Chapter III: Part 3

Of the four cardinal tendencies we have named, the _scientific_ has never been provided for within the interior of Christianity; whose organic life and structure are complete without it. It remains, therefore, sullenly on the outside, without renouncing at present its atheistic propensions: and the part it has played, however important, has been that of external check and antagonism, in the assertion of neglected rights of knowledge, and slighted interests of mankind. This cannot possibly continue for ever; nor is it at all consistent with experience to suppose, that either of the opponent influences will obtain a victory over the other. Their reconcilement, through the mediation and within the compass of some third and more comprehensive conception, is a task remaining for the philosophy and charity of the future. We feel no doubt that it will be accomplished; and will spare us that revolutionary extermination of theology and metaphysics which is proclaimed, on behalf of positive science, by the self-appointed Committee of the "République Occidentale." The other three tendencies early worked their way into the Christian religion, and vindicated a place within its organism. Indeed, the historical genesis of the Catholic Church consists of little else, on the inner side of dogma and ethics, than the successive and successful self-assertion of each of these principles; and, on the outer side of ecclesiastical polity, than the construction of a social framework which held them in co-existence till the sixteenth century. The genius of three distinct peoples conspired to fill up the measure of the early faith; and each brought with it a separate constituent. The Hebrew believer contributed his theistic conscience; the Hellenic, his pantheistic speculation; the Romanic, his passionate appropriation of redemption by faith. The elements were, from the first, mixed and struggling together; so that the phenomena of no period, probably of no place, serve to show them disengaged from one another and insulated. But the Ebionitish period, with its rigorous monachism, its historical and human Christ, its scrupulous asceticism, its sternness against wealth, represents the _ethical_ principle in its excess. The Logos idea, and indeed the whole development of the Trinitarian doctrine, exhibits the effort of the _Greek_ thought to obtain recognition, and qualify the Judaic. And the _Augustinian_ theology, pleading the wants of fervid natures, on whose surface the web of moral doctrines alights only to be shrivelled and disappear, completes the triad of agencies from whose confluence the faith of Christendom arose. In the Catholic system the three ingredients unite in one composite result; and hence the tenacity with which that system keeps possession of the most various types of human character, and, baffled by the spirit of one age, returns with the reaction of another. The ethical feeling finds satisfaction in its theory of human nature; the pantheistic, in its scheme of supernatural grace; the sacrificial, in its conditions of redemption. Through the realism of the mediæval schools, its eucharistic doctrine, which is only the theological side of that philosophical conception, becomes a direct transfusion of Hellenic influence into the Church. And its faith in perpetual inspiration, in the unbroken chain of physical miracle, in the ceaseless mingling of sacramental mystery with the very substance of this world, so far softens and diffuses the concentrated personality of the Divine Essence, as to indulge the free fancy of art. Nor can we deny the same capacity of beauty to its hierarchy of holy natures,--from the village saint, through the heavenly angels, to the Son of God,--all blended in living sympathies that cross and recross the barriers of worlds. This comprehensive adaptation to the exigencies of mankind is a reasonable object of admiration. But nothing can be more absurd than the appeal to it in proof either of preternatural guidance, or of human artifice, in the constitutive process of the Roman Church. There is nothing very surprising in the fact, that a system which is the product of three factors should contain them all. No doubt if these factors are, as we contend, primary and indestructible features of our unperverted nature, no religion can be divine and completely true which refuses to take any of them up; and this _one_ condition of the future faith we may learn from the Christendom of the past. The condition, however, must be satisfied otherwise than by the strange congeries of profound truths and puerile fancies which is dignified by the name of "Catholic doctrine."

For, be it observed, this system has no intrinsic and necessary unity, which would hold it together when abandoned to the free action of the mind, whose requirements it is said to meet. It has something for conscience, something for art, something for passion, each in its turn; but it is not a whole that can satisfy all together. Its contents, gathered by successive experiences, cohere through the external grasp of a sacerdotal corporation; and if that hand be paralyzed or relaxed, it becomes evident at once how little they have grown together. Hence the phenomena of the sixteenth century, whose revolt was the expression, not of theological dissent, but of ecclesiastical disgust; and in which doctrine only accidentally fell to pieces, because the authority that guarded and wielded it became too rotten to be believed in. The secondary revolution, however, was incomparably more momentous than the primary. The treasured seeds that dropped from the shattered casket of the Church had to germinate again in the fresh soil of the richer European mind; and the great year of their development is still upon its round. The outward dictation of the Apostolic See being discarded, it became necessary to find another clew to divine truth; and the inner wants of the human soul and the passing age came into play, with no restraint within the ample scope of Scripture. A reconstitution of Christianity began,--on the basis, no doubt, of materials already accumulated,--more eclectic, therefore, and less creative, than in the infancy of the religion; but proceeding, nevertheless, by the same law, and commencing a similar cycle. The _order_ of development in this second life of Christendom has not been the same as in the first; but the stages, though transposed, do not differ taken one by one. It is only this,--that whilst in the formation of the faith the dominant influences were Conscience, Art, and Passion, in its Re-formation they are Passion, Conscience, Art. At the moment when Luther shattered the fabric of pretended unity, and compelled the husk to shed its kernels, the season and the field were unfavorable to two out of the three, and they lay dormant till more genial times. The _moral_ element had been discredited by the casuistry of the confessional, the "treasure of the Church," and the trade in meritorious works; and, decked in these vile trappings, was flung away in generous disgust. The _æsthetic_ element had become so paganized in Italy, and was so identified with the reproduction of the very tastes and vices, the thought and style, nay, even the mythology itself, which the primitive religion had expelled as the work of demons, that the new piety shrank from it, and let it alone. In an age when episcopates were won by an ear for hexameters or a Ciceronian Latinity, when priests defended materialism in Tusculan disputations, when popes frequented the comic theatre and Plautus was acted in the Vatican, when the proceeds of a purgatorial traffic were spent in destroying ancient basilicas and raising heathenish temples over the sepulchres of saints, it was inevitable that beauty should become suspected by sanctity. There remained, yet unspoiled by the adoption of a corrupt generation, the _impetuous_ devotion and tremendous theory of Augustine; and this, accordingly, was the direction in which the whole early Reformation advanced. It was not the accident that Luther was an Augustinian monk, which determined the character of his movement. The sickened soul of Europe could breathe no other air. Emaciated with the mockery of spiritual aliment, revolting at the chopped straw and apples of Sodom that had been given for fruit from the tree of life, it sighed for escape from this choking discipline into some region fresh with the mountain breath of faith and love, and not quite barren of "angels' food." The burdened moral sense, so long deluded and abused, reduced to self-conscious dotage by vain penances and vainer promises, flung away all belief in itself, asked leave to lay its freedom down, and went into captivity to Christ. So exclusively did the feeling of the time flow into this channel, that no doctrine which had an ethical groundwork, or attempted to soften in the least the implacable hostility of nature and grace, obtained any success; while every enthusiastic excess of the anti-catholic ideas spread like wildfire. The irreproachable innocence and piety of the Salzburg _Gärtner-brüder_ did nothing to save them from quick martyrdom to their Ebionitish faith; while the atrocities and ravings of the Anabaptists of Münster scarcely sufficed to stop the triumph of their hideous kingdom of the saints. The movement of the brave Zwingli, earlier and more moderate than either Luther's or Calvin's, was easily restrained by them within the narrowest range, whilst the Genevan Reformer, cautious and ungenial, had but to collect his logical fuel, and kindle the terrible fire of his dogma, and it spread from the icy chambers of his own nature and wrapt whole kingdoms in its flames. That men without passion or pathos themselves, who do their work by force of intellect and will, should be successful disseminators of a doctrine that can live in no cool air, only shows how wide was the preparation of mind, and how the coming of this time fulfilled the long desire of nations.

The first stage, then, of the new development of Christianity was its _Puritan_ period. The natural perdition of man, the radical corruption of his will, the religious indifference of all his states and actions, and the consequent worthlessness of his morality, except for civil uses and social police, constitute the fundamental assumptions of the system. From this basis of despair its doctrine of atonement comes to the rescue. The obedience of Christ is accepted in place of that which men cannot render, and his sacrifice instead of the penalty they deserve. Not, however, for all, but for those alone who may appropriate the deliverance by an act of faith, and present the merits of Christ as their offering to God, with full assurance of their sufficiency. Nothing but a divine and involuntary conversion can generate this faith, which follows no predisposition from the antecedent life, but the inscrutable decree of Heaven. Once transferred from the state of nature into that of grace, the disciple becomes, through the Holy Spirit, a new creature; is conscious of a sacred revolution in his tastes and affections; gives evidence of this by good works, which, now purified in their principle, are no longer unacceptable to God; and knows that, though he is still liable to the sins, he is redeemed from the penalties, of a son of Adam. The Church is the body of the converted, and while the Sacrament of Baptism initiates the candidate, and provisionally secures him, the Communion seals his adoption afterwards; the efficacy of both being conditional on the inner faith of the participant. The intense and unmediated antithesis of nature and grace, and the gulf, impassable except by miracle, between their two spheres, may be regarded as the most characteristic feature of this scheme. Its text-book contains the Pauline Epistles, and opens most readily at the Romans or Galatians; and its favorite writers are Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. With vast internal differences in their particular conceptions of Christian truth and of ecclesiastical government, the so-called Evangelical sects retain the impress of their common origin in the dearth of any ethical or æsthetic element in their religion.

From this alone must have resulted the fact which a plurality of causes has concurred in producing; viz. that the Reformation soon (within a century and a half) reached its apparent limit of extent, and propagated itself only internally by further evolutions of thought. It had taken up and exhausted the class of minds to which it was specially adapted; and after appropriating these, found itself arrested. Under the impulse of a newly-awakened piety men are disposed to feel that they cannot attribute too much to God; and there will always be large numbers who, from the absorbing intensity of religious sentiment, or the dominance of predestinarian theory, or the ill balance of partial cultivation, abdicate all personal power of good in favor of irreversible decrees. But as the tension relaxes or the culture enlarges, the moral instincts reassert their existence; and the monstrous distortions incident to any theory which denies their authority become too repulsive to be borne. Hence a reaction, in which the natural conscience takes the lead, and insists on obtaining that reconciliation with God which has already been conquered for the affections. Men in whom the sense of right and wrong is deep cannot divest themselves of reverence for it as authoritative and divine; nor can they truly profess that it is to them an empty voice, which, venerable as it sounds, they are never able to obey. They know what a difference it makes to them, in the whole peace and power of their being, whether they are faithful or whether they are false; that this difference belongs alike to their state of nature and their state of grace; that it is as little possible to withhold admiration from the magnanimity of the Pagan Socrates as from that of the Christian Paul; and that the sentiment which compels homage to both is the same that looks up with trust and worship to the justice and holiness of God: how, then, can they consent to draw an unreal line of impassable separation between ethical qualities before conversion and the very same qualities after, and abrogate in the one case the moral distinctions which become valid in the other? The two lives,--of earth and heaven; the two minds,--human and divine; the two states,--nature and grace; which it is the impulse of enthusiasm to contrast, it is the necessity of conscience to unite. When Luther first blew up the sacerdotal bridge which had given a path across to the steps of centuries, the boldness of the deed and the inspiration of the time lightened the feet of men, and enabled them to spring over with him on the wing of faith. But when the van had passed, and the more equable and disciplined ranks of another generation were brought to the brink, there seemed a needless rashness in the attempt, and foundations were discovered for a structure based on the rock of nature, and making one province of both worlds. Even Melancthon, long as he yielded to his leader's more powerful will, could not permanently acquiesce in the complete extinction of human responsibility; and vindicated for the soul a voluntary co-operation with divine grace. This semi-Pelagian example rapidly spread; first among the later Lutherans, especially of Brunswick and Hanover; next into the school of Leyden; and finally into the Church and universities of England. Quick to seize the reaction in the temper of the times, the Jesuits put themselves at the head of the same tendency in their own communion; defended against the Jansenists a doctrine of free-will beyond even the limits of Catholic orthodoxy; upheld Molina against Augustine, as among the Protestants Episcopius was gaining upon Calvin. Among patriotic theologians the authority of the Latin Church gave way in favor of the early Christian apologists and Greek Fathers, who knew nothing of the scheme of decrees. Divinity, under the guidance of More and Cudworth, no longer disdained to replenish her oil and revive her flame from the lamp of Athenian philosophy. And the conception of a universal natural law was elaborately worked out by Grotius. As the sixteenth century was the period of dogmatic theology, the seventeenth was that of ethical philosophy; the whole modern history of which lies mainly within that limit and half a century lower; and conclusively attests the decline of a scheme of belief incompatible with the very existence of such a science. When the Protestantism which had produced a Farel, a Beza, and a Whitgift, offered as its representatives Locke and Limborch, Tillotson and Butler, the nature of the change which had come over it declares itself. It was the revolt of moral sentiment against a doctrine that outraged it,--the re-development, under new conditions, of the ethical principle which had fallen neglected from the broken seed-vessel of the Catholic faith.

The second season of the Reformation, though treated now with unmerited disparagement, was not less worthy of admiration than the first. High-Churchmen may be ashamed of an archbishop who proposed a scheme of comprehension; Evangelicals, of a preacher who applauded the Socinians; and Coleridgians, of a theologian who was no deeper in metaphysics than the "Grotian divines"; but neither the Erastianism, the charity, nor the common sense of a Tillotson would be at all unsuitable at this moment to a church openly torn by dissensions and really held together only by dependence on the state. It has been a current opinion, perseveringly propagated by adherents of the Geneva theology, that the spread of Arminian sentiments was equivalent to a religious decline, and concurrent with the growth of a worldly laxity and selfish indifference of character. The allegation is absolutely false. In literature, in personal characteristics, and in public life, the Latitude-men and their associates in belief bear honorable comparison with their more rigorous forerunners. There is not only less of passionate intolerance, but a nobler freedom from an equivocal prudence, in the great writers of the second period, than in the Reformers of the first: and there is more to touch the springs of disinterestedness and elevation of mind in Cudworth and Clarke than in Calvin and Beza. Nor did the return of ethical theory weaken the sources of religious action. The very enterprises in which evangelical zeal most rejoices,--missions to the heathen, and the diffusion of the Scriptures,--were not only prosecuted but set on foot in new directions and with more powerful instrumentalities, in the very midst of this period, and by the very labors of its most distinguished philosophers. The Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, were both born with the eighteenth century; and while the latter addressed itself to the natives and slaves of the American provinces, the former first made the Scriptures known on the Coromandel coast. It was Boyle who, of all men of his age, displayed the most generous zeal for the multiplication of the sacred writings, himself procuring their translation into four or five languages. For thirty years he was governor of a missionary corporation. Yet the complexion of his theology is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he bought up Pococke's Arabic translation of Grotius (De Veritate Christianæ Religionis), and was at the cost of its wide distribution in the East. And who that has ever read it can forget Swift's letter to the Irish viceroy (Lord Carteret), introducing Bishop Berkeley (then Dean of Derry), and his project for resigning his preferment at home in order that, on a stipend of £100 a year, he might devote himself to the conversion of the American Indians? The imperturbable patience with which the good Dean prosecuted his object, the self-devotion with which he embarked in it his property and life, the gratefulness with which he accepted from the government the promise of a grant, and the treachery which broke the promise, and after seven years compelled his return, make up a story unrivalled for its contrast of saintly simplicity and ministerial bad faith. These and similar features of the time superfluously refute the arbitrary and arrogant assumption, that no piety can be living and profound except that which disbelieves all natural religion, no gospel holy which does not renounce the moral law, no faith prolific in works unless it begins with despising them.

There was, however, still a defect in this gospel of conscience. Regarding the world and life as the object of a divine administration, and seeking to interpret them by a scheme of final causes, it was wholly occupied with the conception of God as proposing to himself certain ends, and arranging the means for their accomplishment. In this light He is a Being with moral preconceptions and an economy for bringing them to pass. Everything is for a purpose, and subsists for the sake of what is ulterior, and forms part of a mechanism working out a prescribed problem. The tendency of this way of thinking will inevitably be, to hunt for providences. These the narrow mind will place in the incidents of individual life; the comprehensive intellect, in the laws and relations of the universe; not perhaps in either case without some danger from human egotism of referring too much to the good and ill which is relative to man. The infinite perfections of God will be concentrated, so to speak, too much in the notion of His WILL, and the powers which subserve its designs; and will in consequence be as much misapprehended as would be our own nature by an observer assuming that we put forth all its life and phenomena _on purpose_. Indeed, the exclusive and unbalanced ascendency of the moral faculty tempts a man to fancy this sort of existence the only right one for himself; to suspect every flow of unwatched feeling, and call himself to account for the burst of ringing laughter, or the surprise of sudden tears, and aim at an autocratic command of his own soul. It is not wonderful that his ideal of human character should reappear in his representation of the Divine. The error deforms his faith as much as it tends to stiffen and constrict his life. Leading him always to ask what a thing is _for_, it hinders him from seeing what it _is_; in search of the _motive_, he misses the _look_; and his interest in it being transitive, he sinks into it with no sympathy on its own account. This is only to say, in other words, that his prepossession detains him from the _artistic_ contemplation of objects and events; for while it is the business of science to inquire their _origination_, and of morals to follow their _drift_, it remains for art to appreciate their _nature_. To feel the type of thought which they express, to recognize the idea which they invest with form, the mind must rest upon them, not as products or as instruments, but as realities; and their significance must not be imposed upon them, but read off from them. The meaning which art detects in life and the world is not a purpose, but a sentiment; in its view the present attitudes and development of things are rather the out-coming of an inner feeling than the tools of a remoter end. To find room for this mode of conception something must be added to the ethical representation of God. He must be regarded as not always and throughout engaged in processes of intention and volition, but as having, around this moral centre, an infinite atmosphere of creative thought and affection, which, like the native inspirations of a pure and sublime human soul, spontaneously flow out in forms of beauty, and movements of rhythm, and a thousand aspects of divine expression. Religion demands the admission of this free element: and without it, will cease to speak home to men of susceptible genius and poetic nature, and must limit itself more and more to the fanatical minds that have too little regulation, and the moral that have too much. A God who offers terms of communion only to the passionate and to the conscientious, will not touch the springs of worship in perceptive and meditative men. _Their_ prayer is less to know the published rules than to overhear the lonely whispers of the Eternal Mind, to be at one with His immediate life in the universe, and to shape or sing into articulate utterance the silent inspirations of which all existence is full. Their peculiar faculties supply them with other interests than about their sins, their salvation, and their conscience; they feel neither sufficiently guilty, nor sufficiently anxious to be good, to make a religion out of the one consciousness or the other; but if, indeed, it be God that flashes on them in so many lights of solemn beauty from the face of common things, that wipes off sometimes the steams of custom from the window of the soul, and surprises it with a presence of tenderness and mystery,--if the tension of creative thought in themselves, which can rest in nothing imperfect, yet realize nothing perfect, be an unconscious aspiration towards Him,--then there is a way of access to their inner faith, and a temple pavement on which they will consent to kneel. It is, we believe, the inability of Protestantism, in either of its previous forms, to meet this order of wants, that has reduced it to its state of weakness and discredit; and the struggle of thought, characteristic of the present century, is an unconscious attempt to supply the defect, and to vindicate, for the third element of Catholic Christianity, the possibility of development in the open air of Protestant belief. The change began, like both of the earlier ones, in Germany; and it was from Plato that Schleiermacher learned where the weakness of Christian dogma lay, and in what field of thought he might create a diversion from the disastrous assaults of French materialism, and restore the balance of the fight. An Hellenic spirit was infused into the scientific theology of the Continent, and has never ceased to prevail there, though Aristotle has long succeeded to Plato as the channel of influence. When Hegel, long the rival of Schleiermacher, triumphed over him, not only in the coteries of Berlin, but in the schools of Germany, he no doubt turned the philosophy which had been invoked to preserve the faith into a dialectic, at whose magic touch it deliquesced; and no one who has followed the application of his principles to history and dogma can be surprised at the antipathy they awaken in the Church. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the step into Pantheism was made by Hegel, and that the opposing theologians raised up by the great preacher of Berlin occupy in this respect any different ground. Since the time of Jacobi theism proper has not been heard of in Germany: the very writers who _mean_ to defend it, surrender it in the disguise of their definition of personality; and so steeped is the whole national mind in the colors of Hellenic thought, that from Neander to Strauss can be found, in our deliberate judgment, only different shades of the same pantheistic conception. What does this denote but a universal sigh after a God, who shall be neither a Jehovah, a Judaic αυτοκρατωρ, nor a redeeming _Deus ex machinâ_, supervening upon the theatre of history, but a living and energizing Spirit, quickening the very heart of to-day, and whispering round the dome of Herschel's sky not less than in the third story of Paul's heaven? In some this feeling breaks out in devilish defiance, as in the unhappy Heinrich Heine's saying, "I am no child, I do not want a Heavenly Father any more": in others it breathes out, as with Novalis, in a tender mysticism, and is traceable by the reverent footfall and uncovered head with which they pace, as in a cathedral, the solemn aisles of life and nature. The expression of this tendency has passed into the literature of our own language, and every year is tinging it more and more with its characteristic hues. Emerson affords the purest and most unmixed example; but perhaps the earlier writings of Carlyle,--before the divine thirst had advanced so much into a human _rabies_,--and more especially his _Sartor Resartus_, may be taken as the real gospel of this sentiment. The intense operation of these essays, so entirely alien to the traditions of English thought and taste, is an evidence of something more than the genius of their authors: it is proof of a certain combustible state of the English mind, prepared by drought and deadness to burst into the flame of this new worship. This feeling, diffused through the very air of the time, has unmistakably evinced its essential identity with the instinct of art; in part, by a direct affluence and excellence of production unknown to the preceding age, but still more, in the wide extension of an appreciating love for the creations of artistic genius. The melancholy prophets who see in this spreading susceptibility only a morbid symptom of decadent civilization, are misled, we hope, by imperfect historical parallels. The flower, no doubt, both of Athenian and of Italian culture, was most brilliant just before it drooped. But the soil which bore it, and the elements that surrounded it, had no essential resemblance to the conditions of modern English society, in which, above all, there are the unexhausted juices of a moral faith and a strenuous habit, not stimulant perhaps of hasty growth, but giving hardihood against the open air and the natural seasons.

By the rules of technical theology, it may appear strange to reckon the turn from theism to pantheism as a _third stage of the Reformation_; as if it could be at all included in the interior history of Christianity, instead of being treated as a direct apostasy. And it is in reality a very serious question, whether, without unfaithfulness to its essential character, the Christian religion can domesticate within it this new action of thought, or must from the first visit it with unqualified excommunication. On the one hand, nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that a faith of Hebrew origin, a faith whose very hypothesis is sin, and whose aspiration is moral perfectness, can ever be reconciled with a thorough-going pantheism. On the other hand, nothing can be more gratuitous than to assume that the feeling which, on getting the whole mind to itself, generates a pantheistic scheme, has _no_ legitimate exercise, and gains its indulgence altogether at the expense of Christian truth. If we mistake not, the pith of the matter lies in a small compass. _Let Christian Theism keep Morals, and Pantheism may have Nature._ This rule is no mere compromise or coalition of incongruous elements, but is founded, we are convinced, on distinctions real and eternal. So long as a holy will is left to God, and a power committed to man, free to sustain relations of trust and responsibility, room remains for all the conditions of Christianity, and the field beyond may be open to the range of mystic perception, and railed off for the sacrament of beauty. But whether this or any other be the just partition of territory between the two claimants, partition there must be, for the real truth of things must correspond, not to the hypothesis of any single human faculty, but to harmonized postulates of all. It is not surprising that, on its first re-birth, the gospel of nature should deny the gospel of duty, or so take it up into its own fine essence as to volatilize all its substance away. This is but the natural revenge taken for past neglect, and the needful challenge to future attention. Each one of the three developments has in its turn run out beyond the limits of the Christian faith, and yet, hitherto, each has established a place within it. The Hegelian, or Emersonian, type of the third period is but the corresponding phenomenon to the Antinomianism of the first, and the Deism of the second. And as these have passed away, after surrendering into the custody of Christendom the principles that gave them strength, so will the Pantheism of to-day, when it has provided for the safe-keeping of its charge, and seen the Church complete its triad of Faith, Holiness, and Beauty.

This question, however, will be asked: If the Reformation only repeats, with some transposition, the cycle of the primitive development, how are we the better for having thus to do our work again? Are we to end where the sixteenth century began, and to reproduce the Catholicism which was then resolved into its elements? And does some fatal necessity doom us to this wearisome periodicity? Not in the least. However little the seeds may be able to transgress the limits of species, and may remain indistinguishable from millennium to millennium, the conditions of growth are so different as practically to cancel the identity in the result. Taken even one by one, the modern forms of doctrine are far nobler than their early prototypes. The narrow Ebionitism of the original Church is not comparable, as an expression of the conscience, with the moral philosophy of Butler; and the Greek element of thought, flowing by Berlin, has entered the Church in deeper channels than when infiltrating through the theosophy of Alexandria. It is only in relation to the passionate element that the doubt can be raised, whether we have gained in truth and grandeur by passing the religion of Augustine through the minds of the modern reformers; and whether the Jansenists within the Church do not exhibit a higher phase of character than the Huguenots without it. But at any rate, the modern development, taken as a whole, is secure of an inner unity and completeness which before has been unattained. It is an obvious, yet little noticed, consequence of the invention of printing, that no one mood of feeling or school of thought can tyrannize over a generation of mankind, and sweep all before it, as of old; and then again, with change in the intellectual season, rot utterly away, and give place to a successor no less absolute. Generations and ages now live in presence of each other; the impulse of the present is restrained by the counsels of the past, and, in fighting for the throne of the human mind, finds it not only strong in living prepossession, but guarded by shadowy sentinels, encircled by a band of immortals. Hence the history of ideas can never be again so wayward and fitful as it was in the first centuries of our era; losing all interest at one period in the questions which had maddened the preceding; for a time covered all over with the pale haze of Byzantine metaphysics, and then suffused with red heats of African enthusiasm. New truth can no longer forget the old, and thrive wholly at its expense, or even make a compact with it to take turn and turn about, but must find an organic relation with it, so as to be its enlargement rather than its rival. The modern moralist already understands Augustine better than did the old Pelagians; "Evangelical" teachers begin to insist on Christian ethics; and the increasing disposition, even in heterodox persons, to dwell on the Incarnation as the central point of faith, shows how credible and welcome becomes the notion of the union of human with divine, and of the moral manifestation of God in the life and soul of man. The time, we trust, is gone, for the merely linear advancement of the European mind, with all its action and reaction propagated downwards, and wasting centuries on phenomena that might co-exist. Henceforth it may open out in all dimensions at once, and fill, as its own for ever, the whole space of true thought into which its past increments have borne it. Sects, no doubt, and schools, will continue to arise on the outskirts of the intellectual realm, possessed by partial inspirations; but the world's centre of gravity will be more and more occupied by minds that can at once balance and retain these marginal excesses, that can round off the sphere by inner force of reason, and, dispensing with the outer mould of sacerdotal compression, let the tides flow free, and the winds blow strong, without alarm for the eternal harmony. This is the form in which nature will restore, and God approve, a Catholic consent.

The idea we have endeavored to give of the genesis of Christian doctrine, and the law of its vicissitudes, is offered only as conveniently distributing the subjective sources of faith. It cannot be applied to the phenomena of particular countries apart from ample historical knowledge of the concurrent social and political conditions, without which the most accurate clews to the natural history of _thought_ can only mislead as the interpreter of concrete _events_. When, for instance, we look around us at home, and seek for the English representatives of the several tendencies explained above, we may, no doubt, find them here and there, but they are so far from exhausting the facts of our time, that some of the most conspicuous parties--as the Anglicans--seem provided with no place at all. The obscurity first begins to clear away when we remember that in England _Schism went before Reformation_. The aim of Henry VIII. was simply to detach and nationalize the Church in his dominions; to give it insular integrity instead of provincial dependence; and could this have been done without meddling with the system of Catholic doctrine at all, the scheme of faith would have been preserved entire. While Luther and the Continental opponents of Rome were faithful to the idea of the unity of Christendom, and were calling out for a general council to restore it by a verdict on doubtful points of faith, the English monarch, undisturbed by doubt or scruple, broke off from Rome, and destroyed the traditions of centralization by taking the ecclesiastic jurisdiction into his own hands and stopping its passage of the seas. In the new movement of the time, England tended to become a petty papacy, still unreformed; Europe sought a universal church reformed. Neither aim admitted of realization. To repudiate the supreme pontiff, and substitute a civil head, involved a fatal breach in the sacerdotal system, and carried with it inevitable departures from the integrity of Catholic dogma; so that reformation was found inseparable from schism. And when no council, acknowledged as universal, was called to give authoritative settlement, arrangements _ad interim_ became consolidated, provisional rights grew into prescriptive; with the spectacle of variety, and the taste of freedom, the idea of unity faded away, till the co-existence of two churches within one land and one Christendom passed into a necessity, and reformation proved impossible without a schism. But, notwithstanding this partial approximation of the English and the Continental movements, the traces remain indelible that their point of departure was from opposite ends. In its origin and earliest traditions, in the basis of its constitution and worship, the Church of England has nothing whatever to do with Protestantism; it is but the Westminster Catholic Church instead of the Roman Catholic Church. Authoritative doctrine, sacramental grace, sacerdotal mediation, are all retained; and throughout the whole of Henry's reign, while the new laws were working themselves into habits, the seven sacraments, the communion in one kind, the Ave Maria, the invocation of saints, with the doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory, remained within the circle of recognized orthodoxy. The impelling and regulative idea of the whole change was that of a nationalization of Catholicism. This original ascendency of the national over the theological feeling was never lost; and though channels were more and more opened, through the sympathies of exiles and the intercourse of scholars, for the infusion of Continental notions, yet the form given to the Church rendered it not very susceptible to the new learning; whose admission, so far as it took place, was rather induced by political conception than made in the interests of universal truth. The present Anglicans represent the first type of the English _schism_; and the High Church in general embodies the distinguishing _national_ sentiment of the Reformation in this country, as compared with the _cosmopolitan_ character of the Continental religious change. Doctrine is universal, administration and jurisdiction are local. Where the former becomes the bond of sympathy, as among the Evangelic Protestants, it unites men together by ties that are irrespective of the limits of country, and subordinates special patriotisms to the interests of a more comprehensive fraternity. Where the latter become the objects of zeal, a flavor of the soil mingles itself with the sentiments of honor, and a peculiar loyalty concentrates itself on the inner circles of duty, often with the narrowest capacity of diffusion beyond. Hence the intensely _English_ feeling which has always prevailed among the parochial--especially the rural--clergy of the Establishment, and the people who form their congregations. They constitute the very core of our insular society, and the retaining centre of our historical characteristics. Their admirations, their prejudices, their virtues, their ambitions, are all national. Their interest in dogma is not intellectually active, or provocative of any proselyting zeal, and is subservient to the practical aim of giving territorial action to the religious institutions under their charge. Their dealings are less with the individual's solitary soul, than with the several social classes in their mutual relations; and to mediate between the gentry and the poor, to keep in order the school, the workhouse, and the village charities,--not forgetting the obligation to ward off Methodists and voluntaries,[2]--constitute the approved circle of clerical duties. Their very antipathies, unlike those of Protestant zealots, are less theological than political; they hate Roman Catholics chiefly as a sort of _foreigners_, who have no proper business here, and Dissenters as a sort of _rebels_, who create disturbance with their discontents; and were old England well rid of them both, the heart of her citizenship, they believe, would be sounder. They stand, indeed, in a curious position, pledged to hold a proud Anglican isolation between two cosmopolitan interests,--the Popish theocracy and the Evangelical dogma,--refusing obedience to Rome, yet declining the alliance of foreign Protestants. Their enmity to the Papal system is quite a different sentiment from that which animates Exeter Hall; they do not deny the absolute legitimacy of the elder corporation in general, but only its relative legitimacy _here_; and Scottish ravings against it as "Babylon" and "Antichrist" offend them more than the confessional and the mass. Twice in their history--under the Stuarts and in our own day--have they seemed to forget their destiny, and make overtures to the Vatican; in both instances it was when Puritanism had threatened to take possession of the Church, and reduce it to a federal member of an Evangelical alliance; and if its separate integrity were in peril, they had rather fling it back into the Apostolic monarchy, than enroll it in the Genevan league. But the first real sight of danger from the Papal side has dissipated this reactionary inclination, and rekindled the instinct of local independence. Thus, in our Church, ideal interests and purely religious conceptions have held the second place to a predominating nationalism. The Church has embodied and handed down the leading sentiment of the Tudor times; and though not guiltless of share in many a Stuart treachery, and often cruel to the stiff-necked recusant, has, on the whole, been true to the English feeling, that the Pope was too great a priest, and Calvin too long a preacher.

The reason then is evident why the Church of England cannot be referred to any of the heads of classification we have given; neither coinciding with Romanism, nor exemplifying distinctively any of the tendencies springing successively out of the disintegration of Catholic dogma. It arose out of an ecclesiastical revolt; other communions, out of a theological aspiration. Its original conception involved no serious modification of belief, no invention or recovery of strange usages, but a mere separation of the island branch from the Roman stem, that it might strike root and be as a native tree of life. The first alterations in doctrine were slight, and merely incidental to this primary end: and the whole amount of change, instead of being determined by the intellectual dictatorship of a Luther or a Calvin, was the illogical result of social forces, seeking the equilibrium of practical compromise. The phenomenon therefore which we observed in the elder Church is repeated in this younger offshoot: the several elements of faith co-exist (though in greatly spoiled proportions) without unity or natural coherence; and the English Church, as the depository of a creed, occupies no place in the history of the human mind: its individual great men must be put here or there in the records of thought, without regard to the accident of their ecclesiastical position. The one real idea which has permanently inspired its clergy and supporters is that of _nationalism in religion_. To the time of the Restoration they _attempted_, since then they have _pretended_, to represent the nation in its faith and worship. Once, their aim appeared to be a noble possibility, struggling still and unrealized, but unrefuted. Now, thousands of Non-conformist chapels proclaim its meaning gone, and its language an affectation and an insolence. The English Church has become an outer reality without an inner idea.

In contrast with the _insular_ feeling predominant in the English schism, we have placed the _cosmopolitan_ zeal of the foreign Puritanism. With this, however, was combined the very opposite pole of sentiment,--a certain _egoism_ and loneliness in religion, from which have flowed some of the most important characteristics of Protestantism. Having flung away, as miserable quackeries, the hierarchical prescriptions for souls oppressed with sin, Luther fell back upon an act of subjective faith in place of the Church's objective works. For the corporation he substituted the individual: whom he put in immediate, instead of mediate, relation with Christ and God. The Catholic's unbloody sacrifice had no efficacy, no existence, without the priest; the Lutheran's bloody sacrifice was a realized historical fact, to be appropriated separately by every believer's personal trust. It was not, therefore, the Church which, in its corporate capacity, occupied the prior place, and held the deposit of divine grace for distribution to its members; but it was the private person that constituted the sacred unit, and a plurality of believers supplied the factors of the Church. The grace which before could not reach the individual except by transit through accredited officials, now became directly accessible to each soul: and only after it had been received by a sufficient number to form a society, did the conditions of spiritual office and organization exist. This essential dependence of the whole upon the parts, instead of the parts upon the whole, is the most radical and powerful peculiarity of Protestantism. A system which raises the individual to the primary place of religious importance, places him nearest to the supernatural energy of God, and makes him the living stone without which temple and altar cannot be built, naturally draws to it minds of marked vigor, and trains men in self-subsisting habits. By giving scope to the forces of private character, it sets in action the real springs of healthy progress, and happily with such intensity as to defy the checks it often seeks to impose in later moods of repentant alarm. This emancipation of the personal life from theocratic control, at first achieved in connection with the doctrine of justification, was sure to present itself in other forms. In its _spiritual_ application Protestant egoism assumes the shape of reliance on _inner faith_; in its _political_, of _voluntaryism_; in its _intellectual_, of free inquiry and _private judgment_. These several directions may be taken separately or together, but where, as in the Church of England, _not one_ of them is unambiguously marked, the very principle of reformed Christianity is unsecured, and Protestantism is present, not by charter, but by social accident. Puritanism everywhere--conforming or nonconforming, English or Continental--exhibits the first direction; "Evangelical" Dissenters add the second; while Unitarians occupy the third,--not perhaps completely, and not altogether exclusively, but characteristically nevertheless. For it is impossible to unite the orthodox with the intellectual egoism. So long as the _inner faith_, which is the presumed condition of justification, includes a controverted doctrine, like the scheme of Atonement, the need of faith imposes a limit on the right of judgment: and you are only free to think till you show symptoms of thinking wrong. But when the sacrificial Christianity has passed into the ethical, and no other condition of harmony with God is laid down than purity of affection and fidelity of will, then honest thought can peril no salvation, and the devotion of the intellect to truth and the heart to grace is a divided allegiance no more.

It was for some time doubtful how far this Protestant egoism was likely to go. Luther was clear and positive that it was faith that justified; and fetching this doctrine out of a deep personal experience, he paid little respect to any one who contradicted it, and regulated by it his first choice of religious authorities. Led by this clew, he arrived at results strangely at variance with modern canons. He neither accepted as a standard the whole Bible, nor at first rejected the whole tradition of the Church; loosely attempting to reserve the Augustinian authorities, and to repudiate the Dominican. When he had renounced altogether the appeal to councils and patristic lore, it was in favor, not of the external Scriptures, unconditionally taken as the rule of faith, but of the private spirit of the Christian reader, who was himself "made king and priest," and could not only find the meaning, but pronounce upon the relative worth, of the canonical books. Accordingly, the Reformer made very free with portions of the Old Testament, and with the more Judaic elements of the New,--the Epistle to the Hebrews, that of James, and the Apocalypse; and avowedly did this because he disliked the flavor of their doctrine, and felt its variance from the Pauline gospel. He thus tampered with his court before he brought forward his cause, and incapacitated the judges whose verdict he feared. In short, the religious life of his own soul was too intense and powerful to be prevailed over by any written word: he appropriated what was congenial, and threw away the rest. Uneasy relations were thus established between the subjective rule of faith found in the believer's own mind, and the objective standard of a documentary revelation: they were soon constituted, and have ever since remained rival authorities, commanding the allegiance of different orders of minds. The vast majority of Protestants, of less profound and tumultuous inner life than Luther, and less knowing how to see their way through it, subsided into exclusive recognition of the sacred writings; denying alike the regulative authority either of church councils or of the private soul. In every branch and derivative of the Genevan Reformation, throughout the whole range of both the Puritan and the Arminian Churches, a rigorous Scripturalism prevails; and the Bible is used as a code or legislative text-book, which yields, on mere interpretation, verdicts without appeal on every subject, whether doctrine or duty, of which it speaks. But Luther's spiritual enthusiasm kindled a fire that he scarce could quench; and while he himself, flung into perpetual conflicts with opponents, was obliged more and more to refer to evidence external to his personality, others had learned from him to look upon their own souls as the theatre of conscious strife between heaven and hell, and to recognize the voice of inspiration there. Carlstadt was the first to catch the flame of his teacher's burning experience, and, touched by prophetic consciousness, to set the Spirit above the Word. Luther, so often recalled from the tendencies of his own turbulent teaching by seeing their mischiefs realized in other men, instantly turned on Carlstadt with his overwhelming scorn: "The spirit of our new prophet flies very high indeed: 't is an audacious spirit, that would eat up the Holy Ghost, feathers and all. 'The Bible?'--sneer these fellows,--'Bibel, Bubel, Babel!' And not only do they reject the Bible thus contemptuously, but they say they would reject God too, if he were not to visit them as he did his prophets." Carlstadt had got hold of a doctrine that was too much for his ill-balanced mind, and Luther easily destroyed his repute. But a principle had been started which has never been dormant since; the very principle which afterwards constituted the Society of Friends, and finds its best exposition in the writings of their admirable apologist, Barclay; and which in our times reappears in more philosophic guise, and fights its old battles again as the doctrine of religious intuition. No period of awakened faith and sentiment has been without some increasing tincture of this persuasion; and under modified forms, with more or less admixture of the ordinary Puritan elements, it has played a great part among the Quietists in France, the Moravians in Germany, and the Methodists in England. In all these, far as they are from being committed to the notion of an "inner light," spiritualism has predominated over Scripturalism, and permanent life in the Spirit has engaged the affections more than the transition into the adoption of faith.