_The characteristic Difference between the Discipline of the
Ancient Philosophers and the Dispensation of the Gospel._
By undeceiving, enlarging, and informing the Intellect, Philosophy
sought to purify, and to elevate the Moral Character. Of course, those
alone could receive the latter and incomparably greater benefit, who
by natural capacity and favourable contingencies of fortune were fit
recipients of the former. How small the number, we scarcely need the
evidence of history to assure us. Across the night of Paganism,
Philosophy flitted on, like the lantern-fly of the Tropics, a light to
itself, and an ornament, but alas! no more than an ornament of the
surrounding darkness.
Christianity reversed the order. By means accessible to all, by
inducements operative on all, and by convictions, the grounds and
materials of which all men might find in themselves, her first step
was to cleanse the _heart_. But the benefit did not stop here. In
preventing the rank vapours that steam up from the corrupt _heart_,
Christianity restores the _intellect_ likewise to its natural
clearness. By relieving the mind from the distractions and
importunities of the unruly passions, she improves the _quality_ of
the Understanding: while at the same time she presents for its
contemplations, objects so great and so bright as cannot but enlarge
the organ, by which they are contemplated. The fears, the hopes, the
remembrances, the anticipations, the inward and outward Experience,
the belief and the Faith, of a Christian, form of themselves a
philosophy and a Sum of Knowledge, which a life spent in the Grove of
Academus, or the "painted Porch," could not have attained or
collected. The result is contained in the fact of a wide and still
widening CHRISTENDOM.
Yet I dare not say, that the effects have been proportionate to the
divine wisdom of the scheme. Too soon did the Doctors of the Church
forget that the _heart_, the _moral_ nature, was the beginning and the
end; and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its
expansion. This was the true and first apostasy--when in council and
synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative
Systems, and Religion became a Science of Shadows under the name of
Theology, or at best a bare Skeleton of Truth, without life or
interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of
Christians. For these therefore there remained only rites and
ceremonies and spectacles, shows and semblances. Thus among the
learned _the substance of things hoped for_ (Heb. xi. 1.) passed off
into _Notions_; and for the unlearned the Surfaces of things
became[82] Substance. The Christian world was for centuries divided
into the Many, that did not think at all, and the Few who did nothing
but think--both alike _unreflecting_, the one from defect of the
_act_, the other from the absence of an _object_.
[82] _Virium et proprietatum, quæ non nisi de substantibus predicari
possunt, formis superstantibus attributio, est_ SUPERSTITIO.