in Paul's love of righteousness is probably what chiefly explains his
conversion. Most men have the defects, as the saying is, of their
qualities. Because they are ardent and severe they have no sense for
gentleness and sweetness; because they are sweet and gentle they have no
sense for severity and ardour. A Puritan is a Puritan, and a man of
feeling is a man of feeling. But with Paul the very same fulness of
moral nature which made him an ardent Pharisee, 'as concerning zeal,
persecuting the church, touching the righteousness which is in the law,
blameless,' was so large that it carried him out of Pharisaism and
beyond it, when once he found how much needed doing in him which
Pharisaism could not do.
Every attentive regarder of the character of Paul, not only as he was
before his conversion but as he appears to us till his end, must have
been struck with two things: one, the earnest insistence with which he
recommends 'bowels of mercies,' as he calls them: meekness, humbleness
of mind, gentleness, unwearying forbearance, crowned all of them with
that emotion of charity 'which is the bond of perfectness;' the other,
the force with which he dwells on the _solidarity_ (to use the modern
phrase) of man,--the joint interest, that is, which binds humanity
together,--the duty of respecting every one's part in life, and of doing
justice to his efforts to fulfil that part. Never surely did such a
controversialist, such a master of sarcasm and invective, commend, with
such manifest sincerity and such persuasive emotion, the qualities of
meekness and gentleness! Never surely did a worker, who took with such
energy his own line, and who was so born to preponderate and predominate
in whatever line he took, insist so often and so admirably that the
lines of other workers were just as good as his own! At no time,
perhaps, did Paul arrive at practising quite perfectly what he thus
preached; but this only sets in a stronger light the thorough love of
righteousness which made him seek out, and put so prominently forward,
and so strive to make himself and others fulfil, parts of righteousness
which do not force themselves on the common conscience like the duties
of soberness, temperance, and activity, and which were somewhat alien,
certainly, to his own particular nature. Therefore we cannot but believe
that into this spirit, so possessed with the hunger and thirst for
righteousness, and precisely because it was so possessed by it, the
characteristic doctrines of Jesus, which brought a new aliment to feed
this hunger and thirst,--of Jesus whom, except in vision, he had never
seen, but who was in every one's words and thoughts, the teacher who was
meek and lowly in heart, who said men were brothers and must love one
another, that the last should often be first, that the exercise of
dominion and lordship had nothing in them desirable, and that we must
become as little children,--sank down and worked there even before Paul
ceased to persecute, and had no small part in getting him ready for the
crisis of his conversion.
Such doctrines offered new fields of righteousness to the eyes of this
indefatigable explorer of it, and enlarged the domain of duty of which
Pharisaism showed him only a portion. Then, after the satisfaction thus
given to his desire for a full conception of righteousness, came
Christ's injunctions to make clean the inside as well as the outside, to
beware of the least leaven of hypocrisy and self-flattery, of saying and
not doing;--and, finally, the injunction to feel, after doing all we
can, that, as compared with the standard of perfection, we are still
unprofitable servants. These teachings were, to a man like Paul, for the
practice of righteousness what the others were for the
theory;--sympathetic utterances, which made the inmost chords of his
being vibrate, and which irresistibly drew him sooner or later towards
their utterer. Need it be said that he never forgot them, and that in
all his pages they have left their trace? It is even affecting to see,
how, when he is driven for the very sake of righteousness to put the law
of righteousness in the second place, and to seek outside the law itself
for a power to fulfil the law, how, I say, he returns again and again to
the elucidation of his one sole design in all he is doing; how he
labours to prevent all possibility of misunderstanding, and to show that
he is only leaving the moral law for a moment in order to establish it
for ever more victoriously. What earnestness and pathos in the
assurance: 'If there had been a law given which could have given life,
verily, righteousness should have been by the law!'[29] 'Do I condemn
the law?' he keeps saying; 'do I forget that the commandment is holy,
just, and good? Because we are no longer under the law, are we to sin?
Am I seeking to make the course of my life and yours other than a
service and an obedience?' This man, out of whom an astounding criticism
has deduced Antinomianism, is in truth so possessed with horror of
Antinomianism, that he goes to grace for the sole purpose of extirpating
it, and even then cannot rest without perpetually telling us why he is
gone there. This man, whom Calvin and Luther and their followers have
shut up into the two scholastic doctrines of election and justification,
would have said, could we hear him, just what he said about circumcision
and uncircumcision in his own day: 'Election is nothing, and
justification is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.'
[Footnote 29: _Gal._, iii, 21.]
This foremost place which righteousness takes in the order of St. Paul's
ideas makes a signal difference between him and Puritanism. Puritanism,
as we have said, finds its starting-point either in the desire to flee
from eternal wrath or in the desire to obtain eternal bliss. Puritanism
has learned from revelation, as it says, a particular history of the
first man's fall, of mankind being under a curse, of certain contracts
having been passed concerning mankind in the Council of the Trinity, of
the substance of those contracts, and of man's position under them. The
great concern of Puritanism is with the operation of those contracts on
man's condition; its leading thought, if it is a Puritanism of a gloomy
turn, is of awe and fear caused by the threatening aspect of man's
condition under these contracts; if of a cheerful turn, of gratitude and
hope caused by the favourable aspect of it. But in either case, foregone
events, the covenant passed, what God has done and does, is the great
matter. What there is left for man to do, the human work of
righteousness, is secondary, and comes in but to attest and confirm our
assurance of what God has done for us. We have seen this in Wesley's
words already quoted: the first thing for a man is to be justified and
sanctified, and to have the assurance that, without seeking it by works,
he is justified and sanctified; then the desire and works of
righteousness follow as a proper result of this condition. Still more
does Calvinism make man's desire and works of righteousness mere
evidences and benefits of more important things; the desire to work
righteousness is among the saving graces applied by the Holy Spirit to
the elect, and the last of those graces. _Denique_, says the Synod of
Dort, _last of all_, after faith in the promises and after the witness
of the Spirit, comes, to establish our assurance, a clear conscience and
righteousness. It is manifest how unlike is this order of ideas to
Paul's order, who starts with the thought of a conscience void of
offence towards God and man, and builds upon that thought his whole
system.
But this difference constitutes from the very outset an immense
scientific superiority for the scheme of Paul. Hope and fear are
elements of human nature like the love of right, but they are far
blinder and less scientific elements of it. 'The Bible is a divine
revelation; the Bible declares certain things; the things it thus
declares have the witness of our hopes and fears;'--this is the line of
thought followed by Puritanism. But what science seeks after is a
satisfying rational conception of things. A scheme which fails to give
this, which gives the contrary of this, may indeed be of a nature to
move our hopes and fears, but is to science of none the more value on
that account.
Nor does our calling such a scheme _a revelation_ mend the matter.
Instead of covering the scientific inadequacy of a conception by the
authority of a revelation, science rather proves the authority of a
revelation by the scientific adequacy of the conceptions given in it,
and limits the sphere of that authority to the sphere of that adequacy.
The more an alleged revelation seems to contain precious and striking
things, the more will science be inclined to doubt the correctness of
any deduction which draws from it, within the sphere of these things, a
scheme which rationally is not satisfying. That the scheme of Puritanism
is rationally so little satisfying inclines science, not to take it on
the authority of the Bible, but to doubt whether it is really in the
Bible. The first appeal which this scheme, having begun outside the
sphere of reality and experience, makes in the sphere of reality and
experience,--its first appeal, therefore, to science,--the appeal to the
witness of human hope and fear, does not much mend matters; for science
knows that numberless conceptions not rationally satisfying are yet the
ground of hope and fear.
Paul does not begin outside the sphere of science; he begins with an
appeal to reality and experience. And the appeal here with which he
commences has, for science, undoubted force and importance; for he
appeals to a rational conception which is a part, and perhaps the chief
part, of our experience; the conception of the law of _righteousness_,
the very law and ground of human nature so far as this nature is moral.
Things as they truly are,--facts,--are the object-matter of science; and
the moral law in human nature, however this law may have originated, is
in our actual experience among the greatest of facts.
If I were not afraid of intruding upon Mr. Ruskin's province, I might
point out the witness which etymology itself bears to this law as a
prime element and _clue_ in man's constitution. Our word righteousness
means going straight, going the way we are meant to go; there are
languages in which the word 'way' or 'road' is also the word for right
reason and duty; the Greek word for justice and righteousness has for
its foundation, some say, the idea of describing a certain line,
following a certain necessary orbit. But for these fanciful helps there
is no need. When Paul starts with affirming the grandeur and necessity
of the law of righteousness, science has no difficulty in going along
with him. When he fixes as man's right aim 'love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control,'[30]
he appeals for witness to the truth of what he says to an experience too
intimate to need illustration or argument.
[Footnote 30: _Gal._, v, 22, 23.]
The best confirmation of the scientific validity of the importance which
Paul thus attaches to the law of righteousness, the law of reason and
conscience, God as moral law, is to be found in its agreement with the
importance attached to this law by teachers the most unlike him; since
in the eye of science an experience gains as much by having
universality, as in the eye of religion it seems to gain by having
uniqueness. 'Would you know,' says Epictetus, 'the means to perfection
which Socrates followed? they were these: in every single matter which
came before him he made the rule of reason and conscience his one rule
to follow.' Such was precisely the aim of Paul also; it is an aim to
which science does homage as a satisfying rational conception. And to
this aim hope and fear properly attach themselves. For on our following
the clue of moral order, or losing it, depends our happiness or misery;
our life or death in the true sense of those words; our harmony with the
universal order or our disharmony with it; our partaking, as St. Paul
says, of the wrath of God or of the glory of God. So that looking to
this clue, and fearing to lose hold on it, we may in strict scientific
truth say with the author of the Imitation: _Omnia vanitas, præter amare
Deum, et illi soli servire_.
But to serve God, to follow that central clue in our moral being which
unites us to the universal order, is no easy task; and here again we are
on the most sure ground of experience and psychology. In some way or
other, says Bishop Wilson, every man is conscious of an opposition in
him between the flesh and the spirit. _Video meliora proboque, deteriora
sequor_, say the thousand times quoted lines of the Roman poet. The
philosophical explanation of this conflict does not indeed attribute,
like the Manichæan fancy, any inherent evil to the flesh and its
workings; all the forces and tendencies in us are, like our proper
central moral tendency the desire of righteousness, in themselves
beneficent. But they require to be harmonised with this tendency,
because this aims directly at our total moral welfare,--our harmony as
moral beings with the law of our nature and the law of God,--and derives
thence a pre-eminence and a right to moderate. And, though they are not
evil in themselves, the evil which flows from these diverse workings is
undeniable. The lusts of the flesh, the law in our members, _passion_,
according to the Greek word used by Paul, _inordinate affection_,
according to the admirable rendering of Paul's Greek word in our English
Bible,[31] take naturally no account of anything but themselves; this
arbitrary and unregulated action of theirs can produce only confusion
and misery. The spirit, the law of our mind, takes account of the
universal moral order, the will of God, and is indeed the voice of that
order expressing itself in us. Paul talks of a man sowing to _his_
flesh,[32] because each of us has of his own this individual body, this
_congeries_ of flesh and bones, blood and nerves, different from that of
every one else, and with desires and impulses driving each of us his own
separate way; and he says that a man who sows to this, sows to a
thousand tyrants, and can reap no worthy harvest. But he talks of sowing
to _the_ spirit; because there is one central moral tendency which for
us and for all men is the law of our being, and through reason and
righteousness we move in this universal order and with it. In this
conformity to _the will of God_, as we religiously name the moral order,
is our peace and happiness.
[Footnote 31: _Col._, iii, 5.]
[Footnote 32: _Gal._, vi, 8.]
But how to find the energy and power to bring all those self-seeking
tendencies of the flesh, those multitudinous, swarming, eager, and
incessant impulses, into obedience to the central tendency? Mere
commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition
in the desires it tries to control. It even enlarges their power,
because it makes us feel our impotence; and the confusion caused by
their ungoverned working is increased by our being filled with a
deepened sense of disharmony, remorse, and dismay. 'I was alive without
the law once,'[33] says Paul; the natural play of all the forces and
desires in me went on smoothly enough so long as I did not attempt to
introduce order and regulation among them. But the condition of immoral
tranquillity could not in man be permanent. That natural law of reason
and conscience which all men have, was sufficient by itself to produce a
consciousness of rebellion and disquietude. Matters became only worse by
the exhibition of the Mosaic law, the offspring of a moral sense more
poignant and stricter, however little it might show of subtle insight
and delicacy, than the moral sense of the mass of mankind. The very
stringency of the Mosaic code increased the feeling of dismay and
helplessness; it set forth the law of righteousness more authoritatively
and minutely, yet did not supply any sufficient power to keep it.
Neither the law of nature, therefore, nor the law of Moses, availed to
blind men to righteousness. So we come to the word which is the
governing word of the Epistle to the Romans,--the word _all_. As the
word _righteousness_ is the governing word of St. Paul's entire mind and
life, so the word _all_ is the governing word of this his chief epistle.
The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike
fail to achieve righteousness. '_All_ have sinned, and come short of the
glory of God.'[34] All do what they would not, and do not what they
would; all feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable. 'O
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?'[35]
[Footnote 33: _Rom._, vii, 9.]
[Footnote 34: _Rom._, iii, 23.]
[Footnote 35: _Rom._, vii, 24.]
Hitherto, we have followed Paul in the sphere of morals; we have now
come with him to the point where he enters the sphere of religion.
Religion is that which binds and holds us to the practice of
righteousness. We have accompanied Paul, and found him always treading
solid ground, till he is brought to straits where a binding and holding
power of this kind is necessary. Here is the critical point for the
scientific worth of his doctrine. 'Now at last,' cries Puritanism, 'the
great apostle is about to become even as one of us; there is no issue
for him now, but the issue we have always declared he finds. He has
recourse to our theurgy of election, justification, substitution, and
imputed righteousness.' We will proceed to show that Paul has recourse
to nothing of the kind.
II.
We have seen how Puritanism seems to come by its religion in the first
instance theologically and from authority; Paul by his, on the other
hand, psychologically and from experience. Even the points, therefore,
in which they both meet, they have not reached in the same order or by
the same road. The miserable sense of sin from unrighteousness, the
joyful witness of a good conscience from righteousness, these are points
in which Puritanism and St. Paul meet. They are facts of human nature
and can be verified by science. But whereas Puritanism, so far as
science is concerned, ends with these facts, and rests the whole weight
of its antecedent theurgy upon the witness to it they offer, Paul begins
with these facts, and has not yet, so far as we have followed him,
called upon them to prove anything but themselves. The scientific
difference, as we have already remarked, which this establishes between
Paul and Puritanism is immense, and is all in Paul's favour. Sin and
righteousness, together with their eternal accompaniments of fear and
hope, misery and happiness, can prove themselves; but they can by no
means prove, also, Puritanism's history of original sin, election and
justification.
Puritanism is fond of maintaining, indeed, that Paul's doctrines derive
their sanction, not from any agreement with science and experience, but
from his miraculous conversion, and that this conversion it was which in
his own judgment gave to them their authority. But whatever sanction the
miracle of his conversion may in his own eyes have lent to the doctrines
afterwards propounded by Paul, it is clear that, for science, his
conversion adds to his doctrines no force at all which they do not
already possess in themselves. Paul's conversion is for science an event
of precisely the same nature as the conversions of which the history of
Methodism relates so many; events described, for the most part, just as
the event of Paul's conversion is described, with perfect good faith,
and which we may perfectly admit to have happened just in the manner
related, without on that account attributing to those who underwent them
any source of certitude for a scheme of doctrine which this doctrine
does not on other and better grounds possess.
Surely this proposition has only to be clearly stated in order to be
self-evident. The conversion of Paul is in itself an incident of
precisely the same order as the conversion of Sampson Staniforth, a
Methodist soldier in the campaign of Fontenoy. Staniforth himself
relates his conversion as follows, in words which bear plainly marked on
them the very stamp of good faith:--
'From twelve at night till two it was my turn to stand sentinel
at a dangerous post. I had a fellow-sentinel, but I desired him
to go away, which he willingly did. As soon as I was alone, I
knelt down and determined not to rise, but to continue crying
and wrestling with God till he had mercy on me. How long I was
in that agony I cannot tell; but as I looked up to heaven I saw
the clouds open exceeding bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the
cross. At the same moment these words were applied to my heart:
"Thy sins are forgiven thee." All guilt was gone, and my soul
was filled with unutterable peace: the fear of death and hell
was vanished away. I was filled with wonder and astonishment. I
closed my eyes, but the impression was still the same; and for
about ten weeks, while I was awake, let me be where I would, the
same appearance was still before my eyes, and the same
impression upon my heart, _Thy sins are forgiven thee_.'
Not the narrative, in the Acts, of Paul's journey to Damascus, could
more convince us, as we have said, of its own honesty. But this honesty
makes nothing, as every one will admit, for the scientific truth of any
scheme of doctrine propounded by Sampson Staniforth, which must prove
itself and its own scientific value before science can admit it.
Precisely the same is it with Paul's doctrine; and we repeat, therefore,
that he and his doctrine have herein a great advantage over Puritanism,
in that, so far as we have yet followed them, they, unlike Puritanism,
rely on facts of experience and assert nothing which science cannot
verify.
We have now to see whether Paul, in passing from the undoubted facts of
experience, with which he begins, to his religion properly so called,
abandons in any essential points of his teaching the advantage with
which he started, and ends, as Puritanism commences, with a batch of
arbitrary and unscientific assumptions.