Chapter XVII: Part 17

The false opposition, however, between the world and the Church is not always thus passive and quiescent. It is not always recognized by those who hold it, as being a permanent fact to be merely sighed over and let alone. Many men are too earnest and truthful to settle down and pitch their tent upon a ground rocking with contradiction; to live two lives wholly unreconciled, one in the shame of nature, the other in the confidence of grace; or to belong to two societies,--one political, the other spiritual,--conducted on principles at incurable variance with each other. That a rule of action should be secularly good and religiously hateful,--that a sentiment should be fitly applauded in Parliament and groaned over in the conventicle,--is to them an intolerable unreality, like the celebrated verdict of the University of Paris, that a doctrine might be true in philosophy and false in theology. In their hands, accordingly, the antithesis between the human and the divine is not a quiescent, but a conflicting dualism, in which their religious ideas become aggressive, and assume a commission to drive back and humble the world. They claim the earth for God, and think the surrender incomplete while anything natural remains;--while any instinct is uncrushed, any laughter unstifled, any genius, however pure, a law unto itself. The crusade against temporal interests and pursuits, consequent upon this state of mind, changes its form with the culture and habits of the age. In the early years of the Reformation, when the whole Bible was spread open beneath the thirsting eye of an undistinguishing enthusiasm, the effect threatened at one time to be more terrible than glorious. The full thunder-cloud of the Hebrew prophets, stealing over a world in negative stagnation, waked the sleeping lightnings of the soul, and for a while streaked the atmosphere of history with fearful portents. Everything that had been written of the chosen people, their exodus, their law, their poetry, their passions,--everything except the relentings of their nature and the unsteadiness of their faith,--became consecrated alike. The military clang of their early history, the harp of their sweet singer, the choral pomp of their priestly rule, the mystic voices of their lonely men of God,--all were Divine music alike, often more exciting than the Sermon on the Mount, and not less piercing than the anguish in Gethsemane. Such was the sequence and connection of the Divine dispensations supposed to be, that Christianity was simply the Jewish theocracy, only let loose out of Palestine to make a promised land of the whole world. The downtrodden serfs of Franconia had not long heard the glad tidings from Wittenberg, ere they began to draw parallels between themselves and the old Israel when the desert had been passed. They had been brought to the brink of new hope, and looked, as across Jordan, to an inheritance verdant and tempting to their eye. The earth was the Lord's, and the army of the saints was come to take it; the bannered princes, the ungodly priests, the "men with spurs upon their heels," all the carnal who peopled this Canaan and perched their "eagle's nests" on every height, must be smitten and cleared off. The time of jubilee was come, when every believer should have his field of heritage; nay, the birds in the forest, the fish in the stream, the fruits of the ground, whatever has the sacred seal of God's creative power, should be free to all, and the noble should eat the peasant's bread or die. The lawyers should take their heathenish courts away, and men of God should sit and judge the people, according to the spirit and the word. The harvest was ripe, when the tares must be burned in the fire and the pure wheat be garnered for the Lord. These were the ideas which thousands of armed men, with a clouted shoe and a cart-wheel for their standards, and a leader who signed himself "the sword of Gideon," preached as their Gospel through the forests of Thuringia and beneath the citadel of Würzburg. Nor was the ripest learning, much less the most generous spirit of the time, any security against the adoption of their doctrine. It was not Münzer alone who breathed the fierce inspiration, exhorting his swarthy miners to "lay Nimrod on the anvil, and let it ring bravely with their strokes"; but the honest Carlstadt, too, scholar, preacher, dialectician as he is, lays aside his broadcloth, and appears in white felt hat and rustic coat at the cross of Rothenburg, to preach encouragement to the people and bring fresh sorrow on himself. Throughout the great movement which in the third decade of the sixteenth century spread insurrection from the Breisgau to Saxony, the peasants were animated with the belief that the Gospel, armed with the sword of Joshua, was to subjugate the world, and that all the conditions of property, of law, of civil administration, under which secular communities exist, were to be superseded by institutions conformed to a divine model. The leading Reformers, terrified by the religious socialism which they had raised, were ready enough to denounce and crush it. But in truth their own idea differed from this insurgent faith more in form than in essence; lodging the power in different hands, and prescribing to it a different method, but assigning to it a similar trust for the same ultimate ends. The kingdoms of this world were to be made the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ; and the temporal power was everywhere to assume a spiritual function, and make aggression on whatever opposed itself to the severity and sanctity of the Divine Word. The converts of Knox, the troopers of Cromwell, the town-councillors of Geneva, acting on this doctrine, claimed the whole of human life as their domain, and pushed the inquisitions of police into private habits, and even the secret inclinations of personal belief. Playing-cards and song-books were denounced and seized, as if they came from the Devil's printing-press; dancing prohibited, as a profane escape of the natural members into mirthful agitation; concerts silenced, as enslaving immortal souls to the delusive sweetness of strings and wind; the caps of women and the coats of men shaped to evangelic type; and, as if the world were a great school, the gates of cities, and even the doors of houses, were closed at temperate hours by vesper bell or signal gun. Asceticism grasped the sceptre and the sword, and demanded the capitulation of the world. How vain and dangerous this tyrannous repression of nature is, the reaction during the seventeenth century into reckless and fatal license emphatically declares; and the contrast shows the necessity of finding some mediating term, some reconciling wisdom, by which the antagonism may cease between the world and heaven, between natural morals and Christian aspiration. Yet under a change of form the struggle is still continued; and with those who most prominently assume to represent the aims of Christianity, the present life, the temporal world, has no adequate recognition of its rights. They have no trust in human nature as divinely constituted, and as having no part or passion without some fitting range. They dare not leave it out of sight for an instant: they must draw up a dietary for it, of sufficing vegetables and water; they must watch its temper, and see that it behaves with winning sweetness to all rascality; they must guard its purse, and teach it that to live cheaply, spending nothing for ornament and beauty, nothing for honor and right, but only for subsistence and charity, is the great wisdom of man; they must stifle its indignations, lest it should cease to hold out its cheek to Russia, and, having gone one shameful mile with "the nephew of my uncle," should refuse to go with him another. Both the ascetic doctrine and the extreme peace principles of the present day, as well as its tendency to renounce all retributory punishment, betray, in our opinion, a morbidly scrupulous apprehension of evil, quite blinding to the healthy eye for good,--a crouching of moral fear, singularly at variance with the free and noble bearing of the Apostle, who found that "to the pure all things are pure." As for the non-resistance principle, we have shown that it meant no more in the early Church than that the disciples were not to anticipate the hour, fast approaching, of Messiah's descent to claim his throne. But when that hour struck, there was to be no want of "physical force," no shrinking from retribution as either unjust or undivine. The "flaming fire," the "sudden destruction," the "mighty angels," the "tribulation and anguish," were to form the retinue of Christ and the pioneers of the kingdom of God. It was not that coercion was deemed unholy, and regarded as the agency appropriate to lower natures and left behind in ascending towards heaven; it was simply that natural coercion was not to fritter itself away, but leave the field open for the supernatural. The new reign was to come _with force_; and on nothing else, in the last resort, was there any reliance; only the army was to arrive from heaven before the earthly recruits were taken up. Nothing, indeed, can well be further from the sentiment of Scripture than the extreme horror of force, as a penal and disciplinary instrument, which is inculcated in modern times. "My kingdom," said Jesus, "is not of this world; else would my servants fight";--an expression which implies that no kingdom of this world can dispense with arms, and that he himself, were he the head of a human polity, would not forbid the sword; but while "legions of angels" stood ready for his word, and only waited till the Scripture was fulfilled and the hour of darkness was passed, to obey the signal of heavenly invasion, the weapon of earthly temper might remain within the sheath. The infant Church, subsisting in the heart of a military empire, and expecting from on high a military rescue, was not itself to fight; not, however, because force was in all cases "brutal" and "heathenish," but because, in this case, it was to be angelic and celestial. It is evident that precepts given under the influence of these ideas can have no just application to the actual duties of citizens and states, whose problems of conduct, whose very existence, they never contemplated; and that to urge them upon modern society as political canons is to introduce a doctrine which, under cover of their form, violently outrages their spirit.

The mistaken antithesis between temporal and spiritual things runs into the greatest excess, wherever the inherent pravity of human nature is most exaggerated. There are churches, however,--the Catholic and the Arminian,--in whose doctrines the natural condition of man is painted in colors far removed from the deepest shade; and which deem him not so much incapable of right moral discernment, as weakened for faithful moral execution. In this view, the function of Christianity is not to supersede and cancel, but to supplement and guide, the native energies of the soul; not to raise it from a mad trance, in which all thought and feeling are themselves but a false glare, but to apply a tonic and healing power, enabling it to do the right which it has already light enough to see. Professor Fitzgerald is an adherent to this doctrine, and justly contends that no lower estimate of human nature can consist with responsibility at all.

"I am not to be ranked," he says, "amongst those who assume that human corruption has not _affected_ the natural power of the moral sense. I think it has. No doubt sinful depravity, wherever it is indulged, is, as Aristotle long ago remarked, φθαρτικη των αρχων,--it tends to weaken or deprave the sentiment of moral censure, and to blunt the perception of moral evil.

"An eloquent but superficial French moralist has compared the conscience to a table-rock in the ocean, its surface, just above the ripple, bearing an inscription graven in the stone, which a genius, hovering over it, reads aloud. At times the waves arise and sweep over the tablet, concealing the mystic characters. Then the reader is compelled to pause. But after a while the wind is lulled, the waves sink back to their accustomed level, the inscription stands out clear and legible, and the genius resumes his interrupted task.

"This comparison might gain something in correctness if we imagine the inscription traced upon a softer substance. For the stormy waves of passion not only conceal, while they prevail, the sacred characters of virtue, but, as billow after billow passes over the tablet, they tend to obliterate the lines.

"But in making these large concessions, (which I do very willingly,) I do not feel that I am surrendering the cause. It is one thing to say that the discriminating power of the moral judgment is _affected_ and impaired by human corruption, and quite another to say that it is destroyed. It is one thing to say that it sometimes goes wrong, and another that we can _never_ depend on its decisions. Most men's experience has often brought them acquainted with persons who had impaired, in some way or other, their natural powers of perceiving truth or excellence in some respects, without losing either sound principles of reason or sound principles of honesty in others. And the way to correct such obliquities of intellectual or moral judgment is, not to tell men that they should distrust their natural faculties altogether, but to avail ourselves of so much as remains sound to discover the mistake or imperfection which we seek to remedy or supply. The appeal, in such cases, is from the reason or conscience perverted or impaired, to the same faculties in what physicians would call their _normal state_. When the effaced portions of the inscription are to be restored, the evidence of the correction results from its harmonizing with the part which has not been obliterated; and an interpolation may be detected by its disturbing the coherence of the context,--an omission by leaving it imperfect or unintelligible."--p. 26.

On this principle alone, unhappily but little congenial with the spirit and traditions of Protestant churches, can Christianity coexist with natural ethics. Faith adopts morals, purifies and sublimes them, and especially changes the character of their force;--for a law of compulsion from below, substituting a love of God above. The enmity ceases between the world and heaven; the physical earth is not more certainly afloat in space, and on the muster-roll of stars, than the present life is plunged in eternity, and not behind its chiefest sanctities. There is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be slurred over as an unmanageable necessity, in the natural constitution and relations of men; whatever acts they prescribe, whatever combinations they require, are within the scope and consecration of religion. The whole compass of the world and its affairs, all the gifts and activities of men, are brought within moral jurisdiction, and included in the embrace of a genial reverence. No narrow interpretation is longer possible of the province of human piety, and the true type of a noble goodness; as though they demanded a definite set of actions, rather than a certain style of soul, and denied a place to any affection or pursuit which can adorn and glorify existence. Divine things are not put away into foreign realms of being, and future reaches of time, attainable by no path of toil, no spring of effort, only by miraculous transport; but are met with every day, shining through the substance of life and hid amid its hours. Whatever original endowments, whatever acquired virtues, enrich and elevate our immediate sphere,--the Thought which finds its truth, the Genius that evolves its beauty, the Honor that guards its nobleness, the Love which lightens the burden of its sorrows,--are not mere temporal embellishments indifferent to its sacredness, but attributes that bring men nearer to the sympathy and similitude of God. Art, literature, politics, employing the highest human activities, and constituting the very blossom and fruit of all our culture, are recognized as having an earnest root, and not being the light growth of secular gayety and selfishness. We have no sympathy with the sentimental and immoral propensity, which corrupts the newest Continental philosophy, to recognize whatever comes into existence as _ipso facto_ divine. But we do believe that the great change for which the secret religiousness of this age pines, and which it is sorely straitened till it can accomplish, is the deliberate adoption into "heavenly places" of this world, its faculties and affairs, just as God has made them, and man's unfaithfulness has not yet spoiled them. The products of human baseness, hypocrisy, and ambition,--let _them_ remain hateful, eternally contrary to God, things scarce safe to pity; but believe not that they have got this planet entirely to themselves, and have snatched it as their _peculium_ quite out of the Supreme Hand. Men are tired of straining their thought along the diameter of the universe to seek for a Holy of Holies in whatever is opposite to their life; they find a worship possible, even irresistible, at home, and on the road-side a place as fit to kneel as on the pavement of the Milky Way. The old antagonism between the world that now is, and any other that has been or is to come, has been modified for them, or has even entirely ceased. The earth is no place of diabolic exile, which the "prince of the power of the air" ever fans and darkens with his wing; and were it even, as was once believed, appointed to perish, this would be not because its failure was complete, but because its task was done. No vengeance burns in the sunshine which mellows its fruits and paints its grass; no threatenings flash from the starry eyes that watch over it by night. It is not only the home of each man's personal affections, but the native country of his very soul; where first he found in what a life he lives, and to what heaven he tends; where he has met the touch of spirits higher than his own, and of Him that is highest of all. It is the abode of every ennobling relation, the scene of every worthy toil;--the altar of his vows, the observatory of his knowledge, the temple of his worship. Whatever succeeds to it will be its sequel, not its opposite, will resume the tale wherever silence overtakes it, and be blended into one life by sameness of persons and continuity of plan. He is set here to live, not as an alien, passing in disguise through an enemy's camp, where no allegiance is due, and no worthy love is possible, but as a citizen fixed on an historic soil, pledged by honorable memories to nurse yet nobler hopes. _Here_ is the spot, _now_ is the time, for the most devoted service of God. No strains of heaven will wake him into prayer, if the common music of humanity stirs him not. The saintly company of spirits will throng around him in vain, if he finds no angels of duty and affection in his children, neighbors, and friends. If no heavenly voices wander around him in the present, the future will be but the dumb change of the shadow on the dial. In short, higher stages of existence are not the refuge from this, but the complement to it; and it is the proper wisdom of the affections, not to escape the one in order to seek the other, but to flow forth in purifying copiousness on both.

We have said that men are tired of having their earthly and their heavenly relations set up in sharp opposition to each other, and are eager to live here in a consecrated world. This tendency has already found expression in two remarkable and apparently dissimilar phenomena,--the partial success of the Anglican and Catholic reaction, and the vast influence on English society of the late Dr. Arnold's character. Both were virtual protests against that removal of God out of the common human life, that unreconciled condition of Law and Gospel, which had made the evangelical theology sickening and unreal. A path had to be opened for the re-introduction of a divine presence into the sphere of temporal things. Newman resorted to the supernatural channel of Church miracle; Arnold to the natural course of human affairs, and the permanent sacredness of human obligation. Both restored to us a solemn mystery of immediate Incarnation; the one putting life, in order to its consecration, into contact with the sacraments; the other spreading a sacramental veneration over the whole of life. Arnold, especially, saw the great moral evils which have arisen from the evangelical depreciation of the "profane" world. The secular, he was well aware, has become _too_ secular, the spiritual too _merely_ spiritual. Human nature is permitted to have play with unchecked wilfulness in the one, and is allowed no place at all in the other. The obligations of natural law are held in light esteem, as if, in being social, they fell short of being sacred. The exercises of intellect, in the survey of nature or the interpretation of history, are often stigmatized as a mere earthly curiosity, permissible to reason, but neutral to the soul. The worst of it is, that these notions, once become habitual, fulfil their own predictions. As there is nothing which the heart cannot sanctify, so is there nothing which it may not secularize. Tell men that in their natural affections there is nothing holy, and their homes will soon be nests of common instinct. Assure them that in their business it is the unregenerate will, and the animal necessity, that labor for the bread which perisheth, and soon enough will an irreverent greediness and a cankered anxiety usurp the place. Persuade them that to study the order of creation or the records of past ages is but a "carnal" pursuit, and the student's prayer for light will become a mere ambition for distinction, the meditations of wonder be stifled in the dust of mental day-labor, and the tears of admiration drop no more on the page of ancient wisdom. This was what Arnold could not abide; to see religion flying off on wings of pompous pretence to other worlds, and leaving no heavenly glory upon the earth, but letting her very fields be paved into a street. There was no attempt to save a spot for any earnest reality, except the poor little enclosure behind the altar rail. The Church will consecrate a graveyard for the dead, but leaves the market of the living still unblessed: you may dissolve away in benediction, when your years are over of toil and sweat beneath the curse. To one who acknowledges a natural conscience and a natural element in faith, there is a _religion in little_ in every part of life; it gives at least a note in the chords and melody of worship. Hence Arnold's curious doctrine of the Church as covering all human relations whatsoever, and including the whole organism of the State. He would have nothing which the laws of this universe imposed on the will of man done without a clear and pious recognition; it was not to be illicitly smuggled in, as if run ashore in a gale of confusion that could not be helped, but must be steadily accounted for and stored in open day. _Ethically_, this doctrine, though, from its adaptation to a permanent world, it is the least Apostolic in appearance, is, of all interpretations of Christianity, the most true; and if it were not for clinging ideas of extra-moral dogma and special priesthood, as limiting the conception of "the Church," would go far to repeat for our age the work of Socrates for his, and bring down our divine philosophy from heaven to earth. It gets rid entirely of the false spiritualism which has either withheld religious men from political affairs, or induced them to urge on statesmen rules applicable only where government can be dispensed with altogether. It rescues Christianity from the degradation of being hypocritically flattered as the great persuasive to peace by rulers whom it does not restrain from going to war, and relieves it of an oppressive weight of false expectation, as though it broke its promise to the world every time a new case of strife appeared. Nothing can well be more damaging to a religion, than to commit it to unqualified disapprobation of anything which must exist while human nature lasts, and to set it frowning with ineffectual sublimity on the passions and events which determine the whole course of history. The amiable enthusiasts who propose to conduct the affairs of nations on principles of brotherly love, and who, till that consummation is reached, can only stand by and protest, do but weaken their country for purposes of justice and bring their faith into merited commiseration. It is commonly said that they are a harmless class, who may even form a useful counterpoise to the warlike susceptibilities of less scrupulous men. We have no belief, however, in the efficacy of falsehood and exaggeration, or in the attainment of truth and moderation by the neutralizing action of opposite extravagances. The reverence for human life is carried to an immoral idolatry, when it is held more sacred than justice and right, and when the spectacle of blood becomes more horrible than the sight of desolating tyrannies and triumphant hypocrisies. Life, indeed, is just the one thing--the reserved capital, the rest, the ultimate security--on whose disposability in the last resort, and on the free control over which, the very existence of society depends. The first and highest social bond is no doubt to be found in a _religious_ sentiment, a common veneration for the same things as right and intrinsically binding on men that live side by side; and the worship, with its institutions, of every community, is its instinctive attempt to get these things spontaneously done by the force of _reverence_. Could this point be really carried, nothing would remain to be accomplished; religion would complete and perfect the incorporation of mutual loyalty which it had begun. But there are some in whom the sentiment of common reverence fails, and for whose fidelity to the moral ends of the social union there is therefore no natural guaranty. To reach these cases, society has no resource but coercive methods, actual or threatened; the threat is _Law_; the actuality is _Punishment_; the power to which both are committed is a _Government_; the commonwealth on whose behalf they exist is a _State_. The very constitution of a state thus presupposes the _possible violation of moral right_, the partial failure of religion to secure its observance, and the determination to _enforce_ on the reluctant an obedience refused of free will. Force, however, is applicable only to men's bodies; it is a restraint and pressure on the functions of their life; and if that life be sacred from infringement, the political existence of nations is itself an offence against the law of God. All law, all polity, is a proclamation that justice is better than life, and, if need be, shall override it and all the possessions it includes; and nothing can be weaker or more suicidal than for men who are citizens of a commonwealth to announce, that, for their part, they mean to hold life in higher esteem than justice. Moreover, there is a low-minded egotism often disguised in this doctrine of passive meekness. As an inducement to quiet endurance of wrong, we are reminded of the duty of "mutual forgiveness." Is all the wickedness, then, that I am doomed to witness, nothing but a _personal affront_? When a rascal threatens to blow out my neighbor's brains, or to blast his character by infamous accusations, am _I_ in a position to forbear and pardon? Must I not own myself under a solemn trust, to see the right done and the guilty punished? Nay, would not the injured man himself greatly mistake the nature of the crime, and measure it by a paltry standard, if he took it for a mere private offence which it was his prerogative to punish or to overlook? "Who is this that forgiveth sins also?" The eternal laws of justice are not of our enacting; and no will of ours has title to suspend or to repeal them. The real and only demand of Christian magnanimity is, that we visit them with no vengeance, but merely with moral retribution;--_that_ is, with no more severity when directed against ourselves, than when we see them at an impersonal distance. But to regard and treat the guilty as if he were an innocent,--that is given to no man, and is even inconceivable of God. Rulers, at all events, as trustees of rights other than their own,--and each generation of a people, as charged with the interests of successors in perpetuity,--have but a limited privilege of forbearance; the meekness of the saint would in them be treason to the world. Even in international disputes, where each party may have a conviction of right, the controversy, but for the possibility of force, could have no end. It is a delusion to rely on courts as a substitute for armies, and to suppose that judicial decision can supersede military. The judge would be of small avail without the constable; and the arbitrator between nations would need a European army to enforce his decrees. Where the stake is large and the feeling strong, it is notorious that the private disputant rarely acquiesces in an arbitration that goes against him; but carries his case to the last appeal, where it is stopped by a barrier of impassable force. You might as well pull down your jails in preparation for the assizes, as destroy your fleets and arsenals in quest of international arbitration. We speak only of the ultimate theory of this matter, and simply affirm, that wherever law and government exist, somewhere in the background force must lurk. It may, no doubt, be provided in excess, and paraded without need; and with the progress of a civilized order, the circle may be ever widened within which the _idea_ of coercion, with the habits it creates, may be substituted for the obtrusive reality; till possibly a family of nations may be gathered, like a group of counties, into a common jurisdiction. But this only shifts the camp without disbanding it; and, after all, the tipstaffs of your supreme court could be no other than the legions of a grand army. We have, therefore, no more doubt that a war may be right, than that a policeman may be a security for justice, and we object to a fortress as little as to a handcuff. A religion which does not include the whole moral law; a moral law which does not embrace all the problems of a commonwealth; a commonwealth which regards the life of man more than the equities of God,--appear to us unfaithful to their functions, and unworthy interpreters of the divine scheme of the world. Quaker histories, written with omission of all the wars, are not less morbid as moral mistakes, than a doctrine of Providence, leaving out the whole realm of heathendom, is narrow as a religious theory; and the misuse of Scripture which has led to both, is most dangerous to its authority in an age remarkable for the breadth of its historical survey and the variety of its ethnological sympathies.

In other ways than those which we have indicated has a mischievous direction been given to modern thought and feeling, by perverting the accidental and transient form of the primitive Christianity into essential and permanent doctrine. But our exposition must proceed no further. The alternation of ascetic spiritualism and worldly laxity, the indifference to natural affections and relations, the exclusiveness at once devout and selfish, the jealous denial of their rights to intellect and art, the false apprehension of the true dignity of law and true life of states, have been the more earnestly dwelt upon from the conviction that these ethical infirmities are producing a perilous reaction,--a distrust of all ethical laws whatsoever, a disposition to hold everything divine that finds strength to realize itself,--a worship of what _is_, in place of an aspiration to what _ought to be_. To this we cannot consent. We cannot look on all forms of human life and character with the neutral eye of an equal admiration, as alike suitable products of formative nature. We cannot forego the right of judgment,--of embracing with reverence or spurning with abhorrence; or part with the ideal type of a perfect soul, to which all others rise as they approach. Neither do we believe with Luther, that human nature is a mere _devilish_ anarchy, reducible only by supernatural irruption; nor with the newest school, that it is a _divine_ anarchy, equally uncontrollable from within, and to be accepted as a wild fact; but that it is a _hierarchy of powers_, each having and knowing its rightful place, and appealing to us to maintain it there. To listen to that appeal, and, in answer to it, strive to harmonize the _de facto_ with the _de jure_ administration of the soul, destroying the usurpation of mean errors, and restoring the sway of kingly truth, is the aim of morals in action and in philosophy.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] Luther de Captivitate, Bab. ii. 264. Comp. Dispu. i. 523. Si in fide fieri posset adulterium, peccatum non esset. Other and yet more revolting assertions of the same principle are cited by Möhle, in his Symbolik, I. iii. § 16, whence these passages are taken.

[56] See Luther's Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, _passim_.

THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF.

_The Restoration of Belief_. No. I. _Christianity in Relation to its
Ancient and Modern Antagonists_. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1852.

We have heard it quoted as the remark of a distinguished foreigner, conversant with the choicest society in several of the capitals of Europe, that nowhere is the alienation of the higher and professional classes from all religious faith so widespread and complete as in England. That the masses at the other end of the social scale are indifferent or disaffected to the institutions which visibly embody the Christianity of our age, can be no secret to any observant inhabitant of a large English town. It is on the middle class alone that the various forms of Protestant worship have any real hold. Removed alike from the passionate temptations of the homeless artisan, and from the mental activity of the statesman or man of letters, the rural gentry and the urban tradespeople are detained under traditional influences, partly by the wholesome conservatism of moral habit, partly by helpless accommodation to conventional standards. Men of this class, if once really touched and possessed by earnest conviction, are the best defenders of a religion from _political_ assault. But a faith exposed to an _intellectual_ struggle finds among them but a precarious shelter; especially if their attachment to it is less a living persuasion than a fear of the blank which its removal would create. Persecuted by the magistrate, they know how to defend their worship from the oppression of law. Assailed by the critic, they can offer but the resistance of a dumb impenetrability; they cannot bring their sterling personal qualities to bear upon the contest; they are obliged, for all active conduct in the strife, to trust to a body of literary Swiss, engaged to protect the Vatican of their faith, and accustomed never to report defeat. In proportion as the methods of sceptical aggression become more formidable, and its temper more earnest, it is found necessary to improve the training of the band of Church defenders;--a measure at once indispensable and fatal; for it lifts them into an intellectual position, which spoils the blind singleness of their allegiance, discloses the hopelessness of the task expected from them, and often destroys their antipathy to the noble revolutionary foe. It is the vainest of hopes, that a body of clergy, brought up to the culture of the nineteenth century, can abide by the Christianity of the sixteenth or of the second; if they may not preserve its essence by translation into other forms of thought, they will abandon it, in proportion as they are clear-sighted and veracious, as a dialect grown obsolete. The number accordingly is constantly increasing, in every college capable of training a rich intellect, of candidates for the ministry forced by their doubts into lay professions, and carrying thither the powerful influence, in the same direction, of learning and accomplishment. The higher offices of education are, to no slight extent, in the hands of these deserters of the Church; and through the tutor in the family, or the master in the school, or the professor in the lecture-room, contact and sympathy are established between the best portions of the new generation, and a kind of thought and culture with which the authorized theology cannot co-exist. College friendships, foreign travel, current literature, familiarize all educated young men with the phenomenon of scepticism, and in a way most likely to disenchant it of its terrors. Thus by innumerable channels it enters the middle class at the intellectual end of their life, assuming in general the form of historic and critical doubt; while from below, from the classes born and bred amid the whirl of machinery, and shaped in their very imagination by the tyranny of the power-loom, it pushes up in the ruder form of material fatalism. The intermediate enclosure, safe in the dull innocence of an unsuspected creed, is growing narrower every day; and, though reserved to the last for its hour of temptation, will be the least prepared to win its victory.

No one who appreciates the real sources of a healthy national life, and knows what to expect from the dissolution of ancient faiths, can look without anxiety at a prospect like this; especially in a country whose religious institutions, rigid with usage, overloaded with interests, charged with the bequests of the past, are manifestly unequal to the crisis, and, in their attempt to train the affections of the Future, wield every power but the right one, and are indeed already regarded, like the Court of Chancery with its wards, as a dry nursery for grown babies. A people that reverences nothing--nothing at least that stretches a common heaven over all--has lost its natural unity. Incipient decay is spreading through the secret cement of its civilization, which, far from bearing the weight of further growth, precariously holds its existing mass together. So far we are entirely at one with those who see something to deplore in the "Eclipse of Faith," and something to desire in the "Restoration of Belief." They do not overrate the evils of a state of society in which, if you think with the wise, you must cease to believe with the vulgar. We would join with them, heart and hand, in the effort to terminate this fatal discrepancy, and find some language of devotion and aspiration, veracious alike from the lips of the richest knowledge and the most primitive simplicity. But when, like the author whose publication is before us, they would abolish the discrepancy by simply reinstating the taught in the creed of the untaught; when they insist on the surrender without terms of modern philosophy and criticism to the "unabated" authority of the Bible; when they pretend to wipe out from calculation all the theological researches of the last half-century, as if they were mere ciphers made in sport on the tablet of history, and had no effect on our computed place at all,--we separate sorrowfully from them, largely sympathizing with their wish, but wholly despairing of their method. The received theory of the origin of Christianity from agencies exclusively divine, and of the infallible character of the canonical books, can no more be "restored," than Roman history can be put back to its state before Niebuhr's time, or Greek mythology be treated as if Heyne and Ottfried Müller had never lived. The present age is not more distinguished by its advance in the material arts, than by its astonishing progress in the interpretation and true painting of the past; a Boeckh or a Grote carries in his mind a picture of Athenian life in the days of Pericles more perfect, it is probable, than could be formed by Plutarch or Longinus; and it would be strange if the Christian era--certainly the object of the most elaborated study--were the only one to escape the work of reconstruction, or to undergo it without considerable change. The limits of that change are at present definable by no consentient estimate; but that they are such as to remove the old lines of Christian defence, and require the choice of more open ground, can no longer be denied, except by the astute consistency of a Romanist hierarchy, and the innocent unconsciousness of English sects. When the time shall come for a dispassionate history of the first two centuries,--a history which, resolving the canon back into the general mass of early Christian literature, shall find an original clew for tradition, instead of accepting one from its posthumous hand,--which shall detect opinions before they were heretic or orthodox, and trace the several streams of tributary thought to their confluence in a determinate Christianity,--the narrowness of our present polemic will be apparent of itself; its fears and triumphs be regarded with a smile; and many, both of its positive and negative results, will vanish from the interests of religion, and be absorbed in a higher view of the relation between the Divine and Human in this world.

We had hoped at first that the author of "The Restoration of Belief" was about to take up the problem of Christianity with a real appreciation of its altered conditions, and with unaffected justice towards those who cannot solve it like himself. His present essay is but the commencement of a series, designed to arrest the progress of educated scepticism, to expose the sophistries of modern criticism, and re-establish the plenary authority, as oracles of faith, of the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. It would perhaps be unreasonable to complain that his argument does not march very far in this first movement; and engages us rather by the stateliness of its step, than by the clearness of its direction. Nevertheless, we do think that the discursive license of introductory exposition is carried by him to an extreme which promises ill for the exactitude of his method. At the outset he declares that the difficulties which embarrass modern faith go down to the very depths of philosophy, and can be resolved only by reaching the ultimate roots of thought. Yet he remains on the upper surface of history, and, without once hinting how this is to lead him to the pith of the controversy, dwells only on facts which are undisputed, and his conception of which might be as readily gathered from Gibbon as from Neander. Like many writers whose eye is caught by grandeur of effect, and whose imagination is sensitive to wonder, he is fascinated by the moment in human affairs when the Roman Empire was exactly poised between the forces of external unity and of internal decay, and the political organism of the Past, so august in its mass and its proportions, held no soul but the young spirit of the Future. Of this crisis, assigned to the reign of Alexander Severus, our author presents an impressive and, we believe, a faithful sketch. Amid the splendor, the misery, the decay of belief and hope, the universal incertitude of that period, there emerges into notice the beautiful and beneficent phenomenon of a real Faith,--a Faith that can live, a Faith that can die. The inevitable conflict between this new power and the Pagan prerogatives of the Cæsars is well brought out by the essayist; and the victory of Christianity is justly ascribed to the peculiar character of the religion, as a feeling directed to a PERSON rather than the simple assent to an IDEA. It was the force of this personal feeling which first awakened in men the sentiment of obligation in regard to religious truth, and substituted faithful veracity for indifferentism and laxity of profession. The author thus sums up the positions which he regards the present essay as establishing:--

"That the Christian communities did, during the period that we have had in view, make and maintain a protest against the idol-worship of the times, which protest, severe as it was in its conditions, at length won a place in the world for a purer theology, and set the civilized races free from the degrading superstitions of the Greek Mythology.

"That in the course of this arduous struggle, and as an unobserved yet inevitable consequence of it, a New Principle came to be recognized, and a New Feeling came to govern the minds of men, which principle and feeling conferred upon the individual man, however low his rank, socially or intellectually, a dignity unknown to classical antiquity; and which yet must be the basis of every moral advancement we can desire, or think of as possible.

"That the struggle whence resulted these two momentous consequences, affecting the welfare of men for ever, was entered upon and maintained on the ground of a definite persuasion, or Belief, of which a PERSON was the object.

"That this belief toward a person embraced attributes, not only of superhuman excellence and wisdom, but also of superhuman POWER and AUTHORITY. If we take the materials before us as our guide, it will not be possible to disengage the history from these ideas of superhuman dignity."--p. 106.

These positions we certainly conceive to be unassailable. But they lie so completely out of the field of modern doubt and controversy, that we are at a loss to imagine what possible use the author can make of them. The general features of the Christian faith, and the character of the Church, had assumed in the third century a determinate form, about which there is no important question between believer and unbeliever. Who would deny that the disciples for whom Clement of Alexandria and Origen wrote, whom Tertullian and Minucius Felix defended, and to whose institutes Cyprian was a convert, believed in Jesus Christ as a person at once historical and divine, and were strengthened by that belief to the endurance of martyrdom? The real and only difficulties lie higher up, in the attempt to trace the sources and earlier varieties of this belief; and if our author can show that, in winding its way through two centuries, and traversing several distinct regions of thought, it dropped or rounded off no primitive facts, and became mingled with no foreign ideas,--if he can establish the essential constancy and uniformity, from the first, of the tradition and doctrine which obtained ascendency at last,--he will indeed reduce legitimate scepticism within very narrow limits, and deserve a niche in the Valhalla of critical renown. But if he contemplates clearing these centuries by an argumentative leap; if, from the martyr faith of an age later than the Antonines, he means to conclude the certainty of the Incarnation two hundred years before,--then we must say, he attempts a logical feat which puts to shame the cautious steps of such reasoners as Paley, Marsh, and Whately. The catena of well-linked testimonies, with its bridge of safe footing, which they have endeavored to sling across the chasm of the post-apostolic age, is but a paltry cowardice of ecclesiastic engineering to one who can pass the gulf upon the wing of inference. An advocate is intelligible, and proceeds upon admitted rules of evidence, who says with these earlier divines: "Here are the writings of Paul, of John, of Matthew, and of other men who were present at the events they relate or assume; whose lives were turned into a new channel by their influence; and who went to prison and to death rather than deny them. They positively declare that they witnessed the most stupendous miracles, and, after their Master had been visibly taken up through the clouds, themselves habitually exercised the same supernatural power. You must admit that the guaranties of testimony can go no further: surrender yourself therefore to the Gospel." This is an argument which accomplishes all that is possible with historical evidence in such a case; and were its allegations of fact sustainable, it would still be the best form into which the reasoning could be thrown. Unfortunately, we can no longer feel assured that any first-hand testimony exists, as a distinguishable element, in the narrative books of the New Testament; so that we can regard them only as monuments of the state of Christian tradition during a secondary period. Still, this flaw is not repaired by striking into the course of belief three or four generations lower down, and substituting the "Martyr literature" of the third century for the Evangelist memorials of the second or the first. And when our author transfers to Clement and Origen the praise of unaffected simplicity usually awarded to the Apostolic writers, and actually presents it as sufficient proof of divine attributes in Christ, we can only suppose that, in his opinion, some truths are too good to have any bad way to them. What else can be said of the following mode of inference?

"Much do we meet with in these writers that indicates infirmity of judgment or a false taste; yet does there pervade them a marked simplicity, a grave sincerity, a quietness of tone, when HE is spoken of whom they acknowledge as LORD. If there be one characteristic of these ancient writings that is _uniform_, it is the calm, affectionate, and reverential tone in which the Martyr Church speaks of THE SAVIOUR CHRIST!

"I am perfectly sure that, if you could absolutely banish from your mind all thought of the inferences and the consequences resulting from your admissions, you would not, after perusing this body of Martyr literature, fall into the enormity of attributing the notions entertained of CHRIST, as invested with Divine attributes, to any such source as 'exaggeration,' or 'extravagance,' or to 'Orientalism,' or 'enlarged Platonism.' Exaggeration and inflation have their own style: it is not difficult to recognize it. No characteristic of thought or language is more obvious. You will fail in your endeavor to show that this characteristic _does_ attach to the writings in question; and why should you make such an attempt? There can be no inducement to do so, unless it appears to be the only means of escaping from some consequence which we dislike."--p. 107.

Our author professedly opposes "Ancient Christianity" to modern scepticism, because "History," as he observes, "is solid ground," and no region of atmospheric phantasms, births from the refracted rays of metaphysic light. History, however, is solid ground only so far as it is really explored; and the trending of the land and curving of the shore in one latitude of time no more enables us to lay down the map of another, than an anchorage at the Ganges' mouth would enable us to paint the gorges of the Himalayas, and distinguish the real from the fabulous sources of the sacred stream. To take us into the basilicas and show us how Christians worshipped in the days of Alexander Severus, to introduce us to the Proconsul's court and bid us witness their refusal of divine homage to Cæsar's image, and then ask us whether a faith like this _could have had_ any origin but ONE,--this is not _history_, but the mere _evasion_ of history. We want to know, not what _must have been_ the source, but what _was_ the source, of the great moral power that rose upon the world as Rome declined. Whoever wishes to shut out human ideas and natural agencies from participation in the matter, must go patiently through the entire remains of the early Christian literature; must trace the conflict between the Hebrew and the Pauline Gospel; find a place for the peculiar version of the religion given by the Evangelist John; fix the limits of Ebionitism, of Chiliasm, of Docetism; and show that these modes and varieties of doctrine stop short of the substance of the early faith, and do not enter the canonical Scriptures with any disturbance of their historic certainty. Nothing of this kind do we expect from our author. For he entertains a conception, respecting the logic of Christian evidence, which, however prevalent among English divines, betrays in our judgment a mind not at all at home with the present conditions of the problem. He seems to think that we can _first_ prove the historic truth of the Scriptures _in general_; and then get rid of the _difficulties in particular_; and requires us, in obedience to this pedantic law of logical etiquette, to carry into our investigation of every successive perplexity the rigid assumption that the writings with which we deal are "inspired," and their contents of "Divine authority."