an ενθουσιασμος,—not μανια,—not βακχεια,—but the πνευμα ἁγιον. The Dæmon of Socrates—the least heathenish of heathen men—was but an intellectual guide, and checked his erring judgment; the Holy Spirit guards the vigils of duty, and succors the disciple's tempted will. This profound sense of interior amity with God through faithfulness to our highest possibility, appears in the Christian Scriptures under two forms,—the positive and the negative,—each the complement of the other. In the Gospel, Jesus himself, as befits the saintly mind lifted above the strife of passion, describes theaspiration after goodnessas the native guidance of the soul to her source and refuge. In the Epistles, Paul, pouring forth the confessions of a fiery nature, proclaims thesense of sinto be the contracted hinderance that bars the ascent, and against which the wings of the struggling will beat only to grow faint. These representations are evidently but the two sides of the same doctrine seen from the heavenly and from the earthly position. Whether we are told what the good heart will find, or what the guilty must lose, the lesson equally recognizes the Divine authority of conscience. The benediction and the curse are but the bright and the dark hemisphere of one perfect truth. The Apostle, standing in the shadow of the world's night, and regarding its averted face, dwells on the gloom of alienation,—the "foolish heart that is darkened,"—the "reprobate mind" from which God is hid. Christ, conscious of the holy light, and knowing how it penetrates the folds of willing natures, and wakes what else would sleep, speaks rather of the glory that is not denied, and utters that deepest of blessings,—"The pure in heart shall see God." To this bright side also the Pauline view in the end comes round. For though in him we miss that recognition of a natural human goodness which gives such grace and sweetness to many of the parables; though in his scheme the human will has not only betrayed its trust, but hopelessly crippled its powers; yet he does not leave it in the collapse of paralysis, with the hard saying that it can in no wise lift up itself, but points to a hope that bends over it from above. The soul that is too far gone to act, may still be capable of love; if unable to trust itself, it may trust another; if it cannot command its volitions, it may surrender its affections; can reverence, can aspire, can yield its hand, like a child, to an angel of deliverance. Beyond the precincts of this world is an Image of divine excellence and beauty,—one recently withdrawn from human history, and soon to have a more august return. It is but to turn the eye and give the heart to that ideal and immortal perfection, and in the light of so pure a love, the clouds will clear from the conscience, and lift themselves as a nightmare away; the lame will, forgetting its infirmities, will spring up and walk; and the restoration, impossible by flight from deformity and ill, will come through theattraction of a Divine sanctity and goodness. Thus does the Apostle snatch the disciple at last into the right perceptions which Christ assumes to be possible at first; and in both its primitive developments the Christian religion implies the communion of man with God through purity of heart.