Chapter XII: Part 12

The Roman Catholic, for instance, entertains a conception about what sacred truth is, and how it is to be had, which, leaving nothing to depend on new discoveries, discharges all the richest interest from any fresh knowledge we may gain of religion in the past. With him divine truth, so far as it is special to Christendom, is something wholly foreign to the human mind, intrinsically unrelated to any faculty we have. In being supernatural, it belongs to another sphere than that to which our thought is restricted, and is totally withdrawn from all the movements of our nature. It consists, indeed, in a set of objective facts from which we are absent, and which no ratiocination of ours can seize, any more than our ear can tell whether there be music on Saturn's ring. There is no human consciousness answering to it; and to resort thither for it is like asking the dreamer or the blindfold to describe the scene in which he stands, or consulting your own feelings to learn what is going on in Pekin or Japan. On this theory, the objects of faith are conceived of as objects of _perception_, only by senses otherwise constituted than ours; we can have no surmise about them, till they are announced to us by qualified percipients, and no comprehension of them even then, but only reception of them as facts imported for us from abroad. The bearing of this doctrine of invisible realism on the treatment of ecclesiastical history is manifest. The inaccessible facts are deposited with the sacerdotal corporation; with whom alone is vested the duty and the power of stating and defining them. They are not indeed all stated and defined in their last amplitude at once; for definition is always an enclosure of the true by exclusion of the false; and it is only in proportion as the dreaming perversity of men throws forth one delusive fancy after another, that the Church draws line after line to shut the intrusion out. If the creeds seem to enlarge as the centuries pass, it is not that they have more truth to give, but only more error to remove. The divine facts were conceived aright and conceived complete in the minds of Apostles and Evangelists, but they were not contemplated then as _against_ the follies and contradictions opposed to them in later times; but as soon as the hour came for this antagonism to be felt, the infallible perception secured in perpetuity to the living hierarchy supplied the due verdict of rejection. To the Catholic, therefore, Christianity was made up and finished, its treasury was full, in the first generation; its power of development is only the refusal of deviation; and its intellectual life is tame as the story of some perfect hero, who does nothing but stand still and repel temptations. The history of doctrines thus becomes a history of heresies; the primitive stock of tradition and Scripture must, on the one hand, be maintained entire in the face of all possible exposures by critical research; and, on the other, remain in eternal barrenness and produce no more. Natural knowledge, whether of the world or of humanity, may grow continually, but the new thoughts it may lead us to entertain of God are either _not_ new, or not true; and every pretended enrichment of truth is nothing but evolution of falsehood. This removal of all variety from religion, this expulsion of life and change into the negative region of aberration and denial, eviscerates the past of its devout interest, rests the study of it on contempt instead of reverence for man; with all its pious air, it simply betrays history with a kiss, and delivers it over for scribes to buffet and chief priests to crucify. Short work is made in this way of any fresh witness, like the author of our book, who turns up unexpectedly from an early age. Does he speak in agreement with the hierarchical standards? He only flings another voice into the _consensus_ of obedient believers. Does he say anything at variance with the _regula fidei_? Then have we only to see in what class of heretics he stands. His testimony is either superfluous or misleading.

The Protestant, of the approved English type, arrives, under guidance of a different thought, at the same flat and indifferent result. Though he gives a more subjective character to divine truth than the Roman Catholic, and brings both the want and the supply of it more within the attestation of consciousness, he puts its discovery equally beyond the reach of our ruined faculties, and equally cuts it off from all relation to philosophy and the natural living exercise of reason and conscience. He further agrees that his foreign gift of revelation was imported all at once, and all complete, into our world, within the Apostolic age; that the conceptions of that time are an authoritative rule for all succeeding centuries; and that every newer doctrine is to be regarded as a false accretion, to be flung off into the incompetent and barren spaces of human speculation. He denies, however, the twofold vehicle of this precious gift; and, cancelling altogether the oral tradition and indeterminate Christian consciousness of the early Church, shuts up the whole contents of religion within the canonical Scriptures. The guardianship of unwritten tradition being abolished, and the canon requiring no guardianship at all, the trust deposited with the hierarchy disappears; and no permanent inspiration, no authoritative judicial function, in matters of faith, remains. Whatever Holy Spirit continues in the Church is not a progressively teaching spirit, which can ever impart thoughts or experiences unknown to the first believers; but a personally comforting and animating spirit, whose highest climax of enlightenment is the exact reproduction of the primitive state of mind. The apprehension of Divine truth is thus reduced to an affair of verbal interpretation of documents; and though in this process there is room for the largest play of subjective feeling, so that different minds, different nations, different ages, will unconsciously evolve very various results; these are not to be regarded as possible Divine enrichments of the faith, but to be brought rigidly to the standard of the earliest Church, and disowned wherever they include what was absent there. This view is less mischievous than the Roman Catholic, only because it is more inconsequent and confused. The canon which you take as sacred was selected and set in authority by the unwritten consciousness and tradition which you reject as profane. The Church existed before its records; expressed its life in ways spreading indefinitely beyond them; and neither was exempt from human elements till they were finished, nor lost the Divine spirit when they were done. So arbitrary a doctrine corrupts the beauty of Scripture, and deadens the noblest interest of history. If the New Testament is to serve as an infallible standard, it is thus committed to perfect unity and self-consistency; and you are obliged to contend that the various types of doctrine found within its compass--the Messianic conceptions of Matthew and John, the "Faith" of Paul and James, the eucharistic conceptions of the first Evangelists and the last, the eschatology of the Apocalypse and the Epistles--are only different sides of one and the same belief, colored with the tints and shadings of several minds. How utterly inadequate such an hypothesis is to the explanation of the Scriptural phenomena, what a distorted and absurd representation it gives of the sacred writers, and their mode of thought, is best known to those who have honestly tried to deal with the fourth Gospel, for instance, as historically the supplement of the others, and dogmatically of the Book of Revelation; to suppose the Logos-doctrine tacitly present in the speeches of Peter; to detect the pre-existence in Mark, or remove it from John; or to identify the Paraclete with the gifts of Pentecost. All feeling of living reality is lost from our picture of the Apostolic time, when its outlines are thus blurred, its contrasts destroyed, its grouped figures effaced, and the whole melted away by the persevering drizzle of a watery criticism into a muddy glory round the place where Christ should be. If, moreover, we are to find everything in the first age, then the second, and the third, and all others, must be worse, just in so far as they differ from it; and the whole course of succeeding thought, the widening and deepening of the Christian faith and feeling, the swelling of its stream by the lapse into it of Oriental Gnosis and Hellenic Platonism and the Western Conscience, must be a ceaseless degeneracy. Thus to the Bibliolater as to the Romanist, Divine truth _has no history among men_, unless it be the history of decline, or of recovery purchased by decline. He also will accordingly care nothing about what the people of Caius or Hippolytus thought. Is it in the Bible? If so, he knew it before. Is it not in the Bible? Then he has nothing to do with it but throw it away. By a fitting retribution, this moping worship of the letter of a book and the creed of a generation brings it to pass that both are lost to the mind in a dismal haze of ignorance and misconception; and if the "Evangelical" believer could be transported suddenly from Exeter Hall into the company of the twelve in Jerusalem, or the Proseucha which Paul enters on the banks of the Strymon, or the room where the Agape is prepared at Rome, we are persuaded that he would find a scene newer to his expectations than by any other migration into a known time and place.

But now let us abolish this isolation from the rest of human existence of the _incunabula_ of our faith, and throw open that time to free relation with the whole providence of humanity. Suppose Christianity to be the influence upon the world of a Divine Person,--in quality divine, in quantity human,--whose Epiphany was determined at a crisis of ripe conditions for the rescue, the evolution, the spread of holy and sanctifying truth. What are those conditions? They consist mainly in the co-presence, within the embrace of one vast state, of two opposite races or types of men, both having a partial gift of divine apprehension, and holding in charge an indispensable element of truth; both with their spiritual life verging to exhaustion and capable of no separate effort more; and each unconsciously pining away for want of the complement of thought which the other only could supply. The _Hebrew_ brought his intense feeling of the Personality of God; conceiving this in so concentrated a form as to exclude the proper notion of infinitude, and render Him only the most powerful Being in the Universe, its Monarch,--wielding the creatures as his puppets,--acting historically upon its scenes as objective to Him, and by the annals of his past agency supplying to the Abrahamic family a religion of archives and documents. The sovereignty of Jehovah raised him to an immeasurable height above his creation; dwarfed all other existence; placed him by _nature_ at a distance from men, and only by _condescension_ allowing of approximation. And hence his worshippers, in proportion as they adored his greatness, felt the littleness of all else; acquired a temper towards their fellow-men, if not severe and scornful, at least not reverent and tender; and regarded them as separate in kind from Him, mere dust on the balance or locusts in the field. The religion of the _Hellenic_ race began at the other end,--from the midst of human life, its mysteries, its struggles, its nobleness, its mixture of heroic Free-will and awful Destiny; and their deepest reverence, their quickest recognition of the Divine, was directed towards the soul of a man vindicating its grandeur, though it should be against superhuman powers. In proportion as men were great, beautiful, and good, did they appear to be as lesser gods, and earth and heaven to be filled with the same race. Thought, conscience, admiration in the human mind were not personal accidents separately originating in each individual; but the sympathetic response of our common intellect, standing in front of Nature, to the kindred life of the Divine intellect behind Nature, and ever passing into expression through it. When this feeling of the Hellenic race became reflective, and organized itself into philosophy, it represented the universe as the eternal assumption of form by the Divine thought, which we were enabled to read off by our essential identity of nature. Hence a whole series of conceptions quite different from the Hebrew representations; instead of Creation, Evolution of being; instead of Interposition from without, Incarnation operating from within; instead of Omnipotent Will, Universal Thought; assigning as the ideal of man's perfection, not so much obedience to Law, as similitude of Mind to God; and tending predominantly not to strength in Morals, but to beauty in Art. These two opposite tendencies had run their separate course, and expended their proper history; and were talking wildly, as in the approaching delirium of death. But they are the two factors of all religious truth: and to fuse them together, to make it impossible that either should perish or should remain alone, the Christ was given to the world, so singularly balanced between them, that neither could resist his power, but both were drawn into it for the regeneration of mankind. In the accidents of his lot given to the one race, and only baffling the visions of prophets to transcend them; in the essence of his nature, so august and attractive to the other that the faith in Incarnation was irresistible; presented to the Hebrews by his mortal birth, and snatched from them by his immortal; stopping by his holiness the mouth of Law, and carrying it up into the higher region of Faith and Love; in the Temple wishing the Temple gone, that there might be open communion, Spirit with Spirit; translating sacrifice into self-sacrifice;--he had every requisite for conciliating and blending the separated elements of truth which, for so many ages, had been converging towards him. But if this was the function providentially assigned to him, and for which the divine and human were so blended in him, it is a function which could not be accomplished in a moment, in a generation, in a century. It is an _historical_ function, freely demanding time for its theatre; and as the separate factors had occupied ages in attaining their ripeness for combination, so must their fusion consume many a lifetime of effervescing thought, ere the homogeneous truth appeared. The words of Christ are not in this view the end in which Revelation terminates; but the means given to us of knowing himself, contributions to the picture we form of his personality. Nor are the sentiments of his immediate followers about his office and position in the scheme of Providence anything more authoritative to us than the incipient attempts made, when his influence was fresh, to grasp the whole of his relations while only a part was to be seen. The records of the great crisis are no doubt of superlative value, as the vehicles by which alone we understand and feel its power; but their value is lost if they are to dictate truth to our passive acceptance, instead of quickening our reason and conscience to find it: they stop in this way the very development which they were to lead, and disappoint Christ of the very work he came to achieve. Human elements were inevitably and fully present in the first age and its Scriptures, as in every other; and the transitory ingredients they have left, it is a duty to detach from the eternal truth. And as conditions of finite imperfection cannot be banished from the central era, neither can the guidance of the Infinite Spirit be denied, whether among the Hebrew, the Hellenic, or the Christian people, in the ages before and after. In that new development of human consciousness and knowledge in regard to God, which we call Christianity, _all_ the requisite conditions--viz. the factors taken up, the Person who blends them, and the continuous product they evolve--include Divine Inspiration as well as Human Reflection,--the living presence and communion of the Eternal with the Transitory Mind, of the perfectly Good with the good in the Imperfect. To disengage the one from the other, to treasure up the true and holy that is born of God, and let fall the false and wrong that is infused by man, is possible only to Reason and Conscience, is indeed the perpetual work in which they live; the denial of which is not merely Atheism, but Devil-worship,--not the bare negation, but the positive reversal, of religion,--the virtual affirmation that God indeed _exists_, but exists as _Un_-reason and _Un_-good. No mechanical, no chronological separation can be effected of the Divine from the Human, the Revealed from the Unrevealed, in faith; there is no person, no book, no age, no Church, in which both do not meet, and require to be disentangled the one from the other; but the perseverance of God's living and self-harmonious Spirit throughout the discordant errors of dying generations enables the men most apt and faithful to his voice to know more and more what his reality is, and drop the semblances by which it is disguised. The effect of this view on our estimate of ecclesiastical literature is evident. As, according to it, the Apostolic period is not exempted from critical judgment, so neither are succeeding times to be without their claim on religious reverence. The canonical books of the New Testament fall back into the general mass of literature recording the earliest knowledge and consciousness of the disciples, neither detached, as a mysterious whole, from other productions of their time, nor excluding the greatest diversities of value among themselves. They exhibit the first struggling efforts--not always concurrent in their direction--of an awakening spiritual life, to interpret a recent Divine manifestation, and to solve by it the problem of the world's Providence. Their very freshness and proximity to the great figure of Christ was by no means an unmixed advantage to these efforts; and they were not so complete and successful as to supersede their continuance in the next and following generations, which lay under no incompetency for their prosecution, and are as likely, so far as antecedent probability goes, to have enriched and improved, as to have impoverished and spoiled, the earlier doctrine of Christ's relation to God and to mankind. The chasm thus disappears between the Apostolic age and its successor; the products of the first are not to be accepted simply because they are there, nor those of the second rejected because they are absent from the first; nor is everything to be admitted on showing that it stands in both, and even had a tenure long enough to become the prescriptive occupant of the Church. The Catholic is right in clinging to the continuous thread of Divine Inspiration binding the centuries of Christendom together; and in maintaining that the expression of true doctrine grows fuller with time. He is wrong in making the Spirit over to an hierarchical corporation; and in treating the ostensible growth of doctrine as the mere negation of heresies. The Protestant is right in rescuing from the haze of uncertain tradition the real historical ground of his religion, and setting it in the focus of an intense reverence; and in rejecting whatever cannot be adjusted with the clear facts and essential Spirit of that primitive Gospel. He is wrong in his insulation of that time as a sole authoritative age of golden days, in which the faith had neither error nor defect, and from which it must be copied, with daguerreotype exactitude, into every disciple's mind. Keep the positive elements, destroy the negative limitations of both these systems, and the true conception of Christianity emerges. As a system of self-conscious doctrine, it is a religious Philosophy, starting from the historical appearance of Christ as an expression of God in human life, and always detained around this one object as its centre; and in its development consulting not the idiosyncrasies and conceits of private and personal reflection, but the devout consciousness and spiritual _consensus_ of all Christian ages and all holy men. All religion is the product of an action of the Infinite mind upon the finite: in the _Christian_ religion that action takes place upon souls engaged in the contemplation of Christ as the manifestation of God's moral nature. This given object remaining the same, there is room for indefinite expansion and variety; and every developed form is to be tried, not by its date, but by the tests of truth relevant to religious philosophy.

How far M. Bunsen would recognize his own doctrine in this exposition we cannot say; but without intending in the least to make him responsible for it, we think it does not essentially deviate from his scheme of thought. The philosophical aphorisms in which he has embodied his speculative faith follow an order which we should have spoiled, had we, for our present purpose, so brought them together as to make them speak for themselves. And though they display the same astonishing command of our language, in which the author never fails, the cast of the thoughts is so Teutonic, that few English readers, it is to be feared, will appreciate their depth and richness. The complaint, which we have heard and seen, that they are wholly unintelligible, is indeed purely ridiculous, except that it sadly illustrates the extent to which reflection, and even feeling, on such subjects has ceased in England. M. Bunsen, we can assure our readers, knows what he means, and lucidly states what he means; and those who miss his meaning have for the most part no slight loss. The following sentences, which the greatest sufferer from philosophobia may drink in without convulsions, will explain his idea of Revelation, in its bearing upon the use of written records. The mere "Natural Religion" of the Deist, he observes, was--

"The negative reaction against the equally untenable, unphilosophical, and irrational notion, that revelation was nothing but an external historical act. Such a notion entirely loses sight of the infinite or eternal factor of revelation, founded both in the nature of the infinite and that of the finite mind, of God and man.

"This heterodox notion became still more obnoxious, by its imagining something higher in the manifestation of God's will and being than the human mind, which is the divinely-appointed organ of divine manifestation, and in a double manner; ideally in mankind, as object, historically in the individual man, as instrument.

"The notion of a merely historical revelation by written records is as unhistorical as it is unintellectual and materialistic. It necessarily leads to untruth in philosophy, to unreality in religious thought, and to Fetichism in worship. It misunderstands the process necessarily implied in every historical representation. The form of expressing the manifestation of God in the mind, as if God was himself using human speech to man, and was thus himself finite and a man, is a form inherent in the nature of human thought as embodied in language, its own rational expression. It was originally never meant to be understood materialistically, because the religious consciousness which produced it was essentially spiritual; and, indeed, it can only be thus misunderstood by those who make it a rule and criterion of faith, never to connect any thought whatever with what they are expected to believe as divinely true.

"Every religion is positive. It is, therefore, justly called a religion '_made manifest_' (offenbart), or, as the English term has it, _revealed_; that is to say, it supposes an action of the infinite mind, or God, upon the finite mind, or man, by which God, in his relation to man, becomes manifest or visible. This can be mediate, through the manifestation of God in the Universe of Nature; or a direct, immediate action, through the religious consciousness.

"This second action is called _revealed_, in the strictest sense. The more a religion manifests of the real substance and nature of God, and of his relation to the universe and to man, the more it deserves the name of a divine manifestation, or of Revelation. But no religion which exists could exist without something of truth, revealed to man, through the creation, and through his mind.

"Such a direct communication of the Divine mind as is called Revelation has necessarily two factors, which are unitedly working in producing it. The one is the infinite factor, or the direct manifestation of eternal truth to the mind, by the power which that mind has of perceiving it; for human perception is the correlate of divine manifestation. There could be no revelation of God if there was not the corresponding faculty in the human mind to receive it, as there is no manifestation of light where there is no eye to see it.

"This infinite factor is, of course, not historical; it is inherent in every individual soul, only with an immense difference in the degree.

"The action of the Infinite upon the mind, is _the_ miracle of history and of religion, equal to the miracle of creation.

"Miracle, in its highest sense, is therefore essentially and undoubtedly an operation of the Divine mind upon the human mind. By that action the human mind becomes inspired with a new life, which cannot be explained by any precedent of the selfish (natural) life, but is its absolute contrary. This miracle requires no proof; the existence and action of religious life is its proof, as the world is the proof of creation.

"The second factor of revelation is the finite or external. This means of divine manifestation is, in the first place, a universal one, the Universe or Nature. But, in a more special sense, it is a historical manifestation of divine truth through the life and teaching of higher minds among men. These men of God are eminent individuals, who communicate something of eternal truth to their brethren; and, as far as they themselves are true, they have in them the conviction, that what they say and teach of things divine is an objective truth. They therefore firmly believe that it is independent of their individual personal opinion and impression, and will last, and not perish, as their personal existence upon earth must.

"The difference between Christ and other men of God is analogous to that between the manifestation of a part, and of the totality and substance, of the divine mind."--Vol. II. p. 60, _seq._

The newly-found work, like other productions of the same period, can have only a disturbing interest for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Protestant. For, in conjunction with previous evidence, it shows that the unbroken unity of teaching is altogether a fiction; that what afterwards became heresy was, in the latter part of the second century, held in the church of the primacy itself, and by successors of St. Peter; that the clergy of Rome, so far from owning the apostolic authority of their chief, could resist him as heterodox; and that the contents of the Catholic system, far from appearing as an invariable whole from the first, were a gradual synthesis of elements flowing in from new channels of influence brought into connection with the faith; and as against the approved type of Protestant, it shows that his favorite scheme of dogma was still in a very unripe state, and that further back it had been still more so; so that if he binds himself to the earliest creed, he may probably have to accept a profession which he hardly regards as Christian at all. But from the third point of view, which assumes that development is an inherent necessity in a revelation, and may add to its truth, instead of subtracting from it, the monuments of Christian literature from the secondary period have a positive interest, free from all uneasiness and alarm. They arrest for us, in the midst, the advance of theological belief towards the form ultimately recognized in the Church, and expressed in the established creeds; they render visible the beautiful features and expanded look of the faith, when its Judaic blood had been cooled by the waters of an Hellenic baptism; and though they leave many undetermined problems as to the successive steps by which the original Hebrew type of the Gospel in Jerusalem was metamorphosed into the Nicene and hierarchical Christianity, they fix some intermediate points, and make us profoundly conscious of the greatness of the change.

The author of the "Philosophumena," for instance, would be stopped at the threshold of every sect in our own country, and excluded as heterodox. He crosses the lines of our theological definitions, and trespasses on forbidden ground, in every possible doctrinal direction. Cardinal Wiseman would have nothing to say to him; for he is insubordinate to the "Vicar of Christ," and profanely insists that a pope may be deposed by his own council of presbyters. The Bishop of Exeter would refuse him institution; for his Trinity is imperfect, and he allows no Personality to the Holy Ghost. The Archbishop of Dublin might probably think him a little hard upon Sabellius; but, if he would quietly sign the Articles, (which, however, he could by no means do,) might abstain from retaliation, and let him pass. At Manchester, Canon Stowell would keep him in hot water for his respectable opinion of human nature, and his lofty doctrine of free-will. In Edinburgh, Dr. Candlish would not listen to a man who had nothing to say of reliance on the imputed merits of Christ. The sapient board at New College, St. John's Wood, would expel him for his loose notions of Inspiration. And the Unitarians would find him too transcendental, make no common sense out of his notions of Incarnation, and recommend him to try Germany. This fact, that a bishop of the second and third centuries would be ecclesiastically not a stranger only, but an outcast among us, is most startling; and ought surely to open the eyes of modern Christians to the false and dangerous position into which their churches have been brought by narrow-heartedness and insincerity. It will not be M. Bunsen's fault if our Churchmen remain insensible to the national peril and disgrace of maintaining unreformed a system long known to have no heart of modern reality, and now seen to have as little ground of ancient authority. Again and again he raises his voice of earnest and affectionate warning. As a foreigner domesticated among us, as a scholar of wide historical view, as a philosophical statesman who, amid the diplomacy of the hour, descends to the springs of perennial life in nations, as a Christian who profoundly trusts the reality of religion, and cannot be dazzled by the pretence, he sees, with a rare clearness and breadth, both the capabilities and the dangers of our social and spiritual condition. He sees that God has given to the English people a moral massiveness and veracity of character which presents the grandest basis of noble faith; while learned selfishness and aristocratic apathy uphold in the Church creeds which only stupidity can sign without mental reservations,--a Liturgy that catches the scruple of the intellectual without touching the enthusiasm of the popular heart,--a laity without function,--a clergy without unity,--and a hierarchy without power. He sees that our insular position has imparted to us a distinctive nationality of feeling, supplying copious elements for coalescence in a common religion; while obstinate conservatism has permitted our Christianity to become our great divisive power, and to disintegrate us through and through. He respects our free institutions, which sustain the health of our political life; but beside them he finds an ecclesiastical system either imposed by a dead and inflexible necessity, or left unguided to a whimsical voluntaryism, which separates the combinations of faith from the relations of neighborhood, of municipality, of country. With noble and richly-endowed universities at the exclusive disposal of the Church, he finds the theological and philosophical sciences so shamefully neglected, that Christian faith notoriously does not hold its intellectual ground, and in its retreat does nothing to reach a firmer position; but only protests its resolution to stand still, and raise a din against the critic or metaphysic host that drives it back. Is there no one in this great and honest country that has trust enough in God and truth, foresight enough of ruin from falsehood and pretence, to lay the first hand to the work of renovation? Is statesmanship so infected with negligent contempt of mankind, that no high-minded politician can be found to care for the highest discipline of the people, and reorganize the institutions in which their conscience, their reason, their upward aspirations, should find life? Has the Church no prophet with faith enough to fling aside creed and college, and fire within him to burn away mediæval pedantries, and demand an altar of veracity, that may bring us together for common work and "common prayer"? Or is it to be left to the _strong men_, exulting in their strength, and storming with the furor of honest discontent, to settle these matters with the sledge-hammer of their indignation? Miserable hypocrisy! to open the lips and lift the eyes to heaven, while beckoning with the finger of apathy to these pioneers of Necessity! Would that some might be found to lay to heart our author's warning and counsel in the following sentences:--

"While we exclude all suggestions of despair, as being equally unworthy of a man and of a Christian, we establish two safe principles. The first is, that, in all congregational and ecclesiastical institutions, Christian freedom, within limits conformable to Scripture, constitutes the first requisite for a vital restoration. The second fundamental principle is, that every Church must hold fast what she already possesses, in so far as it presents itself to her consciousness as true and efficacious. In virtue of the first condition, she will combine Reason and Scripture in due proportions; by virtue of the second, she will distinguish between Spirit and Letter, between Idea and Form. No external clerical forms and mediæval reflexes of bygone social and intellectual conditions can save us, nor can sectarian schisms and isolation from national life. Neither can learned speculations, and still less the incomparably more arrogant dreams of the unlearned. Scientific consciousness must dive into real life, and refresh itself in the feelings of the people, and that no one will be able to do without having made himself thoroughly conversant with the sufferings and the sorrows of the lowest classes of society. For out of the feeling of these sufferings and sorrows, as being to a great degree the most extensive and most deep-seated product of evil,--that is, of selfishness,--arose, eighteen hundred years ago, the divine birth of Christianity. The new birth, however, requires new pangs of labor, and not only on the part of individuals, but of the whole nation, in so far as she bears within her the germs of future life, and possesses the strength to bring forth. Every nation must set about the work herself, not, indeed, as her own especial exclusive concern, but as the interest of all mankind. Every people has the vocation to coin for itself the divine form of Humanity, in the Church as well as in the State; its life depends on this being done, not its reputation merely; it is the condition of existence, not merely of prosperity.

"Is it not time, in truth, to withdraw the veil from our misery? to point to the clouds which rise from all quarters, to the noxious vapors which have already well-nigh suffocated us? to tear off the mask from hypocrisy, and destroy that sham which is undermining all real ground beneath our feet? to point out the dangers which surround, nay, threaten already to engulf us? Is the state of things satisfactory in a Christian sense, where so much that is unchristian predominates, and where Christianity has scarcely begun here and there to penetrate the surface of the common life? Shall we be satisfied with the increased outward respect paid to Christianity and the Church? Shall we take it as a sign of renewed life, that the names of God and Christ have become the fashion, and are used as a party badge? Can a society be said to be in a healthy condition, in which material and selfish interests in individuals, as well as in the masses, gain every day more and more the upper hand? in which so many thinking and educated men are attached to Christianity only by outward forms, maintained either by despotic power, or by a not less despotic, half-superstitious, half-hypocritical custom? when so many churches are empty, and satisfy but few, or display more and more outward ceremonials and vicarious rites? when a godless schism has sprung up between spirit and form, or has even been preached up as a means of rescue? when gross ignorance or confused knowledge, cold indifference or the fanaticism of superstition, prevails as to the understanding of Holy Scripture, as to the history, nay, the fundamental ideas of Christianity? when force invokes religion in order to command, and demagogues appeal to the religious element in order to destroy? when, after all their severe chastisements and bloody lessons, most statesmen base their wisdom only on the contempt of mankind? and when the prophets of the people preach a liberty, the basis of which is selfishness, the object libertinism, and the wages are vice? And this in an age the events of which show more and more fatal symptoms, and in which a cry of ardent longing pervades the people, re-echoed by a thousand voices!"--III. XV.

Sorry, however, as we should be to see our Roman presbyter disconsolately wandering from fold to fold in modern England, and dismissed as a black sheep from all, we should not like to find him metamorphosed into chief shepherd either, and invested with the guidance of our ecclesiastical affairs. Though he is above imitating the feeble railing of Irenæus at the heresies, he deals with them in the true clerical style; often missing their real meaning, he does not spare them his bad word; and fancies he has killed them before he has even caught them. He has an evident relish also for a tale of scandal, as a make-weight against a theological opponent. In the "Little Labyrinth," he had told us a story about a Unitarian minister, who, for accepting his schismatical office, had been horsewhipped by angels all night; so that he crawled in the morning to the metropolitan, and gave in his penitential recantation. And now, in the larger work, the author flies at higher game, and makes out that Pope Callistus was an incorrigible scamp; originally a slave in the household of a wealthy Christian master, Carpophorus, whose confidence he abused in every possible way. First, having been intrusted with the management of a bank in the _Piscina publica_, he swindled and ruined the depositors, and decamped, with the intention of sailing from Portus, but was found on board ship; and, though he jumped into the sea to avoid capture, was picked up, and condemned by his master to the hand-mill. Next, being allowed to go out, on the plea of collecting some debts which would enable him to pay a dividend to the depositors, he created a riot in a Jews' synagogue, and, being brought before the prefect, was sentenced to be flogged and transported to Sardinia. Thence he escaped by passing himself off among a number of Christians, released from their exile through the influence of the Emperor's concubine, Marcia, and on the recommendation of Victor, the Pope. As he was not included in the list of pardons, he no sooner made his appearance in Rome than his master sent him off to live on a monthly allowance at Antium. On the death of Carpophorus, he seems to have attained his freedom by bequest; and his fertility of resource having made him useful to the new Pope Zephyrinus, he acquired influence enough to succeed him in the Primacy. We must confess that the evident _gusto_ with which our presbyter tells this scandal, the _animus_ with which he accuses Zephyrinus also of stupidity and venality, and the predominance in his narrative of theological antipathy over moral disgust, leave a painful impression on the reader respecting the spirit then at work in the Apostolic See. And though his scheme of belief, especially in relation to the person of Christ, was more rational than the definitions of more modern creeds, yet we fear that he would be not less nice about its shape, and intolerant of those who move about in freer folds of thought, than a divine of the Canterbury cloisters or the Edinburgh platform. His quarrel with the two popes whom he abuses shows pretty clearly the stage of development which the Christian theology had then reached. On this matter we must say a few words.

Whatever may have been the precise order of combination which brought the Hebrew and Hellenic ideas of God into union, there can be no doubt about the two _termini_ of the process. It started from the monarchical conception of Jehovah, as a Unity without plurality; and it issued in the Athanasian Trinity, with its three hypostases in one essence. Of these, the Father expressed the Absolute existence, the Son the Objective manifestation, the Holy Spirit the Subjective revelation of God. In the presbyter's creed, the third term was not yet incorporated, but still floated freely, diffused and impersonal. Leaving this out of view, we may observe, in the remaining part of the doctrine, two principal difficulties to be surmounted, arising from the double medium of divine objective manifestation,--Nature, always proceeding,--and Christ, historically transient. The first problem is, How to pass at all out of the Infinite existence into Finite phenomena, and conceive the relation between the Father and the Son; the second, How to pass from Eternal manifestation through all phenomena into temporary appearance in an Individual, so as to conceive the relation between the Son and the Galilean Christ. Thus, excluding all reference to the Holy Spirit, there were, in fact, _four_ objects of thought, whose relations to one another were to be adjusted; viz. the Father, the Son evolving all things, the Christ or divine individualization in the Gospel, and Jesus of Nazareth, the human being with whose life this individualization concurred. Among all these there were, so to speak, two clearly distinct Wills to dispose of; that of the man Jesus at the lowest extremity, and that of the Supreme God, which the Jew, at least, would fix at the upper. These two Wills act, in the whole development of doctrine on this subject, as the secret centres of Personality; and the remaining elements obtain or miss a hypostatic character according as they are drawn or not into coalescence with the one or the other. The volitional point of the Divine Agency being once determined, it may be regarded as enclosed between the _Thought_, or intellectual essence out of which it comes, and the _Execution_ by which it is realized; or it may be left undistinguished from these, and may be made to coincide with either. According to these variable conditions arise the several modes of doctrine in reference to the Divine element in God's Objective manifestation. The differences, for instance, between our presbyter's doctrine and Origen's, will be found to depend on the different points which they seize as the seat of divine volition, and the germ of their logical development. Our author, exemplifying the Hebrew tendency, seeks his initiative up at the fountain-head, and puts himself back before the first act of creation; he starts from the One God, with whom nothing was co-present, and fixes in Him the seat of the primeval Will. There, however, it would remain, a mere potentiality, did not the Eternal Mind, by reflection in itself, pass into self-consciousness, and give objectivity to its own thought. This primary expression of his essence, in which it enters into relation, but relation only to itself, is the _Logos_, or _Son_ of God, the agent in the production of all things. The potentiality is thus reserved to the Father; the effectuation is given to the Son; who, coming in at a point lower down than the seat of Will, and simply bridging over the interval that leads to accomplishment, is felt without the essential condition of a numerically distinct subsistence; and has either the instrumental and subordinate personality of a dependent being, or is imperfectly hypostatized.[41] In this impersonal character does the Logos manifest the Divine thought in the visible universe; in the minds of godly men, which are the source of law; in the glance of prophets, which catches and interprets the divine significance of all times; and first assumes a full personality in the Incarnation. Having left the primary Will behind in the Father's essence, the Logos remains but an inchoate hypostasis, till alighting, in the human nature, on another centre of volition. As if our author were half conscious, in reaching this point, of relief from an antecedent uneasiness, he now holds fast to the personality which has been realized, represents it as not dissolved by the death on the cross, but taken up into heaven, and abiding for ever. It is, in this view, the two extreme terms that supply the hypostatizing power; of the others, the Logos has no personality but by looking back to the Father; nor the Christ, but by going forward to the Son of Mary. This shows the yet powerful influence of the Judaic Monarchianism, and the embarrassment of a mind, setting out from that type of faith, to provide any plurality within the essence of God. Origen, on the other hand, yielded to the Hellenic feeling, and, instead of going back to any absolute commencement, looked for his Divine centre and starting-point further down; and took thence whatever upward glance was needful to complete his view. As the Greek reverence was not touched but by the Divine embodied in concrete life and form, so the Alexandrine catechist instinctively fixed upon the SON, the objective Thought of God, proceeding, not once upon a time or ever _first_, but _eternally_, from Him, as the initiative position for his doctrine. Here was placed the clearest and intensest focus of Will; and only in this ever-evolving efficient were the full conditions of personality realized. The Father was conceived more pantheistically, as the universal νους, the intellectual background, whence issued the acting nature of the Son. In meditating on them in their conjunction, Origen would think of the relation between _thought_ and _volition_; our author, of that between _volition_ and _execution_. Both doctrines show the imperfect fusion of Hebrew and Hellenic elements, and illustrate the characteristic effect of an excessive proportion of each. Where the Hebrew element prevails, the personality of the Son is endangered; where the Hellenic, the personality of the Father. Even our presbyter's doctrine of the Son, however, gave too strong an impersonation to Him for the party in Rome who sided with Zephyrinus and Callistus. These popes accused him, it seems, of being a _Ditheist_; and themselves maintained that the terms Father and Son denoted only different sides and relations of one and the same Being,--nay, not only of the same Being, but of the same προσωπον; and that the spirit that dwelt in Christ was the Father, of whom all things are full. For this opinion the two popes are angrily dealt with by our author, and charged with being half Sabellian, half humanitarian. His rancor justifies the suspicion, that, though he represents the party which triumphed at Rome, his opponents had been numerous and powerful, as, indeed, their election to the primacy would of itself show, and that even his own imperfect dogma was superinduced, not without a protracted struggle, upon an earlier faith yet remote from the Nicene standard.