our own merits? And how often shall we have to repel that false
accusation? If by this is meant, that we deem our virtues to be
_deserving_ of Heaven, the charge of insanity might as well be laid
against us, as that infinite presumption; but if it is meant that, to a
holy spirit, and to a holy life, to a supreme love for the Right, the
True, the Good, _and to these alone_, God, with a love that is infinite,
has attached something of the blessedness of his own nature;—then we do
hold this as the first and brightest of Truths, the very substance of
the Gospel, the sublimest lesson of the Saviour’s life, shadowed by his
death, only to be authenticated and glorified by his resurrection and
ascension. I know of nothing so deeply sad as to witness the ministers
of Christ appealing for support to the lowest parts of human nature—the
fishers of men casting out their nets, that they may take into the drag
the most selfish passions and fears—bribing over to their side the
terrors and the weaknesses, to which, except through penitence and
restoration, Unitarian Christianity dare not offer peace. Trinitarianism
will not deal so justly and so strictly with sin. We are speaking of its
tendencies; not of the forms it sometimes, nay we will say often,
assumes in the higher and purer order of minds. It is true to the
weaknesses of men; but false to their strength. It seems to many to save
them _in_ their low condition, not _from_ it. It will not meet the soul,
and tell it that there is no substitute for holiness, and that to move
guilt from its punishment would be to move God from his throne. It takes
that guilty soul, and instead of dealing with it truly, cleansing from
sin, and pouring in the spirit of the life of Christ, leans it against
the Atoning Sacrifice, and the Righteousness that cometh by imputation,
an unhallowed and unnatural alliance, to make that glorious virtue an
easy retreat for guilt, and the holy Jesus a “Minister of Sin.”[43]
“They have healed the hurt of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace,
where there is no peace.”[44]
And if we value Unitarianism for what we feel to be the efficacy of its
views in regard to the offices of Christ, we value it even more, for its
views of God, and for the connections it gives us with his spirit. Piety
is the noblest distinction, the richest happiness, the purest fountain
of the soul; and we love, without measure, the faith that nurtures it
most strongly. We feel our affections to be drawn towards one God and
Father with a singleness and intensity, that we believe would be
impossible, if the heart was to be distributed among three objects, or
distracted by a confused conception of a tripersonal God. We boast an
undivided worship, and an undivided Temple, where all the soul’s
devotion centres upon one Father. His spirit was with us when we knew
not the power that was exciting our irrepressible joy; and though He has
led us through his ways of discipline, we knew it was the same hand that
had guided our early steps; He has met our souls when they were abroad
through Nature, and touched them with his breathing Spirit; He has
pursued us into our solitudes, and, in our more solemn moments of
penitence and suffering, He has made us to see light in darkness, mercy
in trial, and to drink of the deepest fountains of life; His compassion
has mercifully cooled the burning shame of our guiltiest confessions,
and saved us through fear and weakness by heavenly hope; His peace has
descended upon all our aspirations, and shielded their feebleness from
blight and death;—and, throughout this varied experience, there was but
one voice speaking to the heart; the pressure of one hand on the pulses
of life; one God revealing himself to the spirits of his children.
Whatever is delightful in the Universe, whatever is pure in earthly joy,
whatever is touching in Jesus, whatever is profoundly peaceful in a holy
spirit, are to us the splendours of one God, the gifts of one Father;
bonds upon the heart, uniting it to one spiritual and everlasting
Friend. We do not profess that our Piety has glowed with the intensity
of these mingling fires, but we feel that there is a power of motive
drawing us to the love of one God, which no other Theology may lay claim
to.
But the “practical importance” of our views of God consists not merely
in that Unity of being, through which all the devotion of the soul is
poured into one central affection; it affects also the unity of his
Character, the moral perfections of the source of Piety. We reject that
faith which represents the moral government of God as a system of
favouritism. We meet with nothing in nature to impeach the Impartiality
of our Heavenly Father. We believe that the same God who sends his sun
and his rain upon the evil and upon the just, is willing to shed the dew
of his blessing upon the hearts of all his children. We rejoice to
overlook the vain and perishable distinctions of time; to believe that
all the human family, partakers of one spirit, meet in the love of the
universal Father; that God in heaven is no respecter of persons; and
that the humblest and most neglected of his children may rise into
hallowed intercourse with the infinite spirit. We protest with a strong
abhorrence against the dreadful views which are given of God’s inability
to forgive, of the Justice of the Father horribly satisfied by the
substitution of the innocent for the sins of the guilty. We profess to
have no hope either in time or in eternity, but in the unclouded
goodness of Him who sitteth on Heaven’s throne and reigneth overall—and
if these things may be, and yet God be good, it is a goodness we do not
understand and cannot calculate upon, and the pillars of our faith are
shaken in all the reliances of futurity. We do not enter now into the
scriptural evidence for or against these doctrines—that will be done in
other parts of this course; our present concern is with the question,
which of these views is the most calculated to nourish piety, to kindle
within us a warm, unselfish, and intelligible love of God. We meet in
the world the children of one Parent, with the same souls, the same
hopes, the same capacities for joy; with the same God to comfort their
sorrows and to guard their happiness; breathing on them the same holy
and inspiring influences; leading them to the same Saviour, and
beckoning them to the same Heaven; and our love for God and our
fellowship with man thus mingle intimately in the same heart and shed
through it the serene and blissful light of a full, radiant, and
unclouded Piety. The spiritual influences of Unitarianism thus lead to a
supreme love and veneration for God by exhibiting the Holiness, the
Forgivingness, and the all-embracing Impartiality of the Divine
Character, without a stain upon their brightness and their purity.
We believe that there is in the spirit of these views a peculiar power
to excite an interest in the souls of our brethren; to give an expansive
spirit of humanity; to make us feel that we are bound by the holiest of
ties; united in the purposes of one Father; children of the same God,
and educating for the same destinies. Wherever we cast our eyes they
fall upon God’s everlasting ones. In the humblest we see the future
immortal; and in the proudest we can see no more. We believe that God
made every living soul that it might become pure, virtuous and blessed;
we believe that his eye of watchful care is never removed from it; we
believe that He never abandons it, that He accompanies it in all its
wanderings, and that he will ultimately lead it by his own awful yet
merciful discipline, in this world or in the next, in safety to
Himself—and we dare not to scorn the spirit which God is tending and
which He purposes ultimately to save.
And with this belief at our hearts, we wonder that there is not more
heroism in the cause of the human soul; we wonder that the noblest of
all philanthropy, that which seeks the realization of Christian states
of character, is so rare among men; that there is so little of a strong
and yearning love drawing us towards sinning and suffering man; that
souls are permitted to slumber and die without an awakening voice; that
our hearts are not stirred within us when we look to the awful and
neglected wastes of human ignorance and sin, and reflect that through
each guilty bosom, and each polluted home there might breathe the purity
and the peace of Christ. We despair of none. We believe that the
guiltiest may be turned from their iniquities and saved. We believe that
God works by human means and expects our aid. We believe that the fire
of heaven is still smouldering, and that a spark might light it into
undying flame; and we are sure that the end of this faith is love
unwearied, which ought to assume more earnest forms of interest for our
nature, and to vent itself in purer efforts for its highest good. Others
may defend themselves by casting the whole burden upon God; may point in
despair to the hopeless condition of man’s heart; wait for fire from
heaven to come down and stir the sinner’s soul; and having thus “looked
upon” the moral sufferer may pass by upon the other side; but _with us_
there is but one duty; to go to him, to pour the spirit of Jesus into
his wounded heart, to lay upon ourselves his burdens, and to toil for
his restitution as a brother immortal. The “practical importance,” then,
of Unitarianism as contrasted with Trinitarianism is in this—that it
tends to penetrate our hearts with a deeper spirit of Christian love; to
give us hope and interest in our nature; to call out the highest efforts
of the spirit of humanity; and to supply us with lofty motive for
emulating the self-sacrifice of Jesus.
We think, further, that in our views of God, of Christ, and of human
nature, we have a peculiar encouragement for the personal virtues, a
peculiar demand for individual holiness. We have already alluded to the
force and distinctness with which we teach that the greatest work of
Christ is in giving inward power, strength of purpose to the soul; and
that there is no salvation except where the purity, the freedom, and the
love of Heaven are growing in the heaven-bound heart; but we also
recognize peculiar claims _upon us_ in the conviction which we hold so
sacred that our righteous Father has created us with a nature capable of
knowing and of doing His Will. Others may cast the odium of human sins
upon human inability, and thus at last throw down their burdens at the
door of their God; but as for _us_, we can only bow our heads in sorrow
and ask the forgiveness of Heaven. We believe that God has united us by
no necessity with sin; we deny altogether the incapacity of man to do
the will of God; we feel that there are energies within us which, if but
called out into the living strife, would overcome all the resistance of
temptation; we hear a deep voice issuing from the soul and witnessed to
by Christ, calling us to holiness and promising us peace;—and with God’s
seal thus set upon our nature, and God’s voice thus calling to the
kindred spirit within, why are we not found farther upon the path of
Christ, and brightening unto the perfect man?
For, alas! there is not only energy and holy motive in this lofty
conviction, there are also the elements of a true and deep humility. If
the glory of our souls is marred it is our own work. If the spirit of
God is quenched within us, we have ourselves extinguished it. If we have
gained but little advancement upon Heaven’s way, we have wasted and
misdirected immortal powers. Elevation of purpose, and true humility of
mind, the humility that looks upwards to Christ and God, and bows in
shame, are thus brought together in the Unitarian’s faith, as they are
by no other form of Christianity. I know it is said, with a strange
blindness, that this doctrine of the incapacity of man to know and to do
the will of God is rejected by Unitarianism because it rebukes our
pride; but no—it suffers man to be a sinner without hurting his pride;
it transfers the disgrace from the individual to the race; and that, on
the other hand, is the humbling picture which represents our sins not of
our inheritance but of our choice, the voluntary agent of evil degrading
a spirit made in the image of God, pouring the burning waters of
corruption into a frail though noble nature, until the crystal vessel is
stained and shattered. “Preach unto me smooth things, and prophesy
deceits,” is the demand of the less spiritual parts of man, and
Trinitarianism is certainly the Preacher whose views of sin fall softly
on enervated souls.
We cannot conclude without alluding, however generally, to the practical
importance of our views of the future life. We believe that the fitness
of the soul for Heaven, its oneness with God and Christ, will form the
measure of its joy; and that the thousand varieties of goodness will
each be consigned to its appropriate place in the allotments of
happiness. We believe that the glory of Heaven will brighten for ever as
the character is perfected under the influences of Heaven, and that to
this growing excellence there is no limit or end. We believe that even
in the future there is discipline for the soul; that even for the
guiltiest there may be processes of redemption; and that the stained
spirit may be cleansed as by fire. We believe that this view of a strict
and graduated retribution exerts a more quickening, personal, realizing
power than that of Eternal torments which no _heart_ believes, which no
man trembles to conceive; where the iniquity which is to be visited with
such an awful punishment becomes a _shifting line_ which every sinner
moves beyond himself; until Heaven itself is profaned, and all its
sacredness violated and encroached upon by those who feel that it would
be infinite injustice to plunge _them_ into an Eternity so unutterably
dreadful, but who have been taught to believe that to escape this Hell
is to be sure of Heaven.
Now our present objection to this doctrine of eternal punishment is the
practical one that it has no moral power. It does not come close enough
to truth and justice to take a hold upon the conscience, and so instead
of binding and constraining, it is inoperative and lax. The fact is, it
is not practically believed. It is too monstrous to be realized. Where,
we ask, are the fruits of this appalling doctrine, which is everywhere
preached? One would suppose that its dreadfulness would keep the tempted
spirit in constant alarm. I know that it occasions misery to the timid,
to the sensitive, to the feeble of nerve, that is just to those who
require the purer and gentler influences of religion to give them trust
in God: but what sinner has it alarmed? what guilty heart has it made
curdle with terror? what seared conscience has been scared from evil by
the shriek of woe coming up from the depths of the everlasting torture?
No; these are not the influences that convert sin. They are not believed
or realized, and yet they displace from the thoughts those definite
views of the future which would have power to move and save the soul.
The righteous allotments with which God will award the joys and sorrows
of the future; the character of the individual mind when it first
appears for judgment; the value of every moment of present time in
assigning us our first station in immortality; the exact righteousness
in which every variety of character shall have its graduated place on
the scale of recompense; the appalling thought of every separate spirit
standing before God just as the last effort of convulsed nature
dismissed it from the body;—the trifler in his levity, the drunkard with
his idiot look, the murderer with the blood-stains on his soul—and the
sainted spirit passing on the breath of prayer from the outer to the
inner Court of God’s presence;—these, the solemn distinctions of that
awful world, are all lost, because of that common Hell into whose abyss
unawed Conscience hurls her fears, and then forgets the infinite
gradations of punishment that still remain to pour dread recompense on
evil at the award of a retributive God.
There are some objections urged against these views of the practical
importance of Unitarianism to which I must now give brief and emphatic
answer.
1. It is said that Unitarianism generates no love to Christ: and the
reason assigned is, that as we reject the primal curse of original sin,
we have not so much to be forgiven, and consequently not equal
obligation to love; for to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth
little. Now in our view forgiveness is of God, in whom Trinitarians find
no forgiveness, and Christ is the image of our Father in Heaven, and we
love _him_ who leads us into that pure and blissful presence, and in
whose face we have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, full
of grace and truth. We love Jesus for what he is to our souls, and not
for the theological fiction, that he took off a disqualification which
our God laid on. We love all holy and good beings for the same reasons,
that they strengthen in our own nature the springs of goodness and
unselfish love, and lift us into fellowship with themselves; and
therefore we love God supremely, _and next to God_, _him_ who through
self-devotion and perfect filial trust preserved the moral lineaments of
Heaven, of a mind harmonized with providence, against the weaknesses and
through the temptations of this humanity, whose tremblings we know so
well, and whose fallings away in ourselves from the higher impulses of
God have taught us the love of veneration for him who made it bear the
likeness of Heaven, and, through its trials and its shrinkings, realized
perfection. The moral estimate that would proportion our love to Christ,
not to his own fitness to inspire love, to the heavenly benevolence that
breathed through his own life and death, but to the selfish measure of
the outward benefits received, can be equalled in the confusion and
impurity of its moral ideas only by another moral judgment pronounced
upon the same occasion—that the guilt of the Jews, when they crucified
Jesus, must be estimated and measured in proportion as Jesus was man or
God. This certainly is quite consistent with the Trinitarian scheme,
that guilt can be contracted unknowingly; but who will set right this
utter ignorance of the primitive ideas of morality? What spectres of the
thirteenth century rise before us when we listen to these conceptions—of
God dying under the hands of his creatures; and of their guilt, by some
process, (not moral, but metaphysical,) becoming infinite because the
sufferer was infinite, though they knew it not, and believed themselves
to be crucifying the man Jesus! It is only further proof that the
Atonement and its allied ideas tends to confuse in the minds that
receive it the fundamental perceptions of Right and Wrong.[45]
2. It is said that Unitarianism leads to infidelity: and the proof
assigned is that those whom Trinitarianism makes sceptics, find with us
ideas of Christ and Christianity with which they have sympathies. We
intercept the minds whom they have driven from Belief; we present our
serene and perfect image of Duty and of God to minds wearied and
perplexed with views of Religion which are felt to be too coarse for
their own nature and therefore infinitely unworthy of the spirit of God;
but because they leave the Church, that Christian Jerusalem, and come to
sit at the feet of Jesus in our humble Bethany, where at least he is
loved purely and for himself;—then this is Infidelity, and we who stay
the wanderer, and retain him within the fold, are called producers of
unbelief. The spirit of Jesus said, “he that is not against us is for
us.” The spirit of Trinitarianism says, “he that is not for us is
against us.” It was said that the spirit of infidelity is the spirit of
this age. I only ask, if this is so, could there be a more practical
condemnation of that system, and of that Church, which sways all the
religious influences of the country; and whose representations of Christ
and of Christianity, the universally prevailing ones, have produced the
religious character of these times? If there is Infidelity in the land,
it is mainly the recoil from Orthodoxy.[46]
3. It is said that Unitarianism encourages the pride of human Reason.
Now I shall answer this very briefly, because any lengthened exposure
would necessarily take the form of sarcasm. Whose Reason is it that we
oppose when we reject Trinitarianism? Trinitarians say that it is the
Reason of God. But how do they know this? Because they are sure that
_they_ know the Mind of God as it is revealed in the Scriptures; and
they are sure that _we_ are in error. Infallibility again! So that to
oppose _their_ interpretation of the Scriptures, is to set up our own
Reason against the Reason of God. Now I ask, in all simplicity, Can they
who say these things have taken the trouble to clear their own ideas? If
there is any pride of Reason, on which side does it lie? They first
identify their own sense of the Scriptures with God’s sense, and then
they charge other men with the pride of Reason, for not bowing down
their minds to God, having first taken it for granted that _their_
Reason and God’s Reason are one and the same. Look again to the
uncertain doctrines which they deduce from the Scriptures by processes
of inference, sometimes technical and sometimes mystical, and say, does
the world afford a more marked exemplification of the pride of human
Reason, than the absolute confidence with which these doubtful
conclusions are received, and not only that, but pressed upon men, as
the exact meaning of God, at the peril of their eternal Salvation? What
do these divines rest upon when they deduce from the Scriptures their
essentials of Christianity? Their own reasonings. And yet they will tell
you, that to differ from _them_, is to oppose your own Reason to the
mind of God. I ask, hereafter in this controversy, Should not this
matter of the pride of human reason be a weapon of attack in our hands,
an accusation against Trinitarians, instead of a charge which Unitarians
are to answer? We have too long, in this and many other matters, stood
upon the defensive.[47]