intend to bring him to when he came down in person, after a long series
of precursors had prepared the way before him, to teach and to do that
which could be entrusted to no mere creature, whether man or angel? The
manifestation of Christ in the history of mankind on the earth will
make known the answer to this question to all intelligent beings when
this history is completed. But this will be only at the day of
universal resurrection and final judgment. Until that day arrives there
can only be a gradual and incomplete disclosure and justification of
the ways of God to men, which are unsearchable and past finding out by
human wisdom. The Eternal Word, who created all things, and directed
all nations on the earth by his providence before he assumed human
nature and died on the cross for their salvation, has not ceased, since
his Incarnation, to carry on his work, or confined his care to a small
number elected out of the mass of mankind. Nature has not been
substantially or totally depraved by the fall, or become the property
of Satan. The Incarnation is not a mere device and contrivance, to
which God was forced to resort because he could not otherwise pardon
the elect, and substitute for the eternal punishment which was due to
them an eternal reward due to Christ, and transferred to them without
any personal merit of congruity or condignity. The plan of God for
salvation through Christ is not a mere segregation of a certain number
of individuals from the world, that they may devote themselves
exclusively to their sanctification by purely interior, spiritual
acts—waiting until death shall release their souls from a bodily
existence which is a mere degradation, and a world which is utterly
accursed and given over to the dominion of the devil. Such ideas are
exaggerations and perversions of Christian doctrine. They necessarily
provoked a reaction and revolt in the minds and hearts of men whenever
they were taught; and there has been, consequently, a perpetual effort,
among Protestants who were not willing to abandon Christianity
altogether, to find some kind of rational religion which can plausibly
assume to be the pure, original Christianity of Christ. But by
eliminating or altering and diminishing the mysteries and supernatural
elements of Christianity, they change its nature and reduce it to
something so ordinary and commonplace that its divinity is lost. The
ideal Christianity becomes a sort of peaceable, orderly, moral,
well-educated society, in which as nearly as possible all men enjoy the
comfortable and respectable mode of life belonging to the gentry of
England, and the poorest class are as well off as the ordinary
inhabitants of a pleasant, old-fashioned New England village. That
there is something attractive about this picture we will not deny. But
we cannot think that the production of a state of merely natural
well-being in society, of commonplace human happiness, even supposing
it founded upon religion, sanctified by piety, and tending toward a
more perfect happiness in the future life, was the real, ultimate end
which our Lord had in view when he founded the church. The old idea of
a millennium which used to prevail among the Puritans of New England
had something in it very beautiful; but it was only a beautiful dream,
never destined to be realized in this world. The philosophical dream of
a golden age, to be attained by progress in science, civilization,
political and social reform, is still more futile. The doleful and
terrible wail of the pessimist philosophers and poets of Germany, which
begins to find an echo over all the civilized world, would be the
outcry of a despair justified by the whole history of mankind, were it
not for the light which faith casts across the gloom, and the solution
of the dark enigma of life which is given by the cross on which Jesus
died, exclaiming, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The
drama of human history is grand and terrible and tragic. It has scenes
and episodes which have a character of quiet, delightful, and joyous
comedy, but it is a tragedy; it has been so from the first, and will be
the same to the end. The Son of God came on the earth in the very
crisis of human history, and his human life was a tragedy, ending in a
sublime triumph, but a triumph won by sorrow, conflict, and conquest.
All that was tragic in previous history culminated in him, and
subsequent history can be nothing else than the last act of the tragedy
hastening to the _dénoûment_, and preparing the way for the second
coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven, with great glory, to
achieve his final triumph. The Apocalypse of St. John, in which all
things that were to come to pass in the last age of the world passed
before his entranced spirit in a series of sublime and awful pictures,
shows that this horoscope is true. What for him was a vaticination is
for us in great part a retrospect, by which it is historically
verified, so far as the scroll of time has unrolled itself, and by
which the similar character of that part which is still in prospect is
surely foreboded.
Christianity is an historical religion. It is the outcome of all
previous history, and its inspired documents alone, in which the
genealogy of its founder is traced back to Adam, and the record of the
origin of the human race preserved, give us authentic history of the
most important facts which underlie all the great events and movements
of the world. This history connects the beginning of human destinies
with the earlier and higher sphere, where the history of the
intelligent creation begins—with those great events, the trial of the
angels, the rebellion of Lucifer, and the commencement of the warfare
whose seat was transferred to the earth by the successful ruse of the
serpent in the temptation of Eve. In the expulsion of our weeping
parents from Eden into the outside world, humanity was led by a counter
strategic movement upon the new battle-field, where Satan was to be
vanquished in fair and open war. All the demons, reinforced by all the
traitors and deserters they could gain from among men, were allowed to
pit themselves against the sons of God and the holy angels, and against
the First-begotten Son himself when he came in the infirmity of human
nature, as the captain of salvation, to become perfect through
sufferings and to lead his brethren by the same arduous road to glory.
Redemption and salvation consist essentially in liberation from the
servitude of Satan; victory in the combat against that mass of false
maxims, evil principles, and wicked men called the world, those low and
vicious propensities called the flesh, and the seducing spirits sent
forth by Satan to draw men into his rebellion against God. Human
society was organized under the law of redemption, in the family, in
the social, and in the political community, in religious communion, in
order to reconstruct fallen humanity; to repair the ruin effected by
the devil; to oppose a barrier against his further aggressions; to
consolidate a perpetual force of resistance and warfare against him;
and to be the instrument of the Son of God, the creator and redeemer of
mankind, in effecting the final subjugation of the rebellion
inaugurated and carried on by Lucifer. The division of nations, the
colonization of the earth, the foundation of states, of industry and
commerce, of art and science, of culture and civilization, is a divine
work. Everything good in humanity is from the Word, the predestined Son
of Man. The Book of Wisdom says that it was the delight of the eternal
wisdom to be with the sons of men, and the early Fathers dilate on what
is expressed in the German word _Menschenfreundlichkeit_, better than
in any equivalent English term, as an attribute of the Logos. That
admirable sentiment of the Latin poet, _Homo sum, et nihil humani
alienum a me puto_, may be most appropriately ascribed to the divine
Person who joined the human nature to his uncreated essence in an
indissoluble marriage. The devil is the author of nothing on the earth
which has real being and life, but only of error and sin with their
logical consequences—that is, of intellectual and moral perversion, of
ruin, decay, and death. His kingdom is a graveyard and a realm of
darkness beneath it. The kingdom of the living is the kingdom of
Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver, who proceeds
from the Father through the Son. The power of Satan on the earth is
gained by the invasion and treasonable surrender of the cities and
fortresses founded by the rightful King of men, and consists in the
influence which he usurps in the affairs of men, in the schism and
heresy by which he breaks the unity of human brotherhood in Christ. The
apostasy, the false religions, the corrupted ethics, the degenerate
institutions of the old heathen world were schisms and heresies against
the primitive revelation and the patriarchal unity of mankind in one
true doctrine, worship, and discipline. The foundation of Judaism was a
measure which the Lord adopted to oppose a bulwark against universal
apostasy, to preserve the treasure of revelation and grace, and to
prepare the way for a more perfect organization of the universal
religion. Without abandoning the other nations, he concentrated his
special providence upon Israel. And even here the history of his own
special kingdom and peculiar people is altogether different from what
our human reason and sentiments would expect and wish for, and
especially so in reference to the epoch when the Messias appeared. We
cannot understand it, unless we recognize the universal law pervading
the divine plan, by which almost unlimited play is given to free-will;
the conflict of the powers of good and evil permitted to run its
course; victory and salvation are achieved by labor, combat, and
suffering; the world and humanity are set apart as a battle-field,
between the Son of God, with his brethren by adoption among angels and
men, on one side, Lucifer, with his army of apostate angels and men, on
the other—a battle-field on which the everlasting destinies of the
universe are decided for eternity.
After this long and circuitous digression we may direct our attention
now on the specific nature of Christianity as an historical religion,
and consider what organization Jesus Christ gave redeemed humanity in
the universal church, how he embodied the absolute, universal religion,
what means he adopted for achieving the work of the moral regeneration
and eternal salvation of mankind.
The work undertaken by the Incarnate Word in person is evidently the
continuation of that which he began through his ministering angels, his
prophets, and his other human agents, and by far the most difficult and
important part of the entire plan of God. Passing over his principal
theandric work of redemption, we must affirm the same with equal
emphasis and certainty of that which is supplementary to it, and by
which it is extended to its term. In assuming human nature the Son of
God assumed all its temporal and eternal relations; he grasped and drew
into himself universal humanity and the whole creation. His first and
direct object was the glorification and beatification of human souls in
God, but his action toward this end drew into its current and impelled
by its energy all things connected with and subordinate to this highest
and purely spiritual sphere of his creative wisdom. The action of
Christ in history after his resurrection is necessarily more complex,
more far-reaching and universal, more manifest and immediate, more
obviously dominant and victorious, more evidently bearing on the final
and eternal consummation of the divine plan in the universe through the
destinies of man and the earth, than it could have been before that
glorious and decisive event. Christianity, as an historical religion,
must have more comprehension in its actual development than in its
inchoate state before Christ. While it remains true that it is
characteristic of the pure and perfect religion taught by the mouth of
its divine Author to lead men to an interior, spiritual life, to the
contemplation and love of God, to a paramount desire and effort for the
salvation of the soul, and to bring this way of union with God in
loving, spiritual brotherhood among men down to the level of the lowly
and the poor in all natural goods, this idea does not require an
exclusion of other and different aspects of the same religion. The
specific good proposed and placed within reach is salvation, and not
science, art, civilization, political order, social well-being,
national development, the natural progress of mankind, the production
of a brilliant series of great men, extraordinary works and events in
the temporal order. The empires and cities, the grand monuments, the
intellectual masterpieces, the entire array of results produced by
human activity, and all the splendor and felicity of the men who in
outward seeming are the most favored and fortunate, are transient; they
return to the nothingness from which they came. Nevertheless, they may
be made tributary to something higher and more durable, and what is
substantial and indestructible in and under these evanescent forms may
survive and reappear, like the mortal part of human nature, by a future
resurrection. There is no reason, therefore, why Christ, the Incarnate
Word, in effecting the regeneration of the human race by means and
instruments which are natural and human, yet not purely natural and
human, or standing alone in their nude and finite essence, should not
take hold of all human things and relations and subject them to his own
special service. There is no reason why he should not have secondary
and subordinate ends indirectly connected with his one principal and
ultimate object. There is no reason why Christianity, though not
identified with and merged in human affairs, should not be in intimate
relations with them all. In fact, there is every kind of reason to the
contrary, and as an historical religion it cannot be regarded in any
other light. It must be in continuity with its own past on the same
lines. The same constructive principles must pervade religion in all
ages. The same law of curvature must be verified in every segment of
the circle, and all the diameters must be equal. Unity is essential to
universality. The superior courses of stone in the building must
correspond to the inferior, and rest upon them and upon the foundation.
Christianity as an historical religion must be of equal dimensions and
similar structure to the substratum furnished by the pre-Christian
universal history, where, so to speak, its sub-cellar, crypts, and
basement are covered, and in great measure buried in inexplorable
obscurity, beneath the walls of its colossal architecture.
When we consider Christianity as a religion in the precise and
restricted sense, and the church as a strictly religious society, we
cannot identify the Christian Church and religion so completely with
Christianity in the wider sense as to confound the central nucleus with
its environment and atmosphere. We must distinguish, accurately and
carefully, those things which are really distinct, though not disunited
and separate from one another. Religion is well defined by Mr.
Baring-Gould as consisting essentially in dogma, worship, and
discipline. The church is its organic embodiment. The absolute and
universal religion must of course throw off what was proper only to a
state of inchoate and imperfect development, and the church must be
freed from what was proper only to a partial and national organic
constitution. This is a doctrinal certitude with an actual verification
in history. It is needless to prove that our Lord never thought of
making Christianity a mere extension of Judaism, and of founding a
universal kingdom which should be an enlargement, co-extensive with the
world, of David’s monarchy, with the institutes of Moses and the
religious ceremonial of Solomon’s temple as the model of its civil and
ecclesiastical polity and its ritual of worship. It is equally
unnecessary to prove that the divine Master thought as little of going
back to the more ancient and simple dispensation of patriarchal
religion. This would have been a regression instead of a progression; a
dwindling and dwarfing of humanity into a second infancy instead of its
expansion into adult proportions, similar to the absurd imagination of
Nicodemus in respect to the process of regeneration. The absolute,
universal religion, by virtue of the law of continuity in growth, must
necessarily retain all that which pertained to the essence and
properties of religion as such—that is, of religion generically and
specifically considered in respect to human nature in a state of
probation; a lapsed condition; and in the way of restoration, through
the redemption with its law of grace, as revealed by God from the
beginning. All pertaining to its integrity and to its accidents, in so
far as any such appurtenance is suited to human nature in all ages and
nations—giving greater perfection, adaptation to its end, and power in
its operation to religion—must also be considered as permanent for a
sufficient reason, viz., that its cause and motive are general and
persistent, though it may undergo modification and be subject to
variation. Natural religion is preserved in revealed religion, the
patriarchal in the Mosaic, and all these in the Christian religion.
Precisely how much has been preserved, how much modified or altered,
and in what way, how much dropped as obsolete in Christianity
considered as an historical religion, must be determined historically.
We know, however, before we examine the historical documents of
Christianity, that, unless God manifests in his actual providence a
determination to derogate from constant and general laws by introducing
an entirely miraculous dispensation, we shall surely find in historical
Christianity certain features absolutely requisite in a human religion.
There are such features or characteristics which in their generic ratio
are known with certainty, prescinding from any information given by the
actual, objective manifestation which Christianity presents in its
history. It must be adapted to human nature—that is, it must be a
religion suitable to a being who is not a pure spirit, or one united to
a body by accidental, extrinsic, and temporary relations, but who is
composed of soul and body in his specific and permanent essence. It
must be adapted to the conditions in which human nature exists in its
earthly stage of progress toward perfection—that is, suitable to men
who are in multifarious relations with one another in the family, in
society, in the state; relations both amicable and hostile, relations
of similarity and of opposition, relations of great complexity and
variability. It must be adapted to the character of the divine Person
from whom it proceeds; as the Son of God and the Son of Man, united
with the Father in one essence by the Holy Spirit; hypostatically
united within his proper personality subsisting in two distinct
natures, by the same Spirit; sanctified in soul and body by this
life-giving Spirit; and by the same Spirit sanctifying, and uniting in
himself to the Godhead, redeemed humanity. It must be adapted to the
temporal and eternal end for which it is intended—that is, suitable for
the instruction, sanctification, unification, temporal and eternal
salvation of all mankind, in all nations and ages; for the work of
regeneration, individual, social, political, intellectual, moral, and
physical, as an absolute, universal, world-conquering power.
In order to meet these requisitions, its spirit and body must be
essentially and indissolubly united; it must be organized in a perfect
and unequal society of universal extension, sovereign independence,
complex and irresistible forces. It must have both divine and human
attributes, and be vivified by the divine Spirit. It must be
inseparably united with its head and throughout its members,
indefectible, immutable, and endowed with the plenitude of graces,
gifts, and powers merited by Jesus Christ for mankind and sufficient
for the production of the highest degrees of human virtue in the
greatest possible variety. It must be supreme, and have all things
subordinated to its own end, controlled by its influence, subservient
to its purposes as instrumentalities of its dynamical action.
As the absolute world-religion, its dogma, worship, and discipline must
vastly transcend the initial revelation, elementary ritual, and
propædeutic order of Judaism. There is a kind of foreshadowing of all
these features of the kingdom of Christ in universal history, and there
are abundant types and prophecies of it in the history and inspired
documents of the patriarchal and Judaic dispensations. We need only to
confront the idea of Christianity, derived _à priori_ from the
consideration of the plan of God manifested in his works and word
before the time of Christ, with the actual, historical Christianity, in
order to give this idea distinctness, and to add the last complement of
certitude to our judgment that it truly represents the reality.
Wherever we find existing as a concrete, historical fact that which
realizes in the fullest and the highest sense the predictions of the
prophets; that which fulfils in the most perfect manner the
anticipations of history; that which is the most worthy of the
stupendous miracles culminating in the resurrection; that which
corresponds in magnitude and grandeur to all the great works of God;
that which gives the most sublime significance to the destiny of man;
that which magnifies in the most wonderful way the power and love of
God and the object of the Incarnation—there we behold, with all the
evidence which moral demonstration can furnish, the genuine, absolute
religion, manifest before our eyes as historical Christianity. Facts
interpret prophecy, confirm and consolidate the conclusions of reason,
determine the sense of much that is ambiguous in the disclosures of
revelation. The test of history is therefore safe and conclusive in
respect to the genuine essence and nature of Christianity.
The application of this test shows that Catholic Christianity, which
alone can claim unbroken, unaltered historical continuity and
universality from the apostolic age, is the genuine and absolute
religion of Christ. Any other species is unknown to history as an
historical religion. The Catholic faith, worship, and discipline
manifest themselves in the church of apostolic succession at the
earliest period in which this church is clearly and distinctly visible
through the medium of historical testimony. There is no resource for
those who call in question the identity of Nicene Christianity with the
apostolic religion, except in the obscurity of the century immediately
following the death of St. John, and in the indistinct, incomplete,
and, as considered separately from the traditional supplement and
commentary, partly ambiguous records, allusions, and testimonies, in
respect to some parts of Christian doctrine, worship, and discipline,
of the New Testament. The nobler class of modern Protestant writers
admit in a general sense the historical continuity of the essence of
Christianity in the Catholic Church, placing their own restrictions on
the definition of that which is essential as distinguished from the
non-essential, as well as from abnormal modifications. Those who are
not of the semi-Catholic school are obliged to seek for some tenable
ground on which to maintain their claim of fellowship in essentials
with the universal church, in a theory of transition from apostolical
to ecclesiastical Christianity during the period lying between the
close of the first and the end of the second centuries. The hinge of
the question is the institution of the episcopate, as a distinct and
superior grade of the Christian presbyterate, with hierarchical
authority. We do not propose to discuss the proofs from Scripture and
the most ancient historical records of the apostolic institution of the
episcopate, and of what is called the apostolic succession of bishops,
as a principal and immutable part of organic Christianity. This
controversy has been exhausted by the able writers of the high-church
school. Professor Fisher presents but little in addition to what has
been urged by the advocates of parity, and fully answered in several
works easily accessible to English readers, though his manner of
presenting his case is such as to make the most of it, and shows both
critical ability and a candid spirit. A rejoinder ought to be minute
and critical like the argument itself. As we have not at present time
and space for this, we prefer to pass it over altogether. Our line of
argument leads us to consider some deeper and more universal and at the
same time more obvious and easily apprehended principles of bringing
the Catholic and Protestant theories of Christianity to an historical
issue.