characteristic on which we have insisted—and we believe what we have
asserted—is, that sin is a deep spiritual injury. The source of it is in
the soul; it is the dark corruption of an evil heart. This I take to be
one of the greatest and profoundest revelations of Christ, one which
places him infinitely above all other moral teachers, and which makes
Christianity the highest scheme of moral duty. False religions and false
philosophies have been all at variance with this inward sense of duty.
They have contrived numberless inventions as substitutes for it, or
devised most ingenious means to nullify it. Priesthoods, with most
imposing authority and mystical influence, have offered all sorts of
spiritual panaceas to ease the wounded conscience. Ceremonies, with all
graceful gesture and solemn import, have presented their beauty to the
senses, and their spell to the fancies of superstition. Sacrifices
without number—from the turtle-dove to the hecatomb; from the scape-goat
driven to the desert, to the human being slaughtered to God; from the
blood of life swelling round a thousand altars of vengeance, to the
flowers and the fruits that were heaped upon the altars of mercy—all
these have been tried to make religion for the senses, to make religion
a flattery and delusion: but all were not sufficient; conscience is
stronger than rituals, and to that conscience, to that spirit of God in
the soul of man, Christ came; to that he was the Apostle and to that he
preached. Christ went at once into the soul; he pierced the veil of
sophistries and deceits by which men are ingenious to discover excuses
to cover their selfishness and their wrong doings; he went to the seat
of the evil, and struck at once to the root of bitterness. Others
baptized with water, cleansing merely the outside, but he baptized with
fire and the holy spirit, going to the innermost thoughts of the heart
and the veins;—others preached on the keeping of feast-days and
fast-days, but he taught of that God who is not the Lord of times or
seasons, but the God of life in every hour—the God of the whole universe
in every motion;—others called men to go to the temple, Christ called
them to go into their closets and commune with their hearts;—others told
them to wash their hands, Christ exhorted them rather to cleanse their
spirits;—others told them to fear men who could kill the body, Christ
warned them not to fear man who could only kill the body, but to fear
God who could kill the soul as well as the body. He was truly the
prophet of eternity—the preacher for eternity. He was truly the preacher
of the invisible, and the herald of it—he needed not that any should
testify of man, for he knew what was in man—he required no testimony,
for he had the knowledge of humanity in his own nature deep and true,
but guiltless—and he spake out of the fullness of his own full heart: it
was therefore that he spake as never man spake: it was therefore that
the common people heard him gladly—for his words had power to those
thoughts and affections which are native to bosoms of all men; it was
therefore that he spake with authority, and not as the scribes: for they
discoursed on the traditions of the fathers, but he appealed to the
inspirations of God—they spake of what had been written on tables of
stones, but he spoke of what had been written on the fleshy tables of
the heart. Others made sin to consist in resistance to the priest or to
the king—but Christ showed it to be an alienation of the soul from God,
the apostacy of the conscience from its own sense of duty. It is that
which is within, he taught, that defiles the man; a man may wash his
hands seven times a-day, but not once cleanse his heart; he may often
wash his hands, and yet never in innocency. He showed that sepulchres
might be beautified outside, and inside be only rottenness and
corruption.—His apostles learned of him this most profound, most divine
philosophy, and so they preached it to the world. To be carnally minded,
says Paul, is death; to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
Whatsoever, says the same apostle, a man soweth, that shall he also
reap; he that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption,
but he that soweth to the spirit, shall of the spirit reap everlasting
life. Lust, (or evil desire,) saith Saint James, when it hath conceived,
bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
This is the gospel doctrine on the inwardness and spirituality of sin;
and we preach no other gospel, and we teach no other doctrine. A solemn
consequence attaches to our view which is also powerfully enforced in
the New Testament scriptures, but which the vicarious scheme tends
directly to subvert—I mean the personal nature of transgression. Sin we
hold to be no transferable quality, and this was most lucidly proved
here by one of my brother lecturers. With the sinner himself lies the
guilt; with him who contracts it it must lie; it cannot be acquired by
imputation, nor can it be punished by imputation. If one doctrine be
more clearly taught in scripture than another, it is this, that the
offender shall be answerable only for his own sins; and for these, as
surely as there are a conscience, a future world, and a God, he must be
answerable.—Every man, our Saviour declares, shall be judged according
to his own works. Every one of us, the Apostle Paul asserts, shall give
an account of himself to God. But no, saith orthodoxy, you must also be
answerable for Adam, and upon your head must be a guilt that darkened
the very dawn of creation; and so upon this principle guilt should
descend from sire to son; the later we are in existence, the more
tremendous should be this growing mountain of imputation, until the last
man should sink under the burden of all the crime which had been from
the first man to himself.—We are told that Unitarians make light of sin.
But, I ask, what does orthodoxy make of justice? And I further ask, what
does it make of scripture? If there were a judge on earth who decided as
orthodoxy decides, he would be scouted as a monster: if there were a
code of laws which contained such a standard, the common moral sense of
mankind would reject it; nay, there is not a tribe of savages in the
habitable world so blind to the idea of justice as not to repel the
dogma of imputed and eternal punishment. And yet we are gravely told
that God thus acts, and that the Bible thus teaches; we are constantly
rebuked as wanting in faith and humility, because we can find no such
principles in either providence or the Bible. The plain declaration of
the prophet Ezekiel contains the spirit of both. “The soul that sinneth,
it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither
shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the
righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be
upon him.” As certainly as we have a moral sense, as surely as we can
discern between right and wrong, we are compelled to acknowledge the one
and utterly to repudiate the other. Give but the conscience justice, let
common sense have but the slightest voice in the decision, and you might
as easily attempt to gain a man’s assent to the broadest of
contradictions, even to the admission that a part is equal to the whole,
or that two and two are five, as to feel guilty for another man’s crime,
to feel remorse for another man’s wrong-doing, to be penitent or humble
for that in which we had no participation, or to confess the justice of
punishment by a sentence which made him criminal before his existence.
On the moral injuries of thus forcing men to contradict the first
dictates of their nature, of destroying the personality of virtue on the
one side by an imputed righteousness, and the personality of sin on the
other by an imputed guilt, I intend not here to enlarge: but one evil I
will just allude to; I mean the wrong it does to truth of sentiment.
Feelings in their real existence which are most excellent and most
beautiful, it distorts and falsifies. There are no virtues on earth that
bring men nearer to heaven than humility and repentance. To be humble
with a true humility is to be in the likeness of Christ; to be penitent
with a true repentance is to be an object of rejoicing even to the
angels of heaven: but when we hear it said that we are to be of lowly
mind on account of inherited corruption, and penitent for imputed sin;
when we try to force ourselves into emotions which are not native to the
soul, unconsciously we undermine its simplicity and sincerity, and
instead of virtues which must be of spontaneous growth, or not exist at
all, we have sickly abortions of sentiment that are false, because
unnatural; strained efforts that are at eternal war with experience; and
high-sounding phrases that are as empty as echo and as cold as the
frozen blast. Perversions like these are almost worse than vices, for
vices, though they mar the life, may leave the moral judgment its
integrity. Where there is true conviction there may be amendment, but
when the inward sense is itself diseased, the case is all but hopeless.
Whatever be the evil of sin, whatever be its punishment; whether the
evil be infinite or limited, whether the punishment be eternal or
temporal, let us at least beware of weakening that sentiment on which
all morality is founded, the deep sense of personal responsibility.
Unitarian views are often described as being unfavourable to
spirituality; but if by spirituality I am to understand the inward life
of man, the activity of his mental and moral energies, then I think
these views eminently spiritual. The spirit of man is their great
subject, and the spirit of God in the human, their great agency of
salvation. Within the soul itself they place moral salvation or moral
destruction, and within the soul itself they place the elements which
constitute one or the other, the sense of guilt which makes its hell,
the conscious holiness which makes its heaven. This inward power of
conscience is the true distinction of spiritual life; and the righteous
submission to it in our own hearts, we maintain, is the faith which
justifies: a faith which is an indwelling vitality which consists not in
forming propositions about God and Christ, and in enforcing them or
submitting to them, but in making God and Christ realities in our secret
thoughts; in confidence on the worth of goodness, in allegiance to duty,
and in trust in the power and immortality of truth.
2. Next I affirm that sin is evil, and that sin is punishable; and our
doctrines make not light of the evil, or disguise the awfulness of the
punishment. Sin is evil: we deny not that; how could we? It is an
eternal truth written on the heart and life of man, proved with
unequivocal and gloomy evidence in the whole history of the world. Sin
is evil to the individual; evil in the sufferings it prepares for him,
and a still greater evil when it hardens him beyond suffering. Each one
of us will judge this question for himself according to his degree of
moral sensibility, and according to the circumstances of his moral
history; but whatever be that sensibility, or whatever be that history,
our moments of most profound anguish have ever been those in which we
have felt the shameful consciousness of wrong thoughts or wrong actions.
Not, it is true, when the evil passions or evil deeds held their
tyrannical sway over us, but when the spell was gone, when the mind’s
eye grew clear, and the hour of reflection came with sorrow, and the sad
pale light spread over the hand-writing on the wall, from which
conscience might shrink but could not fail to read. The worst, the most
hardened, the most degraded of human creatures, those whom the world may
think have bidden farewell to conscience, have moments in the dark
silence of thought when the sword of remorse with all its poisoned
tortures sinks into their wounded bosoms. And in such hours, it is not
outward loss, or outward suffering, but inward agony that afflicts them
most; it is not that they have sunk into the dregs of poverty; it is not
that they have been reduced to dependence and exposed to insult; it is
not that pride passes them with cold and withering scorn; it is not that
pity and hope seem banished from their path; that all appear to frown
upon them; that externally for them there is no longer peace on earth or
light in heaven—it is, that the brightness and the freshness of their
own hearts are gone; that sacred affections are a waste; that
conscience, when not silenced into apathy, is enraged into an accuser;
that their own respect is lost beyond recovery, and no delusion, however
self-deceiving, can again restore it. The heart-consuming grief, the
wrath and tribulation treasured up in a life of sin, the righteous judge
of the earth alone can know. And these are all the more bitter if that
life had ever been blessed with holier associations. There is a courage
which can repel the scowl of others; there is a pride, a madness, if you
will, which can despise their opinions, or feel independent of their
esteem; there is a fortitude which can endure physical suffering to its
last infliction; but there is nothing in time, in place, or in
circumstance, which can fortify us against our own thoughts, against our
own feelings, and especially the feelings of the divinity within us,
that struggle to the last for empire over evil; that come ever and ever
to tell us of what we had of good or might have had; that haunt us with
reproach and sorrow when we have become traitors to our better nature.
Not to speak of conscience with its stinging sense of violated
conviction; not to speak of wasted time, ruined power, and a wreck of
hopes; to say nothing of alienation from God, and the fear of a future
world, I can conceive of memory dwelling on spots, which once were spots
of light, becoming the tormentor of a fallen soul, the vindicator of
duty and of God; I can conceive of one looking back from the bare
desolateness of sin to a youth that once had been pure, full of joy and
full of virtue, to homes that had been glad with every affection that
sweetens life, to sabbaths that had repose for the stainless spirit, and
prayer for unpolluted lips; gazing with breaking hearts and weeping eyes
over a part marked with vice and misery, that had been a future glorious
with promise; all this I can conceive in connection with even the felon
in his cell, or with some wretch whose cough, like a knell of despair,
awakens the midnight silence of the street, whose latest pang is spent
in some hidden retreat of filth and sorrow, of sin and loathsomeness.
I need not say that sin is a great social evil. The fact is urged upon
us with too painful a pressure, both from history and observation. Take
the history of governments and nations; wars and bloodshed stain the
record over its whole extent. And whence are these, but from the
struggle and rivalry of selfish and sinful passions? From whence, says
the apostle James, come wars and fightings among you; come they not
hence, even of your lusts? From these we have had the oppression of
strength against right. From these we have had the tyrannies and
cruelties with which they surrounded their thrones of iron despotism;
with which they made the glory of self the affliction of millions; with
which so far as their power extended, they have been the scourges and
the curses of mankind. From these we had the hatred one nation against
another, men arrayed against each other to hew each other down, doing
all iniquities, when interest or ambition called for them, enslaving one
another, and selling one another, unmindful of all the claims of
fraternity in the din of faction, and losing the sense of their common
humanity in the difference of clime or the colour of the skin. Take the
history of laws. I shall not allege those of the criminal code which
until very recently made even Christian and enlightened countries vast
arenas of legalised assassination: which spread a reign of terror over
the face of empires, making the scaffold and the gibbet their principal
symbols of civilization, and multiplying to enormous extent the very
crimes, which, pretending to punish, they only publicly authorized and
exemplified. I speak here more particularly of the spirit of partiality,
injustice, selfishness, and rapacity in which much of legislation has
been conceived and executed: classes of men turning the laws to their
own purposes and leaving those unprotected who most required protection;
commonly preying most on those who least could bear it. Except where the
general sentiment of human right has been too strong for narrow
passions, we may see in the long course of ages, principle sacrificed to
personal interests, the good of masses betrayed or despised, the poor
scorned, the ignorant neglected, the privileged orders hedged about with
all sorts of protection, the classification of crime and criminals most
unfairly adjusted, the distribution of penalties most unrighteously
allotted; this I ascribe to selfish and evil passions. Once more, take
the history of religion, and you have all the anger of faction made more
stern with the rivalry of Creeds; the ambition of earthly dominion more
aspiring by the addition of spiritual rule also; the powers of this
world made more fearful by the powers of the world to come; both the
visible and in visible existence subjected to priestly empire, and made
tributary to priestly aggrandizement; the sword of the civil magistrate
which had been sharp enough with one edge to deal the vengeance of man,
receiving another edge from ecclesiastical authority, to vindicate the
judgments of God. Thus we are compelled to read history, and thus in all
its departments we are compelled to witness the dark traces which sin
has left upon its pages. When we turn to the world around us, these
evils are not the less glaring. Many sufferings, no doubt, are to be
ascribed to our natural wants and weakness, but they scarcely deserve to
be called evils, when we compare them with those which spring from moral
derangements. Poverty is not so great an affliction as an all-devouring
love for gain; sickness is not so great a misfortune as an insatiate
desire for pleasure; and the ills of poverty and pain together, are not
as fatal as the irritable wish for distinction which rules so widely in
the world, with its fierce blood of turbulent passions. To these there
are to be ascribed the worst social miseries that grieve the best
hearts, and to remove or ameliorate which the finest spirits have ever
directed their labours. To these we are to ascribe the covetousness
which closes the hand of bounty, and shuts up the bowels of compassion;
which becomes insensible both to justice and mercy; to these we are to
ascribe all forms of sensuality, and all the abuses of passion; to these
we are to ascribe all vices, material or malignant: and who, though he
had the capacious mind of an archangel, can count the miseries which in
all shapes spread contagion through society? Independently of those
evils which no human eye can reach, those which present themselves on
the very surface of observation are sufficiently extensive and fearful;
intemperance, ignorance, grossness, hatred, strifes, with all their
gloomy appendages; of unhappy homes; of loud and laughing and blushless
infamy; of mad licentiousness, and late despair; of lost health, lost
honesty, lost reason, which respectively close their career in the
hospital, the prison, or the lunatic asylum.
3. As to evidence, then, for the existence of guilt, as to its extent
and its evil, I think I can go as far as any Calvinist. I see the fact,
and I have no wish to disguise it; it startles, but it does not subvert
my faith. I grant sin to be evil—evil in the inward spirit—evil on the
outward life—evil to the individual—evil to the species—evil in this
world—evil in the next. In a certain sense, I am not prepared to deny
that it leaves injurious consequences, which may be eternal; that the
loss of innocence, that subversion of moral tastes, may implant habits
which, for aught I know, shall be an everlasting injury to the soul, not
utterly to destroy its happiness, or stop its progression, but to
deprive it of advantages and advancement which a purer moral state would
have given it. The evils of sin I hold to be terrible; the penalty of
sin I hold to be inevitable—to be removed by no sacrifice, to be washed
out by no expiation—to be escaped only in the criminals rising out of
the corruption by experience and wisdom, to a purer moral state. The
punishment of sin I believe to be not only inevitable, but also
enduring, enduring in proportion to indulgence and malignity. Thoughts,
I admit, which have wrought themselves into the very texture of the
intellectual nature; feelings which have rooted themselves into the
heart; habits that have grown into instinct, are not speedily to be
destroyed. Moral punishment, in my idea, is identical with moral
discipline, and moral discipline I consider to be such an arrangement of
circumstances in the providence of God as shall lead us to
self-correction; such a process of spiritual training as leave us the
consciousness of our own liberty, but yet accomplish God’s wise ends by
God’s boundless power. In building, then, the structure of our
character, our Creator works not by miracle, but by experience, and this
experience may be slow and painful. I believe most sincerely and
profoundly in a future punishment; not vindictive, but corrective—for
all wise punishment is, and must be, corrective. That the dispensations
of God are not completed in this life, I think all the moral aspects of
things here below make most manifest, and all analogies intimate, if
Scripture had not expressly declared, that after death there is to be a
more distinct exhibition of the divine government. That the results of
character formed in the present life are to be carried into the future,
and to influence it, I conceive our whole nature argues. Our existence,
as spiritual beings, is properly connected and continuous; one state
prognosticates another; and no two are absolutely distinct and separate.
Our spiritual life consists of thought united to thought, and feeling to
feeling, one operating on the other, or producing it, of a mysterious
chain of consciousness, bound from link to link by successive memories,
preserving unbroken the identity of our existence. Manhood is the growth
of our youth, and immortality is the growth of our manhood; and the
impressions of character pass from one stage to another, along the line
of succession and sequence. There are no extremes, except to our outward
observation. Looking at one stage of life, and then, after a long
interval, seeing in the same person the apparently opposite
characteristics, we take those things to be antagonists which are bound
together by the inevitable connexion of cause and effect. The dreamer of
youth becomes, perhaps, the misanthropist of age; the prodigal of youth,
it may be, grows into the miser of age; the principle of action may in
each case be the same—vanity or self-love; the passion is identical in
principle, and changed only in form, from a change in circumstances. If
we should meet an honest rustic in his peaceful fields, innocent and
contented; if we should afterwards by accident behold him on a scaffold,
it would be to us a seeming and terrible incongruity. But why? The two
events are in our minds in naked contrast: could we, however, pierce the
Spirit and trace the life of that unfortunate—watch it from the first
intrusive evil thought successively dwelt on; from actions slightly
wrong, unceasingly reiterated and darkening with every repetition, until
the last deadly volition, and the last awful deed, we should have an
analysis of sad consistency and of profound interest. There is something
sublime in the reflection, that every human creature who treads the
earth and breathes the air, has an inward history, a history unread by
every eye but God’s; a history of solemn import, that has definite
impression on the concerns of the universe, and is to live for ever in
the annals of eternity.