"We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful, for the
Useful encourages itself."--GOETHE.
A Moss rose-bud hiding her face among the leaves one
hot summer morning, for fear the sun should injure her
complexion, happened to let fall a glance towards her
roots, and to see the bed in which she was growing.
What a filthy place! she cried. What a home they
have chosen for me! I, the most beautiful of flowers,
fastened down into so detestable a neighbourhood! She
threw her face into the air; thrust herself into the
hands of the first passer-by who stopped to look at her,
and escaped in triumph, as she thought, into the centre
of a nosegay. But her triumph was short-lived: in a
few hours she withered and died.
I was reminded of this story when hearing a living
thinker of some eminence once say that he considered
Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually it
was absurd, and practically an offence, over which he
stumbled; and it would have been far better for mankind,
he thought, if they could have kept clear of superstition,
and followed on upon the track of the Grecian
philosophy, so little do men care to understand the
conditions which have made them what they are, and which
has created for them that very wisdom in which they
themselves are so contented. But it is strange, indeed, that
a person who could deliberately adopt such a conclusion
should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If
a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little
fishing village in Galilee, and spread through the whole
civilized world; if men are so pitiably silly, that in an
age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
should have sunk under an absorption of fear and folly,
should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of
heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness
there was among them; surely there were nothing better
for a wise man than to make the best of his time, and
to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering
himself in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for
mankind or for their opinions. For what better test of
truth have we than the ablest men's acceptance of it;
and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago deliberately
accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what
right have we to hope that with the same natures, the
same passions, the same understandings, no better proof
against deception, we, like they, are not entangled in
what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber
and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by
the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement
and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern
sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to
destroy an idol when another, or the same in another
form takes immediate possession of the vacant pedestal?
But it is not so. Ptolemy was not perfect, but
Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at Ptolemy.
Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor
Ptolemy without the Chaldees; and as it is with the
minor sciences, so far more is it with the science of
sciences--the science of life, which has grown through
all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of
the errors of the past. We, with this glorious present
which is opening on us, we shall never enter on it,
we shall never understand it, till we have learnt to see
in that past, not error but instalment of truth, hard
fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic
effort. The promised land is smiling before us, but
we may not pass over into possession of it while the
bones of our fathers who laboured through the
wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the
unclean birds; we must gather them and bury them,
and sum up their labours, and inscribe the record of
their actions on their tombs as an honourable epitaph.
If Christianity really is passing away, if it has done its
work, and if what is left of it is now holding us back
from better things, it is not for our bitterness but for
our affectionate acknowledgment, not for our heaping
contempt on what it is, but for our reverent and patient
examination of what it has been, that it will be content
to bid us farewell, and give us God speed on our
further journey.
In the Natural History of Religions certain broad
phenomena perpetually repeat themselves; they rise in
the highest thought extant at the time of their origin;
the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it.
It grows through a long series of generations into the
heart and habits of the people; and so long as no
disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the idea at the
centre of it survives; a healthy, vigorous, natural life
shoots beautifully up out of it. But at last the idea
becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit
petrifies the spirit in the outside ceremonial, while quite
new questions rise among the thinkers, and ideas enter
into new and unexplained relations. The old formula
will not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing;
and habit and superstition cling to the past, and policy
vindicates it, and statecraft upholds it forcibly as
serviceable to order, till, from the combined action of folly,
and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
symbolism becomes at last no better than "a whited
sepulchre full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness."
So it is now. So it was in the era of the Caesars, out of
which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in the form
which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy,
was the deliberate solution which the most powerful
intellects of that day could offer of the questions which
had grown out with the growth of mankind, and on
which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.
Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When
Paganism rose men had not begun to reflect upon
themselves, or the infirmities of their own nature. The
bad man was a bad man--the coward a coward--the
liar a liar--individually hateful and despicable. But in
hating and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks
were satisfied to have felt all that was necessary about
them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came
to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to inquire.
There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist
of the gods. There is the Erinnys as the avenger of
monstrous villanies; a Tartarus where the darkest
criminals suffer eternal tortures. But Tantalus and
Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the
small wickedness of common men offers no analogy.
Moreover, these and other such stories are but curiously
ornamented myths, representing physical phenomena.
But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing
religion. The study of man superseded the study of
nature: a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal
of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
importance the intensity of which made every other
question insignificant. How man could know the good
and yet choose the evil; how God could be all pure and
almighty, and yet evil have broken into his creation,
these were the questions which thenceforth were the
perplexity of every thinker. Whatever difficulty there
might be in discovering how evil came to be, the leaders
of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it--whether
matter was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as
Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally
satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this
world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent
grossness of this impracticable substance. God would
have everything perfect, but the nature of the element
in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose.
Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything
which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and
hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations
crushed, its purity tainted by the passions and
appetites of its companion, the fleshly lusts which waged
perpetual war against it.
Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the
question was how to conquer it, or at least how to set
free the spirit from its control.
The Greek language and the Greek literature spread
behind the march of Alexander: but as his generals
could only make their conquests permanent by largely
accepting the Eastern manner, so philosophy could only
make good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised.
The one pure and holy God whom Plato had painfully
reasoned out for himself had existed from immemorial
time in the traditions of the Jews, while the Persians
who had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence
of an independent evil being now had him to
offer to the Greeks as their account of the difficulties
which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of
struggle, and many hundred thousand folios were the
results of the remarkable fusion which followed. Out
of these elements, united in various proportions, rose
successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the Hellenists,
the Therapeute, those strange Essene communists, with
the innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics.
Finally, the battle was limited to the two great rivals,
under one or other of which the best of the remainder
had ranged themselves m Manicheism and Catholic
Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian, Catholicism
in which the Jewish element most preponderated.
It did not end till the close of the fifth century, and it
ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
victory which either side could claim. The Church
has yet to acknowledge how large a portion of its
enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the mediation
of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let
us trace something of the real bearings of this section
of the world's oriental history, which to so many
moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over
words and straws.
Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength
of evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in matter, so
far it was a conclusion which both Jew and Persian
were ready to accept. The naked Aristotelic view of
it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to
the Hellenistic Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew
forced him to look for a solution of the question which
Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
crept into matter. He could not allow that what God
had created could be of its own nature imperfect. God
made it very good; some other cause had broken in to
spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced the
independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt
at Babylon, into a subordinate spirit; so now, not
questioning the facts of disease, of death, of pain, of
the infirmity of the flesh which the natural strength of
the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them
under the supposition that the first man had deliberately
sinned, and by his sin had brought a curse upon the
whole material earth, and upon all which was fashioned
out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a
garden of delight of its own free accord, loading itself
with fruit and flower, and everything most exquisite
and beautiful. No bird or beast of prey broke the
eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by
the kid, the lion browsed beside the ox, and the
corporeal frame of man, knowing neither decay, nor death,
nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
pure as the pure immortal substance of the unfallen
angels. But with the fatal apple all this fair scene
passed away, and creation as it seemed was hopelessly
and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no matter
how--he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact:
moral evil was brought into the world by the only
creature who was capable of committing it. Sin entered
in, and death by sin; death and disease, storm and
pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned
passions of the wild animals were let loose, and earth
and air became full of carnage; worst of all, maws
animal nature came out in gigantic strength, the carnal
lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatred, rapine, and
murder; and then the law, and with it, of course,
breaches of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam
was infected in the animal change which had passed
over his person, and every child, therefore, thenceforth
naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with
the curse which he had incurred. Every material
organization thenceforward contained in itself the
elements of its own destruction, and the philosophic
conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by
theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who
were infected by disease were said to be bound by
Satan; madness was a "possession" by his spirit, and
the whole creation from Adam till Christ groaned and
travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in
man still made itself felt; but it was a slave when it
ought to command. It might will to obey the higher
law, but the law in the members was over strong for it
and bore it down. This was the body of death which
philosophy detected but could not explain, and from
which Christianity now came forward with its magnificent
promise of deliverance.
The carnal doctrine of the sacraments which they
are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as
fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the
Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block
to Protestants. It was the very essence of Christianity
itself. Unless the body could be purified, the soul
could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning,
soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without
his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the
natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless
organization could begin again from a new original, no
pure material substance could exist at all. He, therefore,
by whom God had first made the world, entered
into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak)
of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue
of His creative energy, a material body grew again of
the substance of his mother, pure of taint and clean as
the first body of the first man when it passed out under
His hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus
wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore
the lost power of mankind. He came to redeem man;
and, therefore, he took a human body, and he kept it
pure through a human life, till the time came when it
could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died,
and then appeared what was the nature of a material
human body when freed from the limitations of sin.
The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible
that it should see corruption. It was real, for the
disciples were allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and
drank with them to assure their senses. But space had
no power over it, nor any of the material obstacles
which limit an ordinary power. He willed and his
body obeyed. He was here, He was there. He was
visible, He was invisible. He was in the midst of his
disciples and they saw Him, and then He was gone,
whither who could tell? At last He passed away to
heaven; but while in heaven, He was still on earth.
His body became the body of His Church on earth, not
in metaphor, but in fact. His very material body, in
which and by which the faithful would be saved. His
flesh and blood were thenceforth to be their food.
They were to eat it as they would eat ordinary meat.
They were to take it into their system, a pure material
substance, to leaven the old natural substance and
assimilate it to itself. As they fed upon it it would
grow into them, and it would become their own real
body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of
death, but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world,
over which death had no power. Circumcision availed
nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a new creature--this
new creature, which the child first put on in baptism,
being born again into Christ of water and the spirit.
In the Eucharist he was fed and sustained and going
on from strength to strength, and ever as the nature of
his body changed, being able to render a more complete
obedience, he would at last pass away to God through
the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present
with him; but because while life lasted some
particles of the old Adam would necessarily cling to
him, the Christian's mortal eye on earth cannot see
Him. Hedged in by "his muddy vesture of decay,"
his eyes, like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are
holden, and only in faith he feels Him. But death,
which till Christ had died had been the last victory of
evil, in virtue of His submission to it, became its own
destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted
particles of the old substance, and there was nothing
needed but that these should be washed away and the
elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed
in immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed
of God.
The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work
compared to which the first creation appears but a
trifling difficulty, what could He be but God? God
Himself! Who but God could have wrested His prize
from a power which half the thinking world believed to
be His coequal and coeternal adversary. He was God.
He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the
second starting point of human growth. He was virgin
born, that no original impurity might infect the substance
which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He
showed in the nature of His person, after His resurrection,
what the material body would have been in all of
us except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding
on it in its purity, the bodies of each of us are
transfigured after its likeness. Here was the secret of the
spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.
Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary
fasts, the penitential scourgings, and life-long austerities
which have been alternately the glory and the reproach
of the mediaeval saints. They would overcome their
animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work of death
in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by
the destruction of the flesh which lay as a veil between
themselves and Him.
And such, I believe, to have been the central idea of
the beautiful creed which, for 1800 years, has tuned the
heart and formed the mind of the noblest of mankind.
From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time
went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging
its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the
common detail of the common life of all of us. Like
the seven lamps before the Throne of God, the seven
mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments
shed over us a never ceasing stream of blessed influence.
First there are the priests, a holy order set
apart and endowed with mysterious power, representing
Christ and administering his gifts. Christ, in his
twelfth year, was presented in the temple, and first
entered on His father's business; and the baptized
child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious
of its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full
knowledge of what it undertakes, and receives again
sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to assist it forward on
its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share its
pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to
consecrate the union. Marriage, which outside the
church only serves to perpetuate the curse and bring
fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made holy
by His presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to
represent His own mystic union with His church.
Even saints cannot live without at times some spot
adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe
and move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants.
Christ did penance forty days in the wilderness, not to
subdue His own flesh, for that which was already perfect
did not need subduing, but to give to penance a cleansing
virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution.
Christ consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us
our baptismal robe of pure unsullied innocence. He
strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us when
we fall. He feeds us with the substance of His own
most precious body. In the person of His minister he
does all this for us, in virtue of that which in His own
person he actually performed when a man living on
this earth. Last of all, when all is drawing to its close
with us, when life is past, when the work is done, and
the dark gate is near, beyond which the garden of an
eternal home is waiting to receive us, His tender care
has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of
death, but its appearance is still terrible; and He will
not leave us without special help at our last need. He
tried the agony of the moment; and He sweetens the
cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made
holy in His last anointing before his passion, and then
all is over. We lie down and seem to decay--to decay
--but not all. Our natural body decays, the last
remains of which we have inherited from Adam, but
the spiritual body, that glorified substance which has
made our life, and is our real body as we are in Christ,
that can never decay, but passes off into the kingdom
which is prepared for it; that other world where there
is no sin, and God is all in all! Such is the Philosophy
of Christianity. It was worn and old when Luther
found it. Our posterity will care less to respect Luther
for rending it in pieces, when it has learnt to despise
the miserable fabric which he stitched together out of
its tatters.
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