there _might_ exist any number of persons in the divine Essence, three
thousand as well as three, and that only because Scripture had
revealed no more had Christians fixed upon that number as making up
the divine Unity. And this is so clear a consequence of the principles
of Trinitarian Theology, that the view must be ascribed _to all
Trinitarians_. Scripture, however, though it has only _revealed_
three, has not declared that there are _no more_ persons in the
Godhead—so that it is being wise above what is written to limit the
divine MONARCHY to the ECONOMY of three Persons.
But farther than this it was declared by the Rev. D. James that nature
contained _no evidence_ of One God, not even in the Trinitarian sense
of Oneness, for that many Gods might unite to build the world, as many
men had united to build the Liverpool Custom House. What would the
Architect of that building say to this invasion of the unity of his
designing mind? Mr. James repeatedly informed his audience that he
always appealed to reason! Such is Trinitarianism when it reasons. But
I suppose this view must be considered as a peculiarity of the
individual preacher.
Footnote 512:
Who are the competent Critics, of whom Mr. Byrth speaks as retaining
the text of the three Heavenly Witnesses? The Bishop of Salisbury, I
suppose. If this had been Unitarian Criticism, Mr. Byrth would have
called it _defective_ Scholarship or dishonesty. He can discriminate
in favour of those who err upon his own side. See a curious statement
of the external evidence affecting this text, 1 John v. 7, in the
second volume of Burton’s Theological Works, p. 114, 2nd part.
Footnote 513:
“It is reasonable to expect, that those doctrines, which form the
leading articles of any system, _should be plainly stated in the book_
which professes to make that system known.”—_Wardlaw._
Footnote 514:
“‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ That is, ‘Go ye
therefore into all the world, and teach or disciple all nations,
baptizing them into the profession of faith in, and an obligation to
obey the doctrine taught by Christ, with authority from God the
Father, and confirmed by the Holy Ghost.’”—_Lardner._
Footnote 515:
John x. 34.
Footnote 516:
John xvii. 20, 23.
Footnote 517:
Rom. ix. 5.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LECTURE VIII.
MAN, THE IMAGE OF GOD.
BY REV. HENRY GILES.
“FOR A MAN INDEED OUGHT NOT TO COVER HIS HEAD, FORASMUCH AS HE IS THE
IMAGE AND GLORY OF GOD.”—1 _Cor._ xi. 7.
“AND WHEN HE CAME TO HIMSELF, HE SAID—HOW MANY HIRED SERVANTS OF MY
FATHER’S HAVE BREAD ENOUGH AND TO SPARE, AND I PERISH WITH HUNGER. I
WILL ARISE, AND GO TO MY FATHER, AND WILL SAY UNTO HIM,—FATHER, I
HAVE SINNED AGAINST HEAVEN AND BEFORE THEE, AND AM NO MORE WORTHY TO
BE CALLED THY SON; MAKE ME AS ONE OF THY HIRED SERVANTS.”—_Luke_ xv.
17-19.
We are often told that man was originally created in the image of his
Maker; and, in the same connection, we are told that, in his fall, he
lost it. If this be true, we might expect that Scripture writers, in
alluding to fallen man, would never ascribe to him so holy a
resemblance. Paul, however, does it in one of the texts I have quoted;
and Paul is not alone in this ascription. In an ordinance to Noah,
immediately after the deluge, we find the same truth made the foundation
of a most solemn injunction. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall
his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”[518] Had the
resemblance of God been effaced from the soul of man in the fall of
Adam, there had been in this ordinance neither meaning nor solemnity.
Since, therefore, the sacred writer uses the fact of man’s likeness to
God to stamp deeper guilt on the crime of murder; since, moreover, that
fact is alleged after the narration of the fall,—we are justified by
Scripture in claiming this high and glorious distinction for our
universal nature.
I have quoted the second text, because the principle implied in it is
identical with that which I stand here to maintain, namely, that sin is
not of our nature, but against it; that it is not consistent with it,
but contradictory to it; that to be sinful, is not to be natural, but
unnatural. Sin, properly speaking, is moral delirium; and the progress
towards that last paroxysm which, by revulsion, arouses the soul from
its madness, is eloquently symbolised in the parable from which my
second text is taken. Having tried all that sin could offer him; having
sunk to the very husks of carnal appetites, and vainly sought thus to
satisfy the hunger of an immortal soul, wearied, disappointed, and
disgusted; satiated, but not satisfied, the prodigal arises from his
torpor; he awakens from his wildering dream; the delirium that so long
beset him is dispersed; with a calm and clear brain he finds himself in
open day-light, and discerns the empty and unsubstantial vanities for
which, in a false hope, he spent his labour and his strength, to reap at
last, in the bitterness of a repentant heart, nothing but grief,
tribulation, and anguish.
Sin is not a following of nature, but a violence on it; not conformity,
but contradiction to it. And so, as when returning life beats in the
palsied heart, or the dawn of reason bursts again on the madman’s brain,
the prodigal is said “to come to himself;” when the spirit of moral
renovation opens on him with compunctuous visitings of nature, and
reveals to him a full sense of his condition. In his guilt he was at
variance with all the moral instincts of humanity; and, in the sorrow of
repentance, he needed as much to be at peace with himself as with his
father. It is universally thus. God has established a certain order and
harmony in our nature, appointed to each faculty a place and a purpose;
and, in disturbing this arrangement, we become transgressors. We cannot
sin against God without also sinning against our own souls, for in them
is the primitive revelation of God; and in thus sinning against our own
souls, we may practically resist all the divine attributes of which our
weak faculties are the dim reflection; God’s wisdom in the abuse of our
intellect; his greatness in the loss of our moral dignity; his goodness
in the destruction of our charities; his purity in the corruption of our
hearts. Unitarians are accused of making sin a light matter. We protest
against the justice of the accusation. We hold sin to be the greatest of
evils, and the most dire of miseries. We hold it not as a mere social
impropriety, but we regard it as a dark disloyalty against conscience
and against God. Much suffering, we know, it inflicts on society; but
slight, indeed, is it compared with the ruin and devastation it works in
our own souls. Here, at first, God impressed his image; here, at last,
he fixes his tribunal: it is here his voice was heard in kindness, it is
here it shall be also heard in judgment. God’s government is, like
himself, spiritual. Man rules by outward power, God by inward
inspiration; and it is the peculiarity of the divine legislation that,
in the same individual, it attaches the condemnation to the crime;
forces transgression, to pronounce its own sentence, and to inflict its
own punishment. Human society has set up various bulwarks to guard its
security; human law-givers have accompanied their enactments with
fiercest penalties; and before Draco, and since, millions upon millions
of God’s erring creatures have been offered, a sanguinary sacrifice to
justice: superstition has personified all hideous evil in Satan,—the
mighty sinner of creation,—the minister of eternal vengeance,—the great
executioner of the universe; superstition has spread the limitless
prisons of hell, and filled them with tortures, and lit those flames
which it asserts are kept burning by the breath of an angry God, and are
never to be quenched during his everlasting existence; but we assert,
there is no scorn of society, there is no torture of most cruel laws,
there is no hell of superstition, deep, burning, and eternal as it may
be, that can equal the agonies which man’s own sense of wrong and
degradation heap upon his overwhelmed and sunken spirit. The glory of an
immortal soul is beyond all outward glories; the majesty of empires and
crowns, the splendour of the sun, the beauty of the firmament, the
riches of the universe, are nothing in comparison. We say to those to
whom it is our privilege to minister, though you were stripped of all
that constitute your frail and present happiness; though saddest
reverses became your lot; though God laid his hand heavily upon you and
your family, tore you from that rank and station that now make your
glory; though your children and friends were one by one snatched from
you, until you stood in the world-wilderness like a branchless and a
blasted tree; though all illness of body and grief of mind were
yours,—having an upright soul, it is but a light affliction compared
with a guilty conscience, which could wield over earth a universal
sceptre. The wages of sin is death,—death in the most tremendous meaning
of that tremendous word,—death of purity, death of holy confidence,
death of self-respect, death of inward and outward peace. Sin is misery,
and the worst of miseries,—one that carries with it its own vengeance,
is self-punished and self-cursed. True, we recognize no omnipresent and
invisible tempter; true, we hold no gross and eternal punishment; we
preach no original malediction, and no inherent depravity; we proclaim
no sin which blots out all light and hope around the mercy-seat of God,
and scathes the heart of man with everlasting despair. True, we show you
no maniac penitents, bewildered in the madness of remorse, shrieking on
the death-bed which conscience peoples with furies. We announce no deity
coming from heaven, putting on the frail existence of humanity, and
expiating on the cross the sin which had closed all access to peace. We
cannot, and if we could we would not, freeze your hearts with ideas of
torture, nor appal you with threatenings, nor echo on your ears the
groans that never cease, the weepings, the wailings, the knashing of
teeth, the sighs and hopeless complainings that swell for ever and ever
a thickening smoke of torment. Independently of these things, there are
other considerations more solemn,—more solemn, because more true,—there
is our conscience; there is our peace; there is the dignity of our whole
spiritual nature; there is reverence for duty; there is the power to
enjoy what is pure and beautiful; there is fitness for communion with
God, with all the righteous and the excellent,—these may be lost, or
clouded by sin; and they may be so lost as never fully to be recovered.
We count sin no slight evil, either as to its inward spirit or outward
influence: as I have stated, so we preach. And here, once for all, I
enter my protest against the impeachment which charges us with stripping
guilt of its danger and its awfulness.
I. Human nature, according to the point from which we regard it, has a
good or an evil aspect, each perfectly distinct, and each perfectly
true. The whole truth is then in neither separately, but in both
conjointly. Fixing too intently on either, and carrying our ideas to
extremes, we may, on the one side, flatter human nature above its
merits; or, on the other, be guilty towards it of injustice: on the one
side see in it all possible good, and on the other nothing but
incorrigible evil: on the one side soar into Utopianism, and on the
other descend into Calvinism. The Calvinistic view we hold to be false,
the Utopian impossible. We have no idea of any perfect goodness or
perfect happiness in this world, either possessed or to be attained.
Whilst we pace our way in this earthly pilgrimage, sin and suffering
must more or less track our steps; the prodigal’s confession, and the
publican’s prayer, must still be ours; the most favoured of God’s
children have to meet, and bear their allotted griefs,—to see their
glory grow dim, the desire of their eyes vanish, and to look onward and
backward through the mist of tears. Sufficient of stern realities press
upon us to crush at once the vision of a painless and sinless beatitude.
Physical wants and sufferings, the inevitable condition of our mortal
nature, were there no other, are of themselves equal to the purpose.
While an hospital exists among men, breathing with groans and sickly in
its very look; while a death-bed is found, steeped in the weepings of
affliction; whilst a stone marks and commemorates a spot where the dust
is sacred to affection and to sorrow; the wildest dreamer has enough to
rebuke his enthusiasm, and to cool it into soberness. And extreme or
exaggerated expectations of our nature, are in still stronger
contradiction to our moral constitution than our physical. In every
individual, however humble his grade, and however sluggish his
faculties, there is abundance to make him aware that perfection here is
neither his condition nor his destiny,—numberless desires, passions,
hopes, fears, expectancies; and no one imagines that all his desires are
to be gratified, all his passions fulfilled, all his hopes accomplished,
all his fears removed, all his expectancies realized. Want and wish
pursue their strife to the end. As it is with the individual, so is it
with society: for as society is an aggregate of individual persons,
social character is an aggregate of individual characters. Evils, sins,
and sorrows, must always, we fear, exist, both in the depths and on the
surface of the great community: we look for no period in future time,
when those antagonist passions and rivalries shall be extinct—which
place man into resisting contact to man, when riches, and fame, and
power, shall not be sought for with avidity and strife, and create the
throng of passions which spring from their desire and their abuse: we
look for no period when the strong universally will use their strength
in righteousness and mercy, when the poor and the weak shall cease to be
victims, and have full justice done to them: we dare scarcely hope for a
period when the massive throne of tyranny, whether political or
sacerdotal, should be swept away upon the flood of emancipated
progression; and, with equal fear, we think of the tyrannies of caste
and creed, not less dark or obstinate; and although not entirely in
despair, we look forward with timid anticipation to a time when the war
of opinion shall be changed for Christian peace, and the fierce cry of
bigotry give place to the hymn with which the angels sung our Saviour’s
birth. We see no prospect that men shall lay aside their selfishness,
and act in the spirit of universal charity, or that they shall so curb
it as to harmonize it with the good of others! that they shall become
universally disinterested, forbearing, candid, and generous; that the
proud man will put off his scorn, and the oppressor break or throw away
his sceptre. Moral and social evils will unquestionably be mitigated,
but the sources of them lie too deep for extinction,—were extinction
desirable, which it is not: for these elements of our nature are wrong
only accidentally; while, essentially, they are right. Knowing that an
argument gains nothing by concealing the objections to it, I have thus
far been liberal in admissions: I will make one admission more. I
acknowledge that an over-estimate of the actual condition and prospects
of human nature, as well as their undue depreciation, is likely to have
injurious consequences. One of the worst is this: that, creating vivid
and unreal hopes, they rebound with harsh and cruel disappointments; the
fervour of expectation turns into despair; the glow of generous, but
blasted enthusiasm, cools down into apathy, if it does not wither into
cynicism; exstacy that was too intense to last, and too extravagant to
be well founded, either renounces altogether its early faith, or,
casting away its hope, complains through life in grief and despondency.
Desires, bright and beautiful, are broken, and their light scattered in
the dust. Aspirations, once too big for utterance, turn back to the
bosom that nourished them,—hitherto their palace, now their prison,—and
there waste away in hopeless thinking, or die in the echoes of
unavailing murmurs. Such mistakes are to be lamented, but not to be
scorned; for that suffering is not to be despised which has its
foundation in profound and extensive sympathy. And it is not in the
power of minds more obtuse and slow to measure or conceive the pain of
those who, with a moral imagination that goes out to the very limits of
humanity, and a piercing sensibility that enters into the hidden places
where suffering weeps unnoted, and sin lies down unredeemed, that in the
spirit of unselfish love feels the woe and guilt of a race, as though
they were personal afflictions, it is not easy, I say, to estimate the
pain such men undergo: when some conjuncture of events, which seemed the
dawn of virtue, of liberty, of peace, of brotherhood, turns out a
mockery and a contradiction; when they live to see that their noblest
aspirings were but as the babblings of vanity; that the circumstances of
which they augured most hopefully, proved as empty as shapes of vapour
painted by the rising sun; that changes, of which they prophesied in
most exulting strains, reversed all their calculations. This is no vague
speculation; there have been many instances in fact, and we can imagine
many more. Had Luther been defeated in his attempt for religious
reformation; had Howard departed to his rest with the sorrowful
conviction that he left cells as dark, and prisoners as hopeless, as he
found them; had Wilberforce closed his life in despair of all redemption
for the slave; had Washington fought in vain the fight for independence,
seeing no prospect for his country, but submissively to bear the yoke
for ever; we have no doubt that each would have experienced a more
oppressive anguish than from the keenest of personal afflictions. In
such cases there were, of course, the soundness of conception and wisdom
of execution which ensure success; but in others, it often happens that
the disappointment is not the less bitter because the expectations were
baseless.
Opposed to this scheme is that of rigid Calvinism. By the latter system
the whole nature is described as hopelessly corrupt, and language
affords no colouring which can give shades deep enough for the
theological picture. Minutest analysis is used to prove man such a
being, that when considered you find him to be a compound of fiend and
brute—such a being that you wonder God would allow him to disgrace
existence, to pollute creation, and not annihilate, and blot him out
from the universe, such a being that if correctly described the very
continuance of society becomes a miracle and a marvel. His intellect, we
are told, is utterly and spiritually darkened, his will the slave of
sin, set to work iniquity greedily, his imagination corrupt, his
passions rebellious, his affections perverted, incapable of good in
thought, word, or deed, and completely devoted to evil. Taking this view
as correct, we might suppose the prime use of man’s understanding was to
devise wickedness, of his memory to prolong the thoughts of it, of his
will to form only guilty resolves, and of his passions to riot in all
that is vile and ungodly. We have thus the whole spiritual and moral man
steeped in black and hateful infamy. To sustain these assertions, appeal
is made to experience; and proof is found of entire and universal
depravity in history, laws, and literature. Any conclusion drawn from
these goes but to testify what we are ready to concede, that man is an
imperfect being, and that the evidence of his imperfection is stamped
upon most of his actions and productions. But the testimony is partially
and unjustly quoted. Another estimate of the same evidence would argue
as strongly, and even more so, for the inherent goodness of man. If we
take the instance of human laws it will at once illustrate and confirm
my assertion. If laws prove the existence and universality of crime,
they prove also the existence and universality of the sense of justice,
for laws, so far as they embody general principles, are the expression
of common and collective sentiments. Indirectly, they prove yet more:
for, after all, the great mass of truth and rectitude exists
independently of laws, is such as no law could reach, is in fact such
that without it no laws could have a moment’s force. In the effort to
make good an indictment against human nature, an industry and labour are
expended, as perverse as they are pertinacious; the lowest purlieus of
depravity are raked, the deepest mines of wickedness are worked with a
zeal as ardent as the veriest miser would seek for hidden treasure, the
blackest evils of the worst times are adduced, the pages of history that
are the most darkly stained, are torn out and severed from the context;
and for what purpose is all this? Why, to make the noblest work of God
odious; to vilify that nature which was glorified in the person of our
Lord Jesus Christ. If human nature is so thoroughly depraved and vile,
as so frequently asserted, the scheme of orthodoxy is most improbable,
and a fallen humanity, as it paints humanity, instead of giving
Christianity consistency, renders it the most perplexing of paradoxes.
For if man be thus naturally vile and depraved—corrupted in every
faculty, whence these high counsels in heaven concerning him; whence the
union of three infinite and co-eternal persons to save a wretch, the
extinction of whom would have been mercy to the universe; whence the
counsels of the Father, the incarnation of the Son, and that death of a
God-man on Calvary, at which we are told the angels trembled and
creation stood aghast; along with all, the constant and supernatural
agency of the Holy Spirit? If man be really as worthless and as wicked
as we are often told he is, all this, (with reverence I speak it,) seems
a want of wisdom and a waste of strength. Though it may be considered
over bold I will go a step further. If the one sin of Adam was to work
such complete ruin in all his countless posterity; if it was to be the
source of such an irremediable wickedness, and unrelieved misery, if
notwithstanding the united work of three infinite agents, there was
still to be a bottomless pit and an everlasting smoke of torment, a
black and boundless ocean of guilt and pain, swelled by gloomy streams
ever and ever flowing in from earth, for which infants were sealed in
their birth, to which the lost are consigned in their death—if this be
the lot to which the great mass of our species is destined—of which the
first tear is a symbol, and the last sigh a passport,—if hell still is
more peopled than heaven, then the infinite agencies of redemption might
have been spared, this hopeless and illimitable anguish might have been
extinguished, and the annihilation of our first parents would have been
the greater mercy and the greater salvation.