on the strength of it all, beyond any doubt, 'fairly conclude that
Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments;'
that 'the whole Bible is written on the principle of development.'
Dr. Newman, indeed, uses this idea in a manner which seems to us
arbitrary and condemned by the idea itself. He uses it in support of the
pretensions of the Church of Rome to an infallible authority on points
of doctrine. He says, with much ingenuity, to Protestants: The doctrines
you receive are no more on the face of the Bible, or in the plain
teaching of the ante-Nicene Church, which alone you consider pure, than
the doctrines you reject. The doctrine of the Trinity is a development,
as much as the doctrine of Purgatory. Both of them are developments made
by the Church, by the post-Nicene Church. The determination of the Canon
of Scripture, a thing of vital importance to you who acknowledge no
authority but Scripture, is a development due to the post-Nicene
Church.--And thus Dr. Newman would compel Protestants to admit that
which is, he declares, in itself reasonable,--namely, 'the probability
of the appointment in Christianity of an external authority to decide
upon the true developments of doctrine and practice in it, thereby
separating them from the mass of mere human speculation, extravagance,
corruption, and error, in and out of which they grow. This is the
doctrine of the infallibility of the Church, of faith and obedience
towards the Church, founded on the probability of its never erring in
its declarations or commands.'
Now, asserted in this absolute way, and extended to doctrine as well as
discipline, to speculative thought as well as to Christian practice, Dr.
Newman's conclusion seems at variance with his own theory of
development, and to be something like an instance of what Bishop Butler
criticises when he says: 'Men are impatient, and for precipitating
things.' But Dr. Newman has himself supplied us with a sort of
commentary on these words of Butler's which is worth quoting, because it
throws more light on our point than Butler's few words can throw on it
by themselves. Dr. Newman says: 'Development is not an effect of wishing
and resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, or of any mechanism of
reasoning, or of any mere subtlety of intellect; but comes of its own
innate power of expansion within the mind in its season, though with the
use of reflection and argument and original thought, more or less as it
may happen, with a dependence on the ethical growth of the mind itself,
and with a reflex influence upon it.'
It is impossible to point out more sagaciously and expressively the
natural, spontaneous, free character of true development; how such a
development must follow laws of its own, may often require vast periods
of time, cannot be hurried, cannot be stopped. And so far as
Christianity deals,--as, in its metaphysical theology, it does
abundantly deal,--with thought and speculation, it must surely be
admitted that for its true and ultimate development in this line more
time is required, and other conditions have to be fulfilled, than we
have had already. So far as Christian doctrine contains speculative
philosophical ideas, never since its origin have the conditions been
present for determining these adequately; certainly not in the mediæval
Church, which so dauntlessly strove to determine them. And therefore on
every Creed and Council is judgment passed in Bishop Butler's sentence:
'_The Bible contains many truths as yet undiscovered._'
The Christian religion has practice for its great end and aim; but it
raises, as anyone can see, and as Church-history proves, numerous and
great questions of philosophy and of scientific criticism. Well, for the
true elucidation of such questions, and for their final solution, time
and favourable developing conditions are confessedly necessary. From the
end of the apostolic age and of the great fontal burst of Christianity,
down to the present time, have such conditions ever existed in the
Christian communities, for determining adequately the questions of
philosophy and scientific criticism which the Christian religion starts?
_God_, _creation_, _will_, _evil_, _propitiation_, _immortality_,--these
terms and many more of the same kind, however much they might in the
Bible be used in a concrete and practical manner, yet plainly had in
themselves a provocation to abstract thought, carried with them the
occasions of a criticism and a philosophy, which must sooner or later
make its appearance in the Church. It did make its appearance, and the
question is whether it has ever yet appeared there under conditions
favourable to its true development. Surely this is best elucidated by
considering whether questions of criticism and philosophy in general
ever had one of their happy moments, their times for successful
development, in the early and middle ages of Christendom at all, or have
had one of them in the Christian churches, as such, since. All these
questions hang together, and the time that is improper for solving one
sort of them truly, is improper for solving the others.
Well, surely, historic criticism, criticism of style, criticism of
nature, no one would go to the early or middle ages of the Church for
illumination on these matters. How then should those ages develop
successfully a philosophy of theology, or in other words, a criticism of
physics and metaphysics, which involves the three other criticisms and
more besides? Church-theology is an elaborate attempt at a philosophy of
theology, at a philosophical criticism. In Greece, before Christianity
appeared, there had been a favouring period for the development of such
a criticism; a considerable movement of it took place, and considerable
results were reached. When Christianity began, this movement was in
decadence; it declined more and more till it died quite out; it revived
very slowly, and as it waxed, the mediæval Church waned. The doctrine of
universals is a question of philosophy discussed in Greece, and
re-discussed in the middle ages. Whatever light this doctrine receives
from Plato's treatment of it, or Aristotle's, in whatever state they
left it, will anyone say that the Nominalists and Realists brought any
more light to it, that they developed it in any way, or could develop
it? For the same reason, St. Augustine's criticism of God's eternal
decrees, original sin, and justification, the criticism of St. Thomas
Aquinas on them, the decisions of the Church on them, are of necessity,
and from the very nature of things, inadequate, because, being
philosophical developments, they are made in an age when the forces for
true philosophical development are waning or wanting.
So when Hooker says most truly: 'Our belief in the Trinity, the
co-eternity of the Son of God with his Father, the proceeding of the
Spirit from the Father and the Son, with other principal points the
necessity whereof is by none denied, are notwithstanding in Scripture
nowhere to be found by express literal mention, only deduced they are
out of Scripture by collection;'--when Hooker thus points, out, what is
undoubtedly the truth, that these Church-doctrines are developments, we
may add this other truth equally undoubted,--that being _philosophical_
developments, they are developments of a kind which the Church has never
yet had the right conditions for making adequately, any more than it has
had the conditions for developing out of what is said in the Book of
Genesis a true philosophy of nature, or out of what is said in the Book
of Daniel, a true philosophy of history. It matters nothing whether the
scientific truth was there, and the problem was to extract it; or not
there, and the problem was to understand why it was not there, and the
relation borne by what was there to the scientific truth. The Church had
no means of solving either the one problem or the other. And this from
no fault at all of the Church, but for the same reason that she was
unfitted to solve a difficulty in Aristotle's _Physics_ or Plato's
_Timæus_, and to determine the historical value of Herodotus or Livy;
simply from the natural operation of the law of development, which for
success in philosophy and criticism requires certain conditions, which
in the early and mediæval Church were not to be found.
And when the movement of philosophy and criticism came with the
Renascence, this movement was almost entirely outside the Churches,
whether Catholic or Protestant, and not inside them. It worked in men
like Descartes and Bacon, and not in men like Luther and Calvin; so that
the doctrine of these two eminent personages, Luther and Calvin, so far
as it was a philosophical and critical development from Scripture, had
no more likelihood of being an adequate development than the doctrine of
the Council of Trent. And so it has gone on to this day. Philosophy and
criticism have become a great power in the world, and inevitably tend to
alter and develop Church-doctrine, so far as this doctrine is, as to a
great extent it is, philosophical and critical. Yet the seat of the
developing force is not in the Church itself, but elsewhere; its
influences filter strugglingly into the Church, and the Church slowly
absorbs and incorporates them. And whatever hinders their filtering in
and becoming incorporated, hinders truth and the natural progress of
things.
While, therefore, we entirely agree with Dr. Newman and with the great
Anglican divines that the whole Bible is written on the principle of
development, and that Christianity in its doctrine and discipline is and
must be a development of the Bible, we yet cannot agree that for the
adequate development of Christian doctrine, so far as theology exhibits
this metaphysically and scientifically, the Church, whether ante-Nicene
or post-Nicene, has ever yet furnished a channel. Thought and science
follow their own law of development, they are slowly elaborated in the
growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakspeare calls,--
... the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come;
and their ripeness and unripeness, as Dr. Newman most truly says, are
not an effect of our wishing or resolving. Rather do they seem brought
about by a power such as Goethe figures by the _Zeit-Geist_ or
Time-Spirit, and St. Paul describes as a divine power _revealing_
additions to what we possess already.
But sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian ideas of their own,
and to be less open to new general ideas than the main body of men;
therefore St. Paul in the same breath exhorts to unity. What may justly
be conceded to the Catholic Church is, that in her idea of a continuous
developing power in united Christendom to work upon the data furnished
by the Bible, and produce new combinations from them as the growth of
time required it, she followed a true instinct. But the right
_philosophical_ developments she vainly imagined herself to have had the
power to produce, and her attempts in this direction were at most but a
prophecy of this power, as alchemy is said to have been a prophecy of
chemistry.
With developments of discipline and church-order it is very different.
The Bible raises, as we have seen, many and great questions of
philosophy and criticism; still, essentially the Church was not a
corporation for speculative purposes, but a corporation for purposes of
moral growth and of practice. Terms like _God_, _creation_, _will_,
_evil_, _propitiation_, _immortality_, evoke, as we have said, and must
evoke, sooner or later, a philosophy; but to evoke this was the accident
and not the essence of Christianity. What, then, was the essence?
An ingenious writer, as unlike Dr. Newman as it is possible to conceive,
has lately told us. In an article in _Fraser's Magazine_,--an article
written with great vigour and acuteness,--this writer advises us to
return to Paley, whom we were beginning to neglect, because the real
important essence of Christianity, or rather, to quote quite literally,
'the only form of Christianity which is worthy of the serious
consideration of rational men, is Protestantism as stated by Paley and
his school.' And why? 'Because this Protestantism enables the saint to
prove to the worldly man that Christ threatened him with hell-fire, and
proved his power to threaten by rising from the dead and ascending into
heaven; _and these allegations are the fundamental assertions of
Christianity_.'
Now it may be said that this is a somewhat contracted view of 'the
unsearchable riches of Christ;' but we will not quarrel with it. And
this for several reasons. In the first place, it is the view often taken
by popular theology. In the second place, it is the view best fitted to
serve its Benthamite author's object, which is to get Christianity out
of the way altogether. In the third place, its shortness gives us
courage to try and do what is the hardest thing in the world, namely, to
pack a statement of the main drift of Christianity into a few lines of
nearly as short compass.
What then was, in brief, the Christian gospel, or 'good news'? It was
this: _The kingdom of God is come unto you_. The power of Jesus upon the
multitudes who heard him gladly, was not that by rising from the dead
and ascending into heaven he enabled the saint to prove to the worldly
man the certainty of hell-fire (for he had not yet done so); but that
_he talked to them about the kingdom of God_.[106] And what is the
kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven? It is this: _God's will done, as in
heaven so on earth_. And how was this come to mankind? Because _Jesus is
come to save his people from their sins_. And what is being saved from
our sins? This: _Entering into the kingdom of heaven by doing the will
of our Father which is in heaven_. And how does Christ enable us to do
this? By teaching us _to take his yoke upon us, and learn of him to deny
ourselves and take up our cross daily and follow him, and to lose our
life for the purpose of saving it_. So that St. Paul might say most
truly that the seal of the sure foundation of God in Christianity was
this: _Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from
iniquity_: or, as he elsewhere expands it: _Let him bring forth the
fruits of the Spirit,--love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness,
goodness, faith, mildness, self-control._[107]
[Footnote 106: Nothing can be more certain than that the _kingdom of
God_ meant originally, and was understood to mean, a Messianic
kingdom speedily to be revealed; and that to this idea of the
_kingdom_ is due much of the effect which its preaching exercised on
the imagination of the first generation of Christians. But nothing
is more certain, also, than that while the end itself, the Messianic
kingdom, was necessarily something intangible and future, the _way_
to the end, the doing the will of God by intently following the
voice of the moral conscience, in those duties, above all, for which
there was then in the world the most crying need,--the duties of
humbleness, self-denial, pureness, justice, charity,--became from
the very first in the teaching of Jesus something so ever-present
and practical, and so associated with the essence of Jesus himself,
that the _way_ to the kingdom grew inseparable, in thought, from the
kingdom itself, and was bathed in the same light and charm. Then,
after a time, as the vision of an approaching Messianic kingdom was
dissipated, the idea of the perfect accomplishment on earth of the
will of God had to take the room of it, and in its own realisation
to place the ideal of the true kingdom of God.]
[Footnote 107: II _Tim._, ii, 19; _Gal._, v, 22, 23.]
On this foundation arose the Christian Church, and not on any foundation
of speculative metaphysics. It was inevitable that the speculative
metaphysics should come, but they were not the foundation. When they
came, the danger of the Christian Church was that she should take them
for the foundation. The people who were built on the real foundation,
who were united in the joy of Christ's good news, naturally, as they
came to know of one another's existence, as their relations with one
another multiplied, as the sense of sympathy in the possession of a
common treasure deepened,--naturally, I say, drew together in one body,
with an organisation growing out of the needs of a growing body. It is
quite clear that the more strongly Christians felt their common business
in setting forward upon earth, through Christ's spirit, the kingdom of
God, the more they would be drawn to coalesce into one society for this
business, with the natural and true notion that the acting together in
this way offers to men greater helps for reaching their aim, presents
fewer distractions, and above all, supplies a more animating force of
sympathy and mutual assurance, than the acting separately. Only the
sense of differences greater than the sense of sympathy could defeat
this tendency.
Dr. Newman has told us what an impression was once made upon his mind by
the sentence: _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_. We have shown how, for
matters of philosophical judgment, not yet settled but requiring
development to clear them, the consent of the world, at a time when this
clearing development cannot have happened, seems to carry little or no
weight at all; indeed, as to judgment on these points, we should rather
be inclined to lay down the very contrary of Dr. Newman's affirmation,
and to say: _Securus delirat orbis terrarum_. But points of speculative
theology being out of the question, and the practical ground and purpose
of man's religion being broadly and plainly fixed, we should be quite
disposed to concede to Dr. Newman, that _securus =colit= orbis
terrarum_;--those pursue this purpose best who pursue it together. For
unless prevented by extraneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the
history of the Church's growth shows, to pursue it together.
Nonconformists are fond of talking of the unity which may co-exist with
separation, and they say: 'There are four evangelists, yet one gospel;
why should there not be many separate religious bodies, yet one Church?'
But their theory of unity in separation is a theory palpably invented to
cover existing facts, and their argument from the evangelists is a
paralogism. For the Four Gospels arose out of no thought of divergency;
they were not designed as corrections of one prior gospel, or of one
another; they were concurring testimonies borne to the same fact. But
the several religious bodies of Christendom plainly grew out of an
intention of divergency; clearly they were designed to correct the
imperfections of one prior church and of each other; and to say of
things sprung out of discord that they may make _one_, because things
sprung out of concord may make _one_, is like saying that because
several agreements may make a peace, therefore several wars may make a
peace too. No; without some strong motive to the contrary, men united by
the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible
attractiveness naturally coalesce; and since they coalesce naturally,
they are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it.
All that Dr. Newman has so excellently said about development applies
here legitimately and fully. Existence justifies additions and stages in
existence. The living edifice planted on the foundation, _Let every one
that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity_, could not but
grow, if it lived at all. If it grew, it could not but make
developments, and all developments not inconsistent with the aim of its
original foundation, and not extending beyond the moral and practical
sphere which was the sphere of its original foundation, are legitimated
by the very fact of the Church having in the natural evolution of its
life and growth made them. A boy does not wear the clothes or follow the
ways of an infant, nor a man those of a boy; yet they are all engaged in
the one same business of developing their growing life, and to the
clothes to be worn and the ways to be followed for the purpose of doing
this, nature will, in general, direct them safely. The several scattered
congregations of the first age of Christianity coalesced into one
community, just as the several scattered Christians had earlier still
coalesced into congregations. Why?--because such was the natural course
of things. It had nothing inconsistent with the fundamental ground of
Christians, _Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from
iniquity_; and it was approved by their growing and enlarging in it.
They developed a church-discipline with a hierarchy of bishops and
archbishops, which was not that of the first times; they developed
church-usages, such as the practice of infant baptism, which were not
those of the first times; they developed a church-ritual with ceremonies
which were not those of the first times;--they developed all these, just
as they developed a church-architecture which was not that of the first
times, because they were no longer in the first times, and required for
their expanding growth what suited their own times. They coalesced with
the State because they grew by doing so. They called the faith they
possessed in common the _Catholic_, that is, the general or universal
faith. They developed, also, as we have seen, dogma or a theological
philosophy. Both dogma and discipline became a part of the Catholic
faith, or profession of the general body of Christians.
Now to develop a discipline, or form of outward life for itself, the
Church, as has been said, had necessarily, like every other living
thing, the requisite qualifications; to develop scientific dogma it had
not. But even of the dogma which the Church developed it may be said,
that, from the very nature of things, it was probably, as compared with
the opposing dogma over which it prevailed, the more suited to the
actual condition of the Church's life, and to the due progress of the
divine work for which she existed. For instance, whatever may be
scientifically the rights of the question about grace and free-will, it
is evident that, for the Church of the fifth century, Pelagianism was
the less inspiring and edifying doctrine, and the sense of _being in the
divine hand_ was the feeling which it was good for Christians to be
filled with. Whatever may be scientifically the merits of the dispute
between Arius and Athanasius, for the Church of their time whatever most
exalted or seemed to exalt Jesus Christ was clearly the profitable
doctrine, the doctrine most helpful to that moral life which was the
true life of the Church.
People, however, there were in abundance who differed on points both of
discipline and of dogma from the rule which obtained in the Church, and
who separated from her on account of that difference. These were the
heretics: _separatists_, as the name implies, _for the sake of
opinions_. And the very name, therefore, implies that they were wrong in
separating, and that the body which held together was right; because the
Church exists, not for the sake of opinions, but for the sake of moral
practice, and a united endeavour after this is stronger than a broken
one. Valentinians, Marcionites, Montanists, Donatists, Manichæans,
Novatians, Eutychians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Arians, Pelagians,--if
they separated on points of discipline they were wrong, because for
developing its own fit outward conditions of life the body of a
community has, as we have seen, a real natural power, and individuals
are bound to sacrifice their fancies to it; if they separated on points
of dogma they were wrong also, because, while neither they nor the
Church had the means of determining such points adequately, the true
instinct lay in those who, instead of separating for such points,
conceded them as the Church settled them, and found their bond of union,
where it in truth really was, not in notions about the co-eternity of
the Son, but in the principle: _Let every one that nameth the name of
Christ depart from iniquity_.