_The Temporal Benefits of Christianity exemplified in its
Influence on the Social, Intellectual, Civil, and Political
Condition of Mankind, from its first Promulgation to the present
Day._ By ROBERT BLAKEY. London. 1849.
_Small Books on Great Subjects._ Edited by a few Well-Wishers to
Knowledge. No. 19. _On the State of Man subsequent to the
Promulgation of Christianity._ London. 1851.
_The Connection of Morality with Religion; a Sermon, preached in
the Cathedral of St. Patrick, at an Ordination held by the Lord
Archbishop of Dublin, Sunday, September 21, 1851._ By WILLIAM
FITZGERALD, A.M., Vicar of St. Ann's, and Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Dublin. London. 1851.
Of these works, the third treats theoretically, the others practically,
of the relation of Christianity to human nature. The preacher seeks in
the natural conscience for the moral ground and receptacle of
revelation; while the historians trace its moral operation in society
and life. Were both tasks perfectly performed, we should be furnished
with a complete image of the religion at once in its idea and its
expression; should be able definitely to compare its promise with its
achievements and to submit it, as a whole, to philosophical
appreciation. But the two halves of the subject are exhibited with very
unequal success. It is much easier to show the intended than the actual
influence of the Christian faith upon the character of its
disciples,--to determine by _a priori_ methods what it _must be_, than
by an _a posteriori_ induction to estimate what it _has been_, and is.
Mr. Fitzgerald, as becomes a professor of ethical science, has well
contended that the religion which he recommends from the pulpit is
neither indifferent nor supercilious towards the morals which he teaches
from the University chair,--but assumes their obligation, appeals to
their authority, and, in its mode of reconciling the human will with the
Divine, raises them into eternal sanctities. It addresses itself to man
as a being already conscious of responsibility; and simply proposes to
restore reason and conscience to that supremacy _in fact_ which _of
right_ they can never lose. How far has this aim been visibly realized?
Are the traces of a Divine renovation clear upon the face of
Christendom? Is there the difference between ancient Greece and modern
England, or between the empire and the papacy of Rome, which might be
expected between an unregenerate world and a regenerate? The historical
answer to these questions is attempted by Mr. Blakey, with perhaps
adequate resources of knowledge, but with so imperfect an apprehension
of the requisites of his argument, that his book, though often
instructive in detail, is altogether ineffective as a whole. He is
content to select and enumerate the most salient and favorable points in
the transition from ancient to modern civilization, and to set them down
to the credit of Christianity; without care to disengage the action of
concurrent causes, or to balance the account by reference to more
questionable effects. A much finer analysis is needed, in order to draw
from history its real testimony on this great matter; and nothing can
well be more arbitrary, than to stroll through some fifteen centuries,
and, gathering up none but the most picturesque and beneficent
phenomena, weave them into a glory to crown the faith with which they
co-exist. In Christendom, all the great and good things that are done at
all will of course be done by Christians, and will contain such share of
the religious element as may belong to the character of the actor or the
age; but before you can avail yourself of them in Christian
Apologetics, it must be shown that, under any other faith, no social
causes would have remained adequate either to produce them or to provide
any worthy equivalent. Because Charlemagne, after baptizing the Saxons
in their own blood, displayed a better zeal by establishing cathedral
and conventual schools, _therefore_ to put the horn-book of the liberal
arts into the hand of his religion, while leaving the wet sword to stain
his own; because chivalry blended in its vow "_fear of God_" with "love
of the ladies," _therefore_ to trace all loyalty and courtesy to the
doctrine of the Church; because the mediæval schoolmen imported into
every science the canons of Divinity, and decided between Realism and
Nominalism on eucharistic principles, _therefore_ to give the priesthood
all the honors of modern philosophy and intellectual liberty,--is, to
say the least, very vulnerable logic and very superficial history. Of a
far superior order is the little book "On the State of Man subsequent to
the Promulgation of Christianity." In a previous treatise, "On the State
of Man _before_ the Promulgation of Christianity," the author had passed
under rapid review the ancient systems of civilization,--stationary,
progressive, aggressive; and having seized on their characteristic
features, he now brings with him determinate points of comparison into
his survey of the post-Apostolic times. The view which he spreads
beneath your eye of the world, as it lay ready to afford a channel for
the Christian faith, is remarkable for breadth and truth. Conducting
you, with the wide picture in your mind, to the pure head-spring in
Galilee, and keeping close to the stream as it descends and opens from
these sequestered heights, he enables you to see, reach by reach, where
it fertilizes and where it destroys; the new fields of life it enters,
the old landmarks of habit it overwhelms. The author is not more
familiar with the Christian Apologists and Fathers, than with the later
Latin and revived Greek literature from Trajan to Aurelian; and by
skilfully noting the moments when Pagan and Christian life not only
stood in silent co-presence, but came into active contact, he brings out
into clear relief the new type of character which formed itself within
the communities of disciples. That type is so strikingly original, its
features so conspicuously express an order of passions and ideas strange
alike to the Hellenic and the Italian races, as to betray the creative
action of some vast moral power unborrowed from the established
civilization. When the free Roman breaks the bread of communion with
slaves,--when the slippery Syrian forswears lying and theft,--when the
heedless Greek changes his eagerness of the moment into a living for
eternity,--when a people ignorant of Stoic maxims display a contempt of
torture and death sublimer than the ideal of the Porch,--an influence is
plainly at work which has penetrated to hitherto unawakened depths of
the human soul. The phenomenon is the more impressive, when regard is
had to the materials from which the early Christian communities were
gathered. It cannot be imagined that they were composed of elements
particularly choice; and, indeed, amid the universal corruption of
morals and exhaustion of wholesome life, it is difficult to conceive
how, if the Christian doctrine had enforced a rigorous selection,
instead of indiscriminately inviting innocence and guilt, any decent
elements could have been collected. Without adopting Gibbon's
contemptuous estimate of the body of primitive believers, we cannot
doubt that it comprised very mixed ingredients; we know that it
contained great numbers of the servile class, and very few whose station
and culture gave them access to the higher ideas familiar to the schools
of philosophy: yet from these unpromising sources arose a society,
which, in severity of morals, in intensity of affection, in heroism of
endurance, reversed the habits of the world to which they belonged. It
seems to us an idle question for sceptical criticism to raise, whether
the religion of Christ comprised in its teachings any ethical element
absolutely new. If genius had conceived it all before, life had not
produced it till now; and the more you affirm the philosophers'
competency to think it, the more do you convict them of inability to
realize it. But in morals scarcely _can_ there be clear intellectual
conception of principles not yet embodied in living character. As in the
highest works of art, the thing seen is far other than the thing
imagined and described; not doctrines, but persons, are here the only
expression of the truth; and till they appear, ethical forms are but as
the human clay without the vital fire. In the _statement_ of thought,
the early Christians, not excepting the Scripture writers, are rude and
unskilled; and a taste formed from the study of Plato and Seneca may be
offended by the rusticity of Mark, and the abruptness of Paul. But
whoever can rise above the level of a merely intellectual critique, and
embrace, with our anonymous author, the _whole_ phenomenon of the first
centuries of our era, will see a glow of self-denying faith, and a deep
movement of conscience, affording manifest announcement of a new edition
of human nature.
That edition has now been extant for many centuries; and is variously
legible in the literature, the institutions, the private manners of
Christendom. The Christian ideal of human life lies as an open book
before us; yet as a book so various in its versions, and so overlaid
with comments, that the fresh flavor of its language, and even the finer
essence of its thought, are in danger of being lost. The actual
Christianity of each successive age, and each contemporary nation, is
the express result, not only in its dogma, but in its life, of two
component terms,--a given _matter_, and a given _faculty_ of faith.
However full and constant the former may be in itself, the latter is
perpetually variable with the knowledge and passions of the time, and
the special genius of individual leaders; nor can this variation of
insight in the mind fail to neutralize some portion of truth, and to
give disproportionate magnitude to others. The data supplied by
inspiration itself form no exception to this rule. Delivered into the
charge of the human soul, they fall into the moulds of its recipient
nature, take their immediate form from the laws of its life, and are
reacted on from its independent activity. The _immutable_ custody of
anything by a finite thinking subject, involves the most evident
contradiction; the very contact with human intelligence reduces
universal truth to partial, the permanent to the variable, the secure to
the contingent. It is only in the essential Unity of Reason and
Conscience in every age, that we find the means of correcting the
aberrations and verifying the insight of all particular men. Not that we
are to conceive of the human race collectively as one large person, of
which individual minds are vital organs, and which has a necessary
growth and development, entitling each century to boast of advance
beyond its predecessors. We know of no spiritual units, of no
personalities, except each single and separate will; nor do we find
anything in their mutual relation which necessarily determines them to
uninterrupted improvement, and excludes the encroachment of degeneracy
and falsehood. Indeed, no sorrier product is there of human conceit and
ignorance than the cant of "progress," which assumes that every newest
phase of thought is wisest. But if all men are endowed with radically
the same faculties, however various in their intensities and
proportions, there is a court of appeal in permanent sitting, where the
normal laws of intellectual and moral apprehension are administered
against all provincial prejudices and transient verdicts of error. In
the long run, the healthy perceptions of good eyes will outvote the
discoloring effects of all ophthalmic epidemics, how obstinate and wide
soever they may be. And the moral vision of mankind will no less
vindicate its natural rights, by returning again and again into clear
discernments, and settled admirations, and discharging the illusory
forms and false tints of each separate age. To deny the ethical
competency of the mind for this office,--to say that there is no power
given for deciding what, among the claimants on reverence, is really
noble, true, and good,--is, with all its pietistic pretences, an act of
the profoundest scepticism, washing away, as a quicksand, the only rock
on which any faith can be built. It is to treat the durable source of
truth as evanescent and uncertain, and shut out the possibility of all
religion. On the other hand, to set up and idolize the life and thought
of any one time as an unquestionable rule for all times, and stereotype
it for unmodified reproduction, is to treat the evanescent as the
durable, and build on whatever stands above the water, heedless whether
it be the quicksand or the rock. Yet, strange to say, this particular
superstition, and that general unbelief,--an apparent antithesis of
error,--usually meet in the same mind, and constitute together the chief
theology of most visible churches. Having deposed and insulted the
eternal sanctities, they coax and flatter the letter of Scripture to
accept the vacant throne, and exchange the holy modesty of its
administration for a universal empire of pretence. They drain off the
springs of inspiration at their fountain-head, and turn all history into
a plain of sand, that they may magnify their Hebrew reservoir as the
world's sole supply; forgetting that, when cut off from the running
waters, the choicest store loses its fresh virtues, and the fairest
lake, shut up without exit, turns into a Dead Sea. In contradiction of
both errors, we shall assume that transitory elements cannot fail to mix
themselves with the expression of the purest inspiration,--the horizon
of human relations and expressible things around even the divinest soul
being limited; and that, as the inspiration tries itself upon age after
age, bringing into distinct consciousness now one side of truth and now
another, it becomes more and more possible to find its essence and
eliminate its accidents, to save its catholic beauties apart from its
sectional distortions. The Christian ideal of life is not to be looked
for in what is special to the Crusader or the Quaker,--to Puritan or
Cavalier,--to Platonists of the second century or Aristotelians of the
twelfth,--to Aquinas or Luther,--to John or Paul; but in such sentiment
as was common to them all, and attached to them as citizens of
Christendom. When this element is disengaged from all that encumbers it,
it will be found pervading and animating still whatever is noblest in
our modern life; while all that is narrow, and weak, and unworthy in the
moral doctrine of our age, springs from a forced attempt to perpetuate
the accidental modes of the Apostolic period.
Every one is sensible of a change in the whole climate of thought and
feeling, the moment he crosses any part of the boundary which divides
Christian civilization from Heathendom; yet of nothing is it more
difficult to render any compendious account. It is easy to enumerate in
detail the phenomena which are modified or disappear; just as on
entering a new physical region the travelling naturalist may register
the new species of plants and animals, that, one after another, present
themselves to his research. But these do not paint the scene before even
the learned eye; they are the separate out-comings of a great
life-thrill, into whose current their roots penetrate; the landscape, as
a whole, speaks differently to the mind, and the whole heaven and earth
seem pregnant with a thought unfelt before. To read off that thought,
requires an apprehension the converse of the analytic vision of science.
The same difficulty occurs when we endeavor to seize the latent
principle of a natural realm of history. Such principle, however, there
must be. Beneath all the moving tides of Christian thought there lie
still depths that supply them all, and a centre of equilibrium around
which they sweep. We believe that the fundamental idea of Christendom
may be described to be _the ascent through Conscience into communion
with God_. Other religions have lent their sanctions to morality, and
announced the Divine commands to the human will; but only as the laws of
an outward monarch within whose sovereignty we lie, and who, ruling in
virtue of his almightiness, has a right to obedience, ordain as he will.
Other religions, again, have aimed at a union with God. But the
conditions of this union, dictated by misleading conceptions of the
Divine nature, have missed on every side the true level of human dignity
and peace. Manichæism, deifying the antithesis of matter, takes the path
of ascetic suppression of the body. The Indian Pantheist, imagining the
Divine Abyss as the realm of night and infinite negation, strives to
hold in the breath and sink into self-annulment. Plato, seeing in God
the essence of thought, demands science and beauty, not less than
goodness, as the needful notes of harmony with him, and appoints the
approach to heaven by academic ways. The modern Quietists, worshipping a
Being too much the reflection of their own tenderness, have lost
themselves in soft affections, relaxing to the nerves of duty, and
unseemly in the face of eternal law. Christianity alone has neither
crushed the soul by mere submission, like Mohammedanism; nor melted it
away in the tides of infinite being, like Pantheistic faiths; but has
saved the good of both, by establishing the union with God through a
free act of the individual soul. Assigning to him a transcendent moral
nature, sensitive to the same distinctions, conservative of the same
solemnities, which awe and kindle us, it singles out the conscience as
the field where we are to meet him,--where the bridge will be found of
transit between the human and the divine. No fear or servility remains
with an obedience consisting, not in mystic acts and artificial habits,
but in the free play of natural goodness; and rendered, not in homage to
a Supreme Autocrat, but in sympathy with a Mind itself the infinite
impersonation of all the sanctities. Nor are any dizzy and perilous
flights incurred by a devotion which meets its great Inspirer in no
foreign heaven, but in the higher walks of this home life, and misses
him only in what is mean and low. The place assigned in Christianity to
the _moral_ sentiments and affections has no parallel in any other
religion. The whole faith is as an unutterable sigh after an ideal
perfection. Holiness eternal in heaven, incarnate on earth, and to be
realized in men,--this is the circle of conceptions in which it moves.
Its very name for the Inspiration which mediates all its work, expresses
the same thing. It is not simply an ενθουσιασμος,--not μανια,--not
βακχεια,--but the πνευμα ἁγιον. The Dæmon of Socrates--the least
heathenish of heathen men--was but an intellectual guide, and checked
his erring judgment; the Holy Spirit guards the vigils of duty, and
succors the disciple's tempted will. This profound sense of interior
amity with God through faithfulness to our highest possibility, appears
in the Christian Scriptures under two forms,--the positive and the
negative,--each the complement of the other. In the Gospel, Jesus
himself, as befits the saintly mind lifted above the strife of passion,
describes the _aspiration after goodness_ as the native guidance of the
soul to her source and refuge. In the Epistles, Paul, pouring forth the
confessions of a fiery nature, proclaims the _sense of sin_ to be the
contracted hinderance that bars the ascent, and against which the wings
of the struggling will beat only to grow faint. These representations
are evidently but the two sides of the same doctrine seen from the
heavenly and from the earthly position. Whether we are told what the
good heart will find, or what the guilty must lose, the lesson equally
recognizes the Divine authority of conscience. The benediction and the
curse are but the bright and the dark hemisphere of one perfect truth.
The Apostle, standing in the shadow of the world's night, and regarding
its averted face, dwells on the gloom of alienation,--the "foolish heart
that is darkened,"--the "reprobate mind" from which God is hid. Christ,
conscious of the holy light, and knowing how it penetrates the folds of
willing natures, and wakes what else would sleep, speaks rather of the
glory that is not denied, and utters that deepest of blessings,--"The
pure in heart shall see God." To this bright side also the Pauline view
in the end comes round. For though in him we miss that recognition of a
natural human goodness which gives such grace and sweetness to many of
the parables; though in his scheme the human will has not only betrayed
its trust, but hopelessly crippled its powers; yet he does not leave it
in the collapse of paralysis, with the hard saying that it can in no
wise lift up itself, but points to a hope that bends over it from above.
The soul that is too far gone to act, may still be capable of love; if
unable to trust itself, it may trust another; if it cannot command its
volitions, it may surrender its affections; can reverence, can aspire,
can yield its hand, like a child, to an angel of deliverance. Beyond the
precincts of this world is an Image of divine excellence and
beauty,--one recently withdrawn from human history, and soon to have a
more august return. It is but to turn the eye and give the heart to that
ideal and immortal perfection, and in the light of so pure a love, the
clouds will clear from the conscience, and lift themselves as a
nightmare away; the lame will, forgetting its infirmities, will spring
up and walk; and the restoration, impossible by flight from deformity
and ill, will come through the attraction of a Divine sanctity and
goodness. Thus does the Apostle snatch the disciple at last into the
right perceptions which Christ assumes to be possible at first; and in
both its primitive developments the Christian religion implies the
communion of man with God through purity of heart.
To this sentiment, conveyed with living realization in the person of
Jesus Christ, may be referred whatever is distinctively great in
Christian ethics. Proposing, as an end within their reach, the ascent of
the soul to a divine life, and as the means, a simple surrender to its
own highest intimations, they have melted away the interval between
earthly and heavenly natures,--not by humanizing God, but by
consecrating man. In treating the lower desires of sense and self as the
steams that intercept, the tender reverences as the clear air that
transmits, the light of lights, they have struck the deepest truth of
human consciousness. Hence the temper of aspiration,--the earnest
ideality,--the sense of infinite want, with faith in infinite
possibilities,--the sorrowful unrest in the present, with irrepressible
struggle for a better future,--which are impressed on the poetry, the
art, the social life of Christendom. Unlike the expression of the
Hellenic mind, they are rather a prayer for what might be, than a joy in
what is. Hence, too, the predominance of the psychological and
subjective element in the philosophy of modern times, and the conversion
of the ancient "metaphysics" into the form of "mental science." Man
would never have ceased to be merged in nature, and registered merely as
a part of its contents; his self-knowledge would not have vindicated its
independent rights; his mind would not have been recognized as the court
of record for the moral legislation of the universe,--had not his
religion taken him deep into himself, and from a new point shown him his
relation to all else; kindling his own consciousness to a point of
intense brilliancy, in correspondence with a divine centre, which must
be sought on the same axis of being,--like the two determining foci of
an infinite curve, that find each other out, while the realm of
determined nature lies around, as the configured area, or the bounding
curve. Of the external world, indeed, _too_ little account has been made
in the faith of Christians. They have not cared to recognize it as the
shrine of immanent Deity;--have stood in uneasy relations to it; often
inimical to it; sometimes trying to get rid of it as an illusion;
usually regarding it as a foreign object, like a great statue on the
stage of being, with only stony eyes and ears for the real play of
passions that whirl around. Existence, in its essence, has been felt as
an interview between man and God, at which space and nature have been
collaterally present, but in which it was not apparent what they had to
do. Physical science and the plastic arts may have reason to complain of
the depressing influence of this imperfect view, and of the hard
necessity under which it places them of pursuing their ends with only
scanty and grudging recognition from religion. But, for the philosophic
knowledge of human nature, and the practical regulation of human
society, this isolation of the soul within its own consciousness,--this
concentrated personality,--this vivid interchange of life with God
without diffusion through benumbing media,--must be held eminently
ennobling.
If, from the fundamental Christian sentiment, we descend to the scheme
of _Applied Morals_ which it organized and inspired, the principle
still vindicates itself in its results. The great problems of life are
supplied from two sources,--the _Persons_ that may engage our
affections, and the _Pursuits_ that may invite our will. The light in
which the _personal_ relations are presented before the eye of
Christendom is undeniably benign and true. It has never been obscured
without the social spread of injustice and discontent; nor ever
cleared again, but as the precursor of reformation. That every human
soul has its sacred concerns and its divine communion, is the simplest
of thoughts; but so deep and moving, that, where it is received and
acknowledged, it calls up angelic virtues; where it is insulted and
denied, it lets slip avenging fiends. Wherever it is sincerely held,
it secures that reverential feeling towards others, beneath whose
spell the selfish passions sleep, and without which the precept of
courtesy and the definition of rights are an ineffectual form. Power
loses its insolence, and dependence its sting, where their mutual
relation does not carry the whole individuality with it, but stops
with the limits of social and political convenience, and lies under
the restraining protection of a supreme equality before God. The
"Fraternity" that is the offspring of political theories, and aims to
neutralize by fellow-citizenship the diversities and antipathies of
nature, is often the watchword of envy and egotism, shouted by the
voice of hatred, and announcing the deed of violence. It is for want
of faith in that highest brotherhood of worship and responsibility
which Christianity assumes, that impatient schemes are formed for
artificially equalizing the weak and the strong, and abolishing the
relations of necessary dependence. Nor, where that faith is absent,
can they ever be answered so as to satisfy the _feeling_ from which
they spring. They may be shown to be impracticable, and crushed by the
relentless argument of fact; but the fact will be protested against as
unnatural, and the impossibility will seem a cruelty. How differently
is this topic handled by the logic of science and the sentiment of
religion! How much less justly does the former draw the line between
natural subordination among men and tyrannous oppression, than the
latter! Aristotle undertakes the defence of slavery on grounds both of
philosophy and of experience. Nature, he contends, pursuing a definite
end in every act of creation, assigns to some things, from their very
origin, a destiny to rule, while imposing on others a necessity of
being ruled. Wherever a plurality of parts concur to form a general
whole, dominant and subordinate elements present themselves. Even
within the inanimate realm this is apparent, as in the case of harmony
in music. But it is chiefly conspicuous in the sphere of animal
existence; the body being, by nature, servitor, of which the soul is
lord. In the highest stage of animate being, the constitution of
well-organized men, this law comes into the clearest light; for here
the soul sways the body with absolute command, while reason exercises
over the passions the prerogatives of a royal and constitutional
power; and were equality to be substituted for these modes of
subjection, mischief would ensue on all sides. Not less evidently does
Nature announce the dependence of inferior on superior in the rank
allotted to the brutes in relation to man; and again, in the case of
the two sexes, of which the male, as the more distinguished, is
rendered dominant. The same necessary law adjusts the positions of
mankind _inter se_. All those who are as intrinsically inferior to
their neighbors as the body to the soul, or the brute to the
man,--(and this is precisely the case of the mere manual
laborer,)--are slaves by nature; and for them, as for the body and the
brutes, it is better to be servile than to be free. Any man who can be
made property of by another, and who is competent to understand a
master's intelligence without a spontaneous stock of his own, is
naturally a slave. Such a one performs functions in the world not
essentially distinguished from those of the domestic animals; the
destiny of both is to contribute their corporeal energies to the
service of society; and creatures fit for this alone are brought into
the slave-market by Nature herself. Consistently with this conception
of the laborer as a _living tool_ (δουλος εμψυχον οργανον), Aristotle
lays it down that the relation of master and slave admits no rights,
and excludes friendship. To our modern worshippers of strength, this
will appear commendable doctrine, very much because they have
themselves relapsed into the old Hellenic way of studying the problems
of the universe; descending, in the Pantheistic method, from the whole
upon the parts; fetching rules from the wider sphere (therefore the
lower) to import into the narrower; entering the human world from the
physical,--the οικουμενη from the κοσμος; approaching society as a
specialty superinduced on a groundwork of nomadic barbarism; and
determining the functions of the individual as member of the vital
organism of the state. So long as this logical strategy is allowed,
the Titans will always conquer the gods; the ground-forces of the
lowest nature will propagate themselves, pulse after pulse, from the
abysses to the skies; and right will exist only on sufferance from
might. But there is a heaven, after all, which the most trenchant
giant cannot storm, and where justice and sanctity reserve a quiet
throne. Without disputing the inequality of gifts and consequent law
of natural ranks, religion qualifies it by an addition which
overarches and absorbs it. Were man only the choicest, most
intelligent, most gregarious of the mammalia,--were the theory of his
affairs a mere extension of natural history,--we might reasonably
discuss, in Aristotle's way, the conditions under which he may fitly
be put in harness. But there is in him an element that takes him
beyond the range of a Pliny or a Cuvier, that lifts him out of the
kingdom of nature and gives him kindred with the preternatural and
divine. He is not simply an instrument for achieving a given fraction
of a universal end, but has a sacred trust which, on its own account,
he is empowered and commissioned to discharge. He is watched by the
eyes of infinite Pity and Affection, braced for his faithful work,
succored in his fierce temptations. The conditions of dutiful, loving,
noble life must be preserved to him. Let his task, indeed, be suited
to his powers; and if he cannot rule, by all means let him serve; but
still with a margin and play of spiritual freedom secure from
encroachment and contempt. Those on whom Heaven lays the burden of
duty no power on earth may strip of rights. The conscience with which
the Highest can commune, the spirit which is not too mean for His
abode, can be no object of slight and scorn from men. By law and usage
you may have the disposal of another's lot and labor; but in the
reality of things the lord of a province may be less than the
conqueror of a temptation. You may be Greek, and he barbarian; but in
the heraldry of the universe, the blood of Agamemnon is less noble
than the spirit of a saint. In thus snatching the individual, as
bearer of a holy trust, from the crush of nature and the world,
Christianity became the first _human_ religion,--that absolutely took
no notice of race and sex and class. It created a new order of
inalienable rights, neither the heritage of birth, nor the franchise
of a state, but inherent in the moral capabilities of a man. The free
opening of sanctity and immortality to every willing heart could not
fail to exercise an intense influence on the better portion of a
world, like the declining empire of Rome, sickened with corruption and
confused with unmanageable oppressions. That it did so, is proved by
the whole tenor of the early Christian literature; and the effect is
well described and accounted for by the writer "On the State of Man
subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity."
"The mockery of adoring as gods the licentious tyrants who had
occupied the imperial throne, seems to have put an end to everything
like religious feeling among the nations under the sway of Rome. The
free satire of Lucianus shows how completely it had faded away, for it
introduces the gods of Olympus complaining that they were starving for
lack of offerings; not altogether because Christian or philosophic
doctrines prevailed widely, but rather on account of the total
indifference of the people to their ancient mythology; for even if it
ever had symbolized the truth, its meaning was now forgotten; and,
even so far back as the time of Cicero, had become totally
unintelligible to the learned, as well as to the multitude. It was
useless, therefore, and wanted but a slight impulse from without to
overthrow it. But to the philosopher who was in earnest in his pursuit
of this truth, buried under the rubbish of time, the doctrine of
Christ afforded it; there he found all that the master minds whom he
honored had taught and hoped; but he found it simplified, purified,
and confirmed by sanctions such as Plato had wished for, but scarcely
dared to expect;--to the Roman patrician, if any there were who still
looked back with fond memory to the purer morals and stern courage of
his forefathers, the Christian simplicity of manners and firm
endurance of torture and death was the realization of what he had
heard of and admired, but scarcely seen till then;--to the slave,
sighing under oppression and condemned to homeless bondage, the
doctrine of the Gospel gave all that was valuable in life; the
Christian slave was the friend of his Christian master, partook of the
same holy feast, shared the same painful but glorious martyrdom; he
was raised at once to all his intellectual rank, found freedom beyond
the grave, and lived already in a happy immortality;--to the woman,
degraded in her own eyes no less than in those of the tyrant to whose
lusts she was the slave, it offered a restoration to all that is most
dear to the human race; it offered intellectual dignity, equality
before God, purity, holiness. The Christian woman could die; she could
not, therefore, unless consenting to it, be again enslaved to the vile
passions of men; before God she was free, and with Him she trusted to
find shelter when the hard world left her none. Can we wonder, then,
that Christianity found votaries wherever a mind existed that sighed
after better things? for the preacher of Nazareth had at last
expressed the thought which had been brooding in the minds of so many,
who had found themselves unable to give it utterance."--p. 55.
Nor was it merely within the pale of the Christian fraternity that
relations of mutual reverence and tenderness attested the power of an
ennobling faith. Intensity of internal combination is often balanced,
in religious brotherhoods, by vehemence of external repugnance; and
were we to accept the fiery declamation of Tertullian as fairly
expressing the spirit of his fellow-believers, we could ill defend
them from the charge of fierce antipathy to the persons as well as the
creed of their Pagan neighbors. But many silent mercies appear which
contradict this loud intolerance. When the Decian persecution and its
attendant tumultuary movements had filled Alexandria with such
slaughter as to breed pestilence from the bodies of the dead, the
Christians, instead of sullenly permitting the physical calamity to
avenge their cause, assumed the duties of public nurses, and performed
the loathsome tasks from which priests and magistrates had fled.
Referring to this occasion, the author just cited says:--
"The plague made its appearance with tremendous violence, and
desolated the city, so that, as Dionysius, the Christian bishop,
writes, there were not so many inhabitants left of all ages, as
heretofore could be numbered between forty and seventy. In this
emergency the persecuted Christians forgot all but their Lord's
precept, and were unwearied in their attendance on the sick; many
perishing in the performance of this duty by taking the infection. 'In
this way,' says the bishop, with touching simplicity, 'the best of the
brethren departed this life; some ministers, and some deacons,' the
heathens having abandoned their friends and relations to the care of
the very persons whom they had been accustomed to call 'Men-haters.' A
like noble self-devotion was shown at Carthage when the pestilence
which had desolated Alexandria made its appearance in that city, and,
I quote the words of a contemporary, 'All fled in horror from the
contagion, abandoning their relations and friends as if they thought
that by avoiding the plague any one might also exclude death
altogether. Meanwhile the city was strewed with the bodies, or rather
carcasses of the dead, which seemed to call for pity from the
passers-by, who might themselves so soon share the same fate; but no
one cared for anything but miserable pelf; no one trembled at the
consideration of what might so soon befall him in his turn; no one did
for another what he would have wished others to do for him. The bishop
hereupon called together his flock, and setting before them the
example and teaching of their Lord, called on them to act up to it. He
said, that if they took care only of their own people, they did but
what the commonest feeling would dictate; the servant of Christ must
do more; he must love his enemies, and pray for his persecutors; for
God made his sun to rise and his rain to fall on all alike, and he who
would be the child of God must imitate his Father.' The people
responded to his appeal; they formed themselves into classes, and
those whose poverty prevented them from doing more gave their personal
attendance, while those who had property aided yet further. No one
quitted his post but with his life."--p. 162.
This self-devotion in times of distress, strangely contrasting with
habits and temper apparently unsocial, has too steadily reappeared in
every earnest church not to be accepted as a Christian characteristic.
During the fatal famine and epidemic which desolated Antioch in the
third century, the Pagan governor, when urged by the inhabitants to
make authoritative arrangements for relieving the sufferings of a
perishing populace, replied that "The gods hated the poor"; while the
Christians, prevailingly poor themselves, plunged into the centre of
the danger, and carried into the recesses of fever and despair the
quiet presence of help and hope. If disciples have thus freely
rendered to "those without" services which Pagans refused to one
another, it is not simply in stiff obedience to a precept of love to
their enemies, but from a heart-felt sentiment of honor for human
nature and consequent tenderness of human life. There was no man who,
though he might be a persecutor to-day, might not be a comrade
to-morrow; he had a soul susceptible of consecration; and day and
night the gates of the Church were ready to fly open to the touch of
penitence; and whether he throws off the mask of delusion or not, he
must be treated as a brother in disguise. Only by reference to this
conception of all men as possible subjects of sanctifying change, can
the fact be explained, that even where the creed has opened an
infinite gulf between believer and unbeliever, the active charities
have detained in lingering embrace the persons whom the theoretic
fancy has flung into the ultimate horrors. A religion that is superior
to the external distinctions of lineage and class, and draws its lines
only by the invisible coloring of souls, must ever be a religion open
to hope, and therefore apt to love. Even where the severest doctrine
of exclusion has prevailed, the fundamental sentiment of Christian
faith has saved the heart from the most withering of all
passions,--the blight of _scorn_. Human nature may appear beneath the
eye of an austere believer in an _awful_, but never in a
_contemptible_ light. The very crisis in which it is suspended can
belong to no mean existence. What it has lost is too great a glory,
what it has incurred is too deep a terror, to be conceivable except of
a being on a grand scale. _He_ is no worm for whom the eternal abysses
are built as a dungeon and the lightnings are brandished as a scourge.
Accordingly, the very alienations of intolerance itself have acquired
a higher and more respectful character than in ancient faiths. The
sort of feeling with which the Jew spurned "the Gentile dog" is
sanctioned by piety no more. The Oriental curl of the lip is scarcely
traceable on the features of Christendom; and is replaced by an
expression of tragic sorrow and earnestness, where lights of admiring
pity flash through the darkest clouds.
It seems, then, that the essential sentiment of all Christian faith--the
communion through conscience with God--carries with it, not only noble
personal aspirations, but also, towards others, affections of singular
generosity and depth; affections which demand for every man a position
in which he may work out the moral problem of life, which dignify every
lot where this is possible, and which soften even actual alienations
with possible reverence and hope. The sphere of action which these
feelings may shape for themselves, the particular enterprises they may
undertake, the external pursuits they may assume, will necessarily
depend on many foreign and accidental conditions. The work which it
would fall to the hands of the same faithful man to do, if he lived on
through the changes of the world, would greatly vary from age to age.
The work which contemporary men, of equal and similar fidelity, will set
themselves to accomplish, will vary with their several positions. The
same act, or even habit, which is innocent (though possibly not
innocuous) in one place, may assume quite an altered significance in
another. It would be absurd, for instance, to set down the double
marriages of patriarchal times in the same moral rank with modern cases
of bigamy. And the doctrine of Plato's Republic respecting marriage,
startling as a comment on the manners of his age, by no means expresses
the odious state of mind which would be implied in its substitution now
for the sanctities of private life. The devotion to studious and
peaceful acts which may usually be either blameless or laudable, may
become a guilt like treason in an hour when the interests of public
liberty claim every citizen for the council or the field. Indeed, the
conduct in such contrasted instances is in no proper sense _the same_;
it has only an external identity; it is a physical self-repetition,
with a moral contrariety; and unless, in speaking of a human _action_,
we mean to shut out the soul which makes it human, and to denote only
the muscular flourish and spasm of limb, the sameness is but a semblance
with a reality of difference. The moral values of actions, taken in this
narrowest sense, are inevitably variable; and any code that should
present a list of them as obligatory in perpetuity, without regard to
the changes of their meaning to the mind, would mistake the very nature
of human duty. Not that we deny the existence of permanent grounds for
the adoption of some habits and the avoidance of others. There are
reasons, unchangeable as the corporeal frame of man, why opium should
not be taken as an article of food, and why cousins should not
intermarry. But the grounds of prohibition in these cases are
_rational_, not _moral_; they are found in the outward effects, not in
the inward sources, of conduct; and only when its outward effects are
_known_ to the agent, so as to enter among its inward sources and modify
its meaning, does he pass from _unwise_ to _immoral_. External action,
in short, stands as an _indifferent_ phenomenon, between the mind that
issues it and the world into which it goes. The thought and affection
whence it springs in the former give its _moral_, the results to which
it tends in the latter its _rational_ value. Whoever makes a correct
estimate of the several affections and impulses which stir the will, and
throughout their scale reveres the better and disapproves the worse,
possesses _moral_ truth. Whoever perceives and computes the real
consequences of voluntary conduct, possesses _rational_ discernment in
human affairs. The former--an interpretation of the conscience and its
sacred contents--is the permanent essence of ethical and root of
religious wisdom. The latter--an apprehension of physical laws and
historical tendencies--is conditioned by the progress of science and the
facilities for social vaticination. Errors in _this_ are inevitable to
the limitations of human intellect. Perfection in _that_ is possible
only to the highest divine insight in the soul. The fallible judgment
respecting outward relations affects only the accidents of morals,
though the essence of scientific truth. Where the inner apprehension is
deep and true, the outward judgment contains a principle of
self-correction; the miscalculation of one age is checked by that of a
succeeding; opposite errors cancel each other; and the spirit of a pure
faith, like a just feeling of beauty and greatness in art, works itself
clear of the false data of usage amid which its inspiration arose, and
transmigrates into ever-improving forms. If, however, the reverence due
to the inspiration should become a traditional affair, losing its living
eye and spiritual tact, it will extend itself as a moping idolatry to
the imperfect media and rude materials through which the new glory first
gleamed; an incapable era of _renaissance_ will appear; the very works
which were given as the spring of ever-fresh creation will be used to
stifle it; in servile imitation of an original period, its whole
character will be lost, and the moment of exactest reproduction will be
that of intensest contrast.
This is precisely the way in which the spiritual life of the primitive
Christians has been dealt with. The thought and meaning that lay at its
heart are little apprehended; its applied morals, in which these are
mixed up with the errors incident to their point of view, are distorted
into a rigid code of obligation, in which the original idea is often
entirely reversed. If it be really true that the Apostolic age was
impressed with the belief of a speedy end of the world, such an outlook
must undeniably have affected the disciples' whole estimate of the value
of human pursuits. The plan of life commendable in a passage-ship may be
questionable in a settled home; and the proceedings of an army on the
eve of battle are not like the habits of the same people tilling their
fields and sitting at their hearths. To apply to a permanently
constituted planet the rules promulgated to preserve discipline amid a
general breaking-up, is surely an eccentric kind of legislation. Yet by
just such a process have modern churches derived a number of ethical
extravagances offensive to the eye of chastened conscience, and
condemned by their impracticability to the insincere existence of
perpetual talk. The manner in which English divines conduct themselves
towards this error of the first century appears to us not simple and
ingenuous. Some still affect to deny it, and to treat its reiterated
assertion as a mere perverseness and impudence of heresy; yet they leave
the statement without serious refutation, though well aware that the
weight of critical authority is altogether in its favor, and though
avowing their own theory of revelation absolutely to require that it be
false. Others incidentally and grudgingly admit it, and then pass on as
if nothing had happened; immediately relapsing into the same
authoritative appeal to Scripture, the same direct and mechanical use of
its precepts, the same assumption of it as an instrument yielding on
interpretation nothing but truth, which had been habitual with them
before their eyes were opened. Now, if anything be certain on such a
matter, it is that to suppose one's self in the world's last year,--the
admission paid to the panorama of judgment and the spectacle only
waiting to begin,--is no small and sleepy idea, which might
ineffectually turn up now and then, and sink back below the surface
without further trace. A man who could live in presence of such a
vision, and not carry its crimsoned light upon every object that fixed
his eye, could be no apostle of truth or preacher of earnestness; nor do
we know that anything more contemptuous could be said of him than that,
no doubt, he held such an expectation, but it was of no consequence. To
convert the author of the Pauline Epistles into a dilettante believer of
the pattern of the nineteenth century, and say of his most tremendous
gleams of thought that they were but transitory fireworks which meant
nothing, is no less an offence against his character than a
misunderstanding of his writings; and we conceive that, in affirming the
deep penetration of his mistaken world-view into the substance of his
monitory teaching, we shall be vindicating the fundamental veracity and
noble clearness of his soul.
To exhibit the Christology of the Apostles with the fulness necessary
for tracing pseudo-Christian morality to its origin, would require a
volume. We can only advert to one or two points, indicating the
direction which such an inquiry would take. It is admitted on all
hands, that a second advent of Christ is announced in almost every book
of the New Testament; that, if we except the Gospel of John, it is
spoken of invariably as a real, personal return, an objective and scenic
event, to be seen, heard, and felt; and cannot be explained away into a
spiritual access to the world, or a subjective drama in the soul of
disciples. It is further admitted, that with this advent are integrally
connected many incidents which, however difficult to group into a
complete picture, constitute, under every variety of possible
arrangement, a final consummation of human affairs. Indeed, the article
in the Creed which declares that Christ "shall come to judge the quick
and the dead, and at his coming all men shall rise again with their
bodies and shall give account for their own works," shows how the Church
understands the doctrine, and conjoins the end of the world with the
advent. The _nature_ of the event being so far undisputed, the question
which separates the mass of scientific interpreters from the popular
expounder, refers only to its _date_. The Apostle Paul, it is urged by
the critics, writes to his Thessalonian converts, in answer to a
distressing doubt which could have no existence but in minds on the
watch for the return of Christ; and his answer, far from checking this
outlook, raised it to such intensity that, to soothe their excitement,
he wrote to them again to remove the event from the immediate foreground
of their imagination; yet even then detained it quite within the limits
of their natural lives, and, simply interposing one or two signals of
its approach that had not yet appeared, counselled them not to lose
their composure, but maintain a "patient waiting for Christ." The
original doubt which had disturbed them seems to have been one
instructively characteristic of the early theocratic faith. Some member
of the community had died; his friends, in addition to their natural
sorrow, were apparently taken by surprise, that, after enrolment among
the citizens of the approaching kingdom, he was taken from their side,
and would not be with them when they hailed the arrival of Christ. What
would become of him? They thought he would have to remain in his sleep
till Messiah should exercise his function of raising the dead, which was
not to be at first; and so, during the great crisis, and for an
uncertain continuance beyond, he would linger behind the privilege which
they enjoyed. This seems, at first sight, a strange subject of distress.
That the second advent should take place in the presence of the living
only, and should leave the dead without part or lot in the matter, is so
completely at variance with the picture which has become fixed in the
common Christian imagination, that scruples may readily be felt about
attributing so mutilated a conception to the Thessalonian church. The
commonly received picture, however, is made up of elements incongruously
brought together from several Scripture writers, to whom the expected
event presented itself under different aspects; and nowhere can they be
found combined into such a whole as the ecclesiastical faith represents.
To understand and account for the Thessalonian state of mind, we have
only to read over the 24th and 25th chapters of St. Matthew, and to
surrender ourselves to the images there presented, without adding
anything of our own. These chapters contain the fullest description of
the advent, the last judgment, and the end of the world, that can be
found in Scripture; yet _the dead are not brought upon the scene at all,
nor is any resurrection found among its elements_. The whole idea is
evidently of a return of the Son of Man, within the limits of a
generation, to take account, in his theocratic capacity, of the very
persons who had known him in his Galilean humiliation and disguise,--of
those who, having joined him in his days of trial, had been intrusted by
him with the administration in the interval of his heavenly
absence,--and of those who, after rejecting him personally, had hardened
themselves no less against the preaching and overtures of his subsequent
ambassadors. The nations gathered before him are furnished from the
surviving population of the earth; and the ground of their admittance or
rejection is the reception they have given to Messiah in the persons of
his missionaries and representatives. In supposing the dead to have lost
their chance of participating in this scene, the Thessalonians did but
paint it to themselves as Christ, according to the first Gospel, had
described it to his hearers. Their misgiving plainly assumes that the
advent was sure for the living and was lost for the dead. The Apostle
answers by denying the distinction, and putting both classes into the
same condition ere the great hour strikes: but _what_ condition? Does he
say that the living will die first? No; but that the dead will live
first: so that the departed companion will come back at the right moment
for mingling with the troop of friends that shall go "to meet the Lord
in the air." The same order of events is given in the sublime, but
little understood, chapter on the resurrection in the First Epistle to
the Corinthians, where the Apostle places _himself_, at the advent, not
among "the dead" that "shall be raised incorruptible," but among the
survivors that "shall be changed" into immortals without ever quitting
life. It is a topic of praise to the disciples at Corinth that they are
"waiting for the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall also confirm
you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus
Christ." He assures his Philippian friends that "the Lord is at hand,"
and prays that they may "be sincere and without offence till the day of
Christ." Having come out safe from his examination and hearing at Rome,
he avows his persuasion that he will be similarly delivered "from every
evil work," and preserved unto Christ's heavenly kingdom. Though amid
his toils and weariness he earnestly desired to be endowed with his
immortal frame,--to be invested, as he expresses it, with his house from
above; yet he was unwilling to put off the corruptible, till he could
put on the incorruptible; he would have his mortality "swallowed up of
life"; he did not wish the great hour to find him naked, but clothed,
not, that is, a disembodied spirit, but a living man. He stands at the
era on which "the end of the world has come"; and begs his
correspondents to let certain existing disputes lie over, and to "judge
nothing before the time until the Lord come." Not less explicit evidence
is afforded in the writings of other Apostles. James says, "The coming
of the Lord draweth nigh; ... behold, the Judge standeth before the
door." Peter, "The end of all things is at hand." John, "Children, it is
the last time; and as ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now
are there many Antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time."
If the author of Christianity did not himself entertain the same
expectation of an early return to assume his Messianic prerogatives, he
has been greatly misrepresented by his biographers. For though one of
them represents him as disclaiming a knowledge of the specific "_day_
and _hour_" appointed for his "coming in the clouds with great power and
glory," the disclaimer follows immediately on his announcement, that at
all events it will take place within the existing generation. Does any
reader doubt whether this "coming in the clouds" really describes the
judgment? or whether "this generation" denotes the natural term of human
life? Both questions are answered at once in Matthew's report of a
single sentence, which simultaneously defines the event and its date:
"For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his
angels; and _then he shall reward every man according to his works_.
Verily I say unto you, there be _some standing here which shall not
taste of death_, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." It
is certainly possible enough that the discourses in which these
expressions occur may be incorrectly reported, and have acquired from
the writer's state of mind a definiteness not belonging to the original
production. But, at any rate, they reveal the historian's conception of
what was in Jesus's thought; and the false coloring of expectation which
they threw over his prophecies could not fail to extend in their reports
to his preceptive discourses, and thus to have almost the same influence
on the recorded Christian ethics, as if the error were his as well as
theirs.
The evidence on this point is so positive and overwhelming, that
critics such as Olshausen, whose testimony is undoubtedly reluctant,
no longer think of resisting it. Nothing, indeed, can be opposed to it
but a kind of interpretation which is the opprobrium of English
theology; and whose problem is, not simply to gather an author's
thought from his words, but from among all _true_ thoughts to find
the one that will sit the least uneasily under his words. Thus "the
end of all things" is explained away into the founding of the
Christian Church; the "coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of
heaven," into the Jewish war under Titus; the last judgment, which
"rewards every man according to his works," into the escape of the
Christians and the slaughter of the Jewish zealots at the destruction
of Jerusalem. No doubt, many good and well-instructed men have
persuaded themselves that by such exegetical sleight of hand they
could save Apostolic and other infallibility. We can only say, that
when piety supplies the motive, and learning the means, for
bewildering veracity of apprehension, two rich and noble endowments
are spent in corrupting a nobler, which is the life of them both.