It is at all times difficult, even for the wisest, to describe aright
the tendencies of the age in which they live, and lay down its
bearings on the great chart of human affairs. Our own sensations can
give us no notice whither we are going; and the infinite life-stream
on which we ride, restless as it is with the surface-waves of
innumerable events, reports nothing of the mighty current that sweeps
us on, except by faint and silent intimations legible only to the
skilled interpreter of heaven. It is something, however, to have the
feeling _that we are moving_, and to be awake and looking out; and
perhaps there never was a period in which this consciousness was more
diffused throughout society than in our own. No one can look up and
around at the religious and social phenomena of Christendom, without
the persuasion that we are entering a new hemisphere of the world's
history,--a persuasion corroborated even by those who disclaim it, and
who insist on still steering by lights of tradition now sinking into
the mists of the receding horizon. Wherever we turn our eye, we
discover some symptom of an impending revolution in the forms of
Christian faith. The gross materialism and absolute unbelief diffused
for the first time among vast masses of our population; the
fast-spreading (and, as it appears to us, morbid) dislike to look
steadily at anything miraculous; the extensive renunciation, even
among the religious classes on the Continent, of historical
Christianity; the schisms and ever-new peculiarities which are
weakening all sects, and, like seedlings of the Reformation, are
obscuring the species, by multiplying the varieties, of opinion; the
revived controversies, penetrating all the great political questions
of the age, between the ecclesiastical and civil powers,--are not the
only indications of approaching theological change. That very
conservatism and recoil upon the high doctrine of an elder time, which
is manifest in every section of the Christian world, is a confession
by contrast of the same thing. For opinion does not turn round and
retreat into the past, till it has lost its natural shelter in the
present, and dreads some merciless storm in the future. The outward
strength which the older churches of our country seem to be acquiring
arises from the rallying of alarm and the herding together of
trembling sympathies; and though fear may unite men against external
assaults upon institutions, it cannot stop the decay of inward doubt.
It would seem as if Christianity was threatened by the mental activity
which it has itself created; as if the intellectual weapons which have
been forged and tempered by its skill were treacherously turned
against its life. It is vain, however, to strike a power that is
immortal; nothing will fall but the bodily form cast for a season
around the imperishable spirit.
Protestantism, with all its blessings, has after all greatly
disfigured Christianity, by constructing it into a rigid metaphysical
form, and setting it up on a narrow pedestal of antiquarian proof;--by
destroying its infinite character through definitions, and developing
it dogmatically rather than spiritually;--by treating it, not as an
ideal glory around the life of man, but a logical incision into the
psychology of God. The wreck of systems framed under this false
conception will but leave the pure spirit of our religion in the
enjoyment of a more sacred homage;--you may dash the image, but you
cannot touch the god.
In the following remarks we shall seek to make this evident;--to show
what principles of religion in general, and of Christianity in
particular, may be pronounced safe from the shocks of doubt. In times
of consternation and uncertainty, it behooves each one to look within
him for the heart of courage, and around him for the place of shelter,
and to single out, amid countless points of danger, some refuge
immutable and eternal. With this view, we propose to trace an outline
of Christian truths which we consider secure and durable as our very
nature;--a chain of granite points rising, like the rock of ages,
above the shifting seas of human opinion. In doing so, we shall be
simply delineating Unitarian Christianity, according to our conception
of it;--expounding it, not as a barren negation, but as a scheme of
positive religion; exhibiting both its characteristic faiths, and
something of the modes of thought by which they are reached.
* * * * *
I. In the _first_ place, WE HAVE FAITH in the _Moral Perceptions of
Man_. The conscience with which he is endowed enables him to
appreciate the distinction between right and wrong; to understand the
meaning of "_ought_," and "_ought not_"; to love and revere whatever
is great and excellent in character, to abhor the mean and base; and
to feel that in the contrast between these we have the highest order
of differences by which mind can be separated from mind. And on this
consciousness,--the basis of our whole responsible existence,--no
suspicion is to be cast; no lamentation over its fallibility, no hint
of possible delusion, is to pass unrebuked; it is worthy of absolute
reliance as the authoritative oracle of our nature, supreme over all
its faculties,--entitled to use sense, memory, understanding, to
register its decrees, without a moment's license to dispute them. That
Justice, Mercy, and Truth are good and venerable, is no matter of
doubtful opinion, in which peradventure an error may be hid;--is not
even a thing of certain inference, recommended to us by the force of
evidence;--is not an empirical judgment, depending on the
pleasurableness of these qualities, and capable of reversal, if, under
some tyrant sway, they were to be rendered sources of misery. The
approval which we award to them is quite distinct from assent to a
scientific probability; the excellence which we ascribe to them is not
identical with their command of happiness, but altogether transcends
this, precedes it, and survives it; the obligation they lay upon us is
not the consequence of positive law, human or divine, or in any way
the creature of superior will; for all free-will must itself possess a
moral quality,--can never stir without exercising it,--and cannot
therefore give rise to that which is a prior condition of its own
activity. And if (to pursue the thought suggested above) we could be
snatched away to some distant world, some out-province of the
universe, abandoned by God's blessed sway to the absolutism of demons,
where selfishness and sensuality, and hate and falsehood, were
protected and enjoined by public law, it is clear that, by such
emigration, our interests only, and not our duties, would be reversed;
and that to rebel and perish were nobler than to comply and live. The
discernment of moral distinctions, then, belongs to the very highest
order of certainties; it has its seat in our deepest reason, among the
primitive strata of thought, on which the depositions of knowledge,
and the accumulations of judgment, and the surface growths of opinion,
all repose. As experience in the past has not taught it, experience in
the future cannot _unteach_ it. The difference between good and evil
we cannot conceive to be merely relative, and incidental to our point
of view,--variable with the locality and the class in which a being
happens to rest,--an optical caprice of the atmosphere in which we
live;--but rather a property of the very light itself, found
everywhere out of the region of absolute night; or, at least, a
natural impression, belonging to that perceptive eye of the soul,
through which alone we can look out, as through a glass, upon all
beings and all worlds; and if any one will say that the glass is
colored, it is, at all events, the tint of nature, shed on it by the
ineffaceable art of the Creator. The modes in which we think of moral
qualities are not terrestrial peculiarities of idea, like foreign
prejudices; the terms in which we speak of them are not untranslatable
provincial idioms, vulgarities of our planetary dialect, but are
familiar, like the symbols of a divine science, to every tribe of
souls, belonging to the language of the universe, and standing
defined in the vocabulary of God. The laws of right are more
necessarily universal than the physical laws of force; and if the same
agency of gravitation that governs the rain-drop determines the
evolutions of the sky, and the Principia of Newton would be no less
intelligible and true on the ring of Saturn than in the libraries of
this earth,--yet more certain is it that the principles of moral
excellence, truly expounded for the smallest sphere of responsibility,
hold good, by mere extension, for the largest, and that those
sentiments of conscience which may give order and beauty to the life
of a child, constitute the blessedness of immortals, and penetrate the
administration of God. This is what we intend, when we insist on
implicit faith in the moral perceptions of man. They are to be assumed
by us as the fixed station, the grand heliocentric position, whence
our survey of the spiritual universe must be made, and our system of
religion constructed. Whatever else may move, here, as in creation's
centre of gravity, we take our everlasting stand. Whatever else be
doubtful, these are to be simply trusted. The force of certainty by
which nature and God give them to the conscience exceeds any by which,
either through the understanding or through external supernatural
communication, they might _seem_ to be drawn away. No revelation could
persuade me that what I revere as just, and good, and holy, is _not
venerable_, any more than it could convince me that the midnight
heavens are not sublime.
There is nothing to move us from this position, in the objection, that
different men have different ideas of right and wrong, and that the
heroic deeds of one latitude are regarded as the crimes of another. This
moral discrepancy is, in the first place, infinitely small in proportion
to the moral agreement of mankind, so that it is even difficult to find
many striking examples of it; and when the subject is mentioned,
everybody expects to hear the self-immolation of the Indian widow, and
other superstitions of the Ganges, adduced as the standing
illustrations. What, after all, are these eccentricities of the moral
sense, compared with the scale of its common consent? As well might you
deny the existence of an atmosphere, because you have found the air
exhausted from a pump! Where is the nation or the individual, without
the rudiments, however imperfectly unfolded, of the same great ideas of
duty which we possess ourselves?--where the language, in which there are
no terms to denote good and evil,--the just, the brave, the
merciful?--where the tribe so barbarous as not to listen, with earnest
eye, to the story of the good Samaritan? And if such there were, should
we not call them a people but little human (_inhuman_), and deem them,
not the specimens, but the outlaws of our nature? Moreover, the
variances of moral judgment are usually only apparent and external. The
action which one man pronounces wrong and another right, is not the
same, except upon the lips: enter the minds of the two disputants, and
you will find that it is only half taken into the view of each, and
presents to them its opposite hemispheres; no wonder that it shows the
darkness of guilt to the one, and the sunshine of virtue to the other.
And accordingly, these differences actually vanish as the faculty of
conscience unfolds itself, and the scope of the mind is enlarged. Like
the discrepancies in the ideas which men have of beauty, they exist
principally between the uncultivated and the refined: and the
well-developed perceptions of the best in all ages and countries visibly
agree. Nay, while yet the discordance lasts, it introduces no real
doubt: for heaven has established a moral subordination among men, which
reveals the real truth of our own nature. Do we not always see, that the
lower conscience bows before the higher;--that the heart, without light
or heat itself, may be pierced, as with a flash, by a sentiment darted
from a loftier soul, and own it to be from above;--that, simply by this
natural allegiance of the lesser to the nobler, classes and nations and
sects are raised in dignity and moral greatness;--that they, and they
only, have had any grand and sublime existence in the history of the
world, who have been gifted with power to create a new religion,--a
fresh development of what is holy and divine;--and that every one so
endowed has always gathered around him the multitudes ever praying to
be lifted above the level of their life, and blessing the benefactor who
wakes up the consciousness of their higher nature? And if so, the
general _direction_ of the moral sentiment is the same, however its
intensity may vary: and the irregular indications which it gives are not
due to any inherent vacillation, but to the disturbing causes which
deflect it from the celestial line of simplicity and truth.
We keep our foot, then, on this primitive foundation,--faith in the
moral perceptions of man. We say, that we know what we mean, when we
affirm that a being is just, pure, disinterested, merciful; that these
terms describe one particular kind of character, and one only; that
they have the same sense to whomsoever they are applied, and are not
to be juggled with, so as to denote quite opposite forms of action and
disposition, according as our discourse may be of heaven or of earth;
that whenever they lose their ordinary and intelligible signification,
they become senseless; and that what would be wrong and odious in any
one moral agent, can be, under similar relations, right and lovely in
no other. These positions, which we take to be fundamental, are in
direct contradiction to the theological maxims with which most
churches begin;--viz. that human nature is so depraved that its
conscience has lost its discernment, sees everything through a
corrupted medium, and deserves no trust; that it may surrender its
convictions to anything which can bring fair historical evidence of
its being a revelation;--in other words, that it may be right to throw
away our ideas of right, and, in obedience to antiquarian witnesses,
suppose it holy in God to design and execute a scheme which it would
be a crime in man to imitate. These principles are defended by the
assertion, that the relations of the Divine and the human being are so
different as to destroy all the analogies of character between them.
The only tendency, both of this defence and of the principles
themselves, is to absolute scepticism;--to _atheistical scepticism_,
inasmuch as our propositions respecting God, if not true in the plain
human sense, are to us true in no other, and represent _nothing_; to
_moral scepticism_, inasmuch as, the sentiments of conscience being
exposed to distrust, and all its language rendered unsettled, the very
ground on which human character must plant itself is loosened; the
rock of duty melts into water beneath our feet, and we are cast into
the waves of impulse and caprice.
* * * * *
II. We have Faith in the _Moral Perfection of God_. This indeed is a
plain consequence of our reliance on the natural sentiments of duty.
For it is not, we apprehend, by our logical, but by our moral faculty,
that we have our knowledge of God; and he who most confides in the
instructor will learn the sacred lesson best. That one whom we may
call the Holiest rules the universe, is no discovery made by the
intellect in its excursions, but a revelation found by the conscience
on retiring into itself; and though we may reason in defence of this
great truth, and these reasonings, when constructed, may look
convincing enough, they are not, we conceive, the source, but rather
the effect, of our belief,--not the forethought which actually
precedes and introduces the Faith, but the afterthought by which Faith
seeks to make a friend and an intimate of the understanding. Does any
one hesitate to admit this, and think that our conceptions of the
Divine character are inferences regularly drawn from observation,--not
indeed observation on the mere physical arrangements, but on the moral
phenomena, of our world,--from the traces of a regard to character in
the administration of human life? We will not at present dispute the
conclusion; but, observing that the premises which furnish it are
certain _moral_ experiences, we remark that the very power of
receiving and appreciating these, of knowing what they are worth,
belongs not to our scientific faculty, but to our sense of justice and
of right. On a being destitute of this they would make no impression;
and in precise proportion to the intensity of this feeling will be the
vividness and force of their persuasion. And is it not plain _in
fact_, that it is far from being the clear and acute intellect, but
rather the pure and transparent heart, that best discerns God? How
many strong and sagacious judgments, of coolest capacity for the just
estimate of argument, never attain to any deep conviction of a perfect
Deity! Nay, how much does scepticism on this great matter seem to be
proportioned, not to the obtuseness, but rather to the subtlety and
searchingness of the mere understanding? But when was it ever known
that the singularly pure and simple heart, the earnest and aspiring
conscience, the lofty and disinterested soul, had no faith in the
"First fair and the First good"? Philosophy at its ease, apart from
the real responsibilities and strong battle of life, loses its diviner
sympathies, and lapses into the scrupulosity of doubt, and from the
centre of comfort weeps over the miseries of earth, and the
questionable benevolence of heaven; while the practically tried and
struggling, with moral force growing beneath the pressure of crushing
toil, look up with a refreshing trust, and with worn and bleeding feet
pant happily along to the abodes of everlasting love. The moral
victor, flushed with triumph over temptation, feels that God is on his
side, and that the spirit of the universe is in sympathy with his joy.
Never did any one spend himself in the service of man, and yet despair
of the benignity of God. Our faith, then, in the Divine perfection,
forms and disengages itself from the deeps of conscience: and the
Holiest that broods over us solemnly rises--the awful spirit of
eternity--from the ocean of our moral nature.
It is in conformity with this doctrine of the _moral_ origin of our
belief in the first principles of religion, that to every man his God
is _his best and highest_, the embodiment of that which the believer
himself conceives to be the greatest. The image which he forms of that
Being may indeed be gross and terrible; and others may be shocked, and
exclaim that he trusts, not in a Divinity, but in a Fiend: but will
the worshipper himself perceive and acknowledge this?--will he not
indignantly deny it?--will he not eagerly vindicate the perfection of
the Deity he serves? He can do no otherwise; for he discerns nothing
more sublime, and cannot be convinced that _that_ is low which stands
at the summit of his thoughts. This uniform phenomenon in the history
of religion could not exist, if human faith were an inference of
intellectual origin. There would be nothing _then_ to prevent some
men, in their reasonings on the probable character of God, from
assigning to that character a place _beneath_ their own conceptions of
what is most excellent; and amid the infinite varieties of
speculation, many forms of this opinion would undoubtedly arise. Let
any one, then, who dissents from the account which we have given, ask
himself this question: Why is it, that to discover a blemish in a
divinity is the same thing as to renounce faith in him; and that, even
in pagan times, to _assail the character_ of the gods was the constant
mark of an _unbelieving_ age? Is it not clear that, by a constraining
necessity of our being, we are compelled to regard the godlike and the
perfect as identical, and to look to heaven through the eye of our
moral nature? The Intellect alone, like the telescope waiting for an
observer, is quite blind to the celestial things above it,--a dead
mechanism dipped in night,--ready to serve as the dioptric glass,
spreading the images of light from the Infinite on the tender and
living retina of Conscience.
If, then, there is no discernment of Deity except through our moral
sense, the importance of confiding in the perceptions of that
sense,--of rendering our consciousness of them vivid and
distinct,--and the corresponding mischief of distrusting and
repudiating these our appointed instructors,--become evident. Faith in
the human conscience is necessary to faith in the Divine perfection:
and _this_ again is the needful prelude to the belief in any special
revelation. For, unless we are first assured of the truth and
excellence of God, we cannot tell that his communications may not
deceive us, giving us false notices of things, and agitating us with
illusory hopes and fears. This might be apprehended from a Being of
undetermined benevolence and integrity: and that this idea of a
_mendacious revelation_ has never seriously entered the minds of men,
is a strong proof of their natural and necessary faith in the
rectitude and goodness of the Divine Administrator of creation. This
Moral Perfection of God being assumed as a postulate in the very idea
of a Revelation, no system of religion which contradicts it can be
admitted as credible _on any terms_.
Now the whole scheme of Redemption, as it is represented in the popular
theology, appears to us to fall under this condemnation. Under the
_names_ of Justice, Sanctity, Mercy, it ascribes to the All-perfect a
course of sentiment and of practice which--it is undeniable--no other
moral agent, placed in analogous relations, could adopt without the
deepest guilt. The Holiness of God, so often adduced to justify the
severities of this scheme, we would yield to no one in earnestly
maintaining; believing, as we do, that his abhorrence of moral evil is
absolute and everlasting, his resistance to it real and true, and his
love of excellence simply infinite as his nature. But purity of mind
does not express itself by implacable vengeance against the impure, or
oblige its possessor to engage himself in physically smiting them,--much
less limit him through all eternity to this mode of administration.
Rather does it incline away from a treatment which too often adds only
torment, and removes no guilt,--which makes no advance towards the
blessed dispositions it loves,--which fevers and parches instead of
cooling and melting the passions of a culprit nature. It is a coarse and
wretched error to suppose that anguish is a specific for sin, to the
incessant infliction of which the Sinless is bound. God never departs
indeed from his devotion to the laws of goodness, and his design of
calling wider and wider virtue into existence: but he pursues them with
the fertility of his infinite free-will;--now by the severities of his
displeasure,--now by the openness of his forgiveness,--now by the
solicitations of his love. His purpose, as one whose perfection is not
merely spotless, but active and productive, cannot be, as some
Christians seem to say, the penal publication of his personal offence
against the insulters of his law, but the spread and cultivation
throughout his spiritual universe of pure and high affections: and
whenever the new germs of these appear in the garden of the Lord, no
vernal sunshine or summer dews can more gently cherish the bursting
flower, than does his mercy foster the fair and early growth. The
assertion that God cannot pardon and recall to goodness till he has
expended his tortures upon the evil, seems to us a plain denial of his
moral excellence. Theologians speak as if there were some crime, or at
least some weakness, in the clemency which freely receives a repentant
creature into favor; as if the mercy which exacts no penalty, when
penalty is no longer needed, were an amiable imbecility of human nature,
which only a loose-principled and unholy being can exercise! as if
absolute unforgiveness were the perfection of sanctity! True, this is
disclaimed in words; and the Eternal Father is called merciful, for
remitting the sinner's doom and transferring the burden of his guilt to
a victim divine and pure. But surely this disclaimer is more insulting
to our moral sense than the accusation. For, either this transference of
righteousness and guilt is a mere figure of speech, denoting only that,
from the death on Calvary, God took chronological occasion to pass his
own spontaneous pardon, and set up the cross to _mark the date_ of his
volition; or else, if the vicariousness be not this mere pretence, it
describes an outrage upon the first principles of rectitude, a reckless
disregard of all moral considerations, from the thought of which we are
astonished that all good men do not recoil.
We press once more the question which has never been answered: How is
the alleged immorality of letting off the sinner mended by the added
crime of penally crushing the Sinless? Of what man--of what
angel--could such a thing be reported, without raising a cry of
indignant shame from the universal human heart? What should we think
of a judge who should discharge the felons from the prisons of a city,
because some noble and generous citizen offered himself to the
executioner instead? And if this would be barbarity below, it cannot
be holiness above. Moral excellence and beauty, we repeat, are no
local growths, changing their species with every clime; nor are the
poisonous weeds of this outer region the chosen adornments of
paradise. The principles of Justice and Right embrace all beings and
all times, and, like the indestructible conception of space, attach
themselves to our contemplation of objects within the remotest
infinitude. It is no more possible that what would be evil in man
should be good in God, than that a circle on earth should be a square
in heaven. Having faith, then, in the absolute perfection of our
Creator, we dare ascribe to Him nothing which revolts the secret
conscience He has given us.
* * * * *
III. The relation which thus subsists between the human conscience and
the Divine excellence leads us to avow, in the next place, a FAITH in
the _strictly Divine and Inspired Character of our own highest Desires
and best Affections_. We do not mean by this, that these affections
are of miraculous origin; that their appearance breaks through any
regular law; or that they do not belong to our own nature so as to
form an integrant part of its history; or that they do not arise
spontaneously within it, but require to be precipitated upon it from
without. They are as much properties of our own minds, as our
selfishness and sin: we are _conscious_ of them, and so they cannot
but be parts of our personality.[25] But in admitting them to be
_human_, I do not deny that they are _divine_: in regarding them as
indigenous to our created spirit, I do not treat them as foreign to
the Creator's; nor is there any inconsistency in believing them to be
simultaneously domesticated with both. That which is _included within_
the mind of man, is not _therefore excluded from_ the mind of _God_;
much less is it true that occurrences agreeable to the order of nature
are, by that circumstance, disqualified from being held the immediate
products of the Heavenly Will. The Supreme Cause, so far from being
shut out by his own secondary causes and natural laws, has now at
least no residence, no activity, no existence, except within them; He
covers, penetrates, fills them; thinks, speaks, executes, through
them, as the media of his volition: and _His_ energy and _theirs_ not
only _may coincide_, but even _must coalesce_. He is not to be brought
down from his universal dominion to the rank of _one of_ the physical
causes active in creation, doing that only which the others have left
undone. Will any one stand with me by the midnight sea, and, because
the tides in the deep below hang upon the moon in the heavens above,
forbid me to hear in their sweep the very voice of God, and tell me
that, while they roll untired on, He sleeps through the silent vault
around me? It is by the law of gravitation that the planets find an
unerring track in the desert space; and is it false, then, that He
"leadeth them forth with his finger," and bids us note, in pledge of
his punctuality, that "not one faileth"? Is there any error in
ascribing the very same event at one time to gravitation, at another
to God? Certainly not; for this is but one of the forms of his
personal activity. And it is the same in the world of Mind; its
natural laws do not exclude, but, on the contrary, include, the direct
Divine agency: and though _my_ thought, or hope, or love, cannot be
_yours_, they may yet be God's; not emanations from the God without
us, but inspirations of the God within. Why should we start to think
that there is a part of us which is divine?--why image to ourselves a
distant, external, contemplative God, seeing all things and touching
nothing, gazing on the unconscious evolutions of things, as the
retired Mechanist of nature?--why enthrone Him in the inertness of
dead space, without even a sacred function there, and exclude Him from
the tried, and tempted, and ever-trembling soul of Man? If we found
Him not at home in the secret places of strife and sorrow, vainly
should we wander to seek Him in the colder regions of nature abroad.
We have no sympathy with any system which denies the doctrine of a
Holy Spirit; which discerns nothing divine in the higher experiences
of human nature; which owns no black abyss and no heavenly heights in
the soul of man, but only a flat, common, midway region, neither very
foul nor very fair,--well enough for the streets of traffic, but
without a mount of vision and of prayer. Nothing noble, nothing great,
has ever come from a faith which did not deeply reverence the soul,
and stand in awe of it as the seat of God's own dwelling, the
presence-chamber of his sanctity,--the focus of that infinite
whispering-gallery which the universe spreads around us.
Nor can we doubt at what point of our own nature we must stand, in
order to hear the voice and feel the inspiration of the Eternal. The
pure in heart--each in proportion to his purity--see Him. Our
Conscience, our Moral Perceptions, as we have seen, are our only
revealers of God. In proportion to their clearness do we discern Him;
and behind the clouds that obscure them, He becomes dim, and vanishes
away. The aspirations of duty, the love of excellence, the
disinterested and holy affections, of which every good heart is
conscious, constitute our affinity with Him,--by which we know Him, as
like knows like: they are the expression of his mind, the pencil of
rays by which He paints his image on our spiritual nature. God is
related to our soul, like the sun in a stormy sky to the windowed
cells in which mortals live; and as we sit at our work in the chamber
of conscience or of love, the burst of brilliancy or the sudden gloom
within reports to us the clear-shining or the cloud of the heaven
without. Nor can any philosophy, falsely so called, permanently expel
this conviction from the Christian heart. Every devout and earnest
mind naturally feels that its selfishness and sin are of the earth,
earthy,--the most offensive of all attitudes to God,--the infatuated
turning of the back to Him: and, on the other hand, welcomes the fresh
glow of pure Resolve, the heart-felt sob of Penitence, the glorious
Courage that slays Temptation at his feet,--each as the gracious gift
of a divine strength, and the authentic voice of the Inspirer, God. By
this natural faith (natural, however, only to the Christian mind) we
are prepared to abide; and, with the Apostle Paul, to own ourselves,
not without deep awe, the very temple of the Holiest.
* * * * *
IV. We have said, that in the Conscience and Moral Affections we have
our _only_ revealers of God. Let it be understood that we mean our
only _internal_ revealers of Him; the only faculty of our nature
capable of furnishing us with the idea and belief of Him, with any
perception of his character, and allegiance to his will. We mean to
state that, without this faculty, the bare intellect, the mere
scientific and reasoning power, could make no way towards the
knowledge of divine realities; could never, by any system of helps
whatsoever, be trained or guided into this knowledge, any more than,
in the absence of the proper sense, the _ear_ of the blind can be
taught _to see_; and that nature, life, history, miracle,
notwithstanding their most sedulous discipline, would leave us utterly
in the dark about religion, except so far as they addressed themselves
to our consciousness of what is holy, just, beautiful, and great. But
we do _not_ mean to state that the Moral Sense can stand alone,
dispense with all outward instruction, and supply a man with a natural
religion ready made. Nor do we mean that the every-day experience of
man, and the ordinary providence of God, are enough, without special
revelation, to lead us to heavenly truth. And we are therefore
prepared to advance another step, and to say, that, while regarding
the human conscience as the only inward revealer of God, we have FAITH
in CHRIST as _his perfect and transcendent outward revelation_. We
conceive that Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, not to _persuade_ the
Father, not to _appease_ the Father, not to make a sanguinary
_purchase_ from the Father, but simply to "_show_ us the Father"; to
leave upon the human heart a new, deep, vivid impression of what God
is in himself, and of what he designs for his creature, man; to
become, in short, the accepted interpreter of heaven and life. And
this he achieved, in the only way of which we can conceive as
practicable, by a new disclosure in his own person of all that is holy
and godlike in character,--startling the human soul with the sudden
apparition of a being diviner far than it had yet beheld, and lifting
its faith at once into quite another and purer region. If it be true,
as we have ventured to affirm, that to every man his God is his
_best_, you can by no means give to his faith a _higher God_, till you
have given to his heart a _better best_,--till you have touched him
with a profounder sense of sanctity and excellence, and purified and
enlarged the perceptions of his conscience. Nor can you do _this_,
except by presenting him with nobler models, with the living form of a
fairer and sublimer goodness, visibly transcending every object of his
previous reverence. No verbal teaching, no didactic rules, can
transform any man's moral taste, and place before his mental view a
lovelier and truer image of perfection: as well might you hope, by
definition, and precept, and book-wisdom, to train an artist with a
soul like Raffaelle, or an eye like Claude. But only give the glorious
model to the mind, _produce_ the most finished excellence and harmony,
and our instinctive sympathy with goodness feels and discerns it
instantly, and, though unable to conceive it inventively beforehand,
recognizes it reverently afterwards. And so Christ, standing in
solitary greatness, and invested with unapproachable sanctity, opens
at once the eye of conscience to perceive and know the pure and holy
God, the Father that dwelt in him and made him so full of truth and
grace. Him that rules in heaven we can in no wise believe to be _less
perfect_ than that which is most divine on earth; of anything _more
perfect_ than the meek yet majestic Jesus, no heart can ever dream.
And, accordingly, ever since he visited our earth with blessing, the
soul of Christendom has worshipped a God resembling him,--a God of
whom he was the image and impersonation;--and, _therefore, not_ the
God of which philosophy dreams,--a mere Infinite physical Force,
without spirituality, without love, chiefly engaged in whirling the
fly-wheel of nature, and sustaining the material order of the heavens,
and weaving in the secret workshop of creation new textures of life
and beauty; _not_ the God of which natural theology speaks, the mere
chief of ingenious mechanicians, more optical, and dynamical, and
architectural, than our most skilful engineers,--a cold intellectual
Being, in the severe immensity and immutability of whose mind all warm
emotions are absorbed and dissolved; _not_ the God of Calvinism,
creating a race with certain foresight of the eternal damnation of the
many, and against the few refusing to relax his frown except at the
spectacle of blood;--but the Infinite Spirit, so holy, so
affectionate, so pitiful, whom Jesus felt to be in him as his
Inspirer; who passes by no wounds of sin or sorrow; who stills the
winds and waves of terror, to the perishing that call on him in faith;
who stops the procession of our grief, and bids bereaved affection
weep no more, but wait upon the voice that even the dead obey; who
scathes the hypocrite with the lightning of conviction, and permits
the penitent to wash his feet with tears; who reckons most his own the
gentlest follower, that rests the head and turns up the trustful eye
on him; and bends that look of piercing love upon the guilty which
best rebukes the guilt. Jesus has given us a faith never held before,
and still too much obscured, in the _affectionateness_ of the Great
Ruler; has made Him our own domestic God, whose ample home encircles
all, leaving not the solitary, the sinner, or the sad without a place
in the mansions of his house; has wrapped us in the Divine immensity
without fear, and bid us claim the warm sun in heaven as our Paternal
hearth, and the vault of the pure sky as our protecting roof.
We have spoken of Christ's personal representation, in his own character
and practical life, of the spirit of the Divine Mind, and have explained
how in this way we believe that he has "shown us the Father." This,
however, is not all. His _direct teachings_, perfectly in harmony with
his life, confirm and extend its lessons; and we listen, with venerating
faith, to his inimitable exposition of all divine truth. Purity of soul
makes the most wonderful discoveries in heavenly things, and is indeed
the pellucid atmosphere through which the remoter lights of God are
"spiritually discerned." As we have said, the knowledge of him which any
mind (be it of man or of angel) may possess, is just proportioned to its
sanctity: and our Messiah, having the very highest sanctity, was enabled
to speak with the highest and most authoritative knowledge, and was
inspired to be our infallible guide, not perhaps in trivial questions of
literary interpretation, or scientific fact, or historical expectation,
but in all the deep and solemn relations on which our sanctification and
immortal blessedness depend. And both to his person and to his teachings
do the miracles of his life, the tragedy of his crucifixion, and the
glory of his resurrection, articulately call the attention of all ages,
as with the voice of God. In every way we discern in Christ the
transcendent revelation of the Most High. We are told, that this is to
_dishonor Christ_. We think it, however, a more glorious honor to him,
to be thus indissolubly folded within the intimacy of the Father's love,
than to be blasted by the tempest of his wrath; nor could we ever trust
and venerate a God who--like the barbarians in the judgment-hall--could
smite that meek lamb of heaven with one rude blow of vengeance.
* * * * *
V. But we hasten to observe, finally, that WE HAVE FAITH in HUMAN
IMMORTALITY, as exemplified in the heavenly life to which Jesus
ascended. To assure us of this great truth, it were enough that Jesus
assumed and taught it; that it was his great postulate, essential to
the development of his own character, and to all his views of the
purposes of life,--an integrant part of his insight into human
responsibility and his version of human duty. For if _he_ did not
teach the reality of God in this matter, sure we are that none else
has ever done so; and most of all, that the sceptics who doubt the
heavenly futurity have no claim to take his place as our instructors.
For if this hope were a delusion, _who_ would the mistaken be? Will
any one tell me, that the voluptuary, who, from abandonment to the
body, cannot imagine the perpetuity of the spirit;--that the selfish,
who, looking at the meanness of his own nature, sees nothing worth
immortalizing;--that the contented Epicurean, who, in prudent quietude
of sense and sympathy, finds adequate satisfaction in this mortal
life;--that the cold speculator, who looks at the fouler side of human
nature, and, showing us on its features the pallor of sensualism or
the hard lines of guilt, deems it less fit for the duration of the
angel than for the extinction of the brute;--that these men are
_right_; while Christ, who walked without despair through the deepest
haunts of sin, with faith that succumbed not to wretchedness and
wrong, but stood up and conquered them; who embraced our whole nature
in his love, and displayed it in its perfectness; who lived and died
in its utmost service, with prayers and tears and blood; to whom our
most binding affections cling almost with worship as the holiest glory
of our world;--that _he_ could be under a delusion _here_?--that when,
sinking in trustful death, he laid his meek head to rest on the bosom
of the Father, he was cast off, and dropped on the cold clod?--that he
sobbed into the Infinite by night with a vain love that met no
answer?--that God rather takes part in his providence with the
mean-souled, the cynic, the morbid, the selfish? There _is_ no greater
impossibility than this, on which evidence can fall back. Nay, we
confess that, even apart from his doctrine, the mere mortal history of
Christ would have settled with us the question of futurity. For the
great essential to this belief is a sufficiently elevated estimate of
human nature: no man will ever deny its immortality who has a deep
impression of its capacity for so great a destiny. And this impression
is so vividly given by the life of Jesus,--he presents an image of the
soul so grand, so divine,--as utterly to dwarf all the dimensions of
its present career, and to necessitate a heaven for its reception. At
all events, it is allowable to feel this, when we see that this
natural sequel was actually and perceptibly appended; that this "Holy
One of God could not see corruption," but rose, above the reach of
mortal ill, to the world where now he welcomes the souls of the
sainted dead. That other life we take to be a scene for the mind's
ampler and ampler development, apart from those animal and selfish
elements which now deform and degrade it by their excess. And this
alone, if there were nothing else, would render it a life of awful
retribution. For to the wicked, what is this loss of "the natural
man," but total bereavement and utter death of joy?--what to the good,
but a glad and sacred birth?--to the one, a Promethean exile on a
mid-rock in the ocean of night, under the bite of a remorse that gnaws
impalpably, felt always, but never seen,--to the other, a welcome to
the loving homes of the blest, amid the sunshine of the everlasting
hills? Yet precisely because we believe in Retribution, do we trust in
Restoration. The very abhorrence with which a man's better mind ever
looks upon his worse, while it inflicts his punishment, begins his
cure: and we can never allow that God will suspend this natural law
impressed by himself on our spiritual constitution, merely in order to
stop the process of moral recovery, and specially enable him to
maintain the eternity of torment and of sin. And so, beyond the dark
close of life rise before us the awful contrasts of retribution; and
in the farther distance, the dim but glorious vision of a purified,
redeemed, and progressive universe of souls.
* * * * *
Here, then, are our Five Points of Christianity, considered as a
system of positive religious doctrine, viz.:--1st. The truth of the
Moral Perceptions in man,--not, as the degenerate churches of our day
teach, their pravity and blindness; 2dly. The Moral Perfection of the
character of God,--in opposition to the doctrine of his Arbitrary
Decrees and Absolute Self-will; 3dly. The Natural awakening of the
Divine Spirit within us,--rather than its Preternatural communication
from without; 4thly. Christ, the pure Image and highest Revelation of
the Eternal Father,--not his Victim and his Contrast; 5thly. A
universal Immortality after the model of Christ's heavenly life; an
immortality not of capricious and select salvation, with unimaginable
torment as the general lot, but, for all, a life of spiritual
development, of retribution, of restoration.
To the _Moral_ doctrine which, in our view, the Gospel conjoins with
this religious system, it is impossible for us at present to advert.
Suffice to say that, with Paul, we exclaim, "not _Law_, but
_Love_":--love to God, to Christ, not simply for what they have done
for us, but chiefly for what they are in themselves;--nothing like the
narrow-hearted gratitude for an exclusive salvation, but a _moral_
affection awakened by their holiness, rectitude, truth, and mercy,--by
the sublimity and spirituality of their designs, and the sanctity and
fidelity of their execution: love also to man, looking to him not
merely as a sentient being who is to be made _happy_, but as a child
of God, who is to be raised into some likeness to the Divine image; as
a brother spirit, noble in nature, even though sinful in fact,
glorious as an immortal in the eye of God, though disfigured by this
world's hardship or contempt.
Does any one ask, _where we get_ our system of faith and morals? What
are the principles of reasoning which we apply to nature and Scripture
to extract it thence? The reply would require a volume of exposition.
Suffice it to say, that we think we have full warrant for this belief
from the Scriptures of the New Testament, with which alone we conceive
that Christians have any practical concern; that, in interpreting these
Scriptures, we follow the same rules which we should apply to any other
books; that not even could their instructions make us false to that
sense of right and wrong which God has breathed into us; that if they
taught respecting him anything unjust or unholy, we should not accept
_it_, but reject _them_; and that, as to the points of faith on which we
have dwelt, some receive these truths because they were taught by
Christ; others receive Christ because he taught these truths.
On this faith we desire to take our stand, with the firmness, but
without the ferocity, of the first Reformers. Opposing churches tell
us, we "are so frigid"! Why, it is the very thing our own hearts had
often said to us; for there is nothing that so promptly rebukes the
coldness of our nature as the warmth of our faith. We do not, however,
much admire this mutual criticism of each other's temperature; and
strongly suspect the reality of that earnestness which prides itself
on its own intensity. We must not propose to assume any artificial
heats, in order to spite and disprove this frequent accusation; but be
resolved, in an age diseased with pretence, to remain realities, to
profess nothing which we do not believe, to withhold nothing whereon
we doubt, to affect nothing which we do not feel, to promise nothing
which we will not do; holding, with Paul, that simplicity and
sincerity are truly the godliest of things. With Heaven's good help,
may we bear our testimony thus; deeming it a small thing to be judged
by man's judgment; and, with such light and heat as God shall put into
our hearts, delivering over our portion of truth to generations that
will give it a more genial welcome. There is greatness in a faith,
when it can win a wide success or make rapid conquest over submissive
minds. There is a higher greatness in a faith that, when God ordains,
can stand up and do without success;--unmoved amid the pitiless storms
of a fanatic age; with foot upon the rock of its own fidelity, and
heart in the serene Infinite above the canopy of cloud and tempest.