The priest is dead for the Protestant world. Luther's inkstand did not
kill the devil, but it killed the priest, at least for us: He is a loss
in many respects to be regretted. He kept alive the spirit of reverence.
He was looked up to as possessing qualities superhuman in their nature,
and so was competent to be the stay of the weak and their defence
against the strong. If one end of religion is to make men happier
in this world as well as in the next, mankind lost a great source of
happiness when the priest was reduced to the common level of humanity,
and became only a minister. Priest, which was presbyter, corresponded
to senator, and was a title to respect and honor. Minister is but the
diminutive of magister, and implies an obligation to render service.
It was promised to the first preachers that in proof of their divine
mission they should have the power of casting out devils and talking in
strange tongues; that they should handle serpents and drink poisons
with impunity; that they should lay hands on the sick and they should
recover. The Roman Church claims some of these powers for its clergy and
its sacred objects to this day. Miracles, it is professed, are wrought
by them, or through them, as in the days of the apostles. Protestantism
proclaims that the age of such occurrences as the apostles witnessed is
past. What does it know about miracles? It knows a great many records of
miracles, but this is a different kind of knowledge.
The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his
eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for his amiable qualities,
but he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still, in
the Roman Church. Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault with, but
it has a very real meaning. “The essential point in the notion of a
priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse
with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us morally,--an
unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity.” He did not mean, of course,
that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend
him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, quite
independent of his personal character, which could act, as it were,
mechanically; that out of him went a virtue, as from the hem of his
Master's raiment, to those with whom his sacred office brought him in
contact.
It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a tangible
personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator between them
and the heavenly powers. Sympathy can do much for the sorrowing, the
suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking directly
through human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the channel of
communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is the privilege
of those who looked and those who still look up to a priesthood. It
has been said, and many who have walked the hospitals or served in the
dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the assertion, that the
Roman Catholics know how to die. The same thing is less confidently to
be said of Protestants. How frequently is the story told of the most
exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how common is it to read in the
lives of the most exemplary Protestant ministers, that they were beset
with doubts and terrors in their last days! The blessing of the viaticum
is unknown to them. Man is essentially an idolater,--that is, in bondage
to his imagination,--for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon
than in the Latin word imago. He wants a visible image to fix his
thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are
to our own time what these were to the ancient Egyptians. He wants a
vicegerent of the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed
on his last journey. Who but such an immediate representative of the
Divinity would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on
the block, “Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel”?
It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize the
American Protestant descendant of the ancient priesthood. The history of
the Congregationalists in New England would show us how this change has
gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall open to all sorts
of purposes, the pulpit come down to the level of the rostrum, and the
clergyman take on the character of a popular lecturer who deals with
every kind of subject, including religion.
Whatever fault we may find with many of their beliefs, we have a right
to be proud of our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers among the clergy. They
were ready to do and to suffer anything for their faith, and a faith
which breeds heroes is better than an unbelief which leaves nothing
worth being a hero for. Only let us be fair, and not defend the creed
of Mohammed because it nurtured brave men and enlightened scholars, or
refrain from condemning polygamy in our admiration of the indomitable
spirit and perseverance of the Pilgrim Fathers of Mormonism, or justify
an inhuman belief, or a cruel or foolish superstition, because it
was once held or acquiesced in by men whose nobility of character we
heartily recognize. The New England clergy can look back to a noble
record, but the pulpit has sometimes required a homily from the pew, and
may sometimes find it worth its while to listen to one even in our own
days.
From the settlement of the country to the present time, the ministers
have furnished the highest type of character to the people among whom
they have lived. They have lost to a considerable extent the position
of leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked upon as
representatives of their congregations, they represent what is best
among those of whom they are the speaking organs. We have a right to
expect them to be models as well as teachers of all that makes the best
citizens for this world and the next, and they have not been, and are
not in these later days unworthy of their high calling. They have worked
hard for small earthly compensation. They have been the most learned men
the country had to show, when learning was a scarce commodity. Called
by their consciences to self-denying labors, living simply, often
half-supported by the toil of their own hands, they have let the light,
such light as shone for them, into the minds of our communities as the
settler's axe let the sunshine into their log-huts and farm-houses.
Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a few
instances will illustrate. Often, as was just said, they toiled like
day-laborers, teasing lean harvests out of their small inclosures of
land, for the New England soil is not one that “laughs when tickled with
a hoe,” but rather one that sulks when appealed to with that persuasive
implement. The father of the eminent Boston physician whose recent loss
is so deeply regretted, the Reverend Pitt Clarke, forty-two years pastor
of the small fold in the town of Norton, Massachusetts, was a typical
example of this union of the two callings, and it would be hard to
find a story of a more wholesome and useful life, within a limited and
isolated circle, than that which the pious care of one of his children
commemorated. Sometimes the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward
of Stratford-on-Avon, in old England, joined the practice of medicine
to the offices of his holy profession. Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of
“The Day of Doom,” and Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard
College, were instances of this twofold service. In politics their
influence has always been felt, and in many cases their drums
ecclesiastic have beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good
purpose, as it ever sounded in the slumbering camp. Samuel Cooper sat
in council with the leaders of the Revolution in Boston. The three
Northampton-born brothers Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted
their voices, and, when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of
liberty. In later days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried politics
into their pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done
in times still more recent.
The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office,
tended, to give the New England clergy of past generations a kind of
aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the
days when class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at
present. Their costume added to the effect of their bodily presence,
as the old portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember the
last of the “fair, white, curly” wigs, as it graced the imposing figure
of the Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can testify.
They were not only learned in the history of the past, but they were
the interpreters of the prophecy, and announced coming events with a
confidence equal to that with which the weather-bureau warns us of a
coming storm. The numbers of the book of Daniel and the visions of the
Revelation were not too hard for them. In the commonplace book of the
Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the following record, made, as
it appears, about the year 1773: “Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon
the downfall of Antichrist, after many things had been said upon the
subject, the Doctor began to warm, and uttered himself after this
manner: 'Tell your children to tell their children that in the year 1866
something notable will happen in the church; tell them the old man says
so.'”
The “old man” came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if we
consider what took place in the decade from 1860 to 1870. In 1864 the
Pope issued the “Syllabus of Errors,” which “must be considered by
Romanists--as an infallible official document, and which arrays the
papacy in open war against modern civilization and civil and religious
freedom.” The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to be the bishop
of bishops, and immediately after this began the decisive movement of
the party known as the “Old Catholics.” In the exact year looked forward
to by the New England prophet, 1866, the evacuation of Rome by the
French and the publication of “Ecce Homo” appear to be the most
remarkable events having Special relation to the religious world.
Perhaps the National Council of the Congregationalists, held at Boston
in 1865, may be reckoned as one of the occurrences which the oracle just
missed.
The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later
period. “In half a century,” said the venerable Dr. Porter of Conway,
New Hampshire, in 1822, “there will be no Pagans, Jews, Mohammedans,
Unitarians, or Methodists.” The half-century has more than elapsed, and
the prediction seems to stand in need of an extension, like many other
prophetic utterances.
The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy-browed old minister of
Medford, that he had expressed his belief that not more than one soul
in two thousand would be saved. Seeing a knot of his parishioners in
debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that they
were questioning which of the Medford people was the elected one, the
population being just two thousand, and that opinion was divided whether
it would be the minister or one of his deacons. The story may or may not
be literally true, but it illustrates the popular belief of those days,
that the clergyman saw a good deal farther into the councils of the
Almighty than his successors could claim the power of doing.
The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied
accomplishments of some of the New England clergy. The face of the
Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon
me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which
makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience of
eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription: “Ezroe
Stiles, 1766. Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth.” Both
were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand-lens before me was
imported, with other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John
Prince of Salem, an earlier student of science in the town since
distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute. Jeremy Belknap holds
an honored place in that unpretending row of local historians. And
in the pages of his “History of New Hampshire” may be found a chapter
contributed in part by the most remarkable man, in many respects,
among all the older clergymen preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer,
botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in state and
national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme
Court of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington
offered it to him. This manifold individual was the minister of
Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts,--the
Reverend Manasseh Cutler. These reminiscences from surrounding objects
came up unexpectedly, of themselves: and have a right here, as showing
how wide is the range of intelligence in the clerical body thus
accidentally represented in a single library making no special
pretensions.
It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added
that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities. Mather
Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences. But these
were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an
outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater perfection than in
old clergymen and old college professors. Dr. Sprague's “Annals of the
American Pulpit” tells many stories of our old ministers as good as Dean
Ramsay's “Scottish Reminiscences.” He has not recorded the following,
which is to be found in Miss Larned's excellent and most interesting
History of Windham County, Connecticut. The Reverend Josiah Dwight was
the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not
old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers.
The “sensational” pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the
drollery of its expressions. A specimen or two may dispose the reader
to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. “If
unconverted men ever got to heaven,” he said, “they would feel as
uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak.” Some of his ministerial
associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called on a visit
of admonition to the offending clergyman. “Mr. Dwight received their
reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his faults, and
promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks
for the brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that they might so hitch
their horses on earth that they should never kick in the stables of
everlasting salvation.'”
It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old
ministers in one's veins. An English bishop proclaimed the fact before
an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say
that he had a son who was a doctor. Very kind that was in the bishop,
and very proud his medical audience must have felt. Perhaps he was not
ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, “the beloved physician,” or even of the
teachings which came from the lips of one who was a carpenter, and the
son of a carpenter. So a New-Englander, even if he were a bishop, need
not be ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor who was a
minister. On the contrary, he has a right to be grateful for a probable
inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a
library where he bumped about among books from the time when he was
hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios. What are
the names of ministers' sons which most readily occur to our memory
as illustrating these advantages? Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens
Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth,
James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were all
ministers' boys. John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the clergyman
after whom he was named. George Ticknor was next door to such a descent,
for his father was a deacon. This is a group which it did not take a
long or a wide search to bring together.
Men such as the ministers who have been described could not fail to
exercise a good deal of authority in the communities to which they
belonged. The effect of the Revolution must have been to create a
tendency to rebel against spiritual dictation. Republicanism levels in
religion as in everything. It might have been expected, therefore, that
soon after civil liberty had been established there would be conflicts
between the traditional, authority of the minister and the claims of
the now free and independent congregation. So it was, in fact, as for
instance in the case which follows, for which the reader is indebted to
Miss Lamed's book, before cited.
The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in the
year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the town of Pomfret, Connecticut.
Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the Windham “Herald,”
in all the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with all the emphasis of
italics and small capitals. Was it not time, he said, for people to look
about them and see whether “such despotism was founded in Scripture, in
reason, in policy, or on the rights of man! A minister, by his vote,
by his single voice, may negative the unanimous vote of the church! Are
ministers composed of finer clay than the rest of mankind, that entitles
them to this preeminence? Does a license to preach transform a man into
a higher order of beings and endow him with a natural quality to govern?
Are the laity an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to
be governed? Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to such
degrading vassalage and abject submission? Reason, common sense, and the
Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that they are all born
free and equal; that every member of a church or Christian congregation
must be on the same footing in respect of church government, and that
the CONSTITUTION, which delegates to one the power to negative the
vote of all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OF THE NATURAL RIGHT OF MANKIND AND
REPUGNANT TO THE WORD OF GOD.”
The Reverend Mr. Welch replied to the lawyer's attack, pronouncing him
to be “destitute of delicacy, decency, good manners, sound judgment,
honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat's-paw, the infamous
tool of a party, a partisan, a political weathercock, and a ragamuffin.”
No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and no
clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses Welch.
The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that last two or
three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels by assertion
of their special dignities or privileges. The public is better bred
than to carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms which political
brawlers would hardly think admissible. The minister of religion is
generally treated with something more than respect; he is allowed to say
undisputed what would be sharply controverted in anybody else. Bishop
Gilbert Haven, of happy memory, had been discussing a religious subject
with a friend who was not convinced by his arguments. “Wait till you
hear me from the pulpit,” he said; “there you cannot answer me.” The
preacher--if I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself
to him--has his hearer's head in chancery, and can administer punishment
ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar,
stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened
to without a word of comment or a look of disapprobation.
One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen
has lately ventured to question whether all his professional brethren
invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been
sharply criticised for so doing. The layman, who sits silent in his
pew, has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of
questioning that which has been addressed to him from the privileged
eminence of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious
teacher. It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote
these words: “I am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient,
and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride) of many of our modern
divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as well
as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage to the
enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to be nothing
but a mere trick.”
So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend
Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the
college yard. But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out
earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those
judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so largely
attributable to the clergy.
Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors.
The old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them
together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that
which was intended by the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic who first uttered
it. Undoubtedly there is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the
medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition
and diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of
divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible,
or at least very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual
efforts of Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal
wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the
given conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world
where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain,
where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where
the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for
being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of
that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often
been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently
repudiated him as a monstrosity.
On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as
well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,--led upward
by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before
his own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to that psalm of
praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of;
and if this “heathen” could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we
need not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshippers among
the crowd of medical “atheists.”
No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial relations
as those to which belong the healers of the body and the headers of the
mind. There can be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them
into hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both having in view
the welfare of their fellow-creatures. But there is a territory always
liable to be differed about between them. There are patients who
never tell their physician the grief which lies at the bottom of their
ailments. He goes through his accustomed routine with them, and thinks
he has all the elements needed for his diagnosis. But he has seen no
deeper into the breast than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than
the wrist. A wise and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient's
bedside,--not with the professional look on his face which suggests
the undertaker and the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a
sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, waiting for the right
moment,--will surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt,
the sorrow, the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the
bodily symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying
soul is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world.
And, on the other hand, there are many nervous and over-sensitive
natures which have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual exercises
until their best confessor would be a sagacious and wholesome-minded
physician.
Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants
that he is subject to what are known to the records of insanity as
hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his ears,
and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to be torn
in pieces, or trodden into the mire. Suppose that his mental conflicts,
after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last reduce him to
a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking his own life, and
debates with himself whether it shall be by knife, halter, or poison,
and after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit
suicide. Is not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as
melancholia? Would not any prudent physician keep such a person under
the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least,
partial mental alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental
condition of Christian in “Pilgrim's Progress,” and its counterpart
has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of
self-destruction, which came so near taking place in the hero of the
allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is,
next to the Bible and the Treatise of “De Imitatione Christi,”
the best-known religious work of Christendom. If Bunyan and his
contemporary, Sydenham, had met in consultation over the case of
Christian at the time when he was meditating self-murder, it is very
possible that there might have been a difference of judgment. The
physician would have one advantage in such a consultation. He would
pretty certainly have received a Christian education, while the
clergyman would probably know next to nothing of the laws or
manifestations of mental or bodily disease. It does not seem as if any
theological student was really prepared for his practical duties until
he had learned something of the effects of bodily derangements, and,
above all, had become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the
wards of an insane asylum.
It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to the
divine in the same light as the divine stands to the physician, so
far as each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to
the other's profession. Many physicians know a great deal more about
religious matters than they do about medicine. They have read the Bible
ten times as much as they ever read any medical author. They have heard
scores of sermons for one medical lecture to which they have listened.
They often hear much better preaching than the average minister, for he
hears himself chiefly, and they hear abler men and a variety of them.
They have now and then been distinguished in theology as well as in
their own profession. The name of Servetus might call up unpleasant
recollections, but that of another medical practitioner may be safely
mentioned. “It was not till the middle of the last century that the
question as to the authorship of the Pentateuch was handled with
anything like a discerning criticism. The first attempt was made by a
layman, whose studies we might have supposed would scarcely have led him
to such an investigation.” This layman was “Astruc, doctor and professor
of medicine in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to
Louis XIV.” The quotation is from the article “Pentateuch” in Smith's
“Dictionary of the Bible,” which, of course, lies on the table of the
least instructed clergyman. The sacred profession has, it is true,
returned the favor by giving the practitioner of medicine Bishop
Berkeley's “Treatise on Tar-water,” and the invaluable prescription of
that “aged clergyman whose sands of life”----but let us be fair, if not
generous, and remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston
the credit of introducing the practice of inoculation into America.
The professions should be cordial allies, but the church-going,
Bible-reading physician ought to know a great deal more of the subjects
included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be
expected to know of medicine. To say, as has been said not long since,
that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with the latter
as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the idea that
wisdom is not an heirloom in the family of the one who says it. What a
set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and be, if, after
a quarter or half a century of their instruction, a person of fair
intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any opinion about the
subjects which they have been teaching, or trying to teach him, so long!
A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not
believe, or only half believe, what he preaches. But pews without heads
in them are a still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the
doubter and reform the profligate. But he cannot produce any change on
pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the more wood he sees as
he looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being
useful. It is natural that in times like the present changes of faith
and of place of worship should be far from infrequent. It is not less
natural that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on
the other, when such changes occur. It even happens occasionally that
the regrets become aggravated into reproaches, rarely from the side
which receives the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is
left. It is quite conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers
itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion
as guilty of a great offence. It is equally natural that a church which
considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the
mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should
regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal
error. But within the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and
it would seem that it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to
another.
So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to
happen a great deal oftener than they do. All the larger bodies of
Christians should be constantly exchanging members. All men are born
with conservative or aggressive tendencies: they belong naturally with
the idol-worshippers or the idol-breakers. Some wear their fathers' old
clothes, and some will have a new suit. One class of men must have their
faith hammered in like a nail, by authority; another class must have
it worked in like a screw, by argument. Members of one of these classes
often find themselves fixed by circumstances in the other. The late
Orestes A. Brownson used to preach at one time to a little handful of
persons, in a small upper room, where some of them got from him their
first lesson about the substitution of reverence for idolatry, in
dealing with the books they hold sacred. But after a time Mr. Brownson
found he had mistaken his church, and went over to the Roman Catholic
establishment, of which he became and remained to his dying day one of
the most stalwart champions. Nature is prolific and ambidextrous. While
this strong convert was trying to carry us back to the ancient faith,
another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was trying just as hard
to provide a new church for the future. One was driving the sheep into
the ancient fold, while the other was taking down the bars that kept
them out of the new pasture. Neither of these powerful men could do the
other's work, and each had to find the task for which he was destined.
The “old gospel ship,” as the Methodist song calls it, carries many who
would steer by the wake of their vessel. But there are many others who
do not trouble themselves to look over the stern, having their eyes
fixed on the light-house in the distance before them. In less figurative
language, there are multitudes of persons who are perfectly contented
with the old formulae of the church with which they and their fathers
before them have been and are connected, for the simple reason that they
fit, like old shoes, because they have been worn so long, and mingled
with these, in the most conservative religious body, are here and there
those who are restless in the fetters of a confession of faith to which
they have pledged themselves without believing in it. This has been true
of the Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two centuries more
or less, unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson, stood alone in
wishing the church were well rid of it. In fact, it has happened to the
present writer to hear the Thirty-nine Articles summarily disposed of
by one of the most zealous members of the American branch of that
communion, in a verb of one syllable, more familiar to the ears of the
forecastle than to those of the vestry.
But on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to meet with persons
among the so-called “liberal” denominations who are uneasy for want of
a more definite ritual and a more formal organization than they find in
their own body. Now, the rector or the minister must be well aware that
there are such cases, and each of them must be aware that there are
individuals under his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by argument, and
who really belong by all their instincts to another communion. It seems
as if a thoroughly honest, straight-collared clergyman would say frankly
to his restless parishioner: “You do not believe the central doctrines
of the church which you are in the habit of attending. You belong
properly to Brother A.'s or Brother B.'s fold, and it will be more manly
and probably more profitable for you to go there than to stay with us.”
And, again, the rolling-collared clergyman might be expected to say to
this or that uneasy listener: “You are longing for a church which will
settle your beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great extent from the
task, to which you seem to be unequal, of working out your own salvation
with fear and trembling. Go over the way to Brother C.'s or Brother
D.'s; your spine is weak, and they will furnish you a back-board which
will keep you straight and make you comfortable.” Patients are not the
property of their physicians, nor parishioners of their ministers.
As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will
adhere to the general belief professed by their fathers. But they do
not lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world
all before them to choose their creed from, like other persons. They are
sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas they are supposed
to have heard preached from their childhood. They cannot defend
themselves, for various good reasons. If they did, one would have to say
he got more preaching than was good for him, and came at last to feel
about sermons and their doctrines as confectioners' children do about
candy. Another would have to own that he got his religious belief, not
from his father, but from his mother. That would account for a great
deal, for the milk in a woman's veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes an
acrid doctrine, as the blood of the motherly cow softens the virulence
of small-pox, so that its mark survives only as the seal of immunity.
Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts
from his great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper.
Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a
sister had displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can
be expected to go thus into the details of his family history, and,
therefore, it is an ill-bred and indecent thing to fling a man's
father's creed in his face, as if he had broken the fifth commandment in
thinking for himself in the light of a new generation. Common delicacy
would prevent him from saying that he did not get his faith from his
father, but from somebody else, perhaps from his grandmother Lois and
his mother Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle cautioned against
total abstinence.
It is always the right, and may sometimes be the duty, of the layman to
call the attention of the clergy to the short-comings and errors, not
only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of which
they are the intellectual and moral product. This is especially true
when the authority of great names is fallen back upon as a defence
of opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld. It may be very
important to show that the champions of this or that set of dogmas, some
of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs, while others retain their
vitality, held certain general notions which vitiated their conclusions.
And in proportion to the eminence of such champions, and the frequency
with which their names are appealed to as a bulwark of any particular
creed or set of doctrines, is it urgent to show into what obliquities or
extravagances or contradictions of thought they have been betrayed.
In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just
and proper to show the agency of the Mathers, father and son, in the
witchcraft delusion. It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf the
common beliefs of their time. It would be an extenuation of their acts
that, not many years before, the great and good magistrate, Sir Matthew
Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of prisoners accused of witchcraft.
To fall back on the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying
our predecessors in foro conscientace: The houses they dwelt in may have
had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their
shelter, at any rate. It is quite another matter when those rotten
timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more,
if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation,
the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave
it if we can. And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a
warning and not as a guide.
Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of
Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay. The “Edwardsian”
theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination
to which he belonged. One or more churches bear his name, and it
is thrown into the scale of theological belief as if it added
great strength to the party which claims him. That he was a man of
extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned,
nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a
proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a
palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it
was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his
conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in
his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted
throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so remarkable
a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his inexorable
syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he presents us a God,
in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, “are
young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers;” when he
gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless
tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for “the
bulk of mankind;” when he cruelly pictures a future in which parents are
to sing hallelujahs of praise as they see their children driven into the
furnace, where they are to lie “roasting” forever,--we have a right to
say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations
and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed
with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached
the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse
of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian
pessimism.
If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some
appear to think, we might expect to see the change showing itself in
catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of relief
from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to read in the
newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy because they
could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines. Whether this be
so or not, it must be owned that the name of Jonathan Edwards does at
this day carry a certain authority with it for many persons, so that
anything he believed gains for them some degree of probability from that
circumstance. It would, therefore, be of much interest to know whether
he was trustworthy in his theological speculations, and whether he ever
changed his belief with reference to any of the great questions above
alluded to.
Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years ago
that a certain M. Babinet, a scientific Frenchman of note, had predicted
a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we live by the
collision with it of a great comet then approaching us, or some such
occurrence. There is no doubt that this prediction produced anxiety and
alarm in many timid persons. It became a very interesting question with
them who this M. Babinet might be. Was he a sound observer, who had made
other observations and predictions which had proved accurate? Or was
he one of those men who are always making blunders for other people to
correct? Is he known to have changed his opinion as to the approaching
disastrous event?
So long as there were any persons made anxious by this prediction, so
long as there was even one who believed that he, and his family, and his
nation, and his race, and the home of mankind, with all its monuments,
were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and instantly shivered into
fragments, it was very desirable to find any evidence that this prophet
of evil was a man who held many extravagant and even monstrous opinions.
Still more satisfactory would it be if it could be shown that he had
reconsidered his predictions, and declared that he could not abide by
his former alarming conclusions. And we should think very ill of any
astronomer who would not rejoice for the sake of his fellow-creatures,
if not for his own, to find the threatening presage invalidated in
either or both of the ways just mentioned, even though he had committed
himself to M. Babinet's dire belief.
But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wiping out of a planet
and its inhabitants to the infinite catastrophe which shall establish
a mighty world of eternal despair? And which is it most desirable for
mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds of the threat of M.
Babinet, or those of the other infinitely more terrible comminations, so
far as they rest on the authority of Jonathan Edwards?
The writer of this paper had been long engaged in the study of
the writings of Edwards, with reference to the essay he had in
contemplation, when, on speaking of the subject to a very distinguished
orthodox divine, this gentleman mentioned the existence of a manuscript
of Edwards which had been held back from the public on account of some
opinions or tendencies it contained, or was suspected of containing
“High Arianism” was the exact expression he used with reference to it.
On relating this fact to an illustrious man of science, whose name
is best known to botanists, but is justly held in great honor by the
orthodox body to which he belongs, it appeared that he, too, had heard
of such a manuscript, and the questionable doctrine associated with it
in his memory was Sabellianism. It was of course proper in the writer of
an essay on Jonathan Edwards to mention the alleged existence of such a
manuscript, with reference to which the same caution seemed to have
been exercised as that which led, the editor of his collected works to
suppress the language Edwards had used about children.
This mention led to a friendly correspondence between the writer and one
of the professors in the theological school at Andover, and finally
to the publication of a brief essay, which, for some reason, had
been withheld from publication for more than a century. Its title is
“Observations concerning the Scripture OEconomy of the Trinity and
Covenant of Redemption. By Jonathan Edwards.” It contains thirty-six
pages and a half, each small page having about two hundred words. The
pages before the reader will be found to average about three hundred
and twenty-five words. An introduction and an appendix by the editor,
Professor Egbert C. Smyth, swell the contents to nearly a hundred pages,
but these additions, and the circumstance that it is bound in boards,
must not lead us to overlook the fact that the little volume is nothing
more than a pamphlet in book's clothing.
A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, dealing with the
arrangements entered into by the three persons of the Trinity, in as
bald and matter-of-fact language and as commercial a spirit as if the
author had been handling the adjustment of a limited partnership
between three retail tradesmen. But, lest a layman's judgment might be
considered insufficient, the treatise was submitted by the writer to
one of the most learned of our theological experts,--the same who once
informed a church dignitary, who had been attempting to define his
theological position, that he was a Eutychian,--a fact which he seems
to have been no more aware of than M. Jourdain was conscious that he
had been speaking prose all his life. The treatise appeared to this
professor anti-trinitarian, not in the direction of Unitarianism,
however, but of Tritheism. Its anthropomorphism affected him like
blasphemy, and the paper produced in him the sense of “great disgust,”
which its whole character might well excite in the unlearned reader.
All this is, however, of little importance, for this is not the work
of Edwards referred to by the present writer in his previous essay. The
tract recently printed as a volume may be the one referred to by Dr.
Bushnell, in 1851, but of this reference by him the writer never heard
until after his own essay was already printed. The manuscript of the
“Observations” was received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us in his
introduction, about fifteen years ago, from the late Reverend William
T. Dwight, D. D., to whom it was bequeathed by his brother, the Reverend
Dr. Sereno E. Dwight.
But the reference of the present writer was to another production of
the great logician, thus spoken of in a quotation from “the accomplished
editor of the Hartford 'Courant,'” to be found in Professor Smyth's
introduction:
“It has long been a matter of private information that Professor Edwards
A. Park, of Andover, had in his possession an published manuscript
of Edwards of considerable extent, perhaps two thirds as long as his
treatise on the will. As few have ever seen the manuscript, its contents
are only known by vague reports.... It is said that it contains a
departure from his published views on the Trinity and a modification
of the view of original sin. One account of it says that the manuscript
leans toward Sabellianism, and that it even approaches Pelagianism.”
It was to this “suppressed” manuscript the present writer referred, and
not to the slender brochure recently given to the public. He is bound,
therefore, to say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be still
in doubt with reference to Edwards's theological views, it would be
necessary to submit this manuscript, and all manuscripts of his which
have been kept private, to their inspection, in print, if possible, so
that all could form their own opinion about it or them.
The whole matter may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in
an eternity of unimaginable horrors for “the bulk of mankind.” His
authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects great
numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Stall: “Je n'y crois
pas, mais je les crains.” This belief is one which it is infinitely
desirable to the human race should be shown to be possibly, probably,
or certainly erroneous. It is, therefore, desirable in the interest
of humanity that any force the argument in its favor may derive from
Edwards's authority should be weakened by showing that he was capable
of writing most unwisely, and if it should be proved that he changed
his opinions, or ran into any “heretical” vagaries, by using these facts
against the validity of his judgment. That he was capable of writing
most unwisely has been sufficiently shown by the recent publication
of his “Observations.” Whether he, anywhere contradicted what were
generally accepted as his theological opinions, or how far he may have
lapsed into heresies, the public will never rest satisfied until it sees
and interprets for itself everything that is open to question which may
be contained in his yet unpublished manuscripts. All this is not in
the least a personal affair with the writer, who, in the course of his
studies of Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from the unimpeachable
sources sufficiently indicated, the reports, which it seems must have
been familiar to many, that there was unpublished matter bearing on
the opinions of the author through whose voluminous works he had been
toiling. And if he rejoiced even to hope that so wise a man as Edwards
has been considered, so good a man as he is recognized to have been,
had, possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased to think of children as
vipers, and of parents as shouting hallelujahs while their lost darlings
were being driven into the flames, where is the theologian who would not
rejoice to hope so with him or who would be willing to tell his wife or
his daughter that he did not?
The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant
communities is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists. The
Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by a
cheerful countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised enjoyment
of earthly comforts, and a short confession of faith. His theory of the
universe is progress; his idea of God is that he is a Father with all
the true paternal attributes, of man that he is destined to come into
harmony with the key-note of divine order, of this earth that it is
a training school for a better sphere of existence. The Christian
pessimist in his most typical manifestation is apt to wear a solemn
aspect, to speak, especially from the pulpit, in the minor key, to
undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to insist on a more extended
list of articles of belief. His theory of the universe recognizes this
corner of it as a moral ruin; his idea of the Creator is that of a
ruler whose pardoning power is subject to the veto of what is called
“justice;” his notion of man is that he is born a natural hater of God
and goodness, and that his natural destiny is eternal misery. The line
dividing these two great classes zigzags its way through the religious
community, sometimes following denominational layers and cleavages,
sometimes going, like a geological fracture, through many different
strata. The natural antagonists of the religious pessimists are the men
of science, especially the evolutionists, and the poets. It was but a
conditioned prophecy, yet we cannot doubt what was in Milton's mind when
he sang, in one of the divinest of his strains, that
“Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.”
And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time enough, after giving
mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of
a hunted animal, “never long at ease,” desponding, despairing, on the
verge of self-murder,--painted it with an originality, a vividness, a
power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of
all time,--kind Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the
inspired ploughman, whose songs have done more to humanize the hard
theology of Scotland than all the rationalistic sermons that were ever
preached. Our own Whittier has done and is doing the same thing, in a
far holier spirit than Burns, for the inherited beliefs of New England
and the country to which New England belongs. Let me sweeten these
closing paragraphs of an essay not meaning to hold a word of bitterness
with a passage or two from the lay-preacher who is listened to by a
larger congregation than any man who speaks from the pulpit. Who will
not hear his words with comfort and rejoicing when he speaks of “that
larger hope which, secretly cherished from the times of Origen and Duns
Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting utterance
in the noblest poem of the age?”
It is Tennyson's “In Memoriam” to which he refers, and from which he
quotes four verses, of which this is the last:
“Behold! we know not anything
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last,--far off,--at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.”
If some are disposed to think that the progress of civilization and the
rapidly growing change of opinion renders unnecessary any further effort
to humanize “the Gospel of dread tidings;” if any believe the doctrines
of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the Westminster divines are so
far obsolete as to require no further handling; if there are any who
thank these subjects have lost their interest for living souls ever
since they themselves have learned to stay at home on Sundays, with
their cakes and ale instead of going to meeting,--not such is Mr.
Whittier's opinion, as we may infer from his recent beautiful poem, “The
Minister's Daughter.” It is not science alone that the old Christian
pessimism has got to struggle with, but the instincts of childhood,
the affections of maternity, the intuitions of poets, the contagious
humanity of the philanthropist,--in short, human nature and the advance
of civilization. The pulpit has long helped the world, and is still one
of the chief defences against the dangers that threaten society, and it
is worthy now, as it always has been in its best representation, of all
love and honor. But many of its professed creeds imperatively demand
revision, and the pews which call for it must be listened to, or the
preacher will by and by find himself speaking to a congregation of
bodiless echoes by and by find himself speaking to a congregation of
bodiless echoes.