If unity be the character of truth, no generation was ever so far gone
in errors as our own: nor is the weariness surprising, with which
statesmen and philosophers turn away from the Babel of Divinity, and, in
despair of scaling the heavens, apply themselves to found and adorn the
politics of this world. But the confusion of tongues is too positive and
obtrusive a fact to be escaped by mere retreat: it bids defiance to
polite evasion: it pursues life into every public place and private
haunt; invades the home, the school, the college, the court, the
legislature; and, besides the problems which it fails to solve,
constitutes in itself a new one, not undeserving the closest study and
reflection. To the believers in doctrinal finality, who imagine the
whole sacred economy to be settled by a documentary revelation, the
reopening of every question, down to the very basis of religious faith,
must be an appalling phenomenon, charging either failure on the presumed
designs of God or a traitorous perversity on even the most gifted and
upright of men. And not a whit better is the conclusion of a conceited
illuminism, which, either boldly recalling the human mind to the
sciences of induction, despises all faith as false alike; or, conscious
at least of its own incompetency, pleases itself with a more indulgent
scepticism, and accepts them all as true. If no better revenge can be
taken on pious dogmatism than by falling into the cant of an eclectic
neutrality or an impious despair, there is little encouragement for any
high-minded man to take part against the bigotries of the present on
behalf of sickly negations in the future. The world is better left in
the hands of the poorest interpreter of Paul, and most degenerate heirs
of Augustine and Pascal, than transferred to the dialectic of Proclus or
the materialism of the living "_Fondateur de la Religion de
l'Humanité_."[1] There are those, however, who deny that we are left to
any such alternative; who cannot conceive that human aspirations after
divine reality shall for ever pine and sigh in vain; who contend that
objective truth in reference to morals and religion is attainable, and
has been largely attained;--and who, accordingly, despairing of neither
philosophy nor Christianity, require only the free intercommunion of the
two to appreciate the contradictions of the present without foregoing
the hope of greater unity in the future. The controversies of the hour
are but ill understood by one who remains enclosed within them, and
judges them only on their own assumptions. Like a village brawl, which,
with only the sound of vulgar noise, may be the ripe fruit of oppression
and the germ of revolution, they have an assigned place in the unfolding
of modern civilization; and not till their place is computed in the life
of the human race, and the law which brings them up in our age is
observed, can their real significance be apprehended, and all anger at
their clamorous littleness be lost in hope of their ulterior issues.
Regarded from this higher point, the surface of religious belief in
England, at first sight a mere troubled fermentation of struggling
elements, betrays some organic principle of order, and many salient
points of promise.
We hazard no theory of religion in saying that there is a natural
correspondence between the genius of a people and the form of their
belief. Each mood of mind brings its own wants and aspirations, colors
its own ideal, and interprets best that part of life and the universe
with which it is in sympathy. John Knox would have been misplaced in
Athens, and Tanler could not have lived on the moralism of Kant. No
doubt the ultimate seat of human faith lies deep down below the special
propensities of individuals or tribes,--in a consciousness and faculty
common to the race. But ere it comes to the surface, and disengages
itself in a concrete shape, its type and color will be affected by the
strata of thought and feeling through which it emerges into the light.
Without pretending to an exhaustive classification, we find four chief
temperaments of mind expressed in the theologies and scepticisms of
civilized Europe: the quest of physical _order_, the sense of _right_,
the instinct of _beauty_, and the consciousness of tempestuous
_impulses_ carrying the will off its feet. Variously blended in the
characters of average persons, these tendencies are liable to separate
their intensities, and severally dominate almost alone in minds of great
force and periods of special action or reaction. Were each left to
itself to form its own unaided creed, the doctrine of mere Science would
be _atheistic_; of Conscience, _theistic_; of Art, _pantheistic_; of
Passion, _sacrificial_. The evidence of this distribution of tendencies
is equally conclusive, whether we look to its rational ground or to its
historical exemplification; and a few words on each head will suffice to
clear and justify it.
Notwithstanding some occasional attempts to exhibit natural theology as
a necessary extension of natural philosophy, it is plain that the
maxims, which are ultimate for physical Science, stop short of contact
with Religion; that the final appeal of the two is carried to different
faculties; and that the scope and sphere of the one may be complete
without borrowing any conception from the other. The assumption, for
instance, that "we can know nothing but _phenomena_," directly excludes
all permanent and eternal Being as the possible object of rational
thought. And as "phenomena" are apprehensible only by the _observing_
faculties, whatever refuses to put in an appearance in _their_ court is
nonsuited as an unreality. And again, physical knowledge has
accomplished its aim, as soon as it can predict all the successions that
lie within its field of time and space; and nowhere in this system of
series, nor in the calculated forces which yield it to the view, does
any divine _Person_ look in upon the mind. Whoever, by the restraints of
a hypothetical necessity, detains his intellect _within_ nature, debars
himself _ipso facto_ from any faith that _transcends_ nature, and
recognizes no reserve of _super_natural possibilities, hidden in a Mind
of which the actual universe is but the finite expression. We do not, of
course, intend to affirm that scientific culture cannot coexist with
religious belief;--so preposterous an assertion would be confuted by a
manifold experience;--but only that, where the canons of inductive
knowledge are invested with unconditional universality, and are
logically carried out as valid for all thought, they shut the door upon
the sources of faith. It is the old battle, of which history supplies
such abundant illustration; which brought Parmenides and Protagoras upon
the lists at opposite ends on the field of philosophy; which Bacon
profoundly avoided by assigning separate empires, without common
boundary, to science and religion; but which his modern disciples have
rashly renewed, by invading the realm left sacred by him. Uneasy
relations have always subsisted in Christendom between the investigators
of nature and the trustees of the faith: the men of science rarely
quitting, unless for signs of unequivocal aversion, the attitude of
polite indifference to the Church; and in their turn watched with the
jealous eye of sacerdotal vigilance. It is no untrue instinct that has
hitherto maintained them in this posture of mutual suspicion: to
exchange which for a hearty and intelligent reverence for each other is
an achievement reserved for a higher philosophy than we yet possess.
As Science pays homage to the _force of nature_, so Conscience
enthrones the _law of right_. The conscious subject of moral
obligation feels himself under a rule neither self-imposed and
fictitious, nor foreign and coercive;--neither a home invention nor an
outward necessity;--a rule invisible, authoritative, awful; carrying
with it an _alternative_ irreducible to the linear dynamics of the
physical world; incapable of being felt but by a free mind, or of
being given but by another. He is aware that his will follows a call
of duty not at all as his body adapts itself to the force of
gravitation; and as within him the conscientious obedience wholly
differs from the corporeal, so in the universe of realities beyond him
does the moral legislation differ from the natural, and express the
will of a person, not a mere constitution of things. No ethical
conceptions are possible at all,--except as floating shreds of
unattached thought,--without a religious background; and the sense of
responsibility, the agony of shame, the inner reverence for justice,
first find their meaning and vindication in a supreme holiness that
rules the world. Nor can any one be penetrated with the distinction
between right and wrong, without recognizing it as valid for all free
beings, and incapable of local or arbitrary change. His feeling
insists on its permanent recognition and omnipresent sway; and this
unity in the Moral Law carries him to the unity of the Divine
Legislator. Theism is thus the indispensable postulate of
conscience,--its objective counterpart and justification, without
which its inspirations would be illusions, and its veracities
themselves a lie. To adduce historical proofs of this conjunction is
at once difficult and superfluous in a world whose theism is almost
all of one stock. But it will not be forgotten that Socrates, in whom
Greek religion culminated, avowedly based his reform on the
substitution of moral for physical studies. It is undeniable too that,
in spite of their fatalism, the monotheistic Mohammedans have been
surpassed by few nations in their sense of truth and fidelity; and
that wherever the same type of belief has been approached by Christian
sects, the heresy has been said to arise from an exaggerated estimate
of the moral law.
Art, we have said, is _pantheistic_. Its aim, often unconsciously
present, is to read off the _expressiveness_ of things, and find what
it is which they would speak with their silent look. To its
perceptions, form, color, sound, motion, have a soul within them whose
life and activity they represent: and even language, by flinging
itself into the mould of rhythm and music, acquires, beyond its
logical significance, a second meaning for the affections. As if waked
up and tingling beneath the artist's loving gaze, matter lies dull
and dead no more; opens on him a responding eye; communes with him
from its steadfast brow; and becomes instinct with grace or majesty.
Instead of being the drag-weight and opposite of spiritual energies,
it becomes to him their pliant medium, the docile clay for the shapes
of finest thought, the brilliant palette for the spread of inmost
feeling. He melts the barrier away that hides from mere sense and
intellect the interior sentiment--the formative idea--of all visible
things; and his glance of sympathy changes them not less than a burst
of amber sunrise changes a leaden landscape and picks out the freshest
smiles. Thus he finds himself in a _living_ universe, ever striving to
show him a divine beauty that lurks within and presses to the surface;
and he stands before a curtain only half opaque, watching the lights
and shadows thrown on it from behind by the ceaseless play of infinite
thought. Not that the interpretation is by any means self-evident, or
accessible except to the apprehensive instinct of sympathy. For it
seems as though no form of being, no object in creation, could ever
represent completely its own type: something is lost from its
perfection in the realization; and the actual, falling short of the
ideal, can give it only to one for whom a hint suffices. This
conception of the world as an incarnate divineness does not, we are
well aware, amount to pantheism, unless it become all-comprehensive,
so as to take in not simply physical nature, but the human life and
will; and there are numbers who are saved from this extreme, either by
knowing where to draw the lines of philosophical distinction, or by
the natural force of _moral_ conviction restraining the absolutism of
imagination. But so far forth as the tendency operates, it substitutes
for the theistic reverence for a Holy _Will_ the pantheistic
recognition of a Creative _Beauty_, and presents God to the mind less
as the prototype of Conscience than as the apotheosis of Genius. The
spontaneity of poetic action is supposed to illustrate His procedure
better than the preferential decisions of the moral sentiment; and the
genesis of whatever is good and fair is referred not so much to
deliberate plan as to the eternal interfusion and circulation,
through the great whole, of a Divine Essence, which flings off the
universe and its history as a mere natural language. That this is the
religion of art, is proved by the literature of every creative period,
Greek, Italian, or Teutonic; and negatively by the comparative absence
of artistic feeling and production in ages and nations that have most
intensified at once the Unity and the Personality of God. Beauty was
the Bible of Athens; and Plato, its devoutest and most comprehensive
expounder, shows everywhere, in his metaphysics, his morals, and his
myths, the mould into which its faith inevitably falls.
In _passionate and impulsive_ natures there is a self-contradiction
which makes their religious tendency peculiarly difficult to describe.
They are not less conscious than others of moral distinctions, and own
the sacred authority of the better invitation over the worse. Indeed,
when surprised into a fall, their remorse shares the vehemence of all
their emotions, and from the black shadow in which they sit, the
sanctity of the law which they have violated looks ineffably bright;
and they speak of its holy requirements, and of the infinite purity of
the Divine Legislator, in such fervid tone, that whatever else they
may endanger, the perfection of God's character, you feel assured, and
the obligations of human morality, are secure of reverential
maintenance. Yet the truth is precisely the reverse. At the very
moment that the law of duty is thus loftily extolled, it is on the
point of total subversion; lifted to a height precarious and unreal,
it overbalances on the other side and disappears. For the very same
stormy intensity which makes these men strong to feel the claim of
good, makes them weak to obey it. Their personality wants solidity;
and an atmosphere of tempestuous affections sweeps over it like a
hurricane on water. They can do nothing from out of their own
resolves, and are for ever drawn or driven from the fortress they were
not to surrender. What remains for them, solicited thus by forces
which are an overmatch for their just self-reliance? Is it surprising
that they no sooner confess how they _ought_ to obey, than they
declare that they _cannot_ obey? The thing is a contradiction; but it
all the better for this expresses what _they_ are: with their centre
of gravity in the wrong place, they cannot but hold the truth in
unstable equilibrium. Repose on contradiction is, however, impossible;
and the necessary result of these co-existent feelings of obligation
and incapacity is a _substitute_ for obedience. The resort to
_sacrifice_ which thus arose expressed no more, prior to the Christian
era, than the sentiment, "Take this, O Lord, 't is all I have to
give"; and afforded but a fictitious relief to the laboring spirit. It
acknowledged and attested the incompetency of the will, but made no
use of the excess of the emotions. It was the Pauline doctrine of
faith which first turned this great power to account; and virtually
said, "Are you in slavery because you cannot manage your affections?
turn their trust and enthusiasm on Christ in heaven, and let them
_manage_ you, and you shall be free." The soul that falls in love with
immortal goodness rises above the region of ineffectual strife, and
spontaneously offers what could never be extorted from the will by the
lash of self-mortifying resolve. This is the truth which underlies the
sacrificial doctrine in Christian times,--_the emancipating power of
great trusts and high inspirations_; and its very nature indicates its
birth from impassioned temperaments, and its affinity with their
special wants. The vicarious sacrifice is a mere plea, an ideal point
of attraction, for a profound allegiance of heart; which minds of this
class would hardly yield without an intense appeal to their
_gratitude_; but which, if really awakened by a clear and tranquil
moral reverence, would no less triumph over the gravitation of self.
The one needful condition for the redemption of these natures is the
objective presence and action upon them of a divine person to lift
them clear out of themselves, and render back on the healing breath of
trust the strength that only pants itself away in feverish effort.
Every doctrine of sacrifice necessarily contradicts its own premises;
because for guilt, which is personal and inalienable, it offers a
compensation which is foreign, and meets a moral ill with an unmoral
remedy. True and sound as a mere confession of weakness, it runs off
from that point into mere confusion and morbidness. But add to it the
doctrine of faith, and it acquires its proper complement; balances its
human disclaimer with a divine resource; and instead of sending its
captive through dark labyrinths of vain experiment, opens a direct way
from the chambers of humiliation to the prophet's watch-tower of
prayer and vision. Without this complement, the doctrine created
priesthoods; with it, destroys them. Without it, men are caught up in
their moments of helplessness, and handed over to ritual quackeries;
with it, they are seized in their hour of inspiration, and flung into
the arms of God. The susceptibility for either treatment depends on
the predominance of impulse and passion over breadth of imagination
and strength of will. In short, there are minds whose power is shed,
if we may say so, in _pro_tension, precipitated forwards in narrow
channels with impetuous torrent. There are others whose affluence is
in _ex_tension, and spreads out like a still lake to drink in light
from the open sky, and reflect the look of wide-encircling hills. And
there are others yet again, whose character is _in_tension, and that
move on in full volume, and with steady stream of tendency, rising and
falling little with the seasons, and holding to the limits within
which they are to go. The faith of the first is _sacrificial_; of the
second, _pantheistic_; of the third, _theistic_.
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.
In this endeavor to lay out the ground-plan of modern Christian
development, and trace upon it the chief lines both of psychological and
of historical distinction, our design is to prepare the way for a series
of sketches exhibiting the sects and types of religion in England. It is
scarcely possible to notice the phenomena present here and to-day
without referring to their antecedents in a prior age, their
counterparts in other lands, and their permanent principles in human
nature; and if our chart be tolerably correct, our future course will be
rendered less indeterminate by the relations and points of comparison
which have been established. The age, and even the hour, is teeming with
new interests and pregnant auguries in relation to the highest element
of human well-being. From a desire to approach these in a temper of just
and reverential appreciation, we have abstained from recording the first
impression of them, and sought rather, by a preliminary discipline, to
detect some criteria by which prejudices may be checked, tendencies be
estimated, and criticism acquire a clew.