Church. And here the very word is significant. In one sense, as a
separate ethical corporation, the ancients had no Church. Why? Because
Church and State were one; or, if they were two, they were too like the
famous Siamese twins that used to be carried about the country as a
show, two so closely connected that they could no more be torn from one
another and live than the limpet can be separated from the rock to which
it clings. With the peoples of the ancient world the State was the
Church and the Church was the State; the priest was a magistrate and the
magistrate was a priest. This identity of two things, or loose
intercommunion and fusion of two things in modern association so
instinctively kept apart, arose from the common germ out of which both
Church and State grew--viz., as we saw in the previous lecture, the
FAMILY. Every father of a family, in the normal and healthy state of
society, is his own priest as well as his own king. In religion and
morals, as well as in all domestic ordinances, he is absolute and
supreme; and the functions which necessarily belonged to him as supreme
administrator in his own family would, under the influence of family
feelings, naturally be conceded to him when the family grew to a clan,
and the clan to a kingdom. And this is the state of things which we meet
with in the Book of Genesis, long before the promulgation of the Mosaic
law, where we read (xiv. 18) that Melchizedek, _king_ of Salem,
went out to bless Abraham, and he was _priest_ of the Most High
God; the distinction between priest and layman, to which our ears are so
familiar, being in this, as in a thousand other well-known instances,
altogether ignored. Not only in Homer, where we find Agamemnon, the king
of men, performing sacrificial functions without even the presence of a
priest,[14] but in the sober historical age we find the King of Sparta
performing all the public sacrifices--being, in fact, in virtue of
his office, high priest of Jove.[15] So closely indeed was the State
religion identified with the person of the supreme magistrate that, when
the kingship was abolished in Greece, and three principal archons and
seven secondary ones shared his functions, one still retained the title
of βασιλεύς, _king_, and had the supervision, or, as we
would say, supreme episcopacy and overseership of all matters pertaining
to religion.[16] The same thing took place in Rome, where the name of
king was even more odious than in Greece; but nevertheless a _rex
sacrificulus_, or _king-sacrificer_, with his _regina_ or
_queen_, took rank in all the public pontifical dinners above the
_pontifex maximus_ himself. The college of pontiffs in Rome, which
had the supreme direction of all religious matters, was not a board of
priests, but of laymen--or at least of laymen who, without any
qualification but some inaugurating ceremony, might be assumed into the
pontifical college; whence the title of _pontifex maximus_, which
the emperors assumed, was no more of the nature of a usurpation than the
title of _imperator_, which belonged to them as supreme commanders
of the army. Who, then, were the priests, and what need of them, at all
if the laity might legally perform all their functions? The answer is
simple. Both in Greece and Rome there were priests and priestly
families, as the _Eumolpidæ_ in Eleusis, specially dedicated to
the service of certain local gods; but there was no order, class, or
body of persons having the exclusive right to officiate in sacred
matters over the whole community. No doubt the social position of
priests in democratic Greece and monarchical Egypt was extremely
different, but in one respect they were identical: in Athens Church and
State were one as much as in Memphis. In Egypt there was a remarkably
strong body or clan of priests enjoying the highest dignities and
immunities; but there is no proof that they were a caste, in the strict
sense of the word; and their virtues were so far from being
incommunicable that, when the Pharaoh did not happen to be a born
priest, but of the military class, he was obliged to be made a priest
before he could be a king; and when once king he became _ipso
facto_ the high priest of the nation, and took precedence of all
priests in all great public acts of religious ceremonial. It must not be
supposed, however, that, though he was supreme in all sacred matters and
the actual head of the Church, to use our language, he could set
himself, like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for the people, and
imprison or burn devout persons for refusing to acknowledge his
arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred functions in the hands of the
masterful Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was a usurpation tolerated
by a loyal people as their readiest and most effective way of getting
rid of the masterdom of the Roman Pope, which in those days pressed like
an incubus on the European conscience; it was invoking one devil to turn
out another, and was successful, as such operations are wont to be, in a
blundering sort of way. But the worshipful "Sons of the
Sun"--for so they were betitled--on the banks of the
sweet-watered Nile, had no monstrous pretension of this kind, and could
not even have dreamt of it. They did not sit on the throne to reform
religion, but to maintain it. Neither in Egypt nor in Greece in those
days was any such thing known as the rights of the individual
conscience; but both kings and people received religious laws and
consuetudes as we do _Magna Charta_; reasonable people, in the long
course of the centuries before Christ, would no more dream of disturbing
the ancestral belief about the gods than they would think of influencing
the settled courses of the stars. It was their very deep-rooted
permanency, in the midst of the startling mutabilities to which human
affairs are liable, that made the fundamental truths of religion so
valuable to their souls; and as to the particular forms under which
these fundamental truths might have been symbolised by venerable
tradition, the people were not given to form themselves into hostile
camps on the ground of any local difference, as we do in Scotland about
ecclesiastical conceits and crotchets; and every devout Egyptian allowed
his neighbour without offence to pay sacred honours to a crocodile or a
cat, convinced that these honours were equally legitimate and equally
beneficial whenever the sacred symbolism peculiar to the worship was
wisely understood. Collisions, therefore, between Church and State, or
between priesthood and kingship, such as signalised the medieval
struggles of the Popes and Emperors, and the convulsions of our infant
Protestant freedom in England, could not take place amongst the ancient
polytheists. A wise Socrates was equally willing with the most
superstitious devotee, when pious gratitude called, to sacrifice a cock
to Æsculapius; and the νόμῳ πόλεως, by the custom of the
State, was the direction which he gave to all who inquired of him by
what rites they ought to worship the gods.[17] Only amongst the Hebrews,
as a people in whose religious habitude polytheistic and monotheistic
tendencies had never come to any decisive settlement of their inherent
antagonism, do I find a record of a very serious collision between
Church and State, after the fashion of our German Henries and
Transalpine Hildebrands in the days of Papal aggression. Scotsmen
familiar with their Bibles will easily see that I allude to the case of
Uzziah, as recorded in 2 Chron. xxvi. 16-20:--"But when he
was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he
transgressed against the Lord his God, and went into the temple of the
Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah the priest
went in after him, and with him fourscore priests of the Lord, that were
valiant men: And they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It
appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, but
to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense:
go out of the sanctuary; for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be
for thine honour from the Lord God. Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a
censer in his hand to burn incense: and while he was wroth with the
priests, the leprosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in
the house of the Lord, from beside the incense altar. And Azariah the
chief priest, and all the priests, looked upon him, and, behold, he was
leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him out from thence; yea,
himself hasted also to go out, because the Lord had smitten him."
So much for Polytheism. That it should have served the spiritual needs
of the human heart so long--five thousand years at least, from the
first Pharaoh that looked down from his Memphian pyramid on the mystic
form of the Sphinx, to the last Roman Emperor that sacrificed white
bulls from Clitumnus at the altar of the Capitoline Jove--is proof
sufficient that, with all its faults, it was made of very serviceable
stuff; but creeds and kingdoms, like individuals, must die. At the
commencement of the eighth century of the Roman Republic heathenism was
doomed in all Romanised Europe, in all Northern Africa, and in Western
Asia, and that for four reasons. The polytheistic religions of the Old
World, created as they were in the infancy of society, no doubt under
the guidance of a healthy instinct of dependence on the ruling power of
the universe, but in the main inspired by the emotions and formulated by
the imagination, without the regulating control of reason, could not
hope to hold their ground permanently in the face of that rich growth of
individual speculation which, from the sixth century before Christ,
spread with such ample ramification from Asiatic and European Greece
over the greater part of the civilised world. If it was a necessity of
human beings at all times to have a religion, it was a no less urgent
problem, as the range of vision enlarged with the process of the ages,
to harmonise their theology with their thinking. And if, on the
intellectual side, the polytheistic religions of that cultivated age
were threatened with a collapse, the sensuous element, always strongly
represented in emotional faiths, was in constant danger of being dragged
down into a disturbing and degrading sensuality. Then, again, when the
Roman Republic, in the age of Augustus Cæsar, had completed the range
of its world-wide conquests, two social forces, unknown in the best ages
of Greece and Rome, viz., wealth and luxury, added their perilous
momentum to the corrupting elements which were already at work in the
bosom of the polytheistic system. And in what a hot-bed of fermenting
putridity these evil leavens had resulted at this period, the pages of
Suetonius and many chapters in St. Paul are witnesses equally credible
and equally tragic. Add to all this the fact that the motley
intermixture of ideas and the inorganic confusion and forced
assimilation of creeds which, accompanied the universal march of Roman
polity, brought about a vague desire for some sort of religious unity
which might run parallel with the political unity under which men lived;
and this desire could be gratified only by placing in the foreground the
great truth of the unity of the Supreme Being, which to vindicate in
pre-Christian ages had been the special mission of the Hebrew race, and
which the Greeks themselves had not indistinctly indicated by placing
the moral government of the world and the issues of peace and war in the
hands of an omnipotent, all-wise, all-beneficent, and absolute Jove.
These and the like considerations will lead the thoughtful student of
history easily to understand how the appearance of such an extraordinary
moral force as Christianity was imperatively called for at the period
when our Saviour, with His divine mission to a fallen race, began His
preaching on the shores of a lonely Galilean lake; and the most
superficial glance at the contents of His preaching, as contrasted with
the heathenism which it replaced, will show how wonderful was the new
start which it gave to the moral life of the world, and how effective
the spur which it applied to the march of the ages--a spur so
potent that we may, without the slightest exaggeration, say that to
Christianity we owe almost exclusively whatever mild agencies tempered
the harshness and sweetened the sourness of crude government in the
Middle Ages; and no less, whatever hopeful elements are at the present
moment working among ourselves to save the British people, at a critical
stage of their social development, from the decadence and the
degradation that overtook the Romans after their great military mission
had been fulfilled. Let us look articulately at the main constituents of
that new leaven wherewith Christianity was equipped to regenerate the
world. These I find to be--
(1.) By asserting in the strongest way the unity of God, it at once cut
the root of the tendency in human nature to create arbitrary objects of
worship according to the lust or fancy of the worshipper, and accustomed
the popular intelligence to a harmonised view of the various forces at
work in the constitution of a world so various and so complex as to a
superficial view readily to appear contradictory and irreconcilable.
(2.) By preaching the unity of God, not as an abstract metaphysical
idea, but as what it really is, a divine fatherhood, Christianity at one
stroke bound all men together as brethren and members of a common
family; and in this way, while in the relation of nation to nation it
substituted apostleships of love for wars of subjugation, in the
relation of class to class it established a sort of spiritual democracy,
in which the implied equality of all men as men gradually led to the
abolition of the abnormal institution of slavery, on which all ancient
society rested.
(3.) Christianity, by starting religion as an independent moral
association altogether separate from the State, at once purified the
sphere of the Church from corrupting elements, and confined the State
within those bounds which the nature of a civic administration
furnishes. Religion in this way was purified and elevated, because in
its nicely segregated sphere no secular considerations of any kind could
interfere to tone down its ideal, direct its current, or lame its
efficiency; while the State, on the other hand, was saved from the folly
of intermeddling with matters which it did not understand, and
professing principles which it did not believe.
(4.) Christianity, by planting itself emphatically at the very first
start, as one may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in direct antagonism
to ritualism, ceremonialism, and every variety of externalism, and
placing the essence of all true religion in regeneration, or, as St.
Paul has it, a new creature--_i.e._ the legitimate practical
dominance of the spiritual and ethical above the sensual and carnal part
of our nature--broke down the middle wall of partition which had so
often divided piety from morality; so that now a man of culture might
consistently give his right hand to religion and his left hand to
philosophy, an attitude which, so long as Homer was all that the Greeks
had for a bible, no devout Hellenist could assume.
(5.) By placing a firm belief in a future life as a guiding prospect in
the foreground, the religion of Christ gave the highest possible value
to human life, and the strongest possible spur to perseverance in a
virtuous career.
(6.) By appealing directly to the individual conscience, and making
religion a matter of personal concern and of moral conviction, it raised
the value of each individual as a responsible moral agent, and placed
the dignity of every man as a social monad on the firmest possible
pedestal.
(7.) By making love its chief motive power, it supplied both the steam
and the oil of the social machine with a continuity of moral force never
dreamt of in any of the ancient societies--a force which no mere
socialistic schemes for organising labour, no boards of health, no
political economy, no mathematical abstractions, no curiosities of
physical science, no democratic suffrages, and no school inspectorships,
though multiplied a thousand times, apart from this divine agency, can
ever hope to achieve.
Thus equipped with a moral armature such as the world had never yet
seen, it might have been expected that the triumph of Christianity over
the ruins of heathenism would have been as complete and as pure from all
admixture of evil as it appears in the great evangelical manifesto
commonly called the Sermon on the Mount. But it was not to be so; nor,
indeed, created as human nature is, could possibly be. The miraculous
virtue of the seed could not change the nature of the soil, and the
sweet new wine put into old bottles could not fail to catch a taint from
the acid incrustations of the original liquor. _Corruptia optimi
pessima_ is the great lesson which history everywhere teaches, and
nowhere with a more tragic impressiveness than in the history of the
Christian Church. What a rank crop of old wives' fables, endless
genealogies, ceremonial observances, worship of the letter, voluntary
humilities, and disputations of science, falsely so called, started into
fretful array before the spiritual swordsmanship of St. Paul, no reader
of the grandest correspondence in the world need be told; but it was not
so much from Jewish drivel, Attic subtlety, or Corinthian sensualism,
that the corrupting forces were to proceed which in the post-Apostolic
age insinuated themselves like a poison into the pure blood of the
Church. It is from within that, in moral matters, our great danger
flows: if the kingdom of heaven is there, the kingdom of hell is there
no less distinctly. The doctrine of Aristotle, and the teaching of
history that ALL EXTREMES ARE WRONG, is ever and ever repeated to
passion-spurred mortals, and ever and ever forgotten. In the green
ardour of our worship we make an idol of our virtue; the strong lines of
the particular excellence which we admire are stretched into a
caricature; our sublime, severed from all root of soundness, reels over
into the ridiculous; we revel and riot and get into an intoxicated
excitement with the fruit of our own fancy; and work ourselves from one
stage of inflammation to another, till, as our great dramatist says,
"Goodness, grown to a pleurisy,
Dies of its own too much."
The excess into which Christianity at its first start most naturally
fell was ultra-spiritualism, asceticism, or by whatever name we may
choose to characterise that high-flying system in morals which, not
content with the regulation and subordination, aims at the violent
subjugation and, as much as may be, the total suppression of the
physical element in man. How near this abuse lay is evident, not only
from the general tendency of every man to make an idol of his
distinctive virtue, and of every sect to delight in the exaggeration of
its most characteristic feature, but there are not a few passages of the
New Testament which plainly show that the masculine Christianity of St.
Paul had not more occasion to protest against those Greek libertines who
turned the grace of God into licentiousness, than against those
offshoots of the Jewish Essenes who professed a self-imposed arbitrary
religiosity (Col. ii. 18, 23), even forbidding to marry and commanding
to abstain from meats (I Tim. iv. 3).[18] There is, indeed, something
very seductive in these attempts to acquire a superhuman virtue, whether
they be made by a poet casting off the vulgar bonds that bind him to his
fellows, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may feed upon sun-dews and
get drunk on transcendental imaginations, or by a religious person, that
he may devote himself to spiritual exercises, free from the disturbing
influence of earthly passions. Such a renunciation of the flesh
gratifies his pride, and has, in fact, the aspect of a heroic virtue in
a special line; while, at the same time, it is with some persons more
convenient, inasmuch as when the resolution is once formed and a decided
start made, it is always easier to abstain than to be moderate.
Nevertheless, all such ambitious schemes to ignore the body and to cut
short the natural rights of our physical nature must fail. It never can
be the virtue of a man to wish to be more than man; and every religion
which sets a stamp of special approval on superhuman, and therefore
unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of separation between the gospel which it
preaches and the world which it should convert. In fact, it rather gives
up the world in despair, and institutes an artificial school for the
practice of certain select virtues, which only a few will practise, and
which, when practised, can only make those few unfit for the social
position which Providence meant them to occupy.
The second excess into which Christianity, under the action of frail
human nature, easily ran was intolerance. This intolerance, as in the
previous case, is only a virtue run to seed; for, as all asceticism is
merely a misapplication or an exaggeration of the virtue of self-denial
and self-control, so all intolerance, or defect of kindly regard to the
contrary in opinion or conduct, is merely a crude or an impolitic
extension of the imperative ought which lies at the root of all moral
truth, and specially of all monotheistic religions. There is, indeed, a
certain intolerance in truth which will not allow it to hold parley with
error; and every new religion with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a
divine mission, is necessarily aggressive: it delights to pluck the
beard of ancestral authority, and marches right into the presence of
hoary absurdity and consecrated stupidity. No doubt there is a boundary
here which the divine wisdom of the Son of God pointed at emphatically
enough when he was asked to bring down fire from heaven on those who
taught or did otherwise; but the evil spirit of self-importance which
prompted this request was too deeply engrained in human nature to be
eradicated by a single warning of the great teacher. This spirit of
arrogant individualism asserted itself at an early period in the
disorderly Corinthian Church very much in the same way as it does
amongst ourselves, specially in Scotland, at the present moment--viz.
by the multiplication of sects, the exaggeration of petty distinctions,
and the fomenting of petty rivalries,--"Now this I say, that every one
of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I
of Christ" (I Cor. i. 12),--a spirit which the apostle most strongly
denounces as proceeding manifestly from the overrated importance of
some secondary specialty, or some accessory condition, of the body of
believers, who thus clubbed themselves into a denomination, and
resulting in an unkindly divergence from the common highway of
evangelic life, and an intolerant desire to override one Christian
brother with the private shibboleth of another, and to stamp him with
the seal of their own conceit. The field in which this intolerant Spirit
displayed itself was of course different, according to the influences at
work at the time; but there is one field which, if church history is to
teach us anything, we are bound to emphasise strongly, that is the field
of dogma; for, if there be any influence that has worked more powerfully
to discredit Christianity than even the immoral lives and selfish maxims
of professing Christians, it is the fixation and glorification and
idol-worship of the dogma. No doubt Christianity is far from being that
system, or rather no system, of vague and cloudy sentiment to which some
persons would reduce it: it has bones, and a firm framework; it stands
upon facts, and is not without doctrines, but it does not make a parade
of doctrines; and the faith which it enjoins, as is manifest from the
definition and historical examples in Hebrews xi., is not an
intellectual faith in the doctrines of a metaphysical theology, but a
living faith in the moral government of the world and a heroic conduct
in life, as the necessary expression of such faith. The mere
intellectual orthodoxy on which the Christian Church has, by the
tradition of centuries, placed such a high value, is, in the apostolical
estimate, plainly worth nothing; for the devils also believe and
tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord himself said in the
striking summation to the Sermon on the Mount, "Not they who call me
_Lord, Lord_, shall enter into the kingdom, but they who do the will of
my Father who is in heaven. By their works, not by their creed, ye shall
know them."[19] Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma has always
been a favourite tendency of the Church, and the besetting sin of the
clergy. With the mass of the people, to swear to a curious creed is
always more easy than to lead a noble life; while to the clerical
intellect it must always give a secret satisfaction to think that the
science of theology, which is the furthest removed from the handling of
the great mass of men, has in their hands assumed a well-defined shape,
of which the articulations are as subtle and as necessary as the steps
of solution in a difficult algebraic problem. The late Baron Bunsen, for
many years Prussian ambassador in London, one of the most large-minded
and large-hearted of Christian men, in the preface to his great _Bibel
werk_, devotes a special chapter to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical
mind leading to false views of Scripture; over and above what he calls
the modern revival of scholastic theology in Germany, he enumerates four
dominant epochs of ecclesiastical life in which this anti-evangelical
tendency has prominently asserted itself. These are--(1) the dogmatism
of the great Church councils in the reigns of Constantine, Theodosius,
and Justinian; (2) the medieval scholasticism of the Western Church; (3)
the Protestant scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
(4) the dogmatism of the Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had this
dogmatic tendency of the Church contented itself with tabulating a
curious scheme of divine mysteries, though it might justly have been
deemed impertinent, and here and there a little presumptuous, yet it
might have been condoned lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in
hours which might have been worse employed; but it could not be content
with this: it passed at once into action, and in this guise prevailed to
deface the fair front of the Church with gashes of more bloody and
barbarous inhumanity than ever marked the altars of the Baals and
Molochs of the most savage heathen superstitions.