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Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers

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Title: Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers

Author: James Martineau

Editor: William Rounseville Alger


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY; OR, TIMELY THOUGHTS FOR RELIGIOUS THINKERS ***

STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY:

OR,

TIMELY THOUGHTS FOR RELIGIOUS
THINKERS.

A SERIES OF PAPERS,
BY
JAMES MARTINEAU.

EDITED BY
WILLIAM R. ALGER.

       *       *       *       *       *

BOSTON:
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION,
21 BROMFIELD STREET.
1858.



CAMBRIDGE:

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY METCALF AND COMPANY.

CONTENTS.
                                                           PAGE

  INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS, FROM MR. MARTINEAU'S WRITINGS        v

  DISTINCTIVE TYPES OF CHRISTIANITY                           1

  CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT PRIEST AND WITHOUT RITUAL             35

  INCONSISTENCY OF THE SCHEME OF VICARIOUS REDEMPTION        83

  MEDIATORIAL RELIGION                                      147

  FIVE POINTS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH                            177

  CREED AND HERESIES OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY                  201

  THE CREED OF CHRISTENDOM                                  266

  THE ETHICS OF CHRISTENDOM                                 299

  THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF                                 356

  ONE GOSPEL IN MANY DIALECTS                               399

  ST. PAUL AND HIS MODERN STUDENTS                          414

  SIN: WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT IS NOT                           466

  THE DUTIES OF CHRISTIANS IN AN AGE OF CONTROVERSY         478



INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS,

FROM

MR. MARTINEAU'S WRITINGS.




INTRODUCTION.


The American Unitarian Association in 1835 reprinted from the English
edition, among their Tracts, a Sermon on "The Existing State of Theology
as an Intellectual Pursuit and of Religion, as a Moral Influence." Its
rare merits elicited great praise. Its author was the Rev. James
Martineau, then a settled minister in Liverpool. Since that time, his
occasional publications from year to year have been winning a wider
audience, and awakening a deeper admiration. The history of his mind has
been a broadening track of light. And now the Association feel that they
cannot do a greater favor to the reading public, or better aid that
cause of Liberal Christianity whose servants they are, than by printing
a collection of the later writings of this gifted man, whom they first
introduced to American Unitarians a quarter of a century ago.

The list of works prefixed to the article here entitled "Distinctive
Types of Christianity," as it appeared in the Westminster Review, and
the opening sentence referring to them, have been accidentally omitted.
Two or three of the papers belong to the author's earlier years, but are
inserted here equally on account of their eminent ability, their
special timeliness, and their striking adaptation to the general purpose
of the work; namely, to throw light on the true nature of Christianity.
They will also be new to most of those whom they now reach. The last
paper in the volume is one of the first its writer published, in his
comparative youth. We shall be disappointed if the benignant wisdom and
moral fidelity of its catholic lessons do not secure a sympathetic
response in many a quarter once closed against such appeals.

In selecting from Mr. Martineau's numerous invaluable articles, not
already published in book-form, the contents of the present work, the
rule has not been so much to choose the ablest productions, as to take
those best fitted to meet the wants of the time, by diffusing among
ministers, students of divinity, and the cultivated laity a knowledge
of the most advanced theological and religious thought yet attained.
We regret that the necessary limits of the volume exclude several of
the author's most instructive and inspiring essays; particularly the
magnificent one in the National Review upon "Newman, Coleridge, and
Carlyle"; also the one upon "Lessing as a Theologian."

We have called this volume "Studies of Christianity," simply as a
convenient indication of the general character of its contents. In
justice to the author, it should be borne in mind that the separate
papers were prepared to meet various occasions, without a suspicion that
they would ever be brought together to form a book. Of course they do
not express his complete views of the mighty subject which they
fragmentarily treat. The relative order and rank of his convictions, the
interpretation of Christianity from its inner side, appear much better
in his "Endeavors after the Christian Life,"--by far the richest and
noblest series of sermons in the English language. Still, a kind of
unity pervades the different pieces composing this collection. One
Christ-like strain of sentiment breathes through them all. The same
consecrating fealty to truth presides over them all. The same grand
outline of principles and unvarying standard of judgment are constantly
evident. The same marvellous acumen, breadth of learning, and exquisite
culture, everywhere appear. Each article is more or less directly an
illustration of Christianity, as something moral, spiritual, vital,
dynamic, to be practically assimilated by the soul, in distinction from
the common exposition of it, as something sacerdotal, dogmatic, formal,
forensic, once enacted and now to be mimetically observed. The energetic
patience of labor, the detersive intellect, the unalloyed devoutness of
spirit, the telescopic range both of faculty and equipment, revealed
even in these wayside products, awaken in us an unappeasable desire for
a more purposed and systematic work from the same mind, now in its
fullest maturity. In the mean time we will express our grateful
appreciation of the contributions already furnished, by giving them
further circulation, assured that no truly pious and intelligent person,
free from bigotry and shackles, can peruse them without receiving equal
measures of delight and profit.

Mr. Martineau is so thoroughly acquainted with the processes and
results of spiritual experience, with the sciences of nature, and with
the whole realm of metaphysical philosophy, and his own wealthy
faculties are so tenacious in their activity and freshness, that every
subject he touches receives novelty, light, and ornament. He is
emphatically a teacher for the teachers,--a greater guide and master
for the common guides and masters. Traversing the whole domain of
human contemplation with the defining lines of analysis, clothing the
severe materials of science with the colors of æsthetic art, he sheds
on every theme the illumination of intellectual genius, and transfuses
every thought with the distinctive sentiments of piety. Thus is
afforded that rarest of all spectacles,--and the one now most needed
by the cultivated religious world,--of a man who is greatly endowed at
once as philosopher, poet, and Christian, and who with simultaneous
earnestness in each capacity is devoted, by the whole labors of his
life, to the instruction of mankind.

For these reasons, we feel it a duty to attract as much attention as
possible to Mr. Martineau's past and expected publications. The
peerless intelligence, the bracing fidelity, the essential nobleness
and catholicity, the tender beauty and reverence, of his utterances,
his consummate mastery of the great topics he handles, seem to us
fitted in a solitary degree to meet the highest wants of the age,--to
do divine service in the conflict of scepticism, sensuality, and decay
against all that is truest and purest in the religious faith and moral
life of Christendom. Therefore, to persons who, unacquainted with the
author's previous works, may read the papers here collected, we would
recommend as the best books for educated and earnest Christian
thinkers, Mr. Martineau's "Rationale of Religious Inquiry," the volume
of his "Miscellanies" edited by the Rev. T. S. King, and the two
series of "Endeavors after the Christian Life" recently republished in
one volume by Messrs. Munroe and Company.

We shall make up the rest of this introductory paper by quoting from
some of Mr. Martineau's articles, not generally accessible, a few
specimens of those thoughts which, if freely received in these times
of theological doubt and turmoil, would lead many a religious thinker
towards the truth and peace he covets.

How clearly the following passage shows the true


RELATION BETWEEN NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION.

The contempt with which it is the frequent practice of divines to treat
the grounds of natural religion, betrays an ignorance both of the true
office of revelation and of the true wants of the human heart. It cannot
be justified, except on the supposition that there is some contradiction
between the teachings of creation and those of Christ, with some decided
preponderance of proof in favor of the latter. Even if the Gospel
furnished a series of perfectly new truths, of which nature had been
profoundly silent, it would be neither reasonable nor safe to fix
exclusive attention on these recent and historical acquisitions, and
prohibit all reference to those elder oracles of God, by which his
Spirit, enshrined in the glories of his universe, taught the fathers of
our race. And if it be the function of Christianity not to administer
truth entirely new, but to corroborate by fresh evidence, and invest
with new beauty, and publish to the millions with a voice of power, a
faith latent already in the hearts of many, and scattered through the
speculations of the wise and noble few,--to erect into realities the
dreams which had visited a half-inspired philosophy, interpreting the
life and lot of man;--then there is a relation between the religion of
nature and that of Christ,--a relation of original and
supplement,--which renders the one essential to the apprehension of the
other. Revelation, you say, has given us the clew by which to thread the
labyrinth of creation, and extricate ourselves from its passages of
mystery and gloom. Be it so; still, _there_, in the scene thus cleared
of its perplexity, must our worship be paid, and the manifestations of
Deity be sought. If the use of revelation be to explain the perplexities
of Providence and life, it would be a strange use to make of the
explanation were we to turn away from the thing explained. We hold the
key of heaven in our hands. What folly to be for ever extolling and
venerating it, whilst we prohibit all approach to the temple whose gates
it is destined to unlock.

One would search long to find a finer illustration than is here given
of the real


NATURE OF DEVOTION.

In Devotion there is this great peculiarity,--that it is neither the
_work_ nor the _play_ of our nature, but is something higher than
either,--more ideal than the one, more real than the other. All human
activities besides are one of these two things,--either the mere aim
at an external end, or the mere outcome of an inner feeling. On the
one hand, we plough and sow, we build and navigate, that we may win
the adornments and securities of life; on the other hand, we sing and
dance, we carve and paint, that we may put forth the pressure of
harmony and joy and beauty breaking from within. Mechanical Toil
terminates in a solid product; graceful Art is content with simple
expression; but Religion is degraded when it is reduced to either
character. It is not a labor of utility; and he who looks to it as a
means of safety, to ingratiate himself with an awful God, and bespeak
an interest in a hidden Future, is an utter stranger to its essence;
his habits and words may be cast in its mould, but the spark of its
life is not kindled in his heart. When fed by the fuel of prudence,
the fire is all spent in fusing it into form; and the finished product
is a cold and metal mimicry, that neither moves nor glows. Nor is
Religion a simple gesture of passion; and to class it with mere
natural language, to treat it as the rhythmical delirium of the soul
working off an irrepressible enthusiasm, is to empty it of its real
meaning and contents, and sink it from a divine attraction to a human
excitement. The postures and movements and tones which simply
manifest the impassioned mind are content to go off into space, and
pass away; they direct themselves nowhither; they have no more
_object_ than a convulsion; they ask only leave to be the last shape
of a feeling that must have way; and be the inspiration what it may,
they close and consummate its history. But he who _prays_ is at the
beginning of aspiration, not at the evaporating end of impulse; he is
drawn, not driven; he is not painting _himself_ upon vacancy, but is
surrendering himself to a Presence real and everlasting. If he flings
out his arms, it is not in blind paroxysm, but that he may embrace and
be embraced; if he cries aloud, it is that he may be heard; if he
makes melody of the silent heart, it is no soliloquy flung into
emptiness, but the low-breathing love of spirit to Spirit. Devotion is
not the play even of the highest faculties, but their deep earnest. It
is no doubt the culminating point of reverence; but reverence is
impossible without an object, and could never culminate at all, or
pass into the Infinite, unless its object did so too. In every case we
find that the faculties and susceptibilities of a being tell true, and
are the exact measure of the outer life it has to live; and just as
many and as large proportions as it has, to just so many and so great
objects does it stand related; so that from the axis of its nature you
may always draw the curve of its existence. Human worship, therefore,
turning to the living God as the infant's eye to light, is itself a
witness to Him whom it feels after and adores; it is "the image and
shadow of heavenly things," the parallel chamber in our nature with
that Holy of Holies whither its incense ever ascends.

In a similar strain is this argument to show that


DEVOTION IS NOT A MISTAKE.

Be assured, all visible greatness of mind grows in looking at an
invisible that is greater. And since it is inconceivable that what is
most sublime in humanity should spring from vision of a thing that is
not, that what is most real and commanding with us should come of
stretching the soul into the unreal and empty, that historic
durability should be the gift of spectral fancies, we must hold these
devout natures to be at one with everlasting Fact,--to feel truly that
the august forms of Justice and Holiness are at home in heaven, the
object there of clearer insight and more perfect veneration. There are
those who please themselves with the idea that the world will outgrow
its habits of worship; that the newspaper will supersede the preacher
and prophet; that the apprehension of scientific laws will replace the
fervor of moral inspirations; that this sphere of being will then be
perfectly administered when no reference to another distracts
attention. But, for my own part, I am persuaded, that life would soon
become intolerable on earth, were it copied from nothing in the
heavens; that its deeper affections would pine away and its lights of
purest thought grow pale, if it lay shrouded in no Holy Spirit, but
only in the wilderness of space. The most sagacious secular voice
leaves, after all, a chord untouched in the human heart: listening too
long to its didactic monotone, we begin to sigh for the rich music of
hope and faith. The dry glare of noonday knowledge hurts the eye by
plying it for use and denying it beauty; and we long to be screened
behind a cloud or two of moisture and of mystery, that shall mellow
the glory and cool the air. Never can the world be less to us, than
when we make it all in all.

Our author makes a striking reply to the common assertion that


"THEOLOGY IS NOT A PROGRESSIVE SCIENCE."

It may, however, be retrogressive; and it is sure to repay flippant
neglect by lending its empty space to mean delusions. To its great
problems _some_ answer will always be attempted; and there is much to
choose between the solutions, however imperfect, found by reverential
wisdom, and the degrading falsehoods tendered in reply by the
indifferent and superficial. Even in their failures, there is a vast
difference between the explorings of the seeing and the blind. We deny,
however, that Christian theology can assume any aspect of failure,
except to those who use a false measure of success. It is not in the
nature of religion, of poetry, of art, to exhibit the kind of progress
that belongs to physical science. They differ from it in seeking, not
the _phenomena_ of the universe, but its _essence_,--not its laws of
change, but its eternal meanings,--not outward nature, in short, except
as expressive of the inner thought of God; and being thus intent upon
the enduring spirit and very ground of things, they cannot grow by
numerical accretion of facts and exacter registration of successions.
They are the product, not of the patient sense and comparing
intelligence which are always at hand, but of a deeper and finer
insight, changing with the atmosphere of the affections and will.
Instead of looking, therefore, for perpetual advance of discovery in
theology, we should naturally expect an ebb and flow of light, answering
to the moral condition of men's minds; and may be content if the divine
truth, lost in the dulness of a material age, clears itself into fresh
forms with the returning breath of a better time.

Most readers will find suggestions of great freshness in the passage
next cited:--


THE HEART OF CHRISTIANITY.

To lose sight of this principle in estimating Christianity, and to
insist on judging it, not by its matured character in Christendom, not
by the _unconscious spirit_ of its founders, but by their personal
views and purposes, is to overlook the divine in it in order to fasten
on the human; to seek the winged creature of the air in the throbbing
chrysalis; and is like judging the place of the Hebrews in history by
the court and the proverbs of Solomon, or the value of Puritanism by
the sermon of a hill-preacher before the civil war. The primitive
Christianity was certainly _different_ from that of other ages; but
there is no reason for believing that it was _better_. The
representation often made of the early Church, as having only truth,
and feeling only love, and living in simple sanctity, is contradicted
by every page of the Christian records. The Epistles are entirely
occupied in driving back guilt and passion, or in correcting errors of
belief; nor is it _always_ possible to approve of the temper in which
they perform the one task, or to assent to the methods by which they
attempt the other. Principles and affections were indeed secreted in
the heart of the first disciples, which were to have a great future,
and to become the highest truth of the world. But it was precisely of
these that they rarely thought at all. The Apostles themselves speak
slightingly of them, as baby's food; and the great faith in God, the
need of repentant purity of heart, with the trust in immortality,--the
very doctrines which we should name as the permanent essence of
Christian faith,--are expressly declared by them to be the childish
rudiments of belief, on which the attention of the grown Christian
will disdain to dwell. And what did they prefer to these sublime
truths, as the nutriment of their life and the pride of their wisdom?
Allegories about Isaac and Ishmael, parallels between Christ and
Melchisedec, new readings of history and prophecy to suit the events
in Palestine, and a constant outlook for the end of all things. These
were the grand topics on which their minds eagerly worked, and on
which they labored to construct a consistent theory. These give the
form to their doctrine, the matter to their spirit. These are what you
will get, if you go indiscriminately to their writings for a creed:
and these are no more Christianity than the pretensions of Hildebrand
or the visions of Swedenborg. The true religion lies elsewhere, just
in the things that were _ever present with them, but never esteemed_.
Just as your friend may spend his anxiety on his station, his
usefulness, his appearance and repute, and fear lest he should show
nothing deserving your regard, while all the time you love him for the
pure graces, the native wild-flowers, of his heart; so do the
choicest servants of God ever think one thing of themselves, while
they are dear to him and revered by us for quite another. "The weak
things" in the Church not less than in "the world hath he chosen to
confound the mighty; the simple, to strike dumb the wise; and things
that are not, to supersede the things that are."

In rude ages, and amid feudal customs, it has perhaps been no unhappy
thing that this image of servitude has been transmitted into the
conceptions of faith: it may have touched with some sanctity an
inevitable submission, and mingled a sentiment of loyalty with
religion. But the _external relation_ of serf and lord is no type of
the _internal relation_ of spirit to spirit, which alone constitutes
religion to us. To God himself, with all his infinitude, we are not
_slaves_; we are not his _property_, but his children; he regards us,
not as _things_, but as _persons_; he does not so much command us, as
appeal to us; and in our obedience, it is not his _bidding_ that we
serve, but that divine Law of Right of which he makes us conscious as
the rule of His nature only more perfectly than of ours. To obey him
as _slaves_, in fear, and with an eye upon his power, is, with all our
punctuality and anxiety, simply and entirely to _disobey_ him; nor is
anything precious in his sight, except the free consent of heart with
which we apprehend what is holy to his thought and embrace what is in
harmony with his perfection. Still less can we be _slaves_ to Christ,
who is no autocrat to us, but our freely followed leader towards God;
the guide of our pilgrim troop in quest of a holy land; who gives us
no law from the mandates of his will, but only interprets for us, and
makes burn within us, in characters of fire, the law of our own
hearts; who has no power over us, except through the affections he
awakens and the aspirations he sets upon the watch. We have emerged
from the Religion of _Law_, whose only sentiment is that of _obedience
to sovereignty_; we have passed from the religion of _Salvation_,
whose life consists in _gratitude to a Deliverer_; and we are capable
only of a religion of _reverence_, which bows before the _authority of
Goodness_. And in the infinite ranks of excellence, from the highest
to the lowest, there are no lords and slaves; the dependence is ever
that of internal charm, not of external bond; the _authority_ is but
represented and impersonated in another and a better soul, but has its
living seat within our own; and in this true and elevating worship,
the more we are disposed of by another, the more do we feel that we
are our own. This is a relation which the political terms of the
expected theocracy are ill adapted to express; and if we have required
many centuries to grope our way to this clearest glory of religion, to
disengage it from the impure admixture of servile fear and revolting
presumption; if it has taken long for us to melt away in our
imagination the images of thrones and tribunals, of prize-givings and
prisons, of a police and assizes of the universe; if only at the
eleventh hour of our faith, the cloud has passed away, and shown us
the true angel-ladder that springs from earth to heaven, the pure
climax of souls whereon each below looks up and rises, yet each above
bends down and helps;--the discovery which brings such peace and
freedom to the heart, has been delayed by the mistaken identification
of the entire creed of the first age with the essence of Christianity.
Now that God has shown us so much more, has tried the divine seed of
the Gospel on so various a soil of history, and enabled us to
distinguish its fairest blossoms and its choicest fruits, a much
larger meaning than was possible at first must be given to the purpose
of his revelation. Even to Paul, Christ was mainly the great
representative of a theocratic idea; and was in no other sense an
object of _spiritual_ belief, than that he was not on earth and
mortal, but in heaven and immortal. That _faith_ in Christ, which then
prominently denoted belief in his appointed return, and _allegiance_
to him as God's viceroy in this world, is now transferred into quite a
different thing. It is altogether a moral and affectionate sentiment:
an acknowledgment of him as the highest impersonation of divine
excellence and inspired insight yet given to the world; a trust in him
as the only realized type of perfection that can mediate for us
between ourselves and God; a faithfulness to him, as making us
conscious of what we are and what God and our conscience would have us
to be. It is vain to pretend that revelation is a fixed and
stereotyped thing. It was born, as the divinest things must be, among
human conditions; and into it ever since human conditions have
perpetually flowed. The elements of Hebrew thought surrounded the
sacred centre at first, and have been erroneously identified with it
by all Unitarian churches in every age. The Hellenic intellect
afterwards streamed towards the fresh point of life and faith, and
gathered around it the metaphysical system of Trinitarian dogma in
which orthodox communions of all times have, with parallel error,
sought the essence of the Gospel. The true principle of the religion
has been _secreted in both, and consisted in neither_: it has lain
unnoticed in the midst, in the silent chamber of the heart, around
which the clamor of the disputatious intellect whirls without
entrance. The agency of Christ's mind as the expression of God's moral
nature and providence, and as the realized ideal of beauty and
excellence,--this is the power of God and the wisdom of God, which has
made vain the counsels of the world, and baffled the foolishness of
the Church. This is the Gospel's centre of stability,--"Jesus Christ,
the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

Few persons can be insensible to the sublimity of this expression upon
the relation between


CHRIST, NATURE, PROVIDENCE, AND GOD.

In conclusion, then, I revert, with freshened persuasion, to the
statement with which I commenced. Jesus Christ of Nazareth, God hath
presented to us simply in his inspired humanity. Him we accept, not
indeed as very God, but as the true image of God, commissioned to show
what no written doctrinal record could declare, the entire moral
perfections of Deity. We accept, not indeed his body, not the
struggles of his sensitive nature, not the travail of his soul, but
his purity, his tenderness, his absolute devotion to the great idea of
right, his patient and compassionate warfare against misery and guilt,
as the most distinct and beautiful expression of the Divine mind. The
peculiar office of Christ is to supply a new _moral_ image of
Providence; and everything, therefore, except the _moral_ complexion
of his mind, we leave behind as human and historical merely, and apply
to no religious use. I have already stated in what way nature and the
Gospel combine to bring before us the great object of our trust and
worship. The universe gives us the scale of God, and Christ, his
Spirit. We climb to the infinitude of his nature by the awful pathway
of the stars, where whole forests of worlds silently quiver here and
there, like a small leaf of light. We dive into his eternity, through
the ocean waves of time, that roll and solemnly break on the
imagination, as we trace the wrecks of departed things upon our
present globe. The scope of his intellect, and the majesty of his
rule, are seen in the tranquil order and everlasting silence that
reign through the fields of his volition. And the spirit that animates
the whole is like that of the Prophet of Nazareth; the thoughts that
fly upon the swift light throughout creation, charged with fates
unnumbered, are like the healing mercies of One that passed no sorrow
by. The government of this world, its mysterious allotments of good
and ill, its successions of birth and death, its hopes of progress and
of peace, each life of individual or nation, is under the
administration of One, of whose rectitude and benevolence, whose
sympathy with all the holiest aspirations of our virtue and our love,
Christ is the appointed emblem. A faith that spreads around and within
the mind a Deity thus sublime and holy, feeds the light of every pure
affection, and presses with omnipotent power on the conscience; and
our only prayer is, that we may walk as children of such light.

It seems as if no one capable of understanding could resist the
convincing cogency of the following exhibition of


THE IDEA OF VICARIOUS JUSTICE.

It is only natural that the parable of the Prodigal Son should be no
favorite with those who deny the unconditional mercy of God. The place
which this divine tale occupies in the Unitarian theology appears to
be filled, in the orthodox scheme, by the story of Zaleucus, king of
the Locrians; which has been appealed to in the present controversy by
both the lecturers on the Atonement, and seems to be the only
endurable illustration presented, even by Pagan history, of the
execution of vicarious punishment. This monarch had passed a law
condemning adulterers to the loss of both eyes. His own son was
convicted of the crime; and, to satisfy at once the claims of law and
of clemency, the royal parent "commanded one of his own eyes to be
pulled out, and one of his son's." Is it too bold a heresy to confess
that there seems to me something heathenish in this example, and that,
as an exponent of the Divine character, I more willingly revere the
Father of the prodigal than the father of the adulterer?

Without entering, however, into any comparison between the Locrian and
the Galilean parable, I would observe, that the vicarious theory
receives no illustration from this fragment of ancient history. There
is no analogy between the cases, except in the violation of truth and
wisdom which both exhibit; and whatever we are instructed to admire in
Zaleucus, will be found on close inspection to be absent from the
orthodox representation of God. We pity the Grecian king, who had made
a law without foresight of its application, and so sympathize with his
desire to evade it, that any quibble which legal ingenuity can devise
for this purpose passes with slight condemnation; casuistry refuses to
be severe with a man implicated in such a difficulty. But the Creator
and Legislator of the human race, having perfect knowledge of the
future, can never be surprised into a similar perplexity; or ever pass
a law at one time which at another he desires to evade. Even were it
so, there would seem to be less that is unworthy of his moral
perfection in saying plainly, with the ancient Hebrews, that he
"repented of the evil he thought to do," and said, "It shall not be,"
than in ascribing to him a device for preserving consistency, in which
no one capable of appreciating veracity can pretend to discern any
sincere fulfilment of the law. However barbarous the idea of Divine
"repentance," it is at least ingenuous. Nor does this incident of
Zaleucus and his son present any parallel to the alleged relation
between the Divine Father who receives, and the Divine Son who gives,
the satisfaction for human guilt. The Locrian king took a part of the
penalty himself, and left the remainder where it was due; but the
Sovereign Lawgiver of Calvinism puts the whole upon another. To
sustain the analogy, Zaleucus should have permitted an innocent son to
have both his eyes put out, and the convicted adulterer to escape.

The doctrine of Atonement has introduced among Trinitarians a mode of
speaking respecting God, which grates most painfully against the
reverential affections due to him. His nature is dismembered into a
number of attributes, foreign to each other, and preferring rival
claims; the Divine tranquillity appears as the equilibrium of opposing
pressures,--the Divine administration as a resultant from the
collision of hostile forces. Goodness pleads for that which holiness
forbids; and the Paternal God would do many a mercy, did the Sovereign
God allow. The idea of a conflict or embarrassment in the Supreme Mind
being thus introduced, and the believer being haunted by the feeling
of some tremendous difficulty affecting the Infinite government, the
vicarious economy is brought forward as the relief, the solution of
the whole perplexity; the union, by a blessed compromise, of
attributes that could never combine in any scheme before. The main
business of theology is made to consist in stating the conditions and
expounding the solution of this imaginary problem. The cardinal
difficulty is thought to be the reconciliation of justice and mercy;
and, as the one is represented under the image of a Sovereign, the
other under that of a Father, the question assumes this form: How can
the same being at every moment possess both these characters, without
abandoning any function or feeling appropriate to either? how,
especially, can the Judge remit?--it is beyond his power; yet how can
the Parent punish to the uttermost?--it is contrary to his nature.

All this difficulty is merely fictitious, arising out of the
determination to make out that God is both wholly Judge and wholly
Father; from an anxiety, that is, to adhere to two metaphors, as
applicable, in every particular, to the Divine Being. It is evident that
both must be, to a great extent, inappropriate; and in nothing, surely,
is the impropriety more manifest, than in the assertion that, as
sovereign, God is naturally bound to execute laws which, nevertheless,
it would be desirable to remit, or change in their operation. Whatever
painful necessities the imperfection of human legislation and judicial
procedure may impose, the Omniscient Ruler can make no law which he will
not to all eternity, and with entire consent of his whole nature, deem
it well to execute. This is the Unitarian answer to the constant
question, "How can God forgive in defiance of his own law?" It is not in
defiance of his laws: every one of which will be fulfilled to the
uttermost, in conformity with his first intent; but nowhere has he
declared that he would not forgive. All justice consists in treating
moral agents according to their character; the inexorability of human
law arises solely from the imperfection with which it can attain this
end, and is not the essence, but the alloy, of equity; but God, who
searches and controls the heart, exercises that perfect justice, which
permits the penal suffering to depart only with the moral guilt; and
pardons, not by cancelling any sentence, but by obeying his eternal
purpose to meet the wanderer returning homeward, and give his blessing
to the restored. Only by such restoration can any past guilt be effaced.
The thoughts, emotions, and sufferings of sin, once committed, are woven
into the fabric of the soul; and are as incapable of being absolutely
obliterated thence and put back into non-existence, as moments of being
struck from the past, or the parts of space from infinitude. Herein we
behold alike "the goodness and the severity of God"; and adore in him,
not the balance of contrary tendencies, but the harmony of consentaneous
perfections. How plainly does experience show that, if his personal
unity be given up, his moral unity cannot be preserved!

The author himself is the best exemplification of the man described in
this account of the


DIFFERENCE BETWEEN APPREHENSION AND INTERPRETATION.

The difference between the ordinary visual gaze upon the external
universe, and the interpreting glance of science, is felt by every
cultivated understanding to be immeasurable;--and the contrast is not
less between that dull sense of what passes within him, which is forced
upon a man by mere practical experience, and the exact consciousness,
the discriminative perception, the easy comprehension of his own (and,
so far as they are expressed by faithful symbols, of others') states and
affections, possessed by the patient analyst of thought and emotion, and
careful collector of their laws. The mighty mass of human achievement
and human failure, in intellectual research, in moral endeavor, in
social economy and government, lapses into order before him, and
distributes itself among the provinces of determinate laws. The
structure of a child's perplexity, and the fallacies of the most
ambitious hypothesis, lie open to him as readily, as to the artisan a
flaw in the fabric of his own craft. The creations of art fall before
him into their elements; and, dissolving away their constituent
_matter_, which is an accident of their age, leave upon his mind their
permanent _form_ of beauty, as his guide to a true and noble criticism.
The progress and the aberrations of human reason, in its quest of truth,
are as clearly appreciated by him, as the passages of happy skill or
ignorant roving in some voyage of discovery, when the outlines and
relations of the sphere on which it is made become fully known.
Discerning distinctly the different kinds of evidence appropriate to
different departments of truth, and weighing the scientific value of
every idea and method of thought, he is not at the mercy of each
superficial impression and obtrusive phase presented to him by the
subjects of his contemplation; but he attains a certain rational tact
and graduated feeling of certainty in abstract matters of opinion, by
which he escapes alike the miseries of undefined doubt, and the passions
of unqualified dogmatism. In short, the great idea of Science is applied
by him to the complicated workings of the mind of man; interprets the
activities of his nature, and gives laws to the administration of his
life; and, with wonderful analysis, investigates the properties, and
establishes the equation, of their most labyrinthine curves.

What a rebuke upon dogmatic sciolists, what a glorious invitation to
study, are conveyed in the genial, broad, mental hospitality of the
succeeding paragraph!


NECESSITY OF LEARNING IN PHILOSOPHY.

If there is one department of knowledge more than another in which a
contemptuous disregard of the meditations and theories of distant
periods and nations is misplaced, it is in the philosophy of
man,--which can have no adequate breadth of basis till it reposes on
the consciousness and covers the mental experience of the universal
race; and to construct which out of purely personal materials, is like
attempting to lay down the curves and finish the theory of terrestrial
magnetism on the strength of a few closet experiments. No man, however
large-thoughted and composite his mind, can accept of _himself_ as the
type of universal human nature. It will even be a great and rare
endowment, if, with every aid of exact learning and unwearying
patience, he is able to penetrate the atmosphere of others'
understanding, and to observe the forms and colors which the objects
of contemplation assume, when beheld through this peculiar medium.
Simply to avail one's self of the experience of mankind, and know what
it has really been, demands no little scope of imagination and
versatility of intellectual sympathy. When these qualities are so
deficient in a thinker that he cannot well achieve this knowledge, it
is a great misfortune to his philosophy; when the want is such that he
does not even desire it, it amounts to an absolute disqualification.
Without, therefore, pledging ourselves to the eclectic principles
which prevail in the present school of philosophy in France, we must
beware of the intolerant dogmatism of Bentham in England, sanctioned,
as we have seen, by one of the masters of the antagonist metaphysics
in Germany. Indeed, it will be a chief purpose of all my lectures to
enable you to profit by the light of other minds; in every province of
the vast region which we shall explore together, to indicate the paths
which they have traversed before, nor ever to turn away from their
points of discovery, without raising some rude monument at least of
honest and commemorative praise. To introduce you to the works, to
interpret the difficulties, to do honor to the labors, to review the
opinions, of the great masters of speculative thought in every age and
in many lands, will be an indispensable portion of my duty;--a task
most arduous indeed, but than which none can be more grateful to one
who loves to trace, through all their affinities, the indestructible
types of truth and beauty in the human mind; and to mark the natural
laws, connecting together the most opposite continents and climes of
thought, as parts, successively colonized and cultivated, of one great
intellectual world. But in addition to the study of the several
classes of psychological and moral doctrine as they present themselves
in the _order of science_, it will be important to spread out the
literature of philosophy before us in the _order of time_; to gain an
insight into the natural development of successive modes of thought on
speculative subjects; to notice the action and reaction of philosophy
and practical life; to ascertain whether opinion on these abstract
matters really advances into knowledge and has any determinate
progression, or whether it oscillates for ever on either side of some
fixed idea, or line of mental gravitation. In short, having surveyed
our subject systematically, we shall go over it again chronologically;
and call upon philosophy, when it has recited its creed, and revealed
its wisdom, to finish all by writing its history.

The hints given in Mr. Martineau's frequent references to the bearing
of scientific knowledge and laws upon theological speculations are
very important. We adduce a single example.


PHYSICAL SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

An accomplished and thoughtful observer of nature--Hugh Miller, the
geologist--has somewhere remarked, that religion has lost its
dependence on metaphysical theories, and must henceforth maintain
itself upon the domain of physical science. He accordingly exhorts the
guardians of sacred truth to prepare themselves for the approaching
crisis in its history, by exchanging the study of thoughts for the
apprehension of things, and carefully cultivating the habit of
inductive research. The advice is excellent, and proceeds from one
whose own example has amply proved its worth; and unless the clergy
qualify themselves to take part in the discussions which open
themselves with the advance of natural knowledge, they will assuredly
be neither secure in their personal convictions nor faithful to their
public trust. The only fault to be found with this counsel is, that in
recommending one kind of knowledge it disparages another, and betrays
that limited intellectual sympathy which is the bane of all noble
culture. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, so far from succeeding to the
inheritance of metaphysics, do but enrich its problems with new
conceptions and give a larger outline to its range; and should they,
in the wantonness of their young ascendency, persuade men to its
neglect, they will pay the penalties of their contempt by the
appearance of confusion in their own doctrine. The advance of any one
line of human thought demands--especially for the security of
faith--the parallel movement of all the rest; and the attempt to
substitute one intellectual reliance for another, mistakes for
progress of knowledge what may be only an exchange of ignorance. In
particular, the study of external nature must proceed _pari passu_
with the study of the human mind; and the errors of an age too
exclusively reflective will not be remedied, but only reversed, by
mere reaction into sciences of outward fact and observation. These
physical pursuits, followed into their further haunts, rapidly run up
into a series of notions common to them all,--expressed by such words
as _Law_, _Cause_, _Force_,--which at once transfer the jurisdiction
from the provincial courts of the special sciences to the high
chancery of universal philosophy. To conduct the pleadings--still more
to pronounce the judgment--there, other habits of mind are needed than
are required in the museum and the observatory; and the history of
knowledge, past and present, abounds with instances of men who, with
the highest merit in particular walks of science, have combined a
curious incompetency of survey over the whole. Hence, very few natural
philosophers, however eminent for great discoveries and dreaded by the
priesthood of their day, have made any deep and durable impression on
the religious conception of the universe, as the product and
expression of an Infinite Mind; and in tracing the eras of human
faith, the deep thinker comes more prominently into view than the
skilful interrogator of nature. In the history of religion, Plato is a
greater figure than Archimedes; Spinoza than Newton; Hume and Kant
than Volta and La Place; even Thomas Carlyle than Justus Liebig. Our
picture indeed of the system of things is immensely enlarged, both in
space and duration, by the progress of descriptive science; and the
grouping of its objects and events is materially changed. But the
altered scene carries with it the same expression to the soul; speaks
the same language as to its origin; renews its ancient glance with an
auguster beauty; and, in spite of all dynamic theories, reproduces the
very modes of faith and doubt which belonged to the age both of the
old Organon and of the new.

The ultimate problem of all philosophy and all religion is this: "How
are we to conceive aright the origin and first principle of things?"
The answers, it has been contended by a living author of distinguished
merit, are necessarily reducible to two, between which all systems are
divided, and on the decision of whose controversy, all antagonist
speculations would lay down their arms. "In the beginning was FORCE,"
says one class of thinkers; "force, singular or plural, splitting into
opposites, standing off into polarities, ramifying into attractions
and repulsions, heat and magnetism, and climbing through the stages of
physical, vital, animal, to the mental life itself." "On the
contrary," says the other class, "in the beginning was THOUGHT; and
only in the necessary evolution of its eternal ideas into expression
does force arise,--self-realizing thought declaring itself in the
types of being and the laws of phenomena." We need hardly say, that
the former of these two notions coalesces with the creed of Atheism,
and is most frequently met with upon the path of the physical
sciences, while the latter is favored by the mathematical and
metaphysical, and gives the essence of Pantheism. Each of them has
insurmountable difficulties, with which it is successfully taunted by
the other. Start from blind force; and how, by any spinning from that
solitary centre, are we ever to arrive at the seeing intellect? Can
the lower create the higher, and the unconscious enable us to think?
Start from pure thinking, and how then can you get any force for the
production of objective effects? How metamorphose a passage of dialect
into the power of gravitation, and a silent corollary into a flash of
lightning? In taking the intellect as the type of God, this difficulty
must always be felt. We are well aware that it is not in _this_
endowment that our dynamic energy resides. The _activity_ which we
ascribe to our intellect is not a power going out into external
efficiency, but a mere passage across the internal field of successive
thoughts as spontaneous phenomena. Nor have we, as thinking beings
only, any _option_ with respect to the thoughts thus streaming over
the theatre of rational consciousness; our constitution legislates for
us in this particular, and the order of suggestion is determined by
laws having their seat in us. Finally, we are not, by mere thinking
capacity, constituted _persons_, any more than a sleeper who should
never wake, yet always be engaged with rational and scientific dreams,
would be a person. Without some further endowment, we should only be a
_logical life_ and development. All these characters are imported into
the conception of God, when he is represented as conforming to the
type of reason. The activity of intellect being wholly internal, the
phenomena of the Universe could not be referred to Him as a thinking
being, were they not gathered up into the interior of his nature, and
conceived, not as objective effects of his power, but as purely
subjective successions within the theatre of his infinitude. Intellect
again having no option, the God of this theory is without freedom, and
is represented as the eternal necessity of reason. And lastly, in
fidelity to the same analogy, He is not a divine _Person_, but rather
a _Thinking Thing_, or the thinking function of the universe; we may
say, _universal science in a state of self-consciousness_. The
necessity under which Pantheism lies, of fetching all that is to be
referred to God into the _interior_ of his being, and dealing with it
as not less a necessary manifestation of his mental essence than are
our ideas of the mind that has them, explains the unwillingness of
this system to allow any motives to God, any field of objective
operation, any special relation to individuals, any revealing
interposition, any _supernatural_ agency.

Is it however true, that human belief can only choose between these
two extremes, and must oscillate eternally between the Atheistic
homage to Force, and the Pantheistic to Thought? Far from it; and it
is curiously indicative of the state of the philosophic atmosphere in
Germany, that one of her most discerning and wide-seeing authors
should find no third possibility within the sphere of vision. In any
latitude except one in which moral science has altogether melted away
in the universal solvent of metaphysics, it would occur as one of the
most obvious suggestions, that the intellect is not the only element
of human nature which may be taken as type of the Divine, and as
furnishing a possible solution to the problem of origination. Quitting
the two poles of extreme philosophy, confessedly incompetent in their
separation, we submit that WILL presents the middle point which takes
up into itself Thought on the one hand and Force on the other; and
which yet, so far from appearing to us as a _compound_ arising out of
them as an effect, is more easily conceived than either as the
originating prefix of all phenomena. It has none of the
disqualifications which we have remarked as flowing from the others
into their respective systems of doctrine. It carries with it, in its
very idea, the co-presence of Thought, as the necessary element within
whose sphere it has to manifest itself. Its phenomena cannot exist
_alone_; it acts on preconceptions, which stand related to it,
however, not as its source, but as its conditions, and are its
co-ordinates in the effect rather than its generating antecedents. If
therefore all things are issued by Will, there is Mind at the
fountain-head, and the absurdity is avoided of deriving intelligence
from unintelligence. While it thus escapes the difficulty of passing
from mere Force to Thought, it is equally clear of the opposite
difficulty of making mere Thought supply any Force. The activity of
Will is not, like that of Intellect, a subjective transit of
regimented ideas, but an _objective_ power _going out_ for the
production of effects; nay, it is a _free_ power, exercising
_preference_ among data furnished by internal or external conditions
present in its field; and it thus constitutes proper _Causality_,
which always implies control over an alternative. We need hardly add,
that all the requisites are thus complete for the true idea of a
_Person_; and an Infinite Being contemplated under this type is
neither a fateful nor a logical principle of necessity, but a living
God, out of whose purposed legislation has sprung whatever necessity
there is, except the self-existent beauty of his holiness. Thus,
between the Force of the physical Atheist, and the Thought of the
metaphysical Pantheist, we fix upon the fulcrum of Will as the true
balance-point of a moral Theism.

It would be impossible, perhaps, to find anywhere a finer instance of
perspicuity in condensation, than is given in the following reference to


LESSING'S THEOLOGICAL CONCLUSIONS.

Lessing refused to surrender Christianity, on proof of error in its
first teachers, uncertainty in its reported miracles, contradictions
in its early literature, misapplication of Messianic prophecies. All
these he regards as but the external accidents, the transitory media,
of the religion, constituting, it may be, its support in one age and
its weakness in another. They do not belong to its inner essence, in
which alone the real evidence of spiritual truth is found; and he who
detects anything amiss with them may even render a service by driving
men from sham-proofs, that really persuade no one, to true ones that
lie at the heart of things. Religious doctrine cannot be deduced from
mere historical facts without a μεταβασις εις αλλο γενος vitiating the
whole process. _Facts_ indeed _may_ become the proper ground of moral
and spiritual faith; but then they must be facts which come over again
and again, and betray an element that is permanent and eternal; which
form part of the experience and consciousness of humanity; and ally
themselves with the Divine by not losing their _presence_ in the
world. But _unrepeated facts_, which limit themselves to a moment,
which are the incidents of a single personality, and are left behind
quite insulated in the past, show--were it only by your not expecting
them again--that they are detached from the persistent and essential
life of the universe and humanity. They are but once and away; and
least of all, therefore, can testify of the untransitory and
ever-living. The real can teach us only so far as it has an ideal
kernel, redeeming it from the character of a solitary phenomenon.
Among the various expositions and applications of this favorite theme
of Lessing's, we select the following sentences from his Axiomata.

1. "The Bible evidently contains more than belongs to Religion."

2. "That in this '_more_' the Bible is still infallible, is mere
hypothesis."

3. "The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not the Religion."

4. "The objections therefore against the letter and against the Bible,
are not on that account objections against the spirit and against the
Religion."

5. "Moreover there was a religion ere there was a Bible."

6. "Christianity was in being before Evangelists and Apostles had
written. Some time elapsed before the first of them wrote, and a very
considerable time before the whole canon was constituted."

7. "However much, therefore, may depend on these writings, it is
impossible that the whole truth of the Christian religion can rest
upon them."

8. "If there was a period during which, diffused as the Christian
religion already was, and many as were the souls filled already with
its power, still not a letter had yet been written of the records
which have come down to us; then it must be also possible for all the
writings of Evangelists and Apostles to perish, yet the religion
taught by them still to subsist."

9. "The religion is not true because Evangelists and Apostles taught
it; but they taught it because it is true."

10. "Its interior truth must furnish the interpretation of the
writings it has handed down; and no writings handed down can give it
interior truth, if it has none."

In his controversy with Göze, he illustrates this distinction between
the essence and the historical form of Christianity, by a parable to
the following effect. A wise king of a great realm built a palace of
immense size and very peculiar architecture. About this structure,
there came from the very first a foolish strife to be carried on,
especially among reputed connoisseurs, people, that is, who had least
looked into the interior. This strife was not about the palace itself,
but about various old ground-plans of it, and drawings of the same,
very difficult to make out. Once, when the watchmen cried out "Fire,"
these connoisseurs, instead of running to help, snatched up their
plans, and, instead of putting out the fire on the spot, kept standing
with their plans in hand, making a hubbub all the while, and
squabbling about whether this was the spot on fire, and that the place
to put it out. Happily, the safety of the palace did not depend on
these busy wranglers, for it was not on fire at all; the watchmen had
been frightened by the Northern lights, and mistaken them for fire. It
is impossible to convey by a clearer image Lessing's feeling, that a
Christianity once incorporated in the very substance of history and
civilization, seated deep in human sentiment and thought, and
developed into literature, law, and life, subsists independently of
critical questions, and is with us, not as the contingent vapor that a
wind may rise to blow away, but as the cloud that has dropped its rain
and mingled with the roots of things.

In immediate contrast with the foregoing application of a critical
method to the historic documents of Christianity, it is beautiful to
see the same genius turned with eager joy to a practical
recommendation of the experimental life of Christianity.


THE REDEEMING LAW OF SYMPATHY.

It is quite true, that self-cure is of all things the most arduous;
but that which is impossible _to the man within us_, may be altogether
possible _to the God_. In truth, the denial of such changes, under the
affectation of great knowledge of man, shows an incredible ignorance
of men. Why, the history of every great religious revolution, such as
the spread of Methodism, is made up of nothing else; the instances
occurring in such number and variety, as to transform the character of
whole districts and vast populations, and to put all scepticism at
utter defiance. And if some more philosophic authority is needed for
the fact, we may be content with the sanction of Lord Bacon, who
observed that a man reforms his habits either altogether or not at
all. Deterioration of mind is indeed always gradual; recovery usually
sudden; for God, by a mystery of mercy, has established this
distinction in our secret nature,--that, while we cannot, by one dark
plunge, sympathize with guilt far beneath us, but gaze at it with
recoil till intermediate shades have rendered the degradation
tolerable, we are yet capable of sympathizing with moral excellence
and beauty infinitely above us; so that, while the debased may shudder
and sicken at even the true picture of themselves, they can feel the
silent majesty of self-denying and disinterested duty. With a demon
can no man feel complacency, though the demon be himself; but God can
all spirits reverence, though his holiness be an infinite deep. And
thus the soul, privately uneasy at its insincere state, is prepared,
when vividly presented with some sublime object veiled before, to be
pierced, as by a flash from heaven, with an instant veneration,
sometimes intense enough to fuse the fetters of habit, and drop them
to the earth whence they were forged. The mind is ready, like a liquid
on the eve of crystallization, to yield up its state on the touch of
the first sharp point, and dart, over its surface and in its depths,
into brilliant and beautiful forms, and from being turbid and weak as
water, to become clear as crystal, and solid as the rock.

One of the most elaborate and valuable productions from Mr.
Martineau's pen, an article closely allied in all respects to the
ensuing Studies of Christianity, is the one of some portions of which
we herewith present an epitome.


THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MORAL EVIL.

The Divine sentiments towards right and wrong every man naturally
believes to be a reflection of whatever is most pure and solemn in his
own. We cannot be sincerely persuaded, that God looks with aversion on
dispositions which we revere as good and noble; or that he regards with
lax indifference the selfish and criminal passions which awaken our own
disgust. We may well suppose, indeed, his scrutiny more searching, his
estimate more severely true, his rebuking look more awful, than our
self-examination and remorse can fitly represent; but we cannot doubt
that our moral emotions, as far as they go, are in sympathy with his;
that we know, by our own consciousness, the general direction of his
approval and displeasure; and that, in proportion as our perceptions of
duty are rendered clear, our judgment more nearly approaches the
precision of the Omniscient award. Our own conscience is the window of
heaven through which we gaze on God; and, as its colors perpetually
change, his aspect changes too;--if they are bright and fair, he dwells
as in the warm light of a rejoicing love; if they are dark and turbid,
he hides himself in robes of cloud and storm. When you have lost your
self-respect, you have never thought yourself an object of Divine
complacency. In moments fresh from sin, flushed with the shame of an
insulted mind, when you have broken another resolve, or turned your back
upon a noble toil, or succumbed to a mean passion, or lapsed into the
sickness of self-indulgence, could you ever turn a clear and open face
to God, nor think it terrible to meet his eye? Could you imagine
yourself in congeniality with him, when you gave yourself up to the
voluble sophistry of self-excuse, and the loose hurry of forgetfulness?
Or did you not discern him rather in your own accusing heart, and meet
him in the silent anguish of full confession, and find in the
recognition of your alienation the first hope of return? To all
unperverted minds, the verdict of conscience sounds with a
preternatural voice; it is not the homely talk of their own poor
judgment, but an oracle of the sanctuary. There is something of
anticipation in our remorse, as well as of retrospect; and we feel that
it is not the mere survey of a gloomy past with the slow lamp of our
understanding, but a momentary piercing of the future with the vivid
lightning of the skies. Our moral nature, left to itself, intuitively
believes that guilt is an estrangement from God,--an unqualified
opposition to his will,--a literal service of the enemy; that he abhors
it, and will give it no rest till it is driven from his presence, that
is, into annihilation; that no part of our mind belongs to him but the
pure, and just, and disinterested affections which he fosters, the
faithful will which he strengthens, the virtue, often damped, whose
smoking flax he will not quench, and the good resolves, ever frail,
whose bruised reed he will not break; and that he has no relation but of
displeasure, no contact but of resistance, with our selfishness and sin.
In the simple faith of the conscience it is no figure of speech to say,
that God "is angry with the wicked every day," and is "of purer eyes
than to behold iniquity." So long as the natural religion of the heart
is undisturbed, to sin is, in the plainest and most positive sense, to
set up against Heaven, and frustrate its will.

Soon, however, the understanding disturbs the tranquillity of this
belief, and constructs a rival creed. The primitive conception of God
is acquired, I believe, without reasoning, and emerges from the
affections; it is a transcript of our own emotions,--an investiture of
them with external personality and infinite magnitude. But a secondary
idea of Deity arises in the intellect, from its reasonings about
causation. Curiosity is felt respecting the origin of things; and the
order, beauty, and mechanism of external nature are too conspicuous
not to force upon the observation the conviction of a great Architect
of the universe, from whose designing reason its forces and its laws
mysteriously sprung. Hence the _intellectual_ conception of _God the
Creator_, which comes into inevitable collision with the _moral_
notion of _God the holy watch of virtue_. For if the system of
creation is the production of his Omniscience; if he has constituted
human nature as it is, and placed it in the scene whereon it acts; if
the arrangements by which happiness is allotted, and character is
formed, are the contrivance of his thought and the work of his
hand,--then the sufferings and the guilt of every being were objects
of his original contemplation, and the productions of his own design.
The deed of crime must, in this case, be as much an integral part of
his Providence, as the efforts and sacrifices of virtue; and the
monsters of licentiousness and tyranny, whose images deform the
scenery of history, are no less truly his appointed instruments, than
the martyr and the sage. And though we remain convinced that he does
not make choice of evil in his government for its own sake, but only
for ultimate ends worthy of his perfections, still we can no longer
see how he can truly hate that which he employs for the production of
good. That which is his chosen instrument cannot be sincerely regarded
as his everlasting enemy; and only figuratively can he be said to
repudiate a power which he continually wields. There must be _some
sense_ in which it appears, in the eye of Omniscience, to be eligible;
some point of view at which its horrors vanish; and where the moral
distinctions, which we feel ourselves impelled to venerate, disappear
from the regards of God.

Here, then, is a fearful contradiction between the religion of
conscience and the religion of the understanding; the one pronouncing
evil to be the antagonist, the other to be the agent, of the Divine
will. In every age has this difficulty laid a heavy weight upon the
human heart; in every age has it pointed the sarcasm of the blasphemer,
mingled an occasional sadness with the hopes of benevolence, and tinged
the devotion of the thoughtful with a somewhat melancholy trust. The
whole history of speculative religion is one prolonged effort of the
human mind to destroy this contrariety; system after system has been
born in the struggle to cast the oppression off,--with what result, it
will be my object at present to explain. The question which we have to
consider is this, "How should a Christian think of the origin and
existence of evil?" I propose to advert, first, to the speculative;
secondly, to the scriptural; thirdly, to the moral relations of the
subject; to inquire what relief we can obtain from philosophical
schemes, from biblical doctrine, and from practical Christianity.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us then, for final decision, consult the practical spirit of
Christianity, and ascertain to what view of the origin of sin it
awards the preference. Is it well for the consciences and characters
of men, to consider God--either directly or through his dependant,
Satan, either by his general laws or by vitiating the constitution of
our first parents--as the primary source of moral evil? _or_, on the
contrary, to regard it as in no sense whatever willed by the Supreme
Mind, and absolutely inimical to his Providence? Are we most in
harmony with the characteristic spirit of the Gospel when we call sin
his instrument, or when we call it his enemy? For myself, I can never
sit at the feet of Jesus, and yield up a reverential heart to his
great lessons, without casting myself on the persuasion, that God and
evil are everlasting foes; that never, and for no end, did he create
it; that his will is utterly against it, nor ever touches it, but with
annihilating force. Any other view appears to be injurious to the
characteristic sentiments, and at variance with the distinguishing
genius, of Christian morality.

(1.) Christianity is distinguished by the profound sentiment of
_individual responsibility_ which pervades it. All the arbitrary forms,
and sacerdotal interpositions, and hereditary rights, through which
other systems seek the Divine favor, are disowned by it. It is a
religion eminently _personal_; establishing the most intimate and
solitary dealings between God and every human soul. It is a religion
eminently _natural_; eradicating no indigenous affection of our mind,
distorting no primitive moral sentiment; but simply consecrating the
obligations proper to our nature, and taking up with a divine voice the
whispers, scarce articulate before, of the conscience within us. In this
deep harmony with our inmost consciousness of duty resides the true
power of our religion. It subdues and governs our hearts, as a wise
conqueror rules the empire he has won; not by imposing a system of
strange laws, but by arming with higher authority, and administering
with more resolute precision, the laws already recognized and revered.

To trifle in any way with this plain and solemn principle, to invent
forms of speech tending to conceal it, to apply to moral good and ill
language which assimilates them to physical objects and exchangeable
property, implies frivolous and irreverent ideas of sin and
excellence. The whole weight of this charge evidently falls on the
scheme which speaks of human guilt as an hereditary entail; a scheme
which shocks and confounds our primary notion of right and wrong, and,
by rendering them impersonal qualities, reduces them to empty names.
No construction can be given to the system, which does not pass this
insult on the conscience. In what sense do we share the guilt of our
progenitor? His concession to temptation did not occur within our
mind, or belong in any way to our history. And if, without
participation in the _act_ of wrong, we are to have its _penalties_,
crimes in the planet Saturn may be expected to shower curses on the
earth; for why may not justice go astray in space, as reasonably as in
time? If nothing more be meant, than that from our first parents we
inherit a constitution _liable_ to intellectual error and moral
transgression,--still it is evident that, _until_ this liability takes
actual effect, no sin exists, but only its possibility; and _when_ it
takes effect, there is just so much guilt, and no more, than might be
committed by the individual's will: so that where there is _no_
volition, as in infancy, cruelty only could inflict punishment; and
where there is _pure_ volition, as in many a good passage of the
foulest life, equity itself could not withhold approval.

(2.) I submit as a second distinguishing feature of practical
Christianity, that it makes no great, certainly no exclusive, appeal
to the _prudential feelings_, as instruments of duty; treats them as
morally incapable of so sacred a work; and relies, chiefly and
characteristically, on affections of the heart, which no motives of
reward and punishment can have the smallest tendency to excite.

The Gospel, indeed, like all things divine, is unsystematic and
unbound by technical distinctions, and makes no metaphysical
separation between the will and the affections. It is too profoundly
adapted to our nature, not to address itself copiously to both. The
doctrine of retribution, being a solemn truth, appears with all its
native force in the teachings of Christ, and arms many of his appeals
with a persuasion just and terrible. But never was there a religion
(containing these motives at all) so frugal in the use of them; so
able, on fit occasions, to dispense with them; so rich in those
inimitable touches of moral beauty, and tones that penetrate the
conscience, and generous trust in the better sympathies, which
distinguish a morality of the affections. In Christ himself, where is
there a trace of the obedience of pious self-interest, computing its
everlasting gains, and making out a case for compensation, by
submitting to infinite wisdom? In his character, which is the
impersonation of his religion, we surely have a perfect image of
spontaneous goodness, unhaunted by the idea of personal enjoyment,
and, like that of God, unbidden but by the intuitions of conscience
and the impulses of love. And what teacher less divine ever made such
high and bold demands on our disinterestedness? To lend out our virtue
upon interest, to "love them only who love us," he pronounced to be
the sinners' morality; nor was the feeling of duty ever reached, but
by those who could "do good, hoping for _nothing_ again," except that
greatest of rewards to a true and faithful heart, to be "the children
of the Highest," who "is kind unto the unthankful and the evil." In
the view of Jesus, all dealings between God and men were not of
bargain, but of affection. We must surrender ourselves to him without
terms; must be ashamed to doubt him who feeds the birds of the air,
and, like the lily of the field, look up to him with a bright and
loving eye; and he, for our much love, will pity and forgive us. In
his own ministry, how much less did our Lord rely for disciples on the
cogency of mere proof, and the inducements of hope and fear, than on
the power of moral sympathy, by which every one that was of God
naturally loved him and heard his words; by which the good shepherd
knew his sheep, and they listened to his voice, and followed him; and
without which no man could come unto him, for no spirit of the Father
drew him. No condition of discipleship did Christ impose, save that of
"faith in him"; absolute trust in the spirit of his mind; a desire of
self-abandonment to a love and fidelity like his, without tampering
with expediency, or hesitancy in peril, or shrinking from death.

There is, then, a wide variance between the genius of Christianity,
and that philosophy which teaches that all men must be bought over to
the side of goodness and of God, by a price suited to their particular
form of selfishness and appetite for pleasure. Our religion is
remarkable for the large confidence it reposes on the disinterested
affections, and the vast proportion of the work of life it consigns to
them. And in thus seeking to subordinate and tranquillize the
prudential feelings, Christ manifested how well he knew what was in
man. He recognized the truth, which all experience declares, that in
these emotions is nothing great, nothing lovable, nothing powerful;
that their energy is perpetually found incapable of withstanding the
impetuosity of passion; and that all transcendent virtues, all that
brings us to tremble or to kneel, all the enterprises and conflicts
which dignify history, and have stamped any new feature on human life,
have had their origin in the disinterested region of the mind,--in
affections unconsciously entranced by some object sanctifying and
divine. He knew, for it was his special mission to make all men feel,
that it is the office of true religion to cleanse the sanctuary of the
secret affections, and effect a regeneration of the heart. And this is
a task which no direct _nisus_ of the will can possibly accomplish,
and to which, therefore, all offers of reward and punishment,
operating only on the will, are quite inapplicable. The single
function of volition is _to act_; over the executive part of our
nature it is supreme, over the emotional it is powerless; and all the
wrestlings of desire for self-cure and self-elevation, are like the
struggles of a child to lift himself. He who is anxious to be a
philanthropist, is admiring benevolence, instead of loving men; and
whoever is laboring to warm his devotions, yearns after piety, not
after God. The mind can by no spasmodic bound seize on a new height of
emotion, or change the light in which objects appear before its view.
Persuade the judgment, bribe the self-interests, terrify the
expectations, as you will, you can neither dislodge a favorite, nor
enthrone a stranger, in the heart. Show me a child that flings an
affectionate arm around a parent, and lights up his eyes beneath her
face, and I know that there have been no lectures there upon filial
love; but that the mother, being lovable, has _of necessity_ been
loved; for to genial minds it is as impossible to withhold a pure
affection, when its object is presented, as for the flower to sulk
within the mould, and clasp itself tight within the bud, when the
gentle force of spring invites its petals to curl out into the warm
light. As you reverence all good affections of our nature, and desire
to awaken them, never call them duties, though they be so; for so
doing, you address yourself to the will; and by hard trying no
attachment ever entered the heart. Never preach on their great
desirableness and propriety; for so doing, you ask audience of the
judgment; and by way of the understanding no glow of noble passion
ever came. Never, above all, reckon up their balance of good and ill;
for so doing, you exhort self-interest; and by that soiled way no true
love will consent to pass. Nay, never talk of them, nor even gaze
curiously at them; for if they be of any worth and delicacy, they will
be instantly looked out of countenance and fly. Nothing worthy of
human veneration will condescend to be embraced, but for its own sake:
grasp it for its excellent results,--make but the faintest offer to
use it as a tool, and it slips away at the very conception of such
insult. The functions of a healthy body go on, not by knowledge of
physiology, but by the instinctive vigor of nature; and you will no
more brace the spiritual faculties to noble energy and true life by
study of the uses of every feeling, than you can train an athlete for
the race by lectures on every muscle of every limb. The mind is not
voluntarily active in the acquisition of any great idea, any new
inspiration of faith; but passive, fixed on the object which has
dawned upon it, and filled it with fresh light.

If this be true, and if it be the object of practical Christianity,
not only to direct our hands aright, but to inspire our hearts, then
can its ends never be achieved by the mere force of reward and
punishment; then no system can prove its sufficiency by showing that
it retains the doctrine of retribution, and must even be held
convicted of moral incompetency, if it trusts the conscience mainly to
the prudential feelings, without due provision for enlisting the
co-operation of many a disinterested affection.

We cannot refrain from affording those into whose hands this volume
will go, the pleasure and the lofty encouragement which they must
derive from the perusal of an extract on


THE TRANSMISSION OF SUPERIOR THOUGHTS.

It is a law of Providence in communities, that ideas shall be
propagated downwards through the several gradations of minds. They
have their origin in the suggestions of genius, and the meditations of
philosophy; they are assimilated by those who can admire what is great
and true, but cannot originate; and thence they are slowly infused
into the popular mind. The rapidity of the process may vary in
different times, with the facilities for the transmission of thought,
but its order is constant. Temporary causes may shield the inferior
ranks of intelligence from the influence of the superior; fanaticism
may interpose for a while with success; a want of the true spirit of
sympathy between the instructors and the instructed may check by a
moral repulsion the natural radiation of intellect;--but, in the end,
Providence will re-assert its rule; and the conceptions born in the
quiet heights of contemplation will precipitate themselves on the busy
multitudes below. This principle interprets history and presages
futurity. It shows us in the popular feeling and traditions of one
age, a reflection from the philosophy of a preceding; and from the
prevailing style of sentiment and speculation among the cultivated
classes now, it enables us to foresee the spirit of a coming age. Nor
only to foresee it, but to exercise over it a power, in the use of
which there is a grave responsibility. If we are far-sighted in our
views of improvement; if we are ambitious less of immediate and
superficial effects than of the final and deep-seated agency of
generous and holy principles; if our love of opinions is a genuine
expression of the disinterested love of truth;--we shall remember who
are the teachers of futurity; we shall appeal to those, within whose
closets God is already computing the destinies of remote
generations,--men at once erudite and free, men who have the materials
of knowledge with which to determine the great problems of morals and
religion, and the genius to think and imagine and feel, without let or
hinderance of hope or fear.

We linger over the pages from which the preceding selections have been
made, unwilling to end our grateful task of love. But one quotation
more must be the last. With it we commend these Studies of
Christianity, these timely thoughts for religious thinkers, to the
candid and affectionate inquirers within all sects, confident that, so
far as the work obtains a fit reception, it will exert that purifying,
liberalizing, and sanctifying power which is the genuine influence of
Christ.


CHRISTIANITY AND SECTARIAN THEOLOGY.

The sectarian state of theology in this country cannot but be regarded
as eminently unnatural. Its cold and hard ministrations are entirely
alien to the wants of the popular mind, which, except under the
discipline of artificial influences, is always most awake to generous
impressions. Its malignant exclusiveness is a perversion of the natural
veneration of the human heart, which, except where it is interfered with
by narrow and selfish systems, pours itself out, not in hatred towards
anything that lives, but in love to the invisible objects of trust and
hope. Its disputatious trifling is an insult to the sanctity of
conscience, which, except where it is betrayed into oblivion of its
delicate and holy office, supplicates of religion, not a new ferocity of
dogmatism, but an enlargement and refinement of its sense of right. It
is the temper of sectarianism to seize on every deformity of every
creed, and exhibit this caricature to the world's gaze and aversion. It
is the spirit of the soul's natural piety to alight on whatever is
beautiful and touching in every faith, and take there its secret draught
of pure and fresh emotion. It is the passages of poetry and pathos in a
system, which alone can lay a strong hold on the general mind and give
them permanence; and even the wild fictions which have endeared Romanism
to the hearts of so many centuries, possess their elements of tenderness
and magnificence. The fundamental principle of one who would administer
religion to the minds of his fellow-men should be, that all that has
ever been extensively venerated must possess ingredients that are
venerable. If, in the spirit of sectarianism, he sees nothing in it but
absurdity, it only proves that he does not see it all; it must have an
aspect, which he has not yet caught, that awes the imagination, or
touches the affections, or moves the conscience; and those who receive
it neither will nor should abandon it, till something is substituted,
not only more consonant with the reason, but more awakening to these
higher faculties of soul. Hence, a rigid accuracy and logical
penetration of mind, the power of detecting and exposing error, are not
the only qualities needed by the religious reformer; and in a deep and
reverential sympathy with human feelings, a quick perception of the
great and beautiful, a promptitude to cast himself into the minds of
others, and gaze through their eyes at the objects which they love, he
will find the instrument of the sublimest intellectual power. The
precise logician may sit eternally in the centre of his own circle of
correct ideas, and preach demonstrably the folly of the world's
superstitions; yet he will never affect the thoughts of any but
marble-minded beings like himself. He disregards the fine tissue of
emotions that clings round the objects which he so harshly handles; and
has yet to learn the art of preserving its fabric unimpaired, while he
enfolds within it something more worthy for it to foster and adore.

As, then, it is to the moral and imaginative powers of the human mind
that religion chiefly attaches itself, as it is by these that the want
of it is most strongly felt, so is it to these that its ministrations
should be, for the most part, addressed. While theologians are
discussing the evidences of creeds, let teachers be conducting them to
their applications. Let their respective resources of feeling and
conception be unfolded before the soul of mankind; let it be tried
what mental energy they can inspire, what purity of moral perception
infuse, what dignity of principle erect, what toils of philanthropy
sustain. Thus would arise a new criterion of judgment between
differing systems; for that system must possess most truth which
creates the most intelligence and virtue. Thus would the deeper
devotional wants of society be no longer mocked by the privilege of
choice among a few captious, verbal, and precise forms of belief.
Thus, too, would the alienation which repels sect from sect give place
to an incipient and growing sympathy; for when high intellect and
excellence approach and stand in meek homage beneath the cross, how
soon are the jarring voices of disputants hushed in the stillness of
reverence! Who does not feel the refreshment, when some stream of
pure poetry, like Heber's, winds into the desert of theology! when
some flash of genius, like that of Chalmers, darts through its dull
atmosphere! some strains of eloquence, like those of Channing, float
from a distance on its heavy silence!

Such, then, are the objects which should be contemplated by those who,
in the present times, aim at the reformation of religious
sentiment;--first, the elevation of theology as an intellectual
pursuit; secondly, the better application of religion as a moral
influence. Both these objects are directly or indirectly promoted by
the Association whose cause I am privileged to advocate. It aids the
first, by the distribution of many a work, the production of such
minds as must redeem theology from contempt. It advances the second,
by establishing union and sympathy among those whose first principles
are in direct contradiction to all that is sectarian, and who desire
only to emancipate the understanding from all that enfeebles, and the
heart from all that narrows it. The triumph of its doctrines would be,
not the ascendency of one sect, but the harmony of all. Let but the
diversities which separate Christians retire, and the truths which
they all profess to love advance to prominence, and, whatever may
become of party names, our aims are fulfilled, and our satisfaction is
complete. When faith in the paternity of God shall have kindled an
affectionate and lofty devotion; when the vision of immortality,
imparted by Christ's resurrection, shall have created that spirit of
duty which was the holiest inspiration of his life; when the sincere
recognition of human brotherhood shall have supplanted all exclusive
institutions, and banded society together under the vow of mutual aid
and the hope of everlasting progress, our work will be done, our
reward before us, and our little community of reformers lost in the
wide fraternity of enlightened and benevolent men.

The day is yet distant, and can be won only by the toil of earnest and
faithful minds. In the mean while, it is no light solace to see that
the tendencies of Providence are towards its accelerated approach. And
however dispiriting may sometimes be the variety and conflicts of
human sentiment,--however remote the dissonance of controversy from
that harmony of will which would seem essential to perfected society,
it is through this very process that the great ends of improvement are
to be attained. Hereafter it will be seen, much more clearly than we
can see it now, that opinion generates knowledge. Like the ethereal
waves, whose inconceivable rapidity and number are said to impart the
sensation of vision, the undulations of opinion are speeding on to
produce the perception of truth. They are the infinitely complex and
delicate movements of that universal Human Mind, whose quiescence is
darkness,--whose agitation, light.

To the fit and numerous readers whom we trust they will find, these
papers are now submitted, in the earnest hope that the author will at
no distant day follow them with some more systematic and rounded
survey of the same great subject,--the components and developments of
Christianity.

      W. R. A.




STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY.




DISTINCTIVE TYPES OF CHRISTIANITY.


If unity be the character of truth, no generation was ever so far gone
in errors as our own: nor is the weariness surprising, with which
statesmen and philosophers turn away from the Babel of Divinity, and, in
despair of scaling the heavens, apply themselves to found and adorn the
politics of this world. But the confusion of tongues is too positive and
obtrusive a fact to be escaped by mere retreat: it bids defiance to
polite evasion: it pursues life into every public place and private
haunt; invades the home, the school, the college, the court, the
legislature; and, besides the problems which it fails to solve,
constitutes in itself a new one, not undeserving the closest study and
reflection. To the believers in doctrinal finality, who imagine the
whole sacred economy to be settled by a documentary revelation, the
reopening of every question, down to the very basis of religious faith,
must be an appalling phenomenon, charging either failure on the presumed
designs of God or a traitorous perversity on even the most gifted and
upright of men. And not a whit better is the conclusion of a conceited
illuminism, which, either boldly recalling the human mind to the
sciences of induction, despises all faith as false alike; or, conscious
at least of its own incompetency, pleases itself with a more indulgent
scepticism, and accepts them all as true. If no better revenge can be
taken on pious dogmatism than by falling into the cant of an eclectic
neutrality or an impious despair, there is little encouragement for any
high-minded man to take part against the bigotries of the present on
behalf of sickly negations in the future. The world is better left in
the hands of the poorest interpreter of Paul, and most degenerate heirs
of Augustine and Pascal, than transferred to the dialectic of Proclus or
the materialism of the living "_Fondateur de la Religion de
l'Humanité_."[1] There are those, however, who deny that we are left to
any such alternative; who cannot conceive that human aspirations after
divine reality shall for ever pine and sigh in vain; who contend that
objective truth in reference to morals and religion is attainable, and
has been largely attained;--and who, accordingly, despairing of neither
philosophy nor Christianity, require only the free intercommunion of the
two to appreciate the contradictions of the present without foregoing
the hope of greater unity in the future. The controversies of the hour
are but ill understood by one who remains enclosed within them, and
judges them only on their own assumptions. Like a village brawl, which,
with only the sound of vulgar noise, may be the ripe fruit of oppression
and the germ of revolution, they have an assigned place in the unfolding
of modern civilization; and not till their place is computed in the life
of the human race, and the law which brings them up in our age is
observed, can their real significance be apprehended, and all anger at
their clamorous littleness be lost in hope of their ulterior issues.
Regarded from this higher point, the surface of religious belief in
England, at first sight a mere troubled fermentation of struggling
elements, betrays some organic principle of order, and many salient
points of promise.

We hazard no theory of religion in saying that there is a natural
correspondence between the genius of a people and the form of their
belief. Each mood of mind brings its own wants and aspirations, colors
its own ideal, and interprets best that part of life and the universe
with which it is in sympathy. John Knox would have been misplaced in
Athens, and Tanler could not have lived on the moralism of Kant. No
doubt the ultimate seat of human faith lies deep down below the special
propensities of individuals or tribes,--in a consciousness and faculty
common to the race. But ere it comes to the surface, and disengages
itself in a concrete shape, its type and color will be affected by the
strata of thought and feeling through which it emerges into the light.
Without pretending to an exhaustive classification, we find four chief
temperaments of mind expressed in the theologies and scepticisms of
civilized Europe: the quest of physical _order_, the sense of _right_,
the instinct of _beauty_, and the consciousness of tempestuous
_impulses_ carrying the will off its feet. Variously blended in the
characters of average persons, these tendencies are liable to separate
their intensities, and severally dominate almost alone in minds of great
force and periods of special action or reaction. Were each left to
itself to form its own unaided creed, the doctrine of mere Science would
be _atheistic_; of Conscience, _theistic_; of Art, _pantheistic_; of
Passion, _sacrificial_. The evidence of this distribution of tendencies
is equally conclusive, whether we look to its rational ground or to its
historical exemplification; and a few words on each head will suffice to
clear and justify it.

Notwithstanding some occasional attempts to exhibit natural theology as
a necessary extension of natural philosophy, it is plain that the
maxims, which are ultimate for physical Science, stop short of contact
with Religion; that the final appeal of the two is carried to different
faculties; and that the scope and sphere of the one may be complete
without borrowing any conception from the other. The assumption, for
instance, that "we can know nothing but _phenomena_," directly excludes
all permanent and eternal Being as the possible object of rational
thought. And as "phenomena" are apprehensible only by the _observing_
faculties, whatever refuses to put in an appearance in _their_ court is
nonsuited as an unreality. And again, physical knowledge has
accomplished its aim, as soon as it can predict all the successions that
lie within its field of time and space; and nowhere in this system of
series, nor in the calculated forces which yield it to the view, does
any divine _Person_ look in upon the mind. Whoever, by the restraints of
a hypothetical necessity, detains his intellect _within_ nature, debars
himself _ipso facto_ from any faith that _transcends_ nature, and
recognizes no reserve of _super_natural possibilities, hidden in a Mind
of which the actual universe is but the finite expression. We do not, of
course, intend to affirm that scientific culture cannot coexist with
religious belief;--so preposterous an assertion would be confuted by a
manifold experience;--but only that, where the canons of inductive
knowledge are invested with unconditional universality, and are
logically carried out as valid for all thought, they shut the door upon
the sources of faith. It is the old battle, of which history supplies
such abundant illustration; which brought Parmenides and Protagoras upon
the lists at opposite ends on the field of philosophy; which Bacon
profoundly avoided by assigning separate empires, without common
boundary, to science and religion; but which his modern disciples have
rashly renewed, by invading the realm left sacred by him. Uneasy
relations have always subsisted in Christendom between the investigators
of nature and the trustees of the faith: the men of science rarely
quitting, unless for signs of unequivocal aversion, the attitude of
polite indifference to the Church; and in their turn watched with the
jealous eye of sacerdotal vigilance. It is no untrue instinct that has
hitherto maintained them in this posture of mutual suspicion: to
exchange which for a hearty and intelligent reverence for each other is
an achievement reserved for a higher philosophy than we yet possess.

As Science pays homage to the _force of nature_, so Conscience
enthrones the _law of right_. The conscious subject of moral
obligation feels himself under a rule neither self-imposed and
fictitious, nor foreign and coercive;--neither a home invention nor an
outward necessity;--a rule invisible, authoritative, awful; carrying
with it an _alternative_ irreducible to the linear dynamics of the
physical world; incapable of being felt but by a free mind, or of
being given but by another. He is aware that his will follows a call
of duty not at all as his body adapts itself to the force of
gravitation; and as within him the conscientious obedience wholly
differs from the corporeal, so in the universe of realities beyond him
does the moral legislation differ from the natural, and express the
will of a person, not a mere constitution of things. No ethical
conceptions are possible at all,--except as floating shreds of
unattached thought,--without a religious background; and the sense of
responsibility, the agony of shame, the inner reverence for justice,
first find their meaning and vindication in a supreme holiness that
rules the world. Nor can any one be penetrated with the distinction
between right and wrong, without recognizing it as valid for all free
beings, and incapable of local or arbitrary change. His feeling
insists on its permanent recognition and omnipresent sway; and this
unity in the Moral Law carries him to the unity of the Divine
Legislator. Theism is thus the indispensable postulate of
conscience,--its objective counterpart and justification, without
which its inspirations would be illusions, and its veracities
themselves a lie. To adduce historical proofs of this conjunction is
at once difficult and superfluous in a world whose theism is almost
all of one stock. But it will not be forgotten that Socrates, in whom
Greek religion culminated, avowedly based his reform on the
substitution of moral for physical studies. It is undeniable too that,
in spite of their fatalism, the monotheistic Mohammedans have been
surpassed by few nations in their sense of truth and fidelity; and
that wherever the same type of belief has been approached by Christian
sects, the heresy has been said to arise from an exaggerated estimate
of the moral law.

Art, we have said, is _pantheistic_. Its aim, often unconsciously
present, is to read off the _expressiveness_ of things, and find what
it is which they would speak with their silent look. To its
perceptions, form, color, sound, motion, have a soul within them whose
life and activity they represent: and even language, by flinging
itself into the mould of rhythm and music, acquires, beyond its
logical significance, a second meaning for the affections. As if waked
up and tingling beneath the artist's loving gaze, matter lies dull
and dead no more; opens on him a responding eye; communes with him
from its steadfast brow; and becomes instinct with grace or majesty.
Instead of being the drag-weight and opposite of spiritual energies,
it becomes to him their pliant medium, the docile clay for the shapes
of finest thought, the brilliant palette for the spread of inmost
feeling. He melts the barrier away that hides from mere sense and
intellect the interior sentiment--the formative idea--of all visible
things; and his glance of sympathy changes them not less than a burst
of amber sunrise changes a leaden landscape and picks out the freshest
smiles. Thus he finds himself in a _living_ universe, ever striving to
show him a divine beauty that lurks within and presses to the surface;
and he stands before a curtain only half opaque, watching the lights
and shadows thrown on it from behind by the ceaseless play of infinite
thought. Not that the interpretation is by any means self-evident, or
accessible except to the apprehensive instinct of sympathy. For it
seems as though no form of being, no object in creation, could ever
represent completely its own type: something is lost from its
perfection in the realization; and the actual, falling short of the
ideal, can give it only to one for whom a hint suffices. This
conception of the world as an incarnate divineness does not, we are
well aware, amount to pantheism, unless it become all-comprehensive,
so as to take in not simply physical nature, but the human life and
will; and there are numbers who are saved from this extreme, either by
knowing where to draw the lines of philosophical distinction, or by
the natural force of _moral_ conviction restraining the absolutism of
imagination. But so far forth as the tendency operates, it substitutes
for the theistic reverence for a Holy _Will_ the pantheistic
recognition of a Creative _Beauty_, and presents God to the mind less
as the prototype of Conscience than as the apotheosis of Genius. The
spontaneity of poetic action is supposed to illustrate His procedure
better than the preferential decisions of the moral sentiment; and the
genesis of whatever is good and fair is referred not so much to
deliberate plan as to the eternal interfusion and circulation,
through the great whole, of a Divine Essence, which flings off the
universe and its history as a mere natural language. That this is the
religion of art, is proved by the literature of every creative period,
Greek, Italian, or Teutonic; and negatively by the comparative absence
of artistic feeling and production in ages and nations that have most
intensified at once the Unity and the Personality of God. Beauty was
the Bible of Athens; and Plato, its devoutest and most comprehensive
expounder, shows everywhere, in his metaphysics, his morals, and his
myths, the mould into which its faith inevitably falls.

In _passionate and impulsive_ natures there is a self-contradiction
which makes their religious tendency peculiarly difficult to describe.
They are not less conscious than others of moral distinctions, and own
the sacred authority of the better invitation over the worse. Indeed,
when surprised into a fall, their remorse shares the vehemence of all
their emotions, and from the black shadow in which they sit, the
sanctity of the law which they have violated looks ineffably bright;
and they speak of its holy requirements, and of the infinite purity of
the Divine Legislator, in such fervid tone, that whatever else they
may endanger, the perfection of God's character, you feel assured, and
the obligations of human morality, are secure of reverential
maintenance. Yet the truth is precisely the reverse. At the very
moment that the law of duty is thus loftily extolled, it is on the
point of total subversion; lifted to a height precarious and unreal,
it overbalances on the other side and disappears. For the very same
stormy intensity which makes these men strong to feel the claim of
good, makes them weak to obey it. Their personality wants solidity;
and an atmosphere of tempestuous affections sweeps over it like a
hurricane on water. They can do nothing from out of their own
resolves, and are for ever drawn or driven from the fortress they were
not to surrender. What remains for them, solicited thus by forces
which are an overmatch for their just self-reliance? Is it surprising
that they no sooner confess how they _ought_ to obey, than they
declare that they _cannot_ obey? The thing is a contradiction; but it
all the better for this expresses what _they_ are: with their centre
of gravity in the wrong place, they cannot but hold the truth in
unstable equilibrium. Repose on contradiction is, however, impossible;
and the necessary result of these co-existent feelings of obligation
and incapacity is a _substitute_ for obedience. The resort to
_sacrifice_ which thus arose expressed no more, prior to the Christian
era, than the sentiment, "Take this, O Lord, 't is all I have to
give"; and afforded but a fictitious relief to the laboring spirit. It
acknowledged and attested the incompetency of the will, but made no
use of the excess of the emotions. It was the Pauline doctrine of
faith which first turned this great power to account; and virtually
said, "Are you in slavery because you cannot manage your affections?
turn their trust and enthusiasm on Christ in heaven, and let them
_manage_ you, and you shall be free." The soul that falls in love with
immortal goodness rises above the region of ineffectual strife, and
spontaneously offers what could never be extorted from the will by the
lash of self-mortifying resolve. This is the truth which underlies the
sacrificial doctrine in Christian times,--_the emancipating power of
great trusts and high inspirations_; and its very nature indicates its
birth from impassioned temperaments, and its affinity with their
special wants. The vicarious sacrifice is a mere plea, an ideal point
of attraction, for a profound allegiance of heart; which minds of this
class would hardly yield without an intense appeal to their
_gratitude_; but which, if really awakened by a clear and tranquil
moral reverence, would no less triumph over the gravitation of self.
The one needful condition for the redemption of these natures is the
objective presence and action upon them of a divine person to lift
them clear out of themselves, and render back on the healing breath of
trust the strength that only pants itself away in feverish effort.
Every doctrine of sacrifice necessarily contradicts its own premises;
because for guilt, which is personal and inalienable, it offers a
compensation which is foreign, and meets a moral ill with an unmoral
remedy. True and sound as a mere confession of weakness, it runs off
from that point into mere confusion and morbidness. But add to it the
doctrine of faith, and it acquires its proper complement; balances its
human disclaimer with a divine resource; and instead of sending its
captive through dark labyrinths of vain experiment, opens a direct way
from the chambers of humiliation to the prophet's watch-tower of
prayer and vision. Without this complement, the doctrine created
priesthoods; with it, destroys them. Without it, men are caught up in
their moments of helplessness, and handed over to ritual quackeries;
with it, they are seized in their hour of inspiration, and flung into
the arms of God. The susceptibility for either treatment depends on
the predominance of impulse and passion over breadth of imagination
and strength of will. In short, there are minds whose power is shed,
if we may say so, in _pro_tension, precipitated forwards in narrow
channels with impetuous torrent. There are others whose affluence is
in _ex_tension, and spreads out like a still lake to drink in light
from the open sky, and reflect the look of wide-encircling hills. And
there are others yet again, whose character is _in_tension, and that
move on in full volume, and with steady stream of tendency, rising and
falling little with the seasons, and holding to the limits within
which they are to go. The faith of the first is _sacrificial_; of the
second, _pantheistic_; of the third, _theistic_.

Of the four cardinal tendencies we have named, the _scientific_ has
never been provided for within the interior of Christianity; whose
organic life and structure are complete without it. It remains,
therefore, sullenly on the outside, without renouncing at present its
atheistic propensions: and the part it has played, however important,
has been that of external check and antagonism, in the assertion of
neglected rights of knowledge, and slighted interests of mankind. This
cannot possibly continue for ever; nor is it at all consistent with
experience to suppose, that either of the opponent influences will
obtain a victory over the other. Their reconcilement, through the
mediation and within the compass of some third and more comprehensive
conception, is a task remaining for the philosophy and charity of the
future. We feel no doubt that it will be accomplished; and will spare us
that revolutionary extermination of theology and metaphysics which is
proclaimed, on behalf of positive science, by the self-appointed
Committee of the "République Occidentale." The other three tendencies
early worked their way into the Christian religion, and vindicated a
place within its organism. Indeed, the historical genesis of the
Catholic Church consists of little else, on the inner side of dogma and
ethics, than the successive and successful self-assertion of each of
these principles; and, on the outer side of ecclesiastical polity, than
the construction of a social framework which held them in co-existence
till the sixteenth century. The genius of three distinct peoples
conspired to fill up the measure of the early faith; and each brought
with it a separate constituent. The Hebrew believer contributed his
theistic conscience; the Hellenic, his pantheistic speculation; the
Romanic, his passionate appropriation of redemption by faith. The
elements were, from the first, mixed and struggling together; so that
the phenomena of no period, probably of no place, serve to show them
disengaged from one another and insulated. But the Ebionitish period,
with its rigorous monachism, its historical and human Christ, its
scrupulous asceticism, its sternness against wealth, represents the
_ethical_ principle in its excess. The Logos idea, and indeed the whole
development of the Trinitarian doctrine, exhibits the effort of the
_Greek_ thought to obtain recognition, and qualify the Judaic. And the
_Augustinian_ theology, pleading the wants of fervid natures, on whose
surface the web of moral doctrines alights only to be shrivelled and
disappear, completes the triad of agencies from whose confluence the
faith of Christendom arose. In the Catholic system the three ingredients
unite in one composite result; and hence the tenacity with which that
system keeps possession of the most various types of human character,
and, baffled by the spirit of one age, returns with the reaction of
another. The ethical feeling finds satisfaction in its theory of human
nature; the pantheistic, in its scheme of supernatural grace; the
sacrificial, in its conditions of redemption. Through the realism of
the mediæval schools, its eucharistic doctrine, which is only the
theological side of that philosophical conception, becomes a direct
transfusion of Hellenic influence into the Church. And its faith in
perpetual inspiration, in the unbroken chain of physical miracle, in the
ceaseless mingling of sacramental mystery with the very substance of
this world, so far softens and diffuses the concentrated personality of
the Divine Essence, as to indulge the free fancy of art. Nor can we deny
the same capacity of beauty to its hierarchy of holy natures,--from the
village saint, through the heavenly angels, to the Son of God,--all
blended in living sympathies that cross and recross the barriers of
worlds. This comprehensive adaptation to the exigencies of mankind is a
reasonable object of admiration. But nothing can be more absurd than the
appeal to it in proof either of preternatural guidance, or of human
artifice, in the constitutive process of the Roman Church. There is
nothing very surprising in the fact, that a system which is the product
of three factors should contain them all. No doubt if these factors are,
as we contend, primary and indestructible features of our unperverted
nature, no religion can be divine and completely true which refuses to
take any of them up; and this _one_ condition of the future faith we may
learn from the Christendom of the past. The condition, however, must be
satisfied otherwise than by the strange congeries of profound truths and
puerile fancies which is dignified by the name of "Catholic doctrine."

For, be it observed, this system has no intrinsic and necessary unity,
which would hold it together when abandoned to the free action of the
mind, whose requirements it is said to meet. It has something for
conscience, something for art, something for passion, each in its
turn; but it is not a whole that can satisfy all together. Its
contents, gathered by successive experiences, cohere through the
external grasp of a sacerdotal corporation; and if that hand be
paralyzed or relaxed, it becomes evident at once how little they have
grown together. Hence the phenomena of the sixteenth century, whose
revolt was the expression, not of theological dissent, but of
ecclesiastical disgust; and in which doctrine only accidentally fell
to pieces, because the authority that guarded and wielded it became
too rotten to be believed in. The secondary revolution, however, was
incomparably more momentous than the primary. The treasured seeds that
dropped from the shattered casket of the Church had to germinate again
in the fresh soil of the richer European mind; and the great year of
their development is still upon its round. The outward dictation of
the Apostolic See being discarded, it became necessary to find another
clew to divine truth; and the inner wants of the human soul and the
passing age came into play, with no restraint within the ample scope
of Scripture. A reconstitution of Christianity began,--on the basis,
no doubt, of materials already accumulated,--more eclectic, therefore,
and less creative, than in the infancy of the religion; but
proceeding, nevertheless, by the same law, and commencing a similar
cycle. The _order_ of development in this second life of Christendom
has not been the same as in the first; but the stages, though
transposed, do not differ taken one by one. It is only this,--that
whilst in the formation of the faith the dominant influences were
Conscience, Art, and Passion, in its Re-formation they are Passion,
Conscience, Art. At the moment when Luther shattered the fabric of
pretended unity, and compelled the husk to shed its kernels, the
season and the field were unfavorable to two out of the three, and
they lay dormant till more genial times. The _moral_ element had been
discredited by the casuistry of the confessional, the "treasure of the
Church," and the trade in meritorious works; and, decked in these vile
trappings, was flung away in generous disgust. The _æsthetic_ element
had become so paganized in Italy, and was so identified with the
reproduction of the very tastes and vices, the thought and style, nay,
even the mythology itself, which the primitive religion had expelled
as the work of demons, that the new piety shrank from it, and let it
alone. In an age when episcopates were won by an ear for hexameters or
a Ciceronian Latinity, when priests defended materialism in Tusculan
disputations, when popes frequented the comic theatre and Plautus was
acted in the Vatican, when the proceeds of a purgatorial traffic were
spent in destroying ancient basilicas and raising heathenish temples
over the sepulchres of saints, it was inevitable that beauty should
become suspected by sanctity. There remained, yet unspoiled by the
adoption of a corrupt generation, the _impetuous_ devotion and
tremendous theory of Augustine; and this, accordingly, was the
direction in which the whole early Reformation advanced. It was not
the accident that Luther was an Augustinian monk, which determined the
character of his movement. The sickened soul of Europe could breathe
no other air. Emaciated with the mockery of spiritual aliment,
revolting at the chopped straw and apples of Sodom that had been given
for fruit from the tree of life, it sighed for escape from this
choking discipline into some region fresh with the mountain breath of
faith and love, and not quite barren of "angels' food." The burdened
moral sense, so long deluded and abused, reduced to self-conscious
dotage by vain penances and vainer promises, flung away all belief in
itself, asked leave to lay its freedom down, and went into captivity
to Christ. So exclusively did the feeling of the time flow into this
channel, that no doctrine which had an ethical groundwork, or
attempted to soften in the least the implacable hostility of nature
and grace, obtained any success; while every enthusiastic excess of
the anti-catholic ideas spread like wildfire. The irreproachable
innocence and piety of the Salzburg _Gärtner-brüder_ did nothing to
save them from quick martyrdom to their Ebionitish faith; while the
atrocities and ravings of the Anabaptists of Münster scarcely sufficed
to stop the triumph of their hideous kingdom of the saints. The
movement of the brave Zwingli, earlier and more moderate than either
Luther's or Calvin's, was easily restrained by them within the
narrowest range, whilst the Genevan Reformer, cautious and ungenial,
had but to collect his logical fuel, and kindle the terrible fire of
his dogma, and it spread from the icy chambers of his own nature and
wrapt whole kingdoms in its flames. That men without passion or
pathos themselves, who do their work by force of intellect and will,
should be successful disseminators of a doctrine that can live in no
cool air, only shows how wide was the preparation of mind, and how the
coming of this time fulfilled the long desire of nations.

The first stage, then, of the new development of Christianity was its
_Puritan_ period. The natural perdition of man, the radical corruption
of his will, the religious indifference of all his states and actions,
and the consequent worthlessness of his morality, except for civil
uses and social police, constitute the fundamental assumptions of the
system. From this basis of despair its doctrine of atonement comes to
the rescue. The obedience of Christ is accepted in place of that which
men cannot render, and his sacrifice instead of the penalty they
deserve. Not, however, for all, but for those alone who may
appropriate the deliverance by an act of faith, and present the merits
of Christ as their offering to God, with full assurance of their
sufficiency. Nothing but a divine and involuntary conversion can
generate this faith, which follows no predisposition from the
antecedent life, but the inscrutable decree of Heaven. Once
transferred from the state of nature into that of grace, the disciple
becomes, through the Holy Spirit, a new creature; is conscious of a
sacred revolution in his tastes and affections; gives evidence of this
by good works, which, now purified in their principle, are no longer
unacceptable to God; and knows that, though he is still liable to the
sins, he is redeemed from the penalties, of a son of Adam. The Church
is the body of the converted, and while the Sacrament of Baptism
initiates the candidate, and provisionally secures him, the Communion
seals his adoption afterwards; the efficacy of both being conditional
on the inner faith of the participant. The intense and unmediated
antithesis of nature and grace, and the gulf, impassable except by
miracle, between their two spheres, may be regarded as the most
characteristic feature of this scheme. Its text-book contains the
Pauline Epistles, and opens most readily at the Romans or Galatians;
and its favorite writers are Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards.
With vast internal differences in their particular conceptions of
Christian truth and of ecclesiastical government, the so-called
Evangelical sects retain the impress of their common origin in the
dearth of any ethical or æsthetic element in their religion.

From this alone must have resulted the fact which a plurality of
causes has concurred in producing; viz. that the Reformation soon
(within a century and a half) reached its apparent limit of extent,
and propagated itself only internally by further evolutions of
thought. It had taken up and exhausted the class of minds to which it
was specially adapted; and after appropriating these, found itself
arrested. Under the impulse of a newly-awakened piety men are disposed
to feel that they cannot attribute too much to God; and there will
always be large numbers who, from the absorbing intensity of religious
sentiment, or the dominance of predestinarian theory, or the ill
balance of partial cultivation, abdicate all personal power of good in
favor of irreversible decrees. But as the tension relaxes or the
culture enlarges, the moral instincts reassert their existence; and
the monstrous distortions incident to any theory which denies their
authority become too repulsive to be borne. Hence a reaction, in which
the natural conscience takes the lead, and insists on obtaining that
reconciliation with God which has already been conquered for the
affections. Men in whom the sense of right and wrong is deep cannot
divest themselves of reverence for it as authoritative and divine; nor
can they truly profess that it is to them an empty voice, which,
venerable as it sounds, they are never able to obey. They know what a
difference it makes to them, in the whole peace and power of their
being, whether they are faithful or whether they are false; that this
difference belongs alike to their state of nature and their state of
grace; that it is as little possible to withhold admiration from the
magnanimity of the Pagan Socrates as from that of the Christian Paul;
and that the sentiment which compels homage to both is the same that
looks up with trust and worship to the justice and holiness of God:
how, then, can they consent to draw an unreal line of impassable
separation between ethical qualities before conversion and the very
same qualities after, and abrogate in the one case the moral
distinctions which become valid in the other? The two lives,--of earth
and heaven; the two minds,--human and divine; the two states,--nature
and grace; which it is the impulse of enthusiasm to contrast, it is
the necessity of conscience to unite. When Luther first blew up the
sacerdotal bridge which had given a path across to the steps of
centuries, the boldness of the deed and the inspiration of the time
lightened the feet of men, and enabled them to spring over with him on
the wing of faith. But when the van had passed, and the more equable
and disciplined ranks of another generation were brought to the brink,
there seemed a needless rashness in the attempt, and foundations were
discovered for a structure based on the rock of nature, and making one
province of both worlds. Even Melancthon, long as he yielded to his
leader's more powerful will, could not permanently acquiesce in the
complete extinction of human responsibility; and vindicated for the
soul a voluntary co-operation with divine grace. This semi-Pelagian
example rapidly spread; first among the later Lutherans, especially of
Brunswick and Hanover; next into the school of Leyden; and finally
into the Church and universities of England. Quick to seize the
reaction in the temper of the times, the Jesuits put themselves at the
head of the same tendency in their own communion; defended against the
Jansenists a doctrine of free-will beyond even the limits of Catholic
orthodoxy; upheld Molina against Augustine, as among the Protestants
Episcopius was gaining upon Calvin. Among patriotic theologians the
authority of the Latin Church gave way in favor of the early Christian
apologists and Greek Fathers, who knew nothing of the scheme of
decrees. Divinity, under the guidance of More and Cudworth, no longer
disdained to replenish her oil and revive her flame from the lamp of
Athenian philosophy. And the conception of a universal natural law was
elaborately worked out by Grotius. As the sixteenth century was the
period of dogmatic theology, the seventeenth was that of ethical
philosophy; the whole modern history of which lies mainly within that
limit and half a century lower; and conclusively attests the decline
of a scheme of belief incompatible with the very existence of such a
science. When the Protestantism which had produced a Farel, a Beza,
and a Whitgift, offered as its representatives Locke and Limborch,
Tillotson and Butler, the nature of the change which had come over it
declares itself. It was the revolt of moral sentiment against a
doctrine that outraged it,--the re-development, under new conditions,
of the ethical principle which had fallen neglected from the broken
seed-vessel of the Catholic faith.

The second season of the Reformation, though treated now with
unmerited disparagement, was not less worthy of admiration than the
first. High-Churchmen may be ashamed of an archbishop who proposed a
scheme of comprehension; Evangelicals, of a preacher who applauded the
Socinians; and Coleridgians, of a theologian who was no deeper in
metaphysics than the "Grotian divines"; but neither the Erastianism,
the charity, nor the common sense of a Tillotson would be at all
unsuitable at this moment to a church openly torn by dissensions and
really held together only by dependence on the state. It has been a
current opinion, perseveringly propagated by adherents of the Geneva
theology, that the spread of Arminian sentiments was equivalent to a
religious decline, and concurrent with the growth of a worldly laxity
and selfish indifference of character. The allegation is absolutely
false. In literature, in personal characteristics, and in public life,
the Latitude-men and their associates in belief bear honorable
comparison with their more rigorous forerunners. There is not only
less of passionate intolerance, but a nobler freedom from an equivocal
prudence, in the great writers of the second period, than in the
Reformers of the first: and there is more to touch the springs of
disinterestedness and elevation of mind in Cudworth and Clarke than in
Calvin and Beza. Nor did the return of ethical theory weaken the
sources of religious action. The very enterprises in which evangelical
zeal most rejoices,--missions to the heathen, and the diffusion of
the Scriptures,--were not only prosecuted but set on foot in new
directions and with more powerful instrumentalities, in the very midst
of this period, and by the very labors of its most distinguished
philosophers. The Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge,
and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,
were both born with the eighteenth century; and while the latter
addressed itself to the natives and slaves of the American provinces,
the former first made the Scriptures known on the Coromandel coast. It
was Boyle who, of all men of his age, displayed the most generous zeal
for the multiplication of the sacred writings, himself procuring their
translation into four or five languages. For thirty years he was
governor of a missionary corporation. Yet the complexion of his
theology is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he bought up
Pococke's Arabic translation of Grotius (De Veritate Christianæ
Religionis), and was at the cost of its wide distribution in the East.
And who that has ever read it can forget Swift's letter to the Irish
viceroy (Lord Carteret), introducing Bishop Berkeley (then Dean of
Derry), and his project for resigning his preferment at home in order
that, on a stipend of £100 a year, he might devote himself to the
conversion of the American Indians? The imperturbable patience with
which the good Dean prosecuted his object, the self-devotion with
which he embarked in it his property and life, the gratefulness with
which he accepted from the government the promise of a grant, and the
treachery which broke the promise, and after seven years compelled his
return, make up a story unrivalled for its contrast of saintly
simplicity and ministerial bad faith. These and similar features of
the time superfluously refute the arbitrary and arrogant assumption,
that no piety can be living and profound except that which disbelieves
all natural religion, no gospel holy which does not renounce the moral
law, no faith prolific in works unless it begins with despising them.

There was, however, still a defect in this gospel of conscience.
Regarding the world and life as the object of a divine administration,
and seeking to interpret them by a scheme of final causes, it was wholly
occupied with the conception of God as proposing to himself certain
ends, and arranging the means for their accomplishment. In this light He
is a Being with moral preconceptions and an economy for bringing them to
pass. Everything is for a purpose, and subsists for the sake of what is
ulterior, and forms part of a mechanism working out a prescribed
problem. The tendency of this way of thinking will inevitably be, to
hunt for providences. These the narrow mind will place in the incidents
of individual life; the comprehensive intellect, in the laws and
relations of the universe; not perhaps in either case without some
danger from human egotism of referring too much to the good and ill
which is relative to man. The infinite perfections of God will be
concentrated, so to speak, too much in the notion of His WILL, and the
powers which subserve its designs; and will in consequence be as much
misapprehended as would be our own nature by an observer assuming that
we put forth all its life and phenomena _on purpose_. Indeed, the
exclusive and unbalanced ascendency of the moral faculty tempts a man to
fancy this sort of existence the only right one for himself; to suspect
every flow of unwatched feeling, and call himself to account for the
burst of ringing laughter, or the surprise of sudden tears, and aim at
an autocratic command of his own soul. It is not wonderful that his
ideal of human character should reappear in his representation of the
Divine. The error deforms his faith as much as it tends to stiffen and
constrict his life. Leading him always to ask what a thing is _for_, it
hinders him from seeing what it _is_; in search of the _motive_, he
misses the _look_; and his interest in it being transitive, he sinks
into it with no sympathy on its own account. This is only to say, in
other words, that his prepossession detains him from the _artistic_
contemplation of objects and events; for while it is the business of
science to inquire their _origination_, and of morals to follow their
_drift_, it remains for art to appreciate their _nature_. To feel the
type of thought which they express, to recognize the idea which they
invest with form, the mind must rest upon them, not as products or as
instruments, but as realities; and their significance must not be
imposed upon them, but read off from them. The meaning which art detects
in life and the world is not a purpose, but a sentiment; in its view the
present attitudes and development of things are rather the out-coming of
an inner feeling than the tools of a remoter end. To find room for this
mode of conception something must be added to the ethical representation
of God. He must be regarded as not always and throughout engaged in
processes of intention and volition, but as having, around this moral
centre, an infinite atmosphere of creative thought and affection, which,
like the native inspirations of a pure and sublime human soul,
spontaneously flow out in forms of beauty, and movements of rhythm, and
a thousand aspects of divine expression. Religion demands the admission
of this free element: and without it, will cease to speak home to men of
susceptible genius and poetic nature, and must limit itself more and
more to the fanatical minds that have too little regulation, and the
moral that have too much. A God who offers terms of communion only to
the passionate and to the conscientious, will not touch the springs of
worship in perceptive and meditative men. _Their_ prayer is less to know
the published rules than to overhear the lonely whispers of the Eternal
Mind, to be at one with His immediate life in the universe, and to shape
or sing into articulate utterance the silent inspirations of which all
existence is full. Their peculiar faculties supply them with other
interests than about their sins, their salvation, and their conscience;
they feel neither sufficiently guilty, nor sufficiently anxious to be
good, to make a religion out of the one consciousness or the other; but
if, indeed, it be God that flashes on them in so many lights of solemn
beauty from the face of common things, that wipes off sometimes the
steams of custom from the window of the soul, and surprises it with a
presence of tenderness and mystery,--if the tension of creative thought
in themselves, which can rest in nothing imperfect, yet realize nothing
perfect, be an unconscious aspiration towards Him,--then there is a way
of access to their inner faith, and a temple pavement on which they will
consent to kneel. It is, we believe, the inability of Protestantism, in
either of its previous forms, to meet this order of wants, that has
reduced it to its state of weakness and discredit; and the struggle of
thought, characteristic of the present century, is an unconscious
attempt to supply the defect, and to vindicate, for the third element of
Catholic Christianity, the possibility of development in the open air of
Protestant belief. The change began, like both of the earlier ones, in
Germany; and it was from Plato that Schleiermacher learned where the
weakness of Christian dogma lay, and in what field of thought he might
create a diversion from the disastrous assaults of French materialism,
and restore the balance of the fight. An Hellenic spirit was infused
into the scientific theology of the Continent, and has never ceased to
prevail there, though Aristotle has long succeeded to Plato as the
channel of influence. When Hegel, long the rival of Schleiermacher,
triumphed over him, not only in the coteries of Berlin, but in the
schools of Germany, he no doubt turned the philosophy which had been
invoked to preserve the faith into a dialectic, at whose magic touch it
deliquesced; and no one who has followed the application of his
principles to history and dogma can be surprised at the antipathy they
awaken in the Church. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the step
into Pantheism was made by Hegel, and that the opposing theologians
raised up by the great preacher of Berlin occupy in this respect any
different ground. Since the time of Jacobi theism proper has not been
heard of in Germany: the very writers who _mean_ to defend it, surrender
it in the disguise of their definition of personality; and so steeped is
the whole national mind in the colors of Hellenic thought, that from
Neander to Strauss can be found, in our deliberate judgment, only
different shades of the same pantheistic conception. What does this
denote but a universal sigh after a God, who shall be neither a Jehovah,
a Judaic αυτοκρατωρ, nor a redeeming _Deus ex machinâ_, supervening upon
the theatre of history, but a living and energizing Spirit, quickening
the very heart of to-day, and whispering round the dome of Herschel's
sky not less than in the third story of Paul's heaven? In some this
feeling breaks out in devilish defiance, as in the unhappy Heinrich
Heine's saying, "I am no child, I do not want a Heavenly Father any
more": in others it breathes out, as with Novalis, in a tender
mysticism, and is traceable by the reverent footfall and uncovered head
with which they pace, as in a cathedral, the solemn aisles of life and
nature. The expression of this tendency has passed into the literature
of our own language, and every year is tinging it more and more with its
characteristic hues. Emerson affords the purest and most unmixed
example; but perhaps the earlier writings of Carlyle,--before the divine
thirst had advanced so much into a human _rabies_,--and more especially
his _Sartor Resartus_, may be taken as the real gospel of this
sentiment. The intense operation of these essays, so entirely alien to
the traditions of English thought and taste, is an evidence of something
more than the genius of their authors: it is proof of a certain
combustible state of the English mind, prepared by drought and deadness
to burst into the flame of this new worship. This feeling, diffused
through the very air of the time, has unmistakably evinced its essential
identity with the instinct of art; in part, by a direct affluence and
excellence of production unknown to the preceding age, but still more,
in the wide extension of an appreciating love for the creations of
artistic genius. The melancholy prophets who see in this spreading
susceptibility only a morbid symptom of decadent civilization, are
misled, we hope, by imperfect historical parallels. The flower, no
doubt, both of Athenian and of Italian culture, was most brilliant just
before it drooped. But the soil which bore it, and the elements that
surrounded it, had no essential resemblance to the conditions of modern
English society, in which, above all, there are the unexhausted juices
of a moral faith and a strenuous habit, not stimulant perhaps of hasty
growth, but giving hardihood against the open air and the natural
seasons.

By the rules of technical theology, it may appear strange to reckon
the turn from theism to pantheism as a _third stage of the
Reformation_; as if it could be at all included in the interior
history of Christianity, instead of being treated as a direct
apostasy. And it is in reality a very serious question, whether,
without unfaithfulness to its essential character, the Christian
religion can domesticate within it this new action of thought, or must
from the first visit it with unqualified excommunication. On the one
hand, nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that a faith of
Hebrew origin, a faith whose very hypothesis is sin, and whose
aspiration is moral perfectness, can ever be reconciled with a
thorough-going pantheism. On the other hand, nothing can be more
gratuitous than to assume that the feeling which, on getting the whole
mind to itself, generates a pantheistic scheme, has _no_ legitimate
exercise, and gains its indulgence altogether at the expense of
Christian truth. If we mistake not, the pith of the matter lies in a
small compass. _Let Christian Theism keep Morals, and Pantheism may
have Nature._ This rule is no mere compromise or coalition of
incongruous elements, but is founded, we are convinced, on
distinctions real and eternal. So long as a holy will is left to God,
and a power committed to man, free to sustain relations of trust and
responsibility, room remains for all the conditions of Christianity,
and the field beyond may be open to the range of mystic perception,
and railed off for the sacrament of beauty. But whether this or any
other be the just partition of territory between the two claimants,
partition there must be, for the real truth of things must correspond,
not to the hypothesis of any single human faculty, but to harmonized
postulates of all. It is not surprising that, on its first re-birth,
the gospel of nature should deny the gospel of duty, or so take it up
into its own fine essence as to volatilize all its substance away.
This is but the natural revenge taken for past neglect, and the
needful challenge to future attention. Each one of the three
developments has in its turn run out beyond the limits of the
Christian faith, and yet, hitherto, each has established a place
within it. The Hegelian, or Emersonian, type of the third period is
but the corresponding phenomenon to the Antinomianism of the first,
and the Deism of the second. And as these have passed away, after
surrendering into the custody of Christendom the principles that gave
them strength, so will the Pantheism of to-day, when it has provided
for the safe-keeping of its charge, and seen the Church complete its
triad of Faith, Holiness, and Beauty.

This question, however, will be asked: If the Reformation only
repeats, with some transposition, the cycle of the primitive
development, how are we the better for having thus to do our work
again? Are we to end where the sixteenth century began, and to
reproduce the Catholicism which was then resolved into its elements?
And does some fatal necessity doom us to this wearisome periodicity?
Not in the least. However little the seeds may be able to transgress
the limits of species, and may remain indistinguishable from
millennium to millennium, the conditions of growth are so different as
practically to cancel the identity in the result. Taken even one by
one, the modern forms of doctrine are far nobler than their early
prototypes. The narrow Ebionitism of the original Church is not
comparable, as an expression of the conscience, with the moral
philosophy of Butler; and the Greek element of thought, flowing by
Berlin, has entered the Church in deeper channels than when
infiltrating through the theosophy of Alexandria. It is only in
relation to the passionate element that the doubt can be raised,
whether we have gained in truth and grandeur by passing the religion
of Augustine through the minds of the modern reformers; and whether
the Jansenists within the Church do not exhibit a higher phase of
character than the Huguenots without it. But at any rate, the modern
development, taken as a whole, is secure of an inner unity and
completeness which before has been unattained. It is an obvious, yet
little noticed, consequence of the invention of printing, that no one
mood of feeling or school of thought can tyrannize over a generation
of mankind, and sweep all before it, as of old; and then again, with
change in the intellectual season, rot utterly away, and give place to
a successor no less absolute. Generations and ages now live in
presence of each other; the impulse of the present is restrained by
the counsels of the past, and, in fighting for the throne of the human
mind, finds it not only strong in living prepossession, but guarded by
shadowy sentinels, encircled by a band of immortals. Hence the history
of ideas can never be again so wayward and fitful as it was in the
first centuries of our era; losing all interest at one period in the
questions which had maddened the preceding; for a time covered all
over with the pale haze of Byzantine metaphysics, and then suffused
with red heats of African enthusiasm. New truth can no longer forget
the old, and thrive wholly at its expense, or even make a compact with
it to take turn and turn about, but must find an organic relation with
it, so as to be its enlargement rather than its rival. The modern
moralist already understands Augustine better than did the old
Pelagians; "Evangelical" teachers begin to insist on Christian ethics;
and the increasing disposition, even in heterodox persons, to dwell on
the Incarnation as the central point of faith, shows how credible and
welcome becomes the notion of the union of human with divine, and of
the moral manifestation of God in the life and soul of man. The time,
we trust, is gone, for the merely linear advancement of the European
mind, with all its action and reaction propagated downwards, and
wasting centuries on phenomena that might co-exist. Henceforth it may
open out in all dimensions at once, and fill, as its own for ever, the
whole space of true thought into which its past increments have borne
it. Sects, no doubt, and schools, will continue to arise on the
outskirts of the intellectual realm, possessed by partial
inspirations; but the world's centre of gravity will be more and more
occupied by minds that can at once balance and retain these marginal
excesses, that can round off the sphere by inner force of reason, and,
dispensing with the outer mould of sacerdotal compression, let the
tides flow free, and the winds blow strong, without alarm for the
eternal harmony. This is the form in which nature will restore, and
God approve, a Catholic consent.

The idea we have endeavored to give of the genesis of Christian
doctrine, and the law of its vicissitudes, is offered only as
conveniently distributing the subjective sources of faith. It cannot
be applied to the phenomena of particular countries apart from ample
historical knowledge of the concurrent social and political
conditions, without which the most accurate clews to the natural
history of _thought_ can only mislead as the interpreter of concrete
_events_. When, for instance, we look around us at home, and seek for
the English representatives of the several tendencies explained above,
we may, no doubt, find them here and there, but they are so far from
exhausting the facts of our time, that some of the most conspicuous
parties--as the Anglicans--seem provided with no place at all. The
obscurity first begins to clear away when we remember that in England
_Schism went before Reformation_. The aim of Henry VIII. was simply to
detach and nationalize the Church in his dominions; to give it insular
integrity instead of provincial dependence; and could this have been
done without meddling with the system of Catholic doctrine at all, the
scheme of faith would have been preserved entire. While Luther and the
Continental opponents of Rome were faithful to the idea of the unity
of Christendom, and were calling out for a general council to restore
it by a verdict on doubtful points of faith, the English monarch,
undisturbed by doubt or scruple, broke off from Rome, and destroyed
the traditions of centralization by taking the ecclesiastic
jurisdiction into his own hands and stopping its passage of the seas.
In the new movement of the time, England tended to become a petty
papacy, still unreformed; Europe sought a universal church reformed.
Neither aim admitted of realization. To repudiate the supreme pontiff,
and substitute a civil head, involved a fatal breach in the sacerdotal
system, and carried with it inevitable departures from the integrity
of Catholic dogma; so that reformation was found inseparable from
schism. And when no council, acknowledged as universal, was called to
give authoritative settlement, arrangements _ad interim_ became
consolidated, provisional rights grew into prescriptive; with the
spectacle of variety, and the taste of freedom, the idea of unity
faded away, till the co-existence of two churches within one land and
one Christendom passed into a necessity, and reformation proved
impossible without a schism. But, notwithstanding this partial
approximation of the English and the Continental movements, the traces
remain indelible that their point of departure was from opposite ends.
In its origin and earliest traditions, in the basis of its
constitution and worship, the Church of England has nothing whatever
to do with Protestantism; it is but the Westminster Catholic Church
instead of the Roman Catholic Church. Authoritative doctrine,
sacramental grace, sacerdotal mediation, are all retained; and
throughout the whole of Henry's reign, while the new laws were working
themselves into habits, the seven sacraments, the communion in one
kind, the Ave Maria, the invocation of saints, with the doctrines of
transubstantiation and purgatory, remained within the circle of
recognized orthodoxy. The impelling and regulative idea of the whole
change was that of a nationalization of Catholicism. This original
ascendency of the national over the theological feeling was never
lost; and though channels were more and more opened, through the
sympathies of exiles and the intercourse of scholars, for the infusion
of Continental notions, yet the form given to the Church rendered it
not very susceptible to the new learning; whose admission, so far as
it took place, was rather induced by political conception than made in
the interests of universal truth. The present Anglicans represent the
first type of the English _schism_; and the High Church in general
embodies the distinguishing _national_ sentiment of the Reformation in
this country, as compared with the _cosmopolitan_ character of the
Continental religious change. Doctrine is universal, administration
and jurisdiction are local. Where the former becomes the bond of
sympathy, as among the Evangelic Protestants, it unites men together
by ties that are irrespective of the limits of country, and
subordinates special patriotisms to the interests of a more
comprehensive fraternity. Where the latter become the objects of
zeal, a flavor of the soil mingles itself with the sentiments of
honor, and a peculiar loyalty concentrates itself on the inner circles
of duty, often with the narrowest capacity of diffusion beyond. Hence
the intensely _English_ feeling which has always prevailed among the
parochial--especially the rural--clergy of the Establishment, and the
people who form their congregations. They constitute the very core of
our insular society, and the retaining centre of our historical
characteristics. Their admirations, their prejudices, their virtues,
their ambitions, are all national. Their interest in dogma is not
intellectually active, or provocative of any proselyting zeal, and is
subservient to the practical aim of giving territorial action to the
religious institutions under their charge. Their dealings are less
with the individual's solitary soul, than with the several social
classes in their mutual relations; and to mediate between the gentry
and the poor, to keep in order the school, the workhouse, and the
village charities,--not forgetting the obligation to ward off
Methodists and voluntaries,[2]--constitute the approved circle of
clerical duties. Their very antipathies, unlike those of Protestant
zealots, are less theological than political; they hate Roman
Catholics chiefly as a sort of _foreigners_, who have no proper
business here, and Dissenters as a sort of _rebels_, who create
disturbance with their discontents; and were old England well rid of
them both, the heart of her citizenship, they believe, would be
sounder. They stand, indeed, in a curious position, pledged to hold a
proud Anglican isolation between two cosmopolitan interests,--the
Popish theocracy and the Evangelical dogma,--refusing obedience to
Rome, yet declining the alliance of foreign Protestants. Their enmity
to the Papal system is quite a different sentiment from that which
animates Exeter Hall; they do not deny the absolute legitimacy of the
elder corporation in general, but only its relative legitimacy _here_;
and Scottish ravings against it as "Babylon" and "Antichrist" offend
them more than the confessional and the mass. Twice in their
history--under the Stuarts and in our own day--have they seemed to
forget their destiny, and make overtures to the Vatican; in both
instances it was when Puritanism had threatened to take possession of
the Church, and reduce it to a federal member of an Evangelical
alliance; and if its separate integrity were in peril, they had rather
fling it back into the Apostolic monarchy, than enroll it in the
Genevan league. But the first real sight of danger from the Papal side
has dissipated this reactionary inclination, and rekindled the
instinct of local independence. Thus, in our Church, ideal interests
and purely religious conceptions have held the second place to a
predominating nationalism. The Church has embodied and handed down the
leading sentiment of the Tudor times; and though not guiltless of
share in many a Stuart treachery, and often cruel to the stiff-necked
recusant, has, on the whole, been true to the English feeling, that
the Pope was too great a priest, and Calvin too long a preacher.

The reason then is evident why the Church of England cannot be
referred to any of the heads of classification we have given; neither
coinciding with Romanism, nor exemplifying distinctively any of the
tendencies springing successively out of the disintegration of
Catholic dogma. It arose out of an ecclesiastical revolt; other
communions, out of a theological aspiration. Its original conception
involved no serious modification of belief, no invention or recovery
of strange usages, but a mere separation of the island branch from the
Roman stem, that it might strike root and be as a native tree of life.
The first alterations in doctrine were slight, and merely incidental
to this primary end: and the whole amount of change, instead of being
determined by the intellectual dictatorship of a Luther or a Calvin,
was the illogical result of social forces, seeking the equilibrium of
practical compromise. The phenomenon therefore which we observed in
the elder Church is repeated in this younger offshoot: the several
elements of faith co-exist (though in greatly spoiled proportions)
without unity or natural coherence; and the English Church, as the
depository of a creed, occupies no place in the history of the human
mind: its individual great men must be put here or there in the
records of thought, without regard to the accident of their
ecclesiastical position. The one real idea which has permanently
inspired its clergy and supporters is that of _nationalism in
religion_. To the time of the Restoration they _attempted_, since then
they have _pretended_, to represent the nation in its faith and
worship. Once, their aim appeared to be a noble possibility,
struggling still and unrealized, but unrefuted. Now, thousands of
Non-conformist chapels proclaim its meaning gone, and its language an
affectation and an insolence. The English Church has become an outer
reality without an inner idea.

In contrast with the _insular_ feeling predominant in the English
schism, we have placed the _cosmopolitan_ zeal of the foreign
Puritanism. With this, however, was combined the very opposite pole
of sentiment,--a certain _egoism_ and loneliness in religion, from
which have flowed some of the most important characteristics of
Protestantism. Having flung away, as miserable quackeries, the
hierarchical prescriptions for souls oppressed with sin, Luther fell
back upon an act of subjective faith in place of the Church's
objective works. For the corporation he substituted the individual:
whom he put in immediate, instead of mediate, relation with Christ and
God. The Catholic's unbloody sacrifice had no efficacy, no existence,
without the priest; the Lutheran's bloody sacrifice was a realized
historical fact, to be appropriated separately by every believer's
personal trust. It was not, therefore, the Church which, in its
corporate capacity, occupied the prior place, and held the deposit of
divine grace for distribution to its members; but it was the private
person that constituted the sacred unit, and a plurality of believers
supplied the factors of the Church. The grace which before could not
reach the individual except by transit through accredited officials,
now became directly accessible to each soul: and only after it had
been received by a sufficient number to form a society, did the
conditions of spiritual office and organization exist. This essential
dependence of the whole upon the parts, instead of the parts upon the
whole, is the most radical and powerful peculiarity of Protestantism.
A system which raises the individual to the primary place of religious
importance, places him nearest to the supernatural energy of God, and
makes him the living stone without which temple and altar cannot be
built, naturally draws to it minds of marked vigor, and trains men in
self-subsisting habits. By giving scope to the forces of private
character, it sets in action the real springs of healthy progress, and
happily with such intensity as to defy the checks it often seeks to
impose in later moods of repentant alarm. This emancipation of the
personal life from theocratic control, at first achieved in connection
with the doctrine of justification, was sure to present itself in
other forms. In its _spiritual_ application Protestant egoism assumes
the shape of reliance on _inner faith_; in its _political_, of
_voluntaryism_; in its _intellectual_, of free inquiry and _private
judgment_. These several directions may be taken separately or
together, but where, as in the Church of England, _not one_ of them is
unambiguously marked, the very principle of reformed Christianity is
unsecured, and Protestantism is present, not by charter, but by social
accident. Puritanism everywhere--conforming or nonconforming, English
or Continental--exhibits the first direction; "Evangelical" Dissenters
add the second; while Unitarians occupy the third,--not perhaps
completely, and not altogether exclusively, but characteristically
nevertheless. For it is impossible to unite the orthodox with the
intellectual egoism. So long as the _inner faith_, which is the
presumed condition of justification, includes a controverted doctrine,
like the scheme of Atonement, the need of faith imposes a limit on the
right of judgment: and you are only free to think till you show
symptoms of thinking wrong. But when the sacrificial Christianity has
passed into the ethical, and no other condition of harmony with God is
laid down than purity of affection and fidelity of will, then honest
thought can peril no salvation, and the devotion of the intellect to
truth and the heart to grace is a divided allegiance no more.

It was for some time doubtful how far this Protestant egoism was
likely to go. Luther was clear and positive that it was faith that
justified; and fetching this doctrine out of a deep personal
experience, he paid little respect to any one who contradicted it, and
regulated by it his first choice of religious authorities. Led by this
clew, he arrived at results strangely at variance with modern canons.
He neither accepted as a standard the whole Bible, nor at first
rejected the whole tradition of the Church; loosely attempting to
reserve the Augustinian authorities, and to repudiate the Dominican.
When he had renounced altogether the appeal to councils and patristic
lore, it was in favor, not of the external Scriptures, unconditionally
taken as the rule of faith, but of the private spirit of the Christian
reader, who was himself "made king and priest," and could not only
find the meaning, but pronounce upon the relative worth, of the
canonical books. Accordingly, the Reformer made very free with
portions of the Old Testament, and with the more Judaic elements of
the New,--the Epistle to the Hebrews, that of James, and the
Apocalypse; and avowedly did this because he disliked the flavor of
their doctrine, and felt its variance from the Pauline gospel. He thus
tampered with his court before he brought forward his cause, and
incapacitated the judges whose verdict he feared. In short, the
religious life of his own soul was too intense and powerful to be
prevailed over by any written word: he appropriated what was
congenial, and threw away the rest. Uneasy relations were thus
established between the subjective rule of faith found in the
believer's own mind, and the objective standard of a documentary
revelation: they were soon constituted, and have ever since remained
rival authorities, commanding the allegiance of different orders of
minds. The vast majority of Protestants, of less profound and
tumultuous inner life than Luther, and less knowing how to see their
way through it, subsided into exclusive recognition of the sacred
writings; denying alike the regulative authority either of church
councils or of the private soul. In every branch and derivative of the
Genevan Reformation, throughout the whole range of both the Puritan
and the Arminian Churches, a rigorous Scripturalism prevails; and the
Bible is used as a code or legislative text-book, which yields, on
mere interpretation, verdicts without appeal on every subject, whether
doctrine or duty, of which it speaks. But Luther's spiritual
enthusiasm kindled a fire that he scarce could quench; and while he
himself, flung into perpetual conflicts with opponents, was obliged
more and more to refer to evidence external to his personality, others
had learned from him to look upon their own souls as the theatre of
conscious strife between heaven and hell, and to recognize the voice
of inspiration there. Carlstadt was the first to catch the flame of
his teacher's burning experience, and, touched by prophetic
consciousness, to set the Spirit above the Word. Luther, so often
recalled from the tendencies of his own turbulent teaching by seeing
their mischiefs realized in other men, instantly turned on Carlstadt
with his overwhelming scorn: "The spirit of our new prophet flies very
high indeed: 't is an audacious spirit, that would eat up the Holy
Ghost, feathers and all. 'The Bible?'--sneer these fellows,--'Bibel,
Bubel, Babel!' And not only do they reject the Bible thus
contemptuously, but they say they would reject God too, if he were not
to visit them as he did his prophets." Carlstadt had got hold of a
doctrine that was too much for his ill-balanced mind, and Luther
easily destroyed his repute. But a principle had been started which
has never been dormant since; the very principle which afterwards
constituted the Society of Friends, and finds its best exposition in
the writings of their admirable apologist, Barclay; and which in our
times reappears in more philosophic guise, and fights its old battles
again as the doctrine of religious intuition. No period of awakened
faith and sentiment has been without some increasing tincture of this
persuasion; and under modified forms, with more or less admixture of
the ordinary Puritan elements, it has played a great part among the
Quietists in France, the Moravians in Germany, and the Methodists in
England. In all these, far as they are from being committed to the
notion of an "inner light," spiritualism has predominated over
Scripturalism, and permanent life in the Spirit has engaged the
affections more than the transition into the adoption of faith.

In this endeavor to lay out the ground-plan of modern Christian
development, and trace upon it the chief lines both of psychological and
of historical distinction, our design is to prepare the way for a series
of sketches exhibiting the sects and types of religion in England. It is
scarcely possible to notice the phenomena present here and to-day
without referring to their antecedents in a prior age, their
counterparts in other lands, and their permanent principles in human
nature; and if our chart be tolerably correct, our future course will be
rendered less indeterminate by the relations and points of comparison
which have been established. The age, and even the hour, is teeming with
new interests and pregnant auguries in relation to the highest element
of human well-being. From a desire to approach these in a temper of just
and reverential appreciation, we have abstained from recording the first
impression of them, and sought rather, by a preliminary discipline, to
detect some criteria by which prejudices may be checked, tendencies be
estimated, and criticism acquire a clew.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The title which Auguste Comte gives himself in his "Catechisme
Positiviste."--Preface, p. xl.

[2] The zest with which this ecclesiastical garrison-duty is sometimes
performed, hardly comports with the traditional dignity of the Anglican
gentleman and scholar. We remember an incident which occurred in a
village situated among the hills of one of our northern dioceses. On a
fine summer evening we had gone, at the close of the afternoon service,
for a stroll through the fields overlooking the valley. When we had
walked half a mile or so, an extraordinary din arose from the direction
of the village, sounding like nothing human or instrumental, larynx,
catgut, or brass, though occasionally mingled with an undeniable note
from some shouting Stentor. It was evident, through the trees, that a
crowd was collected on the village green; and not less so, that a farmer
and his wife, who were looking on from a stile hard by, understood the
meaning of the scene below. On asking what all the hubbub was about, we
were told by the good woman: "It's all of our parson, that's banging out
the Methody wi' the tae-board." Being curious in ecclesiastical
researches, we hastened down the hill, in spite of the repulsion of
increasing noise. On one side of the green was a deal table, from which
a field-preacher was holding forth with passionate but fruitless energy;
for on the other side, and at the back of the crowd, was the parochial
man of God, who had issued from his parsonage, armed with its largest
tea-tray and the hall-door key, and was battering off the Japan in the
service of orthodoxy. No military music could more effectually
neutralize the shrieks of battle. The more the evangelist bellowed, the
faster went the parish gong. It was impossible to confute such a "drum
ecclesiastic." The man was not easily put down; but the triumph was
complete; and the "Methody's" brass was fairly beaten out of the field
by the Churchman's tin.




CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT PRIEST AND WITHOUT RITUAL.

    "To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men,
    but chosen of God, and precious; ye also, as lively stones, are
    built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual
    sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ."--1 Peter ii. 4, 5.


The formation of human society, and the institution of priesthood,
must be referred to the same causes and the same date. The earliest
communities of the world appear to have had their origin and their
cement, not in any gregarious instinct, nor in mere social affections,
much less in any prudential regard to the advantages of co-operation,
but in a binding religious sentiment, submitting to the same guidance,
and expressing itself in the same worship. As no tie can be more
strong, so is none more primitive, than this agreement respecting what
is holy and divine. In simple and patriarchal ages, indeed, when the
feelings of veneration had not been set aside by analysis into a
little corner of the character, but spread themselves over the whole
of life, and mixed it up with daily wonder, this bond comprised all
the forces that can suppress the selfish and disorganizing passions,
and compact a multitude of men together. It was not, as at present, to
have simply the same _opinions_ (things of quite modern growth, the
brood of scepticism); but to have the same fathers, the same
tradition, the same speech, the same land, the same foes, the same
priest, the same God. Nothing did man fear, or trust, or love, or
desire, that did not belong, by some affinity, to his faith. Nor had
he any book to keep the precious deposit for him; and if he had, he
would never have thought of so frail a vehicle for so great a
treasure. It was more natural to put it into structures hollowed in
the fast mountain, or built of transplanted rocks which only a giant
age could stir; and to tenant these with mighty hierarchies, who
should guard their sanctity, and, by an undying memory, make their
mysteries eternal. Hence, the first humanizer of men was their
worship; the first leaders of nations, the sacerdotal caste; the first
triumph of art, the colossal temple; the first effort to preserve an
idea produced a record of something sacred; and the first civilization
was, as the last will be, the birth of religion.

The primitive aim of worship undoubtedly was, to act upon the
sentiments of God; at first, by such natural and intelligible means as
produce favorable impressions on the mind of a fellow-man,--by
presents and persuasion, and whatever is expressive of grateful and
reverential affections. Abel, the first shepherd, offered the produce
of his flock; Cain, the first farmer, the fruits of his land; and
while devotion was so simple in its modes, every one would be his own
pontiff, and have his own altar. But soon, the parent would inevitably
officiate for his family; the patriarch, for his tribe. With the
natural forms dictated by present feelings, traditional methods would
mingle their contributions from the past; postures and times, gestures
and localities, once indifferent, would become consecrated by
venerable habit; and so long as their origin was unforgotten, they
would add to the significance, while they lessened the simplicity, of
worship. Custom, however, being the growth of time, tends to a
tyrannous and bewildering complexity: forms, originally natural, then
symbolical, end in being arbitrary; suggestive of nothing, except to
the initiated; yet, if connected with religion, so sanctified by the
association, that it appears sacrilege to desist from their
employment; and when their meaning is lost, they assume their place,
not among empty gesticulations, but among the mystical signs by which
earth communes with heaven. The vivid picture-writing of the early
worship, filled with living attitudes, and sketched in the freshest
colors of emotion, explained itself to every eye, and was open to
every hand. To this succeeded a piety, which expressed itself in
symbolical figures, veiling it utterly from strangers, but
intelligible and impressive still to the soul of national tradition.
This, however, passed again into a language of arbitrary characters,
in which the herd of men saw sacredness without meaning; and the use
of which must be consigned to a class separated for its study. Hence
the origin of the priest and his profession; the conservator of a
worship no longer natural, but legendary and mystical; skilful enactor
of rites that spake with silent gesticulation to the heavens;
interpreter of the wants of men into the divine language of the gods.
Not till the powers above had ceased to hold familiar converse with
the earth, and in their distance had become deaf and dumb to the
common tongue of men, did the mediating priest arise;--needed then to
conduct the finger-speech of ceremony, whereby the desire of the
creature took shape before the eye of the Creator.

Observe, then, the true idea of PRIEST and RITUAL. The Priest is the
representative of men before God; commissioned on behalf of human
nature to intercede with the divine. He bears a message _upwards_,
from earth to heaven; his people being below, his influence above. He
takes the fears of the weak, and the cries of the perishing, and sets
them with availing supplication before Him that is able to help. He
takes the sins and remorse of the guilty, and leaves them with
expiating tribute at the feet of the averted Deity. He guards the
avenues that lead from the mortal to the immortal, and without his
interposition the creature is cut off from his Creator. Without his
mediation no transaction between them can take place, and the spirit
of a man must live as an outlaw from the world invisible and holy.
There are means of propitiation which he alone has authority to
employ; powers of persuasion conceded to no other; a mystic access to
the springs of divine benignity, by outward rites which his
manipulation must consecrate, or forms of speech which his lips must
recommend. These ceremonies are the implements of his office and the
sources of his power; the magic by which he is thought to gain
admission to the will above, and really wins rule over human counsels
below. As they are supposed to change the relation of God to man, not
by visible or natural operation, not (for example) by suggestion of
new thoughts, and excitement of new dispositions in the worshipper,
but by secret and mysterious agency, they are simply _spells_ of a
dignified order. Were we then to speak with severe exactitude, we
should say, a Ritual is a system of consecrated charms; and the
Priest, the great magician who dispenses them.

So long as any idea is retained of mystically efficacious rites,
consigned solely and authoritatively to certain hands, this definition
cannot be escaped. The ceremonies may have rational instruction and
natural worship appended to them; and these additional elements may
give them a title to true respect. The order of men appointed to
administer them may have other offices and nobler duties to perform,
rendering them, if faithful, worthy of a just and reverential
attachment. But _in so far_ as, by an exclusive and unnatural
efficacy, they bring about a changed relation between God and man, the
Ritual is an incantation, and the Priest is an enchanter.

To this sacerdotal devotion there necessarily attach certain
characteristic sentiments, both moral and religious, which give it a
distinctive influence on human character, and adapt it to particular
stages of civilization. It clearly severs the worshippers by one remove
from God. He is a Being, external to them, distant from them, personally
unapproachable by them; their thought must _travel_ to reach the
Almighty; they must look afar for the Most Holy; they dwell themselves
within the finite, and must ask a foreign introduction to the Infinite.
He is not with them as a private guide, but in the remoter watch-towers
of creation, as the public inspector of their life; not present for
perpetual communion, but to be visited in absence by stated messages of
form and prayer. And that God dwells in this cold and royal separation
induces the feeling, that man is too mean to touch him; that a
consecrated intervention is required, in order to part Deity from the
defiling contact of humanity. Why else am I restricted from unlimited
personal access to my Creator, and driven to another in my transactions
with him? And so, in this system, our nature appears in contrast, not in
alliance, with the divine, and those views of it are favored which make
the opposition strong; its puny dimensions, its swift decadence, its
poor self-flatteries, its degenerate virtues, its giant guilt, become
familiar to the thought and lips; and life, cut off from sympathy with
the godlike, falls towards the level of melancholy, or the sink of
epicurism, or the abjectness of vicarious reliance on the priest.
Worship, too, must have for its chief aim, to throw off the load of ill;
to rid the mind of sin and shame, and the lot of hardship and sorrow;
for principally to these disburdening offices do priests and rituals
profess themselves adapted;--and who, indeed, could pour forth the
privacy of love, and peace, and trust, through the cumbrousness of
ceremonies, and the pompousness of a sacred officer? The piety of such a
religion is thus a refuge for the weakness, not an outpouring of the
strength, of the soul: it takes away the incubus of darkness, without
shedding the light of heaven; lifts off the nightmare horrors of earth
and hell, without opening the vision of angels and of God. Nay, for the
spiritual bonds which connect men with the Father above, it substitutes
material ties, a genealogy of sacred fires, a succession of hallowed
buildings, or of priests having consecration by pedigree or by manual
transmission; so that qualities belonging to the soul alone are likened
to forces mechanical or chemical; sanctity becomes a physical property;
divine acceptance comes by bodily catenation; regeneration is degraded
into a species of electric shock, which one only method of experiment,
and the links of but one conductor, can convey. And, in fine, a priestly
system ever abjures all aim at any higher perfection; boasts of being
immutable and unimprovable; encourages no ambition, breathes no desire.
It holds the appointed methods of influencing Heaven, on which none may
presume to innovate; and its functions are ever the same, to employ and
preserve the ancient forms and legendary spells committed to its trust.
Hence all its veneration is antiquarian, not sympathetic or prospective;
it turns its back upon the living, and looks straight into departed
ages, bowing the head and bending the knee; as if all objects of love
and devotion were _there_, not here; in history, not in life; as if its
God were dead, or otherwise imprisoned in the Past, and had bequeathed
to its keeping such relics as might yield a perpetual benediction. Thus
does the administration of religion, in proportion as it possesses a
sacerdotal character, involve a distant Deity, a mean humanity, a
servile worship, a physical sanctity, and a retrospective reverence.

Let no one, however, imagine that there is no other idea or
administration of religion than this; that the priest is the only
person among men to whom it is given to stand between heaven and
earth. Even the Hebrew Scriptures introduce us to another class of
quite different order; to whom, indeed, those Scriptures owe their own
truth and power, and perpetuity of beauty: I mean the PROPHETS; whom
we shall very imperfectly understand, if we suppose them mere
historians, for whom God had turned time round the other way, so that
they spoke of things future as if past, and grew so dizzy in their use
of tenses, as greatly to incommode learned grammarians; or if we treat
their writings as scrap-books of Providence, with miscellaneous
contributions from various parts of duration, sketches taken
indifferently from any point of view within eternity, and put together
at random and without mark, on adjacent pages, for theological
memories to identify; first, a picture of an Assyrian battle, next, a
holy family; now, of the captives sitting by Euphrates, then, of Paul
preaching to the Gentiles; here, a flight of devouring locusts, and
there, the escape of the Christians from the destruction of Jerusalem;
a portrait of Hezekiah, and a view of Calvary; a march through the
desert, and John the Baptist by the Jordan; the day of Pentecost, and
the French Revolution; Nebuchadnezzar and Mahomet; Caligula and the
Pope,--following each other with picturesque neglect of every relation
of time and place. No, the Prophet and his work always indeed belong
to the future; but far otherwise than thus. Meanwhile, let us notice
how, in Israel, as elsewhere, he takes his natural station above the
priest. It was Moses the prophet who even _made_ Aaron the priest. And
who cares now for the sacerdotal books of the Old Testament, compared
with the rest? Who, having the strains of David, would pore over
Leviticus, or would weary himself with Chronicles, when he might catch
the inspiration of Isaiah? It was no priest that wrote, "Thou desirest
not sacrifice, else would I give it; thou delightest not in
burnt-offering: the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken
and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." It was no
pontifical spirit that exclaimed, "Bring no more vain oblations;
incense is an abomination to me; the new moons and sabbaths, the
calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the
solemn meeting: your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul
hateth; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them." "Wash
you, make you clean." Whatever in these venerable Scriptures awes us
by its grandeur and pierces us by its truth, comes of the prophets,
not the priests; and from that part of their writings, too, in which
they are not concerned with historical prediction, but with some
utterance deeper and greater. I do not deny them this gift of
occasional intellectual foresight of events. And doubtless it was an
honor to be permitted to speak thus to a portion of the future, and of
local occurrences unrevealed to seers less privileged. But it is a
glory far higher to speak that which belongs to all time, and finds
its interpretation in every place; to penetrate to the everlasting
realities of things; to disclose, not when this or that man will
appear, but how and wherefore all men appear and quickly disappear; to
make it felt, not in what nook of duration such an incident will
happen, but from what all-embracing eternity the images of history
emerge and are swallowed up. In this highest faculty the Hebrew seers
belong to a class scattered over every nation and every period; which
Providence keeps ever extant for human good, and especially to furnish
an administration of religion quite anti-sacerdotal. This class we
must proceed to characterize.

The Prophet is the representative of God before men, commissioned from
the Divine nature to sanctify the human. He bears a message
_downwards_, from heaven to earth; his inspirer being above, his
influence below. He takes of the holiness of God, enters with it into
the souls of men, and heals therewith the wounds, and purifies the
taint, of sin. He is charged with the peace of God, and gives from it
rest to the weariness and solace to the griefs of men. Instead of
carrying the foulness of life to be cleansed in heaven, he brings the
purity of heaven to make life divine. Instead of interposing himself
and his mediation between humanity and Deity, he destroys the whole
distance between them; and only fulfils his mission, when he brings
the finite mind and the infinite into immediate and thrilling contact,
and leaves the creature consciously alone with the Creator. He is one
to whom the primitive and everlasting relations between God and man
have revealed themselves, stripped of every disguise, and bared of all
that is conventional; who is possessed by their simplicity, mastered
by their solemnity; who has found the secret of meeting the Holy
Spirit within, rather than without; and knows, but cannot tell, how,
in the strife of genuine duty, or in moments of true meditation, the
Divine immensity and love have touched and filled his naked soul; and
taught him by what fathomless Godhead he is folded round, and on what
adamantine manhood he must take his stand. So far from separating
others from the heavenly communion vouchsafed to himself, he
necessarily believes that all may have the same godlike consciousness;
burns to impart it to them; and by the vivid light of his own faith
speedily creates it in those who feel his influence, drawing out and
freshening the faded colors of the Divine image in their souls, till
they too become visibly the seers and the sons of God. His
instruments, like the objects of his mission, are human; not
mysteries, and mummeries, and such arbitrary things, by which others
may pretend to be talking with the skies; but the natural language
which interprets itself at once to every genuine man, and goes direct
to the living point of every heart. An earnest speech, a brave and
holy life, truth of sympathy, severity of conscience, freshness and
loftiness of faith,--these natural sanctities are his implements of
power; and if heaven be pleased to add any other gifts, still are they
weapons all,--not the mere tinsel of tradition and custom,--but forged
in the inner workshop of our nature, where the fire glows beneath the
breath of God, framing things of ethereal temper. Thus armed, he lays
undoubting siege to the world's conscience; tears down every outwork
of pretence; forces its strong-holds of delusion; humbles the vanities
at its centre, and proclaims it the citadel of God. The true prophet
of every age is no believer in the temple, but in the temple's Deity;
trusts, not rites and institutions, but the heart and soul that fill
or ought to fill them; if they speak the truth, no one so reveres
them; if a lie, they meet with no contempt like his. He sees no
indestructible sanctuary but the mind itself, wherein the Divine
Spirit ever loves to dwell; and whence it will be sure to go forth and
build such outward temple as may suit the season of Providence. He is
conscious that there is no devotion like that which comes
spontaneously from the secret places of our humanity, no orisons so
true as those which rise from the common platform of our life. He
desires only to throw himself in faith on the natural piety of the
heart. Give him but that, and he will find for man an everlasting
worship, and raise for God a cathedral worthy of his infinitude.

It is evident that one thoroughly possessed with this spirit could never
be, and could never make, a priest; nor frame a ritual for priests
already made. He is destitute of the ideas out of which alone these
things can be created. His mission is in the opposite direction: he
interprets and reveals God to men, instead of interceding for men with
God. In this office sacerdotal rites have no function and no place. I do
not say that he must necessarily disapprove and abjure them, or deny
that he may directly sanction them. If he does, however, it is not in
his capacity of prophet, but in conformity with feelings which his
proper office has left untouched. His tendency will be against
ceremonialism; and on his age and position will depend the extent to
which this tendency takes effect. Usually he will construct nothing
ritual, will destroy much, and leave behind great and growing ideas,
destructive of much more. But ere we quit our general conception of a
prophet, let us notice some characteristic sentiments, moral and
religious, which naturally connect themselves with his faith; comparing
them with those which belong to the sacerdotal influence.

In this faith, God is separated by nothing from his worshippers. He is
not simply in contact with them, but truly in the interior of their
nature; so that they may not only meet him in the outward providences
of life, but bear his spirit with them, when they go to toil and
conflict, and find it still, when they sit alone to think and pray. He
is not the far observer, but the very present help, of the faithful
will. No structure made with hands, nay, not even his own architecture
of the heaven of heavens, contains and confines his presence: were
there any dark recess whence these were hid, the blessed access would
be without hinderance still; and the soul would discern him near as
its own identity. No mean and ignoble conception can be entertained of
a mind which is thus the residence of Deity;--the shrine of the
Infinite must have somewhat that is infinite itself. Thus, in this
system, does our nature appear in alliance with the Divine, not in
contrast with it; inspired with a portion of its holiness, and free to
help forward the best issues of its providence. Human life, blessed by
this spirit, becomes a miniature of the work of the great Ruler: its
responsibilities, its difficulties, its temptations, become dignified
as the glorious theatre whereon we strive, by and with the good Spirit
of God, for the mastery over evil. Worship, issuing from a nature and
existence thus consecrated, is not the casting off of guilt and
terror, but the glad unburdening of love, and trust, and aspiration,
the simple speaking forth, as duty is the acting forth, of the divine
within us; not the prostration of the slave, but the embrace of the
child; not the plaint of the abject, but the anthem of the free. Is it
not private, individual? And may it not by silence say what it will,
and intimate the precise thing, and that only, which is at
heart?--whence there grows insensibly that firm root of excellence,
truth with one's own self. The priestly fancy of an hereditary or
lineal sacredness can have no place here. The soul and God stand
directly related, mind with mind, spirit with spirit: from our moral
fidelity to this relation, from the jealousy with which we guard it
from insult or neglect, does the only sanctity arise; and herein there
is none to help us, or give a vicarious consecration. And, finally,
the spirit of God's true prophet is earnestly prospective; more filled
with the conception of what the Creator _will_ make his world, than of
what he _has_ already made it: detecting great capacities, it glows
with great hopes; knowing that God lives, and will live, it turns from
the past, venerable as that may be, and reverences rather the promise
of the present, and the glories of the future. It esteems nothing
unimprovable, is replete with vast desires; and amid the shadows and
across the wilds of existence chases, not vainly, a bright image of
perfection. The golden age, which priests with their tradition put
into the past, the prophet, with his faith and truth, transfers into
the future; and while the former pines and muses, the latter toils and
prays. Thus does the administration of religion, in proportion as it
partakes of the prophetic or anti-sacerdotal character, involve the
ideas of an interior Deity, a noble humanity, a loving worship, an
individual holiness, and a prospective veneration.

We have found, then, two opposite views of religion: that of the
Priest with his Ritual, and that of the Prophet with his Faith. I
propose to show that the Church of England, in its doctrine of
sacraments, coincides with the former of these, and sanctions all its
objectionable sentiments; and that Christianity, in every relation,
even with respect to its reputed rites, coincides with the latter.

The general conformity of the Church of England with the ritual
conception of religion will not be denied by her own members. Their
denial will be limited to one point: they will protest that her formulas
of doctrine do not ascribe a _charmed efficacy_, or any operation upon
God, to the two sacraments. To avoid verbal disputes, let us consider
what we are to understand by a spell or charm. The name, I apprehend,
denotes any material object or outward act, the possession or use of
which is thought to confer safety or blessing, not by natural operation,
but by occult virtues inherent in it, or mystical effects appended to
it. A mere commemorative sign, therefore, is not a charm, nor need there
be any superstition in its employment: it simply stands for certain
ideas and memories in our minds; re-excites and freshens them, not
otherwise than speech audibly records them, except that it summons them
before us by sight and touch, instead of sound. The effect, whatever it
may be, is purely natural, by sequence of thought on thought, till the
complexion of the mind is changed, and haply suffused with a noble glow.
But in truth it is not fit to speak of commemorations, as things having
efficacy at all; as desirable observances, under whose action we should
put ourselves, in order to get up certain good dispositions in the
heart. As soon as we see them acquiesced in, with this dutiful
submission to a kind of spiritual operation, we may be sure they are
already empty and dead. An _expedient_ commemoration, deliberately
maintained on utilitarian principles, for the sake of warming cold
affections by artificial heat, is one of the foolish conceptions of this
mechanical and sceptical age. It is quite true, that such influence is
found to belong to rites of remembrance; but only so long as it is not
privately looked into, or greedily contemplated by the staring eye of
prudence, but simply and unconsciously received. No; commemorations must
be the spontaneous fruit and outburst of a love already kindled in the
soul, not the factitious contrivance for forcing it into existence. They
are not the lighted match applied to the fuel on an altar cold; but the
shapes in which the living flame aspires, or the fretted lights thrown
by that central love on the dark temple-walls of this material life.

It is not pretended that the sacraments are mere commemorative rites.
And nothing, I submit, remains, but that they should be pronounced
charms. It is of little purpose to urge, in denial of this, that the
Church insists upon the necessity of faith on the part of the
recipient, without which no benefit, but rather peril, will accrue.
This only limits the use of the charm to a certain class, and
establishes a prerequisite to its proper efficacy. It simply conjoins
the outward form with a certain state of mind, and gives to each of
these a participation in the effect. If the faith be insufficient
without the ceremony, then _some_ efficacy is due to the rite; and
this, being neither the natural operation of the material elements,
nor a simple suggestion of ideas and feelings to the mind, but
mystical and preternatural, is no other than a charmed efficacy.

Nor will the statement, that the effect is not upon God, but upon man,
bear examination. It is very true, that the _ultimate_ benefit of these
rites is a result reputed to fall upon the worshipper;--regeneration, in
the case of baptism; participation in the atonement, in the case of the
Lord's Supper. But by what steps do these blessings descend? Not by
those of visible or perceived causation; but through an express and
extraordinary volition of God, induced by the ceremonial form, or taking
occasion from it. The sacerdotal economy, therefore, is so arranged,
that, whenever the priest dispenses the water at the font, the Holy
Spirit follows, as in instantaneous compliance with a suggestion; and
whenever he spreads his hands over the elements at the communion, God
immediately establishes a preternatural relation, not subsisting the
moment before, between the substances on the table and the souls of the
faithful communicants: so that every partaker receives, either directly
or through supernatural increase of faith, some new share in the merits
of the cross. Whatever subtleties of language then may be employed, it
is evidently conceived that the first consequence of these forms takes
place in heaven; and that on this depends whatever benediction they may
bring: nor can a plain understanding frame any other idea of them than
this; first, they act upwards, and suggest something to the mind of God,
who then sends down an influence on the mind of the believer. From this
conception no figures of speech, no ingenious analogies, can deliver us.
Do you call the sacraments "pledges of grace"? A pledge means a promise;
and how a voluntary act of ours, or the priest's, can be a promise made
to us by the Divine Being, it is not easy to understand. Do you call
them "seals of God's covenant,"--the instrument by which he engages to
make over its blessings to the Christian, like the signature and
completion of a deed conveying an estate? It still perplexes us to think
of a service of our own as an assurance received by us from Heaven. And
one would imagine that the Divine promise, once given, were enough,
without this incessant binding by periodical legalities. If it be said,
"The renewal of the obligation is needful for us, and not for him"; then
call the rites at once and simply, our service of self-dedication, the
solemn memorial of our vows. And in spite of all metaphors, the question
recurs, Does the covenant stand without these seals, or are they
essential _to give possession_ of the privileges conveyed? Are they, by
means preternatural, procurers of salvation? Have they a mystical action
towards this end? If so, we return to the same point; they have a
charmed efficacy on the human soul.

In order to establish this, nothing more is requisite than a brief
reference to the language of the Articles and Liturgical services of
the Church respecting Baptism and the Communion.

Baptism is regarded, throughout the Book of Common Prayer, as the
instrument of regeneration: not simply as its sign, of which the
actual descent of the Holy Spirit is independent; but as itself and
essentially the means or indispensable occasion of the washing away of
sin. That this is regarded as a mystical and magical, not a natural
and spiritual effect, is evident from the alleged fact of its
occurrence in infants, to whom the rite can suggest nothing, and on
whom, in the course of nature, it can leave no impression. Yet it is
declared of the infant, after the use of the water, "Seeing now,
dearly beloved brethren, that _this child is regenerate_," &c.: at the
commencement of the service its aim is said to be that God may "grant
to this child that thing which by nature he cannot have,"--"would wash
him and sanctify him with the Holy Ghost," that he may be "delivered
from God's wrath." Nothing, indeed, is so striking in this office of
the national Church, as its audacious trifling with solemn names,
denoting qualities of the soul and will; the ascription of spiritual
and moral attributes, not only to the child in whom they can yet have
no development, but even to material substances; the frivolity with
which engagements with God are made by deputy, and without the consent
or even existence of the engaging will. Water is said to possess
_sanctity_, for "the mystical washing away of sin." Infants, destitute
of any idea of duty or obligation to be resisted or obeyed, are said
to obtain "_remission of their sins_";--to "renounce the Devil and all
his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world"; "steadfastly to
believe" in the Apostles' Creed, and to be desirous of "baptism into
this faith." Belief, desire, resolve, are acts of some one's mind: the
language of this service attributes them to the personality of the
infant (_I_ renounce, _I_ believe, _I_ desire); yet there they cannot
possibly exist. If they are to be understood as affirmed by the
godfathers and godmothers of themselves, the case is not improved: for
how can one person's state of faith and conscience be made the
condition of the regeneration of another? What intelligible meaning
can be attached to these phrases of sanctity applied to an age not
responsible? In what sense, and by what indication, are these children
_holier_ than others? And with what reason, if all this be
Christianity, can we blame the Pope for sprinkling holy water on the
horses? The service appears little better than a profane sacerdotal
jugglery, by which material things are impregnated with divine
virtues, moral and spiritual qualities of the mind are sported with,
the holy spirit of God is turned into a physical mystery, and the
solemnity of personal responsibility is insulted.

That a superstitious value is attributed to the details of the
baptismal form, in the Church of England, appears from certain parts
of the service for the private ministration of the rite. If a child
has been baptized by any other lawful minister than the minister of
the parish, strict inquiries are to be instituted by the latter
respecting the correctness with which the ceremony has been performed;
and should the prescribed rules have been neglected, the baptism is
invalid, and must be repeated. Yet great solicitude is manifested,
lest danger should be incurred by an unnecessary repetition of the
sacrament: to guard against which, the minister is to give the
following conditional invitation to the Holy Spirit; saying, in his
address to the child, "_If_ thou art not already baptized, I baptize
thee," &c. It is worthy of remark, that the Church mentions as one of
the _essentials_ of the service, the omission of which necessitates
its repetition, the use of the formula, "In the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." By this rule, every one of the
apostolic baptisms recorded in Scripture must be pronounced invalid;
and the Church of England, were it possible, would perform them again:
for in no instance does it appear that the Apostles employed either
this or even any equivalent form of words.

That this sacrament is regarded as an indispensable channel of grace,
and positively necessary to salvation, is clear from the provision of
a short and private form, to be used in cases of extreme danger. The
prayers, and faith, and obedience, and patient love, of parents and
friends,--the dedication and heart-felt surrender of their child to
God, the profound application of their anxieties and grief to their
conscience and inward life,--all this, we are told, will be of no
avail, without the water and the priest. Archbishop Laud says: "That
baptism is necessary to the salvation of infants (in the ordinary way
of the Church, without binding God to the use and means of that
sacrament, to which he hath bound us), is expressed in St. John iii.,
'Except a man be born of water,' &c. So, no baptism, no entrance; nor
can infants creep in, any other ordinary way."[3] Bishop Bramhall
says: "Wilful neglect of baptism we acknowledge to be a damnable sin;
and, without repentance and God's extraordinary me

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