little difference how long the world is to last. But to the course of
_action_ which should engage the hand, it is a matter of primary
moment. All human occupations rest on the assumption of permanence in
the constitution of things; nor is it less true of a planet than of a
farm, that mere tenants at will, unsecured by lease and even served
already with notice to quit, will undertake no improvements, and will
suffer the culture to decline to the lowest point. What profession
could remain respectable if society had no future? What interest would
attach to the administration of law, on behalf of property which was
not worth six months' purchase, and life which, stripped of
survivorship, had lost all sacredness to the affections? Who would sit
down to study the Pharmacopœia on board a sinking ship? What zeal
could be felt by the statesman or general in repelling from his
country an injury that could never be repeated, or removing a
grievance on the point of supernatural death? The fields would scarce
be tilled which the angels with flaming sword might come to reap; or
the vineyards be dressed in sight of him "who treadeth the wine-press
alone." All the crafts of industry, all the adventures of commerce,
are held together by a given element of _time_; and, when deprived of
this, fall away into inanity. No one would build a house on ice
melting with hidden fires; or freight ships over an ocean which
earthquakes were to drain away; or fabricate silks and patent-leather
for appearance at the last tribunal. And the loosened hold of these
pursuits upon human zeal, so far from implying their exchange for
anything higher and more spiritual, involves the direct reverse. They
cannot be abandoned; the stern punctuality of hunger, the
peremptoriness of instinctive or habitual want, compel their
continuance; and Paul himself made sail-cloth for a world on its last
voyage. But they are kept up only because there is no help for it;
they sink into mere bread-trades; and are thrown back many stages from
the tranquil human towards the grim cannibal level. All work in this
world, no doubt, rests at bottom on the elementary animal requirements
of our nature; but it is then most worthily performed, not when these
requirements are most obtrusive, but when they are most withdrawn. It
is the specific moral benefit which social organization confers upon
man, that it enables him to retreat from the constant presence of
sheer necessity, and stand at a sufficient distance from it to allow
other and higher feelings to connect themselves with his industry. It
is a lower thing to consult for the natural wants of primitive
appetite, than for the artificial love of order, neatness, security,
and beauty; and a craftsman works in a better spirit when earning some
_unnecessary_ gift for his wife or child, than when toiling for the
bitter loaf that staves off starvation. An art prosecuted without
pride in its ingenuity, without intellectual enlistment in its methods
of skill, is degraded from an instrument of discipline into a prowling
for food,--from a mode of life into a makeshift against death. To take
away the future, therefore, from secular pursuits, is simply to draw
off from them whatever redeems them from meanness; to plant them in
greedy isolation, as mere personal necessities; and cut them off from
the great human system which lends to them a color of nobleness and
dignity. Among the early Christians this tendency was greatly checked
by the fresh aims and employments which their religion created; and in
devotion to which the more enthusiastic spirits found ample scope for
their affections. The Church, subsisting like an intrenched camp in a
hostile land, had to make sallies in all directions for rescue of the
wandering, and for captives to the faith. An aggressive activity of
compassion and conviction found tasks for the energies disengaged from
secular pursuits; and the new relations into which their religious
profession threw them towards the synagogue, the magistrate, the Pagan
worshipper, supplied them with continual problems of conscience,
severe, but wholesome to the mind. So peculiar, indeed, was their
position, that, even if they had reckoned on a continuance of human
affairs, they could hardly, perhaps, have mingled much with a world
that drew them with such slender sympathies. Separated in ideas and
affections, they must in any case have created a new and detached
centre of social life. Still it is undeniable that their isolation was
favored and exaggerated by their faith in an approaching end of all
things; and that they withdrew from human interests, not simply
because honorable contact with them was impossible, but because they
were taught entire indifference to them as elements of a perishing
system. Not only is no recognition given to the pursuit of art and
letters, and the citizen's duty presented only on the passive side;
but even the relations of domestic life are discouraged, and the slave
is dissuaded from care about his liberty, on the express ground that
it is not worth while, on the brink of a great catastrophe, to assume
any new position, or commit the heart by new ties. The time is too
short, the crisis too near, for the career of a free life, or the
building of a human home. It is better for every one to continue as he
is; and instead of waiting to have the world perish from him, to
regard himself as already dead to the world. To stand impassive and
alone, neutral to joy or sorrow, with soul intent on the future, and
disengaged from impediments of the past, earnest to keep bright on its
watch-tower the beacon of faith, but resolute to descend no more into
the plain below, appeared to the Apostle Paul the highest wisdom. And
how could it be otherwise? Seen from his point of view, all temporal
claims sank into negation. The constitutions, the arts, the culture,
of civilized nations were about to be superseded; and the Christians
who had already retired from them needed no new ones to take their
place, except such provisional arrangements as might serve during the
world's brief respite. Equally natural and suitable to their conceived
position were the non-resistance principles of the early disciples.
What right could be worth contending for on the dawn of a great day of
redress, when every wrong would be brought to its account? Who would
carry a cause before Dikast or Proconsul to-day, when Eternal Justice
was pledged to hear it to-morrow? Who refuse to resign to human
coercion what a retributive Omnipotence would soon restore? When the
great assizes of the universe are about to be opened, it were a poor
thing for the suitors to begin fighting in the vestibule. In all these
respects the practical code of the Apostolic age was inevitably
influenced by the mistaken world-view prevalent in the Church. For the
plaintiff, the hour was fixed when his suit would be called; for the
slave, the emancipation-day was declared; and from him that bound
himself in heart to the past, the past was about to be snatched away.
The rules of action dictated by these notions are mere accidents of
the first age,--correct deductions from a misconceived system of
external relations. They are wholly dependent on this misconception,
and have no necessary connection with the interior spirit, the
characteristic sentiments and affections which distinguish
Christianity as a religion. If the Apostles had lived on till their
mistake had worn itself out, and they had discovered the permanence of
the world,--had they postponed all writing of Scripture till this
lesson of experience had been learned,--we apprehend that their scheme
of applied morals would have been very different; a more genial
recognition would have been given to natural human relations; the
social facts of property and government, the private concerns of
education and self-culture, the personal responsibilities of genius
and intellect, would have been less slightingly dismissed, and reduced
to clear moral order; and the sentences would have been greatly
modified which now support the delusions of the improvident, the
ascetic, the exclusive, and the non-resisting. Unhappily, Apostles do
not live for ever, so that we are denied that chance; and _successors_
of Apostles, though seldom scarce, are not a helpful race, being
chiefly marks of an absent inspiration. The task, therefore, of
applying the essential Christian sentiments to a permanent
world,--though avowedly undertaken by the Roman Catholic
Church,--remains unperformed; and instead of it we have, in the common
Protestantism, a violent misapplication to human nature and all time
of the accidents and errors of the first age, resulting, we fear, in a
caricature injurious alike to that first age itself, and to all true
apprehension of the nature and proportions of human duty.
Expressions abound in the literature of modern Christendom implying an
antithesis between temporal and spiritual things, between morality and
religion, between the world and God. No one can fail to observe that
this antithesis, whether founded in reality or not, has become a social
fact. There are two standards of judgment extant for the estimate of
character and life; one set up in the pulpit, the other recognized in
the forum and the street. The former gives the order in which we
pretend, and perhaps ineffectually try, to admire men and things; the
latter, that in which we do admire them. Under the influence of the one,
the merchant or the country gentleman is professedly in love with the
innocent improvidence of the ravens and the lilies; relapsing into the
other, he sells all his cotton in expectation of a fall, or drains his
farms for a rise of rent. On the Sunday, he applauds it as a saintly
thing to present the patient cheek to the smiter; on the Monday, he
listens with rapture to Kossuth's curse upon the house of Hapsburg, and
the Magyar vow of resistance to the death. He assents when the Apostle
John is held up to his veneration as the beloved disciple, but, if the
truth were known, the Duke of Wellington is rather more to his mind.
Supposing it all true that is said about the vanity of earthly pleasures
and ostentations, he nevertheless lets his daughters send out next day
invitations to a grand ball, and makes his house busy with dress-makers
and cooks. He is accustomed to confess that in him there is no good
thing, and that all his thoughts and works are only evil continually;
yet he is pleased with himself that he has provided for the family of
his gardener who was killed on the railway last week. In these and a
thousand other forms may be noticed the competition between two
coexisting and unreconciled standards, the relations between which are
altogether confused and uneasy. Whoever is interested in following up
the genealogy of ideas, and would search for the origin of this mixed
and mischievous state of mind, must look first to the influence of
Luther, and thence to the Pauline doctrine, which he improperly
generalized and exaggerated. We will endeavor to trace the development
of the sentiment in the opposite direction, from the ancient germ to the
modern fruit.
Paul the Apostle proclaimed _Faith_ to be the condition of
regeneration and acceptance. To appreciate this message of his, we
must remember two things;--namely, (1.) what it was from which men
were to be rescued on these terms; (2.) what other conditions had been
elsewhere insisted on instead of this, and were put aside by Paul in
favor of this. Now enough has been said to show that what he feared
for the world which he labored to convert was, primarily, exclusion
from the theocratic empire which Messiah would return to erect; nor is
it clear what ulterior consequences, if any, he conceived this
exclusion to carry with it. This banishment was the negative of that
"salvation" to which the disciples were called; and which consisted in
their registration as qualified citizens of the kingdom for which the
earth was about to be claimed. The picture before his mind was so far
altogether Jewish; not at all the modern idea of heaven and
hell,--spiritual regions to which individuals, one by one, pass after
death for moral retribution; but a terrestrial scene, the winding up
of history, affecting men in masses, and completing the purpose for
which God had created this world. While, however, the thought of the
Apostle's mind was national, the compass of his heart was human; and
as the hour drew nigh, he felt that the future could not be closed
upon the great Gentile world; that his own people were not so sublime
a race as to have the issues of Providence all to themselves; that he
must get rid of their conceited pedigrees, and let the Divine plan,
which for a while had narrowed its original universality within the
current of Hebrew history, flow out at its end into the full breadth
of its first scope. But if so, a new qualification must be found; one
open alike to Hebrew and to alien, yet nursing the pride of neither.
These requisites are fulfilled in simple Faith, which, as a catholic
possibility of every human heart, Paul substitutes for prescriptive
rights and untenable merits. It was the only condition which there was
time to realize. To insist instead on a mere moral fitness, on a
character of mind suitable to meet the eye of infinite purity, would
be a mockery in a state of society at once decrepit and corrupt. The
hour pressed: it was not the case of a young and fresh generation,
that might be brought back, by heedful training, to the sanctities of
nature and conscience; but an old and callous world, that could do
little for itself, had to be got ready in hot haste. A kindled
enthusiasm, a new allegiance, a resurrection of sleeping reverences,
is the only hope. Once fix the gaze of faith, the simplicity of trust,
on the Divine Human Being, who, having been clad in the sorrows of
this earth, waits to bring in its everlasting peace; and this
affection alone, comprehending in it every lesser purity, will soften
even arid natures, and enrich them with forgotten fertility and grace.
Preach your moral gymnastics to a school of young heroes, whose soul
is noble and whose limbs are free; but at the baths of Baiæ, amid
paralytics that drag the foot, and cripples with worn-out bodies and
halting wills, if you cannot touch the spring of faith, you may spare
your pedantic rules of exercise. Thus the Apostle's demand of faith
was a generous stimulant of hope and recovery to an invalided world,
whose natural forces were broken, and which had but little time for
restoration. It was a provision for pouring a mountain-breath of
healing reverence upon the sickly souls and languid levels of this
world. It was an attempt to meet a quick emergency, and, by an
intense action, condense the powers of preparation. It was therefore
an expression, not of the narrowness, but of the universality of the
Gospel. It shows the great heart of the religion bursting bounds, and
the strong hand of its noblest servant tugging at the gates to get
them open, grinding off the rust of tradition and crushing the
scrupulous gravel of obstruction.
The doctrine, however, assumes quite a different significance when
snatched by Luther out of its historical connection, and held valid as
a sufficient theory of human nature, and its only possibility of
religion. The palsy of will, the incapacity of self-cure, the hopeless
moral prostration into which long corruption had brought the world, as
it lay beneath the eye of Paul, Luther assumes as the normal condition
of the soul, and treats as a congenital incompetency of faculty,
instead of a contracted depravity of state. Not that he disowns the
human will as an executive power, or denies it a sphere of operation.
It can go forth variously into action,--can do what, in the view of
mankind, is better or worse,--can commit a murder or can rescue from
it; but in these outward doings, however differently they affect men,
there is no real good or evil; in the supreme view they are neutral
automatic exhibitions, simply physical as a flash of lightning or a
fall of rain; their real character all lies in the inner spiritual
springs from which they issue in the soul: on these alone is the
infinite gaze fixed; and these are turbid all through, and all alike,
with the taint and poison of a ruined nature. As all natural actions
derive an equal guilt from the impurity of their source, so, when the
source is purified, is the guilt equally removed from all; whilst
nothing which the unconverted may do can please God, nothing that is
performed in faith can come amiss to him. Be it what men call crime or
what they praise as virtue, it makes no difference if only it be done
in faith. Furnished with this supernatural charm, the believer may
pass through any mire and come out clean.
"A Christian cannot, if he will, lose his salvation by any multitude
or magnitude of sins, unless he ceases to believe. For no sins can
damn him, but unbelief alone. Everything else, provided his faith
returns or stands fast in the Divine promise given in baptism, is
absorbed in a moment by that faith."[55]
Here is a conception of faith altogether distinct from Paul's. It is
here no act of reverential enthusiasm and affection, no kindred movement
of the soul towards an object beautiful and holy, but a mere willingness
to trust a verbal assurance of atonement,--a willingness, moreover,
itself foreign to the mind, and superinduced as an unnatural state by
special gift. Nor is its efficacy to be sought in its transforming power
on man, but in its persuasiveness with God. It does not ennoble anything
that is the worshipper's own, but simply hangs on to it externally the
compensating sanctity of another; it is, indeed, described by Luther as
the mere vessel put into the hands of the believer, and charged with the
treasures of Christ's obedience,--treasures so acceptable that they
charm away the foulness, and prevent the rejection, of anything that
accompanies them. Thus the effect of faith on the disciple is not to
inspire him with a God-like mind, but to prevent his corruptions being
any damage to him. By this strange theory, both sin and sanctity are
made entirely _impersonal_ to man; sin, by being a transmitted
inability; sanctity, by being a foreign donation; and his individual
character sits in the midst, at a point of spiritual indifference,
neither chargeable with the dark hue native to its complexion, nor
etherealized by the veil of borrowed light which it wears as a robe. No
room is found, either in the child of Adam, or in the redeemed of
Christ, for any responsibility, any personal guilt or goodness
whatsoever. The misery and deformity in which the Gospel finds him is
un-moral,--the mere scrofula of inheritance; the redemption into which
it lifts him is un-moral,--the mere usufruct of an alien purity: and
thus the whole business of religion begins and ends without
approaching, and without improving, any law of conscience at all;
morality remains absolutely cut off from its contact, unaffected by it
except in being disowned and degraded, and losing the prestige of a
Divine authority. This consequence of his doctrine is not in the least
disguised by Luther, whose impetuous audacity never tires of forging
phrases of opposite stamp, by which he may put the brand of insult upon
Morals, and burn characters of glory into the brow of Religion. The
latter, he again and again insists, is to be set in the heavenly realm;
the former, on the other hand, detained upon the ground; the two being
kept as absolutely apart as the sky from the earth, regarded as not less
incapable of a common function than light and darkness, day and night.
Do we speak of faith and our relations to God? then we have nothing to
do with morals, and must leave them behind lying on the earth. Do we
speak of conduct and our relations with men? then we stop upon the
ground, and get no nearer to heaven and its lights. The protests of our
better nature against our own shortcomings, the sadness of repentance,
and the alarms of guilt, so far from being confirmed by true religion,
are shown to be mere delusion and idle self-torture; and the conscience
that can feel such compunctions is a stupid ass struggling in the dust
and flats of this world beneath a servile burden it need never bear. To
trouble the heart with any moral anxieties or aspirations is the most
fatal act of unbelief,--a downright plunge from heaven over the
precipice of hell. The moral law may rule the body and its members, but
has no right to any allegiance from the soul.[56] In any personal and
historical estimate of Luther there would be much to say in palliation
of these monstrous positions; it would be easy to show their connection
with some of the noblest characteristics of his genius, and their
antagonism to some of the worst features of his times. But regarded in
their influence on Christendom, when detached from their living origin,
and made the ground of a theory for the governance of life, they can
only be lamented as an explosion of mischievous extravagance. For in
what light do they present Morality to us, after stripping it of all
sacredness? What ground is left on which its obligation may repose, and
what end is given for its aim? It exists, as Luther himself declares,
only as a _provision for social order and external peace_. It is not
concerned with the perfection of the individual, but with the
organization of the world; and is nothing but the system of rules and
customs requisite for the safe coexistence of many persons on the same
field. It is thus reduced from an inspiration of conscience to an affair
of police; the private sentiment of duty, operating in the hidden recess
of life, keeping vigils over the temper of the mind and habits of the
home, is a mere substitute for public opinion, and no representative of
the eye of God. In this way, moral usages are first voted into existence
as matters of convenience, and imposed by the general voice, yielding as
their product in the individual an artificial sense of obligation; and
it is a delusion to invert this order, and say that the natural sense of
obligation, inherent in each individual, creates by sympathy and
concurrence the moral usages of mankind. This extreme secularization of
morals places Luther in curious company with Hobbes; and the followers
of both have not been altogether unfaithful to the original affinity of
their ethical ideas. Both schools have withheld from their conception of
morality any touch and color of religion; both have been jealous of its
mingling itself much with sentiment and feeling; both have applied to it
purely objective criteria, and regarded it as a statutory affair,
susceptible of codification, and then needing only a logical
interpreter. This singular alliance between sects regarding each other
with the greatest antipathy, exhibits the irresistible tendency of a
wholly _super_-natural religion to produce an _infra_-natural morality.
The result of this sharp separation of the ethical from the spiritual
province of life is, that both are deprived of elements indispensable
to their proper culture. Our devout people are not remarkable for
either clear notions or nice feelings on moral questions; while the
conscientious class are apt to be dry and cold precisians, truthful,
trustworthy, and humane, but so little genial, so devoid of ideality
and depth, that poet or prophet is struck dumb before their face. Till
the two classes had discovered their mutual alienation and collected
themselves round distinct standards,--evangelical and worldly,--the
evil was inconspicuous. For some time after the Reformation, both
coexisted, without articulate repulsion, in every church, and each
silently qualified the other extreme. Besides, in spite of Lutheran or
other dogma, deep personal faith, grateful trust in such a one as
Christ, could not be awakened in a people into whom God, whatever they
might say of themselves, had actually put a conscience, without
carrying the moralities with it. It might take the liberty of calling
them "stupid ass," but would nevertheless object to have the ass
abused. In truth, no sooner was the law of Duty driven from
Christianity, than the claim of Honor was invoked to take its place;
and the believer was exhorted not to take unworthy advantage of his
redemption from legal liability, but to render in thank-offering the
service exacted by penalty no more; worthless as it was, it was all he
had to give. Such appeal touches a spring powerful in noble hearts,
and is, in fact, only the awakening of _a higher order_ of moral
feelings than before,--a fetching back, under the disguise of
transfiguration, of that very sense of duty which had been professedly
expelled. In the first enthusiasm of faith, while men's souls, having
just flung off the sacerdotal incubus of centuries, were burning to
breathe freely, and felt the healthy throb of a new joy, this appeal
would meet a full response. The doctrine of faith was but the
appointed way of bursting through the miserable scrupulosities, the
life of petty debts and casuistic book-keeping, by which a priesthood
had maintained a balance against the world,--of seizing a Divine
indemnity and recovering the wholesome existence of devout instinct.
If the inspiration of the sixteenth century could be permanently
maintained, if all men were equally susceptible of being snatched up
by a whirlwind of heavenward affection, if the surprise at finding
that the soul had wings of its own could last for ever, the principle
of gratitude and pious honor might answer every end, and human duty be
all the better done by taking no security for it; for you may hurl as
a missile, in hot blood, a weight which otherwise you will scarce drag
upon the ground. But the fire of an age of Reformation cannot be
permanent; nor is gratitude an affection on whose tension life can be
securely built;--you cannot educate people by the force of perpetual
surprise. There is a large natural order of minds, little susceptible
of a self-abandoning fervor, for whom you vainly bring the chariot of
fire and horses of fire by which prophets fly to heaven, and who are
content with the humble mantle of the humanities thrown aside by more
daring spirits in their ascent. Quiet, reflective, self-balanced
persons are not to be taken by storm, and brought to betray the solid
citadel of this world, and say ugly things of the moralities with
which they have lived in friendly neighborhood. They are capable of
being led by reverence for what is _better_, but not of being kindled
by the rays of what is _intenser_. If they are ever to be lifted into
a life _beyond_ conscience, where reluctance and resistance are felt
no more, and the instincts of affection may flow of their own pure
will, it must be by beginning at the other end,--by the _religious
discipline of conscience_, by pious consecration of this earth and its
instant work, by faithful and frugal care of the smaller elements of
duty, as of the sacred crumbs of eucharistic bread, not without a Real
Presence in them. This class, whose religion, by a decree of their
nature, can only exist under ethical conditions, are wholly unprovided
for in the Protestant system. In the Lutheran view they belong to the
school of worldly unbelief; and though their number, as must be the
case in quiet times, has been increasing for a century and a half, and
constitutes the vast majority of educated people in this country, they
are without any recognized religion; either veraciously disbelieving
and waiting for something nobly credible, or uneasily subsisting,
suspected by clergymen, in the midst of churches whose theory of life
has ceased to be a reality to them. With a faith traditionally shy of
morals, and morals not yet elevated into faith, we have two separate
codes of life standing in presence of each other,--one religious, the
other secular,--and neither of them with any true foundation in human
nature as a whole; the secular, an accidental congeries of mixed
customs and inherited opinions; the religious, the product of an
arbitrary spiritualism, lax and ascetic by turns.
It is the peculiarity of modern Christianity that these two codes
coexist within the same social body, and even rule over different parts
of each individual. The Pauline antithesis between the world and the
Church was not less sharp than ours; but it was a distinction of persons
and classes, and nobody could occupy both the opposite ends of it. Once
within a society of disciples, he was out of the world, and belonged to
"the assembly of the saints"; and the whole realm of heathendom beyond
constituted the contrasted term. He did not stand and move with one leg
on holy ground and the other on the common earth; whatever were the
principles of the community he had joined, they served him all through,
and did no violence to the unity of his nature. Praying or dining,
weeping or laughing, in the workshop or the prison, he was the same man
in the same sphere. As the circle of the Church enlarged, we should
therefore expect the world to be driven to a distance, till it was
absent from whole countries and continents. But a new "world" has been
discovered, not only within the Church, but within the person of every
disciple; his body and limbs, his business and pleasures, being under
the law of a morality quite secular; his soul and its eternal affairs
sitting apart in a love quite spiritual. Who shall draw the line between
the provinces, and know practically, hour by hour, where he stands?
Living confusedly in both, a man is apt to acquire a sort of double
consciousness, and fluctuate distractedly between Cæsar and God. He
believes, perhaps, that the kingdoms of nature and of grace are destined
always to remain side by side, neither absorbing the other till the day
of doom. In that case, he will let other men create all the secular
usages, the moralities of trade, the maxims of politics; standing aloof
from them as not belonging to _his_ realm, and falling in with them
freely in his own case. They may be of questionable veracity and
justice; but they belong to the Devil's world, and are as good rules as
can be expected from legislators sitting in the synagogue of Satan. Why
should he decline to profit by them, now that they are there? When Eve
has plucked the apple, it is too late for Adam not to taste the fruit.
The pious broker comes on 'Change as into a foreign world, on which he
is pushed by humiliating necessities, and in which he feels an interest
derived from them alone: he has his citizenship elsewhere; he disdains
naturalization; he is but a temporary settler; he wants no vote about
the laws; but, taking them as they are, cuts his crop and retires. The
coolness with which people who live above the world sometimes avail
themselves of its lowest verge of usage is truly amazing. An affluent
gentleman of high religious profession, subscriber to Gospel schools,
believer in prevenient grace, and otherwise the pride of the Evangelical
heart, found himself not insensible to the approaches of the Hudson
mania, speculated far beyond the resources of his fortune, declined to
take up his bad bargains, and thus, at the expense of utter ruin to his
agent, escaped with comparatively easy loss to himself. The agent, being
but an honorable sinner of the worldly class, was struck down by the
blow into great depression. His employer was enabled to take a more
cheerful view, and, on meeting his poor victim, rallied him on his
dejected looks and hopeless thoughts, so different from his own resigned
and comfortable state of mind:--"But ah! I forgot," he added with a
sigh, "you are not blessed with my religious consolations!" Where no
such positively odious results as these are produced, there is still
often observable the negative selfishness of indifference to political
welfare and political morals,--an affected withdrawal from temporal
interests in the neighborhood or the State, and an insensibility to
public injustice strangely disproportioned to the zeal displayed against
innocent amusements and the nervousness on behalf of invisible
subtilties of creed.
The false opposition, however, between the world and the Church is
not always thus passive and quiescent. It is not always recognized by
those who hold it, as being a permanent fact to be merely sighed over
and let alone. Many men are too earnest and truthful to settle down
and pitch their tent upon a ground rocking with contradiction; to live
two lives wholly unreconciled, one in the shame of nature, the other
in the confidence of grace; or to belong to two societies,--one
political, the other spiritual,--conducted on principles at incurable
variance with each other. That a rule of action should be secularly
good and religiously hateful,--that a sentiment should be fitly
applauded in Parliament and groaned over in the conventicle,--is to
them an intolerable unreality, like the celebrated verdict of the
University of Paris, that a doctrine might be true in philosophy and
false in theology. In their hands, accordingly, the antithesis between
the human and the divine is not a quiescent, but a conflicting
dualism, in which their religious ideas become aggressive, and assume
a commission to drive back and humble the world. They claim the earth
for God, and think the surrender incomplete while anything natural
remains;--while any instinct is uncrushed, any laughter unstifled, any
genius, however pure, a law unto itself. The crusade against temporal
interests and pursuits, consequent upon this state of mind, changes
its form with the culture and habits of the age. In the early years of
the Reformation, when the whole Bible was spread open beneath the
thirsting eye of an undistinguishing enthusiasm, the effect threatened
at one time to be more terrible than glorious. The full thunder-cloud
of the Hebrew prophets, stealing over a world in negative stagnation,
waked the sleeping lightnings of the soul, and for a while streaked
the atmosphere of history with fearful portents. Everything that had
been written of the chosen people, their exodus, their law, their
poetry, their passions,--everything except the relentings of their
nature and the unsteadiness of their faith,--became consecrated alike.
The military clang of their early history, the harp of their sweet
singer, the choral pomp of their priestly rule, the mystic voices of
their lonely men of God,--all were Divine music alike, often more
exciting than the Sermon on the Mount, and not less piercing than the
anguish in Gethsemane. Such was the sequence and connection of the
Divine dispensations supposed to be, that Christianity was simply the
Jewish theocracy, only let loose out of Palestine to make a promised
land of the whole world. The downtrodden serfs of Franconia had not
long heard the glad tidings from Wittenberg, ere they began to draw
parallels between themselves and the old Israel when the desert had
been passed. They had been brought to the brink of new hope, and
looked, as across Jordan, to an inheritance verdant and tempting to
their eye. The earth was the Lord's, and the army of the saints was
come to take it; the bannered princes, the ungodly priests, the "men
with spurs upon their heels," all the carnal who peopled this Canaan
and perched their "eagle's nests" on every height, must be smitten and
cleared off. The time of jubilee was come, when every believer should
have his field of heritage; nay, the birds in the forest, the fish in
the stream, the fruits of the ground, whatever has the sacred seal of
God's creative power, should be free to all, and the noble should eat
the peasant's bread or die. The lawyers should take their heathenish
courts away, and men of God should sit and judge the people, according
to the spirit and the word. The harvest was ripe, when the tares must
be burned in the fire and the pure wheat be garnered for the Lord.
These were the ideas which thousands of armed men, with a clouted shoe
and a cart-wheel for their standards, and a leader who signed himself
"the sword of Gideon," preached as their Gospel through the forests of
Thuringia and beneath the citadel of Würzburg. Nor was the ripest
learning, much less the most generous spirit of the time, any security
against the adoption of their doctrine. It was not Münzer alone who
breathed the fierce inspiration, exhorting his swarthy miners to "lay
Nimrod on the anvil, and let it ring bravely with their strokes"; but
the honest Carlstadt, too, scholar, preacher, dialectician as he is,
lays aside his broadcloth, and appears in white felt hat and rustic
coat at the cross of Rothenburg, to preach encouragement to the
people and bring fresh sorrow on himself. Throughout the great
movement which in the third decade of the sixteenth century spread
insurrection from the Breisgau to Saxony, the peasants were animated
with the belief that the Gospel, armed with the sword of Joshua, was
to subjugate the world, and that all the conditions of property, of
law, of civil administration, under which secular communities exist,
were to be superseded by institutions conformed to a divine model. The
leading Reformers, terrified by the religious socialism which they had
raised, were ready enough to denounce and crush it. But in truth their
own idea differed from this insurgent faith more in form than in
essence; lodging the power in different hands, and prescribing to it a
different method, but assigning to it a similar trust for the same
ultimate ends. The kingdoms of this world were to be made the kingdom
of the Lord and of his Christ; and the temporal power was everywhere
to assume a spiritual function, and make aggression on whatever
opposed itself to the severity and sanctity of the Divine Word. The
converts of Knox, the troopers of Cromwell, the town-councillors of
Geneva, acting on this doctrine, claimed the whole of human life as
their domain, and pushed the inquisitions of police into private
habits, and even the secret inclinations of personal belief.
Playing-cards and song-books were denounced and seized, as if they
came from the Devil's printing-press; dancing prohibited, as a profane
escape of the natural members into mirthful agitation; concerts
silenced, as enslaving immortal souls to the delusive sweetness of
strings and wind; the caps of women and the coats of men shaped to
evangelic type; and, as if the world were a great school, the gates of
cities, and even the doors of houses, were closed at temperate hours
by vesper bell or signal gun. Asceticism grasped the sceptre and the
sword, and demanded the capitulation of the world. How vain and
dangerous this tyrannous repression of nature is, the reaction during
the seventeenth century into reckless and fatal license emphatically
declares; and the contrast shows the necessity of finding some
mediating term, some reconciling wisdom, by which the antagonism may
cease between the world and heaven, between natural morals and
Christian aspiration. Yet under a change of form the struggle is still
continued; and with those who most prominently assume to represent the
aims of Christianity, the present life, the temporal world, has no
adequate recognition of its rights. They have no trust in human nature
as divinely constituted, and as having no part or passion without some
fitting range. They dare not leave it out of sight for an instant:
they must draw up a dietary for it, of sufficing vegetables and water;
they must watch its temper, and see that it behaves with winning
sweetness to all rascality; they must guard its purse, and teach it
that to live cheaply, spending nothing for ornament and beauty,
nothing for honor and right, but only for subsistence and charity, is
the great wisdom of man; they must stifle its indignations, lest it
should cease to hold out its cheek to Russia, and, having gone one
shameful mile with "the nephew of my uncle," should refuse to go with
him another. Both the ascetic doctrine and the extreme peace
principles of the present day, as well as its tendency to renounce all
retributory punishment, betray, in our opinion, a morbidly scrupulous
apprehension of evil, quite blinding to the healthy eye for good,--a
crouching of moral fear, singularly at variance with the free and
noble bearing of the Apostle, who found that "to the pure all things
are pure." As for the non-resistance principle, we have shown that it
meant no more in the early Church than that the disciples were not to
anticipate the hour, fast approaching, of Messiah's descent to claim
his throne. But when that hour struck, there was to be no want of
"physical force," no shrinking from retribution as either unjust or
undivine. The "flaming fire," the "sudden destruction," the "mighty
angels," the "tribulation and anguish," were to form the retinue of
Christ and the pioneers of the kingdom of God. It was not that
coercion was deemed unholy, and regarded as the agency appropriate to
lower natures and left behind in ascending towards heaven; it was
simply that natural coercion was not to fritter itself away, but leave
the field open for the supernatural. The new reign was to come _with
force_; and on nothing else, in the last resort, was there any
reliance; only the army was to arrive from heaven before the earthly
recruits were taken up. Nothing, indeed, can well be further from the
sentiment of Scripture than the extreme horror of force, as a penal
and disciplinary instrument, which is inculcated in modern times. "My
kingdom," said Jesus, "is not of this world; else would my servants
fight";--an expression which implies that no kingdom of this world can
dispense with arms, and that he himself, were he the head of a human
polity, would not forbid the sword; but while "legions of angels"
stood ready for his word, and only waited till the Scripture was
fulfilled and the hour of darkness was passed, to obey the signal of
heavenly invasion, the weapon of earthly temper might remain within
the sheath. The infant Church, subsisting in the heart of a military
empire, and expecting from on high a military rescue, was not itself
to fight; not, however, because force was in all cases "brutal" and
"heathenish," but because, in this case, it was to be angelic and
celestial. It is evident that precepts given under the influence of
these ideas can have no just application to the actual duties of
citizens and states, whose problems of conduct, whose very existence,
they never contemplated; and that to urge them upon modern society as
political canons is to introduce a doctrine which, under cover of
their form, violently outrages their spirit.
The mistaken antithesis between temporal and spiritual things runs
into the greatest excess, wherever the inherent pravity of human
nature is most exaggerated. There are churches, however,--the Catholic
and the Arminian,--in whose doctrines the natural condition of man is
painted in colors far removed from the deepest shade; and which deem
him not so much incapable of right moral discernment, as weakened for
faithful moral execution. In this view, the function of Christianity
is not to supersede and cancel, but to supplement and guide, the
native energies of the soul; not to raise it from a mad trance, in
which all thought and feeling are themselves but a false glare, but
to apply a tonic and healing power, enabling it to do the right which
it has already light enough to see. Professor Fitzgerald is an
adherent to this doctrine, and justly contends that no lower estimate
of human nature can consist with responsibility at all.
"I am not to be ranked," he says, "amongst those who assume that human
corruption has not _affected_ the natural power of the moral sense. I
think it has. No doubt sinful depravity, wherever it is indulged, is,
as Aristotle long ago remarked, φθαρτικη των αρχων,--it tends to
weaken or deprave the sentiment of moral censure, and to blunt the
perception of moral evil.
"An eloquent but superficial French moralist has compared the
conscience to a table-rock in the ocean, its surface, just above the
ripple, bearing an inscription graven in the stone, which a genius,
hovering over it, reads aloud. At times the waves arise and sweep over
the tablet, concealing the mystic characters. Then the reader is
compelled to pause. But after a while the wind is lulled, the waves
sink back to their accustomed level, the inscription stands out clear
and legible, and the genius resumes his interrupted task.
"This comparison might gain something in correctness if we imagine the
inscription traced upon a softer substance. For the stormy waves of
passion not only conceal, while they prevail, the sacred characters of
virtue, but, as billow after billow passes over the tablet, they tend
to obliterate the lines.
"But in making these large concessions, (which I do very willingly,) I
do not feel that I am surrendering the cause. It is one thing to say
that the discriminating power of the moral judgment is _affected_ and
impaired by human corruption, and quite another to say that it is
destroyed. It is one thing to say that it sometimes goes wrong, and
another that we can _never_ depend on its decisions. Most men's
experience has often brought them acquainted with persons who had
impaired, in some way or other, their natural powers of perceiving truth
or excellence in some respects, without losing either sound principles
of reason or sound principles of honesty in others. And the way to
correct such obliquities of intellectual or moral judgment is, not to
tell men that they should distrust their natural faculties altogether,
but to avail ourselves of so much as remains sound to discover the
mistake or imperfection which we seek to remedy or supply. The appeal,
in such cases, is from the reason or conscience perverted or impaired,
to the same faculties in what physicians would call their _normal
state_. When the effaced portions of the inscription are to be restored,
the evidence of the correction results from its harmonizing with the
part which has not been obliterated; and an interpolation may be
detected by its disturbing the coherence of the context,--an omission by
leaving it imperfect or unintelligible."--p. 26.
On this principle alone, unhappily but little congenial with the
spirit and traditions of Protestant churches, can Christianity coexist
with natural ethics. Faith adopts morals, purifies and sublimes them,
and especially changes the character of their force;--for a law of
compulsion from below, substituting a love of God above. The enmity
ceases between the world and heaven; the physical earth is not more
certainly afloat in space, and on the muster-roll of stars, than the
present life is plunged in eternity, and not behind its chiefest
sanctities. There is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be slurred
over as an unmanageable necessity, in the natural constitution and
relations of men; whatever acts they prescribe, whatever combinations
they require, are within the scope and consecration of religion. The
whole compass of the world and its affairs, all the gifts and
activities of men, are brought within moral jurisdiction, and included
in the embrace of a genial reverence. No narrow interpretation is
longer possible of the province of human piety, and the true type of a
noble goodness; as though they demanded a definite set of actions,
rather than a certain style of soul, and denied a place to any
affection or pursuit which can adorn and glorify existence. Divine
things are not put away into foreign realms of being, and future
reaches of time, attainable by no path of toil, no spring of effort,
only by miraculous transport; but are met with every day, shining
through the substance of life and hid amid its hours. Whatever
original endowments, whatever acquired virtues, enrich and elevate our
immediate sphere,--the Thought which finds its truth, the Genius that
evolves its beauty, the Honor that guards its nobleness, the Love
which lightens the burden of its sorrows,--are not mere temporal
embellishments indifferent to its sacredness, but attributes that
bring men nearer to the sympathy and similitude of God. Art,
literature, politics, employing the highest human activities, and
constituting the very blossom and fruit of all our culture, are
recognized as having an earnest root, and not being the light growth
of secular gayety and selfishness. We have no sympathy with the
sentimental and immoral propensity, which corrupts the newest
Continental philosophy, to recognize whatever comes into existence as
_ipso facto_ divine. But we do believe that the great change for which
the secret religiousness of this age pines, and which it is sorely
straitened till it can accomplish, is the deliberate adoption into
"heavenly places" of this world, its faculties and affairs, just as
God has made them, and man's unfaithfulness has not yet spoiled them.
The products of human baseness, hypocrisy, and ambition,--let _them_
remain hateful, eternally contrary to God, things scarce safe to pity;
but believe not that they have got this planet entirely to themselves,
and have snatched it as their _peculium_ quite out of the Supreme
Hand. Men are tired of straining their thought along the diameter of
the universe to seek for a Holy of Holies in whatever is opposite to
their life; they find a worship possible, even irresistible, at home,
and on the road-side a place as fit to kneel as on the pavement of the
Milky Way. The old antagonism between the world that now is, and any
other that has been or is to come, has been modified for them, or has
even entirely ceased. The earth is no place of diabolic exile, which
the "prince of the power of the air" ever fans and darkens with his
wing; and were it even, as was once believed, appointed to perish,
this would be not because its failure was complete, but because its
task was done. No vengeance burns in the sunshine which mellows its
fruits and paints its grass; no threatenings flash from the starry
eyes that watch over it by night. It is not only the home of each
man's personal affections, but the native country of his very soul;
where first he found in what a life he lives, and to what heaven he
tends; where he has met the touch of spirits higher than his own, and
of Him that is highest of all. It is the abode of every ennobling
relation, the scene of every worthy toil;--the altar of his vows, the
observatory of his knowledge, the temple of his worship. Whatever
succeeds to it will be its sequel, not its opposite, will resume the
tale wherever silence overtakes it, and be blended into one life by
sameness of persons and continuity of plan. He is set here to live,
not as an alien, passing in disguise through an enemy's camp, where no
allegiance is due, and no worthy love is possible, but as a citizen
fixed on an historic soil, pledged by honorable memories to nurse yet
nobler hopes. _Here_ is the spot, _now_ is the time, for the most
devoted service of God. No strains of heaven will wake him into
prayer, if the common music of humanity stirs him not. The saintly
company of spirits will throng around him in vain, if he finds no
angels of duty and affection in his children, neighbors, and friends.
If no heavenly voices wander around him in the present, the future
will be but the dumb change of the shadow on the dial. In short,
higher stages of existence are not the refuge from this, but the
complement to it; and it is the proper wisdom of the affections, not
to escape the one in order to seek the other, but to flow forth in
purifying copiousness on both.
We have said that men are tired of having their earthly and their
heavenly relations set up in sharp opposition to each other, and are
eager to live here in a consecrated world. This tendency has already
found expression in two remarkable and apparently dissimilar
phenomena,--the partial success of the Anglican and Catholic reaction,
and the vast influence on English society of the late Dr. Arnold's
character. Both were virtual protests against that removal of God out
of the common human life, that unreconciled condition of Law and
Gospel, which had made the evangelical theology sickening and unreal.
A path had to be opened for the re-introduction of a divine presence
into the sphere of temporal things. Newman resorted to the
supernatural channel of Church miracle; Arnold to the natural course
of human affairs, and the permanent sacredness of human obligation.
Both restored to us a solemn mystery of immediate Incarnation; the one
putting life, in order to its consecration, into contact with the
sacraments; the other spreading a sacramental veneration over the
whole of life. Arnold, especially, saw the great moral evils which
have arisen from the evangelical depreciation of the "profane" world.
The secular, he was well aware, has become _too_ secular, the
spiritual too _merely_ spiritual. Human nature is permitted to have
play with unchecked wilfulness in the one, and is allowed no place at
all in the other. The obligations of natural law are held in light
esteem, as if, in being social, they fell short of being sacred. The
exercises of intellect, in the survey of nature or the interpretation
of history, are often stigmatized as a mere earthly curiosity,
permissible to reason, but neutral to the soul. The worst of it is,
that these notions, once become habitual, fulfil their own
predictions. As there is nothing which the heart cannot sanctify, so
is there nothing which it may not secularize. Tell men that in their
natural affections there is nothing holy, and their homes will soon be
nests of common instinct. Assure them that in their business it is the
unregenerate will, and the animal necessity, that labor for the bread
which perisheth, and soon enough will an irreverent greediness and a
cankered anxiety usurp the place. Persuade them that to study the
order of creation or the records of past ages is but a "carnal"
pursuit, and the student's prayer for light will become a mere
ambition for distinction, the meditations of wonder be stifled in the
dust of mental day-labor, and the tears of admiration drop no more on
the page of ancient wisdom. This was what Arnold could not abide; to
see religion flying off on wings of pompous pretence to other worlds,
and leaving no heavenly glory upon the earth, but letting her very
fields be paved into a street. There was no attempt to save a spot
for any earnest reality, except the poor little enclosure behind the
altar rail. The Church will consecrate a graveyard for the dead, but
leaves the market of the living still unblessed: you may dissolve away
in benediction, when your years are over of toil and sweat beneath the
curse. To one who acknowledges a natural conscience and a natural
element in faith, there is a _religion in little_ in every part of
life; it gives at least a note in the chords and melody of worship.
Hence Arnold's curious doctrine of the Church as covering all human
relations whatsoever, and including the whole organism of the State.
He would have nothing which the laws of this universe imposed on the
will of man done without a clear and pious recognition; it was not to
be illicitly smuggled in, as if run ashore in a gale of confusion that
could not be helped, but must be steadily accounted for and stored in
open day. _Ethically_, this doctrine, though, from its adaptation to a
permanent world, it is the least Apostolic in appearance, is, of all
interpretations of Christianity, the most true; and if it were not for
clinging ideas of extra-moral dogma and special priesthood, as
limiting the conception of "the Church," would go far to repeat for
our age the work of Socrates for his, and bring down our divine
philosophy from heaven to earth. It gets rid entirely of the false
spiritualism which has either withheld religious men from political
affairs, or induced them to urge on statesmen rules applicable only
where government can be dispensed with altogether. It rescues
Christianity from the degradation of being hypocritically flattered as
the great persuasive to peace by rulers whom it does not restrain from
going to war, and relieves it of an oppressive weight of false
expectation, as though it broke its promise to the world every time a
new case of strife appeared. Nothing can well be more damaging to a
religion, than to commit it to unqualified disapprobation of anything
which must exist while human nature lasts, and to set it frowning with
ineffectual sublimity on the passions and events which determine the
whole course of history. The amiable enthusiasts who propose to
conduct the affairs of nations on principles of brotherly love, and
who, till that consummation is reached, can only stand by and protest,
do but weaken their country for purposes of justice and bring their
faith into merited commiseration. It is commonly said that they are a
harmless class, who may even form a useful counterpoise to the warlike
susceptibilities of less scrupulous men. We have no belief, however,
in the efficacy of falsehood and exaggeration, or in the attainment of
truth and moderation by the neutralizing action of opposite
extravagances. The reverence for human life is carried to an immoral
idolatry, when it is held more sacred than justice and right, and when
the spectacle of blood becomes more horrible than the sight of
desolating tyrannies and triumphant hypocrisies. Life, indeed, is just
the one thing--the reserved capital, the rest, the ultimate
security--on whose disposability in the last resort, and on the free
control over which, the very existence of society depends. The first
and highest social bond is no doubt to be found in a _religious_
sentiment, a common veneration for the same things as right and
intrinsically binding on men that live side by side; and the worship,
with its institutions, of every community, is its instinctive attempt
to get these things spontaneously done by the force of _reverence_.
Could this point be really carried, nothing would remain to be
accomplished; religion would complete and perfect the incorporation of
mutual loyalty which it had begun. But there are some in whom the
sentiment of common reverence fails, and for whose fidelity to the
moral ends of the social union there is therefore no natural guaranty.
To reach these cases, society has no resource but coercive methods,
actual or threatened; the threat is _Law_; the actuality is
_Punishment_; the power to which both are committed is a _Government_;
the commonwealth on whose behalf they exist is a _State_. The very
constitution of a state thus presupposes the _possible violation of
moral right_, the partial failure of religion to secure its
observance, and the determination to _enforce_ on the reluctant an
obedience refused of free will. Force, however, is applicable only to
men's bodies; it is a restraint and pressure on the functions of
their life; and if that life be sacred from infringement, the
political existence of nations is itself an offence against the law of
God. All law, all polity, is a proclamation that justice is better
than life, and, if need be, shall override it and all the possessions
it includes; and nothing can be weaker or more suicidal than for men
who are citizens of a commonwealth to announce, that, for their part,
they mean to hold life in higher esteem than justice. Moreover, there
is a low-minded egotism often disguised in this doctrine of passive
meekness. As an inducement to quiet endurance of wrong, we are
reminded of the duty of "mutual forgiveness." Is all the wickedness,
then, that I am doomed to witness, nothing but a _personal affront_?
When a rascal threatens to blow out my neighbor's brains, or to blast
his character by infamous accusations, am _I_ in a position to forbear
and pardon? Must I not own myself under a solemn trust, to see the
right done and the guilty punished? Nay, would not the injured man
himself greatly mistake the nature of the crime, and measure it by a
paltry standard, if he took it for a mere private offence which it was
his prerogative to punish or to overlook? "Who is this that forgiveth
sins also?" The eternal laws of justice are not of our enacting; and
no will of ours has title to suspend or to repeal them. The real and
only demand of Christian magnanimity is, that we visit them with no
vengeance, but merely with moral retribution;--_that_ is, with no more
severity when directed against ourselves, than when we see them at an
impersonal distance. But to regard and treat the guilty as if he were
an innocent,--that is given to no man, and is even inconceivable of
God. Rulers, at all events, as trustees of rights other than their
own,--and each generation of a people, as charged with the interests
of successors in perpetuity,--have but a limited privilege of
forbearance; the meekness of the saint would in them be treason to the
world. Even in international disputes, where each party may have a
conviction of right, the controversy, but for the possibility of
force, could have no end. It is a delusion to rely on courts as a
substitute for armies, and to suppose that judicial decision can
supersede military. The judge would be of small avail without the
constable; and the arbitrator between nations would need a European
army to enforce his decrees. Where the stake is large and the feeling
strong, it is notorious that the private disputant rarely acquiesces
in an arbitration that goes against him; but carries his case to the
last appeal, where it is stopped by a barrier of impassable force. You
might as well pull down your jails in preparation for the assizes, as
destroy your fleets and arsenals in quest of international
arbitration. We speak only of the ultimate theory of this matter, and
simply affirm, that wherever law and government exist, somewhere in
the background force must lurk. It may, no doubt, be provided in
excess, and paraded without need; and with the progress of a civilized
order, the circle may be ever widened within which the _idea_ of
coercion, with the habits it creates, may be substituted for the
obtrusive reality; till possibly a family of nations may be gathered,
like a group of counties, into a common jurisdiction. But this only
shifts the camp without disbanding it; and, after all, the tipstaffs
of your supreme court could be no other than the legions of a grand
army. We have, therefore, no more doubt that a war may be right, than
that a policeman may be a security for justice, and we object to a
fortress as little as to a handcuff. A religion which does not include
the whole moral law; a moral law which does not embrace all the
problems of a commonwealth; a commonwealth which regards the life of
man more than the equities of God,--appear to us unfaithful to their
functions, and unworthy interpreters of the divine scheme of the
world. Quaker histories, written with omission of all the wars, are
not less morbid as moral mistakes, than a doctrine of Providence,
leaving out the whole realm of heathendom, is narrow as a religious
theory; and the misuse of Scripture which has led to both, is most
dangerous to its authority in an age remarkable for the breadth of its
historical survey and the variety of its ethnological sympathies.
In other ways than those which we have indicated has a mischievous
direction been given to modern thought and feeling, by perverting the
accidental and transient form of the primitive Christianity into
essential and permanent doctrine. But our exposition must proceed no
further. The alternation of ascetic spiritualism and worldly laxity,
the indifference to natural affections and relations, the
exclusiveness at once devout and selfish, the jealous denial of their
rights to intellect and art, the false apprehension of the true
dignity of law and true life of states, have been the more earnestly
dwelt upon from the conviction that these ethical infirmities are
producing a perilous reaction,--a distrust of all ethical laws
whatsoever, a disposition to hold everything divine that finds
strength to realize itself,--a worship of what _is_, in place of an
aspiration to what _ought to be_. To this we cannot consent. We cannot
look on all forms of human life and character with the neutral eye of
an equal admiration, as alike suitable products of formative nature.
We cannot forego the right of judgment,--of embracing with reverence
or spurning with abhorrence; or part with the ideal type of a perfect
soul, to which all others rise as they approach. Neither do we believe
with Luther, that human nature is a mere _devilish_ anarchy, reducible
only by supernatural irruption; nor with the newest school, that it is
a _divine_ anarchy, equally uncontrollable from within, and to be
accepted as a wild fact; but that it is a _hierarchy of powers_, each
having and knowing its rightful place, and appealing to us to maintain
it there. To listen to that appeal, and, in answer to it, strive to
harmonize the _de facto_ with the _de jure_ administration of the
soul, destroying the usurpation of mean errors, and restoring the sway
of kingly truth, is the aim of morals in action and in philosophy.