Chapter XLIII: Section VIII: The New Testament (2)

A second kind of relation between the sexes which the apostle condemns is that of prostitution. Here he has not left us equally in the dark as to the grounds upon which his condemnation is founded. Not only does he prohibit prostitution to the Christians, but he tells them exactly why they ought not to indulge in it; and his argument upon this subject is sufficiently curious to merit a moment's examination. In the first place, then, he tells his disciples that neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor Sodomites, nor practicers of various other vices not of a sexual nature, will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. vi. 9, 10; Eph. v. 5). Fornication should not even be named among the Christians (Eph. v. 3). They must mortify their members upon earth, for impure connections and sexual license bring down the wrath of God (Col. iii. 5, 6). They must exclude from their society any one who is guilty of such irregularities (1 Cor. v. 9-11). "The body is not for prostitution, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." The bodies of Christians are the members of Christ: "Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of a prostitute? God forbid. What! do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute is one body? for the two [he says] shall be one flesh" (1 Cor. vi. 13-16). It was surely a very original notion of Paul's to extend to the casual connections formed by the temporary passion the solemn sanction bestowed upon the permanent union of man and wife. It is said in Genesis that a man and his wife are to be one flesh, and this is obviously an emphatic mode of expressing the closeness and binding character of the alliance into which they enter. But what may appropriately be said of married persons cannot of necessity be said of persons linked together only by the most fleeting and mercenary kind of ties. The very evil of prostitution is, that the prostitute and her companion are _not_ one flesh in the allegorical sense in which husband and wife are so; and to condemn it on account of the presence of the very circumstance which is conspicuously absent, is to cut the ground from under our feet. But let us hear the apostle further. "But he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee prostitution. Every sin that a man commits is outside of the body [what can this mean?], but the fornicator sins against his own body. What! do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit in you? which you have of God, and you are not your own" (1 Cor. vi. 17-19). Now in this singular argument it is noticeable that the ground taken up is entirely theological. Destroy the theological foundation, and the ethical superstructure is involved in its ruin. Thus, if we do not believe that our bodies are the members of Christ, nor the temples of the Holy Spirit, Paul has no moral reason to give us against the most unlimited indulgence in prostitution. While, even if we admit his premises, it is not very easy to see how his conclusion follows. For why should we not make the members of Christ those of a prostitute, unless it be previously shown that it would in any case be wrong to do so with our own members? It would not (according to Paul himself) be wrong to make the members of Christ members of a wife; why, then, should it be wrong to make them members of any other woman whatever? Clearly this question could not be answered without an attempt to prove, on independent grounds, the evil of promiscuous indulgence of the sexual passion. But no such attempt is made by Paul. He has therefore failed completely to make out a case against even the most unbridled license. Not that his conclusion need therefore be rejected. On the contrary, the danger of his arguments is not that his view of morals is fundamentally erroneous, but that he rests an important precept upon a dangerously narrow basis.

Pass we now to that which he considers as the normal relation between the sexes. The subject may be divided into three heads: that of the formation of such relations, that of their character when formed, and that of their disruption. Upon all of these the apostle has advice to give.

In the first place it appears that the Corinthians had applied to him for a solution of some question that had been raised among them as to the propriety of entering at all into the matrimonial state. In answer to their inquiries he begins by informing them that it is good for a man not to touch a woman. He would prefer it if every one were like himself unmarried. To unmarried people and widows he says that they had better remain as they are. Concerning virgins of either sex he delivers his private opinion that their condition is a good one for the present necessity. A married man indeed should not endeavor to get rid of his wife; but neither should an unmarried man endeavor to obtain a wife. The time is so short till the final judgment of the world that it makes little difference; before long both married and unmarried will be in the same position. Meantime, however, celibacy is the preferable state; and that because celibates care for the things of the Lord, how they may please the Lord; but married people care for one another, and study to please one another (1 Cor. vii. 1-34). Why Paul should suppose that married people, even while studying one another's happiness, might not also endeavor to please the Lord, it is hard to understand. He seems in this passage to lend his sanction to the very dangerous doctrine that a due discharge of the ordinary duties of life is incompatible with attention to the service of God. As if the highest type of Christian life was not precisely that in which both were combined in such a manner that neither should be sacrificed to the other. But, apart from this fundamental objection to his theory it is liable to the remark that the assumptions on which it rests are untrue. Unmarried persons, unless the whole literature of fiction, dramatic and novelistic, utterly belies them, care at least as much to become married as married persons care to promote one another's comfort. Indeed, it would be no less true to nature to say, that the unmarried in general take more pains to please some persons of the opposite sex than husbands take to please their wives, or wives their husbands. Not to dwell upon the fact that courtship involves a greater effort, mental and physical, than the mere continuance of love assured of being returned, there is the obvious consideration that the mere outward circumstances of the unmarried are far less favorable than those of the married to the enjoyment of their mutual society without considerable sacrifice of time. Hence the estimate made by Paul of the relative advantages of the two states is untrue to facts, except in the rare cases of those who have firmly resolved upon a life of celibacy, and who, in addition to this, have so perfect a control over their passions, or so little passion at all, as to be untroubled by sexual imaginations.

That these objections are well founded might be proved by reference to a picture (drawn either by Paul himself or by some one who assumed his name) of the conduct of young widows. Having to consider the question what widows may properly be supported by the charity of the Church, this writer refuses to admit any of them to the number of pensioners until they are sixty years old, apparently on the ground that they cannot be trusted to give up flirting altogether before they have reached that age. Young widows are to be rejected, for when they have begun to wax wanton against Christ, they wish to marry; a damnable tendency, but one which it is so hopeless to get rid of, that the best thing they can do is to marry, to have children, and manage their households. Otherwise they will gad about gossiping and tale-bearing from house to house; not only idle, but mischievous (1 Tim. v. 9-15). So that the ideal conception of unmarried persons caring only to please the Lord had at least no application to Christian widows.

While recommending celibacy, Paul is careful not to encourage breach of promise of marriage. If a man thinks he is behaving unhandsomely towards his betrothed, who is passing the flower of her age, he may marry her: he is not doing wrong. Nevertheless, if he feel no necessity for a sexual relation, and resolve to keep her a virgin, he does well. So then marriage is good, but celibacy is better (1 Cor. vii. 36-38).

Notwithstanding these views, Paul, or at least the Pauline Christian who wrote the first Epistle to Timothy, by no means contemplates a celibate clergy. It is specially enumerated among the qualifications of a bishop that he is to be a good manager of his household, keeping his children well in order; for (it is argued) if a man cannot rule his own house, how will he be able to take care of the Church of God? The only limitation placed upon the bishops is that they are not to be polygamists. They, as well as the deacons, are to keep to a single wife (1 Tim. iii. 1-5).

Notwithstanding his general preference for celibacy, Paul recognizes certain reasons as sufficing to excuse the establishment of a sexual relation, and it is important to note what, in the apostle's judgment, these reasons are. Now it is remarkable that he seems to perceive no consideration whatever in favor of the matrimonial condition but its ability to satisfy the sexual appetite. To avoid fornication a man is to have his own wife; if people cannot restrain themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn. Those who marry are not guilty of sin, although they will have trouble in the flesh (1 Cor. vii. 2, 9, 28). Such a view of the functions of matrimony as this is simply degrading. It treats it as exactly equivalent to prostitution in the uses it fulfills, and as differing only in the durability of the connection. But if the whole object of the connection is merely to gratify passion, its greater durability is but a questionable advantage. For exactly as marriage is recommended "to avoid fornication," so divorce might often be recommended to avoid adultery. A union of which the main purpose is to give a convenient outlet to desire, had better be broken when it ceases to fulfill that office to the satisfaction of both the parties. It is strange that Paul should seem to have no conception whatever of the intellectual or moral advantages to be derived from the sympathetic companionship of one of the opposite sex. Perhaps his age presented him with scarcely any examples of marriages in which that companionship was carried into the higher fields of human thought or action. Yet he might still have acknowledged something more in the emotion of love than a special condition of the human body. Christianity has done much to raise the character of marriage, but not one of its achievements in that respect can be credited to the writings of its chief apostle.

Such being the grounds on which the matrimonial bond was to be contracted, it was natural that when contracted, the relation of the parties to each other should not be one of a very exalted order. Paul has, in fact, little of moment to recommend under the second head (that of the character of these relations) except the subjection of women, and on this he is certainly emphatic enough. Wives are to submit themselves to their own husbands: husbands are to love their wives (Col. iii. 18, 19.—Eph. v. 22, 25). An extraordinary reason is given in one epistle (possibly indeed not written by Paul) for requiring women to learn with subjection, and forbidding them to teach, or usurp authority over men. It is that Adam was formed first, and Eve after him, and that Adam was not deceived, but Eve was (1 Tim. ii. 11-14). Scarcely less absurd than this is the argument (and again I must note that it occurs in an epistle of doubtful authenticity) that the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is of the Church, and that just as the Church is subject to Christ, so must wives be subject to their husbands. And as Christ loved the Church, so are husbands to love their wives, considering them as equivalent to their own bodies, which they cannot hate (Eph. v. 22-33)—although it did not appear that when man became "one body" with a prostitute he was therefore to love her. These views of the duty of submission on the part of wives are not indeed surprising in that early age, for they have continued to the present day. The writer of these epistles is only chargeable with not being in advance of his fellow-men. It required all the genius of Plato, whom not even the greatest apostle could approach, to foreshadow for women a position of equality which they are but now beginning to attain.

Besides these rules there is another laid down by Paul for the conduct of married parties which evinces his strong common sense. Husbands and wives are mutually to render one another their "due." They have not absolute power over their own bodies. They must not therefore defraud one another of conjugal rights, unless for a short time with a view to fasting and prayer, and then only with mutual consent (1 Cor. vii. 3-5). Paul therefore would have given no sanction to that very questionable form of asceticism in which husbands deserted their wives, or wives their husbands, to pursue their own salvation, regardless of the happiness of their unfortunate consorts. All such persons he would have bidden to return to the more indisputable duties of the marriage-bed.

Such a doctrine, however, to make it properly applicable to practice, would require to be supplemented by a doctrine of divorce; otherwise there is no provision for the case of an invincible repugnance arising in one of the parties towards the other, or in both towards each other. And this brings me to the third head of the apostle's teaching; his views on the disruption of the marriage-tie. Here he has little to say except that the wife is not to quit her husband, or that, if she do, she must remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband; and that the husband is not to put away his wife. In cases where one is a Christian and the other not, they are not absolutely under bondage: they may separate, though it does not appear that they may marry again. But the apostle strongly advises them to keep together, in the hope that the believing member of the couple may save the other (1 Cor. vii. 10-16). It is plain from this summary that the apostle, no more than his Master, faces the real difficulties of the question of divorce. For the case of unhappy unions, except in the single instance of the one party being a Christian, he has no provision whatever. It is remarkable, however, that he several times intimates in the course of this chapter that he is not speaking with the authority of Christ, but simply expressing his personal opinions; a proviso which looks as if he himself were unwilling to invest these views with full force of the sanction they would otherwise have derived from his apostolical commission.

There is another subject on which the opinions expressed by Paul are open to considerable comment—the resurrection of the dead. In a chapter which for its beauty and its eloquence is unparalleled in the New Testament, he discusses the Christian prospect of another life. Had he confined himself to rhetoric I should have been contented simply to admire, but he has unfortunately mingled argument with poetic vision in a very unsatisfactory manner. In the first place, he attempts to deduce the resurrection of the dead from the resurrection of Christ. If, he contends, there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen; our preaching is vain, and so also is your faith (1 Cor. xv. 12-20). He fails to perceive that the resurrection of Christ—a man whose whole life, according to him, was full of prodigies—could be no guarantee for the resurrection of any other individual whatever. Christ had already been restored to life in a manner in which no other person had ever been restored. His body had been reanimated after two days, before it had had time to suffer decomposition, and that without the intervention of any other person, competent like Christ himself, to perform a miracle. How then could so unprecedented an occurrence warrant the expectation of the reanimation of those who had been long dead, and whose bodies had suffered decomposition? Plainly there is here a palpable _non sequitur_. Christ might be raised without this fact involving a general resurrection; and a general resurrection might happen without Christ having been raised. Further on he makes a still more amazing blunder. Answering a supposed antagonist, who puts the natural question, "With what body are the dead raised?" he exclaims, "Fool! that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die;" (1 Cor. xv. 36.) implying that he conceived the change undergone by seed dropped into the ground to resemble the death of the human body. Now it is needless to point out that the organic processes constituting physical life do not cease in the grain which (as he says) grows up into wheat or some other corn; and that if they did cease, that "body that shall be," which he compares to the bodies of men in their expected resurrection, never would appear at all. The grain, in short, would not grow. An adversary, had he been on the alert, might have retorted upon Paul (borrowing his own courteous phraseology): "Idiot! that which thou sowest is not quickened _if_ it die." Such a retort would have been completely crushing. Another very fatal mistake of Paul's is the contention that if the dead do not rise, we have no reason to do anything but enjoy the passing hour. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die" (1 Cor. xv. 32). Nothing can be more dangerous than such language as this; for if a man bases his moral system upon the belief in a future life, the destruction of that belief will involve the destruction of his moral system. It is founding the more certain upon the less so; universal conceptions upon special ones; that which is essential to human existence upon the doctrines of a particular creed held only by a portion of the human race. The argument is a favorite one with theologians, because it enlists in favor of the doctrine of a future state all the strong attachment by which we cling to principles of morals. None the less is it illegitimate, and it ought to be sternly rejected.

Next in beauty to this eloquent description of the future state of man may be reckoned the extremely fine chapter on brotherly love in the same epistle. Brotherly love, according to Paul, never fails, though intellectual gifts, such as prophecies, tongues, and knowledge, will pass away. Hope, faith, and brotherly love are joined together by him as a trinity of virtues which "now abide;" but the greatest of these is brotherly love (1 Cor. xiii).

Scattered about in the writings of this apostle there are also some admirable maxims of conduct, extremely similar in tone to those of Jesus. Thus, he tells his fellow-Christians to be kindly affectioned one to another; to bless those that persecute them—to bless and not to curse; to return no man evil for evil; give food to a hungry enemy and drink to a thirsty one; and generally, not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil by good (Rom. xii. 10-21.—1 Thess. v. 15). It were much to be wished that he himself had remembered these beneficent rules of conduct in the case of Alexander the coppersmith, who he says did him "much evil," and concerning whom he utters the significant prayer that the Lord may reward him according to his works (2 Tim. iv. 14).

SUBDIVISION 3.—_The Apocalypse._

The author of the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation, who professes to have seen the vision he describes at Patmos, gives himself the name of John; a circumstance which led in former times to the belief that the work was the composition of John the disciple of Jesus. It is a rather late production, having been written subsequently to the establishment by Paul of Gentile Christian communities in various parts of Asia. It also presupposes the existence of a sect of heretics termed Nicolaitanes, who had arisen in some places, and was therefore probably not written until some time after the foundation of these churches by the great apostle.

The author endeavors to add lustre to his work by proclaiming at its outset that it was committed to writing under the direct inspiration of Jesus Christ himself, who dictated it to him, or rather showed it to him, when he was "in the Spirit on the Lord's day." Notwithstanding this exalted authorship, it is a production of very inferior merits indeed. It is conceived in that style of overloaded allegory of which the art consists in concealing the thought of the writer under images decipherable only by an initiated few. The Book of Daniel is an example of the same kind of thing. A false interest is excited by this style from the mere difficulty of comprehending the meaning. How widely it differs from that mode of allegory which possesses a real literary justification, may be shown by comparing the Apocalypse with the "Pilgrim's Progress." In Bunyan, the thought is revealed under clear and transparent images; in John, it is concealed under obscure and turbid ones. Hence there have been endless interpretations of the Apocalypse; there has been only one of the "Pilgrim's Progress." That characteristic which Holy Writ has been shown to possess of calling forth a multitude of comments and speculations upon its meaning belongs in a preëminent degree to the Revelation of John.

After writing by the instructions of Christ a letter to each of the Seven Churches, the author proceeds to describe his vision. There was a throne in heaven, upon which God himself was seated. He had the singular appearance of a jasper and a sardine stone. Beasts, elders, angels, saints, and a promiscuous company besides were around the throne, engaged in performing the ceremonies of the celestial court. Various works were executed according to orders by the attendant angels. A beast then arises out of the sea, and is worshiped by those whose names are not in Christ's book. "Babylon the Great," under the form of a harlot, is judged and put an end to. An angel comes down from heaven and binds "that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan," for a thousand years. During this millennium Christ reigns on earth, and all who have been martyrs for his sake, or have not worshiped the beast, rise from the dead to reign with him. After the thousand years are over Satan is unfortunately released from prison, and does a great deal of mischief, but is ultimately recaptured again and cast into a lake of fire and brimstone. A second resurrection, for the unprivileged multitude, now takes place. All the dead stand before God, and are judged by reference to the records which have been carefully kept in heaven in books provided for the purpose. All who are not in the book of life are thrown into the lake of fire, to which death and hell are consigned also. The inspired seer is now shown a new heaven, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem which comes down from heaven. For a moment he rises from the extremely commonplace level upon which he usually moves to an eloquent picture of that happier world in which "God shall wipe away all tears from" the eyes of men; when "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain." The book concludes with a curse upon any one who shall in any manner tamper with it, either by way of addition or erasure, and with a promise from Jesus that he will come quickly.

SUBDIVISION 4.—_The God of Christendom._

Although the God whom Jesus thought himself commissioned to represent, and in whom his disciples believed, is the historical continuation of the Jehovah of Hebrew Scripture, yet his character is in many important aspects widely different. No longer the arbitrary and irascible personage who continually interfered with the current of human affairs, rewarding here, punishing there; now overthrowing a monarch, now destroying a nation; he exercises a calmer and more equitable sway over the destinies of the world. As the servile occupants of the bench in former days too often combined the functions of prosecutors with those of judges, so Jehovah in the ancient times of Israel had sometimes thrown off the judicial dignity to act with all the _animus_ of a party to the cause. This was natural perhaps where the subject-matter of the inquiry was the worship and honor to be paid to himself. It was natural that he should take a strong personal interest in such cases; but as all opposition (among the Jews at least) had passed away, and he remained in exclusive possession of the throne, he could afford to treat the charges with which he had now to deal—mere infractions of morality, for example—in a much more impartial spirit.

In addition to this cause of transformation, the natural growth of religious feeling had tended to replace the older deity by a modified conception, and Jesus, falling in in this respect with the course of thought already in progress, contributed to effect a still further modification in the same direction. Hence, although there is nowhere an absolute break between the old and the new conceptions, the God of the New Testament is practically a very different person from the God of the Old. We cannot conceive him doing the same things. The worst action, in the way of interference in mundane matters, of which the God of the New Testament is guilty, is, perhaps, the sudden slaughter of Ananias and Sapphira. But what is this to such enormities as the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the commission of bears to devour little children who had ridiculed the baldness of a prophet? Horrors like these, so consistent with the general mode of procedure of the ancient Jehovah, are wholly incompatible with the characteristics so often ascribed to the more recent God. According to the theories of the New Testament, the crime committed by the Jews in executing Jesus was at least as great as the crimes for which the antediluvians and the Sodomites had been so ruthlessly exterminated. Yet we cannot imagine Jesus as even wishing for the extermination of his contemporaries by water or by fire. The God whose love for mankind he had been teaching could not for a moment be thought of as consenting to such a course. While Elijah the Tishbite is represented as positively praying for the instant death of one hundred men who came to him with a message from his king, Jesus, on the contrary, is depicted as actually healing the only one of his enemies who had been in any way injured in effecting his arrest. Plainly when the conduct of the prophets is thus dissimilar, the deity whom they represent on earth is dissimilar also.

Another very marked alteration to be observed in passing from the character of Jehovah to that of God, is the emancipation of the object of worship from the limits of race. Jehovah was altogether a Jew. He kept the Sabbath-day; he loved fasts and festivals; he believed strongly in the virtue of circumcision; he was interested not so much in the general well-being of the human species, as in the success of the single people of whom he was the true leader in battle and the ultimate sovereign at home. What happened to all the remainder of mankind was to him a matter of trivial moment, although it might suit him occasionally to use them as instruments either for the chastisement or the restoration to favor of his beloved Israel. But God in the New Testament has largely cast off the special features of his race, and although he sometimes betrays his Judaic origin, he is in the main cosmopolite in his sympathies and impartial in his behavior. Though by no means catholic in religion, but holding exclusively to a single faith, he receives all who embrace that faith, of whatever nation, within the range of his favor. This great and deeply important change, though begun by Jesus, was in the main the work of Paul. If it was Jesus who constructed the tabernacle, it was Paul who built the temple.

While, however, there is an enormous improvement if we compare the administration of human affairs by Jehovah and by God, there is nevertheless a blot upon the character of God which suffices, if rigorously balanced against the failings of Jehovah, to outweigh them all. It is the eternity of the punishment which he inflicts in a future life. No amount of sophistry can ever justify the creation of beings whose lives are to terminate in endless suffering. But while the _reality_ of condemnation to such endless suffering would be a far more gigantic crime than any of the merely terrestrial penalties inflicted by the Hebrew Jehovah, the _belief_ in such endless suffering is quite consistent with a much higher general conception of the divinity than the one that coëxisted with the belief in those terrestrial penalties. The explanation of this apparent paradox is to be found in the fact that the necessary injustice of eternal punishment is not very easily perceived; that, in fact, it is not understood at all in the ruder stages of social evolution, and not by every individual even in so advanced a society as our own. Some degree of punishment for offenses is felt to be requisite; and it is not observed without considerable reflection that that punishment in order to be just must needs be finite; must needs, if imposed by absolute power, aim at the ultimate reformation of the criminal, not at his ultimate misery. And it takes a far higher degree of mental cultivation to feel this than it takes to feel the injustice of the violent outbursts attributed in the Old Testament to Jehovah. Tradition and custom alone could have prevented Jesus and his disciples from feeling shocked at these; while it was intellectual capacity which was needed to enable them to reject eternal punishment as incompatible with justice. Add to these considerations the very important fact that the conduct conducing to salvation, and avoiding condemnation in the future state, was supposed to be known to all men beforehand, being fixed by unalterable rules; while the conduct necessary to ensure the terrestrial rewards, and escape the terrestrial penalties of the Old Testament, was not known till the occasion arose; sometimes not till after it had arisen. Thus, Jesus lays down in his teaching both the rules to be observed by human beings if they would obtain the approbation of his Father, and the exact manner in which the violation of those rules will be visited upon them if they fail to repent and obtain forgiveness. But Jehovah only made his rules from time to time, and never announced beforehand what his punishments would be. Who, for instance, could tell what he would do to the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf? who could say whether he would treat gathering sticks on the Sabbath, as to which there was as yet no law, as a capital crime? still more, who could imagine that he would visit the action of a monarch in taking a census of Israel by a pestilence inflicted on the unoffending people? Plainly it was a very rude notion of deity indeed which was satisfied to suppose an arbitrary interposition in all such cases. The God of the New Testament may be more cruel, but he is also more consistent. If I may venture on a homely comparison, I should say that the Jehovah of the Israelites is like a capricious Oriental despot, whose subjects' lives are in his hand, while the God of Christendom rather resembles a judge administering a Draconian code in which there should be no gradations between capital punishment and entire acquittal. The laws may in fact demand more bloodshed than the tyrant; but their existence and administration by fixed rules would undoubtedly imply that a people had reached a higher grade of civilization. Moreover, exactly as government conducted by laws is capable of improvement by modification of the legislative enactments, while despotic government is essentially vicious, so the character of God admits of easy adaptation to the needs of a more cultivated state, while that of Jehovah can by no possibility be rendered consistent with a high ideal of divinity.

Such adaptation of the Christian God has actually taken place to a very large extent. The doctrine of Purgatory, leaving only the most incorrigible offenders to be consigned to hell, was already a considerable step in advance of the teaching of the New Testament. It got rid of the fundamental weakness in the conception of Jesus, wherein there was no proportion of punishment to offense; every sin, small or great, was either absolutely forgiven or punished to the uttermost extent. It effected the same beneficent change as Romilly effected in the English law. Precisely as our former code punished even trifling crimes with death or not at all, so the God of Jesus punished sin either eternally or not at all. Precisely as the excessive severity of English law led to the entire acquittal of many criminals who should have received some degree of punishment, so the excessive severity of God led to the belief and hope that many sinners would be entirely pardoned who should in justice have received some measure of correction. Thus, in both these cases, the undue harshness of the threatened penalty tended to defeat the very object in view.

But the character of the God of Christendom admits of a much more thorough reformation than that effected by the Catholic Church. Tender spirits, offended, like Uncle Toby, at the notion that even the worst of beings should be damned to all eternity, have simply refused to accept the notion of endless torture. Thinkers, aiming at a system of abstract justice, have sought to prove that it could not be. Theologians have contrived all sorts of shifts to dispense with the necessity of believing it. Modern feeling, whether on grounds of logic or of sentiment, has gradually come to suppress it more and more as an inconvenient article in the nominal creed, to be, if not consciously rejected, at least instinctively thrust as much as possible out of sight. There has resulted an idea of the Deity in which the harsher elements are swept away, and the gentler ones, such as his fatherhood, his care, and his love, are left behind. Such writers as Theodore Parker, Francis W. Newman, and Frances Power Cobb, have carried this ideal to the highest point of perfection of which it appears to be capable. Their God is still the God of Christendom, but refined, purified and exalted. The work which the Jewish prophets began, which Jesus carried on, at which all the nations of Christendom have labored, they have most worthily completed. Whether the ideal thus attained is destined to be final, whether it really represents the ultimate possibilities of religious thought that can remain as the corner-stone of a universal faith, are questions that can be answered only when we have undertaken the complete analysis of those most general constituents of all theological systems which the foregoing examination has disclosed. On that last analysis we are about to enter.

"Ach, mein Kindchen, schon als Knabe,
Als ich sass auf Mutters Schoss,
Glaubte ich an Gott den Vater,
Der da waltet gut und gross.

"Der die schöne Erd' erschaffen,
Und die schönen Menschen d'rauf,
Der den Sonnen, Monden, Sternen,
Vorgezeichnet ihren Lauf.

"Als ich grösser wurde, Kindchen,
Noch vielmehr begriff ich schon,
Und begriff, und ward vernünftig,
Und ich glaub' auch an den Sohn;

"An den lieben Sohn, der liebend
Uns die Liebe offenbart,
Und zum Lohne, wie gebräuchlich,
Von dem Volk gekreuzigt ward.

"Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,
Viel gelesen, viel gereist,
Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen
Glaub ich an den heil'gen Geist."

—HEINE.

THE

RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT ITSELF.