Methodists. Wesleyan Methodism is, as is well known, not Calvinist, but
Arminian. The _Methodist Magazine_ was called by Wesley the _Arminian
Magazine_, and kept that title all through his life. Arminianism is an
attempt made with the best intentions, and with much truth of practical
sense, but not in a very profound philosophical spirit, to escape from
what perplexes and shocks us in Calvinism. The God of Calvinism is a
magnified and non-natural man who decrees at his mere good pleasure some
men to salvation and other men to reprobation; the God of Arminianism is
a magnified and non-natural man who foreknows the course of each man's
life, and who decrees each of us to salvation or reprobation in
accordance with this foreknowledge. But so long as we remain in this
anthropomorphic order of ideas the question will always occur: Why did
not a being of infinite power and infinite love so make all men as that
there should be no cause for this sad foreknowledge and sad decree
respecting a number of them? In truth, Calvinism is both theologically
more coherent, and also shows a deeper sense of reality than
Arminianism, which, in the practical man's fashion, is apt to scrape the
surface of things only.
For instance, the Arminian Remonstrants, in their zeal to justify the
morality, in a human sense, of God's ways, maintained that he sent his
word to one nation rather than another according as he saw that one
nation was more worthy than another of such a preference. The Calvinist
doctors of the Synod of Dort have no difficulty in showing that Moses
and Christ both of them assert, with respect to the Jewish nation, the
direct contrary; and not only do they here obtain a theological triumph,
but in rebutting the Arminian theory they are in accordance with
historical truth and with the real march of human affairs. They allow
more for the great fact of the _not ourselves_ in what we do and are.
The Calvinists seize, we say, that great fact better than the Arminians.
The Calvinist's fault is in his scientific appreciation of the fact; in
the reasons he gives for it. God, he says, sends his word to one nation
rather than another at _his mere good pleasure_. Here we have again the
magnified and non-natural man, who likes and dislikes, knows and
decrees, just as a man, only on a scale immensely transcending anything
of which we have experience, and whose proceedings we nevertheless
describe as if he were in the next street for people to verify all we
say about him.
Arminian Methodism, however, puts aside the Calvinistic doctrine of
predestination. The foremost place, which in the Calvinist scheme
belongs to the doctrine of predestination, belongs in the Methodist
scheme to the doctrine of justification by faith. More and more
prominently does modern Methodism elevate this as its essential
doctrine; and the era in their founder's life which Methodists select to
celebrate is the era of his conversion to it. It is the doctrine of
Anselm, adopted and developed by Luther, set forth in the Confession of
Augsburg, and current all through the popular theology of our day. We
shall find it in almost any popular hymn we happen to take, but the
following lines of Milton exhibit it classically. By the fall of our
first parents, says he:--
Man, losing all,
To expiate his treason hath nought left,
But to destruction sacred and devote
He with his whole posterity must die;
Die he or justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction; death for death.
By Adam's fall, God's justice and mercy were placed in conflict. God
could not follow his mercy without violating his justice. Christ by his
satisfaction gave the Father the right and power (_nudum jus Patri
acquirebat_, said the Arminians) to follow his mercy, and to make with
man the covenant of free justification by faith, whereby, if a man has a
sure trust and confidence that his sins are forgiven him in virtue of
the satisfaction made to God for them by the death of Christ, he is held
clear of sin by God, and admitted to salvation.
This doctrine, like the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, involves a
whole history of God's proceedings, and gives, also, first and almost
sole place to what God does, with disregard to what man does. It has
thus an essential affinity with Calvinism; indeed, Calvinism is but this
doctrine of original sin and justification, _plus_ the doctrine of
predestination. Nay, the Welsh Methodists, as is well known, have no
difficulty in combining the tenet of election with the practices and
most of the tenets of Methodism. The word _solifidian_ points precisely
to that which is common to both Calvinism and Methodism, and which has
made both these halves of English Puritanism so popular,--their
_sensational_ side, as it may be called, their laying all stress on a
wonderful and particular account of what God gives and works for us, not
on what we bring or do for ourselves. 'Plead thou singly,' says Wesley,
'the blood of the covenant, the ransom paid for thy proud stubborn
soul.' Wesley's doctrines of conversion, of the new birth, of
sanctification, of the direct witness of the spirit, of assurance, of
sinless perfection, all of them thus correspond with doctrines which we
have noticed in Calvinism, and show a common character with them. The
instantaneousness Wesley loved to ascribe to conversion and
sanctification points the same way. 'God gives in a moment such a faith
in the blood of his Son as translates us out of darkness into light, out
of sin and fear into holiness and happiness.' And again, 'Look for
sanctification just as you are, as a poor sinner that has nothing to
pay, nothing to plead but _Christ died_.' This is the side in Wesley's
teaching which his followers have above all seized, and which they are
eager to hold forth as the essential part of his legacy towards them.
It is true that from the same reason which prevents, as we have said,
those who know their Bible and nothing else from really knowing even
their Bible, Methodists, who for the most part know nothing but Wesley,
do not really know even Wesley. It is true that what really
characterises this most interesting and most attractive man, is not his
doctrine of justification by faith, or any other of his set doctrines,
but is entirely what we may call his _genius for godliness_. Mr.
Alexander Knox, in his remarks on his friend's life and character,
insists much on an entry in Wesley's Journal in 1767, where he seems
impatient at the endless harping on the tenet of justification, and
where he asks 'if it is not high time to return to the plain word: "He
that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted with him."' Mr.
Knox is right in thinking that the feeling which made Wesley ask this is
what gave him his vital worth and character as a man; but it is not what
gives him his character as the teacher of Methodism. Methodism rejects
Mr. Knox's version of its founder, and insists on making the article of
justification the very corner-stone of the Wesleyan edifice.
And the truth undoubtedly is, that not by his assertion of what man
brings, but by his assertion of what God gives, by his doctrines of
conversion, instantaneous justification and sanctification, assurance,
and sinless perfection, does Wesley live and operate in Methodism. 'You
think, I must first be or do thus or thus (for sanctification). Then you
are seeking it by works unto this day. If you seek it by faith, you may
expect it as you are; then expect it now. It is of importance to observe
that there is an inseparable connection between these three points:
expect it _by faith_, expect it _as you are_, and expect it _now_. To
deny one of them is to deny them all; to allow one is to allow them
all.' This is the teaching of Wesley, which has made the great Methodist
half of English Puritanism what it is, and not his hesitations and
recoils at the dangers of his own teaching.
No doubt, as the seriousness of Calvinism, its perpetual conversance
with deep matters and with the Bible, have given force and fervency to
Calvinist Puritans, so the loveliness of Wesley's piety, and what we
have called his genius for godliness, have sweetened and made amiable
numberless lives of Methodist Puritans. But as a religious teacher,
Wesley is to be judged by his doctrine; and his doctrine, like the
Calvinistic scheme, rests with all its weight on the assertion of
certain minutely described proceedings on God's part, independent of us,
our experience, and our will; and leads its recipients to look, in
religion, not so much for an arduous progress on their own part, and the
exercise of their activity, as for strokes of magic, and what may be
called a sensational character.
In the Heidelberg Catechism, after an answer in which the catechist
rehearses the popularly received doctrine of original sin and vicarious
satisfaction for it, the catechiser asks the pertinent question: '_Unde
id scis?_'--how do you know all that? The Apostle Paul is, as we have
already shown, the great authority for it whom formal theology invokes;
his name is used by popular theology with the same confidence. I open a
modern book of popular religion at the account of a visit paid to a
hardened criminal seized with terror the night before his execution. The
visitor says: '_I now stand in Paul's place_, and say: In Christ's stead
we pray you, be ye reconciled to God. I beg you to accept the pardon of
all your sins, which Christ has purchased for you, and which God freely
bestows on you for his sake. If you do not understand, I say: God's ways
are not as our ways.' And the narrative of the criminal's conversion
goes on: 'That night was spent in singing the praises of the Saviour who
had purchased his pardon.'
Both Calvinism and Methodism appeal, therefore, to the Bible, and, above
all, to St. Paul, for the history they propound of the relations between
God and man; but Calvinism relies most, in enforcing it, on man's fears,
Methodism on man's hopes. Calvinism insists on man's being under a
curse; it then works the sense of sin, misery, and terror in him, and
appeals pre-eminently to the desire to flee from the wrath to come.
Methodism, too, insists on his being under a curse; but it works most
the sense of hope in him, the craving for happiness, and appeals
pre-eminently to the desire for eternal bliss. No one, however, will
maintain that the particular account of God's proceedings with man,
whereby Methodism and Calvinism operate on these desires, proves itself
by internal evidence, and establishes without external aid its own
scientific validity. So we may either directly try, as best we can, its
scientific validity in itself; or, as it professes to have Paul's
authority to support it, we may first inquire what is really Paul's
account of God's proceedings with man, and whether this tallies with the
Puritan account and confirms it. The latter is in every way the safer
and the more instructive course to follow. And we will follow
Puritanism's example in taking St. Paul's mature and greatest work, the
Epistle to the Romans, as the chief place for finding what he really
thought on the points in question.
We have already said elsewhere,[19] indeed, what is very true, and what
must never be forgotten, that what St. Paul, a man so separated from us
by time, race, training and circumstances, really thought, we cannot
make sure of knowing exactly. All we can do is to get near it, reading
him with the sort of critical tact which the study of the human mind and
its history, and the acquaintance with many great writers, naturally
gives for following the movement of any one single great writer's
thought; reading him, also, without preconceived theories to which we
want to make his thoughts fit themselves. It is evident that the English
translation of the Epistle to the Romans has been made by men with their
heads full of the current doctrines of election and justification we
have been noticing; and it has thereby received such a bias,--of which a
strong example is the use of the word _atonement_ in the eleventh verse
of the fifth chapter,--that perhaps it is almost impossible for any one
who reads the English translation only, to take into his mind Paul's
thought without a colouring from the current doctrines. But besides
discarding the English translation, we must bear in mind, if we wish to
get as near Paul's real thought as possible, two things which have
greatly increased the facilities for misrepresenting him.
[Footnote 19: See _Culture and Anarchy_, chap. v.]
In the first place, Paul, like the other Bible-writers, and like the
Semitic race in general, has a much juster sense of the true scope and
limits of diction in religious deliverances than we have. He uses within
the sphere of religious emotion expressions which, in this sphere, have
an eloquence and a propriety, but which are not to be taken out of it
and made into formal scientific propositions.
This is a point very necessary to be borne in mind in reading the Bible.
The prophet Nahum says in the book of his vision: '_God is jealous, and
the Lord revengeth_;'[20] and the authors of the Westminster
Confession, drawing out a scientific theology, lay down the proposition
that God is a jealous and vengeful God, and think they prove their
proposition by quoting in a note the words of Nahum. But this is as if
we took from a chorus of Æschylus one of his grand passages about guilt
and destiny, just put the words straight into the formal and exact cast
of a sentence of Aristotle, and said that here was the scientific
teaching of Greek philosophy on these matters. The Hebrew genius has
not, like the Greek, its conscious and clear-marked division into a
poetic side and a scientific side; the scientific side is almost absent.
The Bible utterances have often the character of a chorus of Æschylus,
but never that of a treatise of Aristotle. We, like the Greeks, possess
in our speech and thought the two characters; but so far as the Bible is
concerned we have generally confounded them, and have used our double
possession for our bewilderment rather than turned it to good account.
The admirable maxim of the great mediæval Jewish school of Biblical
critics: _The Law speaks with the tongue of the children of men_,--a
maxim which is the very foundation of all sane Biblical criticism,--was
for centuries a dead letter to the whole body of our Western exegesis,
and is a dead letter to the whole body of our popular exegesis still.
Taking the Bible language as equivalent with the language of the
scientific intellect, a language which is adequate and absolute, we have
never been in a position to use the key which this maxim of the Jewish
doctors offers to us. But it is certain that, whatever strain the
religious expressions of the Semitic genius were meant, in the minds of
those who gave utterance to them, to bear, the particular strain which
we Western people put upon them is one which they were not meant to
bear.
[Footnote 20: _Nahum_ i, 2.]
We have used the word _Hebraise_[21] for another purpose, to denote the
exclusive attention to the moral side of our nature, to conscience, and
to doing rather than knowing; so, to describe the vivid and figured way
in which St. Paul, within the sphere of religious emotion, uses words,
without carrying them outside it, we will use the word _Orientalise_.
When Paul says: 'God hath concluded them all in unbelief _that he might_
have mercy upon all,'[22] he Orientalises; that is, he does not mean to
assert formally that God acted with this set design, but, being full of
the happy and divine end to the unbelief spoken of, he, by a vivid and
striking figure, represents the unbelief as actually caused with a view
to this end. But when the Calvinists of the Synod of Dort, wishing to
establish the formal proposition that faith and all saving gifts flow
from election and nothing else, quote an expression of Paul's similar to
the one we have quoted, 'He hath chosen us,' they say, 'not because we
were, but _that we might be_ holy and without blame before him,' they go
quite wide of the mark, from not perceiving that what the apostle used
as a vivid figure of rhetoric, they are using as a formal scientific
proposition.
[Footnote 21: See _Culture and Anarchy_, chap. iv.]
[Footnote 22: _Rom._ xi, 32.]
When Paul Orientalises, the fault is not with him when he is
misunderstood, but with the prosaic and unintelligent Western readers
who have not enough tact for style to comprehend his mode of expression.
But he also Judaises; and here his liability to being misunderstood by
us Western people is undoubtedly due to a defect in the critical habit
of himself and his race. A Jew himself, he uses the Jewish Scriptures in
a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion, as if they had a talismanic
character; as if for a doctrine, however true in itself, their
confirmation was still necessary, and as if this confirmation was to be
got from their mere words alone, however detached from the sense of
their context, and however violently allegorised or otherwise wrested.
To use the Bible in this way, even for purposes of illustration, is
often an interruption to the argument, a fault of style; to use it in
this way for real proof and confirmation, is a fault of reasoning. An
example of the first fault may be seen in the tenth chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans, and in the beginning of the third chapter. The
apostle's point in either place,--his point that faith comes by hearing,
and his point that God's oracles were true though the Jews did not
believe them,--would stand much clearer without their scaffolding of
Bible-quotation. An instance of the second fault is in the third and
fourth chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians, where the Biblical
argumentation by which the apostle seeks to prove his case is as unsound
as his case itself is sound. How far these faults are due to the apostle
himself, how far to the requirements of those for whom he wrote, we need
not now investigate. It is enough that he undoubtedly uses the letter of
Scripture in this arbitrary and Jewish way; and thus Puritanism, which
has only itself to blame for misunderstanding him when he Orientalises,
may fairly put upon the apostle himself some of its blame for
misunderstanding him when he Judaises, and for Judaising so strenuously
along with him.
To get, therefore, at what Paul really thought and meant to say, it is
necessary for us modern and western people to translate him. And not as
Puritanism, which has merely taken his letter and recast it in the
formal propositions of a modern scientific treatise; but his letter
itself must be recast before it can be properly conveyed by such
propositions. And as the order in which, in any series of ideas, the
ideas come, is of great importance to the final result, and as Paul, who
did not write scientific treatises, but had always religious edification
in direct view, never set out his doctrine with a design of exhibiting
it as a scientific whole, we must also find out for ourselves the order
in which Paul's ideas naturally stand, and the connexion between one of
them and the other, in order to arrive at the real scheme of his
teaching, as compared with the schemes exhibited by Puritanism.
We remarked how what sets the Calvinist in motion seems to be the desire
to flee from the wrath to come; and what sets the Methodist in motion,
the desire for eternal bliss. What is it which sets Paul in motion? It
is the impulse which we have elsewhere noted as the master-impulse of
Hebraism,--_the desire for righteousness._ 'I exercise myself,' he told
Felix, '_to have a conscience void of offence towards God and men
continually_.'[23] To the Hebrew, this moral order, or righteousness,
was pre-eminently the universal order, the law of God; and God, the
fountain of all goodness, was pre-eminently to him the giver of the
moral law. The end and aim of all religion, _access to God_,--the sense
of harmony with the universal order--the partaking of the divine
nature--that our faith and hope might be in God--that we might have life
and have it more abundantly,--meant for the Hebrew, access to the source
of the _moral_ order in especial, and harmony with it. It was the
greatness of the Hebrew race that it felt the authority of this order,
its preciousness and its beneficence, so strongly. 'How precious are thy
thoughts unto me, O God!'--'The law of thy mouth is better than
thousands of gold and silver.'--'My soul is consumed with the very
fervent desire that it hath alway unto thy judgments.'[24] It was the
greatness of their best individuals that in them this feeling was
incessantly urgent to prove itself in the only sure manner,--in action.
'Blessed are they who hear the word of God, and _keep_ it.' 'If thou
wouldst enter into life, _keep_ the commandments.' 'Let no man deceive
you, he that _doeth_ righteousness is righteous.'[25] What
distinguishes Paul is both his conviction that the commandment is holy,
and just, and good; and also his desire to give effect to the
commandment, to _establish_ it. It was this which gave to his endeavour
after a clear conscience such meaning and efficacity. It was this which
gave him insight to see that there could be no radical difference, in
respect of salvation and the way to it, between Jew and Gentile. 'Upon
every soul of man that _worketh evil_, whoever he may be, tribulation
and anguish; to every one that _worketh good_, glory, honour, and
peace!'[26]
[Footnote 23: _Acts_, xxiv, 16.]
[Footnote 24: _Ps._ cxxxix, 7; cxix, 72; _Ibid._, 20.]
[Footnote 25: _Luke_, xi, 28; _Matth._, xix, 17; I _John_, iii, 7.]
[Footnote 26: _Rom._, ii, 9, 10.]
St. Paul's piercing practical religious sense, joined to his strong
intellectual power, enabled him to discern and follow the range of the
commandment, both as to man's actions and as to his heart and thoughts,
with extraordinary force and closeness. His religion had, as we shall
see, a preponderantly mystic side, and nothing is so natural to the
mystic as in rich single words, such as faith, light, love, to sum up
and take for granted, without specially enumerating them all good moral
principles and habits; yet nothing is more remarkable in Paul than the
frequent, nay, incessant lists, in the most particular detail, of moral
habits to be pursued or avoided. Lists of this sort might in a less
sincere and profound writer be formal and wearisome; but to no attentive
reader of St. Paul will they be wearisome, for in making them he touched
the solid ground which was the basis of his religion,--the solid ground
of his hearty desire for righteousness and of his thorough conception of
it,--and only on such a ground was so strong a superstructure possible.
The more one studies these lists, the more does their significance come
out. To illustrate this, let any one go through for himself the
enumeration, too long to be quoted here, in the four last verses of the
first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, of 'things which are not
convenient;' or let him merely consider with attention this catalogue,
towards the end of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, of
fruits of the spirit: 'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness,
goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.'[27] The man who wrote with
this searching minuteness knew accurately what he meant by sin and
righteousness, and did not use these words at random. His diligent
comprehensiveness in his plan of duties is only less admirable than his
diligent sincerity. The sterner virtues and the gentler, his conscience
will not let him rest till he has embraced them all. In his deep resolve
'to make out by actual trial what is that good and perfect and
acceptable will of God,'[28] he goes back upon himself again and again,
he marks a duty at every point of our nature, and at points the most
opposite, for fear he should by possibility be leaving behind him some
weakness still indulged, some subtle promptings to evil not yet brought
into captivity.
[Footnote 27: Verses 22, 23.]
[Footnote 28: _Rom._, xii, 2.]