"Now the end of the commandment is Charity, out of a pure heart, and
of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned."--1 Timothy i. 5.
The Apostle gives us here a very simple formula of Christian perfection.
He was not fond of long lists of the virtues, such as the moral
philosophers draw up; and though he does sometimes pass through a
series, it is with a peculiar result. Look at any book upon human
ethics, and you are astonished at the number of qualities that go to
make up a good man: the ramifications of duty seem never to terminate:
you scarcely know how a soul like ours can hold so much: the further the
author proceeds in his enumeration, the less does he seem able to
stop,--his divisions breaking into subdivisions, and the subdivisions
opening new varieties,--till life appears to pulverize itself under his
definitions, and become an infinite complexity of moral detail. St.
Paul's enumerations, on the contrary, instead of running down into
multitude, run up into unity; each term is apt to be larger than its
predecessor; he seems impatient of scattering his exhortations, as if
each had a business of its own, and rather forces them as he proceeds
into denser compression, till he flings out some term of power that
holds them all. The graces with him do not present themselves apart,
like garden plants that may be tended and watered one by one; but all on
the same organism, as the leaves and the blossoms of a single shrub. He
felt that in reality the virtues do not add themselves up and subscribe
to the final result of a holy soul: but the one simple soul lives
itself out into the direction of all the virtues; and there is a certain
mood, a temper, a climate of the soul, which grows everything beautiful
at once, and without which, while one adornment is elaborately nursed,
the rest will be apt to droop and die. This blessed and productive mood,
felt to be _one thing_, ought to have _one name_: and the Apostle calls
it _Charity_ or _Love_; and presents it sometimes as the greatest of
graces, sometimes as the unity of them all.
But this simple grace is to have a _triple source_. In the midst of the
garden of the Lord the Apostle plants but a solitary tree of life,--his
divine and fruitful Charity. Only it must be nursed by the threefold
root, of which should any part be wanting, the beauty of the form and
the healing of the leaves will soon be gone. "Charity out of a pure
heart,--and a good conscience,--and faith unfeigned." The Heart, the
Conscience, the Faith, must all be right; and it is no Pauline Charity
that is not sustained by concurrence of them all. And, observe _the
order_. In the centre, striking its fibres deepest down into the
substance of our world, is the _Conscience_, the _Moral_ element of
life; and on either side, held to their due balance by its intermediate
power, we find the _Heart_,--the fresh _human affections_,--and the
Faith,--the _heavenly trust and aspirations_,--of our nature. Tenderness
and pity on the one hand, devotion and hope on the other, are to hold on
to the sense of duty in the midst; and there only will a noble and
majestic Love arise, casting no baneful shade upon the earth, and in its
branches giving no shelter but to birds that sing the songs of heaven. A
charity, therefore, that flows _only_ from the genial heart, that looks
with kindly complacency on all things and persons, and with a sort of
animal sympathy licks every sore of humanity that lies at its
gate;--this is not the "end of the commandment";--for it has in it no
moral, no religious element: it condemns nothing; it worships nothing:
its eye neither flashes in rebuke, nor lifts itself in prayer: it is
sensitive to suffering, not to sin: and, if it can but wipe out pain,
will do it even upon guilty terms, and charm away a God-sent remorse as
freely as it would an anguish of the innocent. And, on the other hand, a
charity that flows only from the sincerity of faith, and limits itself
to the fellowship of belief; that feels perhaps _for_ many, but only
_with_ a few; whose warmest sympathies are little else than a
partnership of antipathies; that transfers to the infinite God the
narrowness of its own consecrated circle, reduces the universe to a
temple of orthodoxy, and turns the Heaven of Immortals into the
May-meeting of a sect;--this also misses "the end of the commandment":
for it abuses the true power of religion over life, and flings in the
branch of faith only to embitter, instead of sweeten, the waters of
natural affection; it blinds and bewilders the moral discernment,
overlooks undeniable nobleness, and glorifies not a little meanness;
and, applying its perverted admiration to the past as well as the
present, crowds the statue-gallery of history with ill-favored and
questionable saints, whose features have so grown to the mould and
pressure of a creed, that they look like casts of an abstract theology,
more than emblems of a living humanity. Take away the wisdom of
Conscience; and Charity, surrendered to mere affection, will fail to see
sin where _it is_; or, constricted by Faith, will suppose it where _it
is not_. Both errors will shape themselves into deliberate doctrines,
deviating on either side from the simple creed of our moral nature and
of Christ. Let us look for a few moments at the central truth on this
matter; and then glance from it at the lateral heresies.
The central truth may be described under the phrase, _The Personal
nature of sin_. In affirming this, I mean both that _each man is a
person, and not a thing_; and that _his sin is his own, and not
another's_. If there is anything within the compass of heaven and earth
which we can be said to know from ourselves, and to have no need that
another should tell us, it is the nature of sin. There is no
arrogance,--there is only sorrowful confession,--in protesting that
_this_ is a matter on which we cannot be mistaken. It is the nearest of
all things to us; the shadow that follows us where we go, and stays
with us when we sit; the clinging presence that penetrates the very
folds of our nature, and is known only from within, where its fibres
strike and draw their nutriment. No external observer, though he have
the divination of a prophet or the glance of an archangel, can add one
iota to our insight into this sad fact, unless by sharpening our
sensibility to feel and interpret it better for ourselves; or by any
testimony, any miracle, take one line away of the handwriting of God
that burns and flashes on the inner walls of the soul. Here at least our
apprehensions are first-hand; and to trust them, to cast out as Satan
what tampers with them or contradicts them, is not scepticism, but
faith,--not infidelity, but faithfulness to the ever-living Word of God.
What the finger of Heaven has written, neither the tapestries of ancient
theology nor the varnish of the newest philosophy can permanently hide;
the light is alive, and will eat through, clearing its everlasting
warning and consuming our perishable work.
What then does this first and last revelation declare human sin to be?
In the moments when we know it best,--when we cover our face because we
can hide our transgression no more,--when we cannot bear the placid
silence of things, and cry in our agony, "Smite us, O Lord, but tell us
what we have done,"--does He not answer us, "You have abused your trust;
I showed you a better, and you have taken the worse; I drew you by a
secret reverence to the nobler, and you have sunk by inclination to the
baser; I gave you a will in the image of my own, free to realize the
good, and you have yielded yourself captive to the evil; therefore have
you a burden now to bear, that none can lift off,--a burden which you
will feel it more faithful and wholesome to carry than to lose." This is
surely the tone in which the voice of God's Holy Spirit speaks to us
when we have grieved it: and if we believe it not, I know not whither we
should go; it is the highest oracle of truth below the skies, having
authority more positive even than the eye that assures us of the sun
above us, and the feet that tell us of the earth beneath.
According to this oracle, then, the essence of the sin lies in the
_conscious free choice of the worse in presence of a better no less
possible_. And to make us guilty in its commission three conditions
are required;--(1.) Our mind must be solicited by at least two
competing propensities; (2.) We must be aware that of these one is
worthy and has a claim upon us, and the other not; (3.) It must be
left to us to determine ourselves to either of these, and we must not
be delivered over by foreign causes to the one or to the other. Take
away any of these conditions, and guilt becomes impossible. If the
mind has _not_ the option of two propensities, but is possessed of
only one, that single impulse, being its entire stock and constituting
its only possibility, affords no scope for good or ill, and leaves the
being a mere creature of instinct. Or if, while rival passions
struggle at his heart, he knows no difference among them, or only
this, that some are _pleasanter_ than others, then also he is
blameless, though he takes only what he likes. If, finally, while he
is drawn by conflicting tendencies and taught to regard _some_ as his
temptations, and solemnly set in the midst to choose, the whole
appearance of option turns out a semblance and a pretence, and the
matter is long ago determined outside of him and now only performs the
ceremony of _passing through_ him,--then, as before, he is
irreproachable: the strife within him is the illusion of mimic
passions wrestling for a dreamer's soul; and while the tragic agony
goes on within,--a dance of fiends, a rescue of angels,--he is
stretched all the while sleeping on the bed of nature, and cannot wake
but to find remorse and responsibility a dream.
Accordingly, whenever we want to make excuse for our wrong-doing, the
false plea takes the form of a denial of one of these conditions.
"Blame me not," we say, "for _I knew of no other_ course"; or, "I did
not _think it signified_ which I did"; or, "I saw it all, but _I could
not help it_." Often the gnawings of self-reproach are felt upon the
heart at the very instant that these excuses escape the lips. But
sometimes they are the suggestions of _sincere_ self-deception, and
proceed from men who are their own dupes; and whenever this is the
case, the sense of responsibility is entirely dissipated; remorse is
extinguished; the confession of guilt is turned into complaint of a
misfortune; and the offender considers himself rather as the injured
of nature than the insurgent against God. These excuses then must be
wholly excluded, if the sanctity of the moral life is to be preserved.
They are the various forms under which the personal nature of sin may
be denied. They all assert that the _person_ either did not contain
within him the requisite conditions, or was hemmed in by natural
preventives, of true obligation. Whoever offers us such pleas is
justly regarded as self-condemned, and indeed as presenting a sadder
spectacle in his defence than in his transgression. Nor are they
improved in their character when they are expanded from excuses of
individuals into doctrines of churches; for they explain away the
essence of sin, and leave us without intelligible faith in anything
holy in heaven or on earth. Thus:--
Whoever maintains that the human heart is invariably wicked, and can
think no thought and prompt no act, except such as are odious to God,
mistakes the whole nature of moral obligation, and virtually excludes
it from the entire system of things. Confront this assertion with the
facts of life, and ask what it really means. Do you mean, I would say
to its defender, that, whenever two principles contend for the mastery
in a man's mind, he always abandons himself to the lower?--that no
one, in short, was ever known to resist a temptation? Such a position
is surely too bold for the paradox of cynicism itself, in a world
where there are many in want that do not steal, and in suffering that
do not complain; where a Pericles could administer the revenues of a
state, yet die without having added to his little patrimony; and a
Socrates could live pure amid corruption, and truthful amid lies, and
die the martyr of injustice rather than offend his reverence for law;
where not a school nor a family can be found that has not its annals
and anecdotes of conscience. You allow, therefore, that victors there
have been in many a temptation. Did it make then no difference to the
sentiments of God respecting them whether they were victors or
vanquished? Was it neutral to him whether they nobly held their post,
or basely betrayed it? Then you simply deny the holiness of God; for
you allow the greatest contrasts of character on earth, with no
responsive feeling, no variety of estimate, in heaven; and make our
human discernment, our natural admirations, more susceptible as moral
barometers than the Omniscient Perception. Or will you say that,
although men differ in moral effort, and withstand temptation in
various degrees, and the Infinite Eye sees through the whole history
with unerring exactitude, yet the entire scale of human character lies
below the point of Divine acceptableness, and in the view of perfect
purity is equivalent to mere variety of guilt? Then do you deny again,
only with a change of form, the personal nature of sin; for you try
the soul by the law of _another_ nature, and not her own,--by a law
beyond her ken or beyond her power; and while she is striving to be
faithful to her best thought against the seductions of the worse,--in
which alone the essence of all goodness dwells,--you tell her that her
God despises a conflict so far down, and that "this people that
knoweth not his law," however true to their own, "is cursed." What is
this but to make Moral Excellence something quite different in heaven
and on earth?--not veracity, not justice, not purity of thought, not
self-sacrificing love; nothing that here makes our hearts burn within
us as we look at the dear face of long-tried friends or saintly
strangers, or leaving the Jerusalem of the noisy present pace the
quiet road of history, talking by the way with the saviours of nations
and the prophets of a world;--not this, but some hidden charm that
finds neither place nor answer in our souls; so that the God who loves
it leaves us herein without a point of sympathy with him, or a
possibility of approach. In that case, he is a Being without moral
perfection; for, however you may apply to him a circle of holy
_names_, the things you denote by them are a set of unknown quantities
bearing no relation to our types of thought. Or, finally, do you
allege that the distinctions of character are not entirely different
in heaven and on earth; only that through all their varieties in the
natural man there is interfused a certain invariable taint, an
irremovable tinge of guilt,--a stain of _self_, a thought of _pride_,
a want of _faith_? Even were it so, still, if this be the constant
coloring of the soul, pervading it by nature and not personally
incurred, it is but a sad condition under which it is given us to work
out our problem, and not any unfaithfulness in dealing with it as it
comes: it is an inherent incapacity, which, however unlike the beauty
of God's holiness, he can no more regard with penal disapproval, than
he can hate the deformed or persecute the blind.
Again, whoever teaches that men are, through and through, the
creatures of circumstance, with no more voice as to their character
than as to their birth, but are the predestined products of nature,
working partly within them and partly without,--no less surely insults
all moral convictions, and denies the reality of duty. For he
abolishes entirely the distinction between a person and a thing; and
conceives of every man as a mere _growth_ or _development_ from the
physiology of the universe, no more responsible for his place in the
scale of excellence, than the plant which, according to its seed and
soil, becomes the hyssop of the wall, the lily of the field, or the
stately cedar of Lebanon. All moral ideas vanish instantly at the
touch of this doctrine; and the solemn language on which Law and
Conscience have stamped their venerable impress, and ruled among the
nations "by the grace of God," is defaced in the revolutionary mint of
fatalism, and made current with the superscription of a pretended
equality where all are low, and liberty where none is free. It is
quite clear, that, if the soul has no originating causality, but in
every step she takes is simply _disposed of_ and bespoken by agencies
provided and set in train, without any question asked of her, she can
have no _duties_, she can win no _deserts_; she can incur no _guilt_,
merit no _punishment_; she is deluded in her _remorse_, and suffers a
vain torture in esteeming herself an _alien from God_. All that
remains is this: that by natural laws there may be pain consequent,
and known to be consequent, on some of the directions which we may
take; and it is at our peril that we enter on these paths. But so is
it at our peril if we go up in a balloon, or put to sea in a small
boat to save a drowning crew. You can get nothing out of this
consideration but more or less of _Prudence_; hope of happiness, fear
of suffering, can consecrate nothing as a _Duty_, but only present it
as _interest_; and if a man chooses to disregard his interest and risk
the result, I know not who, in heaven or earth, can tell him with
authority that he has no right to do it, or can say more to him than
that he is a fool in his folly. Who on these terms could cast himself,
in tears of penitence, upon the bosom of Infinite Mercy, and sob out
his prayer that he might be reconciled to God? Who would ever tremble
beneath the lash of a fiery reproach, and own, as it quivered over
him, that there was justice in the terror of its look? Rather must the
sinner feel himself the victim of a cruel doom; whom it is as little
suitable to punish, as to chastise the patient in fever, or torture
the cripple in the street. A doctrine which reduces duty to interest,
retribution to discipline, guilt to disease, holiness to symmetry and
good health, and God to the neutral source of all things good and
ill;--which frightens us with fears we may defy, but awes us with no
authority we can revere; which pities iniquity and smiles on goodness,
but only in order to patronize enjoyment;--whose faith in human nature
is a reliance on the ultimate docility of the wild animal man; and
whose worship of God is taken, like a morning walk, for the sake of
exercise;--is so alien from the whole spirit of religion, and such an
affront to the first instincts of conscience, that it can only escape
indignant condemnation by withdrawing altogether into the sphere of
natural history, and quitting as a foreign province the domain--whose
language it corrupts--of Morals and of Faith.
Finally, those who teach that guilt and merit, with their penalties
and rewards, can be transferred, deny in the directest way the
personal nature of Sin. That men should find a foreign _remedy_ for
their perpetrated wickedness, is not less shocking than that they
should trace it to a foreign _source_. If they know what it is at all,
they feel it to be inalienably their own; which none could give them
and which none can take away. And nothing is more amazing than that
good Christians, who seem truly cast down in humiliation, oppressed
with the sense of their short-comings, penetrated with the sadness of
baffled aspiration,--and who therefore, one would think, must really
have a consciousness of the personality of sin, and know how it is
chargeable only on their individual will,--can yet obtain relief by
flying, as it is said, to the cross, and persuading themselves that
the evil has been stayed and cured by transactions wholly outside
themselves, and belonging to the history of another being. What can
possibly be meant by the statement that Christ has borne the
punishment, some eighteen hundred years ago, of your sins and
mine,--of people non-existent then, and therefore non-sinful? Can the
punishment precede the sin? Can it be inflicted and gone through
before it is even determined whether the sin will be perpetrated at
all? Or can merely _potential_ sin, which may never become actual, be
dealt with at ages distant, and its accounts be settled ere it arise?
If so, what is the death of Christ but the provisory accumulation of a
fund beforehand, ready to be drawn upon as the everlasting "treasure
of the Church," for the free discharge of guilty debts and the release
of divine obligations? And in what respect does this differ from the
Roman Catholic doctrine,--except that the treasure is at the
discretion of no chartered sacerdotal company, but is open on more
popular and looser terms?
Moral relations, by their very nature, exclude all vicarious agency;
you cannot fall, you cannot recover, by deputy: the ill that haunts
you is the insult you have put on the divine spirit in your heart, and
it is as if you were alone with God. An interposing medium can as
little divert the retribution, as it can intercept the complacency of
the Infinite and Holy Mind. What more fearful charge could you bring
against any government, than to say that its penalties may be bought
off? A judge who accepts the voluntary sufferings of innocence in
acquittance of the liabilities of guilt, shocks every sentiment of
justice, and does that which the worst judicial caprice would never
dare to imitate. A law that does not care whether the right persons
feel its retribution, provided it gets an equivalent suffering
elsewhere, is an affront to the most elementary notions of right. And
an offender who can welcome his escape by such device, permits his
moral perceptions to be blinded by personal gratitude, and is content
to profit by a transaction which it would fill him with remorse to
repeat upon his own children.
A Mediator may do much indeed to reconcile my alienated mind to God.
He may personally rise before me with a purity and greatness so unique
as to give me faith in diviner things than I had known before, and by
his higher image turn my eye towards the Highest of all. He may show
me how, in the sublimest natures, sanctity and tenderness ever blend,
and so touch the springs of inward reverence that, in my returning
sympathy with goodness, all abject and deterring fears are swept away.
He may direct upon me, from the hall of trial or the cross of
self-sacrifice, the loving look that prostrates the impulses of
passion and the power of self, and awakens the repentant enthusiasm of
nobler affections. He may renew my future; but he cannot change my
past. He may sprinkle my immediate soul with the wave of regeneration;
but he cannot drown the deeds that are gone. From _present sinfulness_
he may recover me; but the _perpetrated sins_--though he be God
himself in power, unless he be other than God in holiness--he cannot
redeem. These have become realized facts; and none can cut off the
entail of their consequences: whatever the Divine Law has avowedly
annexed to them will develop itself from them with infallible
certainty. The outward sufferings by which God has stamped into the
nature of things his disapprobation of sin, and made it grievous here
and hereafter, stand irrevocably fast, clinging to guilt as shadow to
body, as effect to cause. This debt of natural penalty is one which
must be paid to the utmost farthing; by penitent and impenitent, by
the reconciled and the unreconciled alike: miracle cannot cancel, nor
mediator discharge it. In this sense,--of rescue from the penal laws
of God,--I know of no remission of sins; nor would Christians have
retained so heathenish a notion, had they not frightfully exaggerated,
in the first instance, the retributions of God by making them an
_eternal vengeance_; and so created a necessity for again rescinding
the fierce enactments of their fancy, that hope and return might not
be quite shut out. It is only in man, however, and not in God, thus to
do and undo. His word, whether of warning or of promise, is Yea and
Amen; and his great realities will march serenely on, and, heedless of
our passionate deprecations and fictitious triumphs, rebuke our
unbelief of their veracity.
But while the past can never be as though it were not, the present may
lie in the shelter of reconciliation, and the future in the light of
boundless hope. The outer burden we have incurred we may still have to
bear; but once brought by Divine conversion to an inner sympathy with
God, and seeing by his light rather than our own, we can suffer our
wounds with a patient shame, and scarcely feel their anguish more. The
averted face of the Infinite has turned round upon us again; and the
pure eyes look into us with a mild and loving gaze, which we can meet
with answering glance, and feel that we are at one with the universe
and reconciled with God.