regretted that any system has not been more fruitful in their
production. In any system, we cannot expect that such men should be
abundant, but observation compels us to confess that the Church has
taken more pride in the reputation of her heroes, than in resembling
them. If we are to judge results by her possessions and opportunities
compared with her moral or spiritual achievements, her works of
worldliness far surpass her works of godliness. Her earthly means have
been unbounded, but where are her heavenly trophies? She has nothing in
comparison to her opportunities to produce in justification of her moral
and national stewardship. Wealth she has had even to fulness. Her lines
have fallen in pleasant places; hers have been the green pastures and
hers the still waters; the tenth of the nation’s produce has been
reserved for her altars. Political power has likewise been hers. Her
mitred ministers are amongst the state’s chief senators. Whether it be
seemly or not, that preachers of the crucified should sit in courts of
proud and worldly legislation, we here forbear to discuss; but once
there, the spirit of the crucified, and of the citizen sanctified by
that spirit, might have been nobly manifested; even there, Ministers of
Christ might have done a glorious work. Men whose lives had been
disciplined by severe and various study; men of chastened passions and
solemn meditation; men who had gone through the humanizing duties of
pastoral gradation from the village pulpit to the episcopal throne,
might be thought a happy counterpoise to the hoary worldliness or
youthful rashness of mere temporal Peers; they would rebuke, we might
suppose, the assumptions of aristocracy, and be as the voice of God for
the rights of the poor. Men who proclaimed that gospel which is full of
mercy and compassion, would resist oppression to the last, and denounce
sanguinary laws with the whole force of their authority; men who were
followers of peace would arrest the blood-hand of war, and quell with
all gentle suasion the horrid spirit of destruction; men appointed to be
teachers of the ignorant, and lights to the blind, would be the friends
of universal instruction; men who were the Priests of that God before
whom all are equal, the Apostles of that Jesus who lived and died for
all, would be ever the friends of liberty and brotherhood. But, I may
ask, when have the Bishops, as a body, not been against the people, and
with the wealthy and the noble? When have they been the first to come
forward to denounce long existing, tolerated, but oppressive, abuses?
When have they raised their voice, as Ministers of God, against
Ministers of the Crown, to avert the horrid curse of war? When have they
given their influence for a free and generous education, which should be
full and boundless as the heart of charity? When, rather, have they not
thrown their most inveterate opposition against it? When is it that a
single effort of national liberty or religious has met their cordial
support? To the moment of despair they stood against the Catholic and
the Dissenter, to the last hour they will also resist the Jew. The
defender of the wronged, the pleader for the weak, the opponent of
sanctified prejudices, the enthusiast for human reforms, the advocate
for peace, the apostle of general education, have never in their most
hopeless hour raised their eyes towards the bench of Bishops with any
expectations of support.
With wealth, with influence, with law, and with scholarship, the Church
has done, and is doing no great spiritual work for her country, or for
mankind, proportioned to her means. She makes a show of upholding her
Creeds, but to many, even of her own members, they are but empty sounds
or convenient mockeries. When we look for any permanent impression on
the popular mind, we have yet to ask concerning the Church, what has she
done? Has she Christianized any great tracts of Heathenism? The English
Establishment, as a Church, has exhibited no missionary zeal, and can
show no missionary triumphs. Individuals and bodies that belong to her
communion, have undoubtedly been active in the great movements that
distinguish modern times, but the impulse has been from outside the
Church, and not from within it—from the zeal of the Sectaries, and not
from the Creeds or Constitution of the Church. On the contrary, of those
who never owned the Establishment, you might find proofs of Missionary
zeal from Indus to the Pole, and from Andes to the Alps. But has she
protestantized our own empire? Consult the writings of Doctor Baines, or
those of Doctor Wiseman; nay, let the lamentations of Reformation
Society itself, ever wailing over the increase of Popery, give the
answer; look through the villages and the glens of England, where Roman
Catholic Chapels are starting up as from the earth, and you will find
the answer fully justified. Ask it in the cities and the mountains of
Ireland, the shout of millions will proclaim what Established
Protestantism has done with all her Creeds and Clergy after centuries of
existence, and a countless expenditure. Three hundred years have nearly
expired since the reformed standard has been planted on that soil, and
after all the spoliation and persecution to which the country has been
subjected, after all the blood and sorrow that have been expended in the
work of compulsory proselytism, Popery has grown stronger, and
Protestantism is expiring. The people pay with repugnance a priesthood
in whom they have not faith, but no power can force them to the worship
in which they have no heart, and they prefer to be taxed rather than be
taught. They are repelled further and further from that system which
commenced in a blunder, and has been continued by rapacity, which
reverses the precepts of Christ, using the sword where he commands it to
be sheathed—which reverses the course of the olden Israelites finding a
land of milk and honey, but leaving it a wilderness, having the pillar
of fire always before, and the pillar of cloud ever behind; the one kept
in flame by hatred and strife, and the other continually dark with
maledictions and tears. But admitting the difficulties of proselytism,
examine the moral state of those over whom the Church has had undivided
control—those with whom there has been least of foreign interference,
and I may appeal to her most strenuous defenders, whether she has not
allowed thousands of human souls to grow up around her for whom she
provided no shelter, whose hearts and wants she made no effort to reach:
they lived without her teaching, they mourned without her solace, they
sickened without her prayer, and until she received the fees for their
burial, she was ignorant of their existence. Yet, after all, by many she
has been called “_The poor man’s Church_.” It is true that for some
years past, and especially at present, there has been a species of
excitement and activity in the church: but so far as these have moral
life in them, so far as they concern the spiritual interests of the
people, whence did they originate? Where were they before John Wesley
and Whitfield raised their soul-piercing cries, and awoke the sense of
immortality that was dormant in the minds of besotted multitudes? Did
the church join with these men, or rather did it not persecute,
calumniate, expel them—say and do all manner of evil against them? What
at the present hour is the activity of the church? Much, it may be, is
sincere and conscientious, but greatly more an emulation with dissenters
in which the pregnant elements are jealousy and fear. Much, it may be,
of disinterested action for the souls of men, but more it is to be
feared for the order and the church. Great excitement there is in the
Establishment, but little of calm and healthy action—a mighty stir of
polemics that make few converts, and of societies that beat the air. The
church has neither union within, nor peace without. Her hand is against
all, and the hands of all are against her. She holds forth creeds as the
symbols of unity, and yet within her own courts are all sorts of
divisions, a chaos of voices that make her the very Babel of theology;
here is one preaching the grace of Palagius, and there another that of
Augustine; one arguing for the hell of Calvin, and another all but
teaching the purgatory of the pope: one a Boanerges for the Bible, and
another an apostle for tradition; with one, Rome is the mother of
abominations, and with another she is the mistress of churches. Amidst
the din, then, of polemics, politics, and theological contradictions, of
inward confusion and outward strifes, how are we to catch the voice of
moral power and of gospel truth? The truth must be told, there is no
grand or concentrative energy of any sort in the church; neither faith
nor freedom, neither bold speculation nor a mighty spiritual zeal; there
is no room even for a gigantic fanaticism or a picturesque superstition;
upon the whole the strife is of this world, and for it; a strife for
wealth or place, in which the spiritual is swallowed in the earthly.
With all her riches and honours; with all her show of dignities and
pride of prelacy, she is yet poor in enlightened esteem, poorer still in
general affection; without authority to sway the superstitious or
liberality to attach the thinking, she has neither the submission of
faith nor the approbation of reason. She has, considering her position
and means, fulfilled no great Christian or Protestant mission; is she
then in a humbler sphere, the friend of general education? Passing over
the Universities, which with a heavy hand she has bolted against
dissenters, is she favourable to the instruction of the youthful poor?
No: except in connection with her ecclesiastical supremacy. Until
recently she had no zeal whatever in the matter: but other parties
becoming active, under the broad gaze of public observation, both her
fears and her interest were awakened. Whilst others were toiling, she
for very shame could not sit wholly idle, and she therefore adopted
education, so far as it was an instrument to counteract her rivals or to
preserve her authority. But to the last and to the death, she is the
sworn enemy to any system of popular instruction which is comprehensive,
liberal, and unsectarian. In this great country, where, thanks to law
and not to creeds, each man may hold and speak his own opinion, she
meets with defiance and resistance every movement towards a large and
equal distribution of knowledge, for lack of which the people are
literally perishing. In a country like this where sects are so many and
so various, and where each has an equal claim on the blessings of
civilized institutions, with a bigotry equalled only by its injustice,
she would usurp the monopoly of national instruction. This is in the
true spirit of creeds, and however repugnant to Christian equity is
fully consistent with worldly policy.
When the church of England seceded from that of Rome, if she cut off
some theological errors, she showed no such disposition respecting her
earthly riches. It cannot be doubted that in the Reformed Establishment,
a greed of lucre remained as deep as was ever in the Romish, less ideal
in its form, and more selfish in its spirit. In our times men absorb the
interests of their church in the interests of themselves, in olden times
men lost themselves in the glory of their church; in that was centered
every thing, even passion itself, as one great and mighty sentiment.
From this it was arose the solemn structure of universal empire; from
this sprung forth the vision of a glory that was to fill the universe.
It was this called up a power before which monarchs bowed, which armed
itself with the terrors of hell and crowned itself with the stars of
heaven. It was this which gave genius the sublimity of religious
inspiration, and which has left for a colder age the forms of beauty to
which faith gave life; it was this which could speak to the world as to
single audience with an eloquence that must live while language has
existence. It may be called fanaticism and ambition, but it is a
fanaticism and an ambition that had something unworldly to dignify them.
The reformed church had preserved the creeds of the ancient one, but not
its creativeness; it has not given conscience freedom, but it has
stripped faith of poetry. Even the ceremonies and forms which it has
preserved are without energy and inspiration—the mere mimicries of
superstition unfraught with a single breath of its enthusiasm. Writings
of no common eloquence have eulogized the cathedral service; it deserves
all that can be said of it, and so do the temples themselves; no one can
hear the one when it receives right expression without solemn emotion,
and no one can behold the antique majesty of the other, but in silent
veneration. The poetry of these things is beautiful, but what is the
reality? A sad contrast—in general, a cold and heartless utterance of
the service, unoccupied pews, a few listless hearers, feeble choirs,
that seem rather to sing the requiem than the triumph of the church,
ostentation without grandeur, and formality without grace. Here, as in
every other department, we find the dominant spirit of worldliness.
Though this service depends for much of its impression on ritual beauty,
yet the higher clergy continually encroach on the revenues and means of
sustaining it. “When we see,” says Dr. Wiseman, “the cathedral service
shrunk into the choir originally designed for the private daily worship
of God’s special ministers, or when we find the entire congregation
scattered over a small portion of the repaired chancel, while the rest
of the edifice is a majestic ruin, as I but lately witnessed, assuredly
one must be more prone to weep than to exult at the change which has
taken place, since these stately fabricks were erected.” I would not
have the world hurled back into Popery; but if we are to have Romish
creeds, rather than have them in repulsive nakedness, give them to us
covered and adorned with the grace of Romish ceremonies; if we are to
resign our liberty, give us at least grandeur and pageantry to amuse our
slavery.
But creeds exist otherwise than in formal expression. A creed is the
standard of a church, it may be the spirit of a sect. And from the
antagonistic aspect which each sect bears to another, and the
centralized organization which it has within itself, this spirit may
have a fierce and powerful operation. The Church-creed is defined; the
Sect-creed is vague, and may depend for interpretation on narrow and
bitter prejudice: the Church-creed may possibly lie dormant, but there
is no escape from the wakeful vigilance of a religious surveillance.
What some sects do by enlarged and rigid co-operation, others effect by
compact and separate unions. The smallness of the assemblies, or the
gradations of dependency, puts one individual within the immediate ken
of another, and thus, if by chance a free thought should be born, there
is little hope that it shall live. Take methodism as an illustration; so
gigantic and yet so minute: with its band-meetings, its class-meetings,
its district assemblies, and its general conference—leaving not a spot
where a heretic could hide himself. In such a system there is neither
room nor a name for liberty, from the preacher who is under the brow of
his conference to the member who lives in the eye of his class-leader.
It is not that such a system creates a terror of expression, from the
first it initiates a slavish intellect—and tends to all the vices of
rancour, bigotry, hypocrisy, and subserviency, to which such an
intellect is allied.
It may be said that my own community in being also a sect, is open to
similar accusations. I do not say that a dictation of belief is
essential to a sect, but it may possibly attach to it with all the
despotism of the most formal creed. If a creed in spirit or expression
be necessary to the constitution of a sect, those then are no sect with
whom I would desire to hold communion. If all in my own belief or any
other, which is great, good, pure, and eternal, inspired by the mind of
God and blessed to the heart of man; if all which disseminates virtue;
which justifies Providence, which emancipates and glorifies society,
goes onward with undeviating pace, if the Kingdom of Jehovah extends,
and the throne of Christ is reared, and the temple of righteousness is
beautified, then, forgetting ourselves and forgetting our sect, we
should rejoice with an honest and generous exultation. We trust the day
will come, when the spirit and the life of Christ, and not the
formularies of men, will be the standards of true religion; when we
shall have unity instead of divisions, when we shall have charity
instead of creeds, when heretic and orthodox shall be lost in the common
name of Christian.
------------------------------------
Footnotes for Lecture X.
Footnote 540:
Art. 8.
Footnote 541:
Michelet, vol. ii. pp. 124, 125.
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LECTURE XI.
THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MORAL EVIL.
BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU.
“WOE UNTO THEM THAT SAY, ... LET THE COUNSEL OF THE HOLY ONE OF ISRAEL
DRAW NIGH AND COME, THAT WE MAY KNOW IT; WOE UNTO THEM THAT CALL EVIL
GOOD, AND GOOD EVIL; THAT PUT DARKNESS FOR LIGHT, AND LIGHT FOR
DARKNESS; THAT PUT BITTER FOR SWEET, AND SWEET FOR BITTER.”—_Isaiah_
v. 18-20.
The Divine sentiments towards right and wrong every man naturally
believes to be a reflexion of whatever is most pure and solemn in his
own. We cannot be sincerely persuaded, that God looks with aversion on
dispositions which we revere as good and noble; or that he regards with
lax indifference the selfish and criminal passions which awaken our own
disgust. We may well suppose, indeed, his scrutiny more searching, his
estimate more severely true, his rebuking look more awful, than our
self-examination and remorse can fitly represent; but we cannot doubt
that our moral emotions, as far as they go, are in sympathy with his;
that we know, by our own consciousness, the general direction of his
approval and displeasure; and that, in proportion as our perceptions of
Duty are rendered clear, our judgment more nearly approaches the
precision of the Omniscient award. Our own conscience is the window of
heaven through which we gaze on God: and, as its colours perpetually
change, his aspect changes too; if they are bright and fair, he dwells
as in the warm light of a rejoicing love; if they are dark and turbid,
he hides himself in robes of cloud and storm. When you have lost your
self-respect, you have never thought yourself an object of divine
complacency. In moments fresh from sin, flushed with the shame of an
insulted mind, when you have broken another resolve, or turned your back
upon a noble toil, or succumbed to a mean passion, or lapsed into the
sickness of self-indulgence, could you ever turn a clear and open face
to God, nor think it terrible to meet his eye? Could you imagine
yourself in congeniality with him, when you gave yourself up to the
voluble sophistry of self-excuse, and the loose hurry of forgetfulness?
Or did you not discern him rather in your own accusing heart, and meet
him in the silent anguish of full confession, and find in the
recognition of your alienation the first hope of return? To all
unperverted minds, the verdict of conscience sounds with a preternatural
voice; it is not the homely talk of their own poor judgment, but an
oracle of the sanctuary. There is something of anticipation in our
remorse, as well as of retrospect; and we feel that it is not the mere
survey of a gloomy past with the slow lamp of our understanding, but a
momentary piercing of the future with the vivid lightning of the skies.
Our moral nature, left to itself, intuitively believes that guilt is an
estrangement from God,—an unqualified opposition to his will,—a literal
service of the enemy; that he abhors it, and will give it no rest till
it is driven from his presence, that is, into annihilation: that no part
of our mind belongs to him but the pure, and just, and disinterested
affections which he fosters; the faithful will which he strengthens; the
virtue, often damped, whose smoaking flax he will not quench, and the
good resolves, ever frail, whose bruised reed he will not break: and
that he has no relation but of displeasure, no contact but of
resistance, with our selfishness and sin. In the simple faith of the
conscience it is no figure of speech to say, that God “is angry with the
wicked every day” and is “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” So
long as the natural religion of the heart is undisturbed, to sin is, in
the plainest and most positive sense, to set up against Heaven, and
frustrate its will.
Soon, however, the understanding disturbs the tranquillity of this
belief, and constructs a rival creed. The primitive conception of God is
acquired, I believe, without reasoning, and emerges from the affections;
it is a transcript of our own emotions,—an investiture of them with
external personality and infinite magnitude. But a secondary idea of
Deity arises in the intellect, from its reasonings about causation.
Curiosity is felt respecting the origin of things; and the order,
beauty, and mechanism of external nature, are too conspicuous not to
force upon the observation the conviction of a great architect of the
universe, from whose designing reason its forces and its laws
mysteriously sprung. Hence the _intellectual_ conception of _God the
Creator_, which comes into inevitable collision with the _moral_ notion
of _God the holy watch of virtue_. For if the system of creation is the
production of his Omniscience; if he has constituted human nature as it
is, and placed it in the scene whereon it acts; if the arrangements by
which happiness is allotted, and character is formed, are the
contrivance of his thought and the work of his hand, then the sufferings
and the guilt of every being were objects of his original contemplation,
and the productions of his own design. The deed of crime must, in this
case, be as much an integral part of his Providence as the efforts and
sacrifices of virtue; and the monsters of licentiousness and tyranny,
whose images deform the scenery of history, are no less truly his
appointed instruments than the martyr and the sage. And though we remain
convinced that he does not make choice of evil in his government, for
its own sake, but only for ultimate ends worthy of his perfections,
still we can no longer see how he can truly hate that which he employs
for the production of good. That which is his chosen instrument cannot
be sincerely regarded as his everlasting enemy; and only figuratively
can he be said to repudiate a power which he continually wields. There
must be _some sense_ in which it appears, in the eye of Omniscience, to
be eligible; some point of view at which its horrors vanish; and where
the moral distinctions, which we feel ourselves impelled to venerate,
disappear from the regards of God.
Here, then, is a fearful contradiction between the religion of
conscience and the religion of the understanding: the one pronouncing
evil to be the antagonist, the other to be the agent, of the divine
will. In every age has this difficulty laid a heavy weight upon the
human heart; in every age has it pointed the sarcasm of the blasphemer;
mingled an occasional sadness with the hopes of benevolence; and tinged
the devotion of the thoughtful with a somewhat melancholy trust. The
whole history of speculative religion is one prolonged effort of the
human mind to destroy this contrariety; system after system has been
born in the struggle to cast the oppression off; with what result, it
will be my object at present to explain. The question which we have to
consider is this: “How should a Christian think of the origin and
existence of evil?” I propose to advert, first, to the speculative;
secondly, to the scriptural; thirdly, to the moral relations of the
subject; to inquire what relief we can obtain from philosophical
schemes, from biblical doctrine, and from practical Christianity.
I. Notwithstanding the ingenuity of philosophers in varying the form and
language of their systems, there can be but two solutions offered to the
great problem respecting evil. The benevolence of the Creator may be
vindicated, by denying that he is the author of evil; or, by pronouncing
it his mere tool, unavoidably introduced for the production of greater
good.