Chapter XIX: Part 19

The more ingenuously the modern Orthodoxy lays bare its essence, the more evident is it that a profound scepticism not only mingles with it, but constitutes its very inspiration. The dread of losing God, the impression that there is but one patent way, not of duty, but of thought, of meeting him, haunt the minds of men, driving some to Anglicanism to compensate defect of faith by excess of sacrament, some to Rome in quest of the Lord's body, and prompting others to conservative efforts of Bibliolatry, conducted with ever-decreasing reason and declining hope. We have seen, however, no such exemplification of this radical distrust as in the treatise before us. Already has the writer declared that the moral side of the universe sends in, with regard to religion, an empty report. And now he hastens to tell us that, on the physical side, the watchmen from every observatory of nature cry out, "No God." He represents the natural sciences as a huge Titanic, resistless mass of knowledge, perfectly demonstrable, and completely irreligious; descending, like a glacier, from the upper valleys of frozen thought; sure to scrape away the wild pine woods and the green fields of natural religion, yet considerate enough, for some reason unexplained, to spare the foundations of the village church. Designating every faith except his own by such phrases as "theosophic fancies," and "pietistic notions," he assures us that they will all be put "right out of existence" by "our modern physical sciences"; and he borrows from the "Positive Philosophy" (apparently by unconscious sympathy) the following maxim to justify his prediction:--

"In any case, when that which on any ground of proof takes full hold of the understanding, (such, for example, are the most certain of the conclusions of Geology,) stands contiguous to that which, in a logical sense, is of inferior quality, and is indeterminate, and fluctuating, and liable to retrogression,--in any such case there is always going on a silent encroachment of the more solid mass upon the ground of that which is less solid. What is SURE will be pressing upon what is uncertain, whether or not the two are designedly brought into collision or comparison. What is well defined weighs upon, and against, what is ill defined. Nothing stops the continuous involuntary operation of SCIENCE in dislodging OPINION from the minds of those who are conversant with both.

"A very small matter that is indeed determinate, will be able to keep a place for itself against this incessantly encroaching movement; but nothing else can do so. As to any of those theosophic fancies which we may wish to cling to, after we have thrown away the Bible, we might as well suppose that they will resist the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences, as imagine that the lichens of an Alpine gorge will stay the slow descent of a glacier."--p. 97.

Here it is alleged that Science and Opinion cannot coexist,--that the demonstrable will banish the probable. And be it observed, this is to take place, not simply where contradiction arises between the two orders of belief, but in _all cases_, from the mere _distaste_ which quantitative studies produce towards everything which evades their rules. In this allegation there is, we believe, with much exaggeration, a certain small amount of truth,--a truth, however, which, so far from supporting our author's plea against natural religion, offers it a conclusive refutation. It may be admitted that the exact and mixed sciences _do_ disincline their votary to put trust in the processes by which judgments of probability are formed, and alienate him from thinkers who read off the meaning of the universe by another key than his. Accustomed to deal with Number and Space, with Motion and Force alone,--to reason upon them by a Calculus which is helpless beyond their range,--to exercise Faculties involving nothing beyond the interpretation of mensurative signs and the conception of relative magnitudes,--he owes it to something else than his peculiar discipline, if he has either the instruments or the aptitudes for moral and philosophical reflection. He carries into the world, as his sole means of representing and solving its phenomena, the notion of physical necessity and linear sequence, secretly defining the universe to himself as Leibnitz defined an organized being,--"a machine, whose smallest parts are also machines,"--and naturally grows impatient when he finds himself in fields of thought over which this narrow imagination opens no track. With respect, therefore, to a certain class of minds, rendered perhaps increasingly numerous by the long neglect of the moral sciences in England, it may be quite true, that a spirit of utter disbelief towards everything beyond the range of necessary matter may more and more prevail. Let us further grant to our author, for the moment, three things assumed by him, all of them, however, false:--1. That this tendency of the "demonstrable sciences" is their _only_ one having a bearing on "theosophic systems." 2. That it is so _new_, at least in degree, as to give "opinion" a worse chance for the future than it has had in the past. 3. That it is a _good_ tendency, favorable to human knowledge and character. Still we must ask, How is the _oracular authority of the Bible_ to escape the fate predicted for all probabilities? Our author assures us that it _will_ escape; but he gives no faintest hint of a reason for so singular an exception to his own canon. It cannot be contended that the evidences of Christianity and Judaism belong to any of the "demonstrable" or "physical" sciences. It cannot be denied that they lie wholly within the limits of contingent knowledge, and terminate only in "probabilities"; that the authorship, for instance, of the fourth Gospel, the credibility of the introductory chapters of Matthew, the correctness of the prophecies about the second advent, are matters which, "standing contiguous" to the laws of refracted and reflected light, occupy the position of the _less sure_ in relation to the _more sure_; that the _relative_ chronology of the Scripture books is more indeterminate than that of the geologic strata, and their _actual_ dates more uncertain than those of the eclipses fatal to Nicias and to Perseus. What, then, is to exempt these judgments of verisimilitude from being pushed "right out of existence" by the "silent encroachment of the more solid mass" of knowledge beside it? Nothing can be plainer than that all testimonial knowledge whatsoever, all history, criticism, and art, the whole system of moral and political sciences, must fall under our author's fatal sentence; and how the propositions which sustain the infallible authority of the canonical books are to hold their ground against the huge glacier on which Herschel, Airy and De Morgan, Comte and Leverrier, triumphantly ride, it is not easy to conceive. Amid the universal crash of probabilities, may not the Mosaic tables of stone, broken once, be pulverized at last? With the abrasion of all the alluvial soil in which the growths of wonder strike their roots, will the garden of Eden, will the blighted fig-tree, remain to mark a verdant and a barren spot in history? Will these riding philosophers from their cold observatory find Paul's "third heaven"? May not their icy mountain slip into "the abyss" whence all the demons came, and fill it up? These questions, indeed, are answered for us in experience. It is notorious that, whenever an unbounded devotion to science has produced a prevalent tendency to disbelief, Revelation, so far from being spared, has been usually the first object of attack; and, both at the origin of modern science in the sixteenth century, and during its accelerated advance towards the close of the eighteenth, the widening conception of determinate Law was found to threaten nothing so decisively as the faith in supernatural dispensations. The greater scepticism includes the less; and the habit of mind which lets slip all beliefs not legitimated by the canons of natural science, cannot possibly retain Christianity.

But our author has only _half_ described the mental effect of studies purely scientific. They do not, in the nature of things they _cannot_, simply push out of the mind all contingent judgments. Human life and action are one continuous texture of such judgments, with some interweaving, no doubt, of mathematic forms, which could not be picked out without spoiling the symmetry of its pattern; but were you to withdraw the threads of probable opinion, still more, to cut the warp of primitive assumptions that stretches through it, the web would simply fall to pieces. No youth can decide on a profession, no man appoint an agent in his business, no physician prescribe for a patient, no judge pronounce a sentence, no statesman answer a despatch, without a constant resort to "surmises," a reliance on slender indications, often even a deliberate adoption of very doubtful hypotheses. All men are driven from hour to hour into positions demanding combinations of thought which can be borrowed from no natural science; where not the laws of matter and motion, not the equilibrium of forces, not the properties of things, are chiefly concerned, but the feelings and faculties of persons, the action and reaction of human affairs. Mathematicians and natural philosophers, being in no way exempt from these conditions, are obliged to have just as many "opinions" and "guesses" as other men; they cannot, if they are to keep their footing on this world at all, have a smaller stock than their neighbors of this "logically inferior" order of persuasions. They are unable to abdicate the necessity of having these persuasions; and their only peculiarity is, that they sometimes import into contingent affairs the methods with which habit has rendered them familiar in another sphere, and so find the conditions of belief unsatisfied; and at others, from consciousness that their own clew will not serve, yet inaptitude for seizing a better, surrender themselves to the fortuitous guidance of ill-balanced faculties and external solicitations. Hence their judgments are frequently fantastic, frequently sceptical,--not less liable to be too easy from one cause than to be too reluctant from another; and were a history to be written of the most remarkable extravagances, positive as well as negative, by which religion and philosophy have sprung aside from the centre of common sense and feeling, it would contain more names of great repute in the exact sciences than from any other intellectual class whatever. From Pythagoras to Swedenborg, the eccentricities of mathematical and physical imagination have been the chief disturbers of a natural and healthy faith. Harmonic theories of the universe, Ideal Numbers, Geometric Ethics, Rosicrucian fraternities, Vortices and Monads, Apocalyptic studies, New Jerusalems, and Electrobiological Metaphysics, have all borne testimony to the aberrant fancy of eminent proficients in the sciences. It is, therefore, far from being universally true, that disputable theosophies and conjectural systems of the universe are distasteful to minds schooled in the "demonstrable sciences." If to men of this order we owe the successive dislodgement of one such hypothesis after another, to them also do we owe their continual reproduction. Whether the unsoundness of judgment which is contracted in the absence of historical, moral, and metaphysical studies shall show itself in an excessive slowness or an excessive facility of belief, will depend on accidents of personal character and social position. But of this we may be sure;--if the _sceptical_ temper be the direction taken, the Bible will not be spared; if the _credulous_, "theosophic fancies" will be copiously saved.

Can there, after all, be a more paradoxical spectacle than that of a religious writer allying himself with the sceptical propensities of science, in order to get rid of gainsayers of the Bible? It is the counterpart in logic of the Italian game in politics,--the Pope appealing to Parisian swords to drive out the Republic, and save the head of Christendom. Is it possible that our author can _approve_ the agency which he thus invokes? that he can really wish to see it in the intellectual ascendant, and garrisoning every sacred fortress of the world? Does he remember what are the fundamental canons of its logic,--that we know nothing but Phenomena,--that Causation is nothing but phenomenal priority,--or else, that Force is the prior datum of which Thought is a particular and posterior development? And what, on the other hand, are the "theosophic fancies" against which he would plant this barbaric artillery of Fate? They are such as these,--that our faculties give us trustworthy reports, not of phenomena only, but of their abiding ground,--Soul within, God without;--that the moral Law of Obligation in the one is the expression of Holy Will in the other;--that faithfulness in the Human mind to its highest aspirations, brings it into communion with the Divine;--that as the Soul is the free Image, so is Nature the determinate Handiwork of God. If these doctrines, spurned by our author with so rude a flippancy, _were_ to surrender to the hostility on which he relies, is he unaware of the character the conflict would assume, and of the dynasty of thought which would reign undisputed at the close? Fighting by the side of such allies against "theosophic fancies," _he_ may skirmish with the "fancies," but _they_ will bear right down upon the "Theism" in the centre; and when the day is over, the standard they will plant upon the conquered towers will be, not the sacred dove he took into the field, and lost to the defeated foe, but their own blind black eagle of necessity. How strange is the perversion of instinctive sympathies, when a theologian disparages the sciences of reflection and self-knowledge, and takes his stand on the evidence of sense and measurement alone!--when he proposes to sweep out beliefs that trouble him with their neighborhood, by a general crusade against all probabilities,--and when, with this design, he violates the just balance of power among the kingdoms of human knowledge, and flatters, as if it were a virtue, the pretensions of a mental habit, which, out of its own province, is one of the most incapacitating, yet destructive, of intellectual vices! There is, however, a certain secret affinity of feeling between a Religion which exaggerates the functions and overstrains the validity of an external authority, and a Science which deals only with objective facts, perceived or imagined. The point of sympathy is found in a common distrust of everything internal, even of the very faculties (as soon as they are contemplated as such) by which the external is apprehended and received. And between this sort of faith and the mathematics there is another analogy, which may explain so curious a mutual understanding. Both rest upon _hypotheses_, which it is beyond their province to look into, but after the assumption of which, all room for opinion is shut out by a rigid necessity. _Once get_ your infallible book, and (supposing the meaning unambiguous) it settles every matter on which it pronounces; and once allow the first principles and definitions in geometry to express truths and realities, and you can deny nothing afterwards. It is the business of philosophy to go _below_ the mathematics, and determine whether they are _more than hypothetical_ science,--whether their assumptions are a mere play of subjective necessity, or are objectively trustworthy. It is the business of both reflective philosophy and historical criticism to go below "the BOOK," and determine whether it has _more than hypothetical_ infallibility,--whether the conditions, inner and outer, of such a claim, are or are not satisfied. If even the Mathematics, which have little to fear from the investigation of their basis, have not been on the best terms with Metaphysics, it is hardly surprising that a Religion of mere external authority should feel antipathy for the studies which pry into its foundations, with the inevitable effect of showing that what is _certainty_ above ground is _opinion_ below. Nor is it wonderful that both sets of beliefs are fond of forgetting their hypothetical origin, contemplating only their acquired semblance of security, and speaking as if they disowned contingency altogether, and despised the detractors who could suspect such a taint in their blood. Hence the fellow-feeling which occasionally unites a rigid theology, and an exclusive physical and mathematical science. It is founded on their joint antipathy to the sources of _moral_ knowledge,--their common blindness to one half of human culture. Like all alliances resting on antipathy alone, it is neither honorable nor durable. It is the function of Religion to occupy a tranquil seat above the contests of partial pursuits and narrow interests; as, in the world of action, to hold the balance of Right, so, in the world of intellect, to preserve the equities and the equilibrium of Truth; and her trust is betrayed by any one who flings himself, as her representative, into the civil wars of the sciences, and in her name signs away whole provinces of thought, and abandons them to outrage and confiscation as conquered lands. Human faith has nothing to fear from the unity and perfection of all the sciences; but much from the blind ambition of each one. It is from this persuasion alone, and not from any defective appreciation of physical studies, that we have spoken freely of their tendency, when the mind is entirely enclosed within them. The undoubted source of inestimable blessings to mankind, and an indispensable element of culture to the individual, they are mischievous only when they grow dizzy with success, and propound schemes of universal empire. The moment they undertake either to create or destroy a religion, the sign is unmistakable that this intoxicated ambition has begun to work.

The relation of Religion to History our author appears to us to conceive much more correctly than its relation to Science. On this great topic, however, our limits forbid us to enter. One remark only we will make. The author misconceives the objection of Theodore Parker and others to the ordinary doctrine of historical revelation. They do not, as he affirms, "disjoin religion from history," or in the least decline the "travelling back to ages past" on its account. It is not the _presence_ of God in antiquity, but his presence _only_ there,--not his inspiration in Palestine, but his withdrawal from every spot besides,--not even his supreme and unique expression in Jesus of Nazareth, but his absence from every other human medium,--against which these writers protest. They feel that the usual Christian advocate has adopted a narrow and even irreligious ground; that he has not found a satisfactory place in the Divine scheme of human affairs for the great Pagan world; that he has presumptuously branded all history but one as "profane"; that he has not only read it without sympathy and reverence, but has used it chiefly as a foil to show off the beauty of evangelic truth and holiness, and so has dwelt only on the inadequacy of its philosophy, the deformities of its morals, the degenerate features of its social life; that he has forgotten the Divine infinitude when he assumes that Christ's plenitude of the Spirit implies the emptiness of Socrates. In their view, he has rashly undertaken to prove, not _one positive_ fact,--a revelation of divine truth in Galilee,--but an _infinite negative_,--no inspiration anywhere else. To this _negation_, and to this alone, is their remonstrance addressed. They do not deny a _theophany_ in the gift of Christianity; but they deny two very different things, viz.:--1. That this is the _only_ theophany; and, 2. That this is theophany _alone_;--that is, they look for _some_ divine elements elsewhere; and they look for _some_ human here. It is not therefore a smaller, but a larger, religious obligation to history, which they are anxious to establish; and they remain in company with the Christian advocate, so long as his devout and gentle mood continues; and only quit him when he enters on his sceptical antipathies. This, in spite of every resistance from the rigor of the older theology, is an inevitable consequence of the modern historical criticism. Its large and genial apprehension opens for us new admirations, new sympathies, clearer insight into human realities, throughout the nations and ages of the past. It melts away from our ancient moral geography the ideal contrasts of coloring which made the world the scene of an unnatural dualism, and reinstates the great families of man in unity. It is doing for our conception of the moral world what science has already done for our conception of the natural: it is expanding our notion of Divine agency within it. As, in reference to physical nature, we have learned to think that God did not enact creation but once, and cease; so are we beginning to perceive, in relation to the human mind and life, that he did not enter history only once, and quite exceptionally. Whoever opens his heart to this great thought will find in it, not the uneasiness of doubt, but the repose of faith. He will no longer fancy that, in order to keep Christianity as the divinest of all, he must fear to feel aught else divine. He will worship still at the same altar, and sing his hymn to the same strain; only with a richer chorus of consentient voices, and in a wider communion of faithful souls.

FOOTNOTE:

[57] The question has been raised, whether the author of "The Restoration of Belief," who presents himself to us through the Cambridge publisher, is really a University man? To those who are curious about such critical problems, we would suggest this consideration, as having some bearing on the case: "Could a person who had studied the laws of accelerated motion at the authoritative school of English science have so forgotten his formulas as to make his _heaviest_ man on that account his _quickest_?" The authorship, however, is not less evident than if the book had been published by Messrs. Longmans, or by Holdsworth and Ball.

ONE GOSPEL IN MANY DIALECTS.

"And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak
in other tongues, according as the Spirit gave them utterance. And
there were sojourning at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every
nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the
multitude came together; and they were confounded because every
one heard them speaking in his own language."--Acts ii. 4-6.

In that marvellous scene, the anniversary of which coincides on this Whitsunday with our Centenary, a question long pending between the Rabbis and the Holy Spirit came to an open issue. They were Aramæan scholars, and had their Kingdom of Heaven set forth in the best Hebrew, which, true enough, was of no great human currency, and not strictly a living tongue at all; but then had been distinguished by Divine use from the earliest time. Was it not in this that the Call had come to Abram? and the promises been repeated to the Patriarchs? and the music been flung from the harp of David? and the burdens of inspiration been treasured on the Prophet's scroll? Who could quote a word that God had ever spoken in any other language? It was the one sacred idiom, from which all others are divergent corruptions, and to which, when the world's confusion is over, they must again return. However few in these decadent ages might understand it still, it was intrinsically fitted to be universal. And who could call _that_ speech provincial, at whose sound the heavens and earth arose? or esteem it temporary, when it persevered through the dispersion at Babel, and was present on the world before the Flood? So there must be nothing else allowed in the liturgies of the Synagogue, in the reading of Scripture, or in any intercourse between _man and God_. Only when men began to converse _with one another_, to compare their human thoughts, and descend from prophetic to didactic gifts, might they resort to the media of profaner life. The language of Worship was but one; though the jargons of Opinion were many. And so the Scribes and the Rabbis of the written Word supposed themselves to hold the only key of life.

But the Holy Spirit goes into no one's keeping, and is no respecter of tongues. Free as the wind to blow where it listeth, it sweeps wherever souls are genial to its breath, and will yield to it their gifts, of love, of lips, of life. It seemed to have had enough of Hebrew, ever since it had gone into the hands of the philologists, and been made a sacred language, and begun to drone. It had long been feeling its way in other directions, tempting men to pray out of the fresh heart, and never mind the words, till now at last the secret broke, that on any native tongue by which souls most freely flow together, may all pass out to God; that the home-sounds are the devoutest too; that the speech into which men are born, and which has become to them as a stringed instrument answering to the faintest touch of their affections, is the true vehicle by which "the Spirit giveth utterance." The prayer of faith, ascending in the idioms of every latitude, converges into one in heaven. And God's truth, descending to this world, breaks into all the moulds of expression native to our various race.

_One Gospel in many dialects_,--that is the great Pentecost lesson, construe the miracle as we may. And there are dialects of _Thought_ as well as speech,--natural differences of temperament and character,--to which the Gospel, still without prejudice to its unity, adapts itself with the same divine flexibility. What private observer--still more what student of history--can doubt that we are not all made in the same mould,--that the proportions of our humanity are variously mixed,--that not only do we individually differ in moral susceptibility and spiritual depth, but fall into permanent groups marked by distinct and ineradicable characters, and reproducing the same religious tendencies from age to age? Transpose the souls of Plato and Pascal into the right place and time, and do you suppose they would turn up as _Latitudinarian Divines_? Deal as you will with the lot of Priestley and Belsham, and could you ever enroll them among the _Christian Mystics_? Close in the fires of Augustine's nature with what damps you may, and could you ever find him peace in a Gospel of _Good Works_? No; we touch here on differences deeper than accident, and irremovable by culture,--differences that vindicate their reality by crossing the lines of dissimilar religions and reappearing in all times. They necessarily give us differing wants and experiences; they set into differing shapes of faith; and on souls equally faithful they fix very differing expressions. They are so many _vernacular idioms of the inner mind_: all have divine right to be: no one of them is entitled to call itself the sacred language alone intelligible between man and God; and the pretension of any to supersede the rest, and reign alone, is not less vain than the complaints of ignorance against foreign dialects, and the ambition to exchange the many running waters of local literature into the huge tank of a universal language. They may not be able to understand each other, or even with the key of outward comparison always bear translation into idioms other than their own. But let them speak in their own way, and pray their own prayer. Not only are they all clear to Him that readeth the heart; there will thus be _more heart for Him to read_: for faith and love, large as they may be, are ever deepest in their special tones; and the prayer, the hymn, which is touched with the spirit's local coloring, comes to us like the aroma of native fields, and assuages our thirst like the sweet waters of some well given to our fathers and made sacred by a Saviour's noonday rest.

On this principle,--that different types of natural genius in men cannot but throw their Christianity into different forms,--we may not only justify the divisions of Christendom, but even cease to wish that they should disappear. Unity no doubt there must be: God is one; Truth is one; the Gospel is one; and a mind that could take in the whole, and spread its insight and affections in all dimensions at once, would reach the Divine equilibrium, in which nothing partial preponderates. But from our watch-tower we can look through only one window at once; the blind walls of our mental chamber shut out all the rest; and as we kneel, like Daniel, at the open light, the breeze upon our face seems sacred, because it comes from our Jerusalem. The question is not, whether there is such a thing as truth, rounded off, self-balanced, and complete; in the mind of God,--the final seat of reality,--of course there is. Nor is it a question, whether each individual man can attain a faith consistent in its parts, agreeable to fact, and adequate to his nature. This also is possible. But when he has attained it, on what terms is it to co-exist with other faiths presenting parallel pretensions? Is he in his heart to identify his own with the absolute truth, sufficient for _all_ as for himself? Is he to expect them to come round to it, and altogether throw away their own? Or is he to confess to himself his own limitations, to suspect that he may have his blind sides, and reverently to seek something he has missed in that which others persist in seeing? In which direction is he to seek unity? By antipathy to all beliefs save one?--or by inviting all of them to live their life and show their place in human nature? It is the genius of Romanism to seek unity by _suppression_; of Protestantism, by free _development_;--of the former, to protect the consistency it has; of the latter, to press forward to one that it has not. Are we taunted with our "Protestant variations"? Why, the more they are, the richer is our field of experience, the finer our points of comparison; provided, however, that we hold fast to the noble trust in a Gospel of identity at bottom, and seek it rather in the religious heart of all the churches, than in the theologic wisdom of our own. No man can proclaim the principle of "_One Gospel in many dialects_," unless he is prepared to admit that his own faith is _one of the dialects, and nothing more_; to presume a meaning in the others, however hid from him; and while they remain to him a mere inarticulate jargon, to ascribe it sooner to his own incapacity than to their insignificance. When God's truth, refracted on its entrance into our nature, shall emerge into the white light again, not one of these tinted beams can be spared. Let us for a moment arrest and examine them. Let us look at the chief varieties which Christianity assumes as it penetrates the soul; at once recognizing our own place, and appreciating that of others.

There are three great types of natural mind on which the Spirit of Christ may fall; and each, touched and awakened by him, "utters the wonderful works of God" in a language of its own.

(1.) There is the _Ethical_ mind, calm, level, and clear; chiefly intent on the good-ordering of this life; judging all things by their tendency to this end; and impatient of every oscillation of our nature that swings beyond it. There is nothing low or unworthy in the attachment which keeps this spirit close to the present world, and watchful for its affairs. It is not a selfish feeling, but often one intensely social and humane; not any mean fascination with mere material interests, but a devotion to justice and right, and an assertion of the sacred authority of human duties and affections. A man thus tempered deals chiefly with this visible life and his comrades in it, because, as nearest to him, they are the better known. He plants his standard on the present, as on a vantage-ground, where he can survey his field, and manœuvre all his force, and compute the battle he is to fight. Whatever his bearing towards fervors beyond his range, he has no insensibility to the claims that fall within his acknowledged province, and that appeal to him in the native speech of his humanity. He so reverences veracity, honor, and good faith, as to _expect them_ like the daylight, and hear of their violation with a flush of scorn. His word is a rock, and he expects that yours will not be a quicksand. If you are lax, you cannot hope for his trust; but if you are in trouble, you easily move his pity. And the sight of a real oppression, though the sufferer be no ornamental hero, but black, unsightly, and disreputable, suffices perhaps to set him to work for life, that he may expunge the disgrace from the records of mankind. Such men as he constitute for our world its moral centre of gravity; and whoever would compute the path of improvement that has brought it thus far on its way, or trace its sweep into a brighter future, must take account of their steady mass.

The effect of this style of thought and taste on the _religion_ of its possessor is not difficult to trace. It _may_, no doubt, stop short of avowed and conscious religion altogether; its basis being simply moral, and its scene temporal, its conditions may be imagined as complete, without any acknowledgment of higher relations. But, practically, this is an exceptional case. A deep and reverential sense of Moral Authority passes irresistibly into Faith in a Moral Governor; and Conscience, as it rises, culminates in Worship. And to such natural religion, the hearty reception of the revealed Gospel is so congenial a sequel, that Christianity has enlisted its chief body-guard--its band of Immortals--from the writers of this school. In the _form_ which they give to the faith, they are true to themselves, still keeping close to the human, and, except to sanction and glorify this, not apt to dwell upon the Divine. The second table of commandment has more reality to them than the first; and the whole of religion presents itself to their mind under the idea of _Law_. God in Christ teaches us his Will; publishes the punishment and the reward; and requires our obedience; aiding us in it by the perfect example of Christ, and reassuring us under failure by the offer of pardon on repentance. Now this is a true Gospel; not a proposition of it can be gainsaid; and whoever from his heart can repeat this creed;--God is holy; morality, divine; penitence, availing; goodness, immortal; guilt, secure of retribution; and Christ, our pattern for both lives,--is not far from the kingdom of Heaven, and has a faith as much beyond the practice, as it is short of the professions, of the great mass of Christians. If he has an equable, rational, and balanced nature; if he can depend on himself, and reduce his will to the discipline of rules; if he have affections temperate enough to follow reason instead of lead it, and to love God by sense of fitness and word of command; if moral prudence is so strong in him that he can bear the idea of "doing good for the sake of everlasting happiness"; if no wing ever beats in his soul that takes him off his feet;--his wants are provided; he has guidance for the problems that will meet him on his way,--indications of duty,--grounds of trust,--and a path traced through every Gethsemane and Calvary of this world, to the saintly peace of another.

But while this is a _true Gospel_, is it the _whole_ Gospel? Not so; unless the voice of the Saviour is to reach only a part of our humanity, and in response draw but a "little flock." For not many of our race are made of this even and unfermenting clay. Who can deny that there abound,--and among the greatest names of Christian history,--

(2.) _Passionate_ natures, that cannot thus work out _their own salvation_, but ever pray to be taken whither of themselves they cannot go? It is not that they are necessarily weak of will, deficient in self-control, and unequal to the human moralities. Rather is it, that they get through all these, and yet can find no peace. Duty, as men measure it, may be satisfied; but still the face of God does not lift up its light. For want of that answering look, it is all as the tillage of the black desert; digging by night without a heaven above, and sowing in sands which no dew shall fertilize. Intense and effectuating resolve was certainly not wanting in Luther; what his young conscience imposed, his will achieved,--wasting asceticism, persevering devotion, humble charities; yet the shadow of death brooded around his irreproachable obedience. Is it not that the same sorrow which, in more level minds, is brought by a fall of the will, arises in these men from the ascent of their aspirations? Haunted by the image of God's _Holiness_, drawn to it, yet fluttering helplessly at immeasurable depths below it, they strain after an obedience they cannot reach, and never lose the sense of infinite failure. Measured by their aims, their power is nothing. Did the law of Christ require nothing but works which the hand could do, its conditions would be finite, and might be satisfied. But its claims sweep through the affections of the soul; and who can _make himself love_ where he is cold? who set himself behind his own thoughts, and keep guilty intruders outside the door of his nature? Impossible! the inner life, which is the special seat of our divine concerns, evades our laboring prudence, and tortures conscience without obeying it. How then do these sufferers find their emancipation? They have a Gospel, according to which Christ is not given as the Teacher of Law, but set up as the personal object of pure Trust and Love. God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, to mitigate the Divine into gentleness, to elevate the Human into holiness, and show how there is one moral perfection for both; surrendered him to humiliation and self-sacrifice; placed him in heaven; and offered to accept pure _faith and love towards him_ as the reconciling term for the human soul,--as the substitute for an unattainable ideal of obedience. Here then is the salvation of these passionate natures. This simple trust, this intense affection, is precisely what they have to give. They cannot direct themselves; but only fix their love, and you may lead them as a child. Self-discipline is impossible; self-escape triumphant. Try from within to hold the struggling winds of their nature with iron bands of law, and you do but stir the sleeping storms. Set in the heavens without an orb of divine attraction,--a new star in the East,--and you carry their whole atmosphere away. Engage their faith; and for the first time they will prevail over their work. Let there be an appeal of Grace to their enthusiasm,--a whispered word, "_Lovest thou me?_"--and the very burden that was too heavy to be borne loses all its weight; and the drudging mill of habit, that seemed so servile once, they pace with songs and joy. There are men who so need to be thus carried out of themselves, that without it their nature runs to waste, or burns away with self-consuming fires. They are like one who, in a dream, should set himself to climb a far-off mountain-top; if he tries to run, he cannot even creep, and only wakes himself to find that he lies still on the bed of nature. But if the thought of his mind should be, that an overmastering power--chariot of fire and horses of fire--lifts him away, he floats through the clear space, till, without effort, his feet stand upon the visionary hills.

Here then, again,--in this doctrine of Faith,--we have a true Gospel, speaking to many hearts impenetrable by the doctrine of Works. But have we even yet the _whole_ Gospel? Has the Good Shepherd, in these two words, made his voice known to all that are his? Or are there other sheep still to be gathered that are not of these folds? I believe _there are_. For thus far we have looked only at the _moral_ side of Christian doctrine,--at its different answers to the problem of Sin,--at the conditions of ultimate acceptance with God, notwithstanding deep unworthiness. Whether you say, Patiently obey, and you shall grow into perfection of faith and love; or, Fling yourself on faith and love, and you will find grace for patient obedience;--in either case you are prescribing terms of salvation; you have the _future life_ specially in mind, and are anxious to make ready the soul _there_ to meet her God. But there are persons who cannot fix any particular solicitude upon that crisis, as if all before were probation, and all after were judgment,--as if here were only faith in an absent, and there sight of a present God;--who cannot dramatically divide existence into a two-act piece, first Time, then Eternity, and wait for the Infinite Presence, till the curtain rises between them; but are haunted by the feeling that, as Time is in Eternity, so is Man already shut up in God. This is the indigenous sentiment of another natural type of mind, which may be called,--

(3.) The _Spiritual_. God is a Spirit; man has a spirit; both, _Now_; both, _Here_; and shall they never meet? shall they remain without exchange of looks? shall nothing break the seal of eternal silence? is there really love between them, and thought, and purpose, and yet all recognition dumb? Why tell us of God's Omniscience, if it only sleeps around us like dead space, or at most lies watching, like a sentinel of the universe, not free to stir? Who could ever pray to this motionless Immensity? who weep his griefs to rest on a Pity so secret and reserved? Surely if He is a Living Mind, he not merely remains over from a Divine Past to appear again in a Divine Future, but moves through the immediate hours, and awakens a thousand sanctities to-day. Urged by such questionings as these, men of meditative piety have thirsted for conscious communion with the All-holy;--communion _both ways_: appeal and response; a crossing line of light from eye to eye; a quiet walk with God, where all the dust of life turns, at his approach, into the green meadow, and its flat pools into the gliding waters. They have retired _within_ to meet him; have believed that all is not ours that it is ours to feel; that there is Grace of his mingling with the inner fibres of our nature, and flinging in, across the constant warp of our personality, flying tints of deeper beauty, and hints of a pattern more divine. And all have agreed, that, in order to reach this Holy Spirit, and through its vivifying touch be born again, the one thing needful is a stripping off of self, an abandonment of personal desire and will, a return to simplicity, and a docile listening to the whispers spontaneous from God. They find all sin to be a rising up of self; all return to holiness and peace a sinking down from self, a free surrender of the soul,--that asks nothing, possesses nothing, that relaxes every rigid strain, and is pliant to go whither the highest Will may lead. Nature, of her own foolishness, ever goes astray in her quest of divine things; wandering away in flights of laboring Reason to find her God; panting with over-plied resolve to do her work; scheming rules, and artifices, and bonds of union for forming her individuals into a Church. Reverse all this, and fall back on the centre of the Spirit, instead of pressing out in all radii of your own. Let Intellect droop her ambitious wing, and come home; there, in the inmost room of conscience, God seeks you all the while. Lash your wearied strength no more; sit low and weak upon the ground, with loving readiness hitherward or thitherward, and you shall be taken through your work with a sevenfold strength that has no effort in it. Leave yourself awhile in utter solitude, shut out all thoughts of other men, yield up whatever intervenes, though it be the thinnest film, between your soul and God; and in this absolute loneliness, the germ of a holy society will of itself appear, a temper of sympathy and mercy, trustful and gentle, suffuses itself through the whole mind: though you have seen no one, you have met all; and are girt for any errand of service that love may find. So then, if there were twenty or a thousand in this case, their wills would flow together of their own accord, and find themselves in brotherhood without a plan at all.

So speaks this doctrine of the Spirit. It matters not now under which of its many theologic forms we conceive it; simplest perhaps, that the Indwelling God, who in Christ was the Word, is in us the Comforter. But surely, this also is not altogether a false Gospel. It rescues the conception of direct communion between the human spirit and the Divine,--a conception essential to the Christian life,--which an Ethical Gospel does not adequately secure: for communion must be between like and like, while obedience may be from slave to lord, nay, in some sense, from machine to maker. Nor is it a slight thing to take the scales from our eyes that hide from us the sanctities of our _immediate_ life; to abolish the postponement of eternity; and, wayfarers as we are, make us feel, as we rise from our stony pillow and pass on, that here is the abode of God, and here does the angel-ladder touch the ground! Yet this too is not the _whole_ Gospel. It absorbs too much in God. It scarcely saves human personality and responsibility. It does no justice to nature, which it regards as the negative of God. It melts away Law in Love, and hides the rocky structure of this moral world in a sunny haze that confuses earth and air.

What, then, shall we say of these three types of Christian faith? Do you doubt their reality? It is demonstrated within the century which we close this day. For while our forefathers were dedicating this house of prayer to the first, the Gospel of Christian Duty, Wesley had already become the prophet of the last,--the new birth of the Spirit; and erelong Evangelicism started up, and proclaimed the second,--the Salvation by Faith. Do you doubt their durability and permanence? It is proved by eighteen centuries' experience, for the New Testament is not older. _There_, within the group of sacred books themselves, do they all lie; the Jewish Gospels represent the first; the Gentile Apostle's letters, the second; the writings of the beloved disciple, the third. Matthew, as every reader must remark, is for the Law; Paul, for Faith; and John, for the Spirit. And, in every age, the great mass of Christian tendencies break themselves into these three forms:--Ebionite, Pauline, and contemplative Gnostic; Pelagian, Augustinian, and Mystic; Jesuit, Jansenist, and Quietist; Arminian, Lutheran, and Quaker; all proclaim the perseverance of the same essential types, wherever the spirit of Christ alights upon the various heart of man.

Is Christ then divided? Is he not equal to the _whole_ of our humanity? Rather let us say, that we are small and weak for the measure of his heavenly wisdom. Doubtless, if we take what we can hold, and put it to faithful application, we have grace enough for every personal exigency. But there is, surely, an evil inseparable from all _partial_ developments of religion, which only satisfy the immediate cravings of the mind, and leave parts of our nature--asleep perhaps at the moment--liable to wake and thirst again. Such _separate growths_ run out their resources and exhaust themselves in a few generations. At first, they answer to some felt want; they collect a congenial multitude, and open to them a spiritual refuge that ends their wanderings. But the sentiment, once brought into a contented state, ceases to be importunate and prominent; and by its abatement gives opportunity for other feelings to vindicate their existence. When the wound is bound up and has lost its smart, the natural hunger begins to tell. The children grow up other than the fathers, perhaps quite as limited, only in different ways,--with affections pressing into just the vacant places of an earlier age. Meanwhile, the imperfection of the original basis has provoked reactions equally of narrow scope,--equally incapable of permanently filling the capacities of the Christian mind. Hence the danger, if the separate veins of thought be still worked on as they thin away, that the sects should degenerate into poor theological egotisms, and wear themselves insensibly out. It cannot be denied that all the three religious movements of the last century--represented by Taylor, by Wesley, by Cowper--exhibit the symptoms of spent strength, and are little likely to play again the part they have played before.