_Stedfast by Faith._ This is absolutely necessary for resistance to
the Evil Principle. There is no standing out without some firm ground
to stand on: and this Faith alone supplies. By Faith in the Love of
Christ the power of God becomes ours. When the soul is beleaguered by
enemies, weakness on the walls, treachery at the gates, and corruption
in the citadel, then by Faith she says--Lamb of God, slain from the
foundation of the World! thou art my strength! I look to thee for
deliverance! And thus she overcomes. The pollution (_miasma_) of sin
is precipitated by his blood, the power of sin is conquered by his
Spirit. The Apostle says not--stedfast by your own resolutions and
purposes; but--_stedfast by faith_. Nor yet stedfast in your Will, but
_stedfast in the faith_. We are not to be looking to, or brooding over
ourselves, either for accusation or for confidence, or (by a deep yet
too frequent self-delusion) to obtain the latter by making a _merit_
to ourselves of the former. But we are to look to CHRIST and _him
crucified_. The Law _that is very nigh to thee, even in thy heart_;
the Law that condemneth and hath no promise; that stoppeth the guilty
PAST in its swift flight, and maketh it disown its name; the Law will
accuse thee enough. Linger not in the Justice-court, listening to thy
indictment! Loiter not in waiting to hear the Sentence! No! Anticipate
the verdict! _Appeal to Cæsar!_ Haste to the King for a pardon!
Struggle thitherward, though in fetters; and cry aloud, and collect
the whole remaining strength of thy Will in the outcry--_I believe!
Lord! help my unbelief!_ Disclaim all right of property in thy
fetters. Say, that they belong to the _old man_, and that thou dost
but carry them to the Grave, to be buried with their owner! Fix thy
thought on what _Christ_ did, what _Christ_ suffered, what _Christ_
is--as if thou wouldst fill the hollowness of thy Soul with Christ! If
he emptied himself of glory to become sin for thy salvation, must not
thou be emptied of thy sinful Self to become Righteousness in and
through his agony and the effective merits of his Cross? [128] By what
other means, in what other form, is it _possible_ for thee to stand
in the presence of the Holy One? With _what_ mind wouldst thou come
before God, if not with the mind of Him, in whom _alone_ God loveth
the world? With good advice, perhaps, and a little assistance, thou
wouldst rather cleanse and patch up a mind of thy own, and offer it as
thy _admission-right_, thy _qualification_, to Him who _charged his
angels with folly_![129] Oh! take counsel of thy Reason! It will show
thee how impossible it is, that even a world should merit the love of
Eternal Wisdom and all sufficing Beatitude, otherwise than as it is
contained in that all-perfect Idea, in which the Supreme Spirit
contemplateth itself and the plenitude of its infinity--the
Only-Begotten before all ages! _the beloved Son, in whom the Father
is_ indeed _well pleased_!
And as the Mind, so the Body with which it is to be clothed! as the
Indweller, so the House in which it is to be the Abiding-place![130]
There is but one wedding-garment, in which we can sit down at the
marriage-feast of Heaven: and that is the Bridegroom's own gift, when
he gave himself for us that we might live in him and he in us. There
is but one robe of Righteousnes, even the Spiritual Body, formed by
the assimilative power of faith for whoever eateth the flesh of the
Son of Man and drinketh his blood. Did Christ come from Heaven, did
the Son of God leave the glory _which he had with his Father before
the world began_, only to _show_ us a way to life, to _teach_ truths,
to _tell_ us of a resurrection? Or saith he not, I _am_ the way--I
_am_ the truth--I _am_ the Resurrection and the Life?
[128] _God manifested in the flesh_ is Eternity in the form of Time. But
Eternity in relation to Time is the absolute to the conditional, or the
real to the apparent, and Redemption must partake of both;--always
perfected, for it is a _Fiat_ of the Eternal;--continuous, for it is a
process in relation to man; the former, the alone objectively, and
therefore universally, true. That Redemption in an _opus perfectum_, a
finished work, the claim to which is conferred in Baptism; that a
Christian cannot speak or think as if his Redemption by the blood, and
his Justification by the Righteousness of Christ alone, were future or
contingent events, but must both say and think, I _have been_
redeemed, I am justified; lastly, that for as many as are received
into his Church by baptism, Christ has condemned sin in the flesh, has
made it _dead in law_, that is, no longer imputable as _guilt_, has
destroyed the _objective reality_ of sin:--these are truths, which all
the Reformed Churches, Swedish, Danish, Evangelical, (or Lutheran,)
the Reformed (the Calvinistic in mid-Germany, France, and Geneva, so
called,) lastly, the Church of England, and the Church of
Scotland--nay, the best and most learned divines of the Roman Catholic
Church have united in upholding as most certain and necessary articles
of faith, and the effectual preaching of which Luther declares to be
the appropriate criterion, _stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ_. The Church
is standing or falling, according as this doctrine is supported, or
overlooked, or countervened. Nor has the contrary doctrine, according
to which the baptized are yet, each individually, to be called,
converted, and chosen, with all the corollaries from this assumption,
the watching for signs and sensible assurances, "the frames," and "the
states," and "the feelings," and "the sudden conversions," the
contagious fever-boils, of the (most unfitly, so called) Evangelicals,
and Arminian Methodists of the day, been in any age taught or
countenanced by any known and accredited Christian Church, or by any
body and succession of learned divines. On the other hand it has
rarely happened, that the Church has not been troubled by pharisaic
and fanatical individuals, who have sought, by working on the fears
and feelings of the weak and unsteady that celebrity, which they could
not obtain by learning and orthodoxy: and alas! so subtle is the
poison, and so malignant in its operation, that it is almost hopeless
to attempt the cure of any person, once infected, more particularly
when, as most often happens, the patient is a woman. Nor does Luther
in his numerous and admirable discourses on this point, conceal or
palliate the difficulties, which the carnal mind, that works under
many and different disguises, throws in the way to prevent the laying
firm hold of the truth. One most mischievous and very popular
mis-belief must be cleared away in the first instance--the
presumption, I mean, that whatever is not _quite_ simple, and what any
plain body can understand at the first hearing, cannot be of necessary
belief, or among the fundamental articles or essentials of Christian
faith. A docile, child-like mind, a deference to the authority of the
Churches, a presumption of the truth of doctrines that have been
received and taught as true by the whole Church in all times; reliance
on the positive declarations of the Apostle--in short, all the
convictions of the truth of a doctrine that are previous to a perfect
_insight_ into its truth, because these convictions, with the
affections and dispositions accompanying them, are the very means and
conditions of attaining to that insight--and study of, and quiet
meditation on, them, with a gradual growth of spiritual knowledge, and
earnest prayer for its increase; all these, to each and all of which
the young Christian is so repeatedly and fervently exhorted by St.
Paul, are to be superseded, because, forsooth, truths needful for all
men, must be quite simple and easy, and adapted to the capacity of
all, even of the plainest and dullest understanding! What cannot be
poured all at once on a man, can only be supererogatory drops from the
emptied shower-bath of religious instruction! But surely, the more
rational inference would be, that the faith, which is to save the
whole man, must have its roots and justifying grounds in the very
depths of our being. And he who can read the Writings of the Apostles,
John and Paul, without finding in almost every page a confirmation of
this, must have looked at them, as at the sun in an eclipse, through
blackened glasses.
[129] Job. iv. 18.--ED.
[130] St. Paul blends both forms of expression, and asserts the same
doctrine when speaking of the _celestial body_ provided for _the new
man_ in the spiritual flesh and blood, (that is, the informing power
and vivific life of the incarnate Word: for the Blood is the Life, and
the Flesh the Power)--when speaking, I say, of this _celestial body_,
as a _house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens_, yet brought
down to us, made appropriable by faith, and _ours_--he adds, _for in
this earthly house_ (that is, this mortal life, as the inward
principle or energy of our Tabernacle, or outward and sensible body)
_we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which
is from heaven: not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that
mortality might be swallowed up of life_. 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
The four last words of the first verse (_eternal in the heavens_)
compared with the conclusion of v. 2, (_which is from heaven_) present
a coincidence with John iii. 13, "And no man hath ascended up to
heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man, which
is in heaven." [Would not the coincidence be more apparent, if the
words of John had been rendered word for word, even to a disregard of
the English idiom, and with what would be servile and superstitious
fidelity in the translation of a common classic? I can see no reason
why the ουδεις, so frequent in St. John, should not be rendered
literally, _no one_; and there may be a reason why it should. I have
some doubt likewise respecting the omission of the definite articles
τον, του, τω--and a greater, as to the ὁ ων, both in this
place and in John i. 18, being _adequately_ rendered by our _which
is_. What sense some of the Greek Fathers attached to, or inferred
from, St. Paul's _in the Heavens_, the theological student (and to
theologians is this note principally addressed) may find in
Waterland's Letters to a Country Clergyman--a divine, whose judgment
and strong sound sense are as unquestionable as his learning and
orthodoxy. A clergyman in full orders, who has never read the works of
Bull and Waterland, has a duty yet to perform.]
Let it not be objected, that, forgetful of my own professed aversion
to allegorical interpretations, I have, in this note, fallen into "the
fond humour of the mystic divines, and _allegorizers_ of Holy
Writ."[131] There is, believe me, a wide difference between
_symbolical_ and _allegorical_. If I say that the flesh and blood
(_corpus noumenon_) of the Incarnate Word are power and life, I say
likewise that this mysterious power and life are _verily_ and
_actually_ the flesh and blood of Christ. _They_ are the allegorizers,
who turn the 6th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John,--_the
hard saying,--who can hear it?_--after which time many of Christ's
disciples, who had been eye-witnesses of his mighty miracles, who had
heard the sublime morality of his Sermon on the Mount, had glorified
God for the wisdom which they had heard, and had been prepared to
acknowledge, _This is indeed the Christ_,--went back and walked no
more with him!--the hard sayings, which even THE TWELVE were not yet
competent to understand farther than that they were to be spiritually
understood; and which the chief of the Apostles was content to receive
with an implicit and anticipative faith!--_they_, I repeat, are the
allegorizers who moralize these hard sayings, these high words of
mystery, into a hyperbolical metaphor _per catachresin_, which only
means a belief of the doctrine which Paul believed, an obedience to
the law, respecting which Paul _was blameless_, before the voice
called him on the road to Damascus! What every parent, every humane
preceptor, would do when a child had misunderstood a metaphor or
apologue in a literal sense, we all know. But the meek and merciful
Jesus suffered _many_ of HIS disciples to fall off from eternal life,
when, to retain them, he had only to say,--O ye simple-ones! why are
ye offended? My words, indeed, sound strange; but I mean no more than
what you have often and often heard from me before, with delight and
entire acquiescence!--_Credat Judæus! Non ego._ It is sufficient for
me to know that I have used the language of Paul and John, as it was
understood and interpreted by Justin Martyr. Tertullian, Irenæus, and
(if he does not err) by the whole Christian Church then existing.
[131] See Introductory Aphorisms, xxix., p. 19.--ED.