might easily be made more dark, and without a whit of controversial
exaggeration. But if this be a true idea of Christianity, it is a system
of terror and not of mercy, an anathema and not a blessing, the fiat of
universal wrath and not the words of universal mercy, the proclamation
from an austere and angry Deity and not a remedy for a weak and erring
humanity. Orthodoxy in this scheme, instead of endearing Christ to the
human heart, alienates and removes him from it; instead of making him an
encouragement, renders him a terror; instead of placing him before us as
the impersonation of almighty clemency, through him proclaims an
almighty vindictiveness; places Jesus out of the sphere of human
affections, and wrenches him from the worn and suffering heart of man.
On the orthodox principle, he is out from us, and not of us. He is alone
in his own mysterious nature. Our affections are perplexed, and our
heads are bewildered. To offer our sympathy, or to look for his, would
be the very climax of presumption. He is in no proper sense identified
with us, or allied to us. His example is more an accident than an
essential of his work. The substance of his work, on the orthodox
scheme, might have taken place in the most secret recesses of the
universe; and God would be satisfied, and the elect would be
redeemed.[157]
What, says Unitarianism, are the moral wants of man? Consequently, what
is the mediator he requires?
Religion, we maintain, was made for man, and not man for religion. The
mediator, therefore, which we require, is one who would guide and not
confound our nature; who would ennoble but not perplex it. We would look
for a mediator by whom we should receive the light and truth of God and
heaven to our souls. We need to see the capacities, the duties, and the
destinies of our kind, in one who is perfectly, but yet simply, of
ourselves. Our sorrows, our sufferings, and our darkness, we regard as
but so many reasons why our Redeemer and Saviour should be entirely of
our own kind. We require one who would manifest to all that God is
really interested in us. We require one who would show that we are not
shut out from communion with the infinite, the invisible, and the
future. We require one who would correct our evils, and yet resolve our
doubts. We require one who could sympathize with our weakness. We
require one who would show us of what our nature is capable, and thus
flash upon us the guilt of our deficiencies, or inspire us with the hope
of advancement. We are feeble, and need strength; we are tempted, and
need support. Jesus proves to us that the strength is in us, if we use
it; and that the support is at hand, if we choose to apply it. In our
transgressions, we are but too much inclined to yield to, or justify
ourselves with, a guilty sophistry; but our views of Jesus leave us no
room for such delusion. Whilst Trinitarianism places most of our
religious wants afar off and outside us, Unitarianism fixes them within
us. Whilst Trinitarianism demands a Christ which shall reconcile God to
us, Unitarianism holds a Christ which shall conform us to God:—to us his
word and work is a spirit of life, his word and work to them but dogma
or mystery.
Upon our views, Christ is properly a mediator; on those of orthodoxy, he
can bear no such character: compounded of Deity and humanity, he is
truly of neither. It is said that we have no need of Christ; that, in
fact, he has no purpose in our system; that he might be taken from it
without creating any loss. We maintain the contrary. We maintain that
Christ is our all in all; that he is the impersonation of our religion,
that he is bodily our Christianity. Whilst others principally regard him
in the retrospect, we have him as a present and a living reality. Whilst
others trust him for what he has done, we love him for what he was.
Whilst others make his nature the subject of hard and abstruse dogmas,
we hold it forth as the subject of affectionate contemplation. Whilst
others propose faith, we propose imitation as the greatest virtue. We
look upon him as the Instructor in our moral doubts; the enlightener of
our ignorance, which, in so many cases, press down our hearts respecting
the general course of Providence and our future destiny; of our
ignorance respecting God, and all that belongs to the future, the Past,
and the Invisible.
The Past, yea, and the present also, is filled, we confess, with
difficulties that alarm our fears, and call forth our sorrows. And it is
only when we look to Christ as really and simply human that we have any
tangible consolation, or any solid support. The trials or temptations or
sufferings of a God are not only repugnant to our reasons, but foreign
to our hearts. Such ideas can create no confidence, and therefore can
afford no ground of sympathy—and no ground of hope, of strength, or of
consolation. If one who is a God—were temptation to such a being
possible—overcomes temptation, on what grounds can any other conclude he
can resist it?—If one who is a God resists indignity with quietude and
calmness, on what ground can another make such conduct an example?—If
one who is a God meets agony and death with confident and fearless
mind—knowing that his life is safe in eternal beatitude—on what possible
principles of reason or expectation can this be a consolation or hope to
feeble mortals?—If a God by his own inherent power rise from the dead,
by what logic of faith or intellect are we to conclude _man_ as _man_ is
to live for ever? It is only then upon our principles that I think he
can properly fulfil the offices that pertain to his character as
Mediator, that he can be our Teacher, that he can be our Exemplar, that
he can be the Discloser of our duties and our destinies, that he can be
at the same time a revealer and a revelation, that he can be the
foundation of our hope and the source of our strength:—that he can, I
say, be our Teacher; for what is necessary to the position of a moral
instructor? not merely to be able to announce truth, but to announce it
with living effect. The being who suffered no pain would have no power
in preaching fortitude. Sympathy is necessary to confidence, and
confidence is necessary to moral influence. Christ in his simple
humanity has a power which we could not give to him, supposing he was of
a compound constitution. Without this belief that he was simply and
naturally man, his instructions have small effect, and his actions have
no reality.—Moreover, I assert it is only in this view he can be our
exemplar, I mean the ideal, or representative of what we ought to be, or
of what in a more perfect condition we will be: for it is utterly and
outrageously absurd to propose as the pattern of human conduct or human
hopes, one who had in the same person the might and security of a Deity
with the dangers and the trials of a man: and in truth it is
outrageously absurd to say he could have such dangers and trials at
all,—it would not be a mystery but a mockery:—and, lastly, I contend,
that it is our views—weakly I have expressed them—which bring to the
human spirit most of strength and most of comfort. They give consistency
and sublimity to his communion with God, and to his revealings of
another world. They give immeasurable value to his miracles. They put
the seal of divine confirmation on his resurrection as the pledge of
human immortality. He is then our Instructor in every doubt; our
Consolation in every sorrow; our Strength in the griefs of life, and our
Support in the fears of death. We see him in his own ennobling and
sanctifying human nature, and by his impressive and vital energy sending
out from him the power for its redemption.
The character of God, as revealed in Christ’s teaching, and manifested
by Christ’s life, in the Unitarian faith, is not only discerned with a
clearer light, but commands a more sacred reverence, as well as a more
willing love. He that hath seen me, says the Saviour, hath seen the
Father. Now we believe this expression to be full of profoundest truth,
if we receive it as a moral revelation; but orthodoxy reduces it to a
mystical enigma, and robs it of meaning and of value. We discern God
through Christ as a Father, universal, merciful, good, holy, and
all-powerful. This we collect from the teachings of Christ; we could
never deduce it from the teachings of Calvinism. If we turn to the
teachings of Christ, we hear of a Father impartial and unbounded; if we
turn to the teachings of Calvinism, we read of a God that, in any
benignant sense, is but father to a few, and these few purchased by the
agonies of innocence; if we turn to the teachings of Christ, we are
instructed of a Father who is merciful, and that mercy is proposed to us
as the most perfect object of imitation; if we turn to the teachings of
Calvinism, we are told of a Father who properly cannot be merciful at
all, for the good he gives has been purchased, and is the equivalent of
a price; a Father, I repeat, whose good-will is paid for; the primary
element in whose character, as drawn in many popular creeds and
formularies, is a stern wrath, falsely called justice; the imitation of
which, in the creature, would turn earth into a darker hell than ever
theology visioned. If we turn to the teachings of Christ, we find in
them a Father supremely good, holding towards all his creatures a
benignant aspect; who, when his children ask for bread will not give
them a stone,—who casts with equal hand the shower and the sun-shine;
who rules in the heavens with glory, and in earth with bounty; who hears
the raven’s cry as well as the Seraph’s song. If we turn to Calvinism we
are informed of a Deity who has seen the ruin and the wreck of his own
workmanship, and pronounced a curse over that which he did not choose to
prevent; we are told that all creatures sicken under that original
curse; that earth feels it to her centre; that it spreads a frown over
heaven, and roars with a voice of destruction in the thunder and the
tempest; that living creatures throughout all their countless tribes,
suffer by it; that it pursues man from the first tears of infancy to the
last pang of death. If we turn to the teachings of Jesus, we are taught
that God is most holy; we are placed before that invisible Being who
searches the heart, and sees it in its last recesses. Thus piercing to
the very source of action, Christ makes guilt and holiness inward and
personal, inflicts on the criminal the full penalty, and secures to
rectitude its great reward: covering the one with moral hideousness, and
the other with exceeding beauty. If we turn to the teachings of
Calvinism, sin is contracted by imputation, and righteousness is
acquired by imputation also. The lost endure the penalty of guilt in
their own persons, the elect endure it by substitution, in the person of
another. If we turn to the teachings of Jesus, we have a Father whose
power is infinite as his goodness, in which we trust for the redemption
and perfection of the universe. If we turn to the teachings of
Calvinism, we see God consigning a vast portion of his rational creation
to eternal sin and misery, and therefore, if we would save his
benevolence we are constrained to sacrifice his power. Christ, Saint
Paul declares, is the image of God; but if the Father be the avenger,
and Christ the victim, he is not his image, but his contrast, and then
our souls, instead of ascending to God in love, turn from him, and fix
all their sympathies on Christ. As Unitarians apprehend him, we conceive
him in perfect union with the Father, imaging, with resplendent
sweetness, the attributes of his Father’s character. In the compassion,
in the benevolence, in the purity, and in the miracles of Christ, we
have revealed to us the goodness, the holiness, and the power of God;
upon the calm and gracious countenance of Jesus we may read the glory of
God, and, as in a stainless mirror, behold the scheme of his providence.
Place these views side by side with common experience and human feeling,
and which, I ask, is the most consistent? Who, in a healthy state of
mind, has any compunction because Adam sinned—but who, with his moral
emotions awakened, is not anxious to know what is the duty of man here,
and what his destiny hereafter? By which scheme, I inquire, are these
momentous problems best resolved? Testing these views by the common
experience to which I have appealed, taking its ordinary convictions as
the standard, I may fairly inquire, whether our principles are not
consistent in their hopes, and high and pure in their consolations?
Comparing each with the history and life of Christ, I have no doubt of
what would be the result, if system or dogmatism did not interfere with
our convictions. Regarding Christ as our perfect, immortal, but human
Brother, we have the living evidence that God is our Father, and Heaven
is our Home.—Our views of Christ makes his history of most precious
value to us—his life, his death, his crucifixion and his
resurrection—Christ becomes to us the great interpreter of Providence,
equally of its fears and hopes. He becomes to us the symbol of humanity,
equally of its grief and glory—near his cross we weep over death, and at
his tomb we rejoice in the certainty of life. In Christ crucified, we
see our nature in its earthly humiliation; in Christ glorified, we
behold it in its immortal triumph. As Jesus on the cross sets forth our
sorrow, so Jesus from the tomb sets forth our hope. Identified with
Jesus in the one, we are also identified with him in the other. We
behold “the man,” and in that man we behold the two solemn stages of our
nature, the struggle of affliction and the glory of success.—We see the
man of sorrow and the man of joy—the man of earth, and the man of
heaven—the man of death and the man of immortality. We are made more
assured of that doctrine to which we fly in every painful turn of
life—and in which we seek a deeper and kinder refuge as years and
troubles gather over us. Without this persuasion we feel ourselves
creatures weak and desolate; when our pleasures here have sunk, when our
hopes here have long since died, how much would we, in this wilderness,
desire to lay our heads, as Jacob did, on a cold stone, if like Jacob we
beheld an opened heaven; but how much more sweetly may we look upon the
risen and the living face of Jesus. He was of ourselves. He was
identified with us. I see then in Jesus, not the illustration of an
argument or of a theory. I see in him the embodiment of human goodness,
human affections, and human hopes, and human capacities, and human
destinies. When, especially, I think of human suffering, some necessary
and some blameless,—when I behold the ignorant and the vicious, the
ignorant and the wretched pining away in a crowded solitude,—when I see
the man of weary years and many adversities, seeking at last but some
spot in which to die,—when I see a sickened wretch, tired of existence,
poor, indigent, cold and naked, the victim of almost every want and
grief, toiling through life and shivering into death,—when I see
laborious age, after few enjoyments of either soul or sense, lying at
last on the bed where the weary are at rest, where at last the still
small voice of Christ is more desired than all the logic of
polemics,—when I see multitudes with dead, or dormant, or perverted
energies—benevolent ardour wasted, or most honourable philanthropy
defeated,—when I consider the thousands, and the tens of thousands of
human beings chained to a dark fatality in the destiny of moral and
physical circumstances—the ignorance, the bondage, the cruelties, the
unrevealed wretchedness without a name heaped on the heads of myriads,
generation after generation,—when I think of unspeaking and unspeakable
agonies lurking in every corner of civilized society—hereditary penury,
unavoidable ruin, unforeseen misfortune, the pangs of noble minds
struggling in vain against dependence; the writhings of dying hearts,
concealing their last sighs from watching friends, the stifled laments
of honest virtue cast forth on over-grown cities and populations, where
sufferer after sufferer sink unheard in the noise of indifferent
millions,—when I remember unrewarded toil, fine spirits crushed, and
fair names blighted,—when I see the enjoyment of the worthless and the
prosperity of the vicious, the success of the worst passions, and the
basest plans, the triumph of wickedness over truth and virtue,—when I
reflect seriously and solemnly on the strange sights which this world
has seen—the persecutor on the throne and the martyr at the stake, the
patriot on the scaffold and the tyrant on the bench—the honest man
ruined, and the villain the gainer,—I have before me, I admit, a dark
and startling problem. In the dying Christ I have the difficulties: in
the risen Christ I have their solution. In Christ on the cross I see our
crucified humanity—in Christ risen and ascending I see the same humanity
glorified; at the cross of Jesus my heart would sink, but at his empty
grave my hope is settled and my soul at ease. I go to that vacant tomb,
and there I am shown that the bands of death are loosed, and the gates
of glory are lifted up. Near Jesus on the cross, I have but thick clouds
and darkness; in Jesus risen the shadows are melted, and the gloom is
lost in brightness, and the sun which burst it shines forth more
resplendent—the blackness of the sky breaks forth into light, and the
wrath of the ocean softens into peace, the curtain of mist is folded up,
and a lovely world bursts upon my gaze. When I stand at the cross I have
man imaged in fears, in struggles and in death. I have around me our
nature in its crimes and passions; but when I see the ascending and
glorified Christ, I behold humanity in its most triumphant hopes:—When I
stand over the silent tomb of Jesus, and would weep, as if all beneath
and beyond the skies were hopeless, a light shines out from the
darkness, and throws a halo of peace about the desponding soul. In
Christ crucified, believing him human, simply human, I feel around me
the right of man—in Christ risen, believing him also human, I exult in
unclouded and unsetting light:—near Christ crucified, I tremble with
exceeding fear; near Christ glorified, I am comforted with exceeding
joy—and in each case because I feel he is truly and simply human.
In both parts of his life and history we have opposing aspects of
Providence. But if in his sufferings we have the pillar of cloud, in his
glory we have the pillar of fire; and in this wilderness pilgrimage we
are saddened and solemnized by the one,—enlightened and guided by the
other. Christ crucified and Christ glorified, united in our faith and
feelings, identified with our nature, our history, and our race, opens
views to the Christian’s soul, not only of consolation but of triumph,
that defy expression. It pours light and hope and dignity on universal
destiny and on every individual condition. In analogy with God’s
material creation in its workings, it shows glory arising out of
humiliation, and renovated beauty from apparent destruction—it shows in
man as in nature—the world of grandeur, of purity, and of softness—born
in the throes of chaotic formation; the streams of spring filled with
the year’s rejoicing gushing out of the frozen fountains of winter; the
fresh, and bright, and peaceful morning generated in the midnight storm.
If these views of Christ are seated in our hearts and faith: if we truly
identify ourselves with one as with the other: feeling that in each case
Christ is simply and perfectly our brother,—what can deaden our hope,
and what can sever us from duty? Though friends be absent and enemies be
fierce, and pain wreck our frames and poverty lay bare our dwellings,
and disappointment wait on our struggles, and grief thicken heavily on
our souls, in Christ suffering there is our worst extremity; in Christ
glorified there is that worst extremity redeemed into the fulness of
salvation; in Christ we see personified our entire humanity, except its
sins; in him we behold its subjection and its triumph. View its pains in
his humiliation, and its future prospects in his victory, and what a
glory does it not spread upon our race? Is there a single track of the
past on which it does not rain showers of light—on which it does not
leave the persuasion of immortal and universal existence? By Christ’s
doctrines and his life we are led to the conclusion that no human
existence has been ever spent in vain; that of all the vast ocean of
intelligent beings with which generations have flooded the earth; that
in that vast universe of life, one heart has never panted without a
purpose; that no thought ever started into being, not a throb of misery,
not a solitary charity, not a silent prayer, not an honest effort, not a
fervent wish or desire, not a single good intention, not a single
instance of sacrifice or worth, ever existed to be destroyed, but that
on the contrary they have been transferred to more genial scenes in
another world, and left seeds for better fruits in this. Believing on
Christ the crucified and the glorified, and still regarding him as the
image of God, it is pleasant to dwell equally upon the past and upon the
future; to think of the good and true who suffered here for virtue,
collected hereafter in all the unity of peace, having escaped the
fightings of earth, settled in the joys of heaven. But why confine
ourselves to the excellent and the great? The glory of Christ proclaims
life to all; it attracts to itself whosoever lived or suffered on earth,
all that ever will live or suffer. Into what a glory has Christ then not
entered: go to the most seclusive church-yard: worlds there moulder in
the smallest space; within its range as many sleep as might have peopled
an empire, and in a few steps we may walk over millions. Beneath those
pacings what parents and children, and companions, have mouldered? What
friendships, and hopes, and energies have melted in this simple dust?
But why say a Church-yard? All earth is a grave. The world is sown with
bodies: is futurity as filled with souls? Is this spot on which we
breathe for a moment a mere speck between two eternities of infinite
nothingness? Have the generations as they vanished, sunk into eternal
sleep, so that “_It is finished_,” should be the proper epitaph of all
departed humanity? Christ alone gives the full solution of this awful
problem; and this solution is clear and consolatory, as we feel him to
be of ourselves. He is thus the great type of our death and of our life,
throwing light over the grave, and opening to our faith a growing and
everlasting future,—where all exist, the great and good to more perfect,
and the evil to be redeemed,—and where every stream that flows on to
eternity will bear along with it a fresh burden of joy and beauty. Jesus
the crucified, and Jesus the glorified, of simple but holy humanity, is
the great interpreter of the past and the future, and by him
interpreted, how glorious are the words, all our memories on earth and
our hopes in heaven.
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APPENDIX.