no perverse temper, no enfeebled powers, no resisting past, no spiritual
organs gangrened, no need of the knife and fire; smoothly and inevitably
he follows the eternal order, and hereto belongs happiness. What sins,
then, has the just to expiate?--_ours._ In truth, men's habitual
unrighteousness, their hard and careless breaking of the moral law, do
so tend to reduce and impair the standard of goodness, that, in order to
keep this standard pure and unimpaired, the righteous must actually
labour and suffer far more than would be necessary if men were better.
In the first place, he has to undergo our hatred and persecution for his
justice. In the second place, he has to make up for the harm caused by
our continual shortcomings, to step between us foolish transgressors and
the destructive natural consequences of our transgression, and, by a
superhuman example, a spending himself without stint, a more than mortal
scale of justice and purity, to save the ideal of human life and conduct
from the deterioration with which men's ordinary practice threatens it.
In this way Jesus Christ truly 'became for our sakes poor, though he was
rich,' he was truly 'bruised for our iniquities,' he 'suffered in our
behoof,' 'bare the sin of many,' and 'made intercession for the
transgressors.'[91] In this way, truly, 'he was sacrificed as a
blameless lamb to redeem us from the vain conversation which had become
our second nature;'[92] in this way, 'he was made to be sin for us, who
knew no sin.'[93] Such, according to that true and profound perception
of the import of Christ's sufferings, which, in all St. Paul's writings,
and in the inestimable First Epistle of St. Peter, is presented to us,
is the expiation of Christ.
[Footnote 91: II _Cor._, viii, 9; _Is._, liii, 5; I _Pet._, ii, 21;
_Is._, liii, 12.]
[Footnote 92: I _Pet._, i, 18, 19.]
[Footnote 93: II _Cor._, v, 21.]
The notion, therefore, of _satisfying and appeasing an angry God's
wrath_, does not come into Paul's real conception of Jesus Christ's
sacrifice. Paul's foremost notion of this sacrifice is, that by it Jesus
died to the law of selfish impulse, parted with what to men in general
is most precious and near. Paul's second notion is, that whereas Jesus
suffered in doing this, his suffering was not _his_ fault, but ours; not
for _his_ good, but for ours. In the first aspect, Jesus is the
_martyrion_,--the testimony in his life and in his death, to
righteousness, to the power and goodness of God. In the second aspect he
is the _antilytron_ or ransom. But, in either aspect, Jesus Christ's
solemn and dolorous condemnation of sin does actually loosen sin's hold
and attraction upon us who regard it,--makes it easier for us to
understand and love goodness, to rise above self, to die to sin.
Christ's sacrifice, however, and the condemnation of sin it contained,
was made for us while we were yet sinners; it was made irrespectively of
our power or inclination to sympathise with it and appreciate it. Yet,
even thus, in Paul's view, the sacrifice reconciled us to God, to the
eternal order; for it contained the means, the only possible means, of
our being brought into harmony with this order. Jesus Christ,
nevertheless, was delivered for our sins while we were yet sinners,[94]
and before we could yet appreciate what he did. But presently there
comes a change. Grace, the goodness of God, _the spirit_,--as Paul loved
to call that awful and beneficent impulsion of things within us and
without us, which we can concur with, indeed, but cannot create,--leads
us to _repentance towards God_,[95] a change of the inner man in regard
to the moral order, duty, righteousness. And now, to help our impulse
towards righteousness, we have a power enabling us to turn this impulse
to full account. Now _the spirit_ does its greatest work in us; now, for
the first time, the influence of Jesus Christ's pregnant act really
gains us. For now awakens the sympathy for the act and the appreciation
of it, which its doer dispensed with or was too benign to wait for;
_faith working through love towards Christ_[96] enters into us, masters
us. We identify ourselves,--this is the line of Paul's thought,--with
Christ; we repeat, through the power of this identification, Christ's
death to the law of the flesh and self-pleasing, his condemnation of sin
in the flesh; the death how imperfectly, the condemnation how
remorsefully! But we rise with him, Paul continues, to life, the only
true life, of imitation of God, of putting on the new man which after
God is created in righteousness and true holiness,[97] of following the
eternal law of the moral order which by ourselves we could not follow.
Then God justifies us. We have the righteousness of God and the sense of
having it; we are freed from the oppressing sense of eternal order
guiltily outraged and sternly retributive; we act in joyful conformity
with God's will, instead of in miserable rebellion to it; we are in
harmony with the universal order, and feel that we are in harmony with
it. If, then, Christ was delivered for our sins, he was raised for our
justification. If by Christ's death, says Paul, we were reconciled to
God, by the means being thus provided for our else impossible access to
God, much more, when we have availed ourselves of these means and died
with him, are we saved by his life which we partake.[98] Henceforward
we are not only justified but sanctified; not only in harmony with the
eternal order and at peace with God, but consecrated[99] and
unalterably devoted to them; and from this devotion comes an
ever-growing union with God in Christ, an advance, as St. Paul says,
from glory to glory.[100]
[Footnote 94: _Rom._, v, 8.]
[Footnote 95: _Acts_, xx, 21.]
[Footnote 96: _Gal._, v, 6.]
[Footnote 97: _Eph._, iv, 24.]
[Footnote 98: _Rom._, v, 10.]
[Footnote 99: The endless words which Puritanism has wasted upon
_sanctification_, a magical filling with goodness and holiness, flow
from a mere mistake in translating; +hagiasmos+ means _consecration_,
a setting apart to holy service.]
[Footnote 100: II _Cor._, iii, 18.]
This is Paul's conception of Christ's sacrifice. His figures of ransom,
redemption, propitiation, blood, offering, all subordinate themselves to
his central idea of _identification with Christ through dying with him_,
and are strictly subservient to it. The figured speech of Paul has its
own beauty and propriety. His language is, much of it, eastern language,
imaginative language; there is no need for turning it, as Puritanism has
done, into the methodical language of the schools. But if it is to be
turned into methodical language, then it is the language into which we
have translated it that translates it truly.
We have before seen how it fares with one of the two great tenets which
Puritanism has extracted from St. Paul, the tenet of predestination. We
now see how it fares with the other, the tenet of justification. Paul's
figures our Puritans have taken literally, while for his central idea
they have substituted another which is not his. And his central idea
they have turned into a figure, and have let it almost disappear out of
their mind. His essential idea lost, his figures misused, an idea
essentially not his substituted for his,--the unedifying patchwork thus
made, Puritanism has stamped with Paul's name, and called _the gospel_.
It thunders at Romanism for not preaching it, it casts off Anglicanism
for not setting it forth alone and unreservedly, it founds organisations
of its own to give full effect to it; these organisations guide
politics, govern statesmen, destroy institutions;--and they are based
upon a blunder!
It is to Protestantism, and this its Puritan gospel, that the reproaches
thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion of the heart into
theories of the head about election and justification, rightly attach.
St. Paul himself, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness and
ends with finding it; from first to last, the practical religious sense
never deserts him. If he could have seen and heard our preachers of
predestination and justification, they are just the people he would have
called 'diseased about questions and word-battlings.'[101] He would have
told Puritanism that every Sunday, when in all its countless chapels it
reads him and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart. The moment
it reads him right, a veil will seem to be taken away from its
heart;[102] it will feel as though scales were fallen from its eyes.
[Footnote 101: I _Tim._, vi, 4.]
[Footnote 102: II _Cor._, iii, 15, 16.]
And now, leaving Puritanism and its errors, let us turn again for a
moment, before we end, to the glorious apostle who has occupied us so
long. He died, and men's familiar fancies of bargain and appeasement,
from which, by a prodigy of religious insight, Paul had been able to
disengage the death of Jesus, fastened on it and made it their own. Back
rolled over the human soul the mist which the fires of Paul's spiritual
genius had dispersed for a few short years. The mind of the whole world
was imbrued in the idea of blood, and only through the false idea of
sacrifice did men reach Paul's true one. Paul's idea of dying with
Christ the _Imitation_ elevates more conspicuously than any Protestant
treatise elevates it; but it elevates it environed and dominated by the
idea of appeasement;--of the magnified and non-natural man in Heaven,
wrath-filled and blood-exacting; of the human victim adding his piacular
sufferings to those of the divine. Meanwhile another danger was
preparing. Gifted men had brought to the study of St. Paul the habits of
the Greek and Roman schools, and philosophised where Paul Orientalised.
Augustine, a great genius, who can doubt it?--nay, a great religious
genius, but unlike Paul in this, and inferior to him, that he confused
the boundaries of metaphysics and religion, which Paul never
did,--Augustine set the example of finding in Paul's eastern speech,
just as it stood, the formal propositions of western dialectics. Last
came the interpreter in whose slowly relaxing grasp we still lie,--the
heavy-handed Protestant Philistine. Sincere, gross of perception,
prosaic, he saw in Paul's mystical idea of man's investiture with the
righteousness of God nothing but a strict legal transaction, and
reserved all his imagination for Hell and the New Jerusalem and his
foretaste of them. A so-called Pauline doctrine was in all men's mouths,
but the ideas of the true Paul lay lost and buried.
Every one who has been at Rome has been taken to see the Church of St.
Paul, rebuilt after a destruction by fire forty years ago. The church
stands a mile or two out of the city, on the way to Ostia and the
desert. The interior has all the costly magnificence of Italian
churches; oh the ceiling is written in gilded letters: '_Doctor
Gentium_.' Gold glitters and marbles gleam, but man and his movement are
not there. The traveller has left at a distance the _fumum et opes
strepitumque Romæ_; around him reigns solitude. There is Paul, with the
mystery which was hidden from ages and from generations, which was
uncovered by him for some half score years, and which then was buried
with him in his grave! Not in our day will he relive, with his incessant
effort to find a moral side for miracle, with his incessant effort to
make the intellect follow and secure all the workings of the religious
perception. Of those who care for religion, the multitude of us want the
materialism of the Apocalypse; the few want a vague religiosity.
Science, which more and more teaches us to find in the unapparent the
real, will gradually serve to conquer the materialism of popular
religion. The friends of vague religiosity, on the other hand, will be
more and more taught by experience that a theology, a scientific
appreciation of the facts of religion, is wanted for religion; but a
theology which is a true theology, not a false. Both these influences
will work for Paul's re-emergence. The doctrine of Paul will arise out
of the tomb where for centuries it has lain buried. It will edify the
church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations,
the applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little to pay
half the debt which the church of God owes to this 'least of the
apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted
the church of God.'[103]
[Footnote 103: I _Cor._, xv, 9.]
* * * * *
PURITANISM
AND THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND.
In the foregoing treatise we have spoken of Protestantism, and have
tried to show, how, with its three notable tenets of predestination,
original sin, and justification, it has been pounding away for three
centuries at St. Paul's wrong words, and missing his essential doctrine.
And we took Puritanism to stand for Protestantism, and addressed
ourselves directly to the Puritans; for the Puritan Churches, we said,
seem to exist specially for the sake of these doctrines, one or more of
them. It is true, many Puritans now profess also the doctrine that it is
wicked to have a church connected with the State; but this is a later
invention,[104] designed to strengthen a separation previously made. It
requires to be noticed in due course; but meanwhile, we say that the aim
of setting forth certain Protestant doctrines purely and integrally is
the main title on which Puritan Churches rest their right of existing.
With historic Churches, like those of England or Rome, it is otherwise;
these doctrines may be in them, may be a part of their traditions, their
theological stock; but certainly no one will say that either of these
Churches was made for the express purpose of upholding these three
theological doctrines, jointly or severally. A little consideration will
show quite clearly the difference in this respect between the historic
Churches and the churches of separatists.
[Footnote 104: In his very interesting history, _The Church of the
Restoration_, Dr. Stoughton says, most truly of both Anglicans and
Puritans in 1660: 'It is necessary to bear in mind this
circumstance, that _both parties were advocates for a national
establishment of religion_.' Vol. i, p. 113.]
People are not necessarily monarchists or republicans because they are
born and live under a monarchy or republic. They avail themselves of the
established government for those general purposes for which governments
and politics exist, but they do not, for the most part, trouble their
heads much about particular theoretical principles of government. Nay,
it may well happen that a man who lives and thrives under a monarchy
shall yet theoretically disapprove the principle of monarchy, or a man
who lives and thrives under a republic, the principle of republicanism.
But a man, or body of men, who have gone out of an established polity
from zeal for the principle of monarchy or republicanism, and have set
up a polity of their own for the very purpose of giving satisfaction to
this zeal, are in a false position whenever it shall appear that the
principle, from zeal for which they have constituted their separate
existence, is unsound. So predestinarianism and solifidianism, Calvinism
and Lutherism, may appear in the theology of a national or historic
Church, charged ever since the rise of Christianity with the task of
developing the immense and complex store of ideas contained in
Christianity; and when the stage of development has been reached at
which the unsoundness of predestinarian and solifidian dogmas becomes
manifest, they will be dropped out of the Church's theology, and she and
her task will remain what they were before. But when people from zeal
for these dogmas find their historic Church not predestinarian or
solifidian enough for them, and make new associations of their own,
which shall be predestinarian or solifidian absolutely, then, when the
dogmas are undermined, the associations are undermined too, and have
either to own themselves without a reason for existing, or to discover
some new reason in place of the old. Now, nothing which exists likes to
be driven to a strait of this kind; so every association which exists
because of zeal for the dogmas of election or justification, will
naturally cling to these dogmas longer and harder than other people.
Therefore we have treated the Puritan bodies in this country as the
great stronghold here of these doctrines; and in showing what a
perversion of Paul's real ideas these doctrines commonly called Pauline
are, we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans.
But those who speak in the Puritans' name say that we charge upon
Puritanism, as a sectarian peculiarity, doctrine which is not only the
inevitable result of an honest interpretation of the writings of St.
Paul, but which is, besides, the creed held in common by Puritans and by
all the churches in Christendom, with one insignificant exception. Nay,
they even declare that 'no man in his senses can deny that the Church of
England was meant to be a thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, and it
may be said Calvinistic Church.' To saddle Puritanism in special with
the doctrines we have called Puritan is, they say, a piece of unfairness
which has its motive in mere ill-will to Puritanism, a device which can
injure nobody but its author.
Now, we have tried to show that the Puritans are quite wrong in
imagining their doctrine to be the inevitable result of an honest
interpretation of St. Paul's writings. That they are wrong we think is
certain; but so far are we from being moved, in anything that we do or
say in this matter, by ill-will to Puritanism and the Puritans, that it
is, on the contrary, just because of our hearty respect for them, and
from our strong sense of their value, that we speak as we do. Certainly
we consider them to be in the main, at present, an obstacle to progress
and to true civilisation. But this is because their worth is, in our
opinion, such that not only must one for their own sakes wish to see it
turned to more advantage, but others, from whom they are now separated,
would greatly gain by conjunction with them, and our whole collective
force of growth and progress be thereby immeasurably increased. In
short, our one feeling when we regard them, is a feeling, not of
ill-will, but of regret at waste of power; our one desire is a desire of
comprehension.
But the waste of power must continue, and the comprehension is
impossible, so long as Puritanism imagines itself to possess, in its two
or three signal doctrines, what it calls _the gospel_; so long as it
constitutes itself separately on the plea of setting forth purely _the
gospel_, which it thus imagines itself to have seized; so long as it
judges others as not holding _the gospel_, or as holding additions to it
and variations from it. This fatal self-righteousness, grounded on a
false conceit of knowledge, makes comprehension impossible; because it
takes for granted the possession of the truth, and the power of deciding
how others violate it; and this is a position of superiority, and suits
conquest rather than comprehension.
The good of comprehension in a national Church is, that the larger and
more various the body of members, the more elements of power and life
the Church will contain, the more points will there be of contact, the
more mutual support and stimulus, the more growth in perfection both of
thought and practice. The waste of power from not comprehending the
Puritans in the national Church is measured by the number and value of
elements which Puritanism could supply towards the collective growth of
the whole body. The national Church would grow more vigorously towards a
higher stage of insight into religious truth, and consequently towards a
greater perfection of practice, if it had these elements; and this is
why we wish for the Puritans in the Church. But, meanwhile, Puritanism
will not contribute to the common growth, mainly because it believes
that a certain set of opinions or scheme of theological doctrine is _the
gospel_; that it is possible and profitable to extract this, and that
Puritans have done so; and that it is the duty of men, who like
themselves have extracted it, to separate themselves from those who have
not, and to set themselves apart that they may profess it purely.
To disabuse them of this error, which, by preventing collective life,
prevents also collective growth, it is necessary to show them that their
extracted scheme of theological doctrine is not really _the gospel_; and
that at any rate, therefore, it is not worth their while to separate
themselves, and to frustrate the hope of growth in common, merely for
this scheme's sake. And even if it were true, as they allege, that the
national and historic Churches of Christendom do equally with Puritanism
hold this scheme, or main parts of it, still it would be to Puritanism,
and not to the historic Churches, that in showing the invalidity and
unscripturalness of this scheme we should address ourselves, because the
Puritan Churches found their very existence on it, and the historic
Churches do not. And not founding their existence on it, nor falling
into separatism for it, the historic Churches have a collective life
which is very considerable, and a power of growth, even in respect of
the very scheme of doctrine in question, supposing them to hold it, far
greater than any which the Puritan Churches show, but which would be yet
greater and more fruitful still, if the historic Churches combined the
large and admirable contingent of Puritanism with their own forces.
Therefore, as we have said, it is out of no sort of malice or ill-will,
but from esteem for their fine qualities and from desire for their help,
that we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans. We propose to complete
now our dealings with this subject by showing how, as a matter of fact,
the Church of England (which is the historic Church practically in
question so far as Puritanism is concerned) seems to us to have
displayed with respect to those very tenets which we have criticised,
and for which we are said to have unfairly made Puritanism alone
responsible, a continual power of growth which has been wanting to the
Puritan congregations. This we propose to show first; and we will show
secondly, how, from the very theory of a historic or national Church,
the probability of this greater power of growth seems to follow, that we
may try and commend that theory a little more to the thoughts and favour
of our Puritan friends.
The two great Puritan doctrines which we have criticised at such length
are the doctrines of predestination and justification. Of the aggressive
and militant Puritanism of our people, predestination has, almost up to
the present day, been the favourite and distinguishing doctrine; it was
the doctrine which Puritan flocks greedily sought, which Puritan
ministers powerfully preached, and called others _carnal gospellers_ for
not preaching. This Geneva doctrine accompanied the Geneva discipline.
Puritanism's first great wish and endeavour was to establish both the
one and the other absolutely in the Church of England, and it became
nonconforming because it failed. Now, it is well known that the High
Church divines of the seventeenth century were Arminian, that the Church
of England was the stronghold of Arminianism, and that Arminianism is,
as we have said, an effort of man's practical good sense to get rid of
what is shocking to it in Calvinism. But what is not so well known, and
what is eminently worthy of remark, is the constant pressure applied by
Puritanism upon the Church of England, to put the Calvinistic doctrine
more distinctly into her formularies, and to tie her up more strictly to
this doctrine; the constant resistance offered by the Church of England,
and the large degree in which Nonconformity is really due to this cause.
Everybody knows how far Nonconformity is due to the Church of England's
rigour in imposing an explicit declaration of adherence to her
formularies. But only a few, who have searched out the matter, know how
far Nonconformity is due, also, to the Church of England's invincible
reluctance to narrow her large and loose formularies to the strict
Calvinistic sense dear to Puritanism. Yet this is what the record of
conferences shows at least as signally as it shows the domineering
spirit of the High Church clergy; but our current political histories,
written always with an anti-ecclesiastical bias, which is natural
enough, inasmuch as the Church party was not the party of civil liberty,
leaves this singularly out of sight. Yet there is a very catena of
testimonies to prove it; to show us, from Elizabeth's reign to Charles
the Second's, Calvinism, as a power both within and without the Church
of England, trying to get decisive command of her formularies; and the
Church of England, with the instinct of a body meant to live and grow,
and averse to fetter and engage its future, steadily resisting.