Chapter XV: Part 15

"In contrast with such teachers" (the Ritual and the Dogmatic), "St. Paul, in our present chapter (1 Corinthians ii.), refers both to the _matter_ and the _manner_ of his own ministration of the Gospel. He did not teach it as a _Rhetorician_, to attract admiration to himself, and give more lively impressions of Paul the Orator than of Christ the Redeemer from sin, nor as a _Philosopher_, to raise doubtful questions on metaphysical subjects, and become the leader of a speculative school; but as the Apostle of Jesus Christ, he proclaimed to the hearts of men the practical and life-giving Gospel, that 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself'; that by the universal Saviour all distinctions were for ever destroyed, and the whole family of God to grow into the common likeness of that well-beloved Son,--for that now neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but the renewal of the affections after the image of the Lord. Where could an entrance be found for party divisions in a doctrine that professed nothing, that aimed at nothing, except to awaken the consciousness of sin within the heart, and, through trust in the God of holiness and love revealed in Jesus, to lead it to repentance and life? All who felt this love of Christ constraining them, cleansing their souls by the divine image that had taken possession of their affections, and, through the mercy it proclaimed, encouraging their penitence to look for pardon from their God, must, of necessity, be one communion; for this Gospel sentiment and hope could create no divisions amongst those who had it,--and those who had it not were outside the Christian pale, and, so far, could make no schisms within it. Now, whence comes this Gospel sentiment, this new principle of life? Were there any who had the exclusive power of communicating it? Did it require to be introduced by any intricate reasonings, by any subtle dialectics, which only the Masters in philosophy had at their command? Not so, says St. Paul;--it is a spiritual feeling, excited by moral sympathy, as soon as Christ is offered to the hearts that are susceptible of the sentiment;--and in whatever bosom there is not enough of the Spirit of God to cause that moral attraction to take place, neither philosophy nor outward forms, nor aught else but the divine image of goodness kept before the heart, can awaken the slumbering sensibilities which are the very faculties of spiritual apprehension, and which, as soon as they are alive, behold in Christ the solution of their own struggling and imperfect existence, their ideal and their rest. In regard to a sentiment so spiritual, a sympathy with the image of God, where is the possibility of introducing party divisions, and violating Christian unity? There can be but two parties,--those that _have_ the sentiment, and those that have it not. All Christians constitute the one,--and as for the other, in relation to Christian unity, they are not in question. Such is the argument of St. Paul in this second chapter."--p. 30.

It may be quite true that the essential power of Christianity resides in the image, ever present to the heart of Christendom, of a God resembling Christ, and loving those who aspire to approach him through the same resemblance. But we cannot find any traces of such a conception in the writings of Paul. The "faith" on which he exclusively insisted would be very incorrectly defined, we conceive, as a reverence of Christ's character as morally like God. If we may judge from the negative evidence of his letters, he appears to have had no insight into the interior of his Master's earthly life, and no great concern about it. There is an entire absence of any _moral_ picture of Jesus, who is presented in the Apostolic writings as an object, not of retrospective veneration, but of expectant reliance; not of admiring trust for personal qualities realized in a past career, but of hope grounded on his official destiny in the future. _One_ beauty of his character is, indeed, appealed to in the Pauline writings, viz. his humility and self-renunciation;[54] but even this is recognized, not on historical, but on theocratic grounds; it is illustrated, not by anything in his life, but by the fact of his death, conceived as a voluntary postponement of his theocratic prerogatives, and an abrogation of his exclusive nationality. He was a "spiritual" object to the Apostle of the Gentiles, not from perception of the inner marks and graces of his spirit, but from his being invisible and immortal, reserved in heaven under external escape from the conditions of earthly life. Mr. Thom's doctrine is a happy development of modern truth from ancient error; but regarded as a mere interpretation, it perhaps sets down to the Apostle's account a just moral appreciation of the past, instead of an erroneous conception of the Providence of the future. The religion of Christ has assuredly turned out a very different phenomenon from anything that was anticipated at its origin. It was announced as a Kingdom; as the king did not come, it became a Republic. It was conceived as a State; it grew up into a Faith. It was proclaimed as the world's end; it proved to be a fresh beginning. It was to consummate the Law and the Prophets; and it confounded both. It was to cover Pagan nations with shame and destruction; it embalmed their literature, and was transformed by their philosophy. It was to deliver over the earth to the pure and severe Monotheism of the Hebrews; which, however, it so relaxed as to provoke Islam into existence to proclaim again the monarchy of God. Its subjects were to be gathered from the Jews and half-castes of the Eastern Synagogue; and its most signal glories have been among the Teutonic nations, and the then unsuspected continents of the West. In every element of its internal power, in every direction of its external action, it has burst all the proportions, left behind all the expectations, with which it was born; and how can we continue to try it by the standard of its origin? Are we to say, that, having promised one thing and become another, it is not of God? That might be well, if it had _fallen short_ of its own professions,--disappointed us of dreams it had awakened of glory and delight. But if it has been _far better than its word_; if, instead of winding up the world's affairs, it has given them a new career; if for Messiah's tame millennium we have the grand and struggling life of Christendom, and for his closed books of judgment the yet open page of human history; if for the earthly throne and sceptre of Christ, sweeping away the treasures of past civilization, we have his heavenly image and spirit, presiding over the re-birth of art, the awakening of thought, the direction of law, and the organism of nations; if from the dignity of outward sovereignty he has been raised to that of Lord of the living conscience, not superseding the soul, but exercising it with sorrow and aspiration; then, surely, in so outstripping itself, the religion should win a more exceeding measure of trust and affection. Had it only realized its first assurances, we should have thought it divine; since it has so much surpassed them, we must esteem it diviner. There is no reason for the common assumption that a religion must be purest in its infancy. It is no less surrounded then, than at each subsequent time, with human conditions, and transmitted through human faculties; and when delivered to the world, embodied in action or in speech, necessarily presents itself as a mixed product of divine insight and of human thought,--of the living present and the decaying past; a flash of heavenly fire on the outspread fuel upon the altar of tradition. So it is with the Scriptures of the New Testament; which are not the heavenly source, but the first earthly result and expression of Christianity, and which present the perishable conditions as well as the indestructible life of the religion. Only by the course of time and Providence can these be disengaged from one another, and the accidents of place and nation fall away. If there dwell in the midst a divine productive element, the further it passes from the moment of its nativity, the clearer and more august will it appear. It is like the seed dropped at first on an unprepared and unexpectant ground; which in its earliest development yields but a struggling and scanty growth, but each season, as another generation of leaves falls from the boughs, becomes the source, through richer nutriment, of fuller forms; till at length, when it has spread the foliage of ages, making its own soil, and deepening the luxuriance of its own roots, a forest in all its glory covers the land, and waves in magnificence over continents once bare of life and beauty. So is it with the germ of divine truth cast upon the inhospitable conditions of history; it is small and feeble in its earlier day; but when it has provided the aliment of its own growth, and shed its reproductive treasures on the congenial mind of generations and races, it starts into the proportions of a Christendom, and becomes the shade and shelter of a world.

Much, therefore, as we value all attempts to illustrate the first records of Christianity, and to detach what was purely human and transient in its original form, we think that the religion itself cannot acknowledge the competency of such investigations to decide upon its claims. From a verdict on its _first_ works, it has a right to appeal for judgment upon _the whole_. It is the religion, not of John and Paul alone, but of Christendom; without a comparative estimate of whose moral and social genius, it can by no means be appreciated. The weakness and inadequacy of all narrower methods of defence will in the end drive the clergy to occupy this larger basis of operations. And the change will be not more favorable to the logic of their cause than to the charity of their disposition. So long as the Scriptures alone are taken as the standard, no more than one creed, at most, can be regarded as concurrent with the Christian faith. But when the entire existence of the religion through eighteen centuries is adopted as the measure, the very interests of advocacy themselves require that the best construction rather than the worst be put upon the errors and eccentricities of all churches within the compass of Christendom. The evidences would, in that case, be destroyed by exclusiveness, and widened in their foundations by comprehensiveness of temper; and the firmness of every disciple's faith and the energy of his zeal would become assurances, not of his limitation of mind, but of his largeness of heart. Instead of endless divisions, multiplied in the search after unity, we might hope to see the lines of separation become ever fainter; and every test of Christianity withdrawn except that of moral sympathy with the spirit of Christ; a test which, as God alone can apply it, man cannot abuse; and according to which many that, in the ecclesiastic roll, have been first, shall be last, and the last first.

FOOTNOTE:

[54] See Philippians ii. 5-11.

THE ETHICS OF CHRISTENDOM.

_The Temporal Benefits of Christianity exemplified in its
Influence on the Social, Intellectual, Civil, and Political
Condition of Mankind, from its first Promulgation to the present
Day._ By ROBERT BLAKEY. London. 1849.

_Small Books on Great Subjects._ Edited by a few Well-Wishers to
Knowledge. No. 19. _On the State of Man subsequent to the
Promulgation of Christianity._ London. 1851.

_The Connection of Morality with Religion; a Sermon, preached in
the Cathedral of St. Patrick, at an Ordination held by the Lord
Archbishop of Dublin, Sunday, September 21, 1851._ By WILLIAM
FITZGERALD, A.M., Vicar of St. Ann's, and Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Dublin. London. 1851.

Of these works, the third treats theoretically, the others practically, of the relation of Christianity to human nature. The preacher seeks in the natural conscience for the moral ground and receptacle of revelation; while the historians trace its moral operation in society and life. Were both tasks perfectly performed, we should be furnished with a complete image of the religion at once in its idea and its expression; should be able definitely to compare its promise with its achievements and to submit it, as a whole, to philosophical appreciation. But the two halves of the subject are exhibited with very unequal success. It is much easier to show the intended than the actual influence of the Christian faith upon the character of its disciples,--to determine by _a priori_ methods what it _must be_, than by an _a posteriori_ induction to estimate what it _has been_, and is. Mr. Fitzgerald, as becomes a professor of ethical science, has well contended that the religion which he recommends from the pulpit is neither indifferent nor supercilious towards the morals which he teaches from the University chair,--but assumes their obligation, appeals to their authority, and, in its mode of reconciling the human will with the Divine, raises them into eternal sanctities. It addresses itself to man as a being already conscious of responsibility; and simply proposes to restore reason and conscience to that supremacy _in fact_ which _of right_ they can never lose. How far has this aim been visibly realized? Are the traces of a Divine renovation clear upon the face of Christendom? Is there the difference between ancient Greece and modern England, or between the empire and the papacy of Rome, which might be expected between an unregenerate world and a regenerate? The historical answer to these questions is attempted by Mr. Blakey, with perhaps adequate resources of knowledge, but with so imperfect an apprehension of the requisites of his argument, that his book, though often instructive in detail, is altogether ineffective as a whole. He is content to select and enumerate the most salient and favorable points in the transition from ancient to modern civilization, and to set them down to the credit of Christianity; without care to disengage the action of concurrent causes, or to balance the account by reference to more questionable effects. A much finer analysis is needed, in order to draw from history its real testimony on this great matter; and nothing can well be more arbitrary, than to stroll through some fifteen centuries, and, gathering up none but the most picturesque and beneficent phenomena, weave them into a glory to crown the faith with which they co-exist. In Christendom, all the great and good things that are done at all will of course be done by Christians, and will contain such share of the religious element as may belong to the character of the actor or the age; but before you can avail yourself of them in Christian Apologetics, it must be shown that, under any other faith, no social causes would have remained adequate either to produce them or to provide any worthy equivalent. Because Charlemagne, after baptizing the Saxons in their own blood, displayed a better zeal by establishing cathedral and conventual schools, _therefore_ to put the horn-book of the liberal arts into the hand of his religion, while leaving the wet sword to stain his own; because chivalry blended in its vow "_fear of God_" with "love of the ladies," _therefore_ to trace all loyalty and courtesy to the doctrine of the Church; because the mediæval schoolmen imported into every science the canons of Divinity, and decided between Realism and Nominalism on eucharistic principles, _therefore_ to give the priesthood all the honors of modern philosophy and intellectual liberty,--is, to say the least, very vulnerable logic and very superficial history. Of a far superior order is the little book "On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity." In a previous treatise, "On the State of Man _before_ the Promulgation of Christianity," the author had passed under rapid review the ancient systems of civilization,--stationary, progressive, aggressive; and having seized on their characteristic features, he now brings with him determinate points of comparison into his survey of the post-Apostolic times. The view which he spreads beneath your eye of the world, as it lay ready to afford a channel for the Christian faith, is remarkable for breadth and truth. Conducting you, with the wide picture in your mind, to the pure head-spring in Galilee, and keeping close to the stream as it descends and opens from these sequestered heights, he enables you to see, reach by reach, where it fertilizes and where it destroys; the new fields of life it enters, the old landmarks of habit it overwhelms. The author is not more familiar with the Christian Apologists and Fathers, than with the later Latin and revived Greek literature from Trajan to Aurelian; and by skilfully noting the moments when Pagan and Christian life not only stood in silent co-presence, but came into active contact, he brings out into clear relief the new type of character which formed itself within the communities of disciples. That type is so strikingly original, its features so conspicuously express an order of passions and ideas strange alike to the Hellenic and the Italian races, as to betray the creative action of some vast moral power unborrowed from the established civilization. When the free Roman breaks the bread of communion with slaves,--when the slippery Syrian forswears lying and theft,--when the heedless Greek changes his eagerness of the moment into a living for eternity,--when a people ignorant of Stoic maxims display a contempt of torture and death sublimer than the ideal of the Porch,--an influence is plainly at work which has penetrated to hitherto unawakened depths of the human soul. The phenomenon is the more impressive, when regard is had to the materials from which the early Christian communities were gathered. It cannot be imagined that they were composed of elements particularly choice; and, indeed, amid the universal corruption of morals and exhaustion of wholesome life, it is difficult to conceive how, if the Christian doctrine had enforced a rigorous selection, instead of indiscriminately inviting innocence and guilt, any decent elements could have been collected. Without adopting Gibbon's contemptuous estimate of the body of primitive believers, we cannot doubt that it comprised very mixed ingredients; we know that it contained great numbers of the servile class, and very few whose station and culture gave them access to the higher ideas familiar to the schools of philosophy: yet from these unpromising sources arose a society, which, in severity of morals, in intensity of affection, in heroism of endurance, reversed the habits of the world to which they belonged. It seems to us an idle question for sceptical criticism to raise, whether the religion of Christ comprised in its teachings any ethical element absolutely new. If genius had conceived it all before, life had not produced it till now; and the more you affirm the philosophers' competency to think it, the more do you convict them of inability to realize it. But in morals scarcely _can_ there be clear intellectual conception of principles not yet embodied in living character. As in the highest works of art, the thing seen is far other than the thing imagined and described; not doctrines, but persons, are here the only expression of the truth; and till they appear, ethical forms are but as the human clay without the vital fire. In the _statement_ of thought, the early Christians, not excepting the Scripture writers, are rude and unskilled; and a taste formed from the study of Plato and Seneca may be offended by the rusticity of Mark, and the abruptness of Paul. But whoever can rise above the level of a merely intellectual critique, and embrace, with our anonymous author, the _whole_ phenomenon of the first centuries of our era, will see a glow of self-denying faith, and a deep movement of conscience, affording manifest announcement of a new edition of human nature.

That edition has now been extant for many centuries; and is variously legible in the literature, the institutions, the private manners of Christendom. The Christian ideal of human life lies as an open book before us; yet as a book so various in its versions, and so overlaid with comments, that the fresh flavor of its language, and even the finer essence of its thought, are in danger of being lost. The actual Christianity of each successive age, and each contemporary nation, is the express result, not only in its dogma, but in its life, of two component terms,--a given _matter_, and a given _faculty_ of faith. However full and constant the former may be in itself, the latter is perpetually variable with the knowledge and passions of the time, and the special genius of individual leaders; nor can this variation of insight in the mind fail to neutralize some portion of truth, and to give disproportionate magnitude to others. The data supplied by inspiration itself form no exception to this rule. Delivered into the charge of the human soul, they fall into the moulds of its recipient nature, take their immediate form from the laws of its life, and are reacted on from its independent activity. The _immutable_ custody of anything by a finite thinking subject, involves the most evident contradiction; the very contact with human intelligence reduces universal truth to partial, the permanent to the variable, the secure to the contingent. It is only in the essential Unity of Reason and Conscience in every age, that we find the means of correcting the aberrations and verifying the insight of all particular men. Not that we are to conceive of the human race collectively as one large person, of which individual minds are vital organs, and which has a necessary growth and development, entitling each century to boast of advance beyond its predecessors. We know of no spiritual units, of no personalities, except each single and separate will; nor do we find anything in their mutual relation which necessarily determines them to uninterrupted improvement, and excludes the encroachment of degeneracy and falsehood. Indeed, no sorrier product is there of human conceit and ignorance than the cant of "progress," which assumes that every newest phase of thought is wisest. But if all men are endowed with radically the same faculties, however various in their intensities and proportions, there is a court of appeal in permanent sitting, where the normal laws of intellectual and moral apprehension are administered against all provincial prejudices and transient verdicts of error. In the long run, the healthy perceptions of good eyes will outvote the discoloring effects of all ophthalmic epidemics, how obstinate and wide soever they may be. And the moral vision of mankind will no less vindicate its natural rights, by returning again and again into clear discernments, and settled admirations, and discharging the illusory forms and false tints of each separate age. To deny the ethical competency of the mind for this office,--to say that there is no power given for deciding what, among the claimants on reverence, is really noble, true, and good,--is, with all its pietistic pretences, an act of the profoundest scepticism, washing away, as a quicksand, the only rock on which any faith can be built. It is to treat the durable source of truth as evanescent and uncertain, and shut out the possibility of all religion. On the other hand, to set up and idolize the life and thought of any one time as an unquestionable rule for all times, and stereotype it for unmodified reproduction, is to treat the evanescent as the durable, and build on whatever stands above the water, heedless whether it be the quicksand or the rock. Yet, strange to say, this particular superstition, and that general unbelief,--an apparent antithesis of error,--usually meet in the same mind, and constitute together the chief theology of most visible churches. Having deposed and insulted the eternal sanctities, they coax and flatter the letter of Scripture to accept the vacant throne, and exchange the holy modesty of its administration for a universal empire of pretence. They drain off the springs of inspiration at their fountain-head, and turn all history into a plain of sand, that they may magnify their Hebrew reservoir as the world's sole supply; forgetting that, when cut off from the running waters, the choicest store loses its fresh virtues, and the fairest lake, shut up without exit, turns into a Dead Sea. In contradiction of both errors, we shall assume that transitory elements cannot fail to mix themselves with the expression of the purest inspiration,--the horizon of human relations and expressible things around even the divinest soul being limited; and that, as the inspiration tries itself upon age after age, bringing into distinct consciousness now one side of truth and now another, it becomes more and more possible to find its essence and eliminate its accidents, to save its catholic beauties apart from its sectional distortions. The Christian ideal of life is not to be looked for in what is special to the Crusader or the Quaker,--to Puritan or Cavalier,--to Platonists of the second century or Aristotelians of the twelfth,--to Aquinas or Luther,--to John or Paul; but in such sentiment as was common to them all, and attached to them as citizens of Christendom. When this element is disengaged from all that encumbers it, it will be found pervading and animating still whatever is noblest in our modern life; while all that is narrow, and weak, and unworthy in the moral doctrine of our age, springs from a forced attempt to perpetuate the accidental modes of the Apostolic period.

Every one is sensible of a change in the whole climate of thought and feeling, the moment he crosses any part of the boundary which divides Christian civilization from Heathendom; yet of nothing is it more difficult to render any compendious account. It is easy to enumerate in detail the phenomena which are modified or disappear; just as on entering a new physical region the travelling naturalist may register the new species of plants and animals, that, one after another, present themselves to his research. But these do not paint the scene before even the learned eye; they are the separate out-comings of a great life-thrill, into whose current their roots penetrate; the landscape, as a whole, speaks differently to the mind, and the whole heaven and earth seem pregnant with a thought unfelt before. To read off that thought, requires an apprehension the converse of the analytic vision of science. The same difficulty occurs when we endeavor to seize the latent principle of a natural realm of history. Such principle, however, there must be. Beneath all the moving tides of Christian thought there lie still depths that supply them all, and a centre of equilibrium around which they sweep. We believe that the fundamental idea of Christendom may be described to be _the ascent through Conscience into communion with God_. Other religions have lent their sanctions to morality, and announced the Divine commands to the human will; but only as the laws of an outward monarch within whose sovereignty we lie, and who, ruling in virtue of his almightiness, has a right to obedience, ordain as he will. Other religions, again, have aimed at a union with God. But the conditions of this union, dictated by misleading conceptions of the Divine nature, have missed on every side the true level of human dignity and peace. Manichæism, deifying the antithesis of matter, takes the path of ascetic suppression of the body. The Indian Pantheist, imagining the Divine Abyss as the realm of night and infinite negation, strives to hold in the breath and sink into self-annulment. Plato, seeing in God the essence of thought, demands science and beauty, not less than goodness, as the needful notes of harmony with him, and appoints the approach to heaven by academic ways. The modern Quietists, worshipping a Being too much the reflection of their own tenderness, have lost themselves in soft affections, relaxing to the nerves of duty, and unseemly in the face of eternal law. Christianity alone has neither crushed the soul by mere submission, like Mohammedanism; nor melted it away in the tides of infinite being, like Pantheistic faiths; but has saved the good of both, by establishing the union with God through a free act of the individual soul. Assigning to him a transcendent moral nature, sensitive to the same distinctions, conservative of the same solemnities, which awe and kindle us, it singles out the conscience as the field where we are to meet him,--where the bridge will be found of transit between the human and the divine. No fear or servility remains with an obedience consisting, not in mystic acts and artificial habits, but in the free play of natural goodness; and rendered, not in homage to a Supreme Autocrat, but in sympathy with a Mind itself the infinite impersonation of all the sanctities. Nor are any dizzy and perilous flights incurred by a devotion which meets its great Inspirer in no foreign heaven, but in the higher walks of this home life, and misses him only in what is mean and low. The place assigned in Christianity to the _moral_ sentiments and affections has no parallel in any other religion. The whole faith is as an unutterable sigh after an ideal perfection. Holiness eternal in heaven, incarnate on earth, and to be realized in men,--this is the circle of conceptions in which it moves. Its very name for the Inspiration which mediates all its work, expresses the same thing. It is not simply an ενθουσιασμος,--not μανια,--not βακχεια,--but the πνευμα ἁγιον. The Dæmon of Socrates--the least heathenish of heathen men--was but an intellectual guide, and checked his erring judgment; the Holy Spirit guards the vigils of duty, and succors the disciple's tempted will. This profound sense of interior amity with God through faithfulness to our highest possibility, appears in the Christian Scriptures under two forms,--the positive and the negative,--each the complement of the other. In the Gospel, Jesus himself, as befits the saintly mind lifted above the strife of passion, describes the _aspiration after goodness_ as the native guidance of the soul to her source and refuge. In the Epistles, Paul, pouring forth the confessions of a fiery nature, proclaims the _sense of sin_ to be the contracted hinderance that bars the ascent, and against which the wings of the struggling will beat only to grow faint. These representations are evidently but the two sides of the same doctrine seen from the heavenly and from the earthly position. Whether we are told what the good heart will find, or what the guilty must lose, the lesson equally recognizes the Divine authority of conscience. The benediction and the curse are but the bright and the dark hemisphere of one perfect truth. The Apostle, standing in the shadow of the world's night, and regarding its averted face, dwells on the gloom of alienation,--the "foolish heart that is darkened,"--the "reprobate mind" from which God is hid. Christ, conscious of the holy light, and knowing how it penetrates the folds of willing natures, and wakes what else would sleep, speaks rather of the glory that is not denied, and utters that deepest of blessings,--"The pure in heart shall see God." To this bright side also the Pauline view in the end comes round. For though in him we miss that recognition of a natural human goodness which gives such grace and sweetness to many of the parables; though in his scheme the human will has not only betrayed its trust, but hopelessly crippled its powers; yet he does not leave it in the collapse of paralysis, with the hard saying that it can in no wise lift up itself, but points to a hope that bends over it from above. The soul that is too far gone to act, may still be capable of love; if unable to trust itself, it may trust another; if it cannot command its volitions, it may surrender its affections; can reverence, can aspire, can yield its hand, like a child, to an angel of deliverance. Beyond the precincts of this world is an Image of divine excellence and beauty,--one recently withdrawn from human history, and soon to have a more august return. It is but to turn the eye and give the heart to that ideal and immortal perfection, and in the light of so pure a love, the clouds will clear from the conscience, and lift themselves as a nightmare away; the lame will, forgetting its infirmities, will spring up and walk; and the restoration, impossible by flight from deformity and ill, will come through the attraction of a Divine sanctity and goodness. Thus does the Apostle snatch the disciple at last into the right perceptions which Christ assumes to be possible at first; and in both its primitive developments the Christian religion implies the communion of man with God through purity of heart.

To this sentiment, conveyed with living realization in the person of Jesus Christ, may be referred whatever is distinctively great in Christian ethics. Proposing, as an end within their reach, the ascent of the soul to a divine life, and as the means, a simple surrender to its own highest intimations, they have melted away the interval between earthly and heavenly natures,--not by humanizing God, but by consecrating man. In treating the lower desires of sense and self as the steams that intercept, the tender reverences as the clear air that transmits, the light of lights, they have struck the deepest truth of human consciousness. Hence the temper of aspiration,--the earnest ideality,--the sense of infinite want, with faith in infinite possibilities,--the sorrowful unrest in the present, with irrepressible struggle for a better future,--which are impressed on the poetry, the art, the social life of Christendom. Unlike the expression of the Hellenic mind, they are rather a prayer for what might be, than a joy in what is. Hence, too, the predominance of the psychological and subjective element in the philosophy of modern times, and the conversion of the ancient "metaphysics" into the form of "mental science." Man would never have ceased to be merged in nature, and registered merely as a part of its contents; his self-knowledge would not have vindicated its independent rights; his mind would not have been recognized as the court of record for the moral legislation of the universe,--had not his religion taken him deep into himself, and from a new point shown him his relation to all else; kindling his own consciousness to a point of intense brilliancy, in correspondence with a divine centre, which must be sought on the same axis of being,--like the two determining foci of an infinite curve, that find each other out, while the realm of determined nature lies around, as the configured area, or the bounding curve. Of the external world, indeed, _too_ little account has been made in the faith of Christians. They have not cared to recognize it as the shrine of immanent Deity;--have stood in uneasy relations to it; often inimical to it; sometimes trying to get rid of it as an illusion; usually regarding it as a foreign object, like a great statue on the stage of being, with only stony eyes and ears for the real play of passions that whirl around. Existence, in its essence, has been felt as an interview between man and God, at which space and nature have been collaterally present, but in which it was not apparent what they had to do. Physical science and the plastic arts may have reason to complain of the depressing influence of this imperfect view, and of the hard necessity under which it places them of pursuing their ends with only scanty and grudging recognition from religion. But, for the philosophic knowledge of human nature, and the practical regulation of human society, this isolation of the soul within its own consciousness,--this concentrated personality,--this vivid interchange of life with God without diffusion through benumbing media,--must be held eminently ennobling.

If, from the fundamental Christian sentiment, we descend to the scheme of _Applied Morals_ which it organized and inspired, the principle still vindicates itself in its results. The great problems of life are supplied from two sources,--the _Persons_ that may engage our affections, and the _Pursuits_ that may invite our will. The light in which the _personal_ relations are presented before the eye of Christendom is undeniably benign and true. It has never been obscured without the social spread of injustice and discontent; nor ever cleared again, but as the precursor of reformation. That every human soul has its sacred concerns and its divine communion, is the simplest of thoughts; but so deep and moving, that, where it is received and acknowledged, it calls up angelic virtues; where it is insulted and denied, it lets slip avenging fiends. Wherever it is sincerely held, it secures that reverential feeling towards others, beneath whose spell the selfish passions sleep, and without which the precept of courtesy and the definition of rights are an ineffectual form. Power loses its insolence, and dependence its sting, where their mutual relation does not carry the whole individuality with it, but stops with the limits of social and political convenience, and lies under the restraining protection of a supreme equality before God. The "Fraternity" that is the offspring of political theories, and aims to neutralize by fellow-citizenship the diversities and antipathies of nature, is often the watchword of envy and egotism, shouted by the voice of hatred, and announcing the deed of violence. It is for want of faith in that highest brotherhood of worship and responsibility which Christianity assumes, that impatient schemes are formed for artificially equalizing the weak and the strong, and abolishing the relations of necessary dependence. Nor, where that faith is absent, can they ever be answered so as to satisfy the _feeling_ from which they spring. They may be shown to be impracticable, and crushed by the relentless argument of fact; but the fact will be protested against as unnatural, and the impossibility will seem a cruelty. How differently is this topic handled by the logic of science and the sentiment of religion! How much less justly does the former draw the line between natural subordination among men and tyrannous oppression, than the latter! Aristotle undertakes the defence of slavery on grounds both of philosophy and of experience. Nature, he contends, pursuing a definite end in every act of creation, assigns to some things, from their very origin, a destiny to rule, while imposing on others a necessity of being ruled. Wherever a plurality of parts concur to form a general whole, dominant and subordinate elements present themselves. Even within the inanimate realm this is apparent, as in the case of harmony in music. But it is chiefly conspicuous in the sphere of animal existence; the body being, by nature, servitor, of which the soul is lord. In the highest stage of animate being, the constitution of well-organized men, this law comes into the clearest light; for here the soul sways the body with absolute command, while reason exercises over the passions the prerogatives of a royal and constitutional power; and were equality to be substituted for these modes of subjection, mischief would ensue on all sides. Not less evidently does Nature announce the dependence of inferior on superior in the rank allotted to the brutes in relation to man; and again, in the case of the two sexes, of which the male, as the more distinguished, is rendered dominant. The same necessary law adjusts the positions of mankind _inter se_. All those who are as intrinsically inferior to their neighbors as the body to the soul, or the brute to the man,--(and this is precisely the case of the mere manual laborer,)--are slaves by nature; and for them, as for the body and the brutes, it is better to be servile than to be free. Any man who can be made property of by another, and who is competent to understand a master's intelligence without a spontaneous stock of his own, is naturally a slave. Such a one performs functions in the world not essentially distinguished from those of the domestic animals; the destiny of both is to contribute their corporeal energies to the service of society; and creatures fit for this alone are brought into the slave-market by Nature herself. Consistently with this conception of the laborer as a _living tool_ (δουλος εμψυχον οργανον), Aristotle lays it down that the relation of master and slave admits no rights, and excludes friendship. To our modern worshippers of strength, this will appear commendable doctrine, very much because they have themselves relapsed into the old Hellenic way of studying the problems of the universe; descending, in the Pantheistic method, from the whole upon the parts; fetching rules from the wider sphere (therefore the lower) to import into the narrower; entering the human world from the physical,--the οικουμενη from the κοσμος; approaching society as a specialty superinduced on a groundwork of nomadic barbarism; and determining the functions of the individual as member of the vital organism of the state. So long as this logical strategy is allowed, the Titans will always conquer the gods; the ground-forces of the lowest nature will propagate themselves, pulse after pulse, from the abysses to the skies; and right will exist only on sufferance from might. But there is a heaven, after all, which the most trenchant giant cannot storm, and where justice and sanctity reserve a quiet throne. Without disputing the inequality of gifts and consequent law of natural ranks, religion qualifies it by an addition which overarches and absorbs it. Were man only the choicest, most intelligent, most gregarious of the mammalia,--were the theory of his affairs a mere extension of natural history,--we might reasonably discuss, in Aristotle's way, the conditions under which he may fitly be put in harness. But there is in him an element that takes him beyond the range of a Pliny or a Cuvier, that lifts him out of the kingdom of nature and gives him kindred with the preternatural and divine. He is not simply an instrument for achieving a given fraction of a universal end, but has a sacred trust which, on its own account, he is empowered and commissioned to discharge. He is watched by the eyes of infinite Pity and Affection, braced for his faithful work, succored in his fierce temptations. The conditions of dutiful, loving, noble life must be preserved to him. Let his task, indeed, be suited to his powers; and if he cannot rule, by all means let him serve; but still with a margin and play of spiritual freedom secure from encroachment and contempt. Those on whom Heaven lays the burden of duty no power on earth may strip of rights. The conscience with which the Highest can commune, the spirit which is not too mean for His abode, can be no object of slight and scorn from men. By law and usage you may have the disposal of another's lot and labor; but in the reality of things the lord of a province may be less than the conqueror of a temptation. You may be Greek, and he barbarian; but in the heraldry of the universe, the blood of Agamemnon is less noble than the spirit of a saint. In thus snatching the individual, as bearer of a holy trust, from the crush of nature and the world, Christianity became the first _human_ religion,--that absolutely took no notice of race and sex and class. It created a new order of inalienable rights, neither the heritage of birth, nor the franchise of a state, but inherent in the moral capabilities of a man. The free opening of sanctity and immortality to every willing heart could not fail to exercise an intense influence on the better portion of a world, like the declining empire of Rome, sickened with corruption and confused with unmanageable oppressions. That it did so, is proved by the whole tenor of the early Christian literature; and the effect is well described and accounted for by the writer "On the State of Man subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity."

"The mockery of adoring as gods the licentious tyrants who had occupied the imperial throne, seems to have put an end to everything like religious feeling among the nations under the sway of Rome. The free satire of Lucianus shows how completely it had faded away, for it introduces the gods of Olympus complaining that they were starving for lack of offerings; not altogether because Christian or philosophic doctrines prevailed widely, but rather on account of the total indifference of the people to their ancient mythology; for even if it ever had symbolized the truth, its meaning was now forgotten; and, even so far back as the time of Cicero, had become totally unintelligible to the learned, as well as to the multitude. It was useless, therefore, and wanted but a slight impulse from without to overthrow it. But to the philosopher who was in earnest in his pursuit of this truth, buried under the rubbish of time, the doctrine of Christ afforded it; there he found all that the master minds whom he honored had taught and hoped; but he found it simplified, purified, and confirmed by sanctions such as Plato had wished for, but scarcely dared to expect;--to the Roman patrician, if any there were who still looked back with fond memory to the purer morals and stern courage of his forefathers, the Christian simplicity of manners and firm endurance of torture and death was the realization of what he had heard of and admired, but scarcely seen till then;--to the slave, sighing under oppression and condemned to homeless bondage, the doctrine of the Gospel gave all that was valuable in life; the Christian slave was the friend of his Christian master, partook of the same holy feast, shared the same painful but glorious martyrdom; he was raised at once to all his intellectual rank, found freedom beyond the grave, and lived already in a happy immortality;--to the woman, degraded in her own eyes no less than in those of the tyrant to whose lusts she was the slave, it offered a restoration to all that is most dear to the human race; it offered intellectual dignity, equality before God, purity, holiness. The Christian woman could die; she could not, therefore, unless consenting to it, be again enslaved to the vile passions of men; before God she was free, and with Him she trusted to find shelter when the hard world left her none. Can we wonder, then, that Christianity found votaries wherever a mind existed that sighed after better things? for the preacher of Nazareth had at last expressed the thought which had been brooding in the minds of so many, who had found themselves unable to give it utterance."--p. 55.

Nor was it merely within the pale of the Christian fraternity that relations of mutual reverence and tenderness attested the power of an ennobling faith. Intensity of internal combination is often balanced, in religious brotherhoods, by vehemence of external repugnance; and were we to accept the fiery declamation of Tertullian as fairly expressing the spirit of his fellow-believers, we could ill defend them from the charge of fierce antipathy to the persons as well as the creed of their Pagan neighbors. But many silent mercies appear which contradict this loud intolerance. When the Decian persecution and its attendant tumultuary movements had filled Alexandria with such slaughter as to breed pestilence from the bodies of the dead, the Christians, instead of sullenly permitting the physical calamity to avenge their cause, assumed the duties of public nurses, and performed the loathsome tasks from which priests and magistrates had fled. Referring to this occasion, the author just cited says:--

"The plague made its appearance with tremendous violence, and desolated the city, so that, as Dionysius, the Christian bishop, writes, there were not so many inhabitants left of all ages, as heretofore could be numbered between forty and seventy. In this emergency the persecuted Christians forgot all but their Lord's precept, and were unwearied in their attendance on the sick; many perishing in the performance of this duty by taking the infection. 'In this way,' says the bishop, with touching simplicity, 'the best of the brethren departed this life; some ministers, and some deacons,' the heathens having abandoned their friends and relations to the care of the very persons whom they had been accustomed to call 'Men-haters.' A like noble self-devotion was shown at Carthage when the pestilence which had desolated Alexandria made its appearance in that city, and, I quote the words of a contemporary, 'All fled in horror from the contagion, abandoning their relations and friends as if they thought that by avoiding the plague any one might also exclude death altogether. Meanwhile the city was strewed with the bodies, or rather carcasses of the dead, which seemed to call for pity from the passers-by, who might themselves so soon share the same fate; but no one cared for anything but miserable pelf; no one trembled at the consideration of what might so soon befall him in his turn; no one did for another what he would have wished others to do for him. The bishop hereupon called together his flock, and setting before them the example and teaching of their Lord, called on them to act up to it. He said, that if they took care only of their own people, they did but what the commonest feeling would dictate; the servant of Christ must do more; he must love his enemies, and pray for his persecutors; for God made his sun to rise and his rain to fall on all alike, and he who would be the child of God must imitate his Father.' The people responded to his appeal; they formed themselves into classes, and those whose poverty prevented them from doing more gave their personal attendance, while those who had property aided yet further. No one quitted his post but with his life."--p. 162.

This self-devotion in times of distress, strangely contrasting with habits and temper apparently unsocial, has too steadily reappeared in every earnest church not to be accepted as a Christian characteristic. During the fatal famine and epidemic which desolated Antioch in the third century, the Pagan governor, when urged by the inhabitants to make authoritative arrangements for relieving the sufferings of a perishing populace, replied that "The gods hated the poor"; while the Christians, prevailingly poor themselves, plunged into the centre of the danger, and carried into the recesses of fever and despair the quiet presence of help and hope. If disciples have thus freely rendered to "those without" services which Pagans refused to one another, it is not simply in stiff obedience to a precept of love to their enemies, but from a heart-felt sentiment of honor for human nature and consequent tenderness of human life. There was no man who, though he might be a persecutor to-day, might not be a comrade to-morrow; he had a soul susceptible of consecration; and day and night the gates of the Church were ready to fly open to the touch of penitence; and whether he throws off the mask of delusion or not, he must be treated as a brother in disguise. Only by reference to this conception of all men as possible subjects of sanctifying change, can the fact be explained, that even where the creed has opened an infinite gulf between believer and unbeliever, the active charities have detained in lingering embrace the persons whom the theoretic fancy has flung into the ultimate horrors. A religion that is superior to the external distinctions of lineage and class, and draws its lines only by the invisible coloring of souls, must ever be a religion open to hope, and therefore apt to love. Even where the severest doctrine of exclusion has prevailed, the fundamental sentiment of Christian faith has saved the heart from the most withering of all passions,--the blight of _scorn_. Human nature may appear beneath the eye of an austere believer in an _awful_, but never in a _contemptible_ light. The very crisis in which it is suspended can belong to no mean existence. What it has lost is too great a glory, what it has incurred is too deep a terror, to be conceivable except of a being on a grand scale. _He_ is no worm for whom the eternal abysses are built as a dungeon and the lightnings are brandished as a scourge. Accordingly, the very alienations of intolerance itself have acquired a higher and more respectful character than in ancient faiths. The sort of feeling with which the Jew spurned "the Gentile dog" is sanctioned by piety no more. The Oriental curl of the lip is scarcely traceable on the features of Christendom; and is replaced by an expression of tragic sorrow and earnestness, where lights of admiring pity flash through the darkest clouds.