Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures, by John Hamilton Thom, James Martineau, Henry Giles
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UNITARIANISM DEFENDED: A SERIES OF LECTURES
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BY
THREE PROTESTANT DISSENTING MINISTERS
OF LIVERPOOL:
IN REPLY TO
A COURSE OF LECTURES, ENTITLED “UNITARIANISM
CONFUTED,” BY THIRTEEN CLERGYMEN OF
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.
Would to Heaven that Christians had their own ‘vail’ of orthodox words taken away
from their minds; that, limiting Orthodoxy to the acceptance of the Christ as the
Spirit (‘the Lord is that Spirit,’ says St. Paul), i.e., the meaning, the end of all
revelation, they would not allow a new letter, consisting of abstract doctrines, to
involve their minds in a ‘vail’ which obstructs the view of the Gospel, even more
than the old letter, which kept the Jews in “bondage.”—Heresy and Orthodoxy by Rev.
J. Blanco White, p. 53, 2nd edition.
LIVERPOOL:
WILLMER AND SMITH, 32, CHURCH STREET.
LONDON:
JOHN GREEN, 121, NEWGATE STREET.
1839.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY RICHARD KINDER,
GREEN ARBOUR COURT, OLD BAILEY.
GENERAL PREFACE.
In this Preface, and in all the other contents of this
volume, we have occupied the position of an assailed
party, lending our best consideration to whatever a
leagued body of resolute and unsparing adversaries
could say against us. We have stood upon the defensive,
not lamenting that such an occasion had occurred
of exposing our views of Christianity to so severe a
scrutiny, and of displaying to the world whether our
position was tenable. We did not provoke this Controversy.
It was of our opponents’ choosing. They
entered into combination, and arranged their method
of attack, and invited the public attentively to look
on while they performed upon us the work of destruction.
With respectful attention, as men whose system
of Christianity was about to be subjected to a powerful
analysis by those who believed the main ingredients
to be poisonous,—but with quiet hearts, as men
who had no interest in this world but to discover
Truth,—we have interfered no further than was necessary
to make this examination, by carefulness, impartiality,
and accuracy, productive of a true result. We
have struck out whatever was untrue, and we have
supplied whatever was wanting, to exhibit a full statement
of the respective Evidences of Unitarianism and
of Trinitarianism. Lecture qualifies lecture; and Preface
corrects Preface. We are satisfied to have thus
placed, side by side, the contrasted views of Man and
God, and to await the issues.
To return upon the “thirteen Clergymen of the
Church of England” the words of their General Preface,
(p. xi.) “it is no uncommon practice in modern criticism
to neglect the statements” of an opponent’s case, as if
they never had been made, and the corrections passed
upon one’s own as if they never had been experienced.
It is the policy of the “thirteen Clergymen” to reiterate,
nothing daunted, arguments, our careful replies
to which are not even noticed, and misrepresentations
whose injustice had solemnly been protested against.
By these resolute repetitions some are seduced to believe,
and attention is withdrawn from the overthrow
of an error or a calumny by the hardihood with which
it rises from its fall, and reasserts itself. Strike them
down;—they get up, and coolly offer themselves to
be struck down again. Great ought to be the power
of Truth; for great is the vitality and the power of
effrontery in a popular error. It is only in the long
combat of years and generations that the Real manifests
at last its imperishable quality. The “General
Preface” quietly gathers up all the “disjecta membra”
of error and misstatement, and without a word of
answer to our analysis of their character, presents
them again to have sentence and execution passed
upon them. It is a careful redintegration of the
broken particles, which in our simplicity we had
hoped would not so readily reunite. We are obliged,
therefore, by way at once of Preface and of Protest,
to repeat our solemn contradiction of some most
strenuous misrepresentations, and to attempt again
the exposure of some fallacies most tenacious of life.
I. It was distinctly stated by us in the course of
this Controversy, that not upon any grounds of literary
evidence did we discredit those prefaces which relate
to the miraculous (or as, in insult to the purest
and holiest human feelings, our opponents are not
ashamed to call it, the immaculate) conception; and that
our estimate of them was formed solely upon grounds
of inherent incredibility, and of proved inconsistencies
both with themselves and with the general statements
of the New Testament. Yet in total disregard of this
our denial, the Preface (p. xiii.) reasserts the charge, as
if it never had been contradicted. We also distinctly
stated that the miraculous conception in no way interfered
with Unitarianism,—that many Humanitarians
believed in it; yet it is the policy of Trinitarianism to
repeat, that we pervert these portions of Scripture, for
the sake of evading a fact fatal to our system. Unitarianism
is so little concerned to evade the fact of a
miraculous conception, that many Unitarians themselves
adopt it. It is the “tactics” of the “thirteen
Clergymen,” their system “of holy war,” (see Preface
to Mr. Ould’s Lecture) to ignore whatever we may
say on our own behalf, either in way of correction or
of defence, and to reassert the false statement.
II. The “Unitarian Creed” is described by our reverend
opponents as “a mere code of unbelief” (p. xiv.)
it being the policy of the “thirteen Clergymen,” not
only to pay no regard to our most solemn assertion of
our faith in Christianity, as God’s full and perfect revelation
to man, but also to assume to themselves the
functions of infallible judges of what is Christianity,
and what is not; and so, again to return upon them
their own language, to “deify their own fallible”
(p. xii.) interpretations and inferences. Yet they can
impose upon the simplicity of the world, by charging
others with the “pride of reason.” Infallible themselves,
to differ from their infallibility can of course
be nothing else than the pride of reason.
III. It is stated (p. xv.), that we “utterly deny”
“the eternity of punishments,” without adding what
we have added, that the moral consequences of actions
are eternal, and that in its influence on character and
progress, the retribution of every evil thought or deed
is everlasting. What we do deny, as the blackest misrepresentation
that can be conceived of the God of
Providence, whose glory it is to lead his children to
Himself, is the horribly distinct statement of their own
“General Preface”—“that the sufferings of the lost
are not intended for their amendment, but as a satisfaction
to divine justice, when the hour of pardon shall have
passed away.” (p. xv.) Is this the Religion, and this
the God, of Love? These are the men who make the
Unbelief of which they afterwards so blindly and
bitterly complain. If such was Christianity, unbelief
would be a virtue, a prompting of devotion, a protest
on behalf of God.
IV. Our doubt as to the existence of, or necessity
for, an external Devil, permitted by God to ruin
the souls of men, has been converted to two uses in
this Preface;—first, as manifesting that we are ourselves
under the power of the subtlest device of Satan,
who has concealed from us his existence, that he
might lead us captive at his will; and, secondly, that
though denying the existence of Satan, we are yet ourselves
the emissaries of Satan; for that as the Devil
tempted Eve, and our Lord himself, by perversions of
the Word of God, so Unitarianism, by its interpretations,
is his present instrument,—in fact, Satan
himself tempting the world by the word of God, as
of old he tempted Eve and Christ. (pp. xv. xvi.) We
leave this matter to the judgment of men whose sense
of propriety and decency has not been borrowed exclusively
from the influences of a dogmatic Theology.
V. It is said of us (p. xvi.), contrary to our own
most distinct averment in this very Controversy, that
“according to the theologians of this unhappy school,
it seems to be almost a fundamental rule, that no
doctrine ought to be acknowledged as true in its
nature, or divine in its origin, of which all the parts
are not level to human understanding: and that
whatever the Scriptures teach concerning the counsels
of Jehovah, and the plan of his salvation, must be
modified, curtailed, and attenuated, in such a manner,
by the transforming power of art and argument, as
to correspond with the poor and narrow capacities of
our intelligence.”
Where are the simplicity, the sincerity, the love of
Truth, which alone can make Controversy fruitful of
good results, when such a representation of the spirit
of our Theology can be given by “thirteen Clergymen”
after we had published the following words in
our fifth Lecture (p. 9), for their special instruction:—“Let
me guard myself from the imputation of rejecting
this doctrine because it is mysterious; or of
supporting a system which insists on banishing all
mysteries from religion. On any such system I
should look with unqualified aversion, as excluding
from faith one of its primary elements; as obliterating
the distinction between logic and devotion, and
tending only to produce an irreverent and narrow-minded
dogmatism. ‘Religion without mystery’ is a
combination of terms, than which the Athanasian
Creed contains nothing more contradictory; and the
sentiment of which it is the motto, I take to be a fatal
caricature of rationalism, tending to bring all piety into
contempt. Until we touch upon the mysterious, we are
not in contact with religion; nor are any objects
reverently regarded by us, except such as, from their
nature or their vastness, are felt to transcend our
comprehension.” Nay, it is not a little remarkable,
that the very illustration employed by the “thirteen
Clergymen” to exhibit our absurdity in rejecting the
incomprehensible, had been previously employed by
ourselves to exhibit the necessity of admitting the
incomprehensible:—
Trinitarian Preface, p. xviii.
Unitarian Lecture, No. V. p. 9.
“Much of the great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh, with all the firmament of saving truth and love, whereof it is the radiant centre, must remain inexplicable to our present capacities. But to argue from thence, that this mystery is a cunningly-devised fable, is as illogical as it would be to maintain that there is no bottom to the sea, because we have no plumb-line with which it may be fathomed.”
“The sense of what we do not know is as essential to our religion, as the impression of what we do know; the thought of the boundless, the incomprehensible, must blend in our mind with the perception of the clear and true; the little knowledge we have must be clung to, as the margin of an invisible immensity; and all our positive ideas be regarded as the mere float to show the surface of the infinite deep.”
This is bold misrepresentation; a consistent hardihood
in the “tactics of holy war.” To persevere,
against all remonstrance, in the repetition of a misstatement
injurious to an opponent, and to do this so
coolly as to use almost his own words in imputing to
him the very opposite of what he has said, is at least
a convenient, if not an honourable nor yet a formidable
policy.
In the same spirit of neither honourable nor yet
formidable policy, is the attempt (p. xvii.) to identify
Mahometanism and Unitarianism, by the help of a
literary forgery, which even if it was authentic, would
prove nothing except that the early Unitarians of
England, in the reign of Charles the Second, amid the
corruptions of Christianity, rejoiced in the testimony
borne by Mahometanism to the great doctrine of revealed
religion, the Unity of God. It is said that there
is, among the MSS. in the Lambeth Library, a “Socinian
Epistle (to this effect) to Ameth Ben Ameth,
Ambassador from the Emperor of Morocco to Charles
II.” Leslie, in the Preface to his “Socinian Controversy
Discussed,” was the first who made use of this
supposed letter, and not without the suspicion, that he
had first forged it himself.[1] “I will here,” says
Leslie, “present the reader with a rarity, which I take
to be so, because of the difficulty I had to obtain it.”
“It is in my mind,” says Mr. Aspland, “decisive of
the question, that immediately after Leslie had published
the Epistle, Emlyn, who answered the tract to
which it was prefixed, stated it as his belief, upon inquiry,
that no such epistle had ever been presented by
any one ‘deputed’ from the Unitarians, and insinuated
that no credit was to be given to a document published
by Leslie, unless vouched by some other authority
than his own; and that Leslie, in replying to this
answer, though he dwells, for pages, upon the passages
before and after this, relating to the epistle, says not a
syllable about his ‘rarity’ or in defence of his veracity.”
“Leslie,” continues Mr. Aspland, “is convicted (by
Emlyn) of quoting passages from Archbishop Tillotson’s
Sermons, which had been published in the name
of their eminent author, as if they were the work of
an avowed ‘Socinian.’ And if you will consult his
reply, you will find this theological braggart completely
humbled, and reduced to the necessity of
using the wretched plea, that he had omitted the
name of the ‘great Prelate,’ out of tenderness.—Is it
uncharitable to suspect, under all these circumstances,
that he who was proved to have resorted to one trick,
might have had recourse to another?”
“As to your ‘rarity,’” says Emlyn in his reply to
Leslie, “of the address to the Morocco ambassador, I
see not what it amounts to, more than a complaint of
the corruption of the Christian faith, in the article of
one God, which the Mahometans have kept, by consent
of all sides. Yet, forasmuch as I can learn nothing
from any Unitarians of any such address from them, nor
do you produce any subscribers’ names,[2] I conclude no
such address was ever made, by any deputed from them,
whatever any single person might do. I suppose you
conclude from the matter of it, that it must be from
some Unitarian, and perhaps so; yet you may remember
that so you concluded from the matter of Dr.
Tillotson’s Sermons, that they were a Socinian’s.”[3]
For our own part, when we read this amusing attempt
to identify us with Mahometans, by the help
of an unknown letter, bearing no subscription, and
addressed, by nobody knows whom, to the Ambassador
of Morocco, in the reign of Charles II., we were forcibly
reminded of two passages in Ecclesiastical History, in
whose pages all tricks and absurdities can be paralleled,
and whose exhibition of gratuitous follies and distortions
has left the possibility of “nothing new under
the sun,” of this description, for our modern days.
Hildebrand himself, yes, Gregory the Seventh, like
our poor selves, was suspected of a leaning to “Islamism,”
(General Preface, p. xvii.) because he wrote a
letter, not to the Ambassador, as in our case but, as became
his greater dignity, to the Emperor of Morocco,
thanking him for the liberation of some Christian captives,
and expressing his conviction, so much was there
of the spirit of God and goodness in this act, “that they
both worshipped the same spirit, though the modes of
their adoration and faith were different.” It also appears
that the Emperor Manuel Comnenus exposed
himself to the same imputation of “Islamism,” because
he wished to correct an error in the ritual of the Greek
Church, which by a laughable misunderstanding of an
Arabic word, signifying eternal, “contained a standing
anathema against the God of Mahomet,” as being
“solid and spherical.”
“Solventur risu tabulæ; tu missus abibis.”
We confess our unmixed astonishment at finding
the “thirteen Clergymen” avowing the most undisguised
Tritheism. We do not recollect in modern
times so bold and unwary an admission of Polytheism
as the following: “Our inability, therefore, to explain
the Triunity of his Essence, can be no reason for rejecting
the revelation of it contained in his Word;
even if we were deprived of those shadows and resemblances
of this divine truth, which may be seen in the
one nature of man, communicating itself to many individuals
of the species. There is one human nature,
but many human persons.” (p. xix.) Is this then the
Unity of God which the “thirteen” maintain, viz., such
a unity as subsists between three individual men? Is
it their meaning that the Divine Nature is a Species
containing under it three Individuals, as human nature
is a species containing under it as many individuals as
there are men? Do they mean to contend, with some of
the Fathers, that three men are only “abusively” called
three, being in reality only one? What mercy would
Dr. Whately have for such unskilful controversialists?
Is this however the deliberate view of the whole thirteen,
or is it only the rashness of one of them?—for
it is very important to have so definite a statement of
what is meant by the Trinity in Unity.
VI. It is most incorrectly stated (Preface, p. xx.)
that “Dr. Priestley, Mr. Lindsey, Mr. Belsham, not
to mention earlier writers, have laboured hard to
show that the Fathers of the first three centuries were
Unitarians, and believers in the simple humanity of
Jesus Christ.” Such a labour was never undertaken
by these writers, nor by any one else. It is capable of
proof that the Fathers of the three first centuries were
not Trinitarian in the Athanasian sense; but that they
were believers in the simple humanity of the Christ,
no one maintains, from the time that Platonism first
began to transform Christianity into harmony with its
own peculiar ideas. That Unitarians have supported
this view by “hardy misquotations,” is, to say the least
of it, an unwise provocation from men who have in the
course of this Controversy been convicted of the most
careless misquotations both in their own case (see especially
preface to the Seventh Unitarian Lecture), and
in that of their favourite Champion (see the Appendix
to the Sixth Unitarian Lecture). That the substantial
statements of Unitarians as to the Unitarianism of the
primitive Church have been overturned by Bull, &c.,
(Trinitarian preface, p. xxi.) is a hardy assertion in the
face of the following quotations from Bull himself:
“In the FIRST and BEST ages, the Churches of Christ
directed all their prayers according to the scriptures,
to God only, through the alone mediation of
Jesus Christ.”—Answer to a Query of the Bishop of
Meaux, p. 295.
“The Father is rightly styled The Whole, as he is
the fountain of divinity: For the divinity which is in
the Son and in the Holy Ghost, is the Father’s, because
it is derived from the Father.”—Defence, sect. ii. 8.
For another quotation from Bishop Bull, see also
preface, p. vi., to the Seventh Unitarian Lecture.
VII. The “thirteen Clergymen,” finding that Mr.
Belsham’s “Improved Version” was not a Standard
with us, and knowing perhaps that in our rejection of
it as such we have been borne out by the Unitarian
Association at its recent general meeting in London,
yet determined to find a standard for us somewhere,
have (p. xxvi.) put into our mouths, with marvellous
naïveté, an appeal to Mr. Belsham’s Translation of St.
Paul’s Epistles. We have already given up the Mr.
Belsham of the Improved Version, and they, for their
own easy purposes, represent us as making an appeal
to the Mr. Belsham of “the Epistles.” We will yield to
our reverend opponents whatever consolation they may
be able to derive from their imaginary triumph, in case
we made this imaginary appeal. The Trinitarians cannot
divest their minds of the idea that we must have an
Authority somewhere. They cannot understand what
is meant by deferring to principles alone; by having
no external judge of Controversies, no shorter road to
conclusions, than to submit every question to the fullest
light that Knowledge and Inquiry have provided,
or may yet provide. The Cæsar to whom we appeal
from Mr. Belsham is not some other Mr. Belsham, or
the same man in a different book, but the great principles
of Criticism and of Interpretation, as recognized
by competent judges of all parties.
VIII. For the faith of the Church of England, the
“thirteen Clergymen” declare, that “it is alike their
privilege and obligation to contend in that spirit
of charity which becomes a believer in Jesus.”
(Preface, p. xxviii.) We shall not open former wounds,
but look simply to some of their last manifestations
of “Charity” in their General Preface.
1. They say of us (p. xxiii.), that “Unitarians have
borne some such proportion to the Christian Church,
as monsters bear to the species of which they are
unhappy distortions.”
2. They “decline to receive us as brethren, and to
give us the right hand of fellowship” partly because
our doctrinal views of Christianity are different from
their own, and partly because, as they aver, we maintain
our views in dishonesty, using language hypocritically.
We “cannot be Christian brethren,” say they,
“for we cannot tread the same road, even for an
instant. They use the language of Christianity, without
believing its mysteries. How, then, can we bid
them God speed, while they are influenced by this
spirit of unfairness? ‘The words of their mouth are
smoother than butter, but war is in their heart: their
words are softer than oil, yet are they drawn swords.’”
(pp. xxiv. xxv.)
3. We are charged with deliberately opposing our
own minds to the mind of God. “That such unwearied
hostility,” say they, “is waged by Unitarians
against the mind of God, as expressed in his word, all
their publications unequivocally and mournfully
attest.” (p. xxv.)
4. They describe us as “blasphemers against the
Son of Man,” and they close this peculiar exhibition
of “Charity” by offering up for us the following
prayer:—
“O merciful God, who hast made all men, and hatest
nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of
a sinner, but rather that he should be converted, and live,
have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics,
and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and
contempt of thy word,” &c. (p. xxix.)
If such is their “Charity,” may we be permitted to
ask, what form would their uncharitableness take?
Such is the “General Preface,” which the “thirteen
Clergymen” are deliberately of opinion that the issues
of this Controversy, and our mutual relations to each
other, justified them in writing. We confess that we
had prepared ourselves for a careful attempt, on their
part, at repairing whatever further inquiry, and, we
may say without presumption, the close scrutiny of an
opponent, had shown to be weak or imperfect in their
previous labours,—a last effort to present again the
edifice of their faith in what they deemed its most
favourable lights, accompanied by a corresponding
attempt to shake the foundations of Unitarian Christianity.
They have thought themselves, however,
sufficiently strong already to be able to throw away
this last opportunity. They deem the work already
done, and that they have earned the right, without
further addition or defence, to entitle their Lectures
“Unitarianism Confuted.”
By their own act they entered with us into this Controversy;
they repeatedly recognized us during its
continuance as the persons whom they were opposing,
and whose Theology they had undertaken to refute;—yet
our careful and respectful examination of their
views, and statement of our own, have not been able
to win from them one word either of notice or reply.
However low their opinion may be of us, as of antagonists
beneath their consideration, yet surely in an
attack on Unitarianism in Liverpool, we are the persons
whose views and influence they had most occasion to
correct; and if no more respectful feeling, mere expediency,
a regard for their own designs against Unitarianism,
would seem to require some examination of
the arguments and doctrines of those who are its
Ministers and interpreters in the place where this
attempt at its overthrow has been made.
In abandoning this last occasion of a careful and elaborately
strengthened restatement of their case, we confess
they have disappointed us. Nor do we believe that
even that part of the public which has most sympathies
with them, and would most rejoice in their success,
will contemplate the omission without surprise.
The origin and history of this Controversy is sufficiently
detailed in the annexed Correspondence. It
will there be seen how our desire for a really close and
decisive examination of the several points at issue
between us has been evaded: our reverend opponents
would not admit of any controversy of which declamation
was not to be the instrument.
We have already stated at the opening of this Controversy,
that we did not enter into this discussion for
the sake of a Sectarian triumph, but in the more
Christian hope of exposing and checking the Sectarian
Spirit. To exalt the spiritual character of Faith
above the verbal and metaphysical,—to unite mankind
through their common love and acceptance of Christ’s
goodness and of Christ’s God,—to make his Church
one by their participation of one spirit, even the spirit
of the life of Jesus,—has been our highest aim, not
only on this particular occasion, but throughout all our
Ministry. We acknowledge it to be an aim that,
indirectly at least, is destructive of “Orthodoxy,” that
is, of “the supposed attainableness of Salvation only
by one particular set of Opinions,” for if the love of
Christ’s God, and the prayerful seeking after Christ’s
goodness are sufficient to place us on the way of everlasting
Safety, then the question is virtually decided,
for no man will follow Orthodoxy gratuitously. It is
necessary to set it forth as the only escape from Hell,—else
no man would burden himself with it. And thus
Orthodoxy is condemned to be damnatory. Intolerance
is the very condition of its existence. Cursing is its
breath of life. Let it acknowledge that the pure heart,
and the pure life, and the spirit of faith in God, may save
a soul from death, and Orthodoxy will have dissolved itself,
for nothing but the last necessity, the attainableness
of safety by no other means, could justify its existence.
A damnatory creed must be an essential of Salvation;—else
it is the greatest impiety possible to conceive.
Was it, then, the intention of Jesus to establish a
certain Creed breathing curses against all who do not
think[4] alike,—however they may love and live? Alas!
why, then, was not that merciful being as distinct as
the Athanasian Creed? If Jesus had been charged
with the delivery of an exclusive Creed, as the only
instrument of Salvation, would he have veiled it from
the eyes of those he came to save? Need we pursue
the argument further? Orthodoxy is not Christianity;—yet
that in Orthodox bosoms the Spirit of Christ
may dwell, we are not the persons to deny.
What interest or value can these disputations have
for beings whose main business in this world is, in the
prospect of a coming world, to conform their souls to
the image of the heavenly model, to Jesus the pattern
of citizenship in the new Heavens and the new Earth
wherein dwelleth righteousness! “Whilst we are
wrangling here in the dark,” says Baxter, “we are
dying, and passing to the world that will decide all
our Controversies, and the safest passage thither is
by peaceable holiness.” Whilst we are struggling for
points, of which we know little or nothing, hearts are
dead or perishing. Whilst we are battling for our
conceits, we are all of us unsound within, not right
with God, and falling away from the true service of
our great master. Whilst proclaiming in Sectarian
eagerness, “Lo, Christ is here,” and “Lo, Christ is not
there,”—none of us are sitting at his feet, and submitting
our souls and passions to his yoke. Whilst we
are falling out by the way, in vain his heavenly invitation
is addressed to our unquiet hearts—“Come unto
me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn
of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye
shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy,
and my burden is light.”
1. See “A Plea for Unitarian Dissenters,” pp. 88-9, published
in 1813, by the Rev. Robert Aspland, from whom we take the exposure
of this forgery now brought forth again; for in Trinitarian
Controversy falsehood seems immortal, and there is no work for
us modern advocates, except to “slay the slain.”
2. “There is internal evidence of its being written in the way of
banter. No subscription appears to it, and no person is named as concerned
in it, but a Monsieur Verze, a Frenchman, who might be employed
as an agent, and yet not be a ‘Socinian’ agent.”—Aspland.
“My Lords, if your Lordships attended to the manner in which
that quotation is introduced into Leslie, you might see that it bore
internal evidence of being something of the nature of a jeu d’esprit....
My Lords, this Leslie was a general maligner.... I
really think that this is raking into a dunghill to produce this address
to the Ambassador of the Emperor of Morocco.”—The Attorney-General
beforethe House of Lordsin the Lady Hewley Appeal,
June 28th, 1839.
4. “He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity.”—Athanasian
Creed.
THE PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE UNITARIAN CONTROVERSY.
BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM.
“Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we preach, warning every man, and
teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect
in Christ Jesus.”—Colossians i. 27, 28.
“And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily
to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring
us into bondage; to whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour;
that the truth of the gospel might continue with you.”—Galatians ii. 4, 5.
“And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory,
the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”—John i. 14.
CHRISTIANITY NOT THE PROPERTY OF CRITICS AND SCHOLARS; BUT THE GIFT OF GOD TO ALL MEN.
BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM.
“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in
our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ.”—2 Cor. iv. 6.
THE PROPOSITION “THAT CHRIST IS GOD,” PROVED TO BE FALSE FROM THE JEWISH AND THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES.
BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU.
“For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth (as there
be gods many, and lords many,) but to us there is but one God, the Father,
of whom all are things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom
are all things, and we by him.”—1 Cor. viii. 5, 6.
“For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image
and glory of God.”—1 Cor. xi. 7.
“And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my
father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I
will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him,—Father, I have
sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called
thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants.”—Luke xv. 17-19.
THE COMFORTER, EVEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH, WHO DWELLETH IN US, AND TEACHETH ALL THINGS.
BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM.
“If ye love me, keep my commandments: and I will pray the Father, and he
shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;
even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth
him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with
you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to
you.”—John xiv. 15-18.
“Woe unto them that say, ... let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel
draw nigh and come, that we may know it; woe unto them that call evil
good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness;
that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”—Isaiah v. 18-20.
“And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he
said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the Lord, Thou
hast pity on the gourd for which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it
grow; which came up in a night and perished in a night. And should not
I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand
persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?”—Jonah
iv. 9, 10, 11.
“To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen
of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house,
a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus
Christ.”—1 Pet. ii. 4, 5.
EXPLAINED OR REFERRED TO IN LECTURES II. V. VI. XI. XIII.
CORRESPONDENCE ON THE TRINITARIAN AND UNITARIAN CONTROVERSY AT LIVERPOOL. — To all who call themselves Unitarians in the town and neighbourhood of Liverpool. — To the Rev. Fielding Ould, and the other Clergymen about to lecture on the Unitarian Controversy in Christ Church. — To the Reverend James Martineau, J. H. Thom, and Henry Giles. — To the Rev. James Martineau, J. H. Thom, and Henry Giles. — To the Reverend Fielding Ould. — To the Trinitarians of this Town and Neighbourhood who may feel interested in the approaching Unitarian Controversy. — TRINITARIAN LECTURE, — UNITARIAN LECTURE, — To the (so-called) Unitarians of Liverpool. — To the Rev. J. Martineau, J. H. Thom, and Henry Giles. — To the Reverend Fielding Ould. — To the Revs. J. Martineau, J. H. Thom, and H. Giles. — To the Revs. J. Martineau, J. H. Thom, and H. Giles. — To the Rev. Fielding Ould. — To the Revs. Thomas Byrth, Fielding Ould, and Hugh M‘Neile. — To the Revs. J. Martineau, J. H. Thom, and H. Giles. — To the Rev. Fielding Ould. — To the Revs. J. Martineau, J. H. Thom, and H. Giles. — To the Revs. H. M‘Neile, F. Ould, and T. Byrth. — To the Revs. J. Martineau, J. H. Thom, and H. Giles. — To the Revs. H. M‘Neile, F. Ould, and T. Byrth.
“And when they had appointed him a day, there came many to him into his lodging
to whom he expounded and testified the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning
Jesus, both out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets, from morning
till evening.”—Acts xxviii. 23.
Men and Brethren,—I am aware that the term “Religious Controversy,”
is a phrase peculiarly revolting to many minds; that it presents
to them nothing in its aspect but that which has been sarcastically called
the “Acetum Theologicum,” a something bitter and distasteful, of more
than common offensiveness and asperity. It is for this reason that, in
proposing a course of lectures on the subjects in controversy between the
Church of England and those who call themselves Unitarians, and who,
by that very term, seem to impute to the great majority of professing
Christians, of almost all denominations, a polytheistic creed, and in
requesting your attendance on these lectures, and inviting your most
solemn attention to those subjects, I wish, antecedently, to remove from
myself every suspicion of unkindness towards you, and to take away any
supposition of unchristian asperity in my feelings, or of a desire to inflict
upon the humblest individual amongst you unnecessary pain. That no
mere political difference of opinion, much less that any apprehension of
danger to the Established Church, have originated this movement, will be
sufficiently evident from the fact, that while we are surrounded by many
other classes of dissenters, equally opposed to the principle of our establishment,
and much more likely to draw away the members of our flocks
to their communion, I and my reverend brethren, who were associated
with me, on the present occasion, have limited ourselves exclusively to
an inquiry into, and an endeavour to expose, the false philosophy and
dangerous unsoundness of the Unitarian System.
Now, what is the cause of this distinction? It is simply this, that while
we believe the other dissenting bodies to have arranged an ecclesiastical
system, in our judgment not clearly Scriptural, and deficient in those
particulars which constitute the perfection, though they may not affect the
essence of a church, we do at the same time acknowledge that they
generally hold, as articles of faith, those great fundamental Gospel truths
which are the substance of the safety of souls; truths which, while so
held, give them a part in that gracious covenant in Christ, within which
God has revealed a way of salvation for all and out of which he has not
revealed a way of mercy to any. These fundamental truths are the very
doctrines which are controverted between us and those whom we call in
courtesy, but not as of right, Unitarians: viz., the Trinity, the deity of
Christ, the atoning sacrifice, the deity and personality of the Holy Spirit,
the fall of our nature, and the gracious renovation of the human soul,
through his supernatural operation. Assured as I am that these truths
(which, without a desperate mutilation, or an awful tampering with the
plain language of the Word of God, it seems impossible to exclude from
that divine record) are of the essence of our souls’ safety, I ask you, men
and brethren, I put it to your consciences, is it not of the nature of the
tenderest charity, of the purest love, of the most affectionate sympathy
with those in the extreme of peril, and that an eternal peril, to supplicate
to these doctrines the attention of such as have not yet received them, to
pray them to come and “search with us the Scriptures, whether these
things be so?”—Acts xvii. 11. Shall he who, unwittingly, totters blindfold
on the edge of a precipice, deem it a rude or an uncharitable violence
which would snatch him with a strong and a venturous hand, or even it
may be with a painful grasp, from the fearful ruin over which he impends?
Is it not to your own judgment a strong antecedent ground of presumption,
that you are alarmingly and perilously mistaken in this matter, when
you see such numbers of highly-gifted and intellectual men, men of
study—of general information and of prayer,—holy men, men who
“count not their lives dear unto them,” so that they may honour God
and preach this gospel, and that not in one particular place, but over
the whole surface of the church; who yet account these truths, which
you reject, as the essential truths of salvation; truths built, you will
remember, in their minds, not on the traditions or authority of men, but
on the lively oracles of God?
Seeing, then, men and brethren,
1. That the points of difference between us are of the very highest possible
importance, and not matters of mere theoretical speculation, as some
of your writers have striven vainly to make appear; that, in short, if
Unitarians be sound interpreters of Holy Scripture, we Trinitarians are
guilty of the most heinous of all sins—idolatry; and if, on the other hand,
ours be the creed of the apostles, saints, and martyrs, Unitarians are
sunk in the most blasphemous and deadly error, and are wholly unworthy
of being considered Christians, in any proper sense of the word. And
seeing,
2. That considerable numbers, it is apprehended, especially among the
middling and lower classes, who outwardly profess Unitarian principles,
are in total ignorance of the unscriptural nature and dangerous character
of those principles. And seeing,
3. That the controversial discussion of disputed points was unquestionably
the practice of the apostolic and primitive, as well as of all other
ages of religious revival, and is calculated as a means, under the good
blessing of Almighty God, to “open men’s eyes, and to turn them from
darkness to light;”—We invite and beseech you, by the mercies of God
in Christ, to come and give us at least a patient hearing, while we endeavour
to “persuade you concerning Jesus,” and “by all means to
win some of you.” It is impossible that we can have any base or
worldly motive in thus addressing you—any other motive, indeed, besides
that which is here avouched, viz., our solemn impression of the value
of souls, and of the peril to which the false philosophy of Unitarianism
exposes them.
Surely it is a sweet and a pleasant thing,—a thing not to divide and
sever, but to unite and to gather into the bonds of dearest affection—thus
to tell and to hear together of the great things which our God has done
for our souls; of His love to us, when He, “Who thought it not robbery
to be equal with God, did take upon him the form of a servant,
and, being found in fashion as a man, did humble himself, and become
obedient unto death, even the death of a cross.”—Phil. ii. 6-8.
It is the intention of my reverend brethren and myself to meet together
on the morning of Tuesday, the 5th of February, (the day immediately
preceding the commencement of the course,) for the purpose of
solemn humiliation before God, and earnest prayer for the blessing of
our Heavenly Father, upon the work in which we are about to engage,
that we may be enabled to exhibit and preserve “the mind of Christ,”
while employed in “contending for the faith,” and that we may have
great success in our endeavours to be instrumental in enlightening the
eyes which we believe to have been blinded by “the god of this world,”
and causing “the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the
image of God, to shine unto them.”—2 Cor. iv. 4.
And now, men and brethren, humbly and affectionately praying your
serious attention to these things, I commend you to the protection and
blessing of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I remain
your friend and servant in the gospel, for the Lord’s sake,
Fielding Ould,
Christ Church, Jan. 21, 1839.
Minister of Christ Church.
Reverend Sirs,—A paper has been put into our hands, and an advertisement
has appeared in the public journals, containing a “Syllabus of
a Course of Lectures on the Controversy between the Protestant
Churches and the (so called) Unitarians,” &c. As individual inquirers
after truth, and disciples of Jesus, we deliberately hold the characteristic
doctrines of Unitarian Christianity; and, as ministers among a class of
Protestants, who, binding themselves and their pastors by no human
creed or interpretation, encourage us to seek for ourselves and expound
for them the uncorrupted Gospel, we publicly preach the faith which we
privately hold. We feel, therefore, a natural interest in the determination
of yourself and brother clergymen to call attention to the Unitarian
Controversy, and a desire that the occasion may be made conducive to
the promotion of candid research, the diminution of sectarian prejudice,
and the diffusion of the true faith, and the spirit of our great
Master.
We are not of opinion that a miscellaneous audience, assembled in a
place of worship, constitutes the best tribunal to which to submit abstruse
theological questions, respecting the canon, the text, the translation of
Scripture—questions which cannot be answered by any “defective
scholarship.” You however, who hold that mistakes upon these points
may forfeit salvation, have consistently appealed to such tribunal; and
nothing is left to us but to hope that its decision may be formed after
just attention to the evidence. This end can be attained only by popular
advocacy on neither side, or popular advocacy on both; and, as you have
preferred the latter, we shall esteem it a duty to co-operate with you, and
contribute our portion of truth and argument towards the correction of
public sentiment on the great questions at issue between us. Deeply
aware of our human liability to form and to convey false impressions of
views and systems from which we dissent, we shall be anxious to pay a
calm and respectful attention to your defence of the doctrines of your
church. We will give notice of your lectures, as they succeed each other,
to our congregations, and exhort them to hear you in the spirit of
Christian justice and affection; presuming that, in a like spirit, you will
recommend your hearers to listen to such reply as we may think it right
to offer. We are not conscious of any fear, any interest, any attachment
to system, which should interfere with the sincere fulfilment of our part in
such an understanding; and, for the performance of yours, we rely on your
avowed zeal for that Protestantism which boldly confides the interpretation
of Scripture to individual judgment, and to that sense of justice which, in
Christian minds, is the fruit of cultivation and sound knowledge. As you
think it the duty of Unitarians to judge of your doctrines, not from our
objections, but from your vindication, you cannot question the duty of
Trinitarians to take their impressions of our faith from us, rather than
from you.
We rejoice to hear that the Christ Church lectures will be published.
Should they issue from the press within a week after delivery, we
should desire to postpone our reply till we had enjoyed the opportunity
of reading them, persuaded that thus we shall best preserve
that calmness and precision of statement, without which, controversial
discussions tend rather to the increase of prejudice than the ascertainment
of truth. Should the publication be deferred for a longer
time, the necessity of treating each subject, while its interest is fresh,
will oblige us to forego this advantage; and we shall, in such case,
deliver, each week, an evening lecture in answer to that preached in
Christ Church on the preceding Wednesday. Permit us to ask, how
early an appearance of your printed lectures may be expected; and
whether you will recommend your congregations to attend with candour
to our replies.
We fear, however, that neither from the pulpit nor the press will your
statements and ours obtain access extensively to the same persons; your
discourses will, perhaps, obtain readers, too exclusively, among Trinitarians;
ours, certainly, among Unitarians. In order to place your views
and ours fairly side by side, allow us to propose the following arrangements;
that an epitome of each lecture, and another of the reply, furnished
by the respective authors, shall appear weekly in the columns of one
and the same newspaper; the newspaper being selected, and the length
of the communications prescribed, by previous agreement. Or should
you be willing, we should prefer making some public journal the vehicle
of a discussion altogether independent of the lectures, conducted in the
form of a weekly correspondence, and having for its matter such topics
as the first letter of the series may open for consideration. In this case
you will perceive the propriety of conceding to us the commencement of
the correspondence, as you have pre-occupied the pulpit controversy;
have selected the points of comparison between your idea of Christianity
and ours; and introduced among them some subjects to which we do
not attach the greatest interest and importance. On this priority, however,
we do not insist. You will oblige us by stating whether you assent
to this proposal.
While we are willing to hope for a prevailing spirit of equity in this
controversy, we are grieved to have to complain of injustice, and of a
disregard to the true meaning of words, at its very opening. We must
protest against the exclusive usurpation of the title “Protestant
Churches,” by a class of religionists who practically disown the principle
of Protestantism: who only make the Church (or themselves), instead
of the Pope, the arbiter of truth; who hold error (that is, an
opinion different from their own,) to be fatal to salvation: and who allow
the right of individual judgment only with the penalty of everlasting
condemnation upon all whose individual judgment is not the judgment
of their Church. We take objection also to the spirit that creeps out
in the expression, “(so called) Unitarians,” maintaining that the word
does not “impute to others ‘a polytheistic creed;’” but that as “Trinitarian”
denotes one who worships the Godhead in three “persons,”
Unitarian fitly describes one who worships the Godhead in one person.
And, above all, we protest against the resolution of our case into “dishonest
or uncandid criticism;” that is the wilful maintenance of error,
knowing it to be such, the Charybdis which one of your lecturers proposes
for us, if we should be fortunate enough to escape the Scylla of “defective
scholarship.” We are deeply concerned that so much of the “acetum
theologicum” has mixed thus early in an invitation, characterized by the
chief inviter as “a sweet and pleasant thing;” and this, too, after a public
announcement of having purged the mind of every feeling but the pure
love of the pure truth.
And to you, reverend sir, in whose letter to the Unitarians of this town
and neighbourhood the announcement in question occurs, it is incumbent
on us to address a few remarks, with a special view to acquaint you with
the feelings awakened by your earnest invitation.
The anxiety which that letter manifests to convince us that, in seeking
our conversion, you are actuated by no “base and worldly motive,” is,
we can assure you, altogether superfluous. Of the purity and disinterestedness
of your intention we entertain no doubt; and we regard it
with such unaffected respect, as may be due to every suggestion of conscience,
however unwise and fanatical. If, with the ecclesiastics and
philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you esteemed the
denial of witchcraft as perilous a heresy as Atheism itself, we should feel
neither wonder nor anger at the zeal with which you might become
apostles of the doctrine of sorcery. Any one who can convince himself
that his faith, his hope, his idea of the meaning of Scripture, afford the only
cure for the sins and sorrows and dangers of the world, is certainly right
in spending his resources and himself in diffusing his own private views.
But we are astonished that he can feel himself so lifted up in superiority
above other men, as to imagine that Heaven depends on their assimilation
to himself,—that, in self-multiplication, in the universal reproduction of
his own state of mind, lies the solitary hope of human salvation. We
think that, if we were possessed by such a belief, our affections towards
men would lose all Christian meekness, our sympathies cease to be those
of equal with equal, the respectful mercy of a kindred sufferer; and that,
however much we might indulge a Pharisaic compassion for the heretic,
we should feel no more the Christian “honour” unto “all men.”
You ask us, reverend sir, whether it is not “a sweet and pleasant
thing,” “to tell and hear together of the great things which God has done
for our souls.” Doubtless, there are conditions under which such communion
may be most “sweet and pleasant.” When they who hold it
agree in mind on the high subjects of their conference, it is “sweet and
pleasant” to speak mutually of “joys with which no stranger intermeddleth,”
and to knit together the human affections, with the bands of
that heavenly “charity,” which, springing from one faith and one hope, is
yet greater than them both. Nay, when good men differ from each other,
it is still “sweet and pleasant” to reason together, and prove all things,
and whatsoever things are pure, and true and lovely, to think on these things,
provided that both parties are conscious of their liability to error, and
are anxious to learn as well as to teach: that each confides in the integrity,
ingenuousness, and ability of the other; that each applies himself with
reasons to the understanding, not with terrors to the will. But such
conference is not “sweet and pleasant” where, fallibility being confessed
on one side, infallibility is assumed on the other; where one has nothing
to learn and everything to teach; where the arguments of an equal are
propounded as a message of inspiration; where presumed error is treated
as unpardonable guilt, and on the fruits of laborious and truth-loving
inquiry, terms of reprobation and menaces of everlasting perdition are
unscrupulously poured.
You announce your intention to set apart, on our behalf, a day of
humiliation and prayer. To supplicate the Eternal Father, as you propose,
to turn the heart and faith of others into the likeness of your own
may appear to you fitting as an act of prayer; it seems to us extraordinary
as an act of humiliation. Permit us to say, that we could join
you in that day’s prayer, if, instead of assuming before God what doctrines
his Spirit should enforce, you would, with us, implore him to have
pity on the ignorance of us all: to take us all by the hand and lead us
into the truth and love, though it should be by ways most heretical and
strange; to wrest us from the dearest reliances and most assured convictions
of our hearts, if they hinder our approach to his great realities.
A blessed day would that be for the peace, brotherhood, and piety of
this Christian community, if the “humiliation” would lead to a recognition
of Christian equality, and the “prayer,” to a recognition of that
spiritual God whose love is moral in its character, spiritual, not doctrinal
in its conditions, and who accepts from all his children the spirit and the
truth of worship.
We fear that you will consider it as a mark of great obduracy, that
we are not more affected by that “purest love” for “those in the extreme
of peril,” which your letter expresses. Let us again assure you that
we by no means doubt the sincerity of that affection. However pure in
its source, it is ineffectual in its result, simply because no one can feel his
heart softened by a commiseration which he is wholly unconscious of
requiring. The pity that feels with me is, of all things, the most delicious
to the heart; the pity that only feels for me, is, perhaps, of all things, the
most insulting.
And, if the tenderness of your message does not subdue us, we trust its
terrors will prevail still less. We are not ignorant, indeed, that, in dealing
with weak minds whose solicitude for their personal security is greater
than their generous faith in truth and God, you enjoy an advantage over
us. We avow that we have no alarms whereby to urge men into our
Church; that we know of no “terrors of the Lord” by which to “persuade
men,” except against sin; nor do we esteem ourselves exclusive
administrators of any salvation, except that best salvation, which consists
in a free mind and emancipated heart; reverencing Christ as the perfect
image of the Father, listening to the accents of reason and conscience, as
to the breathings of God’s spirit, loving all men as his children, and
having hope in death, of a transference from this outer court into the
interior mansions of His house. For this reason, imbecile souls, without
Christian trust and courage, may think it safer, at all events, to seek a
place within your Church; but we wonder that you can feel satisfied,
retaining your Protestantism, to appeal thus to fear and devout policy,
rather than to conviction, and that you cannot discern the mockery of first
placing us on the brink of hell and lifting up the veil, and then bidding
us stand there, with cool and unembarrassed judgment to inquire. Over
converts, won by such means, you would surely have as little reason to
rejoice as had the priests of Rome to exult on the recantation of Galileo.
Our fellow worshippers have learned, we trust, a nobler faith; and will
listen to your arguments with more open and tranquil mind than your invitation,
had it attained its end of fear, would have allowed. They will
hold fast, till they see reason to abandon it, their filial faith in a Divine
Father, of whom Jesus, the merciful and just, is indeed the image; and
who, therefore, can have neither curse nor condemnation for “unwitting”
error, no delight in self-confident pretensions, no wrath and scorn for any
“honest and good heart,” which “brings forth its fruit with patience.”
To this God of truth and love, commending our high controversy, and
all whose welfare it concerns, we remain your fellow-labourers in the
Gospel,
James Martineau,
Minister of Paradise-street Chapel.
John Hamilton Thom,
Minister of Renshaw-street Chapel.
Henry Giles,
Minister of the Ancient Chapel, Toxteth Park.
Liverpool, Jan. 26, 1839.
Gentlemen,—As Christian courtesy seems to require a reply to your
address, published in the Albion of this day, I hasten to furnish it, though
unwilling, for many reasons, to enter into a newspaper discussion with you
on the important subjects which just now engage our attention. I shall,
therefore, (without intending any disrespect,) pass by unnoticed your
critical remarks on certain portions of my recently published invitation to
the members of your body to attend and give a patient hearing to the
lectures about to be delivered at Christ Church, and confine myself altogether
to those points of inquiry to which it is but reasonable that you
should receive an answer. And,
1. You ask, whether I will recommend my congregation to attend (I
presume, in your respective chapels) to hear the replies which you intend
making to our proposed lectures. To this I am compelled to reply in the
negative. Were I to consent to this proposal, I should thereby admit that
we stood on the terms of a religious equality, which is, in limine, denied.
As men, citizens, and subjects, we are doubtless equal, and will also stand
on a footing of equality before the bar of final judgment; I therefore use
the term “religious equality” in order to convey to you the distinction
between our relative position as members of the community and as religionists.
Being unable (you will excuse my necessary plainness of
speech) to recognize you as Christians, I cannot consent to meet you in a
way which would imply that we occupy the same religious level. To you
there will be no sacrifice of principle or compromise of feeling, in entering
our churches; to us, there would be such a surrender of both in entering
yours, as would peremptorily prohibit any such engagement.
2. You next inquire how early an appearance of our printed lectures
may be expected. In answer to this I have only to say, that arrangements
have been made for publishing each lecture as soon after its delivery
as may be practicable. Within what time this practicability may be
found to coincide, it is of course impossible precisely to determine. It
will be obvious, that I cannot answer for my brethren upon this point;
but shall only observe for myself, that I should hope a week or ten days
will be sufficient for the necessary revisal of proofs, arrangement of
authorities, and other business connected with a careful and correct publication.
3. Your third inquiry respects a proposal to have an epitome of each
lecture, and its reply, published weekly in the columns of some previously
selected newspaper. Not having as yet had the opportunity of
collecting the sentiments of my reverend brethren, I can only, as before,
give the view which suggests itself to my own mind. I am inclined to
think it would be unfair to the respectable bookseller, who has undertaken
to publish the course at his own risk, to expect him to concur in a
proposal which could not but materially injure his sale. As it is our intention
to publish each lecture separately, as well as the whole collectively,
at the close of their delivery, and that in the cheapest possible
form, with a view to the most extensive circulation, I cannot but hope
and believe that our united object will be equally, if not better, answered,
than by resorting to a process which should necessarily so condense and
curtail the matter as to present a very meagre and insufficient exhibition
of the arguments, reasonings, references, and authorities, on which so
much of the value of the lectures will depend.
4. And, finally, as to your proposal of making some public journal
the vehicle of a discussion independent of the lectures, I regret that I
feel again obliged to decline pledging myself to concur in it. While I reserve
to myself the right of noticing and replying to any communication
which may appear, in a duly authenticated form, in any of the public
journals, I must at the same time express my conviction, that a newspaper
is not the most desirable medium for disquisition on the deep and awful
subjects which must pass under review in a controversy like that in which
we are about to engage. The ordinary class of newspaper readers, including
too frequently the ignorant scoffer, the sceptical, and the profane,
is not precisely that whose attention we desire to solicit to our high
inquiry into the laws of Scriptural Exegesis, and our application of these
laws to the elucidation of the profound mysteries of the Book of Revelation.
I feel no doubt that all who feel interested on the subject, will
contrive to hear or read what we shall preach and publish; and will thus
be furnished with more solid and suitable materials for forming a correct
judgment, than could be afforded by the casual study of the ephemeral
pages of the public press.
Having thus distinctly replied to the several points of your letter, on
which you may have reasonably expected to hear from me; and trusting
that you will not attribute to any want of respect to you the omission of
all notice of the remainder; and congratulating you with all sincerity on
your avowed intention of coming, with your respective congregations, to
hear the exposition which we are about to give of what we believe to be
fatally false in your system, as contrasted with what we think savingly
true in our own; and praying with all fervency, to the great Head of the
Church, to bless and prosper the effort about to be made for the promotion
of his glory, through the instruction of those who are “ignorant and out
of the way,”
I remain, Gentlemen,
Yours for the Lord’s sake,
January 28, 1839.
Fielding Ould.
Gentlemen,--I owe it to you and to myself to state, that no offence was
intended, either by me, or, as I conscientiously believe, by my clerical
brethren, in the title of the subject to which my name stands affixed in the
Syllabus of the Lectures on the Unitarian Controversy. I am also bound
to acknowledge, that your letter, on the subject of the lecture, is written in
a style of calmness and courtesy, of which, I trust, you will have no
reason to complain of the absence in the statements which I shall have to
submit to your attention. Of course, this is not the time for the vindication
of the view which I adopt on the great question: I content myself,
therefore, with this public disclaimer of any desire to substitute irritating
language for sound argument.
I remain, Gentlemen,
Yours, with all due respect,
Thos. Byrth.
Rev. Sir,—We beg to offer you our thanks for your prompt and distinct
reply, in the Liverpool Courier of yesterday, to the proposals submitted
to you in our letter of Monday. We are as little anxious as yourself for
the prolongation of this preliminary newspaper correspondence; and however
much we may regret the negative character of your answers to our
questions, we should have reserved all comment upon them for notice
elsewhere, if you did not appear to us to have left still open to consideration
the proposed discussion (independent of the lectures) through the
press. That the pulpit controversy should be on unequal terms, is, we
perceive, a matter of conscience with you; but your objections to a
newspaper controversy seem to arise, not from any desire to withhold
your readers from our writings, as you would your hearers from our
preaching, but from the unfitness of a political journal to be the vehicle of
religious argument. Permit us, then, to say, that we have no preference
for this particular medium of discussion; that we are wholly indifferent as
to its form, provided the substantial end be gained of bringing your arguments
and ours before the attention of the same parties, and that any plan
which you may suggest, affording promise of the attainment of this end,
whether it be the joint publication of the lectures in your church and
those in our chapels, or the appearance in the pages of a religious
journal (either already established, or called into existence for the
occasion, and limited to this single object), will receive our welcome
acceptance.
Had we any desire to see a theological opponent in the wrong, we
should leave the case between us in its present position, and should not
persevere thus in opening the way towards a fair adjudication of it; but
our reverence for the religion of which you are a representative and
symbol before the world, transcends all paltry controversial feelings,
and we should see, with grave sorrow, the honour of Christianity compromised
by the rejection, on the part of its authorized ministers, of the
acknowledged principles of argumentative justice. You will not, we trust,
incur the reproach of inviting a discussion with us, and then changing it
into an indictment against us. You have originated the appeal to the
great tribunal of public opinion in this Christian community; you are
plaintiff in this controversy; you will not, we feel assured, so trifle, in
things most sacred, with the rules of evidence, as to insist that your case
shall be heard in one court, and before one jury, while your defendant’s
case is banished to another, and the verdict pronounced without balancing
the attestation and comparing the pleadings. Should you, moreover,
succeed in convincing your readers, that this is a discussion not (as we
submit) between church and church, but (as you contend) between
Christianity and No-Christianity, the effect will be yet more to be
deplored, for, in such case, Christianity will appear to claim from its
votaries the advantage of an exclusive hearing for itself, and, while
challenging, by the very act of controversy, the appeal to argument, to
leave, for those who are stigmatized as unbelievers, the honour of demanding
that open field which, usually, truth is found to seek, and falsehood to
avoid. We trust that you will not thus inflict a wound on a religion
which, in all its forms, we deeply venerate.
You deny our religious equality with you. Is it as a matter of opinion,
or as a matter of certainty, that such equality is denied? If it is only as
an opinion, then this will not absolve you from fair and equal discussion
on the grounds of such opinion. If it is with you not an opinion, but a
certainty, then, Sir, this is Popery. Popery we can understand,—we know,
at least, what it is,—but Protestantism erecting itself into Romish infallibility,
yet still claiming to be Protestantism, is to us a sad and humiliating
spectacle, showing what deep roots Roman Catholicism has in the weaker
parts of our common nature.
We confess ourselves at a loss to comprehend your distinction between
civil equality and religious equality. We claim equally as fellow-men, as
partakers of a common nature; of that nature the religious elements are
to us incomparably dearer and more elevating than the elements that make
us merely citizens; and the equality that is conceded in regard to all our
lower attributes, but denied in regard to those that are spiritual and
immortal, is such an equality as you might concede to the brutes, on the
ground of their animal nature, without injury to the maintenance of your
religious superiority. What is meant by our equality at the bar of final
judgment, as citizens, but not as religionists, we do not know; or, if we
can detect a meaning in it, it is one which we should have supposed
belonged to our faith rather than to yours.
In reference to your repugnance to enter our chapels we say no more,
reserving our right of future appeal in this matter to those members of
your church who may be unable to see the force of your distinction between
religious and social equality. But we are surprised that you should conceive
it so easy a thing for us to enter your churches: and should suppose
it “no sacrifice of principle and compromise of feeling” in us to unite in a
worship which you assure us, must constitute in our eyes “the most
heinous of all sins—Idolatry.” Either you must have known that we did
not consider your worship to be idolatry, or have regarded our resort to it
as a most guilty “compromise of feeling;” to which, nevertheless, you
gave us a solemn invitation; adding now, on our compliance, a congratulation
no less singular.
We thought you had been aware, that, while our services must be, in a
religious view, painfully deficient to you, those of your church are positively
revolting to us. Still as our presence, on such passing occasions as the
present, does not, in our opinion, involve any “sacrifice of principle,”
we shall set the example to our friends of attending; not making our
desire that they should be just dependent on the willingness of others
to be so too. And we shall have this satisfaction, that, whether you
“win” them, or whether we retain them, the result will be a faith held,
not on the precarious tenure of ignorance or submission, but in the
security of intelligent conviction, and the peace of a just and enlightened
conscience.
We remain, reverend Sir,
Yours, with Christian regard,
James Martineau.
John Hamilton Thom.
Liverpool, January 31st, 1839.
Henry Giles.
Christian Brethren,—A letter of public invitation has been addressed
to the Unitarians of this town and neighbourhood, by the Rev. Fielding
Ould, on behalf of himself and twelve other gentlemen associated with
him, urging us, with the earnestness of Christian anxiety, to bend our
minds to their expositions of our errors and our dangers. We naturally
interpreted this to be an invitation to discuss the most momentous questions
as equal with equal. We thought, indeed, that we saw an assumption
of superiority, if not of infallibility, perhaps inseparable from minds
so trained: still we supposed, that this superiority was to be maintained
by argument and fair discussion: and this was all that we desired. It
never occurred to us, that the reverend gentleman might possibly expect
us to accept him as a divinely appointed judge of truth, whose teachings
were to be received in submission and silence; or that he could suppose
that convictions like ours, convictions that have resisted all the persuasions
of worldly ease and interest, that have removed from us the charities and
sympathies of men like him, and held in simple fidelity to truth and God,
could be so lightly shaken that nothing more was required to blow them
away than a course of ex parte lectures without answer or discussion. If
the object had been to confirm Trinitarians in their views, this kind of proceeding
we should have understood; but surely something more was required
when Unitarians were publicly invited to the controversy. Much
less could we anticipate that the reverend gentleman, holding himself to
be upon a “religious level” far above us, to belong to a different order of
spirits, could yet be so far removed from the Christian and Apostolical
spirit as to refuse to bring his “light” into direct conflict with our “darkness.”
With these expectations of controversy, and having no bonds with
anything but truth, we unfeignedly rejoiced, that, for the first time in this
community, both sides of the great question were about to appear together
before the solemn tribunal of public attention.
In all these things we have been quickly undeceived. In our simplicity,
we believed that discussion was really invited and desired. We
now find that we were invited to hear, but not to argue; that to lecture
us is of the nature of “dearest affection;” but that to hear what we may
have to urge in reply would be to “recognize us” as “Christians,” to
admit that we stood on the terms of a religious equality, which is, in
limine, denied. We now find that all reciprocity is refused to us; that it
never was intended to treat us as equals; that the method of discussing
the Unitarian controversy, about to be adopted, is to hear only the
Trinitarian advocates—to call us around the Christ Church pulpit to
be taught to listen and believe. Clergymen may be so blinded by ecclesiastical
feelings as not to perceive the extreme offensiveness of all that is
assumed in this mode of treating their fellow-men; but we turn to you,
the freer laity of the Church, in generous confidence, that such conduct
will not be found to accord with your spirit of justice—with the nobler
ideas which you have gathered, from the intercourse of life, of equitable
dealing between man and man.
We proposed to the clergymen about to lecture at Christ Church, that
since they had appealed to public opinion, through a popular advocacy, the
pleadings should be on both sides, and, as far as possible, before the same
parties. This is refused to us, because we are not Christians. Is this in
the spirit of the Saviour? It is also refused to us, because it is asserted,
that Trinitarians cannot enter our places of worship without a sacrifice of
principle, whilst we may enter theirs without pain or compromise. Now
the very opposite of this, though not the truth, would have been nearer to
it. In our worship there would be the inoffensive absence of some views
dear to you: in your worship there would be the actual presence of some
views most painful to us. In our worship, you would hear addressed that
Great Spirit whom you, too, adore and seek: in your worship, we should
hear addressed, as God, him whom we revere and follow, as the image of
God, the man Christ Jesus. In our worship, you would find deficiencies
only; in yours, we should find what, to us, is positively objectionable,
religion materialized and the Deity distributed into persons. The Rev.
Fielding Ould, in one of his letters, represents us as looking upon you to
be Polytheists, which we do not; and, in another of his letters, tells us,
that we may enter your temples without pain or compromise of feeling. It
will be evident to you, Trinitarian laymen, that the Lecturers at Christ
Church cannot retire, upon such reasoning as this, from the full, public,
and impartial discussion which we propose to them, without making it
manifest to the public, that they are determined upon doing so.
We proposed to them discussion through the press, as well as from the
pulpit: and this also is denied to us, on the ground, that newspapers are
read by the sceptical, the scoffing, and the profane. Now, not in newspapers
alone, but in any journal whatever, was the controversy offered by
us; yet we could not have anticipated the objection, when we recollect
the use made of the newspapers by the religious party to which the reverend
gentlemen belong. Again have we tendered discussion, through the
press, in any form whatever, with the single condition, that the views of
both parties shall be presented to the same readers—in the hope, not as
yet gratified, of an answer in a juster spirit.
Nothing now remains for us but to appeal from ecclesiastics to minds
more generally influenced, to minds that, taught in the great schools of
humanity, have learned mutual respect, and that have dropt, in the free
and noble intercourses of man with man, the monkish and cloistered sentiment
of spiritual as of civil superiority. To you, then, the Trinitarian
laity, we make our appeal; from the exclusiveness and assumed infallibility
of clergymen, to men who, from familiarity with wider influences,
have formed different conceptions of Christian brotherhood and of Christian
justice. We should not have held ourselves authorized in thus addressing
you had we supposed, that your cause or yourselves, your ideas of justice,
had been worthily supported by your ecclesiastical representatives, who, we
firmly believe you will agree with us in feeling, have openly betrayed both
you and it.
We appeal to you, not without confidence, to give us that equal audience
which your clergymen have refused; that those of you who, through interest
in the great question, are led to hear the Trinitarian statements, will,
in the love of the truth, and in the spirit of equitable inquiry, hear also
the Unitarian replies. We seek not to make you Unitarians: that, at least,
is not our chief desire and aim. But would to God that we could do something
to spread that true Christianity which holds the unity of the spirit in
the bond of peace, and deems charity dearer and more heavenly than doctrinal
faith! Would to God that this controversy might have some effect,
not in building up any one creed, or swelling any one sect, but in destroying
the delusive and separating ideas that lie at the roots of creeds, and
are the nourishers of bigotry, uncharitableness, and heresies! We should
deserve well of this great community, if we could remove from it this cause
of strife and bitterness,—if we could exhibit the God of Jesus requiring
from us, not speculative opinions, but the heart, the temper, and the life of
Christ!—if we could expose the unchristian idea of men preparing themselves
for a moral heaven by a metaphysical creed, and unite those who
now consume their energies, their temper, and their time, in contending
for abstruse and uncertain dogmas in the deeds of mercy and of brotherhood
which flow out of our common Christianity, and which, in the wide
wastes of sin, of ignorance, and of misery, that surround us, are the moral
debts of man to man, and constitute the religion which, before God, even
our Father, is pure and undefiled.
Respectfully directing your attention to our advertisement of a syllabus
of Lectures on the Unitarian Controversy, presenting both sides of the
question—our portion of which will be delivered in Paradise Street Chapel,
on successive Tuesdays,
We are, Christian brethren,
Yours, in the spirit of Christian brotherhood,
John Hamilton Thom.
Liverpool, Feb. 2, 1839.
Henry Giles.
James Martineau.
ON WEDNESDAY EVENINGS IN CHRIST CHURCH.
1839.—February 6.
1. Introductory. The practical importance of the Controversy
with Unitarians.
Rev. F. Ould.
February 13.
2. The Integrity of the Canon of Holy Scripture maintained against Unitarian Objections.
Rev. Dr. Tattershall.
February 20.
3. The Unitarian Interpretation of the New Testament based upon defective Scholarship, or on dishonest or uncandid Criticism.
Rev. T. Byrth.
February 27.
4. The proper Humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Rev. J. Jones.
March 6.
5. The proper Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ proved from Prophecies, Types, and Jewish Ordinances.
Rev. J. H. Stewart.
March 13.
6. The proper Deity of our Lord the only ground of Consistency in the Work of Redemption.
Rev. H. M‘Neile.
March 20.
7. The Doctrine of the Trinity proved as a consequence from the Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Rev. D. James.
March 27.
8. The Atonement indispensable to the Necessities of Fallen Man, and shown to stand or fall with the Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Rev. R. P. Buddicom.
April 3.
9. The Deity, Personality, and Operations of the Holy Ghost.
Rev. J. E. Bates.
April 10.
10. The Sacraments practically rejected by Unitarians.
Rev. H. W. M‘Grath.
April 17.
11. The Nicene and Athanasian Creeds explained and defended.
Rev. R. Davies.
April 24.
12. The Personality and Agency of Satan.
Rev. H. Stowell.
May 1.
13. The Eternity of future Rewards and Punishments.
Rev. W. Dalton.
ON TUESDAY EVENINGS IN PARADISE STREET CHAPEL.
1839.—February 12.
1. The practical importance of the Unitarian Controversy.
Rev. J. H. Thom.
February 19.
2. The Bible; what it is, and what it is not.
Rev. J. Martineau.
February 26.
3. Christianity not the property of Critics and Scholars, but the gift of God to all men.
Rev. J. H. Thom.
March 5.
4. “There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.”
Rev. H. Giles.
March 12.
5. The proposition ‘That Christ is God,’ proved to be false from the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures.
Rev. J. Martineau.
March 19.
6. The scheme of Vicarious Redemption inconsistent with itself, and with the Christian idea of Salvation.
Rev. J. Martineau.
March 26.
7. The unscriptural Origin and Ecclesiastical History of the Doctrine
of the Trinity.
Rev. J. H. Thom.
April 2.
8. Man, the Image of God.
Rev. H. Giles.
April 9.
9. The Comforter, even the Spirit of Truth, who dwelleth in us, and teacheth all things.
Rev. J. H. Thom.
April 16.
10. Christianity without Priest, and without Ritual.
Rev. J. Martineau.
April 23.
11. Creeds the foes of Heavenly Faith; the allies of worldly Policy.
Rev. H. Giles.
April 30.
12. The Christian view of Moral Evil here.
Rev. J. Martineau.
May 7.
13. The Christian view of Retribution hereafter.
Rev. H. Giles.
Men and Brethren,—Before the commencement of the lectures, on which
I have taken the liberty of inviting your attendance, I am anxious respectfully
to address to you a few observations in reference to the letters which
have appeared in the public journals under the signature of your ministers.
It would appear that these gentlemen have been desirous to produce upon
the public mind an unfavourable impression, à priori, of my reverend
brethren, and of myself in particular, because of our having declined, on
their proposal, to enter upon a course different from that which we had
originally contemplated. “You will not, we trust,” say Messrs. Martineau,
Thom, and Giles, “incur the reproach of inviting a discussion with us, and
then changing it into an indictment against us.” Now, we never invited
any discussion with these gentlemen; if we had, we should have addressed
ourselves to them personally. But, while we would not, and do not, shrink
from any discussion with them into which we can consistently enter, we
cannot allow ourselves to be diverted from the pursuit of our original purpose,
viz., to deliver a course of lectures upon the various points of Unitarian
doctrine, which we believe, and think we can prove, to be not only
unscriptural, but fatal to the souls of those who embrace them, and which
cannot be maintained (as appears from the published works of the most
learned Unitarians) without a virtual surrender of the inspiration of the
Bible. Believing, as I do, that your best interests for time and for eternity
are involved in the momentous questions at issue—questions affecting the
very vitality of true religion—I inserted a letter in the daily prints, expressed,
as I had hoped, in terms of courtesy and affection, inviting your
presence and soliciting your attention. I also caused a notice to be published
of our intention to print the lectures, separately and in a collective
form, for extensive and immediate circulation, so that the amplest opportunity
might be afforded for replying to our arguments on the part of any
who might feel disposed to the task. That is, we proposed to employ the
instrumentality of the pulpit and the press, (an instrumentality, be it observed,
equally at the service of those who differed from us,) in order to promote
the best interests of a portion of our countrymen, whom we believe
to be “perishing for the lack of knowledge.”
Where is there to be found here aught of arrogance, or uncharitableness,
or “assumed infallibility”? Where is there aught of unfairness, or
“any rejection on our parts of the acknowledged principles of argumentative
justice?” It is true we refuse to advise our respective congregations
to attend at Unitarian chapels, to hear such answers as your ministers
may think it right to offer in refutation of our reasonings. Our principles
and our consciences alike forbid our concurrence in such a proposal.
We cannot go ourselves, nor recommend our people to go and have
their ears wounded, their hearts pained, and their Christian sensibilities
shocked, by the iteration of such, in our view, blasphemous statements, as
we find spread in painful profusion over the pages of Unitarian theology.
And why, then, it is asked, do we invite or expect your attendance upon
what are called “the painfully revolting” services of our church? For
this reason, that, as appears from the works of all their principal writers,
Unitarians do not attach the same importance to religious doctrines and
opinion that we do. It seems to be with them a matter of comparative indifference
what dogmas a man holds, provided he be sincere in his profession;
while with us sincerity is no criterion of truth, being persuaded that
as a man’s religious opinions are, so will his conduct be in time, and his
destiny through eternity. Being of opinion, then, that our people would
suffer by being brought into contact with error, in the same way that the
human body would be endangered by accepting an invitation to feed at a
table where poison was mingled with bread, we feel obliged to decline recommending
the proposed arrangement to their adoption. But, feeling that
there would be neither danger nor risk to those who are represented as having
a moral appetite for poison as well as bread, and as looking upon all theological
opinions if not as equally harmless in their bearing on their eternal
interests, we ventured to invite you to come, that we might “persuade you
concerning Jesus.” If there be any of you whose conscience revolts
against a participation in Trinitarian worship, we invite not his attendance:
we would be not intentionally accessory to the wounding of the weakest
conscience among you.
You will thus, men and brethren, perceive what was intended by the
assertion that our “religious level” was different. We meant not to arrogate
to ourselves any undue superiority, but simply to state a fact. And
while we think it both unreasonable and unjust that we should be expected
to become the auditors of what we deem blasphemous error, or pledge ourselves
to the joint circulation of what we call truth and falsehood, and thus
be “partakers of other men’s sins,”—we cannot but be of opinion that
there is some ground for these charges in reference to the conduct of
those who, on this ground, attempt to prejudice the public mind against us,
as if we were declining a battle which we had invited and provoked.
We are convinced that the attempt will not succeed. The public will
have eyes to see with sufficient clearness the real merits of the case, and
will condemn the efforts made to blind its vision, or at least incline it to
take a distorted view of our relative position.
Again repeating my invitation to all who can conscientiously accept it,
to attend our lectures, and leaving cheerfully to others the free use of the
only weapons we employ—the Bible—the Pulpit—and the Press—and
praying the Lord to guide all his inquiring people, by the teaching of his
Holy Spirit, into all truth, even the “truth as it is in Jesus,” I remain, men
and brethren, yours in the bonds of love,
Christ Church, Feb. 5, 1839.
Fielding Ould.
Gentlemen,—Having hitherto corresponded with you on my own individual
responsibility, I have to request that you will consider me as alone
answerable for what has hitherto appeared under my signature. I had this
morning, for the first time, the opportunity of personal conference with my
reverend brethren collectively at the expected meeting which took place at
my house. I have now to address you upon the result.
All that we had originally contemplated was, the delivery of a course of
lectures upon the principal doctrines in controversy between Unitarians
and ourselves. It now appears that my invitation to the Unitarian laity to
come and hear us, while we brought their avowed principles to the test of
the Word of God, has been taken advantage of by you, and led to a series
of proposals on your part, which I took upon myself to decline. I have
this day addressed a letter to the members of your body generally, which I
trust will have the effect of setting that part of the subject in its proper
point of view.
It is, however, indispensable to distinguish carefully between this
particular invitation of yours, and discussion generally. Your letter to the
Trinitarian laity invites discussion in any shape which shall effectually
bring the statements of both parties before the same individuals. We are
now prepared to gratify your desire, and WE ACCEPT YOUR INVITATION. Our
lectures, however, shall be first delivered; on this we are determined.
Then, in the name of all, and in dependence upon our blessed Lord and
Master, three of our body will be ready to meet you three before a public
audience in this town; all preliminaries to be, of course, arranged
by mutual conference. We propose, if you please, to take the three great
subjects into which the controversy obviously divides itself, viz.,
1. Evidence of the genuineness, authenticity, and inspiration of those
parts of our authorized version of the Holy Scriptures which you deny.
2. Translation of those parts which you alter, and in our judgment
misrepresent.
3. Theology, involving those principles of vicarious sacrifice which we
deem vital, and which you discard.
Our proposal, then, is to meet you either one day on each subject, as you
please; or one week on each subject, as you please: the discussion to be
conducted in speeches of one hour or half an hour each, as you please.
And now, trusting that this proposed arrangement may prove satisfactory
to you, and to all who take an interest in this controversy, and fervently
praying the great Head of the Church to overrule our purposes to the
advancement of His kingdom and the promotion of His glory,
I remain, Gentlemen,
Yours for the Lord’s sake,
February 5, 1839.
Fielding Ould.
Reverend Sir,—It would have been gratifying to us to receive from you
an answer to our offer of a discussion, through the press, before being
called upon to consider a proposal, altogether new, for a platform controversy.
You give us an invitation to talk, and call this an acceptance of our offer
to write. The two proposals are so distinct, that it is not easy to see how
the one could be transformed into the other; nor is the mistake explained
on turning to the words of our invitation, appealed to by you, and contained
in our letter to the Trinitarian laity. They are these:—“We have tendered
discussion through the press, in any form whatever, with the single condition
that the statements of both parties shall be presented to the same
readers.” You leave the impression, that an oral debate is comprised
within the terms of this offer; but, in doing so, you widen its scope, by
striking out the phrases which restrict it to printing and publication, and
describe it thus; “Your letter to the Trinitarian laity invites discussion
in any shape which shall effectually bring the statements of both parties
before the same individuals.” You will at once perceive the misrepresentation;
will acknowledge that the idea of settling historical and philological
controversies, by popular debate, has neither origin nor sanction
from us;—and will permit us to recal you to our first proposal of discussion
through the press,—a proposal to which, though now made for the third
time, we have yet received no answer.
Meanwhile, we will not delay the reply which is due to this new suggestion
of a platform controversy. We decline it altogether; and for this
answer you must have been prepared, by the sentiment we expressed in
an early stage of this correspondence: “We are not of opinion that a
miscellaneous audience, assembled in a place of worship, constitutes the
best tribunal to which to submit abstruse theological questions respecting
the canon, the text, the translation of Scripture,—questions which cannot
be answered by any defective scholarship.” To assemble a similar audience
in an amphitheatre, where the sanctities of worship are not present to calm
and solemnize the mind, is evidently not to improve the tribunal. The
scholar knows that such exhibitions are a mockery of critical theology:
the devout, that they are an injury to personal religion. We are surprised
that any serious and cultivated man can think so lightly of the vast contents
of the questions on which we differ, as to be able to dispense with calm
reflection on the evidence adduced, and to answer off-hand all possible
arguments against him, within the range of biblical and ecclesiastical
literature. We are not accustomed to treat your system with such contempt,
however trivial an achievement it may seem to you to subvert ours.
In reverence for truth, in a spirit of caution inseparable from our desire to
discharge our trust with circumspect fidelity, and from a belief that, to
think deeply, is the needful pre-requisite to speaking boldly, we offered you
the most responsible method of discussion, in which we might present to
each other, and fix ineffaceably before the world, the fruits of thought and
study. To this offer we adhere; but cannot join you, on an occasion thus
solemn, in an appeal to the least temperate of all tribunals. We recollect
that one of the clergymen associated with you refused an oral discussion
of the Roman Catholic controversy. We approved of his decision; and,
in like circumstances, adopt it.
Will you allow us to correct a mistake which appears in your enumeration
of the three topics most fit for discussion? We do not, as Unitarians,
deny the genuineness, or alter the translation, of any part of the authorized
version of the holy Scriptures. The Unitarians have neither canon
nor version of their own, different from those recognized by other churches.
As biblical critics, we do indeed, neither more nor less than others, exercise
the best judgment we can on texts of doubtful authority, (as did Bishop
Marsh, in rejecting the “heavenly witnesses,” 1 John v. 7,) and on the
accuracy of translations (as did Archbishop Newcome, when he published
his version of the New Testament); but no opinions on these matters
belong to us as a class, or are needful to the defence of our theology. If
you allude to the Improved Version, we would state, that it contains the
private criticism of one or two individuals; that it has never been used in
our churches, nor even much referred to in our studies, and is utterly
devoid of all authority with us; and that, for ourselves, we greatly prefer,
for general fidelity as well as beauty, the authorized translation, which we
always employ.
In your letter to the Unitarians, published in the Courier of Wednesday,
you state that you never invited discussion with us (the ministers) personally.
We never imagined or affirmed that you did. But surely you
invited discussion with the class of persons called Unitarians; and as a
class has no voice except through its representatives, and no discussion
can take place without two parties, you cannot think that we are departing
from our proper sphere in answering to your call. Did you not invite us (the
Unitarians) to you, “to tell and hear together the great things which God
has done for our souls?” And did this mean that all the “telling” was to
be on one side, and all the “hearing” on the other? Did you not press upon
our admiration the primitive practice of “controversial discussion of disputed
points?” And did this mean that there was to be neither “controversy,”
“discussion,” nor “dispute,” but authoritative teaching on one side, and
obedient listening on the other? In one of two relations you must conceive
yourself to stand to us;—that of a superior, who instructs with superhuman
authority, or that of an equal, who “discusses” with human and fallible
reasonings. Between these two conditions, there is no third; nor can
you, with justice, take sometimes the one and sometimes the other, according
as the occasion may require the language of dignity or that of meekness.
We certainly addressed you as an equal, and did not pay you the
disrespect of imagining that your invitation to “discussion” meant nothing
at all.
We are sorry that you ascribe to us any intention to divert you from
your contemplated course of lectures. Be assured nothing could be
further from our design. We simply desired that, having invited us, you
should have recognized us when we presented ourselves, as parties in the
“discussion.”
We remain, reverend Sir,
Yours, with Christian regard,
Henry Giles.
John Hamilton Thom.
Liverpool, February 7th.
James Martineau.
Gentlemen,—I think it due to the cause of truth, as well as to the
interest awakened in the public mind by this controversy, to address to
you a few observations on your last letter, as published in the Mercury of
Friday. Though still strongly of opinion that the columns of a newspaper
present a most undesirable medium of communication upon subjects such
as those we are now engaged in discussing, I am unwilling in the absence
of any other accessible instrumentality, to lose the opportunity it affords
of impressing upon the attention of all reflecting men the actual position
which we relatively occupy.
1.—Being aware of the sincere anxiety which you have already manifested
for “discussion in any shape which should bring the statements on
both sides before the same parties,” it is not without considerable surprise
that I perceive that you “decline altogether” my proposal of a “platform
controversy.” Now, while you say I invited you to “talk,” and I answer
I invited you to argue, I cannot but think it will appear evident to most,
that by the subsequent publication, in an authentic form, of our oral debate,
you would have gained all that you could have desired in the assistance of
the press, while a select auditory, equally composed of the respective
friends of both parties, would have been able to judge of your ability, not
intellectually, but morally, to meet the case we could have made out against
your system. I cannot but hope that a secret consciousness of the weakness
of your cause has prompted your determination, and am of opinion
that while a discerning public will approve the discretion of your resolve,
they will not be slow to appreciate its motive, or the precise measure of
your zeal for a candid impartial hearing.
But the “settling of historical and philological controversies by popular
debate has neither origin nor sanction from you.” Perhaps not: but you
cannot say that such a course is altogether without precedent. You have
doubtless heard of the protracted debate upon these same controversies
which were held in the north of Ireland a few years ago between Mr.
Bagot and Mr. Porter. May I ask whether it was the result of that discussion
that induced you to withhold your sanction from all future controversies
so conducted? Mr. Porter did not consider it inconsistent with the
principles of Unitarianism to debate his creed before “a miscellaneous
audience.” Are you wiser than he in your generation? Again:—the
proposed tribunal is not the best “to which to submit abstruse theological
questions respecting the canon, the text, the translation of scripture.” But
do you not apprise us a little lower down, that you, as Unitarians, do not
deny the genuineness, or alter the translation of any part of the authorized
version of the holy scriptures? Why, then, there is no ground for the
above apprehension. As these are not points which the tribunal will have
to try, why question its competence on their account? You are surprised
that I would “dispense with calm reflection on the evidence adduced.” I
am, in my turn, surprised that you should suppose I have any such intention.
When the “evidence adduced” has been taken down and published,
what is there to prevent its being “calmly” weighed and estimated at its
proper value? And then it is hard “to answer off-hand all possible arguments”
advanced. So it is; but not harder for you than for us. Here at
least we should stand on a footing of perfect equality. It was hardly to be
expected that you should object to this.
2.—I now come to the mistake into which you say I have fallen, and
which you offer, obligingly, to correct. “We do not, as Unitarians, deny
the genuineness or alter the translation of any part of the authorized version
of the holy scriptures. The Unitarians have neither canon nor version of
their own different from those recognized by other churches.” If this be
true I certainly have been mistaken; but have the satisfaction of knowing
that this mistake has been shared by a host of abler critics and more
learned scholars than I can pretend to be. I had always thought that I
read of the liberties taken with the received text by the Priestleys and
Belshams—the Wakefields and Channings, when they were of opinion
that they spoke too strongly the language of Trinitarians. I had also
understood that the Bruces, the Drummonds, and the Armstrongs of
Ireland had performed achievements in the same line, at which many not
a little wondered. I had further imagined that the unanswered—because
unanswerable—volumes of Archbishop Magee presented evidence on this
behalf, with which few were unacquainted. Now, if you mean to say that
you, the ministers and representatives of Liverpool Unitarianism have
never “questioned the genuineness, nor altered the translation of any part
of the authorized version,” I can understand the assertion, and willingly
take your own word for its truth. But if you mean to affirm that this
has not been done, and to a very prodigious extent, by Unitarians, both
domestic and foreign, you will excuse me if I positively deny the allegation,
as being totally without foundation, and I refer in proof to the
notorious lucubrations of the above-named doctors of Unitarian divinity,
as well as to the severe exposures of their semi-infidel tampering with the
Bible which they have called forth.
But while you do not “deny the genuineness or alter the translation of
any part,” perhaps you question the inspiration of certain portions of the
sacred volume. You will remember that this was one of the branches of
evidence that we proposed to discuss with you, and that not the least in importance.
Why are you silent on this head? Is it not of any moment,
think ye, to admit the genuineness and confess the authenticity of a book or
a chapter or a verse of scripture, if you withhold your conviction of its inspiration?
Is it not a fact that you might hold the genuineness of the two
first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and feel no disposition to alter
the translation of a word, and, at the same time, boldly deny that they
were “given by inspiration of God?” If I am mistaken here too, I pray
to be set right. If not, then the public will decide upon the candour and
fairness of your profession to remove the necessity of any controversy with
you on the score of EVIDENCE, because of your admission of the genuineness
and your satisfaction with the accuracy of the authorized version, while by
an expressive but momentous silence, you acknowledge that the greatest of
testimonial questions is by you disputed, and you at the same time refuse to
come forward boldly, and debate it fairly before the church.
Again—“Unitarians have neither canon nor version of their own different
from those recognised by,” &c. You anticipate here a reference to “the
improved version,” and tell us that “it contains only the private criticism
of one or two individuals—that it has never been used in your churches,
and is utterly devoid of all authority with you.” Will you excuse me for
expressing my doubts of the accuracy of this statement, for these reasons:
—1. That work was the joint production of some of the ablest men and
best scholars that the Unitarian sect has ever been able to boast of; and
that the shades of Belsham, Lindsey, Jebb, Priestley, Wakefield, &c.,[5] might
well be astonished to hear their learned labours so contemptuously spoken
of by three modern disciples of their school. 2. That, in the year 1819,
(the date of the edition which I possess,) the improved version had gone
through no fewer than five editions—a tolerable criterion of the extent of
its circulation in little more than twenty years. How many it may have
passed through since, I have been as yet unable to ascertain. 3. That so
far from its being “devoid of all authority,” it professes, in the title page,
to have been “published by the Unitarian Society for promoting Christian
Knowledge and the practice of virtue by the distribution of Books.” That
it may “never have been used in your churches” I can well believe, as it
is probable that the feelings of your people would have revolted too strongly
against its introduction, to make the experiment advisable: the food which
it furnishes may have proved too coarse even for the digestive organs of
popular Unitarianism itself. It is also possible that the modern professors
of your theology may be somewhat ashamed of this awful specimen of
“rational and liberal criticism,” and may secretly wish that it had never
seen the light. But the existence of it, at least, cannot be denied; and
there it stands, a painful memorial and a living witness, of what is “in
the heart” of a system that exalts reason into a dominion over revelation,
and that, unwarned by the solemn admonitions contained in the book itself
against the presumptuous additions or detractions of human pride or folly,
has dared sacrilegiously to lay its unhallowed hands on the sacred ark, and
to attempt the mutilation and misrepresentation of the great magna charta
of the spiritual liberties of man.
3.—At the close of your letter, you say, “Surely you invited discussion,
with the class of persons called Unitarians.” I again repeat I did not. I
determined to have a course of lectures delivered in my church on the
points at issue between us and the professors of what we call your “heresy.”
And I invited the persons whom I was and am sincerely anxious to benefit,
to come and hear our well considered convictions of their errors and their
consequent danger, as well as our faithful exhibitions of what we think “a
more excellent way.” It will not be denied that a clergyman of any denomination,
in a free country, and more especially a clergyman of the national
church, has a right to preach, or authorize others to preach, in his
pulpit, according to his own discretion, and invite whom he pleases to come
and hear, without its being understood that he challenges either the parties
so invited, or their representatives, to enter with him the lists of controversial
discussion. I absolutely protest against any such understanding.
I did not seek to compel the attendance of any of your body, nor yet to
deny to you or them, in reply, the use of the same weapons that I had employed
in the attack. I did mean that those who pleased should come and
hear us “tell” them a gospel which they were not told by those upon
whom we looked as “blind leaders of the blind;” and that they should be
prepared to “learn” whatever should commend itself to their consciences,
under our teaching, as the truth of God. We did not, and do not, expect
to be able to bring demonstration home to the hearts of any by the strength
of our arguments, or by the force of our appeals; but we anticipated that,
in answer to our earnest prayers, the power of the Holy Ghost would accompany
our teaching of His truth, and make it effectual to the conversion
of souls “from darkness to light.” We propose to stand before the congregations
that might assemble, neither as “superiors to instruct with superhuman
authority,” nor as “equals to discuss (if you mean by that dispute)
with human and fallible reasonings;” but simply as “ambassadors for
Christ, as though God did beseech them by us, that we might pray them in
Christ’s stead—be ye reconciled to God.”[6] This is the middle position in
which we stand, the mean between your two extremes; and by God’s blessing,
we will continue to occupy it, until we shall have delivered our consciences,
and discharged our duty to a numerous, respectable, but, in our
judgment, blinded and deluded class of our fellow-countrymen.
And now, gentlemen, having taken such notice of certain allegations in
your letter as it seemed impossible to pass by, and with the full purpose
of continuing in the course on which I have entered, until, through the
blessing of God, the grand object which I have proposed to myself shall
have been accomplished,
Gentlemen,—You state, in your letter of the 7th ult., that “your
proposal of discussion through the press, though made for the third time,
has as yet received no answer.” It was thought by ourselves and our
clerical brethren, that as our lectures were to be printed and published,
every facility was afforded you of replying to them through the same
channel, and that thus the whole subject would be fairly brought before
the public.
In addition to this, we have offered to meet you in oral discussion; you
decline the proposal.
Anxiously desirous to bring the whole matter before this great community,
so as to prove that we not only entertain no apprehensions as to
the result, but are convinced that, by such an exposition, great good will
be effected, we, the undersigned, on our own responsibility, ACCEPT YOUR
TERMS of discussing the momentous question between us, in the form of a
correspondence in some public journal or periodical, altogether independent
of the lectures.
We remain, Gentlemen,
Yours, for the sake of the Gospel,
Thomas Byrth.
Fielding Ould.
Liverpool, February 11.
Hugh M‘Neile.
Rev. Sir,—The tone of your last letter makes us rejoice that, by the
acceptance on your parts of discussion through the press, this correspondence
may now be brought to a close.
Let us, Rev. Sir, place before you your own language, and ask, in
solemn sadness, are the feelings it betrays worthy of the occasion, or
deserved by us, or edifying to the public mind? These are your words:—“I
cannot but hope that a secret consciousness of the weakness of your
cause has prompted your determination, and am of opinion, that while a
discerning public will approve the discretion of your resolve, they will
not be slow to appreciate its motive, or the precise measure of your zeal
for a candid and impartial hearing.” Sir, it is not a little mournful to find
a Christian Minister expressing his hope that other men are hypocrites,—that
they are secretly conscious of the weakness of the cause which they
publicly defend. To hope that we secretly know our errors, whilst publicly
preaching them as truth, is, indeed, strange preference of faith before
works. Let us assure you, Sir, that if we could think of you as this
language shows you think of us, we should decline all discussion with
you,—we should regard you as an opponent too discreditable to be identified
with a great question, or to be considered as an honourable representative
of your own party.
We apprehend, Rev. Sir, that nobody but yourself would think of
attributing to conscious weakness our preference of the most perfect and
searching method of discussion, to the most flimsy, insufficient, and
unscholarlike that could by possibility be selected. Had we wished to
catch the ear of a popular assembly, or to turn away attention from weak
points by oratorical artifices, we should have proposed this platform controversy,
instead of, as we did, carefully and purposely wording our
invitation and our enumeration of the modes in which the controversy
might be conducted, so as to exclude the idea of oral discussion.
We observe with sorrow, and with diminished hope of benefit from
controversy, that you can so sink the interests of truth in personal
championship, as to meet our solemn unwillingness to entrust the gravest
questions to extempore dexterity and accidental recollection, with the
reply that in this respect we should be at least equally situated. Doubtless,
Sir, if a display of personal prowess was our object, this would be
conclusive; but TRUTH is our object, and we dare not offer it such worthless
advocacy.
With respect to the instance alluded to by us, of a decision similar to
our own, our impression had been that reasons also similar to our own
were given at the time; and we can only regret, since this impression
seems to be false, that we quoted the case.
With regard to the “Improved Version,” we shall only say here, that
it has been raised to an importance in this discussion which is entirely
factitious. The differences between us must be settled upon principles
of interpretation and criticism recognized by all scholars; and if these
principles can be shown, in any respects, to condemn the “Improved
Version,” in those respects we shall be the first to abandon it, feeling
ourselves to be in nothing bound by it. When we said that, as Unitarians,
we had no canon or version of our own, we meant that we are quite
willing to accept the text as fixed by scholars, most of them Trinitarians,
on critical principles. We most cheerfully recognize the fundamental
principles of Scriptural inquiry, so clearly and soundly stated yesterday
evening by Dr. Tattershall; and although agreeing with many of your
ablest scholars, in thinking the received translation to require corrections,
and not approving of the morality of taking up a position in defence of
truth unnecessarily unfavourable; yet, were our only object to display
the ampler and superior Scriptural evidence for Unitarianism than for
Trinitarianism, the received translation would be quite sufficient for our
purpose.
Again reminding you that the word “discussion” was introduced into
your original invitation, which contained also reference to the controversial
practice of primitive times, and set forth the advantages of “hearing”
and “telling” together,
We remain,
Your fellow-labourers and fellow-Christians,
James Martineau.
John Hamilton Thom.
Feb. 14, 1839.
Henry Giles.
Gentlemen,—Your willingness to discuss the Unitarian and Trinitarian
controversy in the most satisfactory mode, has given us sincere pleasure;
and if we have seemed to press this matter upon your acceptance, we assure
you it was with the single desire that the statements of both views, in their
most accurate and perfect forms, might be presented to the same minds
through an unbiassing medium; an object which could be obtained neither
by the unequal distribution of separate lectures, nor by means so necessarily
imperfect as oral discussion.
We shall be happy to arrange with you, at the earliest possible period,
the manner and conditions of our proposed discussion.
We shall be ready to conform ourselves to your wishes upon the subject;
but we would suggest the desirableness of the discussion being entered on
at once—partly because attention to it might now be secured, and partly
because in the seriousness and number of our mutual engagements, this
controversy should not be allowed to interfere with our other duties and
responsibilities longer than is necessary.
We are, Gentlemen,
Yours, with respect,
John Hamilton Thom.
James Martineau.
Feb. 14, 1839.
Henry Giles.
Gentlemen,—I cannot permit our correspondence to terminate without a
few remarks on your letter, as published in the Mercury of Friday last.
1. I regret that the “tone” of my last address should have given you any
offence, while I am wholly unconscious of any intention unnecessarily to
wound the feelings of those who, I am free to admit, have hitherto written
at least courteously, if not very candidly, upon the subjects which have
been recently submitted to the attention of the public. Allow me distinctly
to disclaim any attempt to charge you with hypocrisy, or make it appear
that you “secretly know as errors what you publicly preach as truths.”
I took occasion merely to express my surprise that persons who seemed so
anxious for an impartial hearing of their defence, should “altogether
decline” a proposal by which, as it appeared, and still appears to me, that
object might have been so satisfactorily attained; and in the exercise of a
charity that “hopeth all things,” I sought to attribute your refusal to a
latent and half-formed conviction within you, that your principles, in whatsoever
sincerity entertained and professed, might not bear the light of such
an investigation as that to which they would have been subjected in a public
vivá voce discussion. Where is there any charge of hypocrisy here? May
not a man be perfectly sincere in the maintenance of an opinion, which he
would nevertheless be very unwilling to defend in oral debate, from a proper
apprehension of the force of argument with which it might be encountered,
and a secret consciousness of his own slender materials for its support?
Be assured it is not necessary for us to brand you with hypocrisy, in order
to convict you of heresy. We are willing to give you every credit for honesty
of intention and integrity of purpose, while we cannot but suspect that you
are fully aware of the difficulty of maintaining the principles of Unitarianism
on the ground of an unmutilated and “unimproved” Bible.
Were I equally disposed with you to take offence, I too might inquire,
“in solemn sadness, whether it be deserved by us, or edifying to the public
mind,” that you should more than insinuate, though of course in very
polished phrases, that “we have proposed a platform controversy, in order
to catch the ear of a popular assembly, and to turn away attention from
weak points by oratorical artifices.” Is this your opinion of us? If we
thought so, “we should decline all discussion with you as opponents too
discreditable to be identified with a great question, or to be considered as
honourable representatives of your own party.” But we are not offended.
We look upon your language as simply intended to convey an admission
that your system is unpopular; one that, from its cold, and cheerless, and
unimpassioned character, would seek in vain to enlist on its behalf any
measure of popular sympathy, or conciliate any favour unless from those
whom it had imbued with its own proud spirit, and accustomed to the low
temperature of its own frigid zone.
2. But, gentlemen, while I cheerfully receive the admonition on the
“tone” of my address which your letter does contain, I have to complain
respecting the answer to a very simple question I had proposed, which your
letter does not contain. As I am unwilling to incur the hazard of again
offending, I will forbear from more than hinting at the semblance of rhetorical
dexterity that appears in your perhaps undesigned turning away of
attention from the PRINCIPAL POINT which I had submitted for your consideration,
in order to fasten upon me a groundless charge, and so challenge
public sympathy in your favour, as men branded with the character of
hypocrites, and secretly cognizant of errors which were openly preached as
truths. We proposed to discuss with you “the evidence of the genuineness,
authenticity, and inspiration of the holy scriptures.” You replied that you
do not “deny the genuineness” and seek not “to alter the translation of any
part of the authorized version,” which you prefer to the abandoned version
of Mr. Belsham and his associates. You were silent, however, about the
INSPIRATION. I ventured to inquire whether I was mistaken in supposing
you denied the plenary inspiration of the authorized version? My words
were, “If I am mistaken here too, I pray to be set right.” In your letter
now before me there is not a word upon the subject; no answer to my all-important
inquiry. There is a little further disparagement of the “improved
version,” which, we are told, has been raised into a “factitious
importance in this controversy;” you will be the first to “abandon it,” if
it should be condemned by the ordinary principles of critical interpretation—so
far so good. But what of the INSPIRATION? Are you either afraid or
ashamed to speak out what you think on this subject? I would not that
you should be offended at the “tone” of my interrogations; but again I
must ask, what are your opinions upon the quality and extent of scripture
inspiration? The public are anxiously expecting an answer to this solemn
query, and our present correspondence cannot close until it is answered.
The way will then be clear for our approaching discussion through the
press; we shall then understand each other, and shall have reconnoitred
and appreciated the character of the field upon which we are to take up our
respective positions. You say that “truth is your object,” and not “personal
championship.” Well, then, let us have the truth upon Unitarian
views of SCRIPTURAL INSPIRATION. All other argument can be only an unmeaning
play of words until this point is settled.
We are rejoiced to learn that you are satisfied with “the authorized
version,” and “the received translation,” for the purposes of our present
inquiry; and when you shall satisfy us that you admit the full inspiration
of all and every part of that volume, we shall be in a condition to inquire
whether it presents “ampler and superior Scriptural evidence for
Unitarianism than for Trinitarianism.” We remember that Mr. Belsham,
in his Review of Mr. Wilberforce’s Treatise, has said, speaking
of the texts usually quoted by Trinitarians in proof of the proper deity of
Christ, that “Unitarians pledge themselves to show that they are all either
interpolated, corrupted, or misunderstood.”—Review, pp. 270, 272. They
engage to get clearly rid of them altogether. You, it would appear, have
given up the interpolations and corruptions; the misunderstandings, we
presume, still remain chargeable against us; but whether on the ground of
ignorance, or of mistaken confidence in the inspiration of the texts in
question, we have yet to be informed.
You will pardon my anxiety for an answer upon this head, bearing in
mind that we regard it as opening wide a door for the introduction of
infidelity, so to give up any portion of the sacred volume as being not of
inspired authority, as to render it doubtful whether any portion does possess
that authority, and thus entirely neutralize the effect of God’s message
of mercy to the minds and hearts of men.
I remain, Gentlemen,
Yours, for the sake of the Gospel,
February 18, 1839.
Fielding Ould.
Reverend Sir,—You proposed (in your letter of the 5th February) a certain
series of subjects as proper topics for the discussion between us, and
submitted the list to our notice for acceptance or rejection. From this
enumeration we struck out two particulars, viz., the authenticity of certain
parts of the New Testament writings, on the ground that we did not deny
your postulates under that head; and the translation of certain other parts
of the Scriptures, on the grounds that, with yourself, we prefer, on the
whole, the authorized version to all others; that we would not be responsible
for any new rendering proposed in the Improved Version; and
that, as we have nothing so absurd as a system of translation capable of
systematic treatment, any special instances, in which we may think the
common translation inaccurate, had better be discussed in connection with
the theological doctrines affected by the texts in question.
These subjects being excluded from the list, the rest, comprising the
question of inspiration, and the doctrines of your theology, of course stand
over for discussion. We said nothing of these, because we had no exception
to take against them. As our notice of the others was to effect their
removal, our “silence” about these was to secure their admission.
The plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, or, if you really prefer it, (as
your phraseology seems to imply,) “the plenary inspiration of the authorized
version” remains then as an essential part of our approaching controversy.
Why you should complain that we do not step aside with you
individually, to render you an account of our belief in this matter, we cannot
divine, unless you think that, by tempting us into your confessional by
appeals to our conscience, you could impose upon the “heretics” your
penance at discretion. If it should be, that this subject is likely to be
committed to your hands in this controversy, and you are merely anxious
to know betimes what precisely are the positions which you may be called
upon to meet, a private communication of your wish would be sufficient.
The second lecture of our series will be speedily published, and will furnish
the information which you desire.
We are sorry that you discover any want of “candour” in our last
letter; and surprised that, this being the case, you can esteem it “courteous.”
We regard a violation of “candour” as the greatest outrage upon
“courtesy;” and despise, above all things, the hollow and superficial
manners, which are empty of all guileless affections and Christian sentiments.
In saying that you charged us with hypocrisy, we committed no
breach of candour, but only the mistake, which we are now happy to
correct, of supposing that your language faithfully represented your meaning.
That you did not think of the word “hypocrite” when you wrote to
us, we cheerfully believe; but that you thought of us as doing that which
makes a hypocrite, your own explanation renders more evident than it was
before. You attribute to us “a latent and half-formed conviction,” that
“our principles might not bear the light of investigation,” and “a consciousness”
of “the difficulty of maintaining them.” Now there can be no
“difficulty,” where the tribunal is wisely chosen, in maintaining any set of
opinions, except from the superior force of the antagonist considerations;
there can be no “consciousness” of such “difficulty,” except from consciousness
of this opposing superiority;—to be conscious of a preponderant
evidence in favour of any system, is at heart to believe it; and he who
believes one system, and publicly upholds another, is, as we interpret the
word, a hypocrite. We perceive, however, that you made this charge without
precisely meaning it; and we think no more of it.
We disclaim any intention of hinting that you “proposed a platform
controversy, in order to catch the ear of a popular assembly, and to turn
away attention from weak points by oratorical artifices.” We simply
affirmed, that oral discussion would have afforded a better refuge for our
imputed “weakness” than the press. But surely it does not follow that,
because the consciously weak might prefer such a method, therefore all
who prefer it must be consciously weak. It would, indeed, be a strange
mistake of all the symptoms by which the characters of men can be
known, if we attributed to you any suspicion that you could be mistaken.
You are quite aware that your earnestness appears to us perfectly sincere,
and even to transgress the bounds of a modest confidence.
We remain, Reverend Sir,
Yours, with Christian regard,
Henry Giles.
John Hamilton Thom.
February 21, 1839.
James Martineau.
Gentlemen,—Before we proceed with our proposed discussion, it is
necessary to determine, with a little more of accuracy than has been
hitherto stated, what our controversy is to be about.
We thought that you, in common with Unitarians generally, acknowledged
the Scriptures of the New Testament, as contained in what is commonly
called “The Unitarian or Improved Version,” to be inspired of
God, and consequently of infallible truth.
This however you, as individuals, have disclaimed; and, therefore, we
are compelled to ask what you do acknowledge Inspired Revelation?
Is our discussion to be,
1. Upon the meaning of a mutually-acknowledged standard of truth?
Or,
2. Upon the question, Is there any such standard? And if so, what
is it?
We affirm the inspiration by God of the Holy Scriptures, as contained
in our authorized canon, and are willing to refer every question for decision
to their ascertained meaning.
Do you agree in this?
Our standard being known, it is a matter of obvious fairness that we
should ask to have yours stated.
Either you admit the divine inspiration, and consequent infallible truth,
of the Bible, or you do not.
Or, you so admit a part, and reject a part. You will be so good as to
state clearly how this matter stands.
Are you believers in a WRITTEN and infallibly-accurate Revelation
from God to man?
If so, what is that Revelation?
If you admit only parts of our Bible as inspired, you will oblige us by
stating what parts.
The character of the discussion must obviously depend upon this: is it
to be a discussion upon EVIDENCE or upon INTERPRETATION? It would be
manifestly a waste of time in us to enter upon the interpretation of what
you might afterwards get rid of, (so far, at least, as you are concerned,)
by declaring it only the opinion of a fallible man.
We remain, Gentlemen,
Yours, for the sake of truth,
Hugh M‘Neile,
Fielding Ould,
March 4th, 1839.
Thomas Byrth.
Gentlemen,—You ask us, Is our discussion to be,
1. “Upon the meaning of a mutually-acknowledged standard of
TRUTH?” Or,
2. “Upon the question, Is there any such standard? And if so,
what is it?”
We answer, distinctly, that our controversy is upon the meaning, ascertained
by INTERPRETATION, of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Should
any questions of criticism arise respecting what is the text to be interpreted,
these must, of course, be argued separately, upon purely critical
grounds.
We conceive that the real controversy between us respects the nature of
Christianity itself;—you holding the Revelation to consist in doctrines
deducible from the written words; we holding the Revelation to be expressed
in the character and person of Jesus Christ, and to be conveyed
to us through a faithful and authentic record. Which of these two ideas
is Scriptural?—that is our controversy.
Of course, “the standard” by which we must test “the truth” of these
ideas is the New Testament, and the Hebrew Scriptures, so far as they
throw light on its contents. Whichever view of Christianity is supported
by the meaning of this standard, is the true one. The method of ascertaining
the meaning of any writings is the same, whether those writings
are of natural or supernatural origin; so that the process of interpretation
may go on, undisturbed by any reference to the theory of verbal inspiration.
The admission of an “infallible truth” in the Bible (which, however,
is known with certainty only to God; for you, after admitting it, are
disputing with heretics of your own communion what it is), cannot alter,
in any respect, the true grounds of our controversy. It is a controversy
of interpretation, and no theory of verbal inspiration can make it anything
else.
This theory, however, we conceive to be altogether fallacious, both in
its principles and its results; and if you wish to make it the subject of
our controversy, we have no objection. We leave it to your choice, whether
we are to discuss the theory of verbal inspiration, or whether we are
to discuss the meaning of the original Scriptures, as ascertained by the
acknowledged principles of interpretation.
We confess to not a little surprise that three clergymen, coming forward
to discuss Unitarianism, should be found to express themselves so inaccurately,
or from such defective information, as to speak of “the Unitarian or
Improved Version,” and to represent the work, thus falsely described, as
acknowledged by Unitarians generally to contain the New Testament as
inspired by God. The theory of verbal inspiration, which we deny altogether,
we are not likely to claim in favour of a Unitarian translator. We
have repeatedly stated, that the “Improved Version,” is not the “Unitarian
Version;” nor is it “commonly” so “called.” And now we say, once more,
that our controversy is not about the Improved Version, but about the
Greek Testament.
When you accepted our invitation, with its terms, it was understood that
all the preliminaries of our controversy were to be arranged by mutual
agreement. You were aware, and we have in our letters distinctly stated,
that the theory of verbal inspiration stood as a part of that controversy;
you knew, also, that in a few days a distinct statement of our opinions upon
the nature of the Bible, in the form of a printed lecture, would be before
the public. We therefore look upon your letter, in the Courier of Wednesday
last, as altogether unnecessary; and we answer, thus publicly, what
ought to have been matter of private communication, only because we are
resolved not to allow any informalities, on your parts, to prevent our coming
to a public discussion of our respective views of Christianity.
We are, Gentlemen,
Yours respectfully,
James Martineau.
John H. Thom.
March 11, 1839.
Henry Giles.
Gentlemen,—In our last letter we gave up the “Improved Version,” so
far as you, as individuals, are concerned, because, as individuals, you disclaimed
it. We are surprised, therefore, that you should revert to it, and
the more so, because you have now ventured to say, not only that you disclaim
it, but also, in the face of known facts, that it is not “the Unitarian
version,” nor is it “commonly so called.” When you disclaimed it for
yourselves, we did not demur. But when you go on to disclaim it for the
Unitarian body, (for which, by the way, you have no authority,) we strenuously
deny your assertion, and call in evidence the language of all the best
writers upon the controversy.
You have misstated our question. We did not ask, “Is our discussion to
be upon the meaning of a mutually-acknowledged standard of Scripture?”
We did ask, “Is it to be upon the meaning of a mutually-acknowledged
standard of truth?” We receive the Scripture as a standard of truth.
The substitution of the one word for the other, in this question, has
mystified your whole letter.
We collect, however, from your letter, and from Mr. Martineau’s
sermon, to which you refer us, (and which we consequently conclude contains
the sentiments of you all,)
1. That you do not believe in a written and infallibly-accurate Revelation
from God to man.
2. That Paul the apostle may have “reasoned inaccurately,” and
“speculated falsely.”[7]
3. And that, consequently, you feel yourselves at liberty to judge his
statements (and all the statements of Scripture) as you do those of any
other books.
You seem to think that this is of little consequence, and say that “the
process of interpretation may go on, undisturbed by any reference to the
theory of verbal inspiration.”
We reply that such a process can lead to nothing but waste of time.
For when we shall have proved some great truth, or condemned some fatal
error, upon the authority of Paul, or some other inspired writer, you have
kept an open door for yourselves to escape from the whole force of our
demonstration, by saying that, in the words on which we rely, the sacred
writers “reasoned inaccurately,” or “speculated falsely,”—while, if any passages
in those writers seem to favour your views, you have adroitly retained
the privilege of ascribing to them a sort of inspiration.[8]
No, gentlemen, we are not to be deceived so, into an attempt to fix
the chameleon’s colour. If the apostles may “reason inaccurately,” and
“speculate falsely;” if the inspiration under which they wrote did not infallibly
preserve them from error, then there is no standard of truth upon
earth. Of what avail is it, then, to refer to the Greek Testament, or the
Hebrew Scriptures? The Scripture, instead of being (what David called
it, speaking as he was moved by the Holy Ghost) “a lamp unto our feet,
and a light unto our path,” degenerates into a mixture of light and darkness,
which we dare not implicitly follow, but of which we must judge by
some superior light in ourselves.
We observe, further, that, according to the light that is in you, historical
proof of miracles having been wrought in attestation of what the writers
of Scripture say, would NOT be proof against inaccuracy in their reasonings,
or falsehood in their speculations.
This notable conclusion you come to, by elevating nature into the miraculous,
and thus depressing the miraculous into the natural; since you say
that the whole force of the impression made by proofs from miracles arises
from a “SUPPOSEDcontrast” between miracle and nature.[9]
You have thus advanced a step beyond common Deism, and rendered
yourselves inaccessible even by miracles. This is conclusive, and demands
the serious attention of all who have hitherto been disposed to receive
instruction from you. We confess that we can go no further! for, if there
be only a supposed contrast between miracles and nature, we cannot prove
the attesting interposition of God on behalf of the statements of Scripture,
and must give up as worthless the appeal which Jesus makes to his
miracles, in answer to the inquiry of John’s disciples: “Go,” said he,
“and show John again those things which ye do see and hear; the blind
receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf
hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.”—Luke
vii, 22. Upon your principles, gentlemen, this appeal is worthless;
for even if the wonderful things here stated be established as
historical facts, still they contain no proof, because between these wonders
and the course of nature there is only “a supposed contrast.”
Thus then, by your avowal, that even miracles cannot prove inspiration,
you are left in undisputed possession of the field of infidelity. We have
no common property of reason with you, and without determining whether
men who reject the evidence of miracles are of an order of beings above
or below ourselves, we feel that discussion with them is impracticable.
While, therefore, we shall continue to use all lawful methods of argument
and persuasion, in the hope of being useful to those who, though
called Unitarians, are not so entirely separated from our common humanity
as you seem to be, we have no hesitation in saying that, with regard to
yourselves as individuals, there appears to be a more insurmountable
obstacle in the way of discussion than would be offered by ignorance of one
another’s language; because the want of a common medium of language
could be supplied by an interpreter, but the want of a common medium of
reason cannot be supplied at all.
We remain, Gentlemen, yours respectfully,
Hugh M‘Neile.
Fielding Ould.
March 18th, 1839.
Thomas Byrth.
7. To grant that Paul reasons, and be startled at the idea that he may reason incorrectly—to
admit that he speculates, and yet be shocked at the surmise that he may speculate
falsely,—to praise his skill in illustration, yet shrink in horror when something
less apposite is pointed out,—is an obvious inconsistency. The human understanding
cannot perform its functions without taking its share of the chances of error; nor can
a critic of its productions have any perception of their truth and excellence, without
conceding the possibility of fallacies and faults. We must give up our admiration of
the apostles as men, if we are to listen to them always as oracles of God.—Martineau’s
Sermon, pp. 34, 35.
8. I believe St. Matthew to have been inspired; but I do not believe him to have
been infallible.—Sermon, p. 27.
9. All peculiar consecration of miracle is obtained by a precisely proportioned desecration
of nature; it is out of a supposed contrast between the two, that the whole
force of the impression arises.—Sermon, p. 24.
Gentlemen,—We regret the misstatement of your question, which
appeared at the commencement of our letter of the 13th instant. We
regret still more that it did not occur to you to attribute it to its real
cause,—the carelessness of a printer or transcriber. In the autograph
manuscript which remains in our hands, your question is correctly stated
thus—“Is our discussion to be upon a mutually-acknowledged standard
of truth?” How the word “truth” became changed into “scripture,” we
cannot tell; and not having read our letter after it was in print, we were
unaware of the mistake until you pointed it out. Whatever “mystification”
it introduced, you will consider as now removed.
Your letter announces your retirement from the promised controversy.
Knowing that in taking this step you could not put yourselves in the right,
it is only natural perhaps that you should resolve to set your opponents in
the wrong, and to cover your own retreat by throwing scorn on their
religious character. Theology appears in this instance to have borrowed
a hint from the “laws of honour;” and as in the world a “passage of
arms” is sometimes evaded, under the pretence that the antagonist is too
little of a gentleman, so in the church a polemical collision may be
declined, because the opponent is too little of a believer.
You refuse to fulfil your pledge to the public and ourselves on two
grounds:—
I. Because we do not acknowledge the plenary inspiration of the
Scriptures.
II. Because we think it impossible to infer from miracles the mental
infallibility of the performer. It is of no use, you say, to argue about
divine truth with those who do not believe in “a written and infallibly
accurate revelation from God to man.”
We will concede, for the moment, and under protest, your narrow meaning
of the words “inspiration” and “revelation;” and without disturbing your
usage of them, we submit that the reasons advanced by you afford not
even a plausible pretext for having violated your pledge. First, as to the
plea that we are put out of the controversy by our unexpected denial of
the intellectual infallibility of the sacred writers; and that to argue about
the meaning of the Bible is a waste of time, till its verbal inspiration is
established. We reply,—
I. That it was you yourselves who started this very question of inspiration
for argument between us. In his letter of February 18th, Mr. Ould
gives this account of our projected controversy: “We proposed to discuss
with you the EVIDENCE of the genuineness, authenticity, and inspiration
of the Holy Scriptures;” he taunts us with reluctance to take up this
“greatest of testimonial questions,” with “refusing to come forward boldly,
and debate it fairly before the church.”[10] We have come forward boldly,
and this is now the alleged reason why there is to be no debate at all before
the church. Moreover, at the time when you said “we accept your terms,”
you regarded us as holding the very opinions which are now made the
excuse for a retreat; in your first lecture they are made a chief ground of
indictment against us, and pages are crowded with citations from Unitarian
writers, expressing those same sentiments, which, when avowed by your
own opponents, are to make them unfit to be addressed, and to exempt you
from the duty of reply. Of the spirit of this proceeding, observers of
honourable mind must judge; they, as well as you, are well aware, that to
pronounce men unworthy of attack, is itself an attack of the last degree of
bitterness.
II. Your refusal to settle with us the meaning of Scripture till the
plenary inspiration is acknowledged, is in plain contradiction to your own
principles. You fix the imputation of deception on our statement, that
“the process of interpretation may go on undisturbed by any reference to
the theory of verbal inspiration.” Yet is this only a repetition of what
Mr. Byrth himself says, “In whatever light the Christian Scriptures are
regarded, whether as the result of plenary inspiration, as we Trinitarians
believe, or as the uninspired productions of the first teachers of Christianity,
or even as the forgeries of imposture, the meaning of their contents
is a question apart from all others.”[11]
Dr. Tattershall, in common with all sound divines, makes it the first step
of scriptural inquiry to “examine the contents” of the books under the
guidance of the following principle: that “any message coming from
God must be consistent with the character of the same holy being, as
exhibited in his works,” and must have “consistency with itself:”[12] and
he justly states, that whether we ought to take the last step, of admitting
the divine authority of the doctrines, must still be contingent on those
doctrines, “being themselves wise and holy,”—“lessons worthy of God.”[13]
These principles are violated, unless our investigation into your doctrines
is taken in the following order:—
I. Are your doctrines true to the sense of Scripture? If not, the controversy
ends here; if they are, then,
II. Are they self-consistent; reconcilable with the teachings of God’s
works, pure and holy? If not, the controversy ends here; if they are,
then,
III. Do they come to us clothed with divine authority, and conveyed in
the language of plenary inspiration?
Your system, then, must establish its existence in the Bible (which is a
matter of interpretation), and its credibility in itself (which we presume
there must be some criterion to determine), before the question of inspiration
is capable of being discussed. We deny both these preliminaries;
protesting that we cannot find your system in the Scriptures; and that if
we could, it appears to us so far from “self-consistent,” “wise and holy,”
and “worthy of God,” as exceedingly to embarrass the claims to divine
authority, of any writings which contain it. It was then in implicit
obedience to your own rules that we proposed to let the question of
interpretation take the lead; and no less so, that we presume to form a
judgment respecting the internal character of doctrines professing to be
scriptural. Permit us to ask how, but by some “light in ourselves,” we
are to determine whether doctrines are “wise and holy,” “self-consistent,”
and “worthy of God?”
Secondly. You plead that we have forfeited our claim on the fulfilment
of your engagement, by a statement of opinion in our second lecture, to
this effect: that miracles do not enable us to infer the intellectual infallibility
of the performer. This, it seems, is an unexpected heresy, and
cancels all promises. You appear to be affected by the Popish tendencies
of the age; and to have adopted the notion, that no faith is to be kept
with heretics. On this point we remark as follows:—
1st. We are astonished at your assertion, that this idea about miracles
deprives us of any “common medium of reason” with you. Did you not
“propose to discuss with us” the “evidence of the plenary inspiration of
the holy Scriptures,” under the persuasion that we should take the
negative side? In such discussion, would you not have argued from the
miracles to the inspiration? And how did you suppose that we should
reply? You were well aware that we should admit the miracles; and
equally well aware that we should deny the plenary inspiration of those
that wrought them. It cannot be supposed that, at this point, you would
have had no more to say; but you would have proceeded, as many able
writers have already done, to seek some “common medium of reason,”—some
considerations, that is, having force with both parties; by which you
might hope to fasten the disputed connection between your premises and
your conclusion.
2nd. We are still more astonished to hear that this sentiment puts us
“a step beyond common Deism,” “in undisputed possession of the field of
infidelity,” and even in “separation from our common humanity;” seeing
that the opinion has been held by
Bishop Sherlock:—Who says, “Miracles cannot prove the truth of
any doctrine; and men do not speak accurately when they say the
doctrines are proved by the miracles; for, in truth, there is no connection
between miracles and doctrines.”[14]
John Locke:—“Even in those books which have the greatest proof
of Revelation from God, and the attestation of miracles to confirm their
being so, the miracles are to be judged by the doctrine, not the doctrine by the
miracles.”[15]
Dr. Samuel Clarke:—“We can hardly affirm, with any certainty, that
any particular effect, how great or miraculous soever it may seem to us, is
beyond the power of all created beings (whom he explains further to be,
‘subordinate intelligences, good or evil angels,’) in the universe to produce.”
He believes the Devil to “be able, by reason of his invisibility, to work
true and real miracles;” and “whether such (i.e. miraculous) interposition
be the immediate work of God, or of some good or evil angel, can hardly
be discovered merely by the work itself.”
He accordingly lays down the conditions under which the miracles will
prove the doctrine.[16]
Bishop Fleetwood:—“Spirits may perform most strange and astonishing
things,—may convey men through the air, or throw a mountain two
miles at a cast.”[17]
The notions expressed by the last two writers, respecting the superhuman
agency of good and evil spirits, evidently destroy, no less than the
more philosophical principle of Sherlock and Locke, all power of reasoning
from miracles, as such, to the divine authority and inspiration of the
performers. You cannot be ignorant of the fact, that these notions prevailed
among all the Fathers of both the Greek and Latin churches; that
they were almost universal among Christians till very recent times; and
that your own church lodges with the Bishop of the Diocese a discretionary
power to license clergymen to cast out devils.[18]
Nor need we remind you that, by yet another process of thought, the
Society of Friends assigns to miracles the rank which you think so profane.
“We know,” says Barclay on this subject, “that the devil can form
a sound of words, and convey it to the outward ear; that he can easily
deceive the outward senses, by making things appear which are not. Yea,
do we not see that the Jugglers and Mountebanks can do as much as all
that, by their legerdemain? God forbid then that the saint’s faith should
be founded on so fallacious a foundation as man’s outward and fallible
senses.”[19] And he urges, “that there must be other ways of ascertaining
divine truth; for as to miracles, John the Baptist and divers of the
Prophets wrought none that we hear of, and yet were both immediately
and extraordinarily sent.”[20] By different modes of thinking, all these
(Christians?) have arrived at the sentiment in question, so that we occupy
“the field of infidelity,” without being “separated from” at least a goodly
portion of “our humanity.” That this sentiment should be of so deep a
dye of Deism is the more remarkable, because it is advanced and vindicated
as a scriptural sentiment,—a plea which, however foolish, can be
shown to be so, only by discussing the interpretation of the New Testament.
You have proposed no explanation of the state of the Apostles’ minds
before the day of Pentecost. On that day they either did, or they did not,
become more enlightened than before. If they did not, the gift of the
Holy Spirit conferred no illumination; if they did, they were deficient in
light before; and the miraculous powers they had possessed and exercised
did not imply infallibility. We thought, indeed, that the comparative
narrowness of their views before this period had been universally admitted.
With respect to the appeal which in the presence of the Baptist’s disciples
our Lord makes to his miraculous acts, you are quite aware that we do not
regard it as “worthless,” though you say we “must” do so. These acts
(the climax of which, however, was no miracle at all,—“the poor have the
Gospel preached to them,”) fully answered the purpose for which they were
appealed to, viz., to determine whether Jesus was “He that should come,”
or whether John was “to look for another;” for as Bishop Sherlock
remarks though miracles may not (he says “cannot) prove the truth of
any doctrine,” they “prove the commission of the person who does them to
proceed from God.”[21] We repeat, then, that we have started no topic
which you did not invite; we have taken up no method of discussion
which your own rules did not prescribe; we have advanced no idea for
which your own Church should be unprepared. You have quitted this
controversy without any justification from the unexpected nature of our
sentiments, and we are persuaded that you can plead no discourtesy in our
proposals respecting the mechanical arrangements. On this point we think
it right to state thus publicly the overtures which we made to you, through
the excellent clergyman who communicated with us as your representative.
An objection having been urged by Mr. Ould to discussion through the
newspapers, on the ground that they are read by “the ignorant scoffer, the
sceptical, the profane,” we proposed the following plan:—That for twelve
or any limited number of weeks, a joint weekly pamphlet of thirty-two
pages should be published, each party furnishing sixteen pages; that the
first number of the series should contain a positive statement, from each
party, of its fundamental principles in religion, of that which it undertook
to assail, and that which it undertook to defend; and that within the limits
of this programme, the replies in the subsequent numbers should confine
themselves. Thus each party would have chosen its own ground, at first;
and both would have disappeared from the public view together, at last.
This proposal was rejected without any reason being assigned, except that
there were “too many difficulties in the way;” and though all preliminaries
were to be settled “by previous agreement,” we were told that in
the following Courier we should find a letter addressed to us, which we
might answer in whatever way we thought proper. The public who have
watched the proceedings in this matter will bear witness, with our consciences,
that we were not the first to enter this controversy; that we have
not been the first to leave it; and that, in its progress, we have departed
from no pledge, and been guilty of no evasion.
And now, Gentlemen, accept from us in conclusion, our solemn protest
against the language of unmeasured insult, in which, under the cover of
sanctity, the associated clergymen whom you represent, have thought
proper to speak of our religion; against the accusations personally addressed
to us, in the presence of 3,000 people, by the Lecturers in Christ
Church, of “mean subterfuges,” “of sneering,” of “savage grins,” of “damnable
blasphemy,” of “the greatest imaginable guilt,” of “doing despite to
the Spirit of Grace,” of “the most odious of crimes against the Majesty of
Heaven,” and in common with all Unitarians of forming our belief, from
“the blindness of graceless hearts,” too bad “to have been touched by any
spirit of God,” and against the visible glee, fierce as Tertullian’s, with
which “the faithful” are reminded that ere long, we must and shall bow
our proud knees, whether we like it or not, to the object of their peculiar
worship;—so that they are sure of their triumph in heaven, however
questionable it may be on earth. You began the controversy by ascribing
to us one shade of “infidelity;” you end it by ascribing to us a blacker.
Beneath “the lowest deep,” there is it seems “a lower still.” We have sat
quietly under all this, bearing the rude friction upon everything that is
most dear to us, assured that if anything in heaven or earth be certain, it
is this;—that no spirit of God ever spake thus, or thus administered the
poison of human passions, falsely labelled as the medicine of a divine love.
What is the difference between your religion and ours, that this high tone
(than which, to a pure moral taste, nothing surely can be lower) should be
assumed against us? We believe, no less than you, in an infallible Revelation
(though had we the misfortune to doubt it, we might be, in the sight
of God, neither worse nor better than yourselves); you in a Revelation of
an unintelligible Creed to the understanding; we in a Revelation of moral
perfection, and the spirit of duty to the heart; you in a Revelation of the
metaphysics of Deity; we in a Revelation of the character and providence
of the Infinite Father; you in a Redemption which saves the few, and
leaves with Hell the triumph after all; we in a Redemption which shall
restore to all at length the image and the immortality of God: we do reserve,
as you suggest, “a sort of inspiration” for the founders of Christianity,
“a sort” as much higher than your cold, dogmatical, scientific inspiration,
as the intuitions of conscience are higher than the predications
of logic, and the free spirit of God, than the petty precision of men. We
believe in a spiritual and moral Revelation, most awakening, most sanctifying,
most holy; which words, being the signs of hard and definite ideas,
could never express, and which is therefore pourtrayed in a mind divinely
finished for the purpose, acting awhile on Earth and publicly transferred
to Heaven. All men may see that such a Revelation corresponds well with
the medium which conveys it; but a set of scholastic propositions, like
Articles and Creeds, might as well have been written on the sky; and
many a bitter doubt and bitterer controversy might have been spared.
We believe, Gentlemen, that the minds of serious and considerate persons
are weary of the aggressions of Churches upon the private and
secret faith of the individual heart; that they will not long be forced to
live on the dry husks of Creeds which have lost the kernel of true life;
nor accept mere puzzles as divine mysteries. It is at the peril of all religion
that its illimitable truths are embalmed in definite formulas, and the
abyss of God confidently measured by thrusting out the foot-rule of ecclesiastical
wisdom. The things most holy cannot without injury be thus
turned from the contemplation of the affections, to the small criticism of
the intellect; and the acute and polished dividing-knife of dialectics, when
applied to cut theology into propositions, is apt to leave scarce a shred
of faith.
That all professing ministers of the Gospel may speedily turn from
their divisions of belief to a hearty union of spirit, is the desire and
prayer of
Us, who in this temper, and in better times, might have been owned as
12. Rev. Dr. Tattershall’s Lecture on the Integrity of the Canon, p. 69.
13. “Whatever lessons of instruction or doctrines they teach us, these doctrines being
themselves wise and holy, must have been delivered under a divine sanction, and
therefore possess divine authority.
“If he (that is, the person who performs miracles) also teaches lessons,—lessons
worthy of God,—these lessons undoubtedly come to us clothed with divine authority.”—Dr.
Tattershall’s Lecture, pp. 70, 71.
14. Sherlock’s Discourses, No. 10, Hughes’s edition, Vol. I. p. 197, and No. 15,
Vol. I. p. 278.
17. Essay on Miracles, p. 99, seq., as quoted by Farmer in his Dissertation on Miracles,
chap. i. § 3.
18. “No minister or ministers shall, without the licence and direction of the Bishop of
the Diocese, first obtained and had under his hand and seal, ... attempt, upon
any pretence whatsoever, either of possession or obsession, by fasting and prayer, to
cast out any devil or devils, under pain of the imputation of imposture or cozenage,
and deposition from the ministry.”—Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical, lxxii.
19. Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Prop. ii, pp. 35, 36.
21. Discourses, No. 10, Hughes’s edition, vol. i. p. 197.
THE PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE UNITARIAN CONTROVERSY.
An attempt has been made, in a preface to the Lecture to which the following
pages are a reply, to break the force, by anticipation, of the statements they
contain. The Answerer, however, evidently did not hear the statements; and
the preface proceeds upon some rumour of what was said. If Clergymen are
conscientiously prevented from going to hear Unitarians, they ought also to be
conscientiously prevented from answering what they did not hear. I am represented
as saying that Trinitarians do not gather, but lecture: I said Trinitarianism
does not gather, but scatters. I am represented as arguing the tendency of
Trinitarianism to Popery from the recent movement of the Oxford Tract divines
in that direction: I argued the tendency of Trinitarianism to Popery from its
fundamental principles, and I referred to the Oxford movement as one of the
visible manifestations of the demonstrated tendency.
I shall notice the instances in which the Preface proceeds upon anything like a
true apprehension of what was said—
1. Page vii. viii.—“When men tell us that Jesus did not weep over errors of
opinion, we maintain that it was the ‘error of opinion’ which led them to reject
him as the Messiah over which he lamented.” Now, 1. Is the unbelief of the
Jews in the Christ, when he was exhibiting his divine credentials in his Character
and in his Miracles before their eyes and to their hearts, in any respect similar to
our unbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which we, accepting both the Scriptures
and Christ, declare we cannot find to be authorized by either? And 2. Is
it not evident that Jesus attributed the unbelief of the Jews to Moral Causes,
and that therefore, and only therefore, he condemned it? “This is the Condemnation,
that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than
light, because their deeds were evil.” John iii. 19.
2. Page viii.—“But these principles involve a violation of unity.” And what
if they do? Did not our Saviour emphatically declare, “Think not that I am
come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace but a sword.” 1. Christ
is here not describing the final purpose of his Mission nor the natural operation
of his Spirit, but the immediate opposition and contention which his religion
would excite both in Jew and Gentile before it rooted out the old Faiths: And
2. The Christ is not here alluding to differences between Christians themselves,
between those who did accept him; but to the necessary conflict of the Spirit of
Jesus with the Antagonist spirits of Judaism and Heathenism. This also is the
great subject of the Book of Revelations.
3. Page xi.—“But it is a priestly spirit which says, ‘you must believe.’”
This ought to be reckoned with the instances in which the answer proceeds upon
an incorrect rumour of what was said; which was to this effect,—“that it is the
priestly spirit, whose constant cry is, unless you believe this doctrine, and unless
you believe that doctrine, you cannot be saved.” Belief in Jesus, entire spiritual
Trust in him, as, for all providential purposes, one with God, we have explicitly
stated as our view of the essentials of Christianity.
Page xxi.—We do not know how far the Author extends his approval of “the
tactics of holy war.” For ourselves we disapprove of all such tactics, especially
the tactics of substituting a mere illustration or practical verification of an
argument, for the argument itself, and then dealing with the illustration as if
there was no general principle behind it, as if the illustration was represented
as the grounds of the principle, when it is only represented as one of its outward
operations. And yet this “argumentum a particulari ad universale,” is one
which the author employs in his description of Unitarianism in almost every page
of his Lecture.
J. H. T.
THE PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE UNITARIAN CONTROVERSY. — APPENDIX. — Note 1 , page 14 . — Note 2 , page 18 . — Note 3 , page 22 . — Note 4 , page 24 . — Note 5 , page 27 . — Note 6 , Page 29 . — Note 7 , page 37 . — Note 8 , Page 38 . — Note 9 , page 39 . — Comments on Rev. F. Ould’s Lecture on the practical importance of the Controversy with Unitarians. — Footnotes for Lecture I.
Colossians I. 27, 28.—Christ in you, the hope of glory:
whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching
every man in all wisdom; that we may present every
man perfect in Christ Jesus.
Galatians II. 4, 5.—And that because of false brethren
unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out
our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they
might bring us into bondage; to whom we gave place
by subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of
the gospel might continue with you.
Were some stranger to our religion inquiring what it is to
be a Christian, there are two quarters from which he might
derive his ideas of that character. He might draw near to
him who is the only perfect expression of Christianity, and
when he had sat at the feet of Jesus, listening with hushed
heart, and then arisen and joined himself to the meek
Prophet of Mercy on his way of Love, he might receive
from Christ his impressions of Christianity and catch from
the living Master the type of a disciple: or he might turn
for information to the Christians of the day, selecting for
examination the largest and most prominent classes, and
so gather from the common specimen his impressions of
their temper, their spirit, and their faith. Each of these
modes of inquiry would produce a result of Truth; but the
one would be a Truth of reality, and the other only a Truth
of description; the one would present to us what we were
seeking, the true idea of a Christian; the other would show
with what degree of faithfulness Christians had preserved the
spirit of the original, or whether in the copy, in the distant
reflection, the features had been faded, marred, distorted;
the one would furnish us with the great Master’s idea of a
Disciple, the other would exhibit the Disciple as a representative
of the Master, and assuming to be his Image to the
world; in a word, the one would be Christ’s idea of a Christian;
the other would be only a Christian’s idea of Christ.
Oh, thanks be to God for the written Gospel, for the
Epistles written on men’s hearts, the living transcripts, give
us no worthy ideas of Christ; and were it not for those
silent witnesses which speak from a passionless page, and
cannot be made to wear the garb of party, which reflect
Christ’s realities, and not man’s ideas, the Image of Jesus
had long since been irrecoverably lost!
Let us then for a moment place ourselves beside Jesus,
and learn from the Christ what it is to be a Christian. I
hear him inviting the weary and the heavy laden to come
and find rest unto their souls. I listen for that doctrine of
rest, the faith that gives the sin-bound peace. I hear him
speak of God, and they are indeed healing words of peace,
intended to quell a superstition and a controversy: “God is
a spirit: the hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers
shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the
Father seeketh such to worship Him.”[22] I hear him speak
of Duty: “The Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: This
is the first Commandment. And the second is like unto it:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. This do and thou
shalt live.” I hear him speak of Heaven: “Blessed are the
poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are
the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’
sake, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” “The kingdom
of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say
lo here, or lo there, for behold the kingdom of God is within
you.”[23] I hear him speak of Sin, melted, and transformed
into penitence: “To whom little is forgiven, the same loveth
little. Thy faith hath saved thee. Go in peace. Sin no more,
lest a worse thing come upon thee.” I hear him speak of
Discipleship: “He that hath my commandments and
keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth
me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and
will manifest myself to him.”[24] “Herein is my Father
glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.
If ye keep my commandments ye shall abide in my love;
even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide
in His love. Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command
you. Henceforth I call you not servants, for the
servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth: but I have called
you friends: for all things that I have heard of my Father I
have made known unto you.” “By this shall all men know
that ye are my disciples if ye have love one to another.”[25]
We turn now from the words to the life of the great
Teacher, in the endeavour to get a more definite idea of Duty,
Discipleship, and Faith. The character of Jesus is the best,
fullest, and truest interpretation of the words of Jesus. His
life is his own translation of his own precepts into the
language of action. We surely cannot be far from the true
sources of Christianity when we first drink his words into
our hearts, and then follow him with reverent steps and with
gazing eyes, to watch his own illustrations of those words, to
behold the spirit breathing in the life, and from the fulness
of his character to learn the fulness of his precepts. Surely
Christ embodied and impersonated his own teachings. Surely
the life of Christ is undoubted Christianity. Surely his
character is Christian Duty; and his destiny Christian Faith.
Surely he knew and exhibited the practical tendencies of his
own doctrines; and surely to set him up at the fountain-head
of our moral being, as God’s image to the conscience, and to
strive in all things to be like unto him, “whom we preach,
warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom,
that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus,”—cannot
be to preach “another gospel,” or to mistake fatally
the essentials of Discipleship. “If a man love me, he will keep
my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come
unto him, and make our abode with him.”[26] The definition of
a Christian, when deduced from the words and the life of the
Christ himself, thus comes out to be—one who TRUSTS himself
in all things to that God of whom Jesus was the image;
and who CONFORMS himself in all things to that will of God
of which Jesus was the perfect expression. “This is life
eternal that they might know thee, the only true God, and
Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”[27]
Turn we now to a different quarter for an answer to our
inquiry what it is to be a Christian; from the one Master to
the multitude of professors; from the original image, distinct
and bright, to the transmitted reflections, all claiming to be
genuine copies; from the single voice, sweet and clear, to
the confusion of jarring tongues; from the pure fountain
to the impure streams; from Christ to Christians. I am
entirely guiltless of the intention of satire, but it is quite
impossible to avoid the appearance of it in any attempt to
give the features of Christianity as they appear in the Christians
of the day, in those, that is, who claim to be Christians
exclusively; for the tamest truth of description excites ideas
of the true Christ, so contrasted, that it has without intention
all the effect of sarcasm. Surely a stranger to the
only true source of our religion, examining its actual forms
as they exist in the world, and selecting its characteristics
from that which is largest and most prominent, would not be
guilty of misrepresentation, if he described a Christian as one
who was shut up within the narrowest circle of religious
ideas; who identified himself and his opinions with absolute
Truth; who idolized himself and his sect as the only friends
of God; who was so unconscious of a liability to err, that he
breathed, unknowingly, an atmosphere of infallibility, and insulted
the Rights of other men, not more fallible than himself,
without perceiving the invasion;—one so used to arrogate to
himself and to his own party, all excellence and all truth, that
he starts in surprise, innocent of what can be meant, when
he is told that he is pressing on the liberties of other minds,
who, with as deep an interest as he can have in their own
salvation, have searched into these things and read differently
the mind of God;—as one who regards a few metaphysical
propositions, confessedly unintelligible, as the only
hope of human salvation, and who, in the confidence of this
faith, speaks to his fellow men as if he had secret council
with God; assumes to be on “a religious level” nearer
to the spirit of the Most High, who, on that more elevated
standing, drops more readily into his heart communications
from Heaven;—and who, when he pays any regard to
other men at all, looks down upon them from an eminence;
assumes as proved their ignorance, their errors, and their
sins; insults their opinions; treats with no brotherly respect
the convictions of Truth and the dictates of Conscience which
to them are Voices from the living God; denies that they
have equal zeal for truth, or equal ability to discover it;
scoffs at the idea of religious equality, and looks amazed when
others tell him, though it be in apostolic words, that they
will not “give place by subjection, no, not for an hour;”
and finally adds mockery to insult and wrong, by telling the
men whom he so treats, that all this is Christian affection,
and an interest in their souls.
It is painful to put last in order, not the true, but the untrue
idea of a Christian, and therefore to set us right, I will present
the original picture again in apostolic words. “Hereby
we do know that we know him if we keep his commandments.”
“Whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God
perfected: hereby know we that we are in him.” “If ye
know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth
righteousness is born of him.” “Let no man deceive you:
he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is
righteous.”[28]
There is still another way of bringing into comparison the
spirit of Christ and the character of that Christianity which
assumes to itself to be the only fruit of his spirit. We can
compare the existing state of the Christian world with the
expectations of Jesus, with that state of things to which he
looked forward as the Reign of his spirit, the Kingdom of
the true Gospel upon earth. If the Christianity that prevails
has not realized the expectations of Christ, then its
practical tendency is evidently not in the direction of the true
Gospel; it is, to the extent of the failure, a departure from
the power and character of the original spirit. Christ could
not be mistaken about the proper operations of his own
spirit; and the system whose operations do not fulfil his
promises cannot contain a full and perfect ministration of his
spirit. And this argument will amount to something like a
demonstration, if we can show, first, that this system which
has failed to realize the expectations of Jesus as to the condition
of his Church, has, for large tracts both of time and
space, been the prevailing influence of the Christian world,
with nothing to obstruct it, so that it has had full and free scope
to work its own works, and to manifest its own spirit; and
secondly, if we can point to the something in that system,
which manifestly has caused it to be destructive of those
hopes, and to work counter to this expectation of Christ.
There is no sublimer idea of Christianity than its delightful
vision of a Universal Church; the kingdom of the Gospel
becoming a kingdom of Heaven on earth; uniting the
nations by a spiritual bond; in every heart among the families
of men kindling the same solemn ideas, and opening the
same living springs; subduing the differences of class and
country by the affinities of worship, by kindred images of
Hope, of Duty, and of God, becoming a meeting place for
the thoughts of men; including every form and variety of
mind within that spiritual faith which leads onwards to the
infinite, yet presents distinct ideas to the heart of childhood,
and feeds the sources of an infant’s prayer; assembling in
their countless homes the Brotherhood of man around the
spiritual altar of one Father and one God, whose presence
is a Temple wherein all are gathered, and whose Spirit,
dwelling in each heart, meets and returns the seekings of
all his children.
Such was the Christian vision of the Church Universal,
of the union of all good men in the worship of one
God under the leadership of his Image, growing up into him
in all things, which is the head, even Christ.
Such was the sublime idea that filled the mind of Jesus when
he looked forward in heavenly faith to the reign of his spirit,
the kingdom of his Gospel in the world. “Other sheep I have
which are not of this fold; them also I must bring and they shall
hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd.”[29]
“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which
shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be
one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee; that they
also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou
hast sent me.” Such also was the magnificent and healing
view that filled the hearts of the Apostles when they protested
against burdens being laid upon Christ’s freemen;
rebuked the first manifestations of a sectarian Christianity;
and would acknowledge no distinctions between those who
were walking in the steps of the same master, and moulding
their souls into the same similitude of Christ. “There is
one body, and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope
of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God
and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in
you all. But unto every one is given grace, according to the
measure of the gift of Christ. Till we all come in the unity
of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto
a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness
of Christ: from whom the whole body fitly joined together
and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according
to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh
increase of the body, unto the edifying of itself in love.”[30]
“Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same spirit.
And there are differences of administration, but the same
Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the
same God which worketh all in all.” “For as the body
is one, and hath many members, and all the members of
that one body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.
For by one spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether
we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and
have been all made to drink into one spirit.” “That there
should be no schism in the body; but that the members
should have the same care one for another. And whether
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one
member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now
ye are the body of Christ and members in particular.”[31]
Such is the Christian and Apostolic view of the Church
of Christ on earth. Turn we now to the actual Church.
Is it a realization of this divine image of the mind of Jesus?
Is there in it a unity of spirit in the bond of peace? Do the
branches abide in the Vine? Do the scattered and warring
members make one spirit in one body? Alas! could there
be a sadder mockery, than to pretend to seek in our prevalent
Christianity any features corresponding to this divine
conception?
Trinitarian Christianity is founded upon a principle
directly opposed to the realization of this prospect and
vision of Jesus. It declares that there shall be no unity
but a doctrinal unity. It rejects that moral and spiritual
union which is the bond of peace, and which, as subsisting
among his followers, Christ looked forward to as the great
proof to the world that God had sent him;—and it declares
that there shall be no bonds but the bonds of Creeds.
It breaks up the Christian world into distinct and mutually
repulsive parties; each claiming—not to be disciples of
the life of Christ—not to be one with him as he was one
with God, in will, aspiration, and purpose of soul, but—to
be in possession of the exact doctrinal ideas which constitute
a saving faith, of a certain intellectual process of
belief, through which alone God conducts the sinner into
Heaven, and without which no soul, whatever may be its
spiritual oneness with Jesus and his Father, can be saved.
Now it is clear that a system such as this, requiring not a
unity of spirit, but a unity of opinion, cannot be that primitive
Gospel, which, according to the expectation of the Saviour,
was to gather all the believers under Heaven into a
universal Church. Trinitarianism, as a system, does not,
and cannot, work out these fruits of the spirit of Christ. It
does not gather, but scatters; it does not collect into one;
but disunites, severs, and casts out. It disowns all harmony
but the harmony of metaphysical conceptions. It has no
wider way of salvation, no broader bond of peace, no more
open road to Heaven, than a coincidence of ideas, on the
essence of the Deity, the mysterious modes of the divine
existence; a person in whom there are two natures; and
then, again, a nature in which there are three persons; and
this as preparatory to a moral process, in which a penalty is
paid by substitution for a guilt incurred by substitution. I
ask not now whether these ideas are true; whether they are
realities of God’s mind; but I ask, Have they ever been, or
can they ever be, bonds of union for a Church Universal?
Are these the grand affinities towards which all hearts shall
be drawn; and which, breaking down our minor distinctions
into less than nothing, shall bind together the families of man
in the fellowship of one spirit? You all know, every man
knows, that a uniformity of opinion is an impossibility; that
God has nowhere provided the means for producing it; that
nowhere does it exist; no—not in that closely-fenced and
strictly-articled Church, whose bosom at this very hour is
rent by heresies, even as, throughout all her history, they
shattered the unity and split the bosom even of infallible
Rome; and seeing, therefore, that there is no such doctrinal
unity on earth, if Jesus understood his own gospel, this cannot
be the oneness with his Father and himself, to which he
looked forward as the Reign of his Spirit in the world. And
yet the Trinitarian Church of England, one of whose Ministers
when, on a late occasion, denouncing Unitarian heresies,
took the opportunity to give the relief of expression to his
horror of other heresies in the bosom of his own communion,
and openly denounced as heretics ordained clergymen and
dignitaries of his own Church,—this Church of England,
notwithstanding all this, still claims to be the great bulwark,
among Protestants, of the unity of the Faith, the
dignified rebuker of schisms and sects; and still offers to
the harassed and distracted, to the rent and divided body
of Christ, a creed—and what a creed!—as the only bond
of agreement and of peace.
Either, then, Christ miscalculated the workings of his own
spirit, when he contemplated a Universal Church as its natural
fruit; or Trinitarianism, when it destroys the spiritual
union of the Church, a moral oneness with Jesus and with
his Father, by its demand for a doctrinal conformity, is, to
the extent of this operation, an Antichrist, a departure from
the healing and uniting spirit of the true Gospel. Let me,
for the sake of distinctness, put you in possession of the
exact difference between the fundamental principles of Unitarian
and Trinitarian Christianity. To a Unitarian the essentials
of Christianity are; that a man takes into his heart
the moral image of Jesus, and loves it supremely, and trusts
it absolutely as his example of perfection, and his leader up
to God. If I was asked to define a Christian, I would say
that he was one who took Jesus Christ as he is presented in
the gospels, as his best idea of Duty, and his best programme
of Heaven; the very ideal of the religious spirit and life;
the perfect image of God; and the perfect model for man.
These are a Unitarian’s essentials of Christianity. To a Trinitarian
the essentials of a Christian are these: not that he
receive Jesus as his image of God, his model of Duty, and his
type of Heaven,—but that he receive a certain metaphysical
Creed, certain doctrinal ideas, which “except he keep whole
and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.”
Now, a union of all hearts, under the leadership of one Christ,
and in the love and reverence of one moral Spirit, is a
possible thing; but a union of all minds in the reception of
certain metaphysical ideas which the minds of Milton, of
Newton, and of Locke, could not find, either in Reason or
in Scripture, is not a possible thing: and therefore my first
assertion of the “practical importance” of the Unitarian Controversy
is to this effect:—that Trinitarianism, by its fundamental
principle of a doctrinal conformity, a principle not
known to the true gospel, is the originating cause of all religious
disunion and strife; the creator of all schisms, sects,
and heresies; the great and effectual antagonist of any realization
of that sublimest and most heavenly conception
of the Saviour—a Universal Church, cherishing the same
Hopes, studying the same Models, trusting to the same
Image of God to guide us to His presence,—a union of all
hearts, seeking to be one, even as God and Christ were
one, in the fellowship of the same spirit. This is my
heaviest indictment against the practice of Trinitarianism,
that it destroys Christ’s delightful image of his Spirit’s
Reign on earth, and creates in its place—what shall I say?—the
strife and disunion, the fears of the weak and the
arrogance of the coarse; the wranglings of creeds and the
absence of love; the heat of controversy and the chill
of religion, through the midst of which we are now
passing.[32]
Trinitarianism has long been the prevailing influence of the
Christian world; it holds all the religious power of these
countries in its own hands; there is nothing external to
prevent its carrying into existence its own ideas; and if in
the day of its power it has not wrought the works and realized
the hopes of Christ, it must be because it has worked
in another spirit, and preached another gospel; adding to the
primitive “glad tidings” of “repentance and remission of
sins,” other conditions which are not glad tidings, and which
are not Christ’s. Now not only can we point to the
actual failure in proof of the absence of the true spirit, but
we can lay our finger upon the element of mischief, and
demonstrate it to be the parent of the evils we deplore, the
frustrator of the hope of Christ. Trinitarianism, by demanding
a doctrinal assimilation, an intellectual instead of
a spiritual union, and wielding, as it does, the prevailing
influences of religion, has, in the day of its power, forcibly
prevented the formation of that universal Church which
Christ contemplated. And until it drops from its essentials
the doctrinal oneness, and substitutes in its place a spiritual
oneness derived from obedience to God as he is manifested
in Jesus, it cannot gather into one fold, and constitute the
kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Now let us suppose, for a moment, that this doctrinal conformity
is required by Christianity, and that not TRUST in
Christ, but belief of Creeds, constitutes acceptance of the
gospel. Then comes the question, and a most perplexing one
it would be, how can any one be sure that the creed he trusts
to contains exactly the ideas to which God has annexed
safety? Supposing creeds to be the essentials of Christianity,
then how can any Christian be sure that he has got the true
creed? I can easily conceive with what fear, with what apprehensions
of mind, with what a paralyzed intellect, and unconfiding
heart, sinking the love of truth in selfish terrors, a
man trembling under the conviction that his everlasting safety
depended upon his reception of a doctrine, would come to the
examination of the Scriptures; I can well conceive how his
judgment would be gradually bereft of all calm and trustful
independence; how his fears and passions would slavishly
draw him over to whatever party predominated in intolerance,
and in the confidence of their assumptions, frightening
him into the belief that safety was with them, for that if creeds
were the essentials of salvation, the more of creed the more
of certainty;—but after all this sacrifice has been submitted
to, after terror has wrought its work, and the intellect has
surrendered to the passions—after the man in the pursuit
of selfish safety has given up his Reason and his free mind,
and stooped his neck to the yoke,—I cannot see how in any
way he has altered or bettered his position; I cannot see
how he has attained the end for which he has paid such degrading
wages; how he can be certain that he has got the
creed which ensures salvation;—and after having sold his
birthright, parted with his free soul for the sake of a safety
built upon doctrines, he discovers at last, unless he is a Roman
Catholic, that he has no absolute certainty of these doctrines
being the true ones; he is still left in doubt whether after
all he is in possession of the particular creed that works salvation—whether,
after all, he has not bowed down his soul
for nothing. If God requires from men certain doctrinal
convictions as necessary to salvation, then how can any man
be sure that he has got the true convictions? Even the
verbal and plenary inspiration of the Bible, if we believed
in it, which we do not, would not relieve a Protestant Trinitarian
of this difficulty: for those who agree in believing
the Bible in every word inspired, can draw from it very
different meanings, as none have reason to know better than
the divines of the English Church.
I am tempted to give a few specimens of the differences
between existing divines of the Church of England on the very
points of accusation against Unitarianism. You are aware of
the place that the Atonement holds in Evangelical preaching.
Listen then to the new party in the Church, the leaders of
which are, one of them, the Oxford Professor of Hebrew and
a Canon of Christ Church, and the others distinguished both
in the Church and in the University. These are their words:—“We
now proceed to the consideration of a subject most important
in this point of view,—the prevailing notion of bringing
forward the Atonement explicitly and prominently on
all occasions. It is evidently quite opposed to what we consider
the teaching of Scripture, nor do we find any sanction
for it in the gospels. If the Epistles of St. Paul appear to
favour it, it is only at first sight.”[33] Again, you are aware of
the importance attached to the doctrine of Justification by
Faith, that test, as it is described, of a rising or a falling
church. Listen then once more to one of the heads of the
Oxford party:—“The instrument of our righteousness, I
would maintain, is holy baptism. Our Church considers it to
be the Sacrament of Baptism; they (the Reformers) consider
it to be Faith. ***Christians are justified by the communication
of an inward, most sacred, and most mysterious gift.
From the very time of baptism they are temples of the Holy
Ghost.*** Faith, then, being the appointed representative
of baptism, derives its authority and virtue from that which it
represents. It is justifying because of baptism; it is the faith
of the baptized, of the regenerate, of the justified. Faith
does not precede justification; but justification precedes
faith, and makes it justifying.”[34] I must quote one other
sentiment of this Oxford section of the English Protestant
Church, respecting the Mass:—“At the time of the Reformation,
we, in common with all the West, possessed the
rite of the Roman Church, or St. Peter’s Liturgy. This
sacred, and most precious monument, then of the Apostles,
our reformers received whole and entire from their predecessors,
and they mutilated the tradition of 1500 years.”[35]
Now it only bears out my argument that this movement of
Trinitarianism is in the direction of Popery.
Such being the doctrinal uniformity of the Church of
England, where then is the infallible authority that is to put
me in possession of those doctrinal ideas, that absolute truth,
without which I cannot be saved? Having got an inspired
Bible, I still want an inspired Interpreter, who, out of all the
possible meanings that the words will bear, will set aside all
the wrong ones, and select that one interpretation which, in the
shape of doctrine, God has made the source of safety. Where
is this Interpreter to be found? Where am I to look for this
infallible authority, which is to explain to me the exact sense
of the Bible, without which I cannot be saved, and to acquaint
me with the very ideas of God? Is it the Church of England
that is to do me this important service; to be my
infallible guide through the possible meanings of words;
and to present me with the one creed that will operate as a
charm for my salvation? Oh no! for the Church is Protestant,
and recognizes the sufficiency of Scripture, and the right
of free inquiry, and rails at the Pope because he denies these
things. But still I ask, if I cannot be saved without this doctrinal
truth, where am I to find it, and how can I feel certain
that I have it? A Roman Catholic would relieve me of my
difficulties. He would treat me more kindly, and with an
ampler provision for my security, than do the divines of the
English Church. They tell me that my salvation depends
upon my having the true creed, and then they leave me in
the dark, without any means of ascertaining what the true
creed is, and whether I have it or not. The Roman Catholics,
on the other hand, seeing that exact truth is necessary, take
care to provide for me an infallible Judge of truth. They are
merciful in the accuracy of their provisions for relieving my
fears, when compared with the worse than Egyptian inconsistency,
the contradictory tyranny of my Protestant taskmasters.
The Egyptians asked for bricks, and provided no
straw. The Church of England asks for absolute Truth, and
provides no judge of Truth. And this it does in the face of
the fact that, not even to its own clergymen is the inspired
Bible a source of certainty: that three distinctly marked
divisions now constitute the Unity of the Church, and dwell,
not peaceably, together.
To any man, then, who believes that doctrinal convictions
are the essentials of Christianity, there is no escape from
Popery. Out of Popery, there is no Church that professes
to have interpreted Scripture with infallible certainty. If
I am to be saved by a true creed, show me the divinely
appointed tribunal, and let me bow down before it. But
do not tell me, unless you are a Roman Catholic, that I
must be saved by Truth, and that your Truth is the one
to which I must bow down my soul, or perish everlastingly.
One man’s Truth is as good as another man’s Truth, unless
there is a divinely appointed tribunal to judge between
them.[36] Where is this tribunal? I know it is supposed
to be in the Roman Catholic Church; and I know that
the English Church, if it possessed such a tribunal, could
not speak with a whit more confidence than it does. I
enter it then as my second indictment against the practice
of Trinitarianism, that by building the Church of Christ
upon the foundation of a doctrinal uniformity, it is an ally
of Popery; that if it was consistent with itself, it would be
Popish altogether; and that this is not a mere tendency but
actually taking effect, is manifested in that Church which is
most open to the temptations of spiritual ambition, by its
gradual and lately accelerating movements in the direction of
Roman Catholicism. I know that the Evangelicals denounce
the Oxford modification of Popery, but they are both of
one spirit, and neither will find their natural issues until
they fall into the arms of the infallible Church, and leave
whatever Protestantism still remains in the land, unencumbered
by their presence.
Listen to some of the Clergymen of the Church of England,
and tell me, can you distinguish their tones from the
tones of Popery? I have lately done so. I heard this
language, I mean language to this effect: “Unitarians think
our pity insulting, because they are not conscious of requiring
of it: but when Jesus wept over Jerusalem, was
his pity an insult to those who had no sympathy with the
sources of his tears?” So that we are left to infer, first,
that he who uses this language knows our need as fully as
Jesus did, when amid the brief acclaim of his followers, he
forgot the momentary triumph, and his sympathy gushed
out in tears wept over the doomed city—and, secondly, that
the speculative errors of Unitarians, supposing them to be
such, require tears of the same description as did the crimes
of Jerusalem. Did Jesus ever weep for errors of opinion;
over Samaritan heresies for instance? “Ye know not what
manner of spirit ye are of. The Son of Man is not come
to destroy men’s lives; but to save them.”
Again I heard, in substance, this language, and could not
distinguish it from Popery. “Christianity must have its
essentials; these to us are the Deity of Christ; the corruption
of human nature; and the remedy of a vicarious sacrifice.
The Unitarians who deny these points we therefore do not
hold to be Christians, and not believing them to be so, we
plainly tell them so.” And accordingly they treat us as if we
were not. Now I acknowledge that this is entirely consistent
upon their part. They make the essentials of Christianity
to consist in doctrinal ideas, and consequently, whether they
choose it or not, and almost without knowing it, they are
forced to assume the tones of Popish Infallibility, and to
decide authoritatively, by their metaphysical standard, who
are Christians and who are not. I am quite aware that this
is not intentional arrogance on their part, but a necessity
in which their first principles involve them. They cannot
begin with a Salvation through creeds, without ending in
Popery; and of all the forms of Popery, that which professes
Protestantism, is the most offensive.
It was a fresh proof to me of the authoritative character
which Trinitarianism by necessity assumes, when I heard
naturally and unconsciously the same kind of doctrinal compactness
ascribed to ourselves, as if a church could not exist
without a fixed creed; and quotations from all sorts of minds
brought forward, without a suspicion, but they were all received
among us as recognized standards of opinion. There
were Arians and Humanitarians, Necessarians and Libertarians,
and one foreign writer, who, as I am informed, was
no Christian at all—and all these were appealed to as
standards of Unitarianism. Now we certainly glory in it
that our religion does not destroy our individuality; that
in consistency with the great principle of Christ being
our Leader, we tolerate freely intellectual differences, and
encourage the virtues of free thought and speech; but it is
a little unfortunate, and a little unfair, if the fundamental
principles of Unitarian Theology and Religion are to be
answerable, with their life, for all the sayings of all the
Unitarians from Marcion and the Ebionites down to the
present day. Take one form of Unitarianism as it is represented
by Priestley; or take another and better form of it as
it is represented by Channing; but do not confuse in one two
minds so radically different, and call a combination which
never had existence, the Unitarian Faith. It was owing to
this Popish idea that all Religions must have a doctrinal
compactness, that I heard a sentiment of Priestley’s, which
I entirely disown, imputing idolatry to Trinitarians, ascribed
to all Unitarians. If Unitarians worshipped Christ not believing
him to be God they would be idolaters: but Trinitarians
worshipping one God in three persons, and still believing
him to be one, are as certainly not Polytheists. Again I
heard the Improved Version stated to be the Unitarian Bible:
and that the Unitarians not finding their favourite doctrines
in the actual Bible made a Bible for themselves. Now let it
be known that this new Bible is simply an English Version
of the New Testament having for its basis or model a translation
made by an Archbishop of the United Church of
England and Ireland, a circumstance which we were not told;
that it is founded upon the translation of Archbishop Newcome;
that it is not used in Unitarian worship and possesses
no authority amongst us except such as it may derive from
its just merits, which are not generally rated by us as very
high: and lastly, that no one is answerable for it except its
editors,[37] and not even they any longer than they choose.
And yet, one would suppose, that the Church of England
divines might be sufficiently conversant with varieties of
opinion, even in a church more strictly bound than ours, and
ought not to fall into the error of taking any book whatever,
or any man whatever, as the standards of a faith. With all
our differences I am not aware that our bond of union covers
wider varieties of opinion on the great questions of Theology
and Criticism, than those which separate Bishop Marsh,
Bishop Butler of Durham, Archdeacon Paley, to say nothing
of the older and nobler school of Sherlock and Barrow,[38]
Tillotson and Taylor, from the modern Evangelical Divines;
and both from the Oxford approach to Popery, a late movement
in the direction which we have now endeavoured to
show is the destined path of Creeds.
But I shall be asked, has Christianity no essentials, and
may a man believe anything he likes, and yet be a Christian?
I answer that the essential belief of a Christian is the belief
that Jesus Christ is the moral image of God; that to be one
with him is to be one with his Father and become fitted for
that Heaven in harmony with which his mind was made;
and that any doctrinal ideas which a man can hold in consistency
with this act of spiritual allegiance, he may hold,
and yet be a Christian.
And yet we do not hold that all doctrines are indifferent,
for we think that some are nearer than others to the great
realities of God; that some, more than others, are in harmony
with the mind of Christ; that some more than others give
us solemn and inspiring views of the infinite Spirit; worthy
conceptions of the mission and offices of Jesus, and elevating
sympathies with his character; sublime and true ideas
of Duty; peaceful yet awful convictions of the retributions of
God; and therefore are more effectual to build us up in the
oneness with his Father and with himself, which is the sublimest
aim of Christ. Other views may operate powerfully
on those who hold them; but as long as they do not accord
with our best ideas of perfection, with our noblest views of
the character of Jesus and of God, they cannot confer upon
us that salvation which we take to be the essence of the
Gospel, assimilation to the infinite Spirit as we know him
through his Image, perfect Trust in our heavenly Father, as
he is manifested in Christ.
I warn you against an imposture that is practised upon
you, not knowingly but ignorantly, in the use that is made
of such expressions as, “salvation by faith and not by works,”
and St. Paul’s anathema on those who preached another gospel,
which he declared was not another gospel, that is, that
it did not contain “glad tidings,” and was therefore no gospel
at all. Now salvation by “faith” does not mean salvation
by doctrines, but by Trust in Jesus Christ as our spiritual
Master, God’s representative to man; and exemption from
“works” does not mean exemption from moral excellence, but
exemption from all the works and conditions of the Jewish
Law, from which, with all the bondage of its sacrifices, services
and exactions, the Gospel, as offered by Christ, was the
glad tidings of deliverance. It is on this account that St. Paul
denounces any man who preaches another gospel, that is, who
adds to it unspiritual conditions which would bring men again
under the yoke of the Law, and change the glad tidings of
Liberty into the burdens of a woeful superstition. “Behold,
I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall
profit you nothing.” To go back to the bondage of the law,
is to make the spiritual liberty of Christ’s freemen of no avail.
Now the scriptural knowledge that is necessary for these
explanations is of the scantiest measure; that Faith means
moral Trust, spiritual acceptance and confidence; that works
frequently mean, when used by Paul, not Christian holiness
but Jewish Ceremonies; and that the Gospel means not a
scheme of doctrines but the glad Message of deliverance from
every yoke of bondage: and yet the false meanings that
lurk under these words, are again and again thrust forward
as Scripture evidence for doctrines entirely alien to their
spirit. Elsewhere, would the anathema of the noble-minded
Apostle be ready to descend upon all other additions
as well as Jewish ones, to Christ’s gospel of spiritual
liberty?[39]
I have contrasted the fundamental principles of Trinitarian
and Unitarian Christianity, and, without entering into their
peculiar tenets, I have shown that the practical tendency of
Trinitarianism is to disunite the Church of Christ; to lead
to Popery as the only known provision for doctrinal certainty;
and to preach “another gospel,” which, to us at least,
is no gospel at all, and has defaced the grace and glory
of the original message. I have now to proceed to the
particular views in which these principles respectively issue
when applied to the examination of the Scriptures, and
to contrast the practical tendencies of the distinguishing
doctrines of Unitarian and Trinitarian Christianity. The
Unitarians think that Trinitarianism, with all its dependent
ideas, is not a system which the Scriptures would of
their own accord naturally suggest to a free mind, examining
them without prejudice or fear, in a spirit of confidingness
in God and in truth; and that its peculiar set of
notions are chiefly arrived at by inferences drawn from the
Scriptures in the spirit of preconceived theories, and under
the intimidation of priest-taught fears. We recognize
nothing but the priestly spirit in all those systems whose
cry is, “unless you believe this and unless you believe that,
you cannot be saved;” and acknowledging no salvation but
that of a spirit morally one with God and with his Christ,
salvation from superstition, and salvation from sin, and
salvation from unconfiding fears; and believing that all truth
is one and from God, we confidently appeal, in confirmation of
our scriptural soundness, to that great and independent test of
Truth which is furnished by the moral tendencies of doctrines.
I shall aim to show that Unitarianism has more power both
with the understanding and the heart; that the Intellect
which Trinitarianism has no resource but to disparage, and
the Reason at which I lately heard, doubtless not without
good reasons, such melancholy scoffs (for what can be more
melancholy than to hear a man scoffing at Reason, and
attempting to reason men into a contempt for Reason?),
that this Reason, our ray of the divine mind, we enlist on
the side of our religion and of our souls;—that the
spiritual nature which Trinitarianism insults and scorns
we contemplate with trembling reverence as made for holiness
and for God;—and that the personal holiness and
love, the Christ-like spirit and the Christ-like life to which
Trinitarianism assigns a secondary place, and in disparagement
of which it can stumble, as happened on a late occasion,
on a condemnation of the Scripture law, that every
man shall be judged according to his works[40]—this holy
living and dying we set forth as the very salvation of the
sons of God, the very way of spiritual safety trodden by the
Forerunner and the Saviour, even Christ the righteous.
I desire to be understood to affirm nothing about the
actual characters of those who hold views which I think
unfriendly to the soul. The tendencies of opinions may
be counteracted: but still wherever there is error, that is,
wherever there is anything not conformed to the mind of
God, there there is, to the extent of its agency, a principle of
evil, or at least of misdirection, at the fountain of our life,
though there may also be sweetening influences which are
strong enough to neutralize its power. Trinitarianism does
not produce all its natural fruits, though it produces some
that are sufficiently deplorable, because it is kept in check
by the better principles of our nature, with which it is not
in alliance. It is vain to pretend that a man’s belief has
no influence upon his life and upon his soul. The belief of
a man is that which animates his sentiments, and peoples
his imagination, and provides objects for his heart;—and
if he bears no impress of it upon his character, it is only
because it forms no real part of his spiritual existence, it is
not written upon the living tablets of the mind. Believing
then that our views of Truth, when they become a part of
our living thoughts, woven into the spiritual frame and the
daily food of the mind, do exercise a controlling influence
over the whole being, it is our ardent desire to discover
those views of the Gospel which put forth most mightily
this power over the heart, and we openly confess, that it is
because we believe it possesses an unrivalled efficacy to save
the soul, by bringing it into a holy and trustful union with
God and Christ, that we value unspeakably, and adhere to
through all temptation and scorn, the faith that is in us. To
us it is the light, as it is the gift of God, and we will not
abandon it, so long as it points Conscience to the things
that are before; leads us up to God through the love and
imitation of his Christ; speaks with heavenly serenity of
grand and tranquillizing truths in moments of trial: and
true to our spiritual connections with Heaven, suffers our
sins to have no peace, and our virtues no fears.
I shall endeavour, briefly but distinctly, to bring out
the prominent points of difference between Unitarian and
Trinitarian Christianity, in their moral aspects.
And, first, Unitarianism alone puts forth the great view
that the moral and spiritual character of the mind itself is
its own recompense, its own glory, its own heaven; and that
this harmony with God and with his Christ is not the means
of salvation only, but salvation itself. Unitarianism alone
receives the spiritual view of Christ that the kingdom of
Heaven is within us; and works not for outward wages, but
to make the inward soul a holy temple for the Spirit of God;
that through its purified affections Jesus, our best type of
Heaven, may shed his own peace, and that he and his Father
may be able to love us, and come unto us, and make their
abode with us. Now you are aware that this qualifying of
ourselves for Heaven through heavenly frames of mind, is so
prominent a part of our faith, that it is actually converted
into a charge against us. I heard the Unitarians charged
with a want of gospel humility for regarding holy affections
and a Christ-like life as the substance of the hope of Heaven;
and I thought on the words of the Apostle—“The kingdom
of God is righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy
Spirit.”[41] This is not the salvation so loudly vaunted by Trinitarianism.
It assigns another office to Christ than that of
leading men to God through a resemblance to himself. Jesus
stands to Trinitarians not principally as the Inspirer of virtue,
the quickener of holiest affections, the guide of the heaven-bound
spirit; but as bearing on his own person the punishment
due to their sins, and as performing in his own person
the righteousness that is imputed to them, and being transferred,
by an act of faith, makes good their claim to Heaven.
Now these notions of Heaven regard it as so much property,
which one person may purchase and transfer to another.
Christ, by an act of self-sacrifice, becomes the purchaser of
Heaven, and gives a right of settlement in the blessed land to
every one who consents to regard his death as a substitution
for his own punishment, and his righteousness as a substitution
for his own virtues. There is no flattering unction
that could be laid to the soul, no drug to stupefy its life,
that could more thoroughly turn it away from the spiritual
purposes of Jesus.[42] He lived that men might know their
own nature, and work out its glory for themselves. He lived
that he might rescue that nature from low views of its duties
and its powers, by showing humanity in the image of God.
He bore his cross that men might look to Calvary and behold
the moral heroism of the meekest heart when it trusts
in God; with what serenity a filial faith can pass through
the vicissitudes of severest trial, and take the cup from the
hand of a Father, though he presents it from out the darkest
cloud of his providence. He died, because Death crossed his
path of Duty, and not to turn aside was part of his loyalty
to the Spirit of Truth, “for this cause was I born, and for
this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness
unto the truth;”—he died that earth and heaven might
unite their influences on the human soul treading an uninterrupted
path to God, that its light might come from beyond
the grave, and its hope from the peace of a world that is
never troubled; and yet, alas! for the perversion—men are
found to stand beneath the cross, and so far to mistake the
spirit of the celestial sufferer, as to appropriate, to transfer to
themselves, by an act of faith, its moral character, and to
call themselves the redeemed of Christ. Surely there is a
“practical importance” in the Unitarian controversy, if it
warns men against these notions of substitution, these unspiritual
views of Heaven and Christ. The worst of all delusions
is that which turns us away from inward holiness,
inward qualifications for Heaven, and holds out to our too
ready grasp some foreign, some adventitious, and extrinsic
hope. It is right that we should rely on God, for his strength
is our strength, and his mercy our supporting hope; it is
right that we should love and look unto Jesus, for his influences
are our spiritual wealth, and his path our bright and
beaming way;—but where in Heaven or earth are we to
rest at last, but in what God and Christ do for us, in the
formed character of our own souls?
And now shall I be told, that this is claiming Heaven on
the ground of our own merits? And how often shall we have
to repel that false accusation? If by this is meant, that we
deem our virtues to be deserving of Heaven, the charge of
insanity might as well be laid against us, as that infinite
presumption; but if it is meant that, to a holy spirit, and
to a holy life, to a supreme love for the Right, the True, the
Good, and to these alone, God, with a love that is infinite,
has attached something of the blessedness of his own nature;—then
we do hold this as the first and brightest of Truths,
the very substance of the Gospel, the sublimest lesson of the
Saviour’s life, shadowed by his death, only to be authenticated
and glorified by his resurrection and ascension. I know
of nothing so deeply sad as to witness the ministers of Christ
appealing for support to the lowest parts of human nature—the
fishers of men casting out their nets, that they may take
into the drag the most selfish passions and fears—bribing
over to their side the terrors and the weaknesses, to which,
except through penitence and restoration, Unitarian Christianity
dare not offer peace. Trinitarianism will not deal
so justly and so strictly with sin. We are speaking of its
tendencies; not of the forms it sometimes, nay we will say
often, assumes in the higher and purer order of minds. It is
true to the weaknesses of men; but false to their strength.
It seems to many to save them in their low condition, not
from it. It will not meet the soul, and tell it that there is
no substitute for holiness, and that to move guilt from its
punishment would be to move God from his throne. It
takes that guilty soul, and instead of dealing with it truly,
cleansing from sin, and pouring in the spirit of the life of
Christ, leans it against the Atoning Sacrifice, and the
Righteousness that cometh by imputation, an unhallowed
and unnatural alliance, to make that glorious virtue an easy
retreat for guilt, and the holy Jesus a “Minister of Sin.”[43]
“They have healed the hurt of my people slightly, saying,
Peace, peace, where there is no peace.”[44]
And if we value Unitarianism for what we feel to be the
efficacy of its views in regard to the offices of Christ, we value
it even more, for its views of God, and for the connections
it gives us with his spirit. Piety is the noblest distinction,
the richest happiness, the purest fountain of the soul; and
we love, without measure, the faith that nurtures it most
strongly. We feel our affections to be drawn towards one
God and Father with a singleness and intensity, that we
believe would be impossible, if the heart was to be distributed
among three objects, or distracted by a confused conception
of a tripersonal God. We boast an undivided worship, and
an undivided Temple, where all the soul’s devotion centres
upon one Father. His spirit was with us when we knew
not the power that was exciting our irrepressible joy; and
though He has led us through his ways of discipline, we knew
it was the same hand that had guided our early steps; He
has met our souls when they were abroad through Nature,
and touched them with his breathing Spirit; He has pursued
us into our solitudes, and, in our more solemn moments of
penitence and suffering, He has made us to see light in darkness,
mercy in trial, and to drink of the deepest fountains of
life; His compassion has mercifully cooled the burning shame
of our guiltiest confessions, and saved us through fear and
weakness by heavenly hope; His peace has descended upon
all our aspirations, and shielded their feebleness from blight
and death;—and, throughout this varied experience, there
was but one voice speaking to the heart; the pressure of
one hand on the pulses of life; one God revealing himself
to the spirits of his children. Whatever is delightful in the
Universe, whatever is pure in earthly joy, whatever is touching
in Jesus, whatever is profoundly peaceful in a holy spirit,
are to us the splendours of one God, the gifts of one Father;
bonds upon the heart, uniting it to one spiritual and everlasting
Friend. We do not profess that our Piety has glowed
with the intensity of these mingling fires, but we feel that
there is a power of motive drawing us to the love of one
God, which no other Theology may lay claim to.
But the “practical importance” of our views of God consists
not merely in that Unity of being, through which all
the devotion of the soul is poured into one central affection;
it affects also the unity of his Character, the moral perfections
of the source of Piety. We reject that faith which represents
the moral government of God as a system of favouritism.
We meet with nothing in nature to impeach the Impartiality
of our Heavenly Father. We believe that the same God who
sends his sun and his rain upon the evil and upon the just,
is willing to shed the dew of his blessing upon the hearts of
all his children. We rejoice to overlook the vain and perishable
distinctions of time; to believe that all the human family,
partakers of one spirit, meet in the love of the universal
Father; that God in heaven is no respecter of persons; and
that the humblest and most neglected of his children may
rise into hallowed intercourse with the infinite spirit. We
protest with a strong abhorrence against the dreadful views
which are given of God’s inability to forgive, of the Justice
of the Father horribly satisfied by the substitution of the
innocent for the sins of the guilty. We profess to have no
hope either in time or in eternity, but in the unclouded goodness
of Him who sitteth on Heaven’s throne and reigneth
overall—and if these things may be, and yet God be good,
it is a goodness we do not understand and cannot calculate
upon, and the pillars of our faith are shaken in all the reliances
of futurity. We do not enter now into the scriptural evidence
for or against these doctrines—that will be done in other
parts of this course; our present concern is with the question,
which of these views is the most calculated to nourish piety,
to kindle within us a warm, unselfish, and intelligible love of
God. We meet in the world the children of one Parent, with
the same souls, the same hopes, the same capacities for joy;
with the same God to comfort their sorrows and to guard
their happiness; breathing on them the same holy and
inspiring influences; leading them to the same Saviour, and
beckoning them to the same Heaven; and our love for God
and our fellowship with man thus mingle intimately in the
same heart and shed through it the serene and blissful light
of a full, radiant, and unclouded Piety. The spiritual influences
of Unitarianism thus lead to a supreme love and
veneration for God by exhibiting the Holiness, the Forgivingness,
and the all-embracing Impartiality of the Divine Character,
without a stain upon their brightness and their purity.
We believe that there is in the spirit of these views a
peculiar power to excite an interest in the souls of our
brethren; to give an expansive spirit of humanity; to make
us feel that we are bound by the holiest of ties; united in
the purposes of one Father; children of the same God, and
educating for the same destinies. Wherever we cast our eyes
they fall upon God’s everlasting ones. In the humblest we
see the future immortal; and in the proudest we can see no
more. We believe that God made every living soul that it
might become pure, virtuous and blessed; we believe that
his eye of watchful care is never removed from it; we
believe that He never abandons it, that He accompanies it
in all its wanderings, and that he will ultimately lead it by
his own awful yet merciful discipline, in this world or in
the next, in safety to Himself—and we dare not to scorn
the spirit which God is tending and which He purposes
ultimately to save.
And with this belief at our hearts, we wonder that there is
not more heroism in the cause of the human soul; we wonder
that the noblest of all philanthropy, that which seeks the
realization of Christian states of character, is so rare among
men; that there is so little of a strong and yearning love
drawing us towards sinning and suffering man; that souls
are permitted to slumber and die without an awakening
voice; that our hearts are not stirred within us when we
look to the awful and neglected wastes of human ignorance
and sin, and reflect that through each guilty bosom, and each
polluted home there might breathe the purity and the peace of
Christ. We despair of none. We believe that the guiltiest
may be turned from their iniquities and saved. We believe
that God works by human means and expects our aid. We
believe that the fire of heaven is still smouldering, and that
a spark might light it into undying flame; and we are sure
that the end of this faith is love unwearied, which ought
to assume more earnest forms of interest for our nature,
and to vent itself in purer efforts for its highest good.
Others may defend themselves by casting the whole burden
upon God; may point in despair to the hopeless condition of
man’s heart; wait for fire from heaven to come down and
stir the sinner’s soul; and having thus “looked upon” the
moral sufferer may pass by upon the other side; but with us
there is but one duty; to go to him, to pour the spirit of
Jesus into his wounded heart, to lay upon ourselves his burdens,
and to toil for his restitution as a brother immortal.
The “practical importance,” then, of Unitarianism as contrasted
with Trinitarianism is in this—that it tends to penetrate
our hearts with a deeper spirit of Christian love; to
give us hope and interest in our nature; to call out the
highest efforts of the spirit of humanity; and to supply us
with lofty motive for emulating the self-sacrifice of Jesus.
We think, further, that in our views of God, of Christ,
and of human nature, we have a peculiar encouragement
for the personal virtues, a peculiar demand for individual
holiness. We have already alluded to the force and distinctness
with which we teach that the greatest work of Christ
is in giving inward power, strength of purpose to the soul;
and that there is no salvation except where the purity, the
freedom, and the love of Heaven are growing in the heaven-bound
heart; but we also recognize peculiar claims upon us
in the conviction which we hold so sacred that our righteous
Father has created us with a nature capable of knowing
and of doing His Will. Others may cast the odium of
human sins upon human inability, and thus at last throw
down their burdens at the door of their God; but as for us,
we can only bow our heads in sorrow and ask the forgiveness
of Heaven. We believe that God has united us by no
necessity with sin; we deny altogether the incapacity of
man to do the will of God; we feel that there are energies
within us which, if but called out into the living strife, would
overcome all the resistance of temptation; we hear a deep
voice issuing from the soul and witnessed to by Christ, calling
us to holiness and promising us peace;—and with God’s seal
thus set upon our nature, and God’s voice thus calling to the
kindred spirit within, why are we not found farther upon the
path of Christ, and brightening unto the perfect man?
For, alas! there is not only energy and holy motive in
this lofty conviction, there are also the elements of a true
and deep humility. If the glory of our souls is marred it
is our own work. If the spirit of God is quenched within
us, we have ourselves extinguished it. If we have gained
but little advancement upon Heaven’s way, we have wasted
and misdirected immortal powers. Elevation of purpose, and
true humility of mind, the humility that looks upwards to
Christ and God, and bows in shame, are thus brought together
in the Unitarian’s faith, as they are by no other form
of Christianity. I know it is said, with a strange blindness,
that this doctrine of the incapacity of man to know and to
do the will of God is rejected by Unitarianism because it
rebukes our pride; but no—it suffers man to be a sinner without
hurting his pride; it transfers the disgrace from the individual
to the race; and that, on the other hand, is the humbling
picture which represents our sins not of our inheritance but
of our choice, the voluntary agent of evil degrading a spirit
made in the image of God, pouring the burning waters of
corruption into a frail though noble nature, until the crystal
vessel is stained and shattered. “Preach unto me smooth
things, and prophesy deceits,” is the demand of the less
spiritual parts of man, and Trinitarianism is certainly the
Preacher whose views of sin fall softly on enervated souls.
We cannot conclude without alluding, however generally,
to the practical importance of our views of the future life.
We believe that the fitness of the soul for Heaven, its
oneness with God and Christ, will form the measure of its
joy; and that the thousand varieties of goodness will each
be consigned to its appropriate place in the allotments of
happiness. We believe that the glory of Heaven will brighten
for ever as the character is perfected under the influences of
Heaven, and that to this growing excellence there is no
limit or end. We believe that even in the future there is
discipline for the soul; that even for the guiltiest there may
be processes of redemption; and that the stained spirit may
be cleansed as by fire. We believe that this view of a strict
and graduated retribution exerts a more quickening, personal,
realizing power than that of Eternal torments which no heart
believes, which no man trembles to conceive; where the
iniquity which is to be visited with such an awful punishment
becomes a shifting line which every sinner moves beyond
himself; until Heaven itself is profaned, and all its
sacredness violated and encroached upon by those who feel
that it would be infinite injustice to plunge them into an Eternity
so unutterably dreadful, but who have been taught to
believe that to escape this Hell is to be sure of Heaven.
Now our present objection to this doctrine of eternal punishment
is the practical one that it has no moral power. It
does not come close enough to truth and justice to take a hold
upon the conscience, and so instead of binding and constraining,
it is inoperative and lax. The fact is, it is not practically
believed. It is too monstrous to be realized. Where, we ask,
are the fruits of this appalling doctrine, which is everywhere
preached? One would suppose that its dreadfulness would keep
the tempted spirit in constant alarm. I know that it occasions
misery to the timid, to the sensitive, to the feeble of nerve,
that is just to those who require the purer and gentler influences
of religion to give them trust in God: but what sinner
has it alarmed? what guilty heart has it made curdle with
terror? what seared conscience has been scared from evil by
the shriek of woe coming up from the depths of the everlasting
torture? No; these are not the influences that convert
sin. They are not believed or realized, and yet they displace
from the thoughts those definite views of the future which
would have power to move and save the soul. The righteous
allotments with which God will award the joys and sorrows
of the future; the character of the individual mind when it
first appears for judgment; the value of every moment of
present time in assigning us our first station in immortality;
the exact righteousness in which every variety of character
shall have its graduated place on the scale of recompense; the
appalling thought of every separate spirit standing before
God just as the last effort of convulsed nature dismissed it
from the body;—the trifler in his levity, the drunkard with
his idiot look, the murderer with the blood-stains on his soul—and
the sainted spirit passing on the breath of prayer from
the outer to the inner Court of God’s presence;—these, the
solemn distinctions of that awful world, are all lost, because
of that common Hell into whose abyss unawed Conscience
hurls her fears, and then forgets the infinite gradations of
punishment that still remain to pour dread recompense on
evil at the award of a retributive God.
There are some objections urged against these views of
the practical importance of Unitarianism to which I must
now give brief and emphatic answer.
1. It is said that Unitarianism generates no love to Christ:
and the reason assigned is, that as we reject the primal curse
of original sin, we have not so much to be forgiven, and consequently
not equal obligation to love; for to whom little is
forgiven, the same loveth little. Now in our view forgiveness
is of God, in whom Trinitarians find no forgiveness, and
Christ is the image of our Father in Heaven, and we love him
who leads us into that pure and blissful presence, and in
whose face we have the light of the knowledge of the glory
of God, full of grace and truth. We love Jesus for what he is
to our souls, and not for the theological fiction, that he took
off a disqualification which our God laid on. We love
all holy and good beings for the same reasons, that they
strengthen in our own nature the springs of goodness and
unselfish love, and lift us into fellowship with themselves;
and therefore we love God supremely, and next to God, him
who through self-devotion and perfect filial trust preserved
the moral lineaments of Heaven, of a mind harmonized with
providence, against the weaknesses and through the temptations
of this humanity, whose tremblings we know so well, and
whose fallings away in ourselves from the higher impulses of
God have taught us the love of veneration for him who
made it bear the likeness of Heaven, and, through its trials
and its shrinkings, realized perfection. The moral estimate
that would proportion our love to Christ, not to his own fitness
to inspire love, to the heavenly benevolence that breathed
through his own life and death, but to the selfish measure of
the outward benefits received, can be equalled in the confusion
and impurity of its moral ideas only by another
moral judgment pronounced upon the same occasion—that
the guilt of the Jews, when they crucified Jesus, must be
estimated and measured in proportion as Jesus was man or
God. This certainly is quite consistent with the Trinitarian
scheme, that guilt can be contracted unknowingly; but who
will set right this utter ignorance of the primitive ideas of
morality? What spectres of the thirteenth century rise
before us when we listen to these conceptions—of God dying
under the hands of his creatures; and of their guilt, by
some process, (not moral, but metaphysical,) becoming infinite
because the sufferer was infinite, though they knew it not,
and believed themselves to be crucifying the man Jesus!
It is only further proof that the Atonement and its allied
ideas tends to confuse in the minds that receive it the fundamental
perceptions of Right and Wrong.[45]
2. It is said that Unitarianism leads to infidelity: and
the proof assigned is that those whom Trinitarianism
makes sceptics, find with us ideas of Christ and Christianity
with which they have sympathies. We intercept
the minds whom they have driven from Belief; we present
our serene and perfect image of Duty and of God to minds
wearied and perplexed with views of Religion which are
felt to be too coarse for their own nature and therefore
infinitely unworthy of the spirit of God; but because
they leave the Church, that Christian Jerusalem, and come
to sit at the feet of Jesus in our humble Bethany, where
at least he is loved purely and for himself;—then this is
Infidelity, and we who stay the wanderer, and retain him
within the fold, are called producers of unbelief. The
spirit of Jesus said, “he that is not against us is for us.”
The spirit of Trinitarianism says, “he that is not for us
is against us.” It was said that the spirit of infidelity is
the spirit of this age. I only ask, if this is so, could
there be a more practical condemnation of that system,
and of that Church, which sways all the religious influences
of the country; and whose representations of Christ and of
Christianity, the universally prevailing ones, have produced
the religious character of these times? If there is Infidelity
in the land, it is mainly the recoil from Orthodoxy.[46]
3. It is said that Unitarianism encourages the pride of
human Reason. Now I shall answer this very briefly, because
any lengthened exposure would necessarily take the
form of sarcasm. Whose Reason is it that we oppose when
we reject Trinitarianism? Trinitarians say that it is
the Reason of God. But how do they know this? Because
they are sure that they know the Mind of God as it
is revealed in the Scriptures; and they are sure that we
are in error. Infallibility again! So that to oppose their
interpretation of the Scriptures, is to set up our own
Reason against the Reason of God. Now I ask, in all
simplicity, Can they who say these things have taken the
trouble to clear their own ideas? If there is any pride of
Reason, on which side does it lie? They first identify their
own sense of the Scriptures with God’s sense, and then
they charge other men with the pride of Reason, for not
bowing down their minds to God, having first taken it for
granted that their Reason and God’s Reason are one and
the same. Look again to the uncertain doctrines which
they deduce from the Scriptures by processes of inference,
sometimes technical and sometimes mystical, and say, does
the world afford a more marked exemplification of the
pride of human Reason, than the absolute confidence with
which these doubtful conclusions are received, and not only
that, but pressed upon men, as the exact meaning of God, at
the peril of their eternal Salvation? What do these divines
rest upon when they deduce from the Scriptures their
essentials of Christianity? Their own reasonings. And
yet they will tell you, that to differ from them, is to oppose
your own Reason to the mind of God. I ask, hereafter
in this controversy, Should not this matter of the
pride of human reason be a weapon of attack in our hands,
an accusation against Trinitarians, instead of a charge
which Unitarians are to answer? We have too long, in
this and many other matters, stood upon the defensive.[47]
And now, in conclusion, let me say once more, that
though we think Trinitarian views of man’s connections
with God injurious to Christian perfection, inasmuch as
they throw the minds which receive them out of harmony
with the realities of God, and must therefore undergo
future correction and re-adjustment, still our strongest
objection to the Trinitarian scheme is the fundamental one
that it is based upon principles of exclusiveness, upon the
indispensable conditions of a narrow and technical creed,
and that thus it is the parent and fomenter of all those
dissensions and practical evils in religion which these times
witness and deplore. How many has orthodoxy persecuted
into a hatred for the very name of religion? In
how many minds has it darkened, or mixed up with the
most incongruous associations, the beautiful image of Christ,
destroying its healing and persuasive power? O! why
should it be, except for this Trinitarian scheme of an
Exclusive Salvation, that Religion should be directing her
whole energies to the support of creeds, instead of going
about doing good, and with her heavenly spirit entering
into conflict with the moral evils that afflict society, and
degrade man, and rebel against God? Why is it, that instead
of this, we have a distinct class of sufferings, that go
under the name of religious evils? Why is it that we are
here holding controversy with our fellow-Christians, instead
of uniting our spirit and our strength to work the
works of Christ? We wage not this controversy for the
purpose of aiding a sect; but we wage it, to do what we
can to expose and put down universally the sectarian spirit.
The great evils of society, the crying wrongs of Man, are
mainly owing to this diversion of Religion from spiritual
and practical objects to the strife of tongues and Salvation
by creeds. What is the Religion of this country doing?
Contending for creeds. What ought it to be doing?
Spreading the spirit of the life of Christ through the
hearts of men and the institutions of society. How long
are these things to be? How long are the spiritual influences
of this country to be all consumed in striving with
heresies instead of striving with sins; leaving untouched
the bad heart of society, whilst wrangling for a metaphysical
faith? Look to the religious apparatus of this
country. Look to the number of pulpits that should send
forth the spiritual influences of righteousness and peace;
and the number of men that should move through society
apostles of the beneficence of Christ.
Suppose all this strength directed to practical and spiritual
objects, and could the things that are, remain as they
are, if the religious forces of the country, instead of being
exclusive, doctrinal, controversial, were full of the love of
Jesus, and sought simply to establish the kingdom of
Heaven upon Earth! Could Religion excite the angry
passions that she does, if her aims were spiritual and not
doctrinal? Could Religion be divorced as she is from
practical life, and confined to a class kept under powerful
stimulants, and called the “religious public,” if her aims
were spiritual and not doctrinal? Could Religion leave
the people neglected and without education, practical
Heathens, while she is settling her creeds, if her aims
were spiritual and not doctrinal? Could Religion have
left unpurified the streams and sources of public morality,
if her aims were spiritual and not doctrinal? Could she
have suffered War still to disgrace the world, and not long
since have extinguished the Earthborn passion by the
Heavenly spirit and the moral instrument, if the direction
of her energies had been spiritual and not controversial?
Could she have shown so little interest in the great mass
of the people? Could she have abandoned them to ignorance
and grinding oppressions and not raised her omnipotent
voice on their behalf? Could she have so separated
herself from the real business of life and left the moralities
of intercourse unsanctified whilst she remained unsympathizing
and cloistered? Every friend to practical
religion has an interest in destroying this exclusive Theology,
which turns away from the works of love to the war
of creeds.
If then we preach Unitarianism, it is that we may win
men’s hearts to the one Spirit who pervades all things, and
harmonizes all things, and sends all blessings, and sanctifies
all thoughts, all duties, and all times. If we preach the man
Christ Jesus, the word made flesh, it is that we too may
sanctify our nature, and make it a temple for the living God,
and grow up into him in all things who is our head, even
Christ. If we preach Salvation, not by creeds, but by the
spirit of Christ in us, the hope of glory, it is that our fitness
for Heaven may commence on Earth; that we may live now
as those who when they have slept the brief sleep of death
shall awake in the presence of Christ and God, and find themselves
in that Heaven wherein dwelleth righteousness. And if
we preach not indiscriminate happiness and indiscriminate
tortures in futurity, but the just retributions of God, it is
that we may redeem the time, remembering that each moment
lost throws us back on the heavenly way, that there is an
infinite perfection before us, providing work for our infinite
capacities through an immortal life; that God is faithful and
inflexible in his retributions; that no virtue shall be without
its reward, no sin without its woe; that we shall be judged
according to our works, and reap what we have sown.
To sum up, the two great principles of Unitarianism are
these:—
I. Spiritual allegiance to Christ as the image of God.
“Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every
man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect
in Christ Jesus.”
II. Spiritual liberty from ought besides; Creeds, Traditions,
Rituals, or Priests. “False brethren, unawares
brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty
which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us
into bondage: to whom we gave place by subjection, no,
not for an hour; that the truth of the gospel might continue
with you.”
“The free and unprejudiced mind dwells with delight on the
image of the universal church or convocation of Christ, as it would
naturally have grown ‘into the fulness of the body’ of its
glorious founder * * * *
“And what (let me earnestly and solemnly ask) has hitherto turned
this view into a mocking dream,—a dream that deludes by images
which are the very reverse of the sad realities which surround us?
Orthodoxy;—the notion that the eternal happiness or misery of
individuals is intimately connected with the acceptance or rejection
of a most obscure system of metaphysics; a system perplexing in
the extreme to those who are best acquainted with its former
technical, now obsolete language, and perfectly unintelligible to the
rest of the Christian world: a system which, to say the least, seems
to contradict the simplest and most primitive notions of the human
mind concerning the unity, the justice, and the goodness of the
Supreme Being; a system which, if it be contained in the Scriptures,
has been laid under so thick and impenetrable a veil, that thousands
who have sought to discover it, with the most eager desire of finding
it, whose happiness in this world would have been greatly increased
by that discovery, and who, at all events, would have escaped much
misery had they been able to attest it, even on the grounds of probability
sufficient to acquit themselves before their own conscience,
have been compelled, by truth, to confess their want of success.
Yet Orthodoxy declares this very system identical with Christianity—with
that Gospel which was ‘preached to the poor,’ and ‘revealed
unto babes;’ such a system, we are told, is that faith which, ‘except
every one keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish
everlastingly.’”—Heresy and Orthodoxy, by Rev. J. Blanco White.
“What do divines understand by Christian Truth? The answer,
at first, appears obvious. ‘Christian truth (it will be said) is what
Christ and his apostles knew and taught concerning Salvation under
the Gospel.’ Thus far we find no difficulty; but (let me ask, again)
where does this exist as an object external to our minds? The
answer appears no less obvious than the former: ‘In the Bible.’
Still I must ask, Is the Material Bible the Christian truth about
which Christians dispute? No: it will be readily said not the
Material Bible, but the Sense of the Bible. Now (I beg to know)
is the Sense of the Bible an object external to our minds? Does
any Sense of the Bible, accessible to man, exist anywhere but in the
mind of each man who receives it from the words he reads? The
Divine mind certainly knows in what sense those words were used;
but as we cannot compare our mental impressions with that model
and original of all truth, it is clear that by the Sense of the Bible
we must mean our own sense of its meaning. When therefore any
man declares his intention to defend Christian truth, he only expresses
his determination to defend his own notions, as produced by the words
of the Bible. No other Christian truth exists for us in our present
state.”—Heresy and Orthodoxy.
“If different men in carefully and conscientiously examining the
Scriptures, should arrive at different conclusions, even on points of
the last importance, we trust that God, who alone knows what every
man is capable of, will be merciful to him that is in error. We trust
that He will pardon the Unitarian, if he be in error, because he has
fallen into it from the dread of becoming an idolater—of giving that
glory to another which he conceives to be due to God alone. If the
worshipper of Jesus Christ be in error, we trust that God will pardon
his mistake, because he has fallen into it from the dread of disobeying
what he conceives to be revealed concerning the nature of the Son,
or commanded concerning the honor to be given him. Both are
actuated by the same principle—the fear of God; and though that
principle impels them into different roads, it is our hope and belief,
that if they add to their faith charity, they will meet in Heaven.”—Watson.
“We should learn to be cautious, lest we charge God foolishly, by
ascribing that to him, or the Nature he has given us, which is owing
wholly to our own abuse of it. Men may speak of the degeneracy
and corruption of the world, according to the experience they have
had of it; but human nature, considered as the divine workmanship,
should, methinks, be treated as sacred: for in the image of God made
he man.”—Bishop Butler.
“But, if Orthodoxy cannot be the principle of union among
Christians, upon what are men to agree in order to belong to the
Convocation, or people of Christ? I believe that the Apostle Paul
has said enough to answer this question. When by using the word
anathema, he rejects from his spiritual society even an angel from
Heaven, were it possible that such a being should “preach another
gospel,” he lays down the only principle, without which there can be
no communion among Christians. Unhappily the word Gospel, like
the word Faith, is constantly understood as expressing a certain
number of dogmatical articles. Owing to this perversion of the
original meaning, these very passages of Paul are conceived to support
the long-established notion that Orthodoxy is the only condition
of Christian communion; and want of it, a sufficient cause for
anathema. I have, however, already proved, that Orthodoxy, without
a supreme judge of religious opinions, is a phantom; and since
it is demonstrable that no such judge has been appointed, it clearly
follows that the Apostle Paul, by the name of Gospel, could not
mean a string of dogmatic assertions. It is necessary, therefore, to
ascend to the original signification of the word Gospel, if we are not
to misunderstand the reason of the anathema pronounced by Paul.
Let such as wish to rise above the clouds of theological prejudice,
remember that the whole mystery of godliness is described by the
expression ‘glad tidings.’ Sad, not glad tidings, indeed, would have
been the Apostles’ preaching, if they had announced a salvation
depending on Orthodoxy, for (as I have said before) it would have
been a salvation depending on chance. But salvation promised on
condition of a change of mind from the love of sin to the love of
God (which is repentance); on a surrender of the individual will
to the will of God, according to the view of that divine will which
is obtained by trust in Christ’s example and teaching, which is faith;
a pardon of sins independent of harassing religious practices, sacrifices,
and ascetic privations—these were ‘glad tidings of great joy,’ indeed,
to all who, caring for their souls, felt bewildered between atheism
and superstition.”—Heresy and Orthodoxy.
“Men want an object of worship like themselves, and the great
secret of idolatry lies in this propensity. A God, clothed in our
form, and feeling our wants and sorrows, speaks to our weak nature
more strongly, than a Father in Heaven, a pure spirit, invisible and
unapproachable, save by the reflecting and purified mind. We think,
too, that the peculiar offices ascribed to Jesus by the popular theology,
make him the most attractive person in the Godhead. The
Father is the depositary of the justice, the vindicator of the rights,
the avenger of the laws of the Divinity. On the other hand, the
Son, the brightness of the divine mercy, stands between the incensed
Deity and guilty humanity, exposes his meek head to the storms, and
his compassionate breast to the sword of the divine justice, bears our
whole load of punishment, and purchases with his blood every
blessing which descends from Heaven. Need we state the effect
of these representations, especially on common minds, for whom
Christianity was chiefly designed, and whom it seeks to bring to the
Father as the loveliest being? We do believe, that the worship of
a bleeding, suffering God, tends strongly to absorb the mind, and to
draw it from other objects, just as the human tenderness of the
Virgin Mary has given her so conspicuous a place in the devotions
of the Church of Rome. We believe, too, that this worship, though
attractive, is not most fitted to spiritualize the mind, that it awakens
human transports, rather than that deep veneration of the moral
perfections of God, which is the essence of piety.
“We are told, also, that Christ is a more interesting object, that
his love and mercy are more felt, when he is viewed as the Supreme
God, who left his glory to take humanity and to suffer for men. That
Trinitarians are strongly moved by this representation, we do not
mean to deny; but we think their emotions altogether founded on a
misapprehension of their own doctrines. They talk of the second
person of the Trinity’s leaving his glory and his Father’s bosom to
visit and save the world. But this second person being the unchangeable
and infinite God, was evidently incapable of parting with
the least degree of his perfection and felicity. At the moment of
his taking flesh, he was as intimately present with his Father as
before, and equally with his Father filled heaven, and earth, and
immensity. This Trinitarians acknowledge; and still they profess
to be touched and overwhelmed by the amazing humiliation of this
immutable being! But not only does their doctrine, when fully
explained, reduce Christ’s humiliation to a fiction, it almost wholly
destroys the impressions with which his cross ought to be viewed.
According to their doctrine, Christ was, comparatively, no sufferer
at all. It is true his human mind suffered; but this, they tell us,
was an infinitely small part of Jesus, bearing no more proportion to
his whole nature, than a single hair of our heads to the whole body,
or than a drop to the ocean. The divine mind of Christ, that which
was more properly himself, was infinitely happy, at the very moment
of the suffering of his humanity; whilst hanging on the cross, he
was the happiest being in the universe, as happy as the infinite
Father; so that his pains, compared with his felicity, were nothing.
This Trinitarians do, and must acknowledge. It follows necessarily
from the immutableness of the divine nature, which they ascribe to
Christ; so that their system justly viewed, robs his death of interest,
weakens our sympathy with his sufferings, and is, of all others, most
unfavourable to a love of Christ, founded on a sense of his sacrifices
for mankind. We esteem our own views to be vastly more affecting.
It is our belief, that Christ’s humiliation was real and entire, that
the whole Saviour and not a part of him suffered, that his crucifixion
was a scene of deep and unmixed agony. As we stand round his
cross, our minds are not distracted, nor our sensibility weakened by
contemplating him as composed of incongruous and infinitely differing
minds, and as having a balance of infinite felicity. We
recognize in the dying Jesus but one mind. This, we think, renders
his sufferings, and his patience, and love, in bearing them; incomparably
more impressive and affecting, than the system we oppose.”—Channing.
“We believe, too, that this system is unfavourable to the
character. It naturally leads men to think that Christ came to
change God’s mind, rather than their own; that the highest object
of his mission was to avert punishment rather than to communicate
holiness; and that a large part of religion consists in disparaging
good works and human virtue, for the purpose of magnifying the
value of Christ’s vicarious sufferings. In this way, a sense of the
infinite importance and indispensable necessity of personal improvement
is weakened, and high sounding praises of Christ’s cross seem
often to be substituted for obedience to his precepts. For ourselves,
we have not so learned Jesus. Whilst we gratefully acknowledge
that he came to rescue us from punishment, we believe that he was
sent on a still nobler errand, namely, to deliver us from sin itself,
and to form us to a sublime and heavenly virtue. We regard him
as a Saviour, chiefly as he is the light, physician, and guide of the
dark, diseased, and wandering mind. No influence in the universe
seems to us so glorious as that over the character; and no redemption
so worthy of thankfulness as the restoration of the soul to
purity. Without this, pardon, if it were possible, would be of little
value. Why pluck the sinner from hell, if a hell be left to burn in
his own breast? Why raise him to heaven, if he remain a stranger
to its sanctity and love? With these impressions, we are accustomed
to value the gospel chiefly as it abounds in effectual aids, motives,
excitements to a generous and divine virtue. In this virtue, as in a
common centre, we see all its doctrines, precepts, promises meet;
and we believe that faith in this religion is of no worth, and contributes
nothing to salvation, any further than as it uses these
doctrines, precepts, promises, and the whole life, character, sufferings
and triumphs of Jesus, as the means of purifying the mind,
of changing it into the likeness of his celestial excellence.”—Channing.
“I can direct you to nothing in Christ more important than his
tried, and victorious, and perfect goodness. Others may love Christ
for his mysterious attributes; I love him for the rectitude of his soul
and life. I love him for that benevolence which went through
Judea, instructing the ignorant, healing the sick, giving sight to the
blind. I love him for that universal charity which comprehended the
despised publican, the hated Samaritan, the benighted heathen, and
sought to bring a world to God and to happiness. I love him for
that gentle, mild, forbearing spirit, which no insult, outrage, injury,
could overpower; and which desired as earnestly the repentance and
happiness of its foes as the happiness of its friends. I love him for
the spirit of magnanimity, constancy, and fearless rectitude with
which, amid peril and opposition, he devoted himself to the work
which God gave him to do. I love him for the wise and enlightened
zeal with which he espoused the true, the spiritual interests of
mankind, and through which he lived and died to redeem them
from every sin, to frame them after his own God-like virtue. I love
him, I have said, for his moral excellence; I know nothing else to
love. I know nothing so glorious in the Creator or his creatures.
This is the greatest gift which God bestows, the greatest to be
derived from his Son. You see why I call you to cherish the love
of Christ. This love I do not recommend as a luxury of feeling,
as an exstasy bringing immediate and overflowing joy. I view it in
a nobler light; I call you to love Jesus, that you may bring yourselves
into contact and communion with perfect virtue, and may
become what you love. I know no sincere, enduring good, but the
moral excellence that shines forth in Jesus Christ. Your health,
your outward comforts and distinctions, are poor, mean, contemptible,
compared with this; and to prefer them to this is
self-debasement, self-destruction. May this great truth penetrate
our souls; and may we bear witness in our common lives, and
especially in trial, in sore temptation, that nothing is so dear to us as
the virtue of Christ! * * *
“Thus Jesus lived with men; with the consciousness of unutterable
majesty he joined a lowliness, gentleness, humanity, and
sympathy, which have no example in human history. I ask you
to contemplate this wonderful union. In proportion to the superiority
of Jesus to all around him was the intimacy, the brotherly love,
with which he bound himself to them. I maintain, that this is a
character wholly remote from human conception. To imagine it to
be the production of imposture or enthusiasm, shows a strange unsoundness
of mind. I contemplate it with a veneration second only
to the profound awe with which I look up to God. It bears no
mark of human invention. It was real. It belonged to, and it
manifested, the beloved Son of God.
“But I have not done. May I ask your attention a few moments
more? We have not yet reached the depth of Christ’s character.
We have not touched the great principle on which his wonderful
sympathy was founded, and which endeared him to his office of
universal Saviour. Do you ask what this deep principle was? I
answer, it was his conviction of the greatness of the human soul.
He saw in man the impress and image of the Divinity, and therefore
thirsted for his redemption; and took the tenderest interest in
him, whatever might be the rank, character, or condition in which he
was found. This spiritual view of man pervades and distinguishes
the teaching of Christ. Jesus looked on men with an eye which
pierced beneath the material frame. The body vanished before him.
The trappings of the rich, the rags of the poor, were nothing to him.
He looked through them, as though they did not exist, to the soul;
and there, amidst clouds of ignorance and plague-spots of sin, he
recognized a spiritual and immortal nature, and the germs of power
and perfection which might be unfolded for ever. In the most
fallen and depraved man, he saw a being who might become an angel
of light. Still more, he felt that there was nothing in himself to
which men might not ascend. His own lofty consciousness did not
sever him from the multitude; for he saw, in his own greatness, the
model of what men might become. So deeply was he thus impressed,
that again and again, in speaking of his future glories, he
announced that in these his true followers were to share. They
were to sit on his throne, and partake of his beneficent power.
Here I pause; and I know not, indeed, what can be added to
heighten the wonder, reverence, and love which are due to Jesus.
When I consider him not only as possessed with the consciousness
of an unexampled and unbounded majesty, but as recognizing a
kindred nature in all human beings, and living and dying to raise
them to an anticipation of his divine glories; and when I see him,
under these views, allying himself to men by the tenderest ties,
embracing them with a spirit of humanity, which no insult, injury,
or pain could for a moment repel or overpower, I am filled with
wonder, as well as reverence and love. I feel that this character
is not of human invention, that it was not assumed through fraud,
or struck out by enthusiasm; for it is infinitely above their reach.
When I add this character of Jesus to the other evidences of his
religion, it gives to what before seemed so strong a new and vast
accession of strength; I feel as if I could not be deceived. The
Gospels must be true; they were drawn from a living original; they
were founded on reality. The character of Christ is not fiction; he
was what he claimed to be, and what his followers attested. Nor is
this all. Jesus not only was, he is still, the Son of God,—the
Saviour of the world. He exists now; he has entered that Heaven
to which he always looked forward on earth. There he lives and
reigns. With a clear, calm faith, I see him in that state of glory;
and I confidently expect, at no distant period, to see him face to face.
We have, indeed, no absent friend whom we shall so surely meet.
Let us then, by imitations of his virtues, and obedience to his word,
prepare ourselves to join him in those pure mansions where he is
surrounding himself with the good and pure of our race, and will
communicate to them for ever his own spirit, power, and joy.”—Channing.
“At the present moment I would ask, whether it is a vice to doubt
the truth of Christianity as it is manifested in Spain and Portugal.
When a patriot in those benighted countries, who knows Christianity
only as a bulwark of despotism, as a rearer of inquisitions, as a stern
jailer immuring wretched women in the convent, as an executioner
stained and reeking with the blood of the friends of freedom,—I say
when the patriot, who sees in our religion the instruments of these
crimes and woes, believes and affirms that it is not from God, are we
authorized to charge his unbelief on dishonesty and corruption of
mind, and to brand him as a culprit? May it not be that the spirit
of Christianity in his heart emboldens him to protest with his lips
against what bears the name? And if he thus protest, through a
deep sympathy with the oppression and sufferings of his race, is he
not nearer the kingdom of God than the priest and the inquisitor
who boastingly and exclusively assume the Christian name? Jesus
Christ has told us that ‘this is the condemnation’ of the unbelieving,
‘that they love darkness rather than light;’ and who does not see
that this ground of condemnation is removed, just in proportion as
the light is quenched, or Christian truth is buried in darkness and
debasing error?”—Channing.
“I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is True. It
is true; and its truth is to break forth more and more gloriously.
Of this I have not a doubt. I know that our religion has been
questioned even by intelligent and good men; but this does not
shake my faith in its divine original or in its ultimate triumphs.
Such men have questioned it, because they have known it chiefly
by its corruptions. In proportion as its original simplicity shall be
restored, the doubts of the well-disposed will yield. I have no fears
from infidelity; especially from that form of it which some are at
this moment labouring to spread through our country (America). I
mean, that insane, desperate unbelief, which strives to quench the
light of nature as well as of revelation, and to leave us, not only
without Christ, but without God. This I dread no more than I
should fear the efforts of men to pluck the sun from his sphere; or
to storm the skies with the artillery of the earth. We were made
for religion; and unless the enemies of our faith can change our
nature, they will leave the foundation of religion unshaken. The
human soul was created to look above material nature. It wants a
Deity for its love and trust, an Immortality for its hope. It wants
consolations not found in philosophy, wants strength in temptation,
sorrow, and death, which human wisdom cannot minister; and
knowing, as I do, that Christianity meets these deep wants of men,
I have no fear or doubts as to its triumphs. Men cannot long live
without religion. In France there is a spreading dissatisfaction with
the sceptical spirit of the past generation. A philosopher in that
country would now blush to quote Voltaire as an authority in
religion. Already atheism is dumb where once it seemed to bear
sway. The greatest minds in France are working back their way
to the light of truth. Many of them cannot indeed yet be called
Christians; but their path, like that of the wise men of old, who
came star-guided from the East, is towards Christ. I am not
ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. It has an immortal life, and will
gather strength from the violence of its foes. It is equal to all the
wants of men. The greatest minds have found in it the light which
they most anxiously desired. The most sorrowful and broken
spirits have found in it a healing balm for their woes. It has
inspired the sublimest virtues and the loftiest hopes. For the
corruptions of such a religion I weep, and I should blush to be
their advocate; but of the Gospel itself I can never be ashamed.”—Channing.
“Having found that pride of reason is an aggression upon other
men’s reason, arising from an over-estimate of the worth of the
aggressor’s own, we may now proceed in our inquiry, who are justly
chargeable with pride of reason? Is it those who, having examined
the Scriptures, propose their own collective sense of those books to
the acceptance of others, but blame them not for rejecting it? or
those who positively assert, that their own sense of the Scriptures
is the only one which an honest man, not under diabolical delusion,
can find there? The answer is so plain, that a child, who could
understand the terms of the question, might give it. And yet
experience has taught me that there is no chance of unravelling the
confused ideas which prevent many a well-meaning Christian from
perceiving that the charge of the pride of reason falls upon the
Orthodox. Their own sense of the Scripture (such is the dizzy
whirl which their excited feelings produce) must be the word of God,
because THEY cannot find another. My sense of the Scripture must,
(for instance,) on the contrary, be a damnable error, because it is
the work of my reason, which opposes the word of God, i.e., THEIR
sense of the Scriptures: hence the conclusion that I am guilty of
pride of reason. ‘Renounce that pride, (they say,) and you will
see in the Scriptures what we propose to you:’ which is to say,
surrender your reason to ours, and you will agree with us. * * *
“It is remarkable that Christians are accused of Pride of reason
in proportion as their view of Christianity contains fewer doctrines of
inference than that of the accusers. Compare the creed of the
Trinitarian with that of the Unitarian. The former may be true,
and the latter erroneous, though I adhere to the latter; but unquestionably
the Trinitarian Creed is nearly made up of inferences, it is
almost entirely a work of reason, though, in my eyes, sadly misapplied.
Why, then, is the Unitarian accused of pride of reason,
when he only employs it to show that the Trinitarian has not any
sound reason to draw those inferences? which of the two is guilty
of encroaching upon another man’s rights of reason? Is it not he
who claims for his inferences—the work of his own reason—an
authority above human reason?
“It is not, however, to inferences alone (the work of logical
reason) that the Trinitarian creed owes its existence, and, more than
its existence, its popularity. My observation has shown me, and
that of every competent judge will find, that the strongest hold which
that creed has on the minds of its supporters, consists in preconceived
theories concerning the nature of God and of sin, and of some
necessity which places the Divine Nature in a state of difficulty in
regard to the pardon of sin. The work of saving the race of man
from a most horrible fate depends (according to this theory) not only
on a very mysterious method of overcoming the difficulty which
prevents pardon by an act of mercy, on repentance, but also on the
acknowledgment of the mystery by the sinner. The remedy prepared
by the wisdom of God is (according to this theory) totally
powerless, unless we believe a certain explanation of the manner in
which it acts.
“Now people who cordially embrace this view very naturally
work themselves into a state of the most agonizing excitement: for
if the whole world is to perish because it does not know how the
saving remedy acts, or because its activity is explained in a wrong
way, benevolent men, who think themselves in possession of that
important secret, must burn with zeal to spread it, and with indignation
against those who propagate an explanation which deprives the
remedy of all its power. ‘Believing,’ says an orthodox writer,
though a dissenter from the orthodoxy of the Church of England,
‘the doctrine (of the divinity of Christ) to comprehend within itself
the hopes of a guilty and perishing world, while I would contend
meekly, I must be pardoned if, at the same time, I contend earnestly.’
It is this preconceived theory (one of the strangest that was ever
founded on reasonings à priori) that guides most Christians in the
exposition of the New Testament, and even in that of many passages
of the Hebrew Scriptures. The notion that sin could not be pardoned
unless a person equal to God suffered for it, is the deeply-coloured
glass through which the orthodox read the Scriptures. I
do not blame them for this extraordinary conception. What I
earnestly wish is, that their religious fears may allow them to perceive
that this theory of redemption is made up of preconceived
notions and inferences. Even if that theory were true, it would
unquestionably be a work of reason working by inference. Can,
then, the attempt to make it the very soul of the Gospel be acquitted
of the charge which is constantly in the mouth of the orthodox?
Are they not guilty of the pride of reason?”—Heresy and Orthodoxy.
Page 5.—It is here argued that the error, if an error, of denying
Unitarians to be Christians is as innocent, as the error, if one, of
denying Jesus to be God. Certainly, if equally involuntary and the
pure conclusion of a truthful mind. But, if an error, it involves
two errors,—first, the mistake as to the nature and offices of Jesus,
and second, the mistake of making essentials which Jesus did not
make, and of passing judgments which Jesus did not pass. It is
also essentially Anti-Protestant.
Page 6.—“But if it be a characteristic of true Christianity so to
trust in Christ, as to commit the salvation of our souls into his hands,
how can we conceive of those as true Christians who consider him
only a fellow-creature, and consequently repose in him no such
trust?” Trust is a moral act of the mind. We trust Jesus
spiritually. Our souls feel him to be the Image of God: and we
confide ourselves with a perfect trust to the God of Love whom
Jesus imaged. “Let not your hearts be troubled: ye believe in
God, believe also in me.” Our hearts are not troubled because our
faith rests upon the God whom Jesus has made known to us. This
is the only intelligible meaning of Trust as a spiritual act. We
trust him whom we believe God to have trusted and sent.
Page 8.—“We maintain that the Bible is alone safely interpreted
by its Author and Inspirer, the Holy Ghost.” Do the Trinitarians
mean that their interpretations of the Bible are the interpretations of
the Holy Spirit? If so, we can have no controversy with them. If
they are inspired to interpret, what the Apostles were inspired to
write, nothing is required but that this should be proved.
Pages 11, 12.—“The New Testament writers also assert their own
inspiration in language equally strong. ‘All Scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable,’ &c. St. Paul does not here
assert his own inspiration, but the inspiration of the Jewish Prophets,
the study of whom had made Timothy wise unto salvation through
faith in Christ. The Christian Scriptures were not in existence when
the words were written. It is also very doubtful whether the word
translated, ‘given by inspiration of God,’ signifies ‘breathing of
God,’ or ‘breathed from God.’
“‘No prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation,’
&c. The inspiration of Prophecy is not denied. But can anything
be more idle than to prove the inspiration of all the books of the
Old Testament by such a quotation as this: ‘Hear me, O Judah,
and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, believe in the Lord your God, so
shall ye be established; believe his prophets, so shall ye prosper’?”
Page 16.—“So then, it appears, that if these ‘rational and
liberal’ critics are not allowed to Unitarianize the Bible, they are
prepared to deny its divine authority, and to give it up to its
enemies!” Dr. Channing does not say so. What he says is, that he
cannot defend the Scriptures unless he is allowed to interpret them
by the same principles which are applied to all other works. And
this principle of interpretation we understood Dr. Tattershall freely to
admit. The use that is made of the extract from Dr. Channing,
exhibits the temptations of controversy. There is nothing in the
extract that Trinitarians themselves would not say upon occasion.
Why is it thought worthy of being marked in italics that the dispensation
of Moses is imperfect when compared with that of Jesus?
Is this denied? Why is the word seems italicized, when the connected
word is not rejects, but only distrusts? Yet the author
praises the candour of Dr. Channing.
Pages 20, 21.—“The improved Version.” It is a curious fact that
most of the Trinitarian objections to the Improved Version have
been provided for them by an Unitarian Critic and Reviewer. Dr.
Carpenter in his reply to Archbishop Magee states, “I furnished to
the opponents of the Improved Version some of the most powerful
weapons against it.” Again, “At my request a young friend undertook
to draw up the table I wished. This led him to collate the two
Versions, which he did with great patience and fidelity. He discovered
some variations from the basis which were not noticed; and
I thought it right to point them out. It is not too much to say that,
but for this, neither Bishop Magee, nor any others who have censured
the Improved Version, would have been aware of their existence.”—pp.
308, 309. Whatever becomes of the Improved Version,
the Controversy between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism remains
just where it was, to be settled upon independent principles, critical
and exegetical. So far, the whole indictment against the Improved
Version relates to the introductory chapters of Matthew and Luke.
Suppose those chapters authentic and genuine, and what follows
from them? The doctrine of the Miraculous Conception, which
most Unitarians believe. Professor Norton, the ablest, perhaps, of
American Unitarian Critics, defends this doctrine. The introductory
chapters of Matthew he rejects, chiefly on account of their inconsistencies
with those of Luke, the authenticity of which he does not
doubt. Dr. Carpenter also critically dissents from the Notes in the
Improved Version on the introductions of Matthew and Luke.
Reply to Dr. Magee, p. 299. It is not then such a new thing among
Unitarians, to question the authority of the Improved Version.
Will the Author inform us where he got his knowledge respecting
Ebion, his existence and opinions?
Page 25.—In an introductory Lecture on the “practical” tendencies
of views, we labour under the disadvantage of being obliged
to allow scriptural language to be quoted in a sense which we do not
admit. It would be evidently quite out of place to enter here into
the textual controversy. This will be done abundantly in the course
of these Lectures.
Page 37.—Does the Author deny that Free Inquiry generates a
degree of scepticism—that is, not of unbelief, but of the examining
and questioning spirit? Or does he mean to object to all free inquiry
on account of this tendency? It is extraordinary reasoning to
take Dr. Channing’s caution against a sceptical spirit, proceeding
from the very constitution of mind, as a proof of the tendency of
Unitarianism to infidelity. If Unitarianism leads to unbelief, it is
strange that so many Unitarians should defend the Evidences of
Christianity, and that one of them, Dr. Lardner, is the great authority
from which Trinitarians themselves draw their knowledge of the
external testimonies.
Page 39.—“Another leading principle, common to both systems,
(Unitarianism and Infidelity,) is the non-importance of principle itself
to the enjoyment of the Divine favour.” Let it be known, that by
principle here, the Author means opinions.
Page 41.—“Does the Deist reject the Bible because God is represented
as a being who takes vengeance? So does the Unitarian
for the very same reason reject the Gospel. Does the Deist reject
the Bible because it contains the doctrine of atonement and of
divine sovereignty? For the very same reason the Unitarian rejects
the Gospel.” It is melancholy to have to remark upon this passage.
The Unitarian does not reject the Gospel, unless the Gospel means
Trinitarianism, a use of words which, in controversy, cannot be
justified. The Unitarian does not deny that God takes vengeance,
if by vengeance is meant the infliction of retribution. The Unitarian
accepts the Gospel, but does not find in it the doctrine of
Atonement.
Page 46.—“How, on Unitarian principles, this reasoning can be
answered, is more than I can tell.” Jesus did refer to God both his
words and his works. But Unitarians do not regard the mission of
Jesus as similar to that of any of the Prophets. It was essentially
different. He was himself the Revelation: a man in the image of
God. By the Prophets, God taught the Jews certain lessons, and
inspired certain expectations. By Jesus, in whom was the spirit
without measure, God exhibited a perfect revelation both of human
perfection and of human destinies. God’s word was made flesh,
and dwelt amongst us. The purposes of the Deity were impersonated.
He was consequently the life, and the way, as well as the
truth.
Page 59.—Does the Author mean to contend that Thomas was an
INSPIRED MAN when he refused to believe in the risen Jesus? We
had thought the Trinitarian view was, that the day of Pentecost
dated the inspiration of the apostles. But it appears the Author
believes Thomas to be inspired when refusing to believe in the resurrection
of Christ.
Page 60.—Is not the Author aware of the doubtful authenticity
of the second epistle of Peter, from which he quotes twice, contrary
to the judgment of Lardner, who decides that the doubtful Epistles,
so stated by Eusebius, should not be used as authority for doctrines?
There are other passages in this Lecture on which we might comment.
But we refrain. We wished to remark upon those passages
which affect the cause, and not more than was unavoidable upon
those which affect only the advocate.
37. It is absurd to say that a work becomes a standard authority, because a Book
Society admits it into its Catalogue, or thinks its objects of sufficient importance
to aid in its publication. Doubtless the Unitarian Society thought the “Improved
Version” valuable as a Scriptural aid.
LECTURE II. — NOTES. — A. On the Improved Version. — B. On the Ebionites and their Gospel. — C. On the Chronological Inconsistency between the introductory chapters of Matthew, and those of Luke. — D. —
THE BIBLE: WHAT IT IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT.
BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU.
“AND THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH, AND DWELT AMONG US, (AND WE
BEHELD HIS GLORY, THE GLORY AS OF THE ONLY BEGOTTEN OF THE
FATHER,) FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH.”—John i. 14.
The Bible is the great autobiography of human nature, from
its infancy to its perfection. Whatever man has seen and
felt and done on the theatre of this earth, is expressed therein
with the simplicity and vividness of personal consciousness.
The first wondering impressions of the new-created being,
just dropt upon a scene quite strange;—the hardened heart
and daring crimes of the long-resident here, forgetting that
he dwells in a hospice of the Lord, and not a property of his
own;—the recalled and penitent spirit, awakened by the voice
of Christ, when, to a world grown old and dead in custom,
he brought back the living presence of God, and to the first
reverence added the maturest love;—all this is recorded there,
written down in the happiest moments of inspiration which
have fallen upon our race during the lapse of sixteen centuries.
The volume stations us on a spot, well selected as a watch-tower,
from which we may overlook the history of the world;—an
angle of coast between the ancient continents of Africa
and Asia, subtended by the newer line of European civilization.
Thence have we a neighbouring view of every form
of human life, and every variety of human character. The
solitary shepherd on the slopes of Chaldæa, watching the
changing heavens till he worships them; the patriarch pitching
his tent in the nearer plain of Mamre; the Arab, half
merchant, half marauder, hurrying his fleet dromedaries
across the sunny desert; the Phœnician commerce gladdening
the Levant with its sails, or, on its way from India, spreading
its wares in the streets of Jerusalem; the urban magnificence
of Babylonia, and the sacerdotal grandeur of Egypt; all are
spread beneath our eye, in colours vivid, but with passage
swift. Even the echo of Grecian revolutions, and the tramp
of Roman armies, and the incipient rush of Eastern nations,
that will overwhelm them both, may be distinctly heard;
brief agents, every one, on this stage of Providence, beckoned
forward by the finger of Omnipotence, and waved off again
by the signals of mercy ever new.
The interest of this wide and various scriptural scene, gradually
gathers itself in towards a single point. There is One
who stands at the place where its converging lines all meet;
and we are led over the expanse of world-history, that we may
rest at length beneath the eye of the Prophet of Nazareth.
He is the central object, around whom all the ages and events
of the Bible are but an outlying circumference; and when
they have brought us to this place of repose, to return upon
them again would be an idle wandering. They are all preliminaries,
that accomplish their end in leading us hither.—“The
law,” aye, and the prophets too, we esteem “our
schoolmasters to bring us to Christ:”[48] and though, like grateful
pupils, we may look back on them with true-hearted respect,
and even think their labours not thrown away on such
as may still be children in the Lord, we have no idea of acknowledging
any more the authority of the task, the threat,
the rod. To sit at the feet of Jesus we take to be the only
proper position for the true disciple; to listen to his voice
“the one thing needful;” and however much others,
notwithstanding that he is come, may make themselves
“anxious and troubled about many things” besides, and fret
themselves still about the preparations for his entertainment,
we choose to quit all else, and keep close to him, as that
better “part, which shall not be taken from” us. Whatever
holy influences of the Divine Word may be found in the old
Scriptures, are all collected into one at length; “the Word
hath been made Flesh,” and in a living form hath “dwelt
among us;” and from its fulness of “grace and truth” we
will not be torn away.
If the ultimate ends of Scripture are attained in Christ,
that portion of the Bible which makes us most intimate with
him, must be of paramount interest. Compelled then as I
am, by my limits, to narrow our inquiry into the proper
treatment of Scripture, I take up the New Testament
exclusively, and especially the Gospels, for examination and
comment to-night.
Suppose then that these books are put into our hands for
the first time;—disinterred, if you please, from a chamber
in Pompeii;—without title, name, date, or other external
description; and that with unembarrassed mind and fresh
heart, we go apart with these treasures to examine them.
It is not long before their extraordinary character becomes
evident. All minds are known by their works,—the human
quite as distinctly as the Divine: and if “the invisible things
of God” “are clearly seen” “by the things that are made,”
and on the material structures of the universe the moral attributes
of his nature may be discerned,—with much greater
certainty do the secret qualities of a man’s soul,—his honesty
or cunning, his truthfulness or fraud,—impress themselves on
his speech and writings. To a clear eye his moral nature will
unerringly betray itself, even in a disquisition; more, in a
fiction; more still, in a history; and most of all, in a biography
of a personal companion and teacher, drawing forth
in turns his friendship and grief, his pity and terror, his love
and doubt and trust, his feelings to country, to duty, to God,
to heaven. Accordingly in these Gospels, and in the Journal
of travels and Collection of letters, which carry out and illustrate
the development of a new religion, I find myself in
the presence of honest and earnest men, who are plainly
strangers to fiction and philosophy, and lead me through
realities fairer and diviner than either. They take me to
actual places, and tell the events of a known and definite
time. They conduct me through villages, and streets, and
markets; to frequented resorts of worship, and hostile halls
of justice, and the tribunals of Roman rulers, and the theatres
of Asiatic cities, and the concourse of Mars’ hill at
Athens: so that there is no denying their appeal, these
things were “not done in a corner.”[49] Yet their frank delineation
of public life is less impressive, than their true and tender
touches of private history. Following in the steps of the
world’s domestic prophet, they entered, evening and morning,
the homes of men,—especially of men in watching and
in grief, the wasted in body or the sick in soul: and the unconsciousness
with which the most genuine traits of nature
gleam through the narrative, the infantile simplicity with
which every one’s emotions, of sorrow, of repentance, of
affection, give themselves to utterance, indicate that, with
One who bare the key of hearts, the writers had been into
the deep places of our humanity. The infants in his arms
look up in the face of Jesus as we read; the Pharisee mutters
in our ear his sceptic discontent at that loving “woman
who was a sinner” kneeling at the Teacher’s feet; and the
voice of the bereaved sisters of Lazarus trembles upon the
page.
But, above all, these writings introduce me to a Being so
unimaginable, except by the great Inventor of beauty and
Architect of nature himself, that I embrace him at once, as
having all the reality of man and the divinest inspiration of
God. Gentle and unconstrained as he is, ever standing,
even on the brink of the most stupendous miracles, in the
easiest attitudes of our humanity, so that we are drawn to
him as to one of like nature, we yet cannot enter his presence
without feeling our souls transformed. Their greatness,
first recognized by him, becomes manifest to ourselves: the
death of conscience is broken by his tones; the sense of accountability
takes life within the deep; new thoughts of duty,
shed from his lips, shame us for the past, and kindle us for the
future with hope and faith unknown before. His promise[50]
fulfils itself, whilst he utters it; and whenever we truly love
him, God comes, and “makes his abode with” us. He has
this peculiarity: that he plunges us into the feeling, that
God acts not there, but here; not was once, but is now;
dwells, not without us, like a dreadful sentinel, but within us
as a heavenly spirit, befriending us in weakness, and bracing
us for conflict. The inspiration of Christ is not any solitary,
barren, incommunicable prodigy; but diffusive, creative,
vivifying as the energy of God:—not gathered up and concentrated
in himself, as an object of distant wonder; but
reproducing itself, though in fainter forms, in the faithful
hearts to which it spreads. While in him it had no human
origin, but was spontaneous and primitive, flowing directly
from the perception and affinity of God, it enters our souls
as a gift from his nearer spirit, making us one with him, as
he is one with the Eternal Father. Children of God indeed
we all are: nor is there any mind without his image: but in
this Man of Sorrows the divine lineaments are so distinct,
the filial resemblance to the Parent-spirit is so full of grace
and truth, that in its presence all other similitude fades away,
and we behold his “glory as of the only begotten of the
Father.” It is the very spirit of Deity visible on the scale
of humanity. The colours of his mind, projected on the
surface of Infinitude, form there the all-perfect God. The
mere fact of his consciousness of the alliance with the
Creator, and his tranquil announcement of it, without the
slightest inflation, and amid the exercise of the meekest
sympathies, appears to me all-persuasive. From whom else
could we hear such claims without disgust? In a moment
they would turn respect into aversion, and we should pity
them as insanity, or resent them as impiety. But to him
they seem only level and natural; we hear them with assent
and awe, prepared by such a transcendent veneration as only
a being truly God-like could excite. This is one of those
statements which refutes or proves itself. Whoever, calmly
affirming himself the Son and express similitude of God,
can thereby draw to him, instead of driving from him, the
affections of the wise and good, proclaims a thing self-evident;
requiring, however, to be stated, in order to be
tested.
Of such self-evidence as this, the gospels appear to me to
be full. Whenever men shall learn to prefer a religious to
a theological appreciation of Christ, and esteem his mind
greater than his rank, much more of this kind of internal
proof will present itself. It has the advantage of requiring
no impracticable learning, and being open, on internal study
of the books, to all men of pure mind and genuine heart;
it is moral, not literary; addressing itself to the intuitions
of conscience, not to the critical faculties. It makes us disciples,
on the same principles with the first followers of
Christ, who troubled themselves about no books, and forged
no chains of scholastic logic to tie them to the faith; but
watched the Prophet, beheld his deeds of power, felt his
heavenly spirit, heard his word, found it glad tidings, and
believed. In short, it is identical with the evidence to which
our Lord was so fond of appealing when he said, “No man
can come to me, except the Father, which hath sent me,
draw him;”[51] “every one that is of the truth heareth my
voice;”[52] “if I do not the works of my Father, believe me
not;”[53] “my sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and
they follow me;”[54] “if any man will do His will, he shall
know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I
speak of myself.”[55] This spiritual attraction to Christ,
arising out of mere contemplation and study of the interior
of his life, is enough to bring us reverently to his feet,—to
accept him as the divinely-sent image of Deity, and the appointed
representative of God. If this be not discipleship,
allow me to ask, “What is it?”
I consider, then, this internal or self-evidence of the New
Testament, as incomparably the most powerful that can be
adduced; as securing for Christianity an eternal seat in
human nature, so as to throw ridicule on the idea of its
subversion; and as the only evidence suitable, from its universality,
to a religion intended for the majority of men,
rather than for an oligarchy of literati.
But though the divine perfection and authority of Christ
may thus be made manifest to our moral and spiritual nature,
what is called the plenary inspiration of the whole Bible is
by no means a thing equally self-evident. By the term
plenary inspiration is denoted the doctrine,—That every
idea which a just interpretation may discover in the Scriptures,
is infallibly true, and that even every word employed
in its expression is dictated by the unerring spirit of God;
so that every statement, from the beginning of Genesis to
the end of Revelations, must be implicitly received, “as
though from the lips of the Almighty himself.” We are first
assured that whoever denies this, shall have his name cancelled
from the Book of life; and then we are called upon to come
forward, and say plainly whether we believe it. The invitation
sounds terrible enough. Nevertheless, having a faith
in God, which takes the awe out of Church thunders, I say
distinctly, this doctrine we do not believe; and ere I have
done, I hope to show that no man who can weigh evidence,
ought to believe it.
It is clear that, by no interior marks, can a book prove
this sort of inspiration to belong to itself. Accordingly, the
advocates for it are obliged to quit the intrinsic evidence,
of which I have hitherto spoken, and to seek external and
foreign testimony on behalf of the Biblical writings, and of
the New Testament in the first instance. The course of the
reasoning is thus adverted to by Bishop Marsh: “The
arguments which are used,” he says, “for divine inspiration,
are all founded on the previous supposition that the Bible
is true; for we appeal to the contents of the Bible in proof
of inspiration. Consequently, these arguments can have no
force till the authenticity and credibility of the Bible have
been already established,”[56] “Suppose,” observes the same
author, “that a professor of Divinity begins his course of
lectures with the doctrine of divine inspiration; this doctrine,
however true in itself, or however certain the arguments by
which it may be established, cannot possibly, in that stage
of his enquiry, be proved to the satisfaction of his audience;
because he has not yet established other truths, from which
this must be deduced. For whether he appeals to the promises
of Christ to his Apostles, or to the declarations of the
Apostles themselves, he must take for granted that these
promises and declarations were really made; i.e., he must
take for granted the authenticity of the writings in which
these promises and declarations are recorded. But how is
it possible that conviction should be the consequence of
postulating, instead of proving, a fact of such importance?”
“If (as is too often the case in theological works) we undertake
to prove a proposition by the aid of another which is
hereafter to be proved, the inevitable consequence is, that
the proposition in question becomes a link in the chain by
which we establish that very proposition, which at first was
taken for granted. Thus we prove premises from inferences,
as well as inferences from premises; or, in other words, we
prove—nothing.”[57]
In perfect consistency with these remarks, was the lucid
exposition of the true method of theological enquiry, which
I had the privilege of hearing in Christ Church, on Wednesday
last: to every word of which (limiting it, however, to
the external evidences of Christianity) I entirely assent.
It was then stated that we must
(1st.) Ascertain that the books under examination are
self-consistent, and that they contain nothing at variance
with the character of God impressed upon his works.
(2ndly.) Enquire whether the writings are really the
productions of the authors whose names they bear; or, in
other words, determine their authenticity.
(3dly.) Whether the writers were in circumstances to
know what they relate, and were persons of character and
veracity.
(4thly.) Whether we have the works in an unmutilated
state, and as they came from the pens of the authors.
If all these researches should have an issue favourable to
the writings, the Lecturer conceives, for reasons which I
think very inconclusive, that the following inferences may
be drawn:—
(1.) That the whole contents of the Bible have divine
authority, because they truly report the fulfilment of prophecy,
and the performance of miracles; and all the doctrines
and lessons of a person who works miracles must
have divine authority.
(2.) That the writers were so inspired, that their writings
are, in all respects, infallibly correct; for, among the facts
narrated (and which we admit to be true), is this one; that
the Holy Ghost was promised to the Apostles, and actually
descended on the disciples assembled on the day of Pentecost,
and was so extensively communicated through them to
the early church, that no New Testament writer could be
without it. So that these books are as strictly the Word
of God, as if all their statements proceeded at once and
immediately from the lips of the Almighty himself.
As “the Word of God” is a beautiful Scriptural phrase,
which I must refuse to give up to this most unscriptural
idea, I shall replace it, when I wish to speak of verbal inspiration,
by the more appropriate expression, the Words
of God. I discern in the Bible the Word of God, but by no
means the Words of God.
For the sake of brevity, I may be allowed to compress
this elaborate system of external evidence into two successive
divisions; and, taking up the first Gospel as an
example, I should say, we have to enquire respecting it,
(1.) Whether we have the words of St. Matthew. And
if this be determined in the affirmative,
(2.) Whether we have the words of God.
(1.) Our first attempt then must be, to establish the
origin of these books from Apostles or Apostolic men,—which
is the sole ground for affirming their infallibility.
The method by which their origin must be ascertained is
admitted to be similar to that which would be employed in
the case of any work not sacred. It is an enquiry altogether
historical or antiquarian;—a process of literary identification.
We must collect, and dispose along an ascending
chronological line, the various writers who have quoted
and mentioned the New Testament writings; call each,
in turn, into the court of criticism, to speak to the
identity of the work he cites with that which we
possess; and if the series of witnesses be complete,—if,
in following into antiquity the steps of their attestation,
we find ourselves in contact with the Apostolic age, and
near the seats of Apostolic labours, we justly conclude
that we have the genuine and original productions. By
the help of this foreign testimony, almost all the books
of the New Testament may be traced perhaps to the middle
of the second century; the remaining fifty or sixty years to
the death of St. John, and eighty or ninety to that of the
Apostle of the Gentiles, must be filled up by arguments
showing, that this chasm is too small for the possibilities of
forgery and mistake to take effect. The results of this process
are not fit matter for detailed criticism here; I will
simply state, in general, that they yield a preponderating
probability in favour of the general reception, in the second
age of the church, of all the New Testament writings, under
the names of their reputed authors; and that it would be
unreasonable to expect more precise external evidence of
authenticity than this. It is indeed much easier to prove
in this way the origin, from the founders of our religion, of
the books which we receive, than to disprove a like authority
with respect to others which we disown, or whose memory
(for many of them are lost) we dishonour. The equal antiquity
of some of these repudiated works, it is scarcely possible
to deny; their inferior authority we are obliged either to
conclude from their intrinsic character, (a reason, often
abundantly satisfactory,) or to assume on the word of a set
of ecclesiastical writers, not generally distinguished for sound
judgment or tranquil passions, nor always trustworthy, even
in matters of fact; and who notoriously formed their estimate
of Christian books, less from enquiry into their genuineness,
than from the supposed orthodoxy of their contents. The
Christian Fathers, on whose statement the whole case rests,
were undoubtedly guilty of that which, at all events, with far
less justice, is charged on Unitarian authors: they threw away
many a writing as spurious, because they did not like its
doctrines; testing the work by their own belief, instead of
their own belief by the work. The zone of proof which
encircles the books within the canon, and separates them from
the apocryphal tribe without, appears to me less sacred, and
more faint, than it is common for theologians to allow. And
even when the selection has been made, and we have agreed
to accept the canon as it is, it is impossible, until it is shown
that one uniform inspiration produced the whole, to acknowledge
the equal value of every part. It is usual to urge the
“authenticity” upon us as a kind of technical quantity which
we must take or reject, an indivisible theological unit admitting
of no variation, but that of positive or negative. But it
would surely be extraordinary, if all the twenty-seven books
of the New Testament should have precisely the same amount
of historical attestation in their favour; and it is undeniable
that they have not. The probabilities are much stronger in
behalf of some books than in that of others, though preponderant
in all. There is a gradation of evidence, arranging
the writings along at least five separate steps in the descent
of proof; in effecting this division, however, let it be clearly
understood, that I refer solely to the literary question of personal
authorship, not to that of religious worth and authority;
and that, for the moment, I take into account the internal as
well as external considerations bearing upon this single point.
1. The letters of St. Paul (excepting Hebrews) occupy
the highest station of evidence.
2. The remaining letters, excepting 2nd Peter and
Hebrews again, I should place next.
3. The Gospel of St. John is more certainly authentic
than the other three; which, however, would follow in the
4th place with the book of Acts. And the list will be
closed by
5. The Apocalypse, 2 Peter, and the Epistle to the
Hebrews.
This arrangement might be justified, if it were necessary,
in detail. But my sole purpose in stating it now, is to convey
a distinct idea of the kind of graduated scale of proof
which, from the very nature of the enquiry, must be applied
to the authenticity of the Christian records; and to
give force to the protest, which truth compels me to enter
against the indiscriminate coercion of assent attempted by
theologians in this argument. With this qualification then,
we approve the general decision of the Protestant Churches,
and adopt as authentic the canon as it stands. “Unitarians,”
we repeat, “have neither canon nor version of their own.”
“What! not the Improved Version?” I shall be asked:—that
favourite achievement of your most renowned Unitarian
champions;—published by a Unitarian society;—circulated
among your laity in three simultaneous editions; when
assailed successively by Dr. Nares and Archbishop Magee,
repeatedly defended by your ablest critics in your own
Journals; containing moreover all the standard heresies of
your sect; using all your received methods of getting rid
of troublesome texts; and especially relieving you of the
doctrine of the miraculous conception by the liberal application
of Jehoiakim’s pen-knife to the initial chapters of
Matthew and Luke?[58] “The shades of Belsham, Lindsey,
Jebb, Priestley, Wakefield, &c., might well be astonished to
hear their learned labours so contemptuously spoken of by”
the “modern disciples of their school.”[59]
Now it so happens, that, excepting two, all these good
men were dead before the commencement of that work. Of
the two survivors, Mr. Lindsey was disabled, by the infirmities
of age, from any participation in it, and scarcely lived
to see it published.[60] The remaining divine, Mr. Belsham,
was the real editor of this translation; and alone, among
Unitarians, must have the whole honour or dishonour of the
work. The funds for the publication were doubtless furnished
by a society, whose members hoped thus to present
the theologian with a valuable contribution to Biblical literature;
but had neither power nor wish to bind themselves
or others to an approval of its criticisms, or a maintenance
of its interpretations. That “all the ministers belonging to
this Society” were enrolled in the Committee for preparing
the Work, is itself a proof of the small proportion which
the Association bore to the whole body of Unitarians; and
is well known to have been an inoperative form, which had
no practical effect in dividing the chief Editor’s responsibility.
The Version adopts, as a basis, the “Attempt towards
revising our English Translation of the Greek Scriptures,”
by Archbishop Newcome, Primate of Ireland; from which,
including the smallest verbal variations, there are not, on
an average, more than two deviations in a page; and it is
a principle with the Editors, that these departures shall be
noticed in the margin; so that any one, having the Improved
Version in his hand, has the Archbishop’s Revision also
before him. How far this translation has authority with
Unitarians, may perhaps be judged of from one fact. The
clergymen who are holding up this work to the pious horror
of their hearers are repeating charges against it, long ago
preferred by Archbishop Magee; who, in his time, reproduced
them from Dr. Nares, the Regius Professor of modern
history in the University of Oxford; who, again, borrowed
no small part of his materials from a Review of the Version, in
the Monthly Repository for 1809, by Dr. Carpenter, a distinguished
Unitarian Divine. I do not mean that there was
nothing but reproduction of the original Reviewer’s materials
throughout all these steps; if it were so, I should be ashamed
to call that venerable man my friend: fresh objections were
added at every stage; and, by Archbishop Magee, a mass of
abuse the most coarse, and misrepresentation the most black;
repeated still by unsuspecting and unlearned admirers, who
find it easier to acquire from him his aptitudes for calumny
than his acuteness in criticism. But the principal objections
to the Improved Version were certainly anticipated by Dr.
Carpenter, who furnished a list of unacknowledged deviations
from Newcome’s revision, and from Griesbach’s and the Received
Texts;—who censured the whole system of departure
from that text, which seemed to be adopted as a standard;
the license allowed to conjectural emendation; the preference
of Newcome’s to the authorized version as a basis; the
introduction of any doctrinal notes; and, what is especially
to our present purpose, who vindicated, from the suspicion
of spuriousness, the initial chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel, and
consented to part with those of St. Matthew’s, only because
at variance with the authority of the third Evangelist. From
the armoury, therefore, of our own church, are stolen the
very weapons, wherewith now, amid taunts of sacerdotal
derision, we are to be driven as intruders from the fair fields
of learning. For myself, when the learned labours of Dissenters
are ridiculed, and the “defective scholarship” of
heretics affirmed, by the privileged clergy of the established
church, I always think of the Universities,—those venerable
seats of instruction, from which Nonconformists must be
excluded. The precious food of knowledge is first locked
up; the key is hung beyond our reach; and then the
starvelings must be laughed at, when they sink and fall.
But so is it always with unjust power; the habit of injury
begets the propensity to scorn.[61]
But we are called upon to say, whether we really mean
to repudiate the Improved Version. If by “repudiate” be
meant, confess the truth of all the accusations brought
against it, or reject it from our libraries as unworthy of consultation,
we do not repudiate it. But we do refuse to be
held responsible, directly or indirectly, for any portion of its
criticisms; with which we have no more concern, than have
our Reverend assailants with the Translation of Luther
or the Institutes of Calvin. If we are pressed with the
personal inquiry, “but, what portion of its peculiarities,
especially in relation to the narrative of the miraculous
conception, do you as a matter of fact, approve?” I can
answer for no one but myself, for we have no theological
standards, nor any restriction on the exercise of private
judgment, on such subjects. But, individually, I have no
objection to state, that I consider Mr. Belsham as having
brought over the threshold of his conversion so much of his
original orthodoxy, that, like all who insist upon finding a
uniform doctrinal system prevading the various records of
Christianity, he is justly open to the charge of having accommodated
both his criticism and his interpretations to his
belief; that his objections to the authenticity of both accounts
of the miraculous conception, appear to me altogether inconclusive;
that I therefore leave these histories as integral
parts of the gospels they introduce.[62] Whether I receive all
their statements as unerringly true, is a question altogether
different; nor can the Lecturer who calls on us to satisfy
him on this point, link together in one query our reception
of these chapters as authentic and as true, without falling
into Mr. Belsham’s own error of mixing these two things
so obviously distinct. It no more follows, because these
chapters are Matthew’s, that they must be reconcilable with
Luke, and so, free from objection to their truth; than, because
they are inconsistent with Luke, therefore they cannot be
Matthew’s. This part of the enquiry belongs to the second
portion of our discussion respecting the New Testament;
whether, granting that we have the veritable words of the
reputed authors, we have, in consequence, the ipsissima
verba of God. To this topic let us now proceed.
(2.) The advocate of plenary inspiration, having obtained
our assent to the authenticity of the Christian Scriptures,
proceeds to show their truth. He reminds us that the
depositions are no longer anonymous; and that, the testimony
having been duly signed, we may examine the character
of the witnesses. We call them therefore before us.
They are plain, plebeian, hard-handed men of toil, who have
laboured in the fields and olive-grounds of Judæa, or held an
oar on the Galilean Lake; who nevertheless have been not
without the cottage and the home, the parent, wife and child;
belonging, moreover, to a country having something to
remember, and more to expect. Addressed by a solitary and
houseless wanderer from Nazareth, won by some undefinable
attraction that makes them think him a man of God, they
follow him awhile, hoping for promotion, if he should prove,
as they suspect, to be some great one. Daily this hope
declines, but hourly the love increases. They hang upon his
words; their passions sink abashed before his look; they
blindly follow his steps, knowing nothing but that they will
be the steps of mercy; they rebuke the blind beggar who
cries; but he calls him groping to him, and sends him
dazzled away; they go to help the cripple, and ere they reach
him, at a word he leaps up in strength; they fly at the shriek
of the maniac from the tombs, when lo! he lapses into silence,
and sits at the feet of the Nazarene in the tears of a right and
grateful mind. How can they leave him? yet why precisely
do they stay? If they depart, it is but to return with joy;
and so they linger still, for they learn to trust him better than
themselves. They go with him sorrowing; with occasional
flashes of brilliant ambition, but with longer darkness
between; with lowering hopes, but deepening love; to the
farewell meal; to the moonlit garden, its anguished solitude,
its tranquil surrender to the multitude, making the
seeming captive the real conqueror; a few of them to the
trial; one, to the cross; the women, even to the sepulchre;
and all, agitated and unbelieving, were recalled in breathless
haste from their despair by the third day’s tidings, the Lord
has risen indeed! Thenceforth, they too are risen from the
dead; the bandages, as of the grave, drop from their souls;
the spirit of God, which is the spirit of truth, comes to loose
them and let go. Not higher did the Lord ascend to the
heaven which holds him now, than did they rise above the
level of their former life. They understand it all, and can
proclaim it; the things that were to come,—that dreadful
cross, that third day, so darkly hidden from their eyes,—are
shown them now; a thousand things which he had said unto
them, rush, by the help of this new spirit, to their remembrance.
And forth they go, to tell the things which they
have seen and heard. They most of them perished, not without
joy, in the attempt; but they did tell them, with a
voice that could summon nations and ages to the audience;
which things are this day sounded in our ears.
But I suppose we must endeavour to speak coolly of these
venerable men, if we are to save them from being deprived of
their manhood, and turned into the petrified images and
empty vessels of a physical or intellectual inspiration. Why
will the extravagance of Churches compel us to freeze down
our religion into logic, to prevent it blazing into an unsocial
fanaticism? If, however, we must weigh the Apostles’
claims with nice precision, we must say (at this stage of our
enquiry we can say only) that they were honest personal
witnesses of visible and audible facts; deserving therefore
of all the reliance to which veracity, severely tested, is entitled.
To everything then which comes under the description
of personal testimony, their demand on our confidence
extends; their own impressions we believe to have been
as they record. But their inferences, their arguments, their
interpretations of ancient writings, their speculations on
future events, however just and perfect in themselves, are
no part of the report which they give in evidence, and
cannot be established by appeal to their integrity.
Nor, in this limitation of testimony to its proper province,
is there anything in the slightest degree dishonourable to
these “chosen witnesses.” “Is the judgment of the writers
of the New Testament,” says Archdeacon Paley, “in interpreting
passages of the Old, or, sometimes perhaps in receiving
established interpretations, so connected either with
their veracity, or with their means of information concerning
what was passing in their own times, as that a critical mistake,
even were it clearly made out, should overthrow their
historical credit? Does it diminish it? Has it any thing to
do with it?” “We do not usually question the credit of a
writer, by reason of an opinion he may have delivered upon
subjects unconnected with his evidence; and even upon subjects
connected with his account, or mixed with it in the
same discourse or writing, we naturally separate facts from
opinions, testimony from observation, narrative from argument.”[63]
Moreover, our dependence upon a faithful witness,
besides being restricted to matters of fact, is measured by his
opportunities of observation; and it would be absurd to insist
on his being heard with precisely equal belief, whether he
relates, to the best of his knowledge, that which happened
before he was born, or tells an occurrence that passed under
his eyes. If this distinction be not well founded, then has
personal contact with events no advantage; the stranger is
on a footing with the observer; and all the defensive reasonings
which theologians have thrown round Christianity,
from the station which the Apostles occupied as eye-witnesses,
are destitute of meaning; supported though they
are by the sanction of the Apostles themselves, whose constant
claim to belief, when they preached, was this only,
“and we are witnesses of these things.” And if this distinction
be well founded, there is just ground for discriminating
between the different parts of an historian’s narrative, and
giving the highest place of credit to that which he had the
best means of knowing; nor is it possible to admit the rule
which I heard laid down on Wednesday evening, that if we
discover in an Evangelist a single incorrect statement, the
whole book must be repudiated,—selection being wholly out
of the question. Of the birth of Christ, for example, St.
Matthew was not a witness; of his ministry he was; and
has the report of the latter no higher claim upon belief than
the history of the former,—seen as it was only in retrospect,
at the distance of from thirty to sixty years, and through
the colours of a subsequent life so great, so marvellous, so
solemn? Hence, with relation to the initial chapters of the
first and third Evangelists, while I leave them on an equality
with the rest of the Gospels, in respect of authenticity,
I place them in an inferior rank of credibility; especially
since I find it impossible to reconcile them with each other.
To justify this opinion, I will point out two inconsistencies
between them, one chronological, the other geographical.
I heard it affirmed on Wednesday evening, that the former
of these difficulties was only apparent, and arose from the
mistaken calculation of our Christian era, the commencement
of whose year, 1, does not really strike, as it ought, the hour
of the nativity. Well, then, we will throw this era aside for
the moment, and employ another mode of reckoning, prevalent
among the historians of those times, dating from the
building of Rome. St. Luke tells us that in the fifteenth
year of Tiberius, our Lord was about thirty years of age;
this would assign the birth of Christ, at the earliest, to
Jan. 1 of the year of Rome 751. According to St. Matthew,
he was born full one year before the death of King Herod,
whose massacre of the innocents included all under two
years; the latest date that can be fixed for the death of
Herod is Feb. or March 751, so that the nativity falls, according
to one Evangelist not later than 750, according to
the other not earlier than 751.[64] The geographical discrepancy
between the two Evangelists has reference to the
habitual residence of the Virgin Mary; St. Matthew supposes
Bethlehem to have been Joseph’s usual dwelling place;
and “nothing can be more evident than that, according to
the account of St. Luke, Joseph was a total stranger at
Bethlehem.” I quote the opinion of the Rev. Connop Thirlwall,
a divine whose distinguished philological attainments
have given him a European reputation, without at present
raising him to that station in his own church, which would
best suit his merits and her dignity.[65]
The variance between two narratives is no sufficient reason
for rejecting both, though it compels the disbelief of one.
In the present instance, the probabilities appear to preponderate
in favour of St. Luke’s. And, returning from the
particular case to the general rule, I conclude this topic by
repeating, respecting the “credibility” of any set of historical
works, the remark formerly made respecting their
“authenticity.” I protest against its being urged upon us
as an indissoluble magnitude, without fractional parts, incapable
of increment or decrement, analysis or composition,
which must be taken whole, or rejected whole; and I claim
the right, till it can be shown not to belong to me, of reducing
the recorded events of Scripture into classes, according to
their decree of probability and their force of testimony. With
this qualification, we maintain, with all other Christians, the
ample credibility and the actual truth of the Gospel records,
making no divorce between the natural and the miraculous,
but taking both as inseparably woven together into
the texture of the same faithful narrative.
But this step in the argument, I am reminded, cannot be
taken without another, which brings us directly to the intellectual
infallibility of the Apostles. Among the primary
and undisputed facts which they record from personal experience,
are the miracles which they wrought; and miracles,
being an interposition of God, establish the divine authority
of the performer; so that all the lessons and sentiments
propounded by a person so endowed, must be received as
immediate communications from the Unerring Spirit.
To this argument, if somewhat limited in the extent of
its conclusion, I believe that most Unitarians would yield
their assent. Certain it is that their best writers constantly
reason from the miraculous acts, to the doctrinal inspiration
of the first preachers of Christianity; and Dr. Priestley
calls it “egregious trifling”[66] to question the soundness of
the proof. Yet it is surely difficult to reconcile it with
fact and Scripture; and not less so to state it logically in
words. In whatever form it is expressed, it rests upon a
postulate which I hold to be false and irreligious; viz., that
the supernatural is Divine, the natural not Divine; that
God did the miracles, and since the creation has done nothing
else; that Heaven gave a mission to those whom it thus
endowed, and has given no mission to those who are otherwise
endowed. All peculiar consecration of miracle is obtained
by a precisely proportioned desecration of nature;
it is out of a supposed contrast between the two, that
the whole force of the impression arises. The imagination
which overlooks and forgets all that is sacred in the common
earth and sky, that gives itself over to the dream, that all
is dead mechanism,—downright clock-work, wound up, perhaps
at creation, but running down of itself till doom; the
heart that feels nothing divine in life, and nothing holy in
man; that has lost, from Epicurean sloth and sickness of
soul, the healthy faculty of spontaneous wonder, and worship
ever fresh,—are the pupils most ripe for this tutelage.
The Deity must be thrust from the universe, or else benumbed
there, in order to concentrate his energies in the
preternatural. The speculative convert to miracles, is the
practical Atheist of nature.
I need not remind any reader of the Gospels, of the accordance
of this view with the general temper of our Lord’s
mind. His miracles, surely, sprung from compassionate, not
proselytizing impulses; had a practical, not a didactic air;
were not formally wrought as preliminaries to a discourse,
but spontaneously issued from the quietude of pity; they
were not syllogisms, but mercies. Nay, where conviction
was most needed, what is said of him? “He did not many
mighty works there, because of their unbelief;”[67] unless he
wished them to continue in unbelief, he must have regarded
miracles as an improper instrument of overcoming it. And
can we forget his language of rebuke, “except ye see signs
and wonders, ye will not believe,”[68] When he appeals to his
“works,” it is to his “many good works;”[69] to the benevolence
of his acts, not their marvellousness chiefly, to their
being “the works of his Father,”[70] conceived in the spirit
of God, and bearing the impress of his character.
This estimate of the logical force of miracles (the moral
power of those which belong to Christianity is incalculable)
appears to be consonant with experience. I conceive that, in
fact, unbelievers are very seldom convinced by the appeal to
the supernatural; that the avenues of admission to Christianity
lie usually in quite a different direction; and that the
reason and affections surrender to Christ’s spirit, and thus
comprehend the thing signified, before they can receive and
interpret “the sign.” Nay, let me put the case home to
your own experience. Would you, by this instrumentality,
become convinced of that which you before held false? If,
before your eyes, a person were to multiply five loaves into
five hundred, and then say, “this is to prove the doctrines
which I teach, that God is malignant, and that there is no
heaven after death,”—should you be converted, and follow
him as his disciple? Certainly not; the statement being
incredible, the miracle would be powerless. And the inference
I would draw is this: that the primitive force of
persuasion lies in the moral doctrine as estimated by our
reason and conscience, not in the preternatural act displayed
before our senses; for, the moment you test their
forces, by bringing them into collision, the original convictions
of the reason obtain the mastery. It is no answer to
say, that such a case is of impossible occurrence. For the
purpose to which I apply it, viz., to try an experiment with
our own minds, respecting the real argumentative capabilities
of miracles, an imaginary case is not only as good as
an actual one, but a great deal better: for so long as a
good truth and a good miracle are linked together, and
move in the same direction, we rest confusedly in the joint
support of physical and moral evidence, and are unable to
determine which is the ascendant power.
The statements and examples of Scripture tend to the
same conclusion. The personal disciples of our Lord returned
from a mission on which he had sent them; exclaiming,
“Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy
name,”[71] Yet, though they were possessed of these miraculous
powers, their views of the very kingdom which they
had gone forth to preach were at this time exceedingly
narrow and erroneous,—leading them into acts and desires
ambitious, passionate, and false.
Miracles, then, are simply awakening facts: demanding and
securing reverential and watchful regard to something, or to
everything, in the persons performing them; but not specifically
singling out any portion of their doctrinal ideas, and
affording them infallible proof. Is it not competent to God
thus to draw human attention to a person, as well as a truth;—to
a character, as well as a doctrine? At all events, it is
an unwarrantable presumption in us to select for the All-wise
the particular motive with which exclusively he ought to
create a miracle; instead of humbly noting the actual results,
and judging thence of his divine purposes.
But, it will now be urged, whatever sentiments may be
entertained respecting the proper inference from miracles in
general, there is one in particular which directly establishes
the plenary inspiration of the apostles and first disciples. It
is recorded in the book of Acts, that on the day of Pentecost,
when they were with one accord in one place, the Holy Ghost
descended upon all.[72] The two Evangelists, St. Matthew and
St. John, were present; so were St. Peter and St. James; for
all these were Apostles. And we know that, by the laying on
of the hands of the Apostles, the same power passed into all
disciples on whom they might choose to confer the privilege.
We cannot suppose any of the New Testament authors to
have been excluded from this class; and must therefore believe,
that every word of the Christian canon was composed
under the influence of the Unerring Spirit. This argument
is proposed in the following words, by Dr. Tattershall, in his
published sermon on the “Nature and Extent of the Right
of Private Judgment.”
“The Scriptures have been already proved” ... “to be
a true and authentic history; one of the principal facts of
which history is, the outpouring of the gift of the Holy
Spirit upon the disciples of Christ. I take, therefore, as
an example, the Gospel of St. Matthew, and reason as
follows:—I learn, from the history, that Christ’s disciples
were inspired by the Holy Ghost; among this number was
St. Matthew; therefore St. Matthew was inspired; and,
consequently, that which he wrote, under this influence of
inspiration, is to be regarded as the Word of God. Whereas,
on the other hand, if St. Matthew was not inspired, the
history relates that which is not true, and the credibility of
the whole sacred history is at once destroyed: and, with it,
both the Church, and also Christianity itself, must fall to
the ground.”[73]
Now to convey, at the outset, a distinct idea of the reason
why this argument does not convince me, let me say, that I
believe St. Matthew to have been inspired; but I do not believe
him to have been infallible. I am sure that he nowhere
puts forth any such claim: and if he does not affirm it himself,
I know not who can affirm it for him. Indeed, to the
advocates of this doctrine it must seem strange, that even St.
John the Divine, instead of bearing down all doubt by this
overwhelming claim, should so modestly and carefully conciliate
the belief of his readers, by appealing to his own human
opportunities of information: “and he that saw it bare record,
and his record is true:”[74] “this is the disciple that testifieth
of these things, and wrote these things:”[75] and that
St. Luke should content himself with saying, at the commencement
of his Gospel, that its materials were furnished
by those who “from the beginning were eye-witnesses.”[76]
Everything in this argument clearly depends on the meaning
which we are to attach to the phrases “Holy Ghost,”—“Inspiration,”—“Spirit of God,”—and
other forms of expression
employed to denote this peculiar influence. What,
according to the Scriptures, were the appropriate functions
of this Divine Agent? and are we to include among them an
exemption of those on whom its power fell from all possibilities
of error, in narration, in reasoning, in expectation, in
speculative and practical doctrine? In short, do the sacred
writers represent this Holy Spirit as conferring intellectual
infallibility?
Now the original account of the descent of the Holy Spirit
certainly implies nothing of the kind.[77] The gift of tongues,
which St. Paul, though possessed of it in the highest degree,[78]
places in the lowest rank of spiritual gifts,[79] and which he
expressly discriminates from “the word of wisdom,” and
“the word of knowledge,”[80] is the only preternatural effect
there ascribed to this new influence. Other passages descriptive
of this agency equally fall short of this claim of
infallibility. We read, for example,[81] that by the direction
of the Apostles, seven persons were to be selected from the
general body of believers, who were to be men “full of the
Holy Ghost, and wisdom,”—the two attributes being distinguished.
It must be supposed, too, that the qualifications
demanded of these officers had some proportionate reference
to the duties assigned. These duties were simply the management
of the society’s financial accounts, and the distribution
of its eleemosynary funds. When it is said that John the
Baptist should “be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his
mother’s womb,”[82] are we to understand, that from earliest
infancy he was infallible?—he who, in the very midst of
his ministry, sent to Jesus for information on this question,
“Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?”[83]—a
question, be it observed, which implies doubt on the
great subject-matter of the Baptist’s whole mission. Perhaps,
however, it will be admitted that there are inferior
degrees of this inspiration; so that passages like this may
be found, in which the phrases denoting it are used in a
lower sense. But, it will be said, in its highest intensity it
cannot be so restricted, and is even distinctly affirmed to
involve infallibility. The operations of the spirit of God are
distributed by theologians into two classes,—the extraordinary,
experienced by the apostles, and exempting them from
liability to error,—the ordinary, which are assured to all
true disciples, and whose office implies no further illumination
of the understanding, than is needful for the sanctification
of the heart. Now if this statement and division
be really true and scriptural, we shall doubtless find Christ
and his Apostles separating their promises of divine
influence into two corresponding sets; keeping things so
different, clear of all confusion; and fully as exact in this
“discerning of spirits,” as their modern disciples. But so far
is this from being the case, that between the greater spirit
of the twelve apostles, and the less spirit of the general
church, no distinction whatever is drawn; nor any between
the intellectual infallibility which was to await the apostles,
and the spiritual sanctification promised to the faithful
multitude of all ages. Nay, it so happens, that the most
unlimited expressions relating to the subject occur in such
connections, that they cannot be confined to the apostles,
but obviously apply to all private Christians. For instance,
shall we say that our Lord’s promise of the “Comforter,
which is the Holy Ghost,” explained by the remarkable
synonym which he appended, “the spirit of truth” which
should “teach them all things,” and “lead them into all
truth”—implies universal illumination of the understanding?
Close at hand is a clause forbidding the interpretation,
by spreading the promise over all ages of the
church; “I will pray the Father, and he will give you
another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever,
even the spirit of truth;”[84] and the expression is accordingly
quoted by Dr. Wardlaw, as descriptive of the common
operations of the spirit.[85] Again, St. John in his first
General Epistle (addressed of course to the whole church)
says, “Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know
all things.”[86] Take then the strongest and most unqualified
expressions on this subject, and if they prove the infallibility
of the apostles, they prove the same of all private Christians.
Or, take those which show sanctification to be the characteristic
office of the Holy Spirit with respect to the general church,
and you show that this also was its agency on the Apostles.
One or two texts are occasionally adduced in defence of
this doctrine; their paucity and inapplicability show how
slight is the scripture foundation on which it rests. By far
the most remarkable of these is found in 2 Tim. iii. 16. “All
scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable
for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness.” Now observe,
1. That the verb is, which constitutes the whole affirmation
here, has nothing corresponding to it in the Greek, and
is put in by the English translators. Of course the sentence
requires a verb somewhere, but the place of its insertion
depends on the discretion of the translator. Baxter, Grotius,
and other critics, accordingly render the passage thus: “All
scripture, given by inspiration of God, is also profitable,”
&c. The Apostle has already been reminding Timothy of
the importance of those scriptures with which he had been
acquainted from his youth, to his personal faith: and he
now adds, that they are also useful for his public teaching.
He therefore simply says that whatever scriptures are given
by inspiration of God, are thus profitable.
2. Since Paul first speaks generally of those scriptures
with which Timothy had been familiar from his youth, and
then proceeds to select from these a certain class, as given by
inspiration of God, his description extends to no portion of
the New Testament, and only to some writings of the Old.
The purpose for which he recommends them, indicates what
books were in his thoughts. As they were to aid Timothy
in his public duty of convincing his countrymen that Jesus
was the Messiah, he refers to those books which had sustained
the expectation of a Messiah,—the Jewish Prophets.
“The whole extent of his doctrine, I conceive to have been
expressed by the Apostle Peter thus: ‘prophecy came not
in old time by the will of men; but holy men of God spake,
moved by the Holy Spirit;’[87]—that those also who recorded
these speeches, wrote by the Holy Spirit; that, in addition
to the superhuman message, there was a superhuman report
of it, is a notion which no trace can be found in the
apostolic writings. The whole amount, therefore, of the
Apostle’s doctrine is this; that the prophets had a preternatural
knowledge of future events; and that their communications
were recorded in the prophetic books. By the
admission of these points, the theory of inspired composition
obviously gains nothing.”[88]
No appeal can be more unfortunate for the advocate of
plenary inspiration, than to the writings of the great apostle
of the Gentiles. Not a trace can be found in them of the
cold, oracular dignity,—the bold, authoritative enunciation,—the
transcendental exposition, equally above argument and
passion, in which conscious and confessed infallibility would
deliver its decisions. All the natural faculties of the man
are shed forth, with most vehement precipitation, on every
page. He pleads with his disciples, as if kneeling at their
feet. He withstands Peter to the face,—though no less
inspired than himself,—because he was to be blamed for
unsound sentiments and inconsistent conduct. He hurries so
eagerly, and sinks so deep into an illustration, that scarcely
can he make a timely retreat. He too quickly seizes an analogy
to apply it with exactitude and precision. And above
all, he is incessantly engaged in reasoning: and by that very
act, he selects as his own the common human level of
address,—generously submits his statements to the verdict
of our judgment, and leaves that judgment free to accept or
to reject them. Nor is it on mere subordinate points that
he contents himself with this method, which, by challenging
search, abandons infallibility. The great controversies of
the infant church, which involved the whole future character
of Christianity, which decided how far it should conciliate
Polytheism, and how much preserve of Judaism, the apostle
of the Gentiles boldly confides to reasoning: and his
writings are composed chiefly of arguments, protective of
the Gospel from compromise with Idolatry on the one hand,
and slavery to the Law on the other.
Nor is this denied by any instructed divine of any church.
In insisting “upon the duty of professed Christians to abstain
from all compliance with the idolatrous practices of the
heathens around them,” says Dr. Tattershall, “St. Paul, even
though an inspired Apostle, does not proceed upon the mere
dictum of authority, but appeals to the reason of those to
whom he writes; and calls upon them to reflect upon the
inconsistency of such conduct, with the nature of their
Christian profession. In fact, he produces arguments, and
desires them to weigh the reasons which he assigns, and see
whether they do not fully sustain the conclusion which he
draws from them. ‘I speak,’ says he, ‘as to wise men,
JUDGE YE what I say.’”[89]
If then the Apostle wrote his letters under inspiration,
have we not here direct authority to sit in judgment on the
productions of inspiration, or the contents of the word of
God; not merely to learn what is said, but to consider its
inherent reasonableness and truth? No one, indeed, can state
more forcibly than Dr. Tattershall himself the principle, of
which this conclusion is only a particular case. “When I
reason with an opponent,” says he, “I do not invade his
acknowledged right of private judgment, nor do I require
of him to surrender that judgment to me. I am, in fact,
doing the precise contrary of this. I am, by the very act
of reasoning, both acknowledging his right of judgment,
and making an appeal to it.”[90]
To acknowledge the right of judgment, is to forego the
claim of infallibility, and to concede the privilege of dissent;
and thus frankly does St. Paul deal with me. Vainly do his
modern expounders attempt to make him the instrument of
their own assumptions. To appeal to my reason, and then,
if I cannot see the force of the proof, to hold me up as a
blasphemer and a rebel against the word of God, is an inconsistency,
of which only the degenerate followers of the
great Apostle could be guilty. His writings disown, in
every page, the injurious claims which would confer on
them an artificial authority, to the ruin of their true power
and beauty. In order to show the absolute divine truth of
all that may be written by an inspired man, it is not
enough to establish the presence of inspiration, you must
prove also the absence of everything else. And this can
never be done with any writings made up, like the Apostle’s,
of a scarce-broken tissue of argument and illustration. It
is clear that he was not forbidden to reason and expound,
to speculate and refute, to seek access, by every method of
persuasion, to the minds he was sent to evangelize; to
appeal, at one time to his interpretation of prophecy, at
another to the visible glories of creation, and again to the
analogies of history. Where could have been his zeal, his
freshness, his versatility of address, his self-abandonment, his
various success, if his natural faculties had not been left to
unembarassed action? And the moment you allow free action
to his intelligence and conscience, you inevitably admit the
possibilities of error, which are inseparable from the operations
of the human mind. To grant that Paul reasons, and
be startled at the idea that he may reason incorrectly,—to
admit that he speculates, and yet be shocked at the surmise
that he may speculate falsely,—to praise his skill in illustration,
yet shrink in horror when something less apposite
is pointed out, is an obvious inconsistency. The human
understanding cannot perform its functions without taking
its share of the chances of error; nor can a critic of its
productions have any perception of their truth and excellence,
without conceding the possibility of fallacies and
faults. We must give up our admiration of the Apostles as
men, if we are to listen to them always as oracles of God.
But I must proceed to my last argument, which is a plain
one, founded upon facts, open to every one who can read his
Bible. I state it in the words of Mr. Thirlwall: “the discrepancies
found in the Gospels compel us to admit that
the superintending control of the Spirit was not exerted to
exempt the sacred writings altogether from errors and inadvertencies;”[91]
nay, he speaks of “the more rigid theory of
inspiration” having been so long “abandoned by the learned
on account of the insuperable difficulties opposed to it by
the discrepancies found in the Gospels, that it would now
be a waste of time to attack it.”[92]
I heard it affirmed on Wednesday evening, that, in the
sacred writings, no case can possibly occur of self-contradiction
or erroneous statement; that the very idea of inspiration
is utterly opposed to all supposition of the presence
of error; that the occurrence of such a blemish would prove,
that the writer was not so under the immediate teaching
and superintendence of Almighty God as to be preserved
from error; or, in other words, that he was not inspired;
that the erroneous passage must indeed be rejected, but, with
it, the whole work in which it is found, as destitute of divine
authority. I have brought Mr. Thirlwall to confront the
question of fact; let me quote Dr. Paley in relation to this
statement of principle. “I know not,” he says, “a more
rash or unphilosophical conduct of the understanding, than
to reject the substance of a story, by reason of some diversities
in the circumstances with which it is related. The
usual character of human testimony (Dr. Paley is discussing
the discrepancies between the several Gospels), is, substantial
truth under circumstantial variety.” “On the contrary, a
close and minute agreement induces the suspicion of confederacy
and fraud.”[93] If both these statements be true, the
phenomena of inspiration would be identical with those of
confederacy and fraud. I estimate the Scriptures far too
highly to hesitate, for a moment, about pointing out to your
notice certain small variations and inconsistencies, utterly
destructive of the doctrine of plenary inspiration; but absolutely
confirmatory, in some instances, of the veracity of
the historians, and, in all, compatible with it. Our faith
scorns the insinuation, that these sacred writings require
“any forbearance from the boasted understanding of man.”
1. The different Evangelists are at variance with each
other, with respect to the calling of the first Apostles. They
differ with respect to the time, the place, the order; e.g.:
First, as to time; Matthew[94] represents the imprisonment
of John the Baptist as the occasion of our Lord’s beginning
to preach, and as preceding the call of any Apostles.
John[95] represents Andrew and Simon, Philip and Nathanael,
as called,—the miracle at Cana as wrought, a Passover
as attended at Jerusalem,—a residence of Jesus and his disciples
in the rural district of Judæa, as going on; and then
adds, “for John was not yet cast into prison.”
Next, as to place; according to Matthew and Mark,[96]
Andrew and Peter are called by the Lake of Galilee; according
to John, in Judæa.
And as to order; Matthew and Mark represent the two
pairs of brothers, as successively called: first, Andrew and
Peter; then, after a short interval, James and John.
Luke,[97] making no mention of Andrew, represents the
others as simultaneously called.
John represents Andrew as called with himself; and
Peter, as subsequently called, through the instrumentality of
his brother Andrew. Of James (though affirmed by the other
Evangelists to have been his own companion in the call),
he is silent.
The three first writers not being present, it is nothing
wonderful that they are less accurate than the fourth, who
was.
2. The three denials of Peter, as recorded by the first,
third, and fourth Evangelists, will be found inconsistent in
their minute circumstances. The denials are uttered,
John:[107] “Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews.”
5. Matthew[108] and Mark[109]; state that our Lord on the
cross was reviled by both the malefactors; but Luke[110]
affirms that when one of them was guilty of this shocking
mockery, he was rebuked by the other; and that the latter
received the well-known assurance, “this day shalt thou be
with me in Paradise.”
6. The last discrepancy which I shall mention, has
reference to the final Passover, and its relation to the day
of crucifixion. But in order to understand the case, and
indeed to read with intelligence the whole series of events
connected with the crucifixion and resurrection, it is necessary
to bear in mind the following facts:—
(a.) That the Jewish day commenced in the evening, and
was reckoned from sunset to sunset.
(b.) That the Jewish Sabbath was the seventh day of the
week, and extended from six o’clock on Friday evening, to
the same time on Saturday.
(c.) That at the Passover, the paschal lamb was slain at
the end of one Jewish day, and eaten immediately, i.e., at
the commencement of the next, or about six or seven in the
evening. The three hours before sunset, during which it
was prepared, were called preparation of the Passover, and
belonged to the fourteenth of the month; while the hours
after sunset, during which it was eaten, belonged to the fifteenth.
The phrase, preparation of the Sabbath, was used
in like manner, to denote the three hours before sunset every
Friday.
(d.) The Passover being fixed to the fifteenth of the month,
and that a lunar month, necessarily moved over all the days
of the week; and might fall, of course, into coincidence
with the weekly Sabbath.
(e.) The feast of unleavened bread was a festival of seven
days’ duration, the first day of which coincided with that
on which the Passover was eaten, following of course that
on which it was killed.
These things being premised, we are prepared to notice
the points on which the Evangelists agree, and those in which
they disagree, in their accounts of the crucifixion, and its
connected events. They all agree in assigning the same
distinguishing incidents of our Lord’s personal history to the
four great days of the week most interesting to Christians,
viz., to the Thursday the last supper; to the Friday, the
crucifixion; to the Saturday, the sleep in the sepulchre; to
the Sunday, the resurrection. But about the position of the
Jewish Passover upon these days, they singularly differ; St.
John fixing it on the Friday evening, and making it therefore
coincide with the weekly Sabbath; the other three fixing
it on the Thursday evening, and so following it up by the
Sabbath. The variance is the more interesting from its
influence on our views of the last supper; which, according
to the three first Evangelists was the Passover, according to
the fourth, was not the Passover. The institution of the
Communion, as a Christian transformation of the Jewish
Festival rests entirely on the former of these narratives;
St. John is altogether silent respecting it. Yet it was he
who leaned on Jesus’ bosom, and stood beneath his cross.
Now what is the just inference from such discrepancies?
Is it that the writers were incompetent reporters of the main
facts? Not so; for there are few biographers, however well-informed,
whose testimony, produced in circumstances at all
parallel, would not yield, on the application of as severe a
test, inconsistencies more considerable. Is it that they are
not veracious? Not so; for not a trace of self-interest is
discernible in these cases. Is it that they were not inspired?
Not so; for the transition they underwent from peasants to
apostles, from dragging the lake to regenerating the world,
is the sublimest case of inspiration (except one) with which
God has refreshed the nations. But it is this; that they
were not intellectually infallible.
I have now endeavoured to give some idea of two different
ways of regarding the Christian records.
I. They possess an internal and self-evidence, in their
own moral beauty and consistency, and the unimaginable
perfection of the great Son of God, whom they bring to life
before us. With this evidence, which is open to every pure
mind and true heart,—which speaks to the conscience like
a voice of God without, conversing with the spirit of God
within, all those may be content, who think that, to accept
Christ as the image of Deity, and the authoritative model
of Duty, is to be a Christian.
II. Those, however, who think that, in order to be Christians,
we must hold one only doctrinal creed, containing
many things hard to understand, and harder to believe, are
aware that nothing short of a divine infallibility can prevail
with us to receive a system so repugnant to our nature.
And as this is incapable of self-proof, they appeal chiefly to
the external evidence and foreign attestation which belong
to the Christian records; beginning with the historical
method, they endeavour to show,
(1.) That we have the original words of the Gospel witnesses
(authenticity):
(2.) That, this being the case, we have the very Words
of God (plenary inspiration).
Now let me detain you by one reflection on these two
methods. Suppose each, in turn, to prove insufficient, as
a basis of Christianity, the other remaining firm; and consider
what consequences will result.
If the internal or self-evidence be inadequate, (which our
objectors must suppose, for it cannot, they admit, prove
their creeds,) then every one must seek a foundation for his
faith in the other. He must satisfy himself, in limine, of
the personal authorship of the books in the Canon; a purely
literary inquiry, and one of extraordinary labour, even to
those who enjoy every advantage for its prosecution. In
order to be saved, doctrines must be embraced, requiring for
their proof an inspiration, which does not exist in the New
Testament writings, except on the supposition of their
apostolic origin. The ascertainment, then, of this point, is
the necessary prelude to all saving faith; this duty lies on
the outermost threshold of our acceptance with the Giver of
salvation. So that God hangs the eternal welfare of every
man on an investigation so critical and elaborate, that a whole
life of research is not too much to understand it, and the most
familiar with its details are, by no means, the most uniformly
confident of its results; an investigation which assigns a
certain date to each book, as the lowest limit of security;
and says, if you dare to fix this letter or that Gospel upon
a time later by half a century, you are lost for ever.
But may not the young and the ignorant trust in the guidance
of a teacher? In his sermon on private judgment,
Dr. Tattershall treats of this question, and lays down the
following rule:—“In the case of adults, such reliance is
justifiable so far, and no farther, than it is unavoidable.
So far as God has not given the ability, or the opportunity
of investigation, so far he will not require it; but in
whatever degree any person has the power and opportunity
of examining the will of God for himself,—in that
degree,—whether he exercise his privilege or not,—God
will hold him responsible. As to the liability to fall into
error;—beyond all doubt, such liability exists, whether we
submit to the guidance of any teacher, or exercise our own
private judgment.”[111] How, let me ask, can we avoid
drawing the following inferences?
(1.) That the greater part of mankind must be held to
be in a condition rendering this reliance on a teacher
“unavoidable.”
(2.) For this reliance, then, such portion of mankind
must be held justified in the sight of God.
(3.) But such dependence makes them liable to err;
and must, in fact, have led countless multitudes into
error.
(4.) If these errors are fatal to salvation, then Godinflicts eternal torments for the inevitable results of a
justifiable act.
(5.) If these errors are not fatal to salvation, then
there is salvation out of the faith.
The result, then, of this external system is, that you
may be saved on either of two conditions; that you belong
to the orthodox literary sect, and hold the antiquarian
opinions of the priests; or, that you belong to the ignorant,
and can find out the right persons to whom to say,
“I will believe, as you believe.”
Reverse the supposition. Conceive that in the process,
becoming ever more searching, of historical inquiry, the
other and external method should be found to be inadequate
to the maintenance of its superstructure; what
would be the fate of Christianity, trusted solely to its self-evidence?
I will imagine even the worst: and suppose
that the first three Gospels are shown to be not personally
authentic, not the independent productions of three apostolic
men; but a compilation of very composite structure,
consisting of (we will say) some thirty fragments, obviously
from different hands, and all of anonymous origin.
In such case, the individual testimony of eye-witnesses
being gone, the whole edifice of external proof which
supports a dogmatic Christianity, must fall. But the self-evidence
of a moral and spiritual Christianity, of a Christianity
that clings to the person and spirit of Christ, is
not only unharmed, but even incalculably increased. For
how often, and how truly, has it been argued, that the
mere inspection of the four Gospels is enough to prove
the reality of Christ; that the invention, and consistent
maintenance of a character so unapproachable, so destitute
of all archetype beneath the skies, so transcending the
fictions of the noblest genius, and so unlike them, are
things utterly incredible, were they supposed even of one
writer: and that, for the same divine image to gleam forth
with coincident perfection from four, belongs to the highest
order of impossibilities. What then should we say, if these
four were resolved into thirty? The coalescence of so
many fragmentary records, could no more make a Christ,
than the upsetting of an artist’s colours could paint a
Raffaelle. Whatever then becomes of Church Christianity,
that which lives in Christ, and has the power of love in
man, is everlasting as the soul.
We are warned that “the Bible is not a shifting,
mutable, uncertain thing.” We echo the warning, with
this addition, that Christianity is a progressive thing; not
a doctrine dead, and embalmed in creeds, but a spirit
living and impersonated in Christ. Two things are
necessary to a revelation: its record, which is permanent;
its readers, who perpetually change. From the
collision of the lesson and the mind on which it drops,
starts up the living religion that saves the soul within,
and acts on the theatre of the world without. Each eye
sees what it can, and what it needs; each age develops a
new and nobler idea from the immortal page. We are
like children, who, in reading a book above their years,
pass innocently and unconsciously over that which is not
suited to their state. In this divine tale of Christ, every
class and every period seizes, in succession, the views and
emotions which most meet its wants. It is with Scripture
as with nature. The everlasting heavens spread above the
gaze of Herschel, as they did over that of Abraham; yet
the latter saw but a spangled dome, the former a forest of
innumerable worlds. To the mind of this profound observer,
there was as much a new creation, as if those
heavens had been, at the time, called up and spread before
his sight. And thus it is with the Word of God. As its
power and beauty develop themselves continually, it is as
if Heaven were writing it now, and leaf after leaf dropped
directly from the skies. Nor is there any heresy like that,
which denies this progressive unfolding of divine wisdom,
shuts up the spirit of heaven in the verbal metaphysics and
scholastic creeds of a half-barbarous period,—treats the
inspiration of God as a dry piece of antiquity, and cannot
see that it communes afresh with the soul of every age;
and sheds, from the living Fount of truth, a guidance
ever new.
Great allowance must perhaps be made for the clergymen who
persist, after repeated expostulation, in their assumption that
the Improved Version is an authoritative exposition of Unitarian
theology. The convenience of limiting their studies, for the most
part, to a single work, and the inconvenience of dispensing with the
previous labours of Dr. Nares, and Archbishop Magee, whose
hostile criticisms furnish the orthodox divine with invaluable prolegomena
to the book, ought to diminish our surprise at the tenacious
adherence to this ground of attack. The advantage too of giving
fresh currency to the popular notion, that some dreadful production
exists, containing unmentionable impieties, and constituting the
“Unitarian Bible,” is undeniable. It is evident that the utility
of fostering this impression is by no means overlooked: for after
strong assertion and contemptuous comments have given to a
very few passages of the Improved Version the appearance, to an
unlearned audience, of falsification of the word of God, I have
heard it said, that these cases are but a small sample of a system,
which might be illustrated to an indefinite extent from every page.
As there are not, on an average, more than two variations in a page
from Archbishop Newcome, the charge must, in an incalculable
majority of instances, fall on him.
I am at a loss, however, to perceive even any controversial advantage
to be gained by the rash statement of Mr. Byrth; that every
Unitarian minister is as much bound to uphold the criticism and interpretation
of the Improved Version, as the Established Clergy to
maintain the Thirty-nine Articles. A clergyman, it is known, signs
the articles, and solemnly contracts to preach in conformity with
them; a minister among Unitarians may never see the Improved
Version, or hear its name. During a five years’ course of study at
the college where I received my education for the ministry, I do
not remember any mention of it in the theological classes, and only
two in the Greek classes: both of which were condemnatory; one,
of the introduction of the English indefinite article to indicate, in
certain cases, the absence of the definite article in the original; the
other, of the rendering of the preposition διά, with the genitive, by
the word “for.” The fact that most ministers of our persuasion
subscribe to the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, which
has succeeded to the property in the Improved Version, and continues
to circulate it, no more makes them responsible for its criticisms
than a contribution to the Bible Society makes a clergyman accountable
for the forgery of the “heavenly witnesses.” The one aids in
distributing a possibly defective, the other a certainly interpolated,
copy of the Christian records. Let us apply another test to this
imprudent parallel between the established clergy, and the Unitarian
ministers. In the United States of America, no one, I presume,
could take holy orders in the Episcopal church, without pledging his
assent to the Thirty-nine Articles; and should he cease to approve of
them, his ordination vow would require him to resign his preferment.
But in that country are hundreds of Unitarian ministers, who know
nothing of the Improved Version; and would be as much astonished
to be told that they were bound by it, as would Dr. Tattershall to
hear that he must answer for the Oxford Tracts.
But the mere fact, that within a year after the publication of this
work, a Unitarian divine, a subscriber to the Unitarian society, in a
Unitarian periodical, submitted it to a criticism far more searching
and elaborate than that which an acumen sharpened by theological
hostility is now able to produce, is sufficient to set in its true light
the statement which I have quoted. I beg to call the attention of
our Reverend opponents to the following enumeration of the points,
to which the censures of the Reviewer (Dr. Carpenter) are directed.
(1.) The selection of Newcome’s Revision, instead of the authorized
version, as the basis.
(2.) The departure, and without any intelligible rule, from Griesbach’s
text, which, in the introduction, had been mentioned in a way
to excite the expectation of its invariable adoption. Of these departures,
a complete table is given.
(3.) The neglect of proper acknowledgment and defence of
these departures.
(4.) The professed employment of brackets for one purpose, (to
indicate words which, according to Griesbach, were probably, though
not certainly, to be expunged,) and the actual use of them for
another; as, for example, in the introduction of St. Matthew’s
Gospel, which is thus enclosed.
(5.) The use of italics (intended to indicate doubtful authority)
without adequate evidence of doubtful authority, and in violation of
the apparent intention to repudiate critical conjecture. And in particular,
the use of this type in the introduction to St. Luke’s gospel;
which “the evidence is far too little to justify;” and in the introduction
to St. Matthew’s gospel. Both these examples are considered
by the reviewer as instances of conjectural criticism.
(6.) The unwarrantable license allowed in general to conjectural
emendation of the text; of which particular cases are adduced; as
the transposition of verses, John i. 15, 18; and, in a lower sense of
the word conjecture, the omission of διὰ τῆς πίστεως, Rom. iii. 25;
and the καὶ in 2 Tim. iii. 16.
(7.) The departures from the received text without notice. Of
these departures, a complete table is given.
(8.) The departures from Newcome’s Revision, without sufficient
notice; of these, a list was given, and a synoptical table has since
been published in the appendix to Dr. Carpenter’s reply to the
“unanswered” Archbishop Magee.
(9.) The use of the English indefinite article, in certain cases,
where there is no Greek definite article. For example, the Centurion’s
exclamation at the crucifixion, Matt. xxvii. 54; in his remarks
on which, Mr. Byrth will perceive that he has been anticipated by
the reviewer.
(10.) The introduction of doctrinal notes, which the reviewer
thinks ought to have been entirely excluded.[112]
The culpable omission of the epithet, “Unitarian,” from the description
of the “Society for promoting Christian Knowledge,” in
the title-page of the first edition, has since received the censure of
the same friendly but just critic.[113]
If then, all that is original and “orthodox,” in the recent assaults
on the Improved Version, be the sarcasm and extravagance; and all
that is “candid” and “scholar-like” was long ago anticipated by a
Unitarian divine, (to whom Dr. Nares awards the praise of being
“the very learned and dispassionate reviewer,”) with what propriety
can we be held responsible, as Unitarian ministers, for the peculiarities
of the work, and called upon to defend it from strictures, produced
at second-hand in Christ Church, and originally published
among ourselves. If Dr. Carpenter had been minister in Liverpool,
instead of Bristol, would he have been bound to come forward and
answer himself?
I by no means intend to charge the clergymen engaged in this
controversy with plagiarism. Their great authority, Archbishop
Magee, so completely withheld in his postscript, all notice of his
obligations to the Unitarian Reviewer, that a reader may well be
excused for not knowing that there was such a person. Nor do I at
all doubt the competency of our respected opponents to originate
whatever they have advanced, without the aid of any one’s previous
researches. I simply affirm that they have been anticipated, in a
quarter, and to an extent, which disprove their assertions respecting
the acceptance and influence of the Improved Version among
Unitarians.
For the very same reason, however, that we are not bound to
praise this work when faults are fairly attributed to it, neither are we
bound to be silent, when merit is unjustly denied it. With the
corrections introduced in the fourth and fifth Editions, it has the
exclusive honour of accomplishing the following important ends:
(1.) It exhibits the text of the New Testament in the most perfect
state, being conformed to Griesbach’s second Edition.
(2.) It enables the English reader to compare this critical with
the Received text, all their variations being noticed.
(3.) It places before its possessors Archbishop Newcome’s Revision,
which otherwise would have passed into unmerited oblivion.
Wherever it departs from its basis, and advances any new translation,
the Primate’s rendering is given also; so that the whole extent of
the innovation is seen, and free choice afforded to the reader.
When the advocates of the common version shall exert themselves
to bring it into accordance with the true text, they will attack the
Improved Version, from a safer position. But so long as they leave
with this heretical work the sole praise, among British translations,
of showing what the Evangelists and Apostles really wrote, and
content themselves with circulating a version containing words and
passages, without mark or warning, which they know to be spurious,
and in more than one case, to be ancient theological allies of their
creed, they are too much open to the charge of availing themselves
of detected forgeries, to be entitled to read lectures to others, about
reverence for the text. Dr. Tattershall enforces well “the duty of
preserving the Canon of Scripture in its integrity.” Will he permit
me to remind him of the duty of preserving it in its simplicity: or is
there, in the bare proposal of curtailment of the volume, a sinfulness
which does not exist in the practical and persevering maintenance of
known interpolation?
The argument of Mr. Belsham against the authenticity of Matthew’s
account of the miraculous conception appears to me very unsound:
but Dr. Tattershall’s criticism upon it, I must think to be altogether
unsuccessful; if at least, amid its intricate construction, I have really
apprehended the points to which its force is applied. In rejecting
this portion of Scripture, Mr. Belsham relies on the authority of the
Nazarenes and Ebionites, or early Hebrew Christians: who are
affirmed by Epiphanius and Jerome, to have used copies of Matthew’s
Gospel, without the introductory passages in question.
As the value of this argument depends altogether on the character
of the attesting parties and documents, Dr. Tattershall calls in question
the respectability of them all; and disparages, first, the ancient
Nazarenes and Ebionites themselves; secondly, the testimony, in
this matter, of Epiphanius and Jerome; thirdly, the Hebrew gospel
or record, which they describe. The positions advanced under every
one of these heads, appear to me to be erroneous.
I. Nothing, it is said, can be more incorrect than to admit the
claim of the Nazarenes and Ebionites to be regarded as the original,
or main body of Hebrew Christians. They were a sect, at first
united, then divided into two; successors of the Judaizing Christians;
and after Adrian’s destruction of Jerusalem (A. D. 132), they separated
from the general community of the Christian Church.
I certainly had conceived that this quæstio vexata of ecclesiastical
history, might be considered as set at rest, since the controversy
respecting it between Bishop Horsley and Dr. Priestley; and still
more, since the production of many additional loca probantia from
the Fathers, by Eichhorn, Olshausen, Bertholdt and others, who
have engaged in the inquiry respecting the origin of the three first
gospels. If, however, the subject is still open to agitation, the
principle on which it must be discussed is evident. If, as Dr.
Tattershall states, the Nazarenes and Ebionites did not embrace
in extent, the main body, and in time, the original societies, of
Jewish believers, it is incumbent on him to find some clear traces of
other or earlier Hebrew Christians, denominated by some different
term, or at all events excluded from these. Until such persons are
discovered, in the primitive history of the church, the Nazarenes
and Ebionites must remain in undisturbed possession of their title as
“The early Hebrew Christians.” Meanwhile, in direct proof of
their claim to be so regarded, I submit the following considerations:
(1.) Their name is applied, in a direct definition, to the whole of
the Jewish Christians. Origen says, “Those from among the Jews
who received Jesus as the Christ,” were called Ebionites.[114]
(2.) The characteristic sentiments of this “sect,” are ascribed to
the early Hebrew Christians generally. These were, the persuasion
of the continued obligation of the Mosaic law, on persons of Jewish
birth, and the belief that Christ was a creature, some considering
him as simply human, others as pre-existent.[115] Origen says, “Those
from among the Jews who have faith in Jesus, have not abandoned
their ancient law; for they live in conformity with it, deriving
even their name (according to the true interpretation of the word,)
from the poverty of the law; for Ebion, among the Jews, means
poor.”[116] Origen again says, “And when you observe the belief
respecting the Saviour, held by those from among the Jews who have
faith in Jesus, some supposing that he was of Mary and Joseph,
and others that he was of Mary alone and the Holy Spirit, but still
without the notion of his Deity, &c.”[117]
(3.) The characteristic Gospel of the sect (under its frequent
title “Gospel according to the Hebrews”) was used by the Hebrew
Christians generally. Eusebius says: “In this number, some have
placed the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which is a favourite
especially with the Hebrews who receive Christ.”[118] The gospel
here given to “the Hebrews who received Christ,” is given in the
following to the “Ebionites,” by the same author. “They (the
Ebionites) made use only of that which is called ‘the Gospel
according to the Hebrews;’ the rest they made small account of.”[119]
If these passages be thought sufficient to identify the Ebionites
and Nazarenes with the “main body of Hebrew Christians,” perhaps
the following may be held to prove their early existence; as it
states that they presented the Apostle John with a motive for composing
his Gospel: Epiphanius says, “When therefore the blessed
John comes and finds men speculating about the human nature of
Christ,—the Ebionites going astray respecting the genealogy of
Christ in the flesh, deduced from Abraham, and by Luke from
Adam; and when he finds the Cerinthians and Merinthians affirming
his natural birth as a mere man; the Nazarenes too, and many other
heresies; coming as he did, fourth, or in the rear of the Evangelists,
he began, if I may say so, to recall the wanderers, and those who
speculated about the human nature of Christ, and to say to them,
when from his station in the rear, he beheld some declining into
rugged paths, and quitting, as it were, the straight and true one,
‘whither are you tending, whither are you going, you who are treading
a path rugged and obstructed, conducting, moreover, to a precipice?
Return, it is not so; the God, Logos, who was begotten of
the Father from the beginning, is not from Mary only.’”[120]
That the Nazarenes and Ebionites were truly “the early Hebrew
Christians,” must be considered as a fact established by such evidence
as the foregoing, till some testimony to the contrary can be produced.
That they were the successors of the Judaizing Christians reproved
by St. Paul is an assertion destitute of support; for the opponents
who troubled the Apostle of the Gentiles were distinguished by their
pertinacious attempts, as Hebrews, to force the Mosaic Law on
Gentile converts; whereas, respecting the Nazarenes, Lardner
observes, “Divers learned moderns are now convinced of this, and
readily allow, that the Jewish believers, who were called Nazarenes,
did not impose the ordinances of the law upon others, though they
observed them as the descendants of Israel and Abraham.”[121]
The application by Epiphanius of the words “sect” and “heretics”
to these believers, does not prove that he was speaking of a different
class from the early Hebrew Christians; but only that this same
class began, in his time, to be spoken of in a different and more
disparaging way. He is the first writer, so far as I can discover,
who describes them in such reproachful language. On this point
Dr. Wall observes: “He styles them heretics, for no other reason
that I can see, but that they, together with their Christian faith,
continued the use of circumcision and of the Jewish rites; which
things St. Paul never blamed in a Jewish Christian, though, in the
Gentile Christian, he did: and Epiphanius with the same propriety,
as far as I can perceive, might have blamed St. James, bishop of
Jerusalem, and those thousands of Jewish Christians with him,
concerning whom James said to Paul, ‘Thou seest, brother, how
many thousands of Jews there are which believe, and they are all
zealous for the law.’”[122]
And as to the Nazarenes and Ebionites separating from the general
community of the Christian church, after the second destruction of
Jerusalem by Adrian, and thus bringing upon themselves the opprobrium
of heresy, the fact, stated in this form, cannot be proved.
From the first, the Hebrew Christians had formed a separate body
from the Gentile Christians. But their proportion to the whole body
of believers seems to have been for some time too considerable to
admit of their being spoken of in contemptuous language. When
the Gentile portion of the Church became altogether ascendant, and
especially when it furnished all the ecclesiastical writers, (one of
whose chief functions it has been, in every age, to call names,) the
Jewish brethren, destitute of all pretensions to philosophy, and free
from that ambitious speculative spirit out of which orthodox theology
arose, were naturally treated with less respect, and regarded as exceptions
to that general union which had consolidated itself independently
of them, and at last completely left them out. It does
not appear that any further change was wrought by Adrian’s destruction
of Jerusalem, than necessarily followed from his resolution to
exclude, from the new colony which he founded there, all who
practised Jewish rites. This imperial determination compelled the
withdrawal of the Hebrew Christians to the North of Palestine;
and they were replaced by a new church, whose Gentile origin and
customs qualified its members (under the Emperor’s decree) for
settlement on the ancient site.
II. Dr. Tattershall disparages the testimony of the witnesses cited
in this cause,—Epiphanius and Jerome; and not without good
reason, if there should be sufficient proof, when the whole case is
before us, of his two allegations, viz.:
First, That Epiphanius contradicts himself; affirming now the
completeness, and then the mutilation, of the Gospel in question.
Secondly, That Epiphanius contradicts Jerome; in asserting, what
“Jerome does not admit,” the identity of the Ebionite Gospel with
that of St. Matthew.
Premising that one and the same work is to be understood as
described, by the several titles, “Nazarene Gospel,” “Ebionite
Gospel,” “Gospel according to the Hebrews,” “Gospel according to
the Twelve Apostles,” I would submit that the first of these allegations
is more plausible than true, and that the second is wholly
untenable.
The contradictory statements of Epiphanius are the following:
(a.) “They (i.e. the Nazarenes) have the Gospel of Matthew
most entire in the Hebrew language among them; for this, truly, is
still preserved among them, as it was at first, in Hebrew characters.
But I know not whether they have taken away the genealogy from
Abraham to Christ.”[123]
(b.) “In that Gospel which they (i.e. the Ebionites) have called
the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which is not entire and perfect,
but corrupted and curtailed, and which they call the Hebrew Gospel,”
&c.[124]
The verbal contradiction between these two passages, is no doubt
manifest enough; and in a writer of more accuracy than Epiphanius,
might have justified the proposal of Casaubon (approved by Jones)
to effect a violent reconciliation, by the conjectural insertion of the
negative adverb in the former sentence, which would then describe
the document as not wholly perfect. But the looseness of this
author’s style appears to me sufficient to explain the opposition
between the statements; which seem indeed, to look defiance at each
other, when brought by force, face to face; but which at the intervals
of separate composition, may be, by no means, irreconcilable. That
in the first, Epiphanius designed the phrase “most entire,” to be
understood with considerable latitude, is evident from the expression
of suspicion which instantly follows, that the genealogy might probably
be absent. And if the work in question contained a quantity
of matter additional to Matthew’s Gospel, whilst it also omitted some
of its integral parts; it seems not unnatural that the same writer,
who with his thoughts running on its redundancies, had at one time
called it a most full copy, should at another, when dwelling on its
deficiencies, style it an incomplete edition of the first Evangelist.
But it is more important to observe, that on the points for which the
Editors of the Improved Version adduce the testimony of Epiphanius,
viz., to identify the Gospel of Matthew with that of the Nazarenes
and Ebionites, and to attest the absence from this book of the story
of the miraculous conception, there is here no contradiction whatever.
In both passages he states the work to be Matthew’s, and in neither,
according to Dr. Tattershall, does he say that the first two chapters
were wanting. The harmony then, on these, the only points in dispute,
is complete.
(2.) “Jerome,” it is said, “does not admit the work in question
to be the Gospel of St. Matthew;” which puts him at issue with
Epiphanius. Will Dr. Tattershall permit me to lay before him a
passage of Jerome, which has been under his eye recently, for he has
quoted a sentence from Jones which occurs on the adjacent page; it
runs thus. “Matthew, also called Levi, who became from a publican
an Apostle, was the first who composed a gospel of Christ; and for
the sake of those who believed in Christ among the Jews, wrote it in
the Hebrew language and letters; but it is uncertain who it was that
translated it into Greek. Moreover the Hebrew (copy) itself is to
this time preserved in the library of Cæsarea, which Pamphilus, the
martyr, with much diligence collected. The Nazarenes, who live in
Beræa, a city of Syria, and make use of this volume, granted me the
favour of writing it out; in which (Gospel) there is this observable,
that wherever the Evangelist either himself cites, or introduces our
Saviour as citing, any passage out of the Old Testament, he does
not follow the translation of the Seventy, but the Hebrew copies: of
which there are these two instances, viz., that ‘Out of Egypt I have
called my son;’[125] and that, ‘He[126] shall be called a Nazarene.’”[127]
Here Jerome, I presume, does admit the Nazarene Gospel to be
that of Matthew; and the harmony on this point, between him and
Epiphanius, is complete.
Besides alleging the above contradiction, Dr. Tattershall notices
a supposed variance (not amounting to inconsistency) between these
two Fathers on another point. From a statement of Jerome, he
“thinks it may be fairly inferred,” that he knew the first two chapters
of Matthew’s Gospel to be wanting in the Nazarene record.
But it is denied that Epiphanius gives any countenance to the notion
of their absence. Now I conceive that if this statement be precisely
reversed, we shall have the true state of the case before us. Epiphanius
gives us testimony to the absence, Jerome to the presence,
of these chapters in the Nazarene Gospel.
First, as to Epiphanius: he makes the following statements bearing
on this point:
(1.) He says that “the beginning of their (the Ebionites’) Gospel
was this: ‘It came to pass in the days of Herod, the king of Judæa,
that John came baptizing with the baptism of repentance in the river
Jordan.’”[128] Is it not evident from this, that the initial event of this
narrative was the advent of the Baptist, and that the previous account
of the birth of Christ was absent? So, at least, it has been hitherto
supposed.
(2.) He says in positive terms, “They have taken away the
genealogy from Matthew, and accordingly begin their Gospel, as I
have above said, with these words; ‘It came to pass,’ &c.”[129] It
cannot be imagined that this will bear any but the common interpretation,
that the Gospel began with the substance of our third chapter.
The introduction of the miraculous conception, after John’s mission,
would be an incredible disturbance of arrangement.[130]
(3.) He says, “That Cerinthus and Carpocrates, using this same
Gospel of theirs, would prove from the beginning of that Gospel
according to Matthew, viz. by its genealogy, that Christ proceeded
from the seed of Joseph and Mary.” But to what purpose would
these heretics have put this construction upon the genealogy, and
argued from it the mere humanity of Christ’s origin, if it was immediately
followed by a section, flatly contradicting what they had been
labouring to prove? It is impossible then to get rid of Epiphanius’s
testimony to the absence of these chapters.
Secondly, let us turn to Jerome. Dr. Tattershall conceives that
because this author speaks of certain men without the spirit and
grace of God, as having had some concern in the composition of this
gospel, we may conclude that the introductory chapters were wanting
from the copy which he used. The inference is not very obvious;
and is at once destroyed by the fact, that Jerome’s quotations from
the Nazarene Gospel, contain passages of Matthew’s introductory
chapters. In a passage, e.g., which I have adduced above, occur
two instances; “Out of Egypt I have called my son;” and, “He
shall be called a Nazarene.”
This discrepancy between these two fathers would have furnished
Dr. Tattershall with a more powerful argument against the Editor’s
note, than any which he has adduced; and have enabled him to
show that Jerome, being cited for one purpose, establishes precisely
the reverse.
III. Dr. Tattershall adduces in evidence against the worth of the
Nazarene Gospel, the absurd chronological mistake in its first sentence,
which assigns the Baptist’s appearance to the days of Herod,
king of Judæa.
On this I have only to observe, that it might have been well to
state, that the blunder is commonly attributed to Epiphanius himself,
rather than to the Gospel which he cites. Whatever that work may
have been, it was produced near the spot where the Herods lived, in
times when the remembrance of them was fresh, for the people over
whom they reigned; so that a mistake of that magnitude, in its first
verse, must be regarded as of improbable occurrence. On the other
hand, Epiphanius, it is admitted, had never seen this Gospel, and
therefore cited it from hearsay; he wrote in the latter part of the
fourth century, and is remarkable for inaccuracy of every kind, and
especially with regard to time. There is then no improbability in
the supposition that Epiphanius confounded Herod the king, with
Herod the tetrarch, and with the purpose of explanation, inserted a
mistake, by adding the words, “King of Judæa.” Eichhorn says,
“Two different Herods are confounded together,—the King Herod
under whom John was born, and Herod Antipas, under whom the
Baptist publicly appeared;—an evident mark of a later annotating
or correcting hand, unguided by a knowledge of the true chronology,
as contained in Luke, and so substituting one Herod for another.”[131]
For the foregoing reasons, it appears to me that Dr. Tattershall has
not, by making his strictures sound, earned the right to render them
severe.
The evidence bearing upon the introduction of Luke’s Gospel, is
much simpler and less confused; and to Dr. Tattershall’s estimate of
it, no valid objection, I think, can be urged.
In his note on this subject, Dr. Tattershall points out, as an
example of carelessness in the Editors of the Improved Version, the
following discrepancy between two of their statements. In their
note on Matthew i. 16, they say, “If it be true, as Luke relates,
that ‘Jesus was entering upon his thirtieth year, in the fifteenth year
of the reign of Tiberius;’” and in their note on Luke i. 4, they say,
“The Evangelist (Luke) expressly affirms that Jesus had completed
his thirtieth year,” &c. It would have been only just to add, that
in the more recent editions of the Improved Version, this inconsistency
does not exist. The fourth edition (1817) lies before me; and
in it the latter note stands thus: “The Evangelist expressly affirms
that Jesus had entered upon, or, as Grotius understands it, had completed
his thirtieth year,” &c.
To all the other strictures contained in Dr. Tattershall’s note, “the
Unitarian Editors” appear to me to be justly liable.[132] The inaccuracy
of their chronology was long ago perceived, by more
friendly critics than their present assailants; and sounder calculations
of the dates of our Lord’s birth, and ministry, were instituted and
published by Dr. Carpenter, in the admirable dissertation prefixed to
his “Apostolical Harmony of the Gospels.” Not being aware of
any method, at all satisfactory, by which the notes in the “Improved
Version,” referring to this point, can be defended, I do not profess
to understand why they appear again and again without remark or
correction, in the successive editions of that work.
Dr. Tattershall, I perceive, adopts the usual mode of reconciling
the chronology of Matthew and Luke; and supposes that the reign
of Tiberius must be reckoned, not from his succession to the dignity
of Emperor, on the death of Augustus, but from his previous association
with Augustus, in the tribunitial authority. Widely as this
explanation has been adopted, it cannot be denied that it has been
invented to suit the case; that such a mode of reckoning would
never have been thought of, had it not been for this discrepancy
between the two Evangelists; and that it has nothing to support it
but the evidence which belongs to all hypotheses, viz., that if true,
it removes the difficulty which it was designed to explain. Even
the industry of Lardner has failed to present us with any instance
in which a Roman historian has reckoned the reign of Tiberius,
from this association with his predecessor; or with any distinct trace
that such a mode of computation was ever employed. And it is
notorious that all the Christian Fathers calculated the fifteenth year
of Tiberius from the death of Augustus. Should Dr. Tattershall be
in possession of any evidence in support of this mode of reckoning,
more satisfactory than that which has hitherto been adduced, he
would render an important service to biblical literature by producing
it.
It is so universally understood that we are indebted to Mr. Thirlwall
for the admirable translation of Schleiermacher’s Essay, that I
conceive there can be no impropriety in speaking of the work as
his; though his name does not appear in the title-page;—a circumstance
of which I was not aware, till making this extract for the
press. The whole note from which are taken the words in the
Lecture, is as follows:—“The arguments by which Hug attempted
to reconcile the two Evangelists on the residence of Joseph, are
extremely slight and unsatisfactory. He admits that St. Matthew
supposes Bethlehem to have been Joseph’s usual dwelling-place.
But, he asks, was St. Matthew wrong? This, however, is not the
question, but only whether he is consistent with St. Luke. Now,
nothing can be more evident than that, according to the account of
the latter, Joseph was a total stranger at Bethlehem. Bethlehem
was indeed, as Hug remarks, in one sense his own city, but clearly
not in the sense that Matthew’s account supposes. Here too, therefore,
Schleiermacher’s position seems to remain unshaken.”—(See
note on p. 44, of Translation of Schleiermacher’s Critical Essay on
St. Luke’s Gospel.)
60. The Improved Version was published in August, 1808. Rev. T. Lindsey, who
had been labouring under the effects of paralysis ever since 1801, died November
3rd, the same year.
88. Unwilling to repeat what I have already said, in a former publication, I have
contented myself with a brief and slight notice of this celebrated text. It is discussed
in a less cursory manner in the notes to the first Lecture in the “Rationale
of Religious Inquiry.” I would only add, that Schleusner considers the word
θεὀπνευστος, as belonging, not to the predicate, but to the subject, of the sentence.
See his Lexicon in Nov. Test. in verb. “In N. T. semel legitur 2 Tim. iii. 16.
πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος, omnis scriptura divinitus inspirata, seu, quæ est originis
divinæ.”
89. Sermon on the Nature and Extent of the Right of Private Judgment
p. 238.
114. Καὶ Ἐβιωναῖοι χρηματίζουσιν οἱ ἀπὸ Ἰουδαίων τὸν Ἰησοῦν ὡς Χριστὸν παραδεξάμενοι.—Contr. Cels., lib. ii. c. 1. Op. tom. i. pp. 385 C. 386 A. Ed.
Delarue. Paris. 1733.
115. Οὗτοι δε εἰσὶν οἱ διττοὶ Ἐβιωναῖοι, ἤτοι ἐκ παρθένου ὁμολογοῦντες ὁμοίως ἡμῖν τὸν Ἰμσοῦν, ἤ οὐχ οὕτω γεγεννῆσθαι, ἀλλ’ ὡς τοὶς ἀνθρώποις.—Contr. Cels., lib. v. c. 61. Op. tom. i. p. 625 A.
118. Ἤδη δ’ ἐν τούτοις τινὲς καὶ τὸ καθ’ Ἑβραίους εὐαγγέλιον κατέλεξαν, ᾧ μάλιστα Ἑβραίων οἱ τὸν παραδεξάμενοι χαίρουσι.—Hist. Eccles.,
lib. iii. c. 25. vol. i. pp. 246, 247. Heinichen Lips. 1827.
119. Εὐαγγελίῳ δὲ μόνῳ τῷ καθ’ Ἑβραίους λεγομένῳ χρώμενοι, τῶν λοιπῶν σμικρὸν ἐποιοῦντο λόγον.—Lib. iii. c. 27. vol. i. p. 252. Both passages are in
Jones, Pt. II. ch. 25.
127. Catal. vir. illust. in Matth. Giving Jones’s translation, I do not think it necessary
to quote the original Latin. See Jones on the Canon, Part II. ch. 25.
128. Hær. 30, § 13, quoted by Jones, Part II. ch. 25.
130. See Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das N. T. I., § 8; Leipzig, 1820.
131. Einleitung in das N. T., I., § 8, 31; Leipzig, 1820. See also Evidences of
the Genuineness of the Gospels, by Andrews Norton, Note A. sec. V. i. Boston,
U. S., 1837.
132. There is a misprint in Dr. T.’s note, p. 104. The sentence at the end of the
third paragraph should close thus: “nine months after that event, on one calculation,
or three months before it, on the other.”
LECTURE III. — APPENDIX. — See pp. 30 , 31. — The Introduction of St. John’s Gospel. — Romans. ix. 5, page 32 . — Footnotes for Lecture III.
CHRISTIANITY NOT THE PROPERTY OF CRITICS AND SCHOLARS;
BUT THE GIFT OF GOD TO ALL MEN.
BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM.
“FOR GOD WHO COMMANDED THE LIGHT TO SHINE OUT OF DARKNESS, HATH
SHINED IN OUR HEARTS, TO GIVE THE LIGHT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE
GLORY OF GOD IN THE FACE OF JESUS CHRIST.”
2Cor. iv. 6.
No fact can be more extraordinary than that a Revelation
from God should give rise to endless disputes among men,
that “light” should produce the effects of “darkness,”
causing confusion and doubt. A Revelation in which nothing
is revealed! A Revelation that occasions the most bitter controversies
upon every question and interest it embraces! A
Revelation that perplexes mankind with the most uncertain
speculations, and splits the body of believers into sects and
divisions too numerous to be told! A Revelation in which
nothing is fixed, in which every point is debated and disputed
from the character of God to the character of sin! A Revelation
which is so little of a Revelation, that after nearly two
thousand years the world is wrangling about what it means:
this surely is a fact that demands an explanation, which
should make the Believer pause and ask whether he may not
be guilty, by some dogmatism about what he calls essentials, of
casting this discredit upon Revelation, making the very word
a mockery to the Unbeliever, who inquires in simplicity
“what is revealed? I find you disputing about everything
and agreeing about nothing;” and to whom the Believer is
certainly bound to render an account of this strange state of
things, before he condemns his infidelity. Can any two ideas
be more opposed, more directly inconsistent, than Christianity
considered as a Revelation, a gift of LIGHT from
God, and Christianity as it exists in the world—the most
dark and perplexed, the most vexed and agitated of all subjects,
no two parties agreeing where the light is, or what the
light is, or who has it? Surely if Christianity is a Revelation,
the things it has revealed must constitute the essence
of the Revelation, and not the things which it has left unrevealed.
Surely the illumination from God must be in the
clear Truths communicated, and not in the doubtful controversies
excited. Surely it is a mockery of words to call that
a Revelation upon which there is no agreement even among
those who accept the Revelation. A Revelation is a certainty,
and not an uncertainty: and therefore we must strike
out of the class of revealed truths every doctrine that is disputed
among Christians. Many of these doctrines we may
possess other and natural means of determining; but it is
clear that that which is so far unrevealed as to be constantly
debated among believers themselves, cannot yet be revealed
by God. Now the Unity of God is not one of these
debated points. All Christians regard it as revealed; and
therefore it remains as a part of the Revelation. But the
doctrine of the Trinity, an addition to the Unity, and as some
think a mode of the divine Unity, is a disputed point; it
does not manifest itself to all believers; it does not make a
part of the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in
the face of Jesus Christ; Christ’s life would teach no man
that there are three persons in the Godhead—neither would
Christ’s words; the doctrine is not anywhere stated in
Scripture; it is deduced by a process of fallible reasonings
from a number of unconnected texts, doubtful both in their
criticism and in their interpretation; it is not a declaration
made by God, but an inference drawn by man, and, as many
think, incorrectly drawn; the doctrine of the Trinity therefore,
whether true or not, cannot be regarded as a revealed
Truth; what is still a subject of controversy cannot be a portion
of Revelation. If then, turning away from our disputes,
we could ascertain the universal ideas which Christianity implants
in all minds which receive it; the images of God, of
Duty, and of Hope, which it deposits in all hearts; the impression
of Christ taken off by every spirit of man from the
Image and Son of God;—these would be the essentials of
the Revelation, for since these are the only uniform impressions
that Christianity has actually made upon those who believe
it, we must suppose that these were the chief impressions
which God intended it to make. This alone can be “the
light which, coming into the world, lighteth every man.”
But I may be answered here, that Christianity itself is a
matter of debate, and that if doubtful things cannot be revealed,
then Christianity itself is not a Revelation. To this I
reply, that Christianity is a matter of debate chiefly because
Christ himself is not offered to the hearts of men, because
controversialists thrust forward their own doctrinal conceptions
as the essentials of Christianity, presenting themselves,
and not Jesus to make his own impression on the heart. If
not creeds, but Jesus the Christ was offered spiritually to the
souls of men, unbelief would be soon no more. No earnest
and pure mind would reject from its love and faith the serene
and perfect image of the living Jesus. Men can deny metaphysical
doctrines: but they could not deny the spiritual
Christ. The spirit of God in every man would bear witness
to him who was the fulness of that spirit, and would recognize
the heavenly leadership of the Son of God. If the essentials
of Christianity had not been made by Divines and Theologians
to consist in disputed doctrines, if it had been offered to faith
on the ground of its inherent excellence, its ample attractions
for our spiritual nature, how readily, how universally would
it have been received by all who felt that it had echoes within
the soul, and that Jesus was indeed the brightest image of
God, and the very ideal of humanity! Who would not be a
Christian, if to be a Christian required faith only in such
truths as these:—that the holy and affectionate Jesus was
the human image of the mind of God, and that the Universal
Father is more perfect and more tender than his holy and
gentle child, by as much as Deity transcends humanity; that
the character of the Christ is God’s aim and purpose for us
all, the result at which He desires each of us to arrive through
the discipline and sufferings of earth;—that traces of Immortality
were upon that heavenly mind; that his profound
sympathy with the Spirit of God, the surrender of his own
immediate interests for the sake of the purposes and drift of
providence, the identification of himself with the will of God,
the constant manifestation of a style of thought and action
drawn on a wider scale than this present life, and that placed
him in harmony with better worlds,—that these marked him
out as a being whose nature was adjusted to more glorious
scenes, whose soul was out of proportion to his merely
earthly and external lot, and whose appropriate home must
be the pure Heaven of God? Would any one refuse admission
to these spiritual views as they are given off to our
souls from the pure life of Jesus, if he was permitted to receive
them from Christ himself, and not obliged on his way
to that Heavenly Image of grace, liberty, and truth, to stoop
his free neck to the yoke of Churches and of Creeds? But
men preach themselves, not Christ. They embody their own
conceptions of Christianity in formulas, and pronounce these
to be essentials, instead of suffering Jesus to make his way
to the heart, and stamp there his own impression. Hence
the origin of unbelief. I quote the words of an eminent
Unitarian, himself converted from orthodoxy chiefly by the
force of the argument I am about to state: “Settle your
disputes (says the unbeliever), and then I will listen to your
arguments in defence of Christianity. Both of you, Romanists
and Protestants, offer me salvation on condition that I
embrace the Christian faith. You offer me a sovereign
remedy, which is to preserve me alive in happiness through
all eternity; but I hear you accusing each other of recommending
to the world, not a remedy but a poison; a poison,
indeed, which, instead of securing eternal happiness, must
add bitterness to eternal punishment. You both agree that
it is of the essence of Christianity to accept certain doctrines
concerning the manner in which the Divine Nature exists;
the moral and intellectual condition in which man was created;
our present degradation through the misconduct of our first
parents: the nature of sin, and the impossibility of its being
pardoned except by pain inflicted on an innocent person; the
existence or non-existence of living representatives of Christ
and his apostles; a church which enjoys, collectively, some
extraordinary privileges in regard to the visible and invisible
world; the presence of Christ among us by means of transubstantiation,
or the denial of such presence; all this, and
much more, some of you declare to be contained in, and
others to be opposed to, the Scriptures; and even here, there
is a fierce contention as to whether those Scriptures embrace
the whole of that Christianity which is necessary for salvation,
or whether tradition is to fill up a certain gap. I am,
therefore, at a loss how to account for the invitation you give
me. To me (the unbeliever might continue) it is quite
evident that the ablest opponents of Christianity never discovered
a more convincing argument against Revelation
in general, than that which inevitably arises from your own
statements, and from the controversies of your churches.
God (you both agree), pitying mankind, has disregarded the
natural laws fixed by himself, and for a space of four
thousand years, and more, has multiplied miracles for the
purpose of acquainting men with the means of obtaining
salvation, and avoiding eternal death, eternal death signifying
almost universally, among you, unending torments. But
when I turn to examine the result of this (as you deem it)
miraculous and all-wise plan, I find it absolutely incomplete;
for the whole Christian world has been eighteen centuries in
a perpetual warfare (not without great shedding of blood),
because Christians cannot settle what is that faith which
alone can save us. Have you not thus demonstrated that
the revelation of which you boast cannot be from God? Do
you believe, and do you wish me to believe, that when God
had decreed to make a saving truth known to the world, he
failed of that object, or wished to make Revelation a
snare?”[133]
Now not believing that Revelation has failed of its object,
or that it is a snare, and believing that under all the so-called
Essentials, which we regard as mere human additions, there
is yet a true and universal impression received from the spirit
of Jesus, believing, in fact, that our Controversies are about
accidentals, and that under all our differences there is, deeper
down, the untroubled well of Christ springing up into everlasting
life, I would proceed to expose those errors in the
Trinitarian conception of Revelation which have laid it open to
the charge of not being a Revelation, of dividing mankind by
Controversies instead of uniting them by moral Certainty,—and
to contrast this Trinitarian Conception of Revelation
with what, for the following reasons, we hold to be the true
one; because it represents God as accomplishing what, from
the very nature of a Revelation, he must have intended to
accomplish, namely, the communication of moral and spiritual
knowledge: because it removes the materials for doctrinal
strife and controversial rancour which never could have been
God’s object in sending a Revelation, but which are inseparable
from Trinitarian ideas of Revelation; and because
it would realize that union for which Christ prayed and
Apostles intreated, a moral oneness with God as revealed in
Jesus, a unity of spirit in the bond of peace.
Let us suppose, then, God having the design to send a
Revelation to Mankind. There are two methods, either of
which He might adopt in the execution of that intention. He
might send them a written Revelation in the form of a Book:
or He might send them a living Revelation in the form of a
Man. He might announce to them His Will through words:
or He might send to them one of like nature with themselves,
who would actually work the Will of God before their eyes;
one who, passing through their circumstances of life and death,
would show them in his own person the character which God
intended this present discipline to create; and who, appearing
again after death, morally unchanged, and passing into the
Heavens, would reveal to them, by these his own destinies,
the unbroken spiritual connection of the present with the
future, and the immortal home which God has with Himself
for the spirits of those holy ones who are no more on Earth.
In the first case, then, we suppose God to send a verbal
Message to men, a communication by words teaching
doctrines, spoken first, and afterwards committed to writing:
in the second case we suppose that a pure and heavenly being,
manifesting the will and purposes of God through his own
nature, which is also our nature, is himself the divine Message
from our Father; one who walks this earth amidst our
sorrows and our sins,—transfiguring the one and reclaiming
the other—and gathering up into his own soul the strength
that is to be derived from both; who enters our dwellings,
sheds through them the divine light of heavenly love, plants
the hope of immortality in the midst of trembling, because
loving and dying, beings, and binds together the perishing
children of Earth in the godlike Trust of imperishable affections
which Death can glorify but cannot kill; who places
himself in our circumstances of severest trial, and shows us
the energy of a filial heart, and the unquenchable brightness
of a spirit in prayerful communion with the God of Providence;
who, that he might be a revelation of a heavenly
mind amidst every variety of temptation, passed on his way
to death through rudest insults, and showed how awful a
thing is moral greatness, how calm, how majestic, how inaccessible,
how it shines out through aggressive coarseness,
a mental and ineffaceable serenity, a spirit that has its glory
in itself, and cannot be touched;—who, having showed man
how to live and to suffer, next showed him how to die;—who
in the spirit and power of Duty subdued this garment of
throbbing flesh to the will of God, and in the death agonies
was self-forgetful enough to look down from the cross in the
tenderest foresight for those he left behind, and to look up to
Heaven, presenting for his murderers the only excuse that
heavenly pity could suggest,—“Father forgive them! they
know not what they do;”—and who having thus glorified
God upon the earth, and finished the work given him to do,
was himself glorified by God; taken to that Heaven which is
the home of goodness;—thus showing the issues to which
God conducts the tried and perfected spirit, that His Faithfulness
is bound up with the destinies of those that trust
Him, and that His providence is the recompense of the just,
who live now by Faith.
Now the first thing that will strike you in comparing these
two possible methods of a Revelation is, that the written
communication containing doctrines is cold, formal, indistinct
and distant, when contrasted with the living presence of a
pure and heavenly being, who places himself at our side,
enters into our joys and sorrows, shows us in action and in
suffering the will of God reflected on every form of life, and
works out before our eyes the vast idea of perfection. No
message, no written document, no form of words, could leave
such distinct impressions or quicken such sympathy and love,
as the warm and breathing spirit who entered into communication
with us, whose influences we felt upon our trembling
souls, whose eye penetrated and whose voice melted us, and
who took us by the hand and showed us how children of God
should prove their filial claim, and through the vicissitudes of
a Father’s providence pass meekly to their Home.
Such a living Revelation could of course be preserved for
posterity only through the medium of written records, but
then these records would be chiefly descriptive; and their
grand purpose would be faithfully to convey to the men of
other times the true image of that heavenly being; to re-create
him, from age to age, in the heart of life; to introduce
the Son of God with the power of reality into the business
and the bosoms of men; to impress upon the silent page such
graphic characters that they give off to the mind animated
scenes, and bring the living Christ before the gazing eye; and
the written Revelation would perfectly fulfil its mission,
when by vivid and faithful narrative, without comment or
reflection of its own, it had placed us in the presence of Jesus,
and left us, like the disciples of old, to collect our impressions
of the Christ as we waited upon his steps, and watched
the spirit working into life, and caught the tones of living
emotion; when we walked with him through the villages of
Galilee, and saw him arrest the mourners, and touch the bier,
and restore the only son of the widowed mother; when
we retired with him to the lone mountain, and witnessed
how the spirit ascended to God before it entered into the
conflicts of temptation; when we stood with him in the
Temple Court, and beheld how much more noble than the
Temple is the Spirit that sanctifies the Temple, and how the
Priest in his strong hold quailed and trembled under
the thrilling tones and simple majesty of Truth; when we
followed him to his home, not neglecting to observe how his
eye, that was never cold to goodness, fell upon the widow
and her mite as he left the Temple; when we leaned with the
loved disciple on his bosom, and watched his last offices, and
listened, with hushed hearts, for his last words; when we
saw him kneel at the disciples’ feet, that the spirit of equality
and brotherhood might enter into their hearts; and break the
bread of remembrance and distribute the parting cup,—that
bound up with such symbols of self-sacrifice, he, the living
Christ, might come back in moments of severe Duty, and
pour his own spirit of self-denial through deathless memories;
when we listened to his last prayers and consolations,
and observed that, in that awful pause between life and death,
he was the comforter; when we watched with him in Gethsemane’s
garden, and beheld the tears of nature, the holy
one and the just, beneath the awe of his mission, trembling
and melted before God; when we stood by him in Pilate’s
hall, and saw the moral greatness of the unassailable spirit
unobscured by bitterest humiliation; when we drew nigh
to his cross, and witnessed the crown placed upon a glory
that in mortal form could rise no higher—“It is finished.”
To place us by its vivid descriptions in such communication
with Jesus himself, is the great purpose of the historical
record of Christianity; and in proportion as it makes
this intercourse real and intimate, does the New Testament
become to us the instrument and vehicle of a Revelation.
Without this reproduction in our hearts of Jesus, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever, the Scriptures are but a
dead letter, barren symbols, perverted to mere verbal and
logical uses, that awake no life, and serve no spiritual purpose.
The next observation that could not fail to strike you in
contrasting the two methods of Revelation which I have supposed,
a written communication containing doctrines, and a
living character representing the will of God, is the great uncertainty
and liability to various interpretations of the written
method of Revelation when compared with the acted Revelation,
the will of God embodied in Christ Jesus. Nothing
is so unfixed as the meaning of words; nothing is so fixed as
the meaning of actions. Nothing is so vague as language;
nothing is so definite as character. You may fail to collect
the exact ideas of a written communication; but you cannot
fail to understand a living, feeling, acting, suffering, and
dying man, who, on his own person, works out the will of
God before your eyes; and, instead of communicating with
you through writing, communicates with you through a character
that can have no two meanings, and that requires no
doubtful application of scientific rules of interpretation to
make it plain. Place me in the presence of Christ, and the
Revelation is impressing itself on my answering heart, and
exhibiting itself before my living eyes. Place me before some
lengthened statement in words, and I may draw from them
a variety of senses, and perhaps fix upon, as their true sense,
one that their Author did not intend. Who will protect me
from error in all my applications of the difficult science of
interpreting words? How, for instance, shall I be certain
that I do not impress my own limited conceptions upon the
most solemn and inspired language? How shall I rise through
words, which are mere symbols, to conceptions, which, not
being in my own soul, mere words do not suggest? If I
saw a living being embodying these sublime conceptions before
me, or read a description of him that brought him
vividly before the soul, then the words would be no longer
clothed with my poor meanings, but would bring before me
the living forms of goodness and of greatness into which they
expanded when represented by that heavenly mind. To illustrate
my meaning by a single instance: Jesus said, “Love
your enemies.” Now how poor would be my conception of
that duty, if I had only these words, if I had not his own
acted interpretations of their fulness, if I could not stand by
his cross, and witness his own exhibition of this heavenly
spirit. The precept would be narrowed to my own littleness
if I had not the illustration of the living Christ. It is possible
to put a limitation upon the revelation of mercy as it is
written in the dead words: it is not possible to put any limitation
on “the word made flesh,” the Revelation of Mercy
breathing from the dying Jesus. Such then is the greater
clearness, and freedom from uncertainty, of the meaning of
God, when that meaning is revealed on the person of a living
being, than when it is a statement of Doctrines expressed
through a medium so indefinite, so susceptible of a variety of
interpretations, as written language.
That there is a distinct branch of study called the Art of
Interpretation; that its principles are derived from the profoundest
acquaintance with the Mind; that it is in fact a
practical Metaphysics, which even, when most fully understood,
requires, for its correct application to ancient writings,
the most varied and extensive knowledge, and the utmost
natural acuteness, disciplined by long practice,—these things,
which every one knows, scholar or no scholar, are standing
and undeniable proofs of the inherent ambiguity of language,
of the variety of meanings, which no skill in the use of words
can possibly prevent, and out of which we have to make a
selection of some one, when we apply ourselves to interpret
a document. Now were I to enter into a full enumeration of
the considerations that should determine an interpreter of the
New Testament, and out of all the possible meanings direct
his selection of that one which he adopts, I should have to
present you with a disquisition on perhaps the most profound
and difficult department of literary inquiry. I should have
to speak of Archæology and original languages, themselves
even in their most general character, the study of a life; I
should have to speak of one form of those original languages,
peculiar and a study in itself, the Hellenistic Greek, in
which the New Testament is written, and in the interpretation
of which we are left without the aid that is derived from
the usages of language by other authors: I should have to
speak of the particular writer whose words we were examining,
of the character of his mind, of the peculiarities of his
style, whether he wrote oratorically or scientifically, whether
we were to tame down his metaphors, or whether we were to
regard them as literally descriptive; I should have to speak
of the age and country in which he lived, of the state of
opinion and philosophy in his times, of the colourings which
his words or thoughts were likely to adopt from the then
prevailing theories, of the particular purpose for which he
was writing, and of the particular minds, their circumstances
and states of knowledge to which the writing was addressed;
and after all this I could not allow any man, however erudite,
to be a competent Interpreter who was not richly endowed
with that noble but most rare Faculty which can re-create
the past and place us in the heart of a by-gone world, that
Historic Imagination which throws itself into the sympathies
of Antiquity and re-produces the living forms of Society that
kindled the very thoughts and modified the very language now
submitted to our minds; and in addition to all this I should
demand, also, as an essential requisite for an Interpreter, a
mind emptied of all prejudice, a calm and sound judgment.
Now it is most evident that a result depending on so many
qualifications will be necessarily uncertain; that in every separate
man who comes to the study of the New Testament,
according as these instruments of interpretation exist in different
degrees of perfection will they derive various meanings
from the written document; and that consequently, since nowhere
do these requisites for a perfect interpretation exist in
perfection, there is no one of the contested meanings that can
be relied upon with an absolute confidence. It is also to be
noticed, that this uncertainty attending the meaning of words
does not attach to the narrative or historical portion of a
document, but is very much confined to that portion of it
which contains doctrinal ideas, philosophical theories, or metaphysical
statements. The descriptive portion of an ancient
writing (and especially when, as in the case of Christ, the description
is of a moral nature, and is addressed to the affections
and the soul, which are the same in all ages,) will convey a
uniform and universal impression, whilst the didactic portion
of the very same writing will suggest as many meanings as
there are varieties of intellectual texture and complexion in the
minds that read it. The character of Jesus shines out from
the Gospels to be seen of all men, full of grace and truth. No
one mistakes that. It does not depend upon the skilful application
of the science of Interpretation. The symbols of language
that reveal the living Jesus are of universal significance,
and finding their way at once to every heart, stamp upon it
a faithful image of the Christ. But doctrinal conceptions
cannot be conveyed in this way: there is no universal and
unchanging language for metaphysical ideas—and consequently
it is impossible that any written communication on such subjects
should be free from a variety of interpretations. And especially
must this be so, when, as is the case with the Trinity,
the doctrine is nowhere expressly stated in the document, but
is only inferred by connecting together into a system a number
of ideas which it seems to contain. Let me give you an illustration
that was lately brought before me of the impossibility
of a Revelation of doctrines being made to man, by means of
written language, upon such subjects as the Trinity, the modes
in which the essence of the Deity enables him personally to
subsist. I heard it stated on a late occasion by Dr. Tattershall,
that the Trinity existed as one nature in three personalities;
and that to ask how three could be one and one three,
was to ask an unmeaning and irrelevant question, because that
the Trinity was three and one in different senses, three in
Person but one in Essence. I turn now to Dr. Sherlock, and
I find these words: “To say,” says Dr. William Sherlock,
“that there are three divine persons, and not three distinct
infinite minds, is both heresy and nonsense.” “The distinction
of persons cannot be more truly and aptly represented
than by the distinction between three men; for Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost, are as really distinct persons as Peter, James,
and John.” Here then we have Dr. Tattershall charging Sherlock
with polytheism; and we have Sherlock charging Dr.
Tattershall with Heresy and nonsense. That is, neither of
these Trinitarians regards the other as having the true faith.
Is it not evident then, that the doctrine of the Trinity, seeing
how Trinitarians themselves charge one another with heresy,
cannot be a doctrine of Revelation, cannot be a part of that
universal Gospel which was preached to the poor, and revealed
unto babes?
It was stated in Christ Church, by the Rev. Mr. Byrth, that
the controversy between us was solely a question of Interpretation.
It is so, because in the case cited, our dispute is about
doctrines. The question of Unitarianism or Trinitarianism
must be decided by Interpretation after Criticism has fixed the
Text to be interpreted; but I deny, altogether, that the question
of Christianity or No-Christianity is to be decided by any
such imperfect and doubtful instrument. Though no one
honours Scholarship more, or has a profounder veneration for
its noble functions, and altogether renouncing the vulgarity of
depreciating its high offices, and maintaining, wherever I have
influence, especially for our own Church and in our own day, the
necessity for a learned Ministry, able to refresh their souls at
the original wells and unfrighted by confident dogmatism to
give a reason for the faith that is in them, I yet declare, that
Christianity is a religion for the people; that the Gospel was
originally preached to the poor; that Christ is manifested to
the heart and soul of every man whom he attracts by heavenly
sympathy; that when not many wise, not many learned were
called, the lowly but honest in heart, recognized the divine
brightness, and sat at the feet of Jesus docile and rejoicing;
and I protest altogether against any learned Aristocracy, any
literary Hierarchy, any priestly Mediators, having more of the
true light that lighteth every man than the humblest of
their brethren, who has taken to his heart the free gift of God,
and loves the Lord Jesus with sincerity.
Now, strange to say this principle was broadly admitted. It
was broadly admitted that Christianity is not the property of
scholars or critics, but the gift of God to all men; and yet, with
a remarkable inconsistency, it was added, that “the all men”
to whom Christianity is the gift of God, must find in it the
doctrine of the Trinity, else they are no Christians at all. That
is, Christianity is the gift of God to those who, by the aids of
interpretation and criticism, become Trinitarians, and to all
those who, following their leaders, accept this doctrine; but is
not the gift of God to Unitarians, who, though loving Jesus as
their Light on Earth and their Forerunner amid the skies,
cannot so read either the written Gospel or the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, as
to collect from them the doctrine of a Trinity. If Trinitarianism
is Christianity exclusively, then Christianity is not the
gift of God to all men; for many, in all ages of the Church
and in the first century, perhaps, without exception, have
accepted Christ, but knew no Trinity. If Trinitarianism is
Christianity exclusively, then Christianity is the property of
critics and scholars, for that doctrine is not a self-evidencing
Truth, it does not shine out from the Gospels so that no honest
mind and pure heart can fail to receive it, and, if capable of
being proved at all, it can only be proved by a most technical
and subtle logic, by far-fetched inferences from disconnected
texts, every one of which is open to a hostile criticism, and
by a most scholastic and indirect system of interpretation,
which is a task, and that a most painful one, for plain
men to comprehend. My audience will be enabled to
judge of this matter for themselves when I tell them that
one of the strongest reliances of modern Trinitarians, until
proved to be completely fallacious, was the power of the
Greek article; and that one of the texts long used in
this controversy, and still used,[134] owes its whole importance
to an accident so minute as this, whether the letter O was
written with a central dot, or without the dot; so that the
chance touch of a transcriber might put in or put out one of
the principal proofs of the doctrine of the Trinity. Now I
further declare, that all the strongest evidence for the doctrine
of the Trinity is exactly of the same critical nature—that the
only text of the slightest difficulty, cited in Christ Church on
Wednesday evening, owes its whole force to a question of
punctuation; and that the best critics and scholars, and they
Trinitarians, for true scholars never degrade their high calling,
nor enter the solemn sanctuary open to them alone, to falsify
the oracle, give many authorities against the Trinitarian, and
in favour of the Unitarian, Interpretation.[135] Now will any
man tell me that the doctrine of the Trinity, which, if true, is
the most awful Truth that ever bowed down the heart, that the
God of Heaven walked this earth, a partaker of our sufferings
and our sorrows, and lived our life, and died our death, would
be left to be proved by evidence of this nature, by a controversy
nearly two thousand years after the Revelation, about the force
of the Greek article and the punctuation of a Greek manuscript?
Is this the light that lighteth every man that cometh
into the world? There could have been no difficulty in revealing
this doctrine, in words at least, if it was intended to be
revealed. The Athanasian Creed is at least explicit enough,
and leaves us in no doubt of the purpose of its Author. Now
I conclude that if Trinitarianism alone is Christianity, and if
such are the processes of criticism and interpretation by which
alone that doctrine can be proved, then Trinitarianism is the
property of Critics and Scholars, and those who implicitly
trust them; and Christianity requiring us either to be Critics
or to prostrate ourselves before Critics, not agreed among
themselves, is not the free “gift of God to all men.” The
rightful privileges of critics and scholars are large enough, and
let no man disown them; but I do disown this literary Hierarchy
arrogating to themselves sole access to the oracles of
God, and limiting Christ’s free approach to the souls of the
people to long processes of inferential reasoning and the winding
ways of a syllogism. I entreat them to stand aside, and
let the living Jesus come into communication with the living
heart, and not place themselves, like the multitude who
threatened the blind beside the way, between the ready mercy
of the Heavenly Teacher and the humblest follower who seeks
his face, that a ray of the light that shineth there may fall
upon eager and wistful, though dimmed and earth-stained,
eyes. “And it came to pass, that as he was come nigh unto
Jericho, a certain blind man sat by the way-side begging. And
hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant. And
they told him, that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by. And he
cried, saying, Jesus thou son of David, have mercy on me.
And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold
his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou son of David,
have mercy on me. And Jesus stood and commanded him to
be brought unto him: and when he was come near he asked
him, saying, What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And
he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight. And Jesus said
unto him, Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee.”
I trust that you will perceive now the essential distinction
between a Revelation by words, of doctrines, and a Revelation
by a living being; between the uncertain meaning that
is arrived at by the interpretation of language, and the light
of the knowledge of the glory of God shining on the face of
Jesus Christ. In the one case we have a statement of doubtful
doctrines in written words; in the other we have a living
Character. In the one case we have the dead letter; in the
other we have the “word made flesh.” In the one case we
have the Mind of God stated in propositions; in the other
we have the Image of God set up in our hearts, and the purposes
of God for man, both while on earth and beyond the
grave, realized before us, to be seen of all men. If Christianity
is a scheme of doctrines in a written communication
from God, then of course it is subject to all the necessary
ambiguities of language; and expositors will be busy upon
it, to draw out of it all the meanings it can possibly contain;
and every fresh interpretation will be regarded by some as
part of the Revelation from Heaven, and never will men rest
lest there should be some lurking sense in it that they have
not reached, and every interpreter will thrust in the face of
the world, as the essential and saving meaning, his own reading
of the document. And as language is a thing that is never
fixed, but is always gathering fresh imports from the developments
of Time, this is a process that must go on for ever, and
the document will speak a new Message to the men of every
age, and the Doctrines that constitute Salvation will be always
the subject matter of a controversy. But if Christianity,
instead of a form of written words, is a character sent to us
by God, to manifest his will in the flesh, and to reveal living
Truth in a living being; if Jesus himself is the record we are
to study; if it is not an inspired Book but an inspired Life
that is the gift of God; if his works of Power and Love, his
actions and his sufferings, his holy living and dying, are the
full and spiritual Scriptures imprinted on humanity by God’s
own hand, then the whole work of a Christian is to understand
and love that Character,—then is the Revelation like a light
shining in a dark place, “a salvation prepared before the face
of all people,” “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the
glory of his people Israel,” a ray of God’s light shining into
the heart of man, touching the mountain tops of humanity
and piercing the deep valleys, that all flesh may see it together.
It is in remarkable consistency with these views that very
little is said in the popular systems of Christ’s character.
The doctrinal ideas respecting Jesus are all in all: the moral
and spiritual ideas are looked upon as not peculiarly Christian.
A vast deal is said about his Rank, his Merits, his Mediatorial
Distinction: very little is said about his Life, his Example, his
Revelations of Duty and of Destiny. The Trinitarians taunt us
with having no use for Christ in our system. Certainly we
believe in a God who does not require their Christ. We do
not speak of Atonement therefore. But we might retort, that
if we neglect their metaphysical Christ, they neglect our moral
and spiritual Christ. They speak little of his character, his
life, his example, as a model for humanity: nor could they in
consistency with their system. Jesus, as God and man, is
powerless as an exhibition of what man may be. He is no
revelation of Humanity to Humanity. Humanity with Deity
attached to it, or indwelling, is Humanity no more.
If Christianity is a system of doctrines to be deduced from
words, and if our salvation depends upon the certainty of our
deductions, then is it not clear that God would be requiring
an absolute Truth of Interpretation which he has not given
us the means of attaining, and that the Revelation, even to
“Critics and Scholars,” would be an uncertain property?
But if Christianity is an inspired Life, the Duties and the
Destinies of Man shown forth on the Son of God, the word
made flesh, the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus
Christ, a character perfectly reflecting the purposes of Providence,
and preserved for us, in faithful narratives that still
enable us to have the image of Jesus formed within us, then
is it not clear that the Revelation is perpetuated in our hearts,
and that the Christ with us still, the same yesterday, and to-day,
and for ever, is the gift of God to all men? “Lo, I am with
you always, to the end of the world.” Now this is Christ’s
own account of himself as a Revelation. “I am the Light
of the world.” “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” “I
am the way, and the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto
the Father but by me. If ye had known me, ye should have
known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him and
have seen him.”[136] “The Son can do nothing of himself, but
what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth,
these also doeth the Son likewise.”[137] “Whoso hath seen me
hath seen the Father also.” And to crown all this scriptural
evidence, this is God’s own account of his Christ as a Revelation,
authenticating him at the opening of his Mission, and
repeated again as His seal upon its close, “This is my beloved
Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
I have shown that there is no doctrinal certainty in Christianity
considered as a written Revelation: but neither is there
any moral certainty as to the Will of God and his practical
requirements conveyed by mere words. When God tells me
in words to love Him and to love my neighbour, I do not know
what practical forms these feelings are to assume, neither do I
know how all the influences of my present life are to control
me in the exercise of these affections. But I understand what
God means when I see Jesus interpreting for me this will of
God by his own character, and combining in his own life,
through all circumstances, the perfect love of God and Man.
Now I maintain, that no system of Doctrine could be a Revelation
to me of the purposes and ends of life. It is a practical
question, and practically must it be solved. He who will work
out for me on this scene of things the great designs of my
being, and show to me, in action and in suffering, in sympathy
and in struggle, in the throbbings of life and in the hushed
sublimities of death, the right attitudes of my nature, the fitting
dignities of enlightened and heaven-bound man,—he who
is not the Prophet merely of divine Truth but the Impersonator
of his own views, who stands successively in each practical
position and robes himself in the living glories of duty,—he
alone can pretend to be a Revelation of character, as God wills
it, having stamped upon his views illustrations of Reality.
And he alone can pretend to have unravelled the mystery of
our Discipline, who himself passes through our trials, and
transmutes them into the nurseries of Power, the pregnant
schools of Character—who shows us the outward circumstance,
as a torch to the Spirit, lighting up the energies of Duty’s inviolable
will,—who moves amid the evil that is in the world,
and is not overcome by it, but overcomes it with good,—who
encounters sin and sinners, and treats them with the pity of a
brother, yet with the holiness of one whose Father is the spiritual
God,—who stands amid baffled purposes of good, the
broken projects of benevolence in the unquelled trusts of
Faith, seeing, though afar off, the Harvest of this unpromising
Spring,—in whom the worst aspects of Humanity only draw
out the unselfishness of Charity; and the clouded countenance
of God, veiled to sight though not to Faith, the perfect peace
of a filial Spirit. He who passes for us through all this variety
of mortal circumstance, and exhibits each, even the most dark
and unpromising, as full of the materials of our Education,
contributing to the formation of that perfect mind which is the
end and heaven of our being, is indeed a perfect Revelation,
“unimproved and unimprovable,” though improving us to the
end of Time, an embodied Scripture, the word made flesh and
dwelling amongst us.
Christianity will be a matter of controversy so long as men
look to it for what they are to think, and not for what they
are to trust in and be. Creeds will divide the world, so long
as Christianity is regarded as a Revelation of Doctrines, and
not as a Revelation of Character, of Practical Interests, of Destinies
and of Duties. In the one case it will be the “property
of Critics and Scholars,” held by an uncertain tenure; in the
other case, it will be “the gift of God to all men.” Strange
that all Protestants do not feel the force of this argument!
And as for Roman Catholics, if we had any controversy with
them, the argument has only to take another step to hold them
too in its grasp.
And now I shall be obliged to speak of Critics and Scholars
in a way that Critics and Scholars should never expose themselves
to be spoken of. I have a most painful duty before me,
very different from the one I had been led to expect,—which I
had hoped would have been to answer calm, learned, judicious
reasonings, instead of simply to resist pretension, a task, which
if much easier, is yet one that neither elevates nor instructs.
Nothing could justify me in using in this place the language
of grave remonstrance, but the consciousness that thereby instead
of indulging I am wounding my own feelings, and the
conviction that, in this case, Duty to Truth and to the Public
requires it from me. Every one must have felt that the declaration
before the world, of “the Unitarian Interpretation of
the New Testament, based upon defective Scholarship, or on
dishonest or uncandid criticism,” ought to have been amply
supported, or never made. To fail in the proof was to pass
not only intellectual but the severest moral condemnation on
such a statement. I know of no abuse of Power and Place
more immoral, than when a Scholar uses his Scholarship to
libel others before the unlearned, than when a Preacher uses
his sacred and elevated standing to make assertions that are
taken upon his word, but which are not correct, and of which
nothing but the certainty that they were correct could justify
the utterance. If I cannot take example from what I witnessed
in Christ Church on Wednesday evening, let me at least take
warning. I will not pray to be preserved meek and truthful,
and then regard my prayer as an indemnity for unlicensed
speech. I will not commit here the disrespectful impropriety
of quoting Greek. Neither will I pay this audience the false
compliment of pretending to make such subjects intelligible
and interesting to them, but I will make some statements that
shall go forth to the world, and there find fitting judgment.
There are some points, however, to which I shall have to
advert, of which every one may judge.
1. It was stated by the Preacher that he could not himself
believe the mysterious statements of the New Testament unless
he first believed in their inspiration, and that this alone could
command his faith. Now there was great candour in this, but
no Scholarship. You cannot prove the Inspiration of the
Bible except by first proving the truth of the Bible, for there
are no proofs of Inspiration except what the Bible itself
contains. To believe in the truth of the Bible, because it is
inspired, and then to prove it inspired because it is true, is an
error in reasoning inexcusable in the divines of the Church of
England, for an eminent Bishop of their own Church, Bishop
Marsh, has abundantly exposed it.
2. It was stated that every Unitarian Minister in England
was as much bound by the Improved Version, as every
Clergyman of the Establishment was by the Articles of the
Church. The Preacher has written his name beneath those
Articles; as long as he remains in the Church he has, to use
Milton’s expression, to those Articles subscribed “Slave;”
he has entered into a vow to preach nothing contrary to them;
he belongs to a body of men organized to prevent all dissent
from those Articles, and pledged to oppose and avenge every
attempt to break up the dogmatical principle of their Church
Union, and yet he stated solemnly before an assembled multitude
that no Clergyman of the Church was more bound by
the Articles of the Church than was every Unitarian Minister
by a Book which one man edited on his sole literary responsibility,
and which other men contributed to publish, simply
because they expected from it some valuable scriptural aid.
Now when a man is capable of making such a statement,
when his judgment will allow him to do so, his credibility as a
witness to facts I do not dispute, but his opinion on any
question, merely as coming from him, I cannot feel deserving
of my confidence. I might quote passages of contemporary
Unitarian criticism reflecting on the Improved Version; I
might quote Dr. Carpenter in his answer to Archbishop
Magee, ascribing the whole responsibility to Mr. Belsham; I
might quote Mr. Yates in his able answer to Mr. Wardlaw,
exposing the false impression made by Dr. Magee, that the
Improved Version was the Unitarian Version: but I cannot
so misuse your time. The Unitarians, most of whom never
saw the work, and whose pride it is that their Ministers study
the Scriptures freely, and lay before them the results, will
smile at the idea of these Ministers being as much bound by
the Improved Version as the Clergy by the Articles of the
Church, though in a graver spirit they must morally condemn
an assertion so recklessly made. It was stated that all Protestant
Christians were satisfied with the received Version up
to the time of the Improved Version, and, to advance no
other proof of the ignorance displayed by such a statement,
in the next breath it was declared that the Improved Version
was on the basis of Archbishop Newcome’s Translation, the
title of which is this, “An Attempt towards revising our
English Translation of the Greek Scriptures.” But what
means this attempt to fasten us down to the Improved Version?
Is it not clear that these clergymen wish us to fight
the battle upon a disadvantageous ground? Is it not clear
that they wish us to take up some weak position, and defend
that, rather than meet us in the strongest positions that
criticism and scholarship enable us to assume and to maintain?
Is not our controversy between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism,
and what can be more unworthy of critics and
scholars than to conduct that controversy on any ground but
that of the original Scriptures? We do not think of fixing
them down to any particular critic of their own church, many
of whom we could advance who abandon almost every position
they maintain; we freely give them advantage of the
best criticism and the best scholarship they can anywhere
obtain; and we do confess that we hold it very uncandid
towards us, and very unconfiding in their own strength, and
very disloyal towards Truth, to tell opponents, I wish I could
say fellow inquirers, that they are not to defend their cause
by the best arguments known to them, but by a certain set of
arguments published in a certain book more than thirty
years ago, and before some of us now engaged in this controversy
were born. Our controversy is not about the Improved
Version, but about the Greek Testament; and I must
certainly regard any attempt to intercept us in our appeal to
the original Scripture, by thrusting any other Version in
our faces, as a sign either of great weakness or of great
unfairness. Where would the Lecturers at Christ Church have
got matter of indictment against us, if it had not been for this
Improved Version?
3. It was stated that minute examination of the Scripture
Evidence for Trinitarianism hardly influenced the result, for
so thoroughly were the Scriptures imbued with its doctrines,
that if but a fragment of them remained, the mysterious
truths that pervade the whole would be found in that
fragment. Now I doubt not that men can say these things
sincerely, and yet methinks they ought to ask themselves
before they mislead a multitude, is there Reality in these statements?
Now I can not only mention fragments, but whole
books, in which Trinitarians themselves will confess that there
is not a trace of these doctrines; the whole Gospel of St.
Mark; the whole Gospel of St. Luke, for the portions respecting
the miraculous generation cannot be proof of the Deity of
the person so generated; the whole of the book of Acts; and
very many of the Epistles. We have the Gospel which the
Apostle Peter delivered to the Gentiles, when he gave them his
exposition of Christianity, and we find from it that Cornelius
and the Gentiles might have believed all that the Apostle
taught them, and yet, according to the Trinitarians, be lost
everlastingly from the scantiness of their faith. Here then is
the Gospel which Peter delivered to the Gentiles, containing
the whole account he gave them of the doctrine of Christ:
“Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I
perceive that God is no respecter of persons; but in every
nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is
accepted with him. The word which God sent unto the
children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ: (he is
Lord of all:) That word, I say, ye know, which was published
throughout all Judæa, and began from Galilee, after the
baptism which John preached; how God anointed Jesus
of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went
about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed by the
devil; for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all
things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in
Jerusalem: whom they slew and hanged on a tree: Him God
raised up the third day, and shewed him openly: not to all
the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to
us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the
dead. And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and
to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the
Judge of quick and dead. To him give all the prophets
witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him
shall receive remission of sins.”[138] Now you will know what
weight, what measure of calm and considerate truth attach
to the assertions made at Christ Church, when you compare
this account of Christianity by the Apostle Peter, with the
bold statement that if only a fragment of the New Testament
remained, it would contain and show forth the mysterious
doctrines of Trinitarianism.
4. It was stated that a slight degree of evidence might
affect the introductory chapters of Matthew and Luke, if the
statements they contain were not supported by the rest of the
Gospels, but that so full were the Gospels of the peculiarities
of these chapters, to remove them would be like removing the
Portico from a Temple. The only evidence brought to
support this large declaration was the last verse of the Gospel
of St. Matthew, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the
end of the world.” Now I am not concerned in the
correctness or the incorrectness of the Improved Version’s
translation of this passage, Lo, I am with you alway, to the
end of the age, or dispensation, that is, till the new dispensation
was fully established: for in the first place I have no
difficulty in believing that the spirit and power of Jesus
was with his followers when in the strength of love and
trust they lived and died for him and for his truth, and that
thus spiritually he still is with all who give him a place in
their hearts, even unto the end of the world; and, in the
second place, translate this passage in any way you will, and
it contains no assertion of the Deity of Jesus, and no confirmation
of the miraculous conception. But when I hear it
confidently asserted in the presence of a crowd ready to take
the Preacher’s word for anything he chooses to assert about
Greek, that any scholarship is utterly contemptible that interprets
the “end of the world” to mean “the end of the era or
age,” or that puts any other interpretation on these words than
that of the received version, I confess I am amazed at the
boldness with which men not habitually under correction
will make rash statements, even at times when they must
know that watchful eyes are upon them. I turn to
Schleusner’s Lexicon of the New Testament, I look for
the word in question, and I find from that authority that the
word signifies primarily, an undefined period of considerable
extent, and, secondarily, the state of things existing within
that period; I find him quoting the very passage in question
which we are told every scholar would translate “to the end
of the world,” and explaining it to mean “to the end of the
lives” of the Apostles; I find that in other cases where this
word is used, a limit is put upon its meaning, restricting it to
the signification of “age or dispensation,” and rendering it
impossible it should mean the “end of the world,” in our
sense, by such a clause as this, “Verily I say unto you, this
generation shall not pass until all these things be fulfilled;”[139]
I find in our common version the plural[140] of this word translated
exactly as the singular, where if “dispensations” was
substituted for “world,”[141] all difficulty would disappear; I
find the interpretation of the Improved Version given by such
scholars as Hammond and Le Clerc, and adopted consistently
and throughout by Bishop Pearce, who argues for it against
the common rendering, and whether it is true or not, which is
really a matter of no importance, I do calmly but solemnly
protest against any man so abusing his actual place and his
reputation for learning, as to proclaim to a multitude that no
scholar would countenance such a translation, and that no interpreter
would adopt it, except for the sake of an à priori
meaning. No man who understood the dignity and the privileges
of scholars would in this way forfeit them.[142]
5. It was stated that no scholar would translate the first verse
of the Gospel of St. John thus: “In the beginning was the
word, and the word was with God, and the word was a God.”[143]
Now for myself I do not agree with this translation. I think
that the Logos, or Word, is a very usual personification of
the Power and Wisdom of God. (See Prov. viii.) I think
that this verse has no reference to Jesus whatsoever; that in
the first place God alone is spoken of; his Power and Wisdom
are described as belonging to and dwelling with him; that He
is described as purposing to communicate or reveal these to
men, for of course it is not God himself, but only a portion
of his Knowledge and Will that can be revealed to us; and
then for the first time in the fourteenth verse is Jesus introduced,
as the person through whose character these attributes
are to be communicated, “the Word was made flesh and
dwelt amongst us.” I dissent therefore from the translation
which Mr. Byrth condemned; but when I am told that NO
SCHOLAR would tolerate such a translation, I turn to my books,
and I find Origen and Eusebius not only tolerating but
actually adopting and insisting upon this very translation. I
recollect that Greek was the vernacular tongue of these eminent
men; and when I am told by an Englishman, in this
nineteenth century, that no Greek Scholar would do what
Origen and Eusebius have done, I think it is not disrespectful
to decline his authority in all matters that require calmness and
accuracy.
6. It was stated that no scholar could translate the fifth
verse of the ninth chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans
thus: “Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning
the flesh Christ came: God who is over all be blessed
for ever.” Perhaps the more correct rendering would be,
“whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh
Christ came (i.e. from among whom the Messiah was to be
born); he who was over all, was God blessed for ever:” or
with more fidelity, because with more rapidity, our language
not admitting, like the Greek, the ellipsis of the substantive
verb—“He who was over all, being God blessed for ever.”
With regard to the ellipsis of the substantive verb, nothing
can be more common. It occurs again and again in the verses
that lie on each side of the text in question. And in ascriptions
of praise it is almost uniform. And nothing can be more
natural than that the Apostle should state as the closing distinction
of the Jews, that over all their dispensations it was God
who presided, the God of their signal Theocracy. Now when I
am told that no scholar would so translate, let me simply
name to you some of the Scholars who do adopt this translation:
Erasmus, Bucer, Le Clerc, Grotius, and Wetstein;
the first three most learned Trinitarians, and the last two,
if not of unquestioned orthodoxy, only of suspected Heresy.
Let me now give you some quotations from other Scholars
of an earlier date, from the Christian Fathers, even when
adopting the received translation of this passage. Tertullian,
whose temper rather than his learning has been preserved in
controversy, says, “We never speak of two Gods or two Lords;
but following the Apostle, if the Father and the Son are to
be named together, we call the Father, God, and Jesus
Christ, Lord.” “But when speaking of Christ alone, I may
call him God, as does the same Apostle; of whom is Christ,
who is God over all blessed for ever. For speaking of a ray
of the sun by itself,” continues Tertullian, “I may call it the
sun; but when I mention at the same time the sun, from
which this ray proceeds, I do not then give that name to the
latter.” “Some of the earlier Greek Fathers,” who I suppose
it will be admitted knew Greek, “expressly denied that
Christ is ‘the God over all.’” “Supposing,” says Origen,
“that some among the multitude of believers, likely as they
are to have differences of opinion, rashly suppose that the Saviour
is God over all; yet we do not, for we believe him when
he said, ‘The Father who sent me is greater than I.’” Even
after the Nicene Council, Eusebius, in writing against Marcellus,
says: “As Marcellus thinks, He who was born of the
holy virgin, and clothed in flesh, who dwelt among men, and
suffered what had been foretold, and died for our sins, was
the very God over all; for daring to say which, the Church
of God numbered Sabellius among Atheists and Blasphemers.”[144]
I have one other observation to make upon this verse. The
translation of the passage depends very much on a question
of punctuation, and, so far, is a question for Critics and Scholars.
Now we have seen already the high authorities that give
the punctuation in favour of the Unitarian rendering.[145] I
say nothing of the conjectural readings of these two passages,
because, though brought by the Preacher as instances of
unlicensed Conjecture, he treated them chiefly as mistranslations,
with the view, I suppose, of introducing the same
passages over and over again, to multiply the instances of
Unitarian alterations. The conjecture is not adopted by the
improved version; and yet, for allowing some little weight
to the authority of Dr. Whitby in the latter case, for it allows
none whatever to the conjecture of Crellius in the former, it
is charged with two sins: first, the sin of adopting the
conjecture; and secondly, the sin of mistranslation after
rejecting the conjecture. This is a method of multiplying
sins, or rather charges. Indeed, if I understood the Preacher,
he admitted that Crellius and Slichtingius, in the then state of
Biblical knowledge, might very justifiably have made the
conjectures, for they were Scholars: but that now, with all
our new lights, such a conjecture is inadmissible; that is to
say, Biblical Literature was not far enough advanced in their
day to enable them to discover in these texts, what yet if they
did not discover there, or somewhere else, they must perish
everlastingly. And yet we were told that Christianity was not
the property of critics and scholars, but the gift of God to all
men.[146]
Now when I examine into these things, my duty to scholarship,
my reverence for its high functions, my duty to Truth,
my duty to the public, who ought not, in matters not of
opinion but of knowledge, to be misled by their Teachers, and
my duty to the Pulpit, which suffers in power and credit by
every unwarrantable statement that proceeds from it, all oblige
me to declare that the impression which I carried away from
Christ Church, that the supposed ignorance of a vast assembly
was sported with, and their confidence abused, has been more
than confirmed.
So much for scholarship and candour together. I have now
to speak of “candour” alone.
1. A sentiment was quoted from Coleridge, expressing his
belief, that if Jesus was not God, he was a deceiver: and then
the Preacher asked his audience, “Can the advocates of a
system that makes Jesus a deceiver be Christians?” thus identifying
Unitarians with the sentiment of Coleridge. How long
will controversalists condescend to such practices? From any
controversy so conducted no good can come: but great scandal
to Religionists, and deep pain to all who love Religion and
Truth better than their own party.
2. Advantage was taken of some words of my Colleague,
the Minister of this Chapel, to produce the impression that
Unitarianism, as a religious faith, was merely negative. Now
the words themselves not only bear no such meaning, but
guard against it; and the whole speech from which they were
extracted is rich in the overflowings of the true, working,
onward spirit of our faith, as you who have the privilege
of worshipping here, well know everything from the same
mind must necessarily be. The words quoted were these: “I
conceive that, controversially, our system is correctly described
as purely negative;” and the whole object of the speech
was to enforce the peaceful and fruitful view that the power
of our religion proceeds not from what we disbelieve, but
from what we believe. No man who read the speech could
be ignorant of this; and it is remarkable, that the very next
words, containing a passage quoted by Mr. Byrth, are these:
“Let us place the utmost reliance upon positive religious
principles; and especially let us act on our own internal convictions.”
My valued friend is abundantly equal to the task
of defending himself, and not often should I do him the
disservice of appearing for him, but as this statement was
made in a lecture which it was my duty to answer, and as I am
always confirmed in any view of my own that I can identify
with him, I shall, to show that the present is no forced advocacy,[147]
extract a few sentences from an Article, which nearly
at the time he was speaking, it happened to be my duty to be
writing. “We are not devotional, we are not practical,
in our combative aspects. We are on preliminary, not on
Christian ground. We are not improving, we have not a
Religion, until we have ceased contending and commenced
cultivating. Moral progress proceeds from cultivation of
the faith we rest in, producing its fruits in the warmth of
love. We must pursue what is our own, and forget our
controversial attitudes. They never will nourish the inner
life of a Congregation, nor keep its interest alive. They give
us no character of our own. They feed no intense yearnings.
They make no devoted disciples. We must proceed upon
our own views, not defending them, but loving them and
studying them. We must pursue a more independent course
of Developement. We must understand our own mission,
which is not to battle but to advance; not to be dogmatists
of any kind, but cherishers of Spirit and of Truth. Our
Union must be a moral one, a sympathy of Spirit. We can
have no intellectual or doctrinal union. We must give up
therefore the idea of aggregate life, as a Body devoted to a
uniform Belief, and held together by the forms of an uniform
Ecclesiastical Government. The whole body can flourish
only by the members having each life in himself. Our union
must be one of sentiment and first principles; our life one
of individualities.” And again, speaking of Unitarian Ministers:
“They should present a Christianity qualified by its
energy to meet both the strength and the weakness of the
spiritual being, to inspire a devoted love, and to lead souls
captive. They should take their stand upon no combative
ground. They should eschew a religion of negations. Faith
should be their great power; a faith that appeals to the faith
of their hearers, nourishing it where it is, creating it where
it is not. With no other bond of union than this power
to satisfy the deep spiritual wants of those to whom they
minister, they above all others should cultivate a Christianity
that has positive attractions for the spirit of man, a Christianity
that is fitted to draw upon itself the warmest and purest
affections; a Christianity that engages to do for us what it did
for Christ, to elevate the diviner tendencies, whilst it supports
the weakness of our frail yet noble nature. From the absence
of creeds, and its want of a mystical or fanatical interest, no
sect, so much as Unitarianism, requires a sympathetic,
generous, deep-hearted faith, an affirmative and nutritive
Christianity, to lay hold upon the religious affections, and feed
the religious life of its Churches. There is no other sect to
which coldness in Religion could be so fatal.”[148]
I have now gone through all the evidence adduced on
Wednesday evening, in support of the allegation, “The
Unitarian interpretation of the New Testament based upon
defective Scholarship, or on dishonest or uncandid Criticism.”
Such a declaration, again I say, should never have been made,
or should have been adequately sustained. To fail in the
proof is to pass upon the statement not intellectual only, but
moral condemnation. We were told by the preacher that
when the time came to support the allegation, he would not
use irritating language, but sound argument. I grieve to
say that pledge was not redeemed. And the moral condemnation
of advancing such a charge, and leaving it unproved,
falls upon him. I understand that the lecture was continued
yesterday evening; when the press puts it into my hands
I shall have an opportunity of seeing what additional comments
it may require. But when I was told by the preacher
himself, on Wednesday evening, that on the evidence then
adduced, and which I have now presented to you, he regarded
his charge made out not only in one but in both its
clauses, that in short he had been too forbearing, for that instead
of the disjunctive he might have used the copulative
conjunction, and made his accusation to be this, “The Unitarian
Interpretation of the New Testament based upon defective
scholarship, and on dishonest and uncandid Criticism,”—I
held myself discharged from all further duty of attention.
And now, after the “expostulations” to which you have
been subjected elsewhere, your convictions treated as sins,
and the exercise of your conscientious judgment represented
as exposing you to the wrath of a holy God, (strange combination
of ideas, wrath and holiness!) I may, perhaps, not
unbecomingly address a few words to you my fellow-believers.
Trinitarians have the power to deny you the name of Christians;
but they have not the power to deny you the Reality.
They cannot prevent you being Christians; and it is a light
thing for you to be judged by man’s judgment, provided only
you can disprove the judgment by preserving your Christianity
unprovoked, by retaining your Christian love towards those
who deny you the Christian name. The worst operation of
persecution and fanaticism is its tendency to produce a reaction.
The worst working of an Evil Spirit is that it calls
up other evil spirits to oppose it. The temper we complain
of has a tendency to provoke the same temper in ourselves.
And yet an evil spirit cannot be conquered by an evil spirit.
This is one of the divine prerogatives of the spirit of goodness.
You must overcome evil with good. You must be
prepared to expect that men who deem themselves your religious
superiors, will comport themselves accordingly. You
must regard it as only natural that men who hold themselves
to be the favourites of God, and never expect to meet
you in heaven, should treat you with little respect on earth.
Nay, you must even have some tenderness for the feelings
of irritation which this very faith cannot fail to generate in
the kindlier nature of those who hold it. Holding you to be
lost, and having human hearts, how can they avoid assailing
you with eager, anxious, and even persecuting aggression?
I blame them not for this: I only wonder there is so little of
it: that they leave us to our fate, with so little effort, to use
their own favourite figure, to pluck the brands from the burning.
Nay, my friends, more than this, their confidence in
their own salvation depending on the dogmatical assurance
with which they hold certain doctrinal ideas, they are
naturally alarmed lest this essential faith should in any way
be disturbed in their bosoms, and they come to look upon every
freer mind as a tempter and an enemy. And as their Faith
is by their own boast not a rational Faith, as it has no roots
in their intellectual nature, they feel that their danger is all
the greater, and that their caution must be all the more. They
are not happy in their exclusive faith. How can they if they
have Christian hearts? It rests upon an evidence out of themselves,
so that they cannot, at all times, be confident in it.
It presents to them many unhappy images, a vindictive God,[149]
an exclusive Heaven, a condemned world, fellow-beings
against whom their religious feelings are embittered, but
towards whom their hearts still yearn. All these are reasons
why you should exercise forbearance. You have an easier
part. You have a faith that supports you in meek Hope and
Trust for all. Your hearts are at peace both with Man and
God. You can wait in patience until Heaven does justice
unto all. Having this more blessed and peaceful faith, you
must also make it more fruitful, and thus be enabled to meet
the question, “What do ye more than others?”
For ourselves, let us pursue our own way, and love our
own Christ in meek faith and trust. Doctrines are uncertain:
but the spirit of Jesus is not uncertain. You know
what that is; and that its fruits are, “love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.”
Love, venerate, obey in all things, the Heaven-sent and
Heaven-marked Christ; cherish the growth of his spirit in
your souls; place him before you in moments of trying duty;
and in all times of nature’s languishing see him at the open
gate of Heaven, inviting you to be faithful to the end, that you
may join him at the resurrection of the just. Do this and
your souls shall live. To be this is to be Christians. Others
may hold a different language; but you owe no allegiance
save to God in Christ. One is your master, and all ye are
brethren.
συντελειαν του αιωνος—the end of the age.
“Hanc ob causam Judæi universum tempus in duas magnas periodos
dispescere consueverunt, alteram Messiæ adventum antecedentem
(αιων οὑτος vel ὁ νυν αιων), alteram consequentem (αιων μελλων vel
ερχομενος vel εκεινος). Postremam illius (αιωνος τουτου) partem, ævo
Messiano annexam, nominarunt ὑστερους καιρους, καιρον εσχατον, εσχατα
των χρονων, εσχατας ἡμερας, exitumque ejus τα τελη των αιωνων vel
συντελειαν του αιωνος.”—Bertholdt.Christologia Judæorum Jesu
Apostolorumque ætate. pp. 38, 39.
“On this account the Jews were accustomed to divide Time into
two great Periods, one preceding the advent of the Messiah, and
called ‘this world,’ ‘this age,’ or, ‘the world that now is,’ ‘the age
that now is;’ the other subsequent to the advent, and called ‘the
world to come,’ ‘the age to come,’ ‘that world,’ ‘that age.’ The
latter portion of the former Period, that immediately adjoining the
Messianic Age, they called ‘the latter times,’ ‘the last time,’ ‘these
last days,’—and its close (that is, the close of the Ante-Messianic
Period), ‘the ends of the world,’ or, ‘the end of the world,’ ‘the
end of the age.’”
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God,
and the Logos was God.”
“There is no word in English answering to the Greek word
Logos, as here used. It was employed to denote a mode of conception
concerning the Deity, familiar at the time when St. John
wrote, and intimately blended with the philosophy of his age, but
long since obsolete, and so foreign from our habits of thinking, that
it is not easy for us to conform our minds to its apprehension. The
Greek word Logos, in one of its primary senses, answered nearly to
our word Reason. It denoted that faculty by which the mind
disposes its ideas in their proper relations to each other: the Disposing
Power, if I may so speak, of the mind. In reference to this
primary sense, it was applied to the Deity, but in a wider significance.
The Logos of God was regarded, not in its strictest sense,
as merely the Reason of God, but under certain aspects, as the
Wisdom, the Mind, the Intellect of God. To this the Creation of
all things was especially ascribed. The conception may seem obvious
in itself; but the Cause why the creation was primarily referred to
the Logos, or Intellect of God, rather than to his goodness or omnipotence,
is to be found in the Platonic Philosophy, as it existed
about the time of Christ, and particularly as taught by the eminent
Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria.
“According to this philosophy, there existed an archetypal world
of Ideas, formed by God, the perfect model of the Sensible Universe;
corresponding, so far as what is divine may be compared with
what is human, to the plan of a building or city, which an architect
forms in his own mind before commencing its erection. The faculty
by which God disposed and arranged the world of Ideas was his
Logos, Reason, or Intellect. This world, according to one representation,
was supposed to have its seat in the Logos or Mind of
God; according to another, it was identified with the Logos. The
Platonic philosophy further taught, that the Ideas of God were not
merely the archetypes, but, in scholastic language, the essential forms
of all created things. In this philosophy, matter in its primary state,
primitive matter, if I may so speak, was regarded merely as the substratum
of attributes, being in itself devoid of all. Attributes, it is
conceived, were impressed upon it by the Ideas of God, which Philo
often speaks of under the figure of seals. These Ideas, indeed,
constituted those attributes, becoming connected with primitive
matter in an incomprehensible manner, and thus giving form and being
to all things sensible. But the seat of these ideas, these formative
principles, being the Logos, or intellect of God; or, according to the
other representations mentioned, these Ideas constituting the Logos,
the Logos was, in consequence, represented as the great agent in
creation. This doctrine being settled, the meaning of the Term
gradually extended itself by a natural process, and came at last to
comprehend all the attributes of God manifested in the creation and
government of the Universe. These attributes, abstractly from God
himself, were made an object of thought under the name of the
Logos. The Logos thus conceived, was necessarily personified or
spoken of figuratively as a person. In our own language, in describing
its agency,—agency, in its nature personal, and to be ultimately
referred to God,—we might indeed avoid attaching a personal
character to the Logos considered abstractly from God, by the use of
the neuter pronoun it. Thus we might say, All things were made
by it. But the Greek language afforded no such resource, the relative
pronoun, in concord with Logos, being necessarily masculine. Thus
the Logos or Intellect of God came to be, figuratively or literally,
conceived of as an intermediate being between God and his creatures,
the great agent in the creation and government of the universe.” * * *
“The conception and the name of the Logos were familiar at the
time when St. John wrote. They occur in the Apocryphal book of
the Wisdom of Solomon. The writer, speaking of the destruction
of the first-born of the Egyptians, says (xviii. 15):
“‘Thine almighty Logos leapt down from heaven, from his royal
throne, a fierce warrior, into the midst of a land of destruction.’”
In another passage, likewise, in the prayer ascribed to Solomon,
he is represented as thus addressing God (ix. 1, 2):
“God of our fathers, and Lord of mercy,
Who hast made all things by thy Logos,
And fashioned man by thy Wisdom. * * *
“St. John, writing in Asia Minor, where many, for whom he intended
his Gospel, were familiar with the conception of the Logos,
has probably, for this reason, adopted the term Logos, in the proem
of his Gospel, to express that manifestation of God by Christ, which
is elsewhere referred to the spirit of God.”
“But to return: the conception that has been described having
been formed of the Logos, and the Logos being, as I have said,
necessarily personified, or spoken of figuratively as a person, it soon
followed, as a natural consequence, that the Logos was by many
hypostatized, or conceived of as a proper person. When the corrective
of experience and actual knowledge cannot be applied, what
is strongly imagined is very likely to be regarded as having a real existence;
and the philosophy of the ancients was composed in great
part of such imaginations. The Logos, it is to be recollected, was
that power by which God disposed in order the Ideas of the archetypal
world. But in particular reference to the creation of the
material universe, the Logos came in time to be conceived of by
many as hypostatized, as a proper person going forth, as it were,
from God in order to execute the plan prepared, to dispose and
arrange all things conformably to it, and to give sensible forms to
primitive matter, by impressing it with the ideas of the archetypal
world. In many cases in which the term ‘Logos’ occurs, if we
understand by it the Disposing Power of God in a sense conformable
to the notions explained, we may have a clearer idea of its
meaning than if we render it by the term ‘Reason,’ or ‘Wisdom,’
or any other which our language offers.” * * *
“From the explanations which have been given of the conceptions
concerning the Logos of God, it will appear that this term properly
denoted an attribute or attributes of God; and that upon the notion
of an attribute or attributes, the idea of personality was superinduced.” * * *
“It was his (St. John’s) purpose in the introduction of his Gospel,
to declare that Christianity had the same divine origin as the Universe
itself; that it was to be considered as proceeding from the same
power of God. Writing in Asia Minor, for readers, by many of
whom the term ‘Logos’ was more familiarly used than any other,
to express the attributes of God viewed in relation to his creatures,
he adopted this term to convey his meaning, because from their
associations with it, it was fitted particularly to impress and affect
their minds; thus connecting the great truths which he taught with
their former modes of thinking and speaking. But upon the idea
primarily expressed by this term, a new Conception, the Conception
of the proper personality of those attributes, had been superinduced.
This doctrine, then, the doctrine of an hypostatized Logos, it appears
to have been his purpose to set aside. He would guard himself, I
think, against being understood to countenance it. The Logos, he
teaches, was not the agent of God, but God himself. Using the
term merely to denote the attributes of God as manifested in his
works, he teaches that the operations of the Logos are the operations
of God; that all conceived of under that name is to be referred
immediately to God; that in speaking of the Logos we speak of
God, ‘That the Logos is God.’
“The Platonic Conception of a personal Logos, distinct from God,
was the Embryo form of the Christian Trinity. If, therefore, the
view just given of the purpose of St. John be correct, it is a remarkable
fact, that his language has been alleged as a main support of
that very doctrine the rudiments of which it was intended to oppose.”—Norton
on the Trinity.
I shall now give a paraphrase of the Introduction of St. John’s
Gospel in harmony with the Conception that the Logos is described
first as dwelling in God—and afterwards as manifested through
Christ—the Logos made flesh—“God manifest in the flesh,” an
expression which is so far from implying Trinitarianism, that it
exactly expresses the Unitarian idea of Christianity as a revelation of
God—of Deity imaged perfectly on the human scale—of the light of
the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Jesus Christ.
Proem of St. John’s Gospel.
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God,
and the Logos was God. It was in the beginning with God. By it
all things were made, and without it was not any thing made, that
was made. It was life (the source of life)—and the source of life
or blessedness was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness,
and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent
from God. This man came as a witness to bear testimony concerning
the light; that all men through him might believe. He was not
the Light, but he was sent to bear testimony concerning the Light.
That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world. It was in the world, and the world was made by it, and
the world knew it not. It came unto its own, and its own received
it not. But to as many as received it, it gave power to become the
Sons of God (Logoi)—being born, not of favoured races, nor
through the will of the flesh, nor through the will of man, but being
children of God. And the Logos became flesh (was manifested
through a man, the Mind or Spirit[150] of God shown on the human
Image), and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory as of the
only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
“Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh
Christ came; God who is over all be blessed for ever.” Amen.
The objections made to our rendering of this passage are these:—
1. That ὁ ὠν coming first in the sentence must refer to the nominative
(χριστὸς). But there is no grammatical rule to prevent ὁ ὠν
commencing a sentence and referring to a subsequent nominative; so
that to say it must refer to the preceding χριστὸς is only to take the
desired interpretation for granted.
2. That another article is required before θεος, and the position of
the words to be Ὁ δε θεος ὁ ὠν ἐπὶ πάντων, κ. τ. λ. If θεος had been
placed first in the sentence the article would have been used, but the
qualifying expression ὁ ἐπὶ πάντων more than supplies its place. A
passage from Philo exactly parallel is cited by the Rev. W. Hincks
in his very able Review of Dr. J. P. Smith’s Scripture Testimony to
the Messiah του προς ἀληθειαν οντος θεου. Ed. 1610, (apud Middleton,)
p. 860. Also Clem. Rom. ad Cor. cap. xxxii. ὁ παντοκρατωρ θεος,
where παντοκρατωρ is equivalent to ὁ ὠν ἐπὶ πάντων. Eusebius has this
passage, τὸ τῆς φυχῆς ὄμμα πρὸς τὸν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸν καθαρῶς τείναντες.
See Jortin. Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. 235.
3. That εὐλογητὸς ought to come first in the sentence. But the
words “for ever,” εἰς τοὺς αιῶνας, whenever used, are placed at the
end of the sentence, and this naturally draws εὐλογητος to the same
position, to avoid awkwardness or ambiguity. In the cases where
θεος has dependent words, then ευλογητος comes first, that the words
connected by construction may not be awkwardly separated: in the
case of ευλογητος having dependent words, as here, then θεος would
naturally come first.
In the only three cases in which εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας occur in
the New Testament they follow one another in this fixed order.
In the Septuagint, contrary to the statement of Whitby, there is
one clear instance of a similar construction: Κυριος ὁ θεος ευλογητος,
Ps. lxviii. 19.
Finally, ευλογητος is nowhere in the New Testament applied to
Jesus.
4. That our rendering requires another substantive verb. Of such
ellipsis examples might be given without number. See Rom. x. 12.
2 Cor. v. 5. Ephes. iv. 6, a case exactly in point. Rev. xiv. 13.
5. That there is an antithesis intended by St. Paul between “as
concerning the flesh,” and “God over all”. But the sentence is not
an antithesis but a climax closed by Christ, as the consummation:
and at the close of a climax of blessings and privileges, acknowledgment
almost spontaneously bursts out to God.
Comments on the Rev. Mr. Byrth’s Lecture entitled “The Unitarian
Interpretation of the New Testament based upon defective Scholarship,
or on dishonest or uncandid Criticism.”
Page 108.—“It does appear to me extraordinary, that my opponents
should appear to complain of the introduction of critical and
scholastic considerations into this discussion.” We make no such
complaint. We complain that the essence of Christianity should be
derived from the Criticism and Interpretation of controverted passages.
Will my reverend opponent state a single argument for
Trinitarianism, or adduce a single scriptural evidence, not fairly open
to hostile Criticism or Interpretation? To us the Revelation is not
derived from any thing doubtful; it is derived from those impressions
of Jesus the Christ which Trinitarianism itself receives. To us the
Revelation is the Person, (in which we include his Life, Character,
Destinies,) of the man Christ Jesus. We know our God when we
know that he who was as full of grace as of truth was the Image of
our Father’s Mind: we know God’s will for man when we look
upon him who was perfected human nature: we know the connections
of Heaven with Duty when we see the crucified made the
glorified, and taken to the bosom of his Father.
Page 115.—“It does not, however, follow that, because the Unitarian
interpretation of the New Testament bears this character, all
Unitarians are defective Scholars, or uncandid or dishonest Critics.
Many of them may have received their opinions through the channel
of traditional education; and may never have deemed it obligatory
upon them to examine the matter for themselves.” So, we have the
choice of any one of three characters, viz., Bad Scholars, Dishonest
Critics, or So-called Christians, who know nothing and care
nothing about the matter. Does Mr. Byrth really think that this last
refuge removes the insult of his Title, or softens its indictment?
Some of us, confined to a choice among these three descriptions,
preach Christianity, and are therefore certainly bound to “examine
the matter” for ourselves; nor is it to us that the suspicion usually
attaches of receiving our “opinions through the channels of a traditional
education.”
“The dogmata are too few, too general, too unimportant, to elicit
inquiry, or to excite anxiety as to their truth.” There is some truth
in this, though not exactly of the kind the author contemplated.
The interest of Trinitarianism depends greatly on the number of its
dogmata, their intricacy, their supposed necessity to salvation, the
exactness of their right mutual positions. There is much in a saving
Theology, having an intricate scheme, and whose main principles and
evidences are external to the mind of the believer, and therefore
constantly agitating him with apprehension as to whether he has
disposed them according to the precise conditions of orthodoxy, to
occupy and sometimes oppress minds that have little affinities with a
saving Religion, a simple spirit of Worship, Duty, and Trust immortal.
But is it true that these Unitarian doctrines are “unimportant”—The
Fatherhood of God—the Brotherhood of Man—the relations
of Jesus to God as His Image, and to Man as his Model—the retributions
of Eternity—the Heaven of Duty?
Page 119.—See the Note.—Surely Mr. Byrth will perceive the
unfairness of concluding a Book to be our Standard, merely because
some other parties, very unfavourably disposed towards us, choose to
represent it as such.
Page 124.—See the Note.—“I have been charged with almost or
altogether suppressing, in the delivery of this Discourse, the word
‘controversially.’” I eagerly assure Mr. Byrth that no such charge
was ever made, nor could be made with truth, and I am much grieved
that any rumour has conveyed to him the pain of such an impression.
Though using hard words to his opponents, and giving them the
choice of any one of three bad characters, I believe him perfectly
incapable of “dishonesty.” Believing me to have made such a
charge, whilst I do not excuse him for so believing upon hearsay, I
feel obliged by his forbearance, and for a courtesy in denying the
charge, which if made I should not have deserved. I complained
that the “controversial” attitudes of Unitarianism were confounded
with its own peaceful and positive ones, two things that were most
carefully separated in the speeches from which Mr. Byrth took
extracts; and that he represented as a description of Unitarianism,
what was distinctly stated to be Unitarianism, “controversially”
described. Mr. Byrth, though giving the word “controversially,”
overlooked its meaning.
Page 132.—“Epiphanius asserts that the Ebionites,” &c.: also
the note marked †.
As it is exceedingly inconvenient to repeat subjects and answers,
and so never to get rid of a topic, I refer Mr. Byrth and my readers
to note B, on the Ebionites and their Gospel, in the Appendix to the
Second Lecture of our Course.
Page 140.—See the Note.—“I cannot but express my satisfaction
that in the very place where this book was thus regarded as an
authority, and thus earnestly recommended, it is now renounced and
disclaimed.”
I do not know what Mr. Byrth includes in “renouncing” and
“disclaiming.” If these words mean “rejecting as a standard
authority,” then in the place alluded to was the Improved Version
always renounced and disclaimed.
The praise quoted in the note certainly requires much qualification.
Nevertheless the Improved Version is neither renounced nor disclaimed.
We have no predilection for the rude principle of taking
things in the mass, or leaving them in the mass, without discrimination.
And I fancy that if our opponents were in these matters as
much at liberty as ourselves, there are some of their standards which
would soon be thoroughly sifted.
Page 143.—“For even they would scarcely think highly of the
scholarship of Bishop Pearce.”
I have quoted Bishop Pearce, not for his learning, though unquestionably
that was respectable, but for the sake of stating that the
acceptance by a Bishop of the English Church of a certain interpretation
ought to have screened “a reputed heretic” from the charge
of accepting the same interpretation solely for the sake of an a
priori meaning.
Page 146.—“Epiphanius has little authority with any one else.”
Mr. Byrth is quite right in his estimate of Epiphanius. But it is
hardly wise for those who, like Mr. Byrth, rest their faith upon
external testimonies, to look too closely into the characters of the
witnesses, or raise doubts respecting them in the public mind. We
know how much of the weight of these testimonies rests upon
Eusebius—and I doubt not Mr. Byrth knows very well that he is
clearly convicted of having interpolated one passage in Josephus, and
corrupted another. How can we tell how far this process of reconciliation
was carried? Why is it that we have not the works of the
Heretics, of whose names ecclesiastical History is so full?
Page 147.—See the Note.—Mr. Byrth seems to think it impossible
to have worded the Title of his Lecture so as not to have
insulted some one. Will he allow me to suggest what the Title
might have been without offence, though not with exact truth of
description—“Some of the interpretations of the Improved Version
of the New Testament based upon defective Scholarship.” To
attribute “dishonesty” and want of “candour,” Mr. Byrth will I am
sure feel to be too vulgar to be altogether worthy of his character as
a Critic and a Scholar. In the text of his Lecture (p. 122), he
indeed states his belief that Unitarian Interpretation, of every kind,
wants scholarship, or wants honesty—and it was to the proof of this
statement that he ought to have applied himself, or else to have
altered the Title of his Lecture.
Page 148.—Luke iii. 23.—“And Jesus himself began to be about
thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph.”
This passage was not introduced into the first part of Mr. Byrth’s
Lecture as originally delivered. I state this only to excuse myself
for having taken no notice of it in the body of my Lecture. This
is the case also with some other passages. There were also expressions
and sentiments of Mr. Byrth spoken, but not printed. I would
not state this were it not necessary to justify some passages in my
own Lecture. I refer especially to an oratorical use that was made
of a most objectionable and irreverent sentiment of Coleridge’s, full
of the very spirit of dogmatism and presumption. P. 161.
With regard to Luke iii. 23. The rendering of the Improved
Version is that of Bishop Pearce, who I suppose had no heretical
reason for preferring it. I confess it does not seem natural. Dr.
Carpenter thinks the words “as he was supposed,” put in to guard
against some Gnostic or Platonic error, and for the purpose of stating
distinctly that he was the son of Joseph, as he was supposed to be.
The same writer acutely remarks that it is most improbable, indeed
next to impossible, that any writer should trace our Lord’s descent
from David through Joseph, and then declare that Joseph was only
supposed to be his father, thus nullifying his own genealogy. Kuinoel
gives a suggestion of Boltenius, to which he evidently inclines that
ὡς ἐνομίζετο applies not to the supposed descent of Jesus from Joseph
but to the whole genealogy. I annex his note.
“Boltenius ad h. l. suspicatus est, verba ὡς ἐνομίζετο, non tantum
eo referenda esse, quod Judæi falso putaverint, Josephum esse Christi
parentem, sed spectari quoque his verbis genealogiam ipsam h. l.
exhibitam, eaque reddenda esse: hanc putabant esse Jesu genealogiam,
erat pater ejus Josephus, hujus pater Eli, etc., ut adeo Lucas professus
sit, se inseruisse genealogiam, prouti ea in manus ipsius venisset,
seque authentiam illius acrius defendere nolle. Hac ratione admissa,
explicari forte etiam posset, quî factum sit, ut Lucas genealogiam
ipsi suspectam, in Evangelio infantiæ Jesu propositam, ad calcem
illius fortasse adjectam, h. l. inseruerit, quod nempe aliquamdiu
dubius hæsisset, an eam reciperet. Alii opinati sunt, hanc genealogiam,
cum diversa sit ab ea quæ in Matthæi commentariis reperitur,
cum laxiori vinculo superioribus annexa sit, non a Luca ipso, sed
serius additam esse.”
Page 149.—See the Note.—“Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of
Mary: of whom (Mary) was born (or was begotten) Jesus who is
called the Christ.” “Now is it possible to declare, in plainer terms,
that, though Jesus was born of Mary, who was married to Joseph,
yet that Joseph did not beget him.”—Magee. Great is the ingenuity
here, wonderfully misapplied. Is it not clear that St. Matthew was
tracing the descent of Jesus from David, and that he brings down
the chain to the very last link, namely Joseph, that is, the very Joseph
necessary to be included, the husband of the mother of Jesus? That
Joseph, the very husband of Mary, from whom Christ was born,
being thus shown to be a lineal descendant of David, the Evangelist
stops. What could he do more? His object being to trace the
descent of Jesus from David, what could be more natural than, when
he arrived at Joseph, to say—here is the unbroken succession, for
this is the very man who was the husband of that Mary from whom
Jesus was born. Of course the writer could not alter the form of
expression until he arrived at the very man whom he wished to identify
as the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus—and the reason for
altering it then is very obvious.
If Joseph was not the father of Jesus, the genealogy is vitiated,
for it is through Joseph that the descent is traced.
Pages 157, 158.—“He was in the world, and the world was made
by him, and the world knew him not.” “He was in the world, and
the world was enlightened by him, and yet the world knew him not.”—I. V.
This interpretation cannot, I think, be defended. I am
sorry it was ever given. Yet Mr. Byrth’s sarcasm is quite powerless
against it, “what kind of light is that which blinds the eyes which it
was intended to illuminate?” in the face of the text—“the light
shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not;” unless
he adopts the interpretation of some of the Fathers,—“And the
darkness did not insinuate itself into the light, interpenetrate and
quench it.”
Page 161.—The liberality of Robert Hall. We desire to speak
with respect of this great and good man. But perhaps it would be
impossible to name a man more illiberal as a controversialist, and who
allowed himself such an unmeasured use of uncharitable language.
It was only the other day I learned an anecdote of him from the person
to whom the words were spoken, descriptive at once of his vigour
and his rancour: speaking of the Unitarians he said—“they are
inspired from beneath,”—with a look, said my informant, never to be
forgotten. Many passages might be brought from his writings,
especially his Reviews, demonstrative of this temper,—but the passage
given by Mr. Byrth himself, in which he is satisfied to rest
conclusions so momentous and fearful upon reasonings so arbitrary
and vague, is quite enough. When any man acquainted with the
state of Theological opinion in the world, and with the impossibility
of uniformity, can fix upon his own opinions as essential, and run a
doctrinal line between Heaven and Hell, we require no further tests
of his “liberality,” unless indeed he is, what Mr. Hall was not, only
a traditional believer.
I have already remarked that some of my observations apply more
to the spoken than to the printed lecture. Were it possible to efface
the impressions made by the speaker, and which required to be
counteracted, gladly would I efface every word of personal reference
from my pages. Even now, with the recollection fresh upon my mind,
of the unsparing contempt, both literary and moral, expressed by
words and tones, not conveyed by the printed page, when the speaker,
feeling that the sympathies of his audience were with him to the
full, and that their knowledge of the subject required from him the
broadest statements, to render it intelligible, gave himself to the
excitement of the moment,—I have more than doubted whether it
would not have been better to have avoided every personal allusion.
I believe that I have in no case overstated or misrepresented what
was said. I deeply grieve to fix upon my pages the suggestions,
perhaps, of momentary excitement, which Mr. Byrth’s better feeling
has, in some instances, refused to record—and that the obligation I
was under to remove an impression actually made, does not permit
me to give full effect to this working of a kinder spirit, the manifestations
of which, in other ways, I have respectfully to acknowledge.
133. “Heresy and Orthodoxy,” by Rev. J. B. White, pp. 8, 9.
135. See Griesbach. Chrysostom omits “who is God over all.” Clement, in a
passage evidently imitated from this, omits the doxology, which he is not likely
to have done if he understood it as referring to Christ. In addition to other
authorities for pointing the passage in consistency with the Unitarian Interpretation,
Griesbach quotes “Many Fathers who denied that Christ could be called ‘the
God over all.’ Multi patres, qui Christum τὸν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸν appellari posse
negant.” In an edition of Griesbach, printed by Taylor and Walton in 1837,
this punctuation is given, and is stated also to be the pointing of Scholz.
140. “The mistranslation of the word αἰῶνες, by the English word ‘worlds,’ in
the commencement of the Epistle to the Hebrews. For giving this sense to the
original term, there is not, I think, any authority to be found either in Hellenistic
or classic Greek.”—Norton on the Trinity.
142. Whitby, from whose armoury I find so many weapons have been taken,
contends also for “the end of the world,” on the ground that Christ’s miraculous
assistance was continued sensibly till the beginning of the fourth century.
145. See note, page 19. I have no access to the text of Scholz, except in the
edition published by Taylor and Walton. This places a period after σάρκα, flesh;
which, however, it also gives in the text as the pointing of Griesbach, contrary to
the only other edition I have at present the opportunity of examining.
146. See Appendix for a fuller examination of these two passages, viz., the Proem
of St. John’s Gospel, and Rom. ix. 5.
147. And especially since Mr. Byrth has alluded to the disapprobation with which
the sentiment was received.
148. Christian Teacher, New Series, No. I, pp. 31, 32.
149. By this I mean a God who cannot forgive except by one process—advantage
of which must be taken by an act of faith—it being always uncertain whether the
faith is right or sufficient.
150. We find in the first beginnings of the Trinity, the Logos and the Holy Spirit
identified. This is even angrily contended for by Tertullian. “What! when
John said that the Logos was made flesh, and the angel” (respecting the miraculous
conception) “that the Spirit was made flesh, did they mean any thing different?”—Tertullian,
Advers. Praxeam. Cap. xxvi.
LECTURE IV. — APPENDIX. — Note on John xii. See page 8 . — Note 1, see page 18 . — Note 2, see page 26 . — Footnotes for Lecture IV.
“THERE IS ONE GOD, AND ONE MEDIATOR BETWEEN GOD AND MEN,
THE MAN CHRIST JESUS.”
BY REV. HENRY GILES.
“THERE IS ONE GOD, AND ONE MEDIATOR BETWEEN GOD AND MEN, THE MAN CHRIST JESUS.”—1 Tim. ii. 5.
The passage I have read suggests the subject of my lecture,
the position in which we stand to our opponents will suggest
the tendency of the commentary. The text announces
the two great truths on which our entire system of Christianity
is based, and ours in all essential points, we think,
coincides with simple, with evangelical Christianity. The
truths propounded in the text are, the Unity of God, and the
Unity of Christ.—A unity in each case absolute and perfect,
without division of nature or distinction of person. We
believe that God is one,—that he is one being, one mind, one
person, one agent. And this belief, and no other, we can
deduce from the works of creation, and the teachings of the
Scriptures.
That God is one universally and absolutely, we have impressed
upon us from the order of creation; that he is great,
we learn from the magnitude of his works; and that he is
good, we learn from their blessedness and beauty. This
sublime truth is illustrated in every region of existence, so
far as we know it, and every illustration is an argument. It
is written on the broad and immortal heavens in characters
of glory and light; it is manifested in that mighty law which
binds atom to atom into a world, and world to world in a
system, and system to system, until from that wonderful
universe which science can traverse, we arise to him, whom
no knowledge can fathom, whom no limits can bound, and in
contemplating whom science must give place to faith.
The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament
showeth his handy-work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and
night unto night showeth knowledge—and that God is one, is
proclaimed in this speech, and manifested in this knowledge. It
gleams in the light, it breathes in the air, it moves in the life
of all created nature; it is the harmony of creation, and the
spirit of providence, the inspiration of reason, and the consistency
of wisdom. The existence of one Supreme Intelligence
is the Testimony of Nature, and to the same import
are the testimonies of Scripture. We are told, and told
it in every variety of tone, that to believe one God in three
persons is absolutely needful to Salvation, yet we may read
from Genesis to Revelations without finding such a doctrine
either as a statement of truth, or a means of sanctity: but
the simple and unqualified declaration that God is one, without
any of these dogmatical distinctions which men of later
ages have invented, I need not tell a Bible-reading audience,
are interwoven with the whole texture of revelation. It
was that for which Abraham left his home, and went forth
a wanderer from his family and his nation; it was that for
which Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s
daughter, and for which he chose rather to suffer affliction
with the people of God; it was that over which he had long
thought in his shepherd-life in an Arabian wilderness; it was
that with which he was more deeply inspired in the solemn
retirements of Mount Horeb; it was that to which all his
laws and institutions pointed. Our Saviour took the doctrine
as a known maxim—and in this his disciples followed
him. We have then the truth brought down to us through
Scripture, in patriarchal tradition, in Mosaic legislation, in
the poetry of prophets, in the words of Christ, in the preaching
of apostles,—and we have it brought down to us without
one of those distinctions with which it has been since surrounded
by theological ingenuity. We are zealous in the
assertion of it, not for its mere metaphysical correctness, but
for its moral power and its moral consistency. It does not
divide our hearts, and it does not confuse our heads. It
leads our minds up to one spirit, infinite in power, infinite
in wisdom, and infinite in goodness. Without confusion or
perplexity we can trace God in all and all in God: in the
atom that trembles in a sunbeam, as in the planet that moves
in boundless light, from the blush of a flower to the glory
of the heavens—from the throb of an insect to the life of an
immortal. The Unitarian faith in the universal father is
clear, simple, and defined; inflicting no violence on our
understandings, and raising no conflicts in our affections. One,
and one in the strictest sense, is our parent, one is our sovereign,
one is our highest benefactor, one is our protector and
our guide, one is our deliverer and sanctifier; one has bestowed
all we possess, one alone can give all we hope for;
one is holy who demands our obedience; one is merciful who
pities our repentance; one is eternal in whose presence we
are to live, and therefore whether we present our adorations
in dependence, or bow down in submission, or send forth
our praises in gratitude, there is one, and but one, to whom
our aspirations can ascend, and to whom our hearts can be
devoted. Thus impressed, we must feel united to one Father
in filial obedience, and to all men in a common and fraternal
relationship; we cannot look upon some as selected, and
upon others as outcasts; we cannot look upon some as
purchased, and upon others as reprobate; we cannot look
upon some as sealed with the spirit of grace for ever unto
glory everlasting, and upon others as abandoned, unpitied,
and unprotected, the victims of an everlasting malediction.
We regard men as bound in a community of good, consequently
as bound in a community of praise; we regard them
as struggling in like trials, and therefore indebted to each
other for mutual sympathy; we regard them as heirs of the
same glory, and on the level of their heavenly hopes, standing
on a basis of sacred and eternal equality. If these sentiments
are false, they are at least generous, and it is not often that
generosity is found in company with falsehood. Alas, how
many heart-burning enmities, how many deadly persecutions
have been caused by different apprehension of God’s nature
or God’s worship; how often have these differences broken
all the fraternal bonds of humanity, made man the greatest
enemy to man,—more savage and cruel than the beast, yea,
and cruel in proportion to the zeal he pretended for his God.
But never could this have been, had men believed in God,
had men believed in Christ—had they believed in God as an
impartial and universal Father, had they believed in Christ as
an equal and universal brother.—Then we could have all sent
our mingled prayers to the skies, and with a Christianity as
broad as our earth, and as ample as our race, and generous as
the soul of Jesus, we could have taken all mankind to our
heart. We maintain it not in mere abstract speculation, but
because we consider it a positive and a vital truth. Were
the point metaphysical and not moral, we conceive it would
be little worthy of dispute—and in that sense I for one would
have small anxiety, whether God existed in three persons
or in three thousand. In like manner we hold the simple
and absolute unity of Christ; a unity of nature, a unity
of person, and a unity of character. But as this topic is
to occupy so large a space in the present lecture, I shall here
forbear from further comments.
The statement of our subject in a text, was alluded to by
the Christ Church Lecturer, in a tone that at least approached
to censure. But we consider it amongst our privileges, that
we can express our main principles in the simple and obvious
language of Scripture; and if in this case deep scholarship
and acute criticism be needed to give it to common minds
a meaning different from that in which we understand it, the
fault certainly is not ours.—Neither, indeed, is ours the blame,
if a similar phraseology pervades the whole Christian Scriptures;
that in every page we read of God and Christ, and
never of God in three persons, or of Christ in two natures.
To find out such distinctions, we leave to Scholastic ingenuity;
to give them definition and perpetuity, we consign to
the framers of creeds and articles—and to receive and reverence
them we turn over to the admirers of Athanasian perspicuity.
We take the New Testament as the best formulary;
we are satisfied with a religion direct and simple in its principles,
and we long not for a religion of deducibles. We
have been accused of tortuous criticism; and although we
desire not to retort the accusation on our opponents, so far
I mean, as it implies moral delinquency, we cannot forbear
observing that the intellectual sinuosities by which some
of these deductions have been drawn from the New Testament
is to us, certainly, a subject of not a little admiration.
Our motive in selecting this text was the best of all which
governs men in the use of language, simply that with greatest
brevity and greatest perspicuity, it enunciates our opinions.
Our opponents, however, have no right to complain; the
advantage of being first in the field was on their side, and
the struggle was not provoked on our part but on theirs:
they of course selected their own subjects, and they suggested
ours. They could, therefore, have had no uncertainty either
as to our views or interpretation of the text. I would not
allude to a matter so small, were it not for the contradictory
delinquencies with which Unitarians are accused—one time
they are charged with dreading an appeal to Scripture, and
when by the very title of their subject, they tacitly appeal to
Scripture, there is wanting still no occasion to blame.
What, in Unitarian views, is Christ the Man, and what
is Christ the Mediator, shall make the subject of the present
Lecture.
I.—First, I beg your attention to the enquiry as to what
we believe of Christ as man. To this we answer, that in his
nature we think him simply and undividedly human; that in
his character we regard him morally perfect. We cannot
recognize in Christ a mixture of natures, and we wonder that
any who read the gospel’s records can. That he was simply
and merely human, is a conclusion which meditation on these
Records but fixes more profoundly on our understandings,
and makes more precious to our faith. We derive the conclusion
from Christ’s own language—“Ye seek to kill me,” he
says, “a man—which hath told you the truth, which I heard
of God.”—Again, when a worldly and ambitious individual,
mistaking the true nature of this kingdom, desired to become
his disciple: “The foxes, said Jesus, have holes, and the birds
of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not whereon
to lay his head.” Instances, too many to repeat, might be
enumerated; but the only other I shall adduce is that in
which Christ’s human nature speaks from its deepest sorrows,
and its strongest love: when Jesus, as he hung upon the
Cross, saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved
standing by, he saith unto his mother, “Woman, behold thy
son.” It is vain to tell us of an infinite God veiled behind
this suffering and sweetness, the mind repels it, despite of all
the efforts of theology.[151]
The impression of a simple humanity was that which he
left on the mind of his countrymen. What other impression
could they have of one whom they daily saw amongst
them as of themselves? who came weary to rest in their
habitations; who came hungry to sit at their boards; whom
they met in their streets sinking with fatigue; whom they
might see upon their wayside asking drink from a well; one
whom they saw weep over their troubles and rejoice in their
gladness. Nay, the very intenseness of his humanity became
a matter of accusation. To many it seemed subversive of
religion. That spirit which sympathized with human beings,
in their joys and woes, which not only loved the best, but
would not cast out the worst, was what those of strait and
narrow hearts could not understand. He came eating and
drinking, and they called him a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber.
Had he said long prayers at the corners of their streets,
and been zealous for the traditions of the fathers, they would
have revered him as a saint. Those who were panoplied
in their own spiritual sufficiency knew not how he could be
the friend of sinners; how he could associate with the
deserted and the excommunicated; how he could take to his
compassion the weary and the heavy-laden. The pharisee
who proudly asked him to his house, but gave him no salute,
no oil for his stiffened joints, and no water for his parched
feet, had nothing within him whereby to interpret the feeling
of Jesus towards her who anointed his head with ointment,
washed his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs
of her head. Yes, it was this truth and fulness of humanity
which made Jesus hateful to the pharisees, but loved and
blessed by the poor; it was this that made the common people
hear him gladly, and gave his voice a power which they never
felt in the teachings of the scribes; which drew crowds
around him, in wilderness and mountain, that hung raptured
on the glad tidings which he preached. The flatterers of
Herod on a particular occasion cried out, “It is the voice of
a god and not of a man;” but no one ever thought of insulting
Jesus with such an exclamation.
The guilt of the Jews in crucifying Christ has been alluded
to in the present controversy. But this is only an additional
proof that Jesus left no other conviction on the minds of his
countrymen than that he was simply a man. That our views
diminish this guilt has been urged as a powerful objection
against us; but, with reverence I say it, the objection turns
more against Christ himself. Either then he was simply man,
or being Deity, he suppressed the evidence which would prove
it, and allowed this people to contract the awful guilt of killing
a God-man. If the first be true, the guilt asserted has no
existence; if the second, I leave you to judge in what light it
places the sincerity and veracity of an incarnate Deity.
There is neither declaration nor evidence afforded by Christ
by which the Jews could think him more than man. On the
contrary he disclaims expressly the far lower honour at which
they thought his presumption aimed, by a quotation from
their own Scriptures: “It is written in your law” he observes,
“I said ye are Gods. If he called them Gods, unto
whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be
broken), say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and
sent into the world, thou blasphemest, because I said I am
the Son of God.”[152] There is then no declaration, nor yet is
there evidence. Miracles were not such: for the Jewish mind
and memory were filled with instances of these, and to the
performers of which they never thought of attributing a
nature above humanity. If Christ was more, the fact should
have been plainly manifested, for the idea of a God in a
clothing of flesh was one not only foreign but repugnant to
every Jewish imagination. The difference between the Jews
and pagans in this particular is not a little striking. Jesus
raised the dead before their eyes, and yet they thought him
but a man having great power from the Creator. Paul, in
company with Barnabas, healed a cripple at Lystra, and the
populace cried out, “The Gods are come down to us in the
likeness of men.” When Paul in Melita shook without harm
the viper from his hand, the spectators who at first considered
him a murderer, changed their minds, and said that
he was a God. In proportion then to the natural and religious
repugnance which the Jews had to humanize the
divinity, should there have been clearness in the proof of it
on the part of Jesus. No such proof was given.
The greatest miracles of Jesus disturbed not the conviction
of the Jews in his simple human nature. The woman of Samaria,
wondering at once at his charity and his knowledge,
called her neighbours to see a man who told her all things whatsoever
she did. She asked them, then is not this the Christ?
The blind man awakened by his touch from thick darkness into
the marvellous light of God’s creation describes him but as
a man who anointed his eyes. The Jewish officers struck
dumb before his wisdom, declare that never man spake like
this man. The Jews who stood around him and saw Lazarus,
whose body had been already dissolving, come forth quickened
from the grave, beheld in him but the powerful and the
loving friend. The multitudes of Judea, who in desert and
city were amazed at his wonderful works, simply “glorified
God who had given such power unto men.”
Similar was the impression which he left upon his intimate
friends. What would have been their emotions had they a
belief that continually they were in the bodily presence of the
incarnate God? How would they not have bowed themselves
in the dust, and stopped the familiar word as it trembled on
their lips? Instead of approaching with unfearing hearts, how
would they not have stood afar off and apart, and gazed with
awe upon a being who was pacing a fragment of the world
he created, instead of clinging to him as one of themselves?
Whenever they saw his mysterious appearance, would they
not call on the mountains to fall upon them, and the hills
to cover them? But not so was it. The lowly, the humble,
and the poor rejoiced to see him, and were glad when he entered
their habitations. They were consoled by the benediction
of peace with which he sanctified his approach and his
departure. For him was the gratulations of loving friends,
and for him were the smiles of little children. In Bethany,
Martha, when he came, was busy in much serving, and the
meek and gentle Mary sat at his feet to drink in his heavenly
wisdom. At the last supper John leaned upon his bosom.
At the cross, when the head of Jesus bent heavily in anguish,
and solitary torture was wearing away his life, there again we
meet the same disciple, there also we meet the mother of
Jesus and the grateful Magdalene, all three oppressed with
darkest affliction and despair. Some of them we again behold
at the sepulchre in utmost alarm. Now this grief at the
cross and this perplexity at the tomb is consistent with no
other supposition than that they regarded him simply as a
man. Why else should they have been afflicted? What
though his enemies were strong, if knowing him to be God,
they must also have known that his power was boundless and
his triumph certain. This sorrow and uncertainty, I repeat,
can have no other foundation than a belief in his simple humanity.
And surely if his mother had only such impression,
it is hard to expect that the Jews at the time, and many
Christians since, could have had any other.
I anticipate the objection that the glories of his deity were
concealed, and that this concealment was necessary to his mediatorial
work. I answer then, that when he had departed, and
when such a secresy was no longer needful, his apostles on some
of the most solemn occasions merely asserted his humanity, on
occasions, too, when, if he were God as well as man, the whole
truth were to be expected. Paul,[153] in announcing him as the
great and final judge of the world, calls him no more than man.
Nor does his language assume a higher import when he speaks
of him as the pattern and pledge of immortality.[154] No other
conclusion is to be drawn from the address of Peter to Cornelius;
and if a belief of Christ’s deity be necessary to salvation,
the centurion might, for anything Peter asserted, have gone
direct to perdition.[155] Still more remarkable is it, that in this
apostle’s first public address after the departure of his master
to the skies, we have nothing more than the same declaration.
The occasion and the circumstances not only justified, but
demanded the highest announcement that could be made
respecting Christ. The disciples had just seen him taken
up into heaven, and the awe of the ascension was yet
upon their hearts. He who had trod this weary earth
in many sorrows was taken from their sight. They who
had recently seen his blood streaming warmly on Calvary,
had come fresh from the glory of Olivet. He who
had been their suffering companion and instructor was
now their blessed and triumphant master. Alone in the
midst of a gainsaying and persecuting world, with gladness
solemnized by reverence, and victory tempered by grief, they
had assembled to await the promised Comforter. After that
event they were to be separated, and each was to take his
own path in the moral wilderness that stretched far and
desolately before him. The Spirit of Promise came. The
cloven tongues of fire fell upon them: that beautiful emblem
of the eloquent spirit of the gospel that was to carry light
and heat to the hearts of all generations, and through every
language of earth; that beautiful emblem of a Christianity
which might exist in many forms, but be at the same time
enlightened and enflamed by the soul of a common charity.
Multitudes from all nations were collected in the Holy City;—under
the influence of recent and solemn events Peter rises
to address them. The tragedy of Calvary was yet fresh in
the general imagination, the stain of a slave and malefactor’s
death was still dark on the forehead of Christianity. This
surely was the time to cover the ignominy that lay on the
humanity of Jesus by proclaiming the resplendent glory of
his godhead. This was especially to be expected from Peter.
He had on a preceding occasion spurned the idea of such a
shameful death, though coming from Christ’s own lips; now
was the time to pour the glory of the God over the humiliation
of the man; he too, who in an hour of weakness denied
his master, was the one who in the time of his strength and
repentance would be most ready to vindicate and assert his
highest honour. It is said that the apostles were not
thoroughly inspired, and did not fully know Christ before
the day of Pentecost. But this was the day of Pentecost.
If, besides, it was the speaker’s object—as indeed it must
have been—that Christ should be rightly and widely known,
now was the opportunity to send forth his name and nature
through every kingdom and in every tongue. If, according
to the doctrine some time since propounded in Christ Church,
the sin of the Jews was dark in proportion to the grade of
being in which we place the Saviour, now was the time, while
the event was recent, to strike their hearts with terror and
compunction. Contrast, then, these natural, these fair and
unexaggerated expectations, with the actual speech of Peter,
and without a word of comment the contrast is itself the
strongest argument. “Ye men of Israel hear these words:
Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by
miracles, and wonders, and signs which God did by him in
the midst of you, as ye yourselves know: him being delivered
by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have
taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom
God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because
it was not possible that he should be holden of it.”
(Acts ii. 22, 24.) Had you been listeners to this address, I
ask your candour, I ask your intellect, could you conceive
that the apostle was speaking, not of a glorified man, but of
an incarnate Deity? No, certainly.
The testimony of Peter thus clearly given, is more and
more confirmed as we look upon the life of Jesus. In every
stage of that life we see him human, and though in all moral
purity and moral grandeur, yet simply human. We are not
ashamed of our belief. No, we glory in it, and we rejoice
in it. We glory in it, for it is the proof that the elements
of our nature can be moulded into such beauty; and
we rejoice in it, for it is the proof that he who left a religion
for the immortal heart of man was himself purely and simply
of the nature he would sanctify. We see him as the infant
cradled in Bethlehem, the nurseling hanging on a mother’s
care, and we escape the moral and intellectual confusion of
joining the omnipotence of a God with the feebleness of a
babe. We see him in maturer years in his social relations
and social intercourse casting a holy light around him,
and spreading the influence of all that is most blessed in
human affections. We destroy not the virtue of the man by
absorbing it in the glory of the God. Human, and only
human, we see him in goodness, in duty, and in suffering.
Even in his most marvellous works of mercy, so harmonious
is his power with our common nature, that we feel as if they
were merely ordinary acts of kindness. When he compassionated
the widow’s anguish and restored her son; when
pitying the blind, he opened their eyes to the joy and beauty
of light; when to the ears of the deaf he gave an inlet to
the music of nature and the voice of friendship; when he
cast out the dumb spirit and unclosed sealed lips in hymns
of gratitude and praise; when he fed multitudes on the
mountain’s brow; when lepers went clean from his presence
to their fellows and their homes; when parents clung to their
restored children, and friends who had separated in despair
met again in hope,—wonderful as are all these events, we
connect them with the man Christ Jesus, the real, simple,
holy, and perfect man.
The lecturer in Christ Church stated three peculiarities
which distinguished the Unitarian from the orthodox belief
in Christ’s humanity. The third of these was his pre-existence.
The Lecturer defined with admirable accuracy the essentials
of humanity, one of which, as would be universally
admitted, was to be born. I was therefore not prepared to
hear the proper humanity of Christ before he was born most
zealously defended. I look upon it, however, as a mere oversight,
and no doubt it will be corrected in the printed lecture.
The main point is, however, that of Christ’s pre-existence,
which independently of mistake in arrangement or expression
is a fair topic of argument and discussion. The Lecturer
quoted a number of texts from the evangelist John,—from any
other of the gospel-writers he could not have taken the shadow
of a proof: these he seemed to think invincible evidence.
Good scholars, however, and candid critics, aye, and honest
Christians, have found such explanations of these expressions
as satisfied both their intellects and their conscience. Orthodox
commentators are aware that the idiom of the New
Testament frequently uses the tense grammatically past to
signify events which are actually future. I ask those critics
what they have urged, what they usually urge, against Roman
Catholic controversialists, who, in proving the doctrine of
transubstantiation, quote the text, “This is my body which
is broken for you.” What says the Protestant opponent?
Oh, it is a mere idiomatic expression, by which an event is
represented as complete which is yet to be accomplished. In
like manner and with a like interpretation, we hear the orthodox
use the phrase, “The lamb slain from the foundation
of the world.” They have in this case no scruple to speak
of that as actually existing which was merely contemplated in
eternal foreknowledge. If it be said that all events are
present to the mind of God, so we answer are all persons;
and so was Christ. This view of the subject has satisfied
many reflective, and whatever our opponents may think,
many able and honest minds. But I avail myself of this
opportunity to state distinctly and plainly, that though challenged
by our opponents in the title of their subject to discuss
this point, it is one on which Unitarians have great
differences of opinion, but one which would not disturb a
moment’s harmony in Unitarian Churches. Personally the
Lecturers in the present controversy, on our side, do not believe
the pre-existence of Christ; but there are congregations
and individuals amongst us, with whom we hold, and wish to
hold, kindly, brotherly, and Christian communion, who cling
to this doctrine most sacredly and most reverently. We all
agree in maintaining the absolute unity of God, and if I may
so speak, the CREATURESHIP of Christ. We desire to bind
our charity to no dogmas, and we simply say, with the
Apostle, “Let every man be persuaded in his own mind.”
On this point, and indeed in this discussion generally, I
have observed with great pain a disposition on the part of
our opponents to connect the venerable name of Priestley
with odium. It is an unworthy office for men of education
in the nineteenth century. We take not the authority of
Priestley, nor of any other, except Jesus. One is our Master,
even Christ: and all we are brethren. But in venerating
Priestley, yea, and in loving his memory, we are guilty of no
Sectarianism, we but agree with the generous, the excellent,
the enlightened of the earth: we but agree with Robert Hall,
a stern but eloquent Trinitarian, who in allusion to the Birmingham
riots, deprecated in glowing language the insults
offered to philosophy in “the first of her sons.” Both his
critical and his religious opinions are fair subjects for investigation
and opposition. But great sacrifices and honourable
consistency should render his moral character sacred, if any
thing could melt the stony heart of polemical austerity.
When we hear, as lately we did hear, that Priestley sought
not for truth, but for arguments to sustain a system, we are
not only impelled to ask, with Pilate, “What is truth?”
but also to inquire, “Who are those who seek it?” One
thing we do know, that if he gave himself to a system, it
was a devotion to one which had little wherewith to recompense
him; and we know also that as far as the good things
of this world is concerned, that he might have turned his
devotion to a far better purpose. Instead of having his home
and his all shattered in the storm of popular turbulence,
instead of being left houseless in the land of his nativity, he
might have been great amongst the heads of colleges, or
first upon the bench of Bishops; instead of being expatriated
amidst vulgar execration, he might have spent his life fairing
sumptuously every day, clothed in purple and fine linen,
with a dignified hypocrisy; instead of burying his later sorrows
in a foreign land, and dropping there his last and most
bitter tears, and leaving there his venerable dust, and his
still more venerable memory, to the shame of England, and
to the immortal honour of his most generous and hospitable
entertainers, we might now have had proposals for a national
monument to him, long lists of subscribers’ names,
and loud clamours of exulting praise. One consolation at
least was left: his right hand was clean, and had he been
dragged to the stake he need never have thrust it in the
flame for having been the instrument to give signature to a
lie, from a beggarly, a dastardly, and a cowardly fear of death.
If he could look from where he lives in heaven, he would
have a still nobler consolation, in being aware that, despite of
bigots, his name is treasured in venerated recollection with
the pious and philosophical of all sects and parties—that to
give him due and most beautiful praise[156] was amongst the last
earthly acts of a kindred spirit, but of another soil, that
fanatics may rant and rage, but the good will love.—That
when this, with such controversies in general, sink into the
common and oblivious grave to which all polemical divinity
is doomed, the good his invention have given to mankind
will survive, and the witness he has left of an upright conscience
will be an everlasting example.
The conviction of his reason, it is true, was so strong
against the pre-existence of Christ, that he would suppose
the apostle misunderstood the Saviour’s words, or the amanuensis
mistranscribed the apostle’s language. This was urged
as a mighty accusation, as a most blasphemous transgression.
There are here an opinion and an alternative. The opinion
is the belief in Christ’s simple humanity; the alternative
is merely to suppose the want of memory in an evangelist,
or the want of accuracy in a copyist. Place in contrast to this
Coleridge as quoted by our opponents. He has also an
opinion and an alternative—his opinion is, that Christ was
God, and his alternative is, that if not God he was a deceiver.
If Dr. Priestley was wrong, he left not only Christ but his
apostles morally blameless—if Coleridge mistook, he attributed
directly and without compromise the want of even
common honesty to the Author of our religion: I leave
you to judge between the two cases. I do not wish to disparage
erring and departed genius; but when the name of
Coleridge is called up in my mind in connection with that of
Priestley, it is not in human nature to avoid comparison.
The one steeped the best part of his life in opium, the other
spent it in honourable toil; the one squandered his brilliant
and most beautiful genius in discursive efforts and magical
conversations, the other with heroic self denial shut himself
up in dry and laborious studies for the physical good, and the
moral wants of mankind; the one wrote sweet and wild
and polished poesy for their pleasure, the other has left
discoveries for their endless improvement. Yet orthodoxy
builds for one the shrine of a saint, but like those who in
other days dug up the bones of Wickliff to be burned, drags
forth the memory of the other from the peaceful and forgiving
past, to inflict an execution of which we might have
supposed his lifetime had a sufficient endurance. Tranquil in
the far-off and quiet grave be the ashes of the Saint and
Sage: his soul is beyond the turmoils and battles of this
fighting world. When these who are now in strife shall be
at last in union, his will not be the spirit to whom that blessed
consummation will give least enjoyment.
The preacher in Christ Church made some lengthened observations
on the two-fold nature of Jesus. This topic will more
properly be included in another lecture. I only mention it
here for the purpose of making a passing remark. The
preacher’s language implied that among our reasons for rejecting
the doctrine is, that it is a mystery. Now we maintain
that a mystery is properly no doctrine, for it can be neither
affirmed or denied. The lecturer observed that there are
mysteries in life and nature. If by such he meant facts
which we do not fully comprehend, or ultimate facts beyond
which we cannot penetrate, he is right. But of these we
assert nothing, of these we deny nothing. Intellectually or
spiritually they are in no sense subjects of contemplation.
The preacher, if my memory deceives me not, maintained
that philosophy has also mysteries. The principles or phenomena
of Philosophy are not mysteries—and so far as they
are mysteries they are not philosophy. We reject not the
doctrine proposed to us on any such ground. We reject it,
not because we do not understand the terms in which it is
expressed, but because we do understand them, and find
them equally repugnant to reason and to Scripture. We reject
it because it does equal violence to faith and intellect;
we reject it, not only from the want of consistency, but the
want of evidence.
The apology for mystery made by the defenders of the
incarnation has been as often, as ably, and as successfully
used by the advocates of Transubstantiation. Among other
questions, we are asked by both parties—it is a favourite
illustration—if we know how a grain of wheat germinates
and fructifies! Without hesitation we reply—no. And not
only do we not understand this how, but many others which
might seem very much simpler. But where, I ask, is the
analogy? A grain of wheat is buried in the earth, and the
spirit of Universal Life prepares it for reproduction, and
in the harvest it comes forth abundantly multiplied, to make
glad the hearts of men. On this point I am equally willing
to confess my ignorance and my gratitude. All the facts are
not known to me, but such as I do know are perfectly consistent
with each other. If I am told that I know not how
a grain of wheat germinates, I admit it without hesitation;
but I should certainly be startled if I were also told, that
besides being a grain of wheat it was also, by a mysterious
compound of natures, the Planet Herschel, or the archangel
Michael. And yet this does not amount by infinite
degrees of self-contradiction to the assertion, that the same
being is God and man; that one part of the nature is weary,
and hungry, and thirsty, bowed down by every want and
grief, while the other is resting in peace and blessedness—that
in the same person there is one mind which is ignorant
of that which is to come in a day, and another in which
reside the secrets of the universe, of time, and of eternity.
The preacher, in speaking to Unitarians specially, commenced
his address to us in a tone of exhortation, and closed
it in that of rebuke. And what was the ground and subject
of rebuke? Why, the smallness of our numbers. He exhorted
us on our want of humility, of modesty, in opposing
the whole Christian world. I wondered, if I were in a place
of Protestant worship, or if I heard an advocate for the right
of private judgment. My mind, as by a spell, was thrown
back upon the early and infant history of Christianity; I saw
the disciples going forth on that opposing world, of which
their master had given them no enticing picture; I saw Peter
at Antioch, and Paul harassed and toil-worn at Rome and
Athens; I heard the cry of the vulgar, and the sarcasms
of the philosophical, going forth in prolonged utterance in
condemnation of the strange doctrine; I visioned before
me the little knots of Christians, bound to each other in love,
holding their own faith, despite of multitudes and despite of
antiquity, fronting the world’s scorn and the world’s persecution.
I thought of Luther, standing, as he confessed,
against the world, an admission which was made one of the
strongest arguments against him,—an argument that there
are piles of divinity to maintain on the one side, and to repel
on the other. I thought on the persecution of the Waldenses
and the Albigenses; I saw them, few, and scattered, and
shivering, and dying, in their Alpine solitudes: for persecution,
like the sun, enters into every nook. I thought of
the early struggle of Protestantism in this country,—of Latimer,
of Cranmer, and of Ridley; I thought of these
honest and right-noble beings given, by a barbarous bigotry,
to a death of infamy; delivered over to the fires of Smithfield;
perishing amidst vulgar yells; not only abandoned, but condemned,
by episcopal domination. I remembered having
read, in the Life of Saint Francis Xavier, precisely similar
objections made against him by the bonzas of Japan. I also
considered how many societies at present send missionaries to
the Heathen. I considered that, amidst the populousness of
India, the Brahmins might make a similar objection with
much greater force. Our fathers, they might say, never
heard these things; our people repudiate them.
But notwithstanding such general objections, we do not
withhold our admiration from Xavier and such self-denying
men who were willing to spend and be spent so that they might
make known the glory of Christ; we rejoice in seeing men
thus forget their persons in love to their principles, and in
Doctor Carey standing alone, preaching under a tree opposite
to Juggernaut—we recognize with joy the impersonation of
Christian sincerity and Christian philanthrophy. If numbers
were the proof of truth, what changeful shapes might not truth
assume to meet the humour of the multitude! And we hear
the immortal Chillingworth—the first of logicians, the most
charitable of polemics—thus replying to one of his assailants:
“You obtrude upon us,” says he, “that when Luther
began, he being yet but one, opposed himself to all, as well
subjects as superiors. If he did so in the cause of God it was
heroically done of him. This had been without hyperbolizing,
Mundus contra Athanasium et Athanasius contra mundum.
Neither is it so impossible that the whole world should so far
lie in wickedness (as St. John speaks,) that it may be lawful
and noble for one man to oppose the world. But yet were
we put to our oaths, we should not surely testify any such
thing for you; for how can we say properly that he opposed
himself to all unless we could say also that all opposed themselves
to him?” The same noble writer goes on to say “that
though no man before him lifted up his voice as Luther did,
yet who can assure us but that many before him both thought
and spake in the lower voice of petitions and remonstrances
in many points as he did?”—One fact at least must be conceded,
and we are entitled to any advantage it implies, that
it is more painful and self-sacrificing to be of the few than of
the many, that there is far more to endure in being a little
flock, than of the great multitude; and that in maintaining
with all honesty our opinions in the face of the world’s
odium and the world’s revilings, in despite of popular outcry
and theological accusation, if no other virtues, we can surely
claim those of sincerity and fortitude, of moral courage and
moral consistency.
The preacher alluded to the ransom which Christ paid for
sinners, and compared it to that which anciently was given in
exchange for slaves. The question is, to whom were mankind
slaves? To whom or what was the purchase-ransom to
be paid? Was this slavery to sin, to Satan, or to God?
Whosoever or whatsoever held the captive, must, of course,
receive the price of redemption. To which of these was it
due, and how holds the analogy? I leave the subject with
the lecturer.
I now turn to what is greatly more agreeable in this discussion,
the statement that we hold Christ to have been
morally perfect. To this we assent with all our conscience,
with all our hope, and with all our hearts. We regard him
as pure and perfect in every thought and word. We see him
with a holy piety illuminating his whole character and conduct.
We see him, in solitude and society, holding communion
with his Father and our Father, his God and our
God. We see him in darkest moments, in periods of
deepest anguish, maintaining a hopeful and a trustful spirit;
in every affliction holding true to his love for God and man.
We see him with a patience that toiled for all, and never
tired. We see him plodding through every thankless labour,
which here can find no recompense, except it be that wherein
the act itself is a blessing to the Spirit. We see him in vexation
and sorrow; and, whilst we gaze upon his tranquil
brow, we feel our stormy passions silenced into peace. We
see him in his struggles and temptations, and we feel how
poor and pitiful are our deepest griefs or sorest trials compared
with his. We regard him in the greatness of his benevolence,
and we hear from his lips such words as never man
spake before. We behold him, whose soul was never tainted
with sin, turn most mercifully on the repentant sinner,
striking the heart with rending anguish, yet filling the eye
with sweetest and most hopeful tears. We see him with a
bosom throbbing with all human charities, and an ear open
to every cry of woe and wretchedness. We see him in all
unselfish sacrifices, and all generous labours; and regarding
our nature in him as most lovely, most glorious, and most
triumphant, we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.
We see him as the most perfect image of his Father; and the
first, among all his brethren, filled with the inspiration of
God, and spreading it forth abundantly on the souls of
men.
Amongst other wrongs to Christ, we are accused of taking
away all motives of love to him. It may be fair, then, to ask,
for what do Trinitarians love him? And it may be also fair
to ask, what is it in him that moves their affections which may
not equally move ours? They cannot love Christ the God in
the same sense or on the same grounds on which they love
Christ the man. For what, then, do they love Christ the
man, or Christ the mediator, for which, in that aspect, we may
not love him as deeply and as truly? Is it for his many and
great labours? On even the orthodox doctrine, these were the
toils of the manhood and not of the godhead. Is it for his sufferings?
The God could not suffer, could not be weary, could
not be persecuted, could not die, could neither be hooted nor
crucified; if, therefore, all the strongest motives of love to
Christ be founded in his humanity, then I assert we have all
these motives. On any supposition, it was not the second
person of the godhead that bent his bleeding head on Calvary,
it was the man Christ Jesus. If it be said that Unitarian
views do not move the heart, we have only with sorrow
to confess, that no views of Christ’s nature or character move
us practically as they ought; and for the small results which
his doctrines have produced amongst us, we, with others,
have reason to bend down our heads in deepest humiliation:
but we solemnly deny that our convictions about Christ
have any tendency to produce such an effect. In the case of
wrong, the fault is in ourselves, and not in our doctrines.
II. Having thus explained our views on Christ as a man,
I shall occupy the remaining part of this discourse by stating,
as briefly as I can, the difference between Trinitarians and
ourselves on his character as a mediator.
What are the religious needs of man? says the Trinitarian.
Consequently, What is the office of the Messiah? If we
take the Calvinistic scheme, and at present that is the most
popular, the reply would be, or should be, thus:—There is a
decree of eternal election and reprobation by which millions,
before the foundation of the world, were destined to be saved
or lost. The numbers were fixed, and could neither be enlarged
or diminished. For the salvation of the elect, and
these only, the second person in the godhead became incarnate:
them he purchased with his blood, and the rest
were left to perish. The elect entered into life with the seal
of predestination on their birth, redeemed, to be justified, to
be sanctified, and finally to be glorified. The remainder
came into the same life burdened with the imputation of a
sin committed centuries previous to their existence. Foredoomed
to perdition, overpassed by the Father, and disregarded
by the Son, and unvisited by the Holy Spirit, they
die in their sins, enter on their predetermined destiny, and,
to use the tremendous language of the Athanasian Creed,
“perish everlastingly.”
In this statement, I do no wrong to Calvinism, and scarcely
justice. It might easily be made more dark, and without a
whit of controversial exaggeration. But if this be a true idea
of Christianity, it is a system of terror and not of mercy, an
anathema and not a blessing, the fiat of universal wrath and
not the words of universal mercy, the proclamation from an
austere and angry Deity and not a remedy for a weak and
erring humanity. Orthodoxy in this scheme, instead of endearing
Christ to the human heart, alienates and removes him
from it; instead of making him an encouragement, renders
him a terror; instead of placing him before us as the impersonation
of almighty clemency, through him proclaims an
almighty vindictiveness; places Jesus out of the sphere of
human affections, and wrenches him from the worn and suffering
heart of man. On the orthodox principle, he is out
from us, and not of us. He is alone in his own mysterious
nature. Our affections are perplexed, and our heads are bewildered.
To offer our sympathy, or to look for his, would
be the very climax of presumption. He is in no proper sense
identified with us, or allied to us. His example is more an
accident than an essential of his work. The substance of his
work, on the orthodox scheme, might have taken place in the
most secret recesses of the universe; and God would be satisfied,
and the elect would be redeemed.[157]
What, says Unitarianism, are the moral wants of man?
Consequently, what is the mediator he requires?
Religion, we maintain, was made for man, and not man
for religion. The mediator, therefore, which we require, is
one who would guide and not confound our nature; who
would ennoble but not perplex it. We would look for a
mediator by whom we should receive the light and truth of
God and heaven to our souls. We need to see the capacities,
the duties, and the destinies of our kind, in one
who is perfectly, but yet simply, of ourselves. Our sorrows,
our sufferings, and our darkness, we regard as but so
many reasons why our Redeemer and Saviour should be
entirely of our own kind. We require one who would manifest
to all that God is really interested in us. We require
one who would show that we are not shut out from communion
with the infinite, the invisible, and the future. We
require one who would correct our evils, and yet resolve our
doubts. We require one who could sympathize with our
weakness. We require one who would show us of what our
nature is capable, and thus flash upon us the guilt of our deficiencies,
or inspire us with the hope of advancement. We
are feeble, and need strength; we are tempted, and need support.
Jesus proves to us that the strength is in us, if we use
it; and that the support is at hand, if we choose to apply it.
In our transgressions, we are but too much inclined to yield
to, or justify ourselves with, a guilty sophistry; but our views
of Jesus leave us no room for such delusion. Whilst Trinitarianism
places most of our religious wants afar off and outside
us, Unitarianism fixes them within us. Whilst Trinitarianism
demands a Christ which shall reconcile God to us,
Unitarianism holds a Christ which shall conform us to God:—to
us his word and work is a spirit of life, his word and
work to them but dogma or mystery.
Upon our views, Christ is properly a mediator; on those
of orthodoxy, he can bear no such character: compounded
of Deity and humanity, he is truly of neither. It is said
that we have no need of Christ; that, in fact, he has no purpose
in our system; that he might be taken from it without
creating any loss. We maintain the contrary. We maintain
that Christ is our all in all; that he is the impersonation
of our religion, that he is bodily our Christianity. Whilst
others principally regard him in the retrospect, we have him
as a present and a living reality. Whilst others trust him
for what he has done, we love him for what he was. Whilst
others make his nature the subject of hard and abstruse dogmas,
we hold it forth as the subject of affectionate contemplation.
Whilst others propose faith, we propose imitation
as the greatest virtue. We look upon him as the Instructor
in our moral doubts; the enlightener of our ignorance,
which, in so many cases, press down our hearts respecting
the general course of Providence and our future destiny; of
our ignorance respecting God, and all that belongs to the
future, the Past, and the Invisible.
The Past, yea, and the present also, is filled, we confess,
with difficulties that alarm our fears, and call forth our sorrows.
And it is only when we look to Christ as really and
simply human that we have any tangible consolation, or any
solid support. The trials or temptations or sufferings of a
God are not only repugnant to our reasons, but foreign to
our hearts. Such ideas can create no confidence, and therefore
can afford no ground of sympathy—and no ground of
hope, of strength, or of consolation. If one who is a God—were
temptation to such a being possible—overcomes
temptation, on what grounds can any other conclude he
can resist it?—If one who is a God resists indignity with
quietude and calmness, on what ground can another make
such conduct an example?—If one who is a God meets
agony and death with confident and fearless mind—knowing
that his life is safe in eternal beatitude—on what possible
principles of reason or expectation can this be a consolation
or hope to feeble mortals?—If a God by his own
inherent power rise from the dead, by what logic of faith or
intellect are we to conclude man as man is to live for ever?
It is only then upon our principles that I think he can properly
fulfil the offices that pertain to his character as Mediator,
that he can be our Teacher, that he can be our Exemplar,
that he can be the Discloser of our duties and our
destinies, that he can be at the same time a revealer and a
revelation, that he can be the foundation of our hope and the
source of our strength:—that he can, I say, be our Teacher;
for what is necessary to the position of a moral instructor?
not merely to be able to announce truth, but to announce it
with living effect. The being who suffered no pain would
have no power in preaching fortitude. Sympathy is necessary
to confidence, and confidence is necessary to moral influence.
Christ in his simple humanity has a power which
we could not give to him, supposing he was of a compound
constitution. Without this belief that he was simply and
naturally man, his instructions have small effect, and his
actions have no reality.—Moreover, I assert it is only in
this view he can be our exemplar, I mean the ideal, or representative
of what we ought to be, or of what in a more
perfect condition we will be: for it is utterly and outrageously
absurd to propose as the pattern of human conduct or
human hopes, one who had in the same person the might
and security of a Deity with the dangers and the trials of a
man: and in truth it is outrageously absurd to say he could
have such dangers and trials at all,—it would not be a
mystery but a mockery:—and, lastly, I contend, that it is
our views—weakly I have expressed them—which bring to the
human spirit most of strength and most of comfort. They give
consistency and sublimity to his communion with God, and to
his revealings of another world. They give immeasurable value
to his miracles. They put the seal of divine confirmation on
his resurrection as the pledge of human immortality. He is
then our Instructor in every doubt; our Consolation in every
sorrow; our Strength in the griefs of life, and our Support
in the fears of death. We see him in his own ennobling
and sanctifying human nature, and by his impressive and vital
energy sending out from him the power for its redemption.
The character of God, as revealed in Christ’s teaching,
and manifested by Christ’s life, in the Unitarian faith, is not
only discerned with a clearer light, but commands a more
sacred reverence, as well as a more willing love. He that
hath seen me, says the Saviour, hath seen the Father. Now
we believe this expression to be full of profoundest truth, if
we receive it as a moral revelation; but orthodoxy reduces it
to a mystical enigma, and robs it of meaning and of value.
We discern God through Christ as a Father, universal, merciful,
good, holy, and all-powerful. This we collect from
the teachings of Christ; we could never deduce it from the
teachings of Calvinism. If we turn to the teachings of
Christ, we hear of a Father impartial and unbounded; if we
turn to the teachings of Calvinism, we read of a God that,
in any benignant sense, is but father to a few, and these few
purchased by the agonies of innocence; if we turn to the
teachings of Christ, we are instructed of a Father who is
merciful, and that mercy is proposed to us as the most perfect
object of imitation; if we turn to the teachings of
Calvinism, we are told of a Father who properly cannot be
merciful at all, for the good he gives has been purchased,
and is the equivalent of a price; a Father, I repeat, whose
good-will is paid for; the primary element in whose character,
as drawn in many popular creeds and formularies, is a stern
wrath, falsely called justice; the imitation of which, in the
creature, would turn earth into a darker hell than ever theology
visioned. If we turn to the teachings of Christ, we find
in them a Father supremely good, holding towards all his
creatures a benignant aspect; who, when his children ask
for bread will not give them a stone,—who casts with equal
hand the shower and the sun-shine; who rules in the
heavens with glory, and in earth with bounty; who hears
the raven’s cry as well as the Seraph’s song. If we turn to
Calvinism we are informed of a Deity who has seen the ruin
and the wreck of his own workmanship, and pronounced a
curse over that which he did not choose to prevent; we are
told that all creatures sicken under that original curse; that
earth feels it to her centre; that it spreads a frown over
heaven, and roars with a voice of destruction in the thunder
and the tempest; that living creatures throughout all their
countless tribes, suffer by it; that it pursues man from the
first tears of infancy to the last pang of death. If we turn
to the teachings of Jesus, we are taught that God is most
holy; we are placed before that invisible Being who searches
the heart, and sees it in its last recesses. Thus piercing to
the very source of action, Christ makes guilt and holiness inward
and personal, inflicts on the criminal the full penalty,
and secures to rectitude its great reward: covering the
one with moral hideousness, and the other with exceeding
beauty. If we turn to the teachings of Calvinism, sin is contracted
by imputation, and righteousness is acquired by imputation
also. The lost endure the penalty of guilt in their
own persons, the elect endure it by substitution, in the person
of another. If we turn to the teachings of Jesus, we have a
Father whose power is infinite as his goodness, in which we
trust for the redemption and perfection of the universe. If
we turn to the teachings of Calvinism, we see God consigning
a vast portion of his rational creation to eternal sin and misery,
and therefore, if we would save his benevolence we
are constrained to sacrifice his power. Christ, Saint Paul declares,
is the image of God; but if the Father be the avenger,
and Christ the victim, he is not his image, but his contrast,
and then our souls, instead of ascending to God in love, turn
from him, and fix all their sympathies on Christ. As Unitarians
apprehend him, we conceive him in perfect union with
the Father, imaging, with resplendent sweetness, the attributes
of his Father’s character. In the compassion, in the
benevolence, in the purity, and in the miracles of Christ, we
have revealed to us the goodness, the holiness, and the power
of God; upon the calm and gracious countenance of Jesus we
may read the glory of God, and, as in a stainless mirror, behold
the scheme of his providence.
Place these views side by side with common experience
and human feeling, and which, I ask, is the most consistent?
Who, in a healthy state of mind, has any compunction because
Adam sinned—but who, with his moral emotions awakened, is
not anxious to know what is the duty of man here, and what
his destiny hereafter? By which scheme, I inquire, are these
momentous problems best resolved? Testing these views by
the common experience to which I have appealed, taking its
ordinary convictions as the standard, I may fairly inquire,
whether our principles are not consistent in their hopes, and
high and pure in their consolations? Comparing each with the
history and life of Christ, I have no doubt of what would
be the result, if system or dogmatism did not interfere with
our convictions. Regarding Christ as our perfect, immortal,
but human Brother, we have the living evidence that
God is our Father, and Heaven is our Home.—Our views
of Christ makes his history of most precious value to us—his
life, his death, his crucifixion and his resurrection—Christ
becomes to us the great interpreter of Providence, equally
of its fears and hopes. He becomes to us the symbol
of humanity, equally of its grief and glory—near his cross
we weep over death, and at his tomb we rejoice in the certainty
of life. In Christ crucified, we see our nature in
its earthly humiliation; in Christ glorified, we behold it in its
immortal triumph. As Jesus on the cross sets forth our sorrow,
so Jesus from the tomb sets forth our hope. Identified with
Jesus in the one, we are also identified with him in the other.
We behold “the man,” and in that man we behold the two
solemn stages of our nature, the struggle of affliction and
the glory of success.—We see the man of sorrow and the man
of joy—the man of earth, and the man of heaven—the man of
death and the man of immortality. We are made more
assured of that doctrine to which we fly in every painful turn
of life—and in which we seek a deeper and kinder refuge as
years and troubles gather over us. Without this persuasion
we feel ourselves creatures weak and desolate; when our
pleasures here have sunk, when our hopes here have long
since died, how much would we, in this wilderness, desire to
lay our heads, as Jacob did, on a cold stone, if like Jacob
we beheld an opened heaven; but how much more sweetly
may we look upon the risen and the living face of Jesus. He
was of ourselves. He was identified with us. I see then in
Jesus, not the illustration of an argument or of a theory.
I see in him the embodiment of human goodness, human
affections, and human hopes, and human capacities, and
human destinies. When, especially, I think of human suffering,
some necessary and some blameless,—when I behold
the ignorant and the vicious, the ignorant and the wretched
pining away in a crowded solitude,—when I see the man of
weary years and many adversities, seeking at last but some
spot in which to die,—when I see a sickened wretch, tired
of existence, poor, indigent, cold and naked, the victim of
almost every want and grief, toiling through life and shivering
into death,—when I see laborious age, after few enjoyments
of either soul or sense, lying at last on the bed where
the weary are at rest, where at last the still small voice of
Christ is more desired than all the logic of polemics,—when
I see multitudes with dead, or dormant, or perverted energies—benevolent
ardour wasted, or most honourable philanthropy
defeated,—when I consider the thousands, and the
tens of thousands of human beings chained to a dark fatality
in the destiny of moral and physical circumstances—the ignorance,
the bondage, the cruelties, the unrevealed wretchedness
without a name heaped on the heads of myriads, generation
after generation,—when I think of unspeaking and
unspeakable agonies lurking in every corner of civilized
society—hereditary penury, unavoidable ruin, unforeseen
misfortune, the pangs of noble minds struggling in vain
against dependence; the writhings of dying hearts, concealing
their last sighs from watching friends, the stifled laments
of honest virtue cast forth on over-grown cities and populations,
where sufferer after sufferer sink unheard in the
noise of indifferent millions,—when I remember unrewarded
toil, fine spirits crushed, and fair names blighted,—when I
see the enjoyment of the worthless and the prosperity of the
vicious, the success of the worst passions, and the basest
plans, the triumph of wickedness over truth and virtue,—when
I reflect seriously and solemnly on the strange sights
which this world has seen—the persecutor on the throne
and the martyr at the stake, the patriot on the scaffold and
the tyrant on the bench—the honest man ruined, and the villain
the gainer,—I have before me, I admit, a dark and startling
problem. In the dying Christ I have the difficulties: in the
risen Christ I have their solution. In Christ on the cross I
see our crucified humanity—in Christ risen and ascending
I see the same humanity glorified; at the cross of Jesus my
heart would sink, but at his empty grave my hope is settled
and my soul at ease. I go to that vacant tomb, and there I
am shown that the bands of death are loosed, and the gates
of glory are lifted up. Near Jesus on the cross, I have
but thick clouds and darkness; in Jesus risen the shadows
are melted, and the gloom is lost in brightness, and the sun
which burst it shines forth more resplendent—the blackness
of the sky breaks forth into light, and the wrath of the
ocean softens into peace, the curtain of mist is folded up,
and a lovely world bursts upon my gaze. When I stand
at the cross I have man imaged in fears, in struggles and
in death. I have around me our nature in its crimes
and passions; but when I see the ascending and glorified
Christ, I behold humanity in its most triumphant hopes:—When
I stand over the silent tomb of Jesus, and would weep,
as if all beneath and beyond the skies were hopeless, a light
shines out from the darkness, and throws a halo of peace
about the desponding soul. In Christ crucified, believing
him human, simply human, I feel around me the right of
man—in Christ risen, believing him also human, I exult in unclouded
and unsetting light:—near Christ crucified, I tremble
with exceeding fear; near Christ glorified, I am comforted
with exceeding joy—and in each case because I feel he is
truly and simply human.
In both parts of his life and history we have opposing
aspects of Providence. But if in his sufferings we have the
pillar of cloud, in his glory we have the pillar of fire; and in
this wilderness pilgrimage we are saddened and solemnized
by the one,—enlightened and guided by the other. Christ
crucified and Christ glorified, united in our faith and feelings,
identified with our nature, our history, and our race, opens
views to the Christian’s soul, not only of consolation but of
triumph, that defy expression. It pours light and hope and
dignity on universal destiny and on every individual condition.
In analogy with God’s material creation in its workings,
it shows glory arising out of humiliation, and renovated
beauty from apparent destruction—it shows in man as in
nature—the world of grandeur, of purity, and of softness—born
in the throes of chaotic formation; the streams of
spring filled with the year’s rejoicing gushing out of the
frozen fountains of winter; the fresh, and bright, and peaceful
morning generated in the midnight storm. If these views of
Christ are seated in our hearts and faith: if we truly identify
ourselves with one as with the other: feeling that in each
case Christ is simply and perfectly our brother,—what can
deaden our hope, and what can sever us from duty? Though
friends be absent and enemies be fierce, and pain wreck our
frames and poverty lay bare our dwellings, and disappointment
wait on our struggles, and grief thicken heavily on our
souls, in Christ suffering there is our worst extremity;
in Christ glorified there is that worst extremity redeemed
into the fulness of salvation; in Christ we see personified
our entire humanity, except its sins; in him we behold
its subjection and its triumph. View its pains in his
humiliation, and its future prospects in his victory, and
what a glory does it not spread upon our race? Is there a
single track of the past on which it does not rain showers of
light—on which it does not leave the persuasion of immortal
and universal existence? By Christ’s doctrines and his life
we are led to the conclusion that no human existence has
been ever spent in vain; that of all the vast ocean of intelligent
beings with which generations have flooded the earth;
that in that vast universe of life, one heart has never panted
without a purpose; that no thought ever started into being,
not a throb of misery, not a solitary charity, not a silent prayer,
not an honest effort, not a fervent wish or desire, not a single
good intention, not a single instance of sacrifice or worth,
ever existed to be destroyed, but that on the contrary they have
been transferred to more genial scenes in another world, and
left seeds for better fruits in this. Believing on Christ the crucified
and the glorified, and still regarding him as the image
of God, it is pleasant to dwell equally upon the past and
upon the future; to think of the good and true who suffered
here for virtue, collected hereafter in all the unity of peace,
having escaped the fightings of earth, settled in the joys of
heaven. But why confine ourselves to the excellent and the
great? The glory of Christ proclaims life to all; it attracts
to itself whosoever lived or suffered on earth, all that ever
will live or suffer. Into what a glory has Christ then not
entered: go to the most seclusive church-yard: worlds there
moulder in the smallest space; within its range as many
sleep as might have peopled an empire, and in a few steps we
may walk over millions. Beneath those pacings what parents
and children, and companions, have mouldered? What
friendships, and hopes, and energies have melted in this
simple dust?
But why say a Church-yard? All earth is a grave. The
world is sown with bodies: is futurity as filled with souls? Is
this spot on which we breathe for a moment a mere speck between
two eternities of infinite nothingness? Have the generations
as they vanished, sunk into eternal sleep, so that
“It is finished,” should be the proper epitaph of all departed
humanity? Christ alone gives the full solution of this awful
problem; and this solution is clear and consolatory, as we
feel him to be of ourselves. He is thus the great type of our
death and of our life, throwing light over the grave, and opening
to our faith a growing and everlasting future,—where all
exist, the great and good to more perfect, and the evil to be
redeemed,—and where every stream that flows on to eternity
will bear along with it a fresh burden of joy and beauty.
Jesus the crucified, and Jesus the glorified, of simple but holy
humanity, is the great interpreter of the past and the future,
and by him interpreted, how glorious are the words, all our
memories on earth and our hopes in heaven.
I think it right to state here that one or two passages are printed in
the lecture, which, as time was failing, I passed over in the delivery.
They affect in nowise the general import or argument. I thought it
possible that one sentence in reference to Mr. Jones’s lecture would
require to be expunged; but having now read the lecture in print, I
see the sentence may stand. Mr. Jones defined with clearness and
accuracy his belief in Christ’s humanity—that Christ was really a
man, “that he had a corporeal and mental existence like our own,”
“that he possessed a body of flesh and blood, such as is common to
our race,” “that in that body dwelt a rational soul, to whose volitions
it was subject,” “that he was conceived in the womb, and born
a helpless infant, and dependent on the care of his parents through
the whole of his childhood and youth.”[158] Here, then, we have a set
of qualities in the man Christ Jesus, which from their very nature
must have commenced with his earthly life. Thus defined, the lecturer
afterwards goes on to say that “though there was nothing in his corporeal
or mental powers essentially different from other men, yet were
there certain peculiarities connected with his perfect manhood, which it
is of momentous consequence that we should know and believe.”[159]
“First, he possessed moral perfection.” On this all Unitarians are
agreed. Secondly, the lecturer noticed the miraculous conception. On
this we have differences amongst us. Now a third peculiarity was also
marked, which by the order of the lecturer’s argument we are entitled
to rank with the others as belonging to the manhood of Christ. Mr.
Jones is still speaking of the man Christ Jesus, and yet the third peculiarity
is alleged to be his pre-existence. But if to have been born of a
woman, if to have had a corporeal and mental existence like our own,
were essentials of his humanity, then this is a flat contradiction; if this
attribute were meant to apply to him as God, we should have been told
so; and even then, the distinction would be wholly powerless, for
no one thinks of comparing other men with Jesus as God. Mr.
Jones does not introduce that portion of his subject until we have
passed over several pages.[160] The analogy of body and soul in man
is incessantly used to illustrate a two-fold nature in Christ. Nothing
can be more fallacious. It breaks down at every step; for if it be
used to signify the possible union of two different elements in one
being, then Christ is not two-fold but three-fold, there are in his person
the divine soul and the human soul, and in addition to all, the human
body. If it be used to signify the union of two natures in one person,
the soul and body are not two distinct natures, in the sense required,
and therefore can neither illustrate nor prove the dogmatical complexity
ascribed to Christ. Every nature that we know is composite, but it is
one thing to be compounded of various qualities, and another to be a
union of irreconcileable ones. If man had two souls in one body,
so perfectly united as to make a single person, and yet that one
should be ignorant of what the other knew, then we should have an
illustration that would be correct and intelligible. Mr. Jones uses
the following illustration, to shew that we distinguish between the
body and the soul when we do not express the distinction in words.
“If we say,” he observes, “that a neighbour is sick, or in pain, or
hungry, or thirsty, or in want, we mean that his body is sick, or in pain,
or hungry, or thirsty, or in want, and no one for a moment supposes
that we refer to his soul. And if, on the other hand, we say that a
man is learned, or ignorant, wise or unwise, happy or miserable,
humble or proud, it is equally obvious that we refer to the soul, and
not to the body.”[161] No such distinction is known either in grammar or
philosophy, and the laws of thought as well as those of language
equally repudiate it. A man may be healthy or sick by means of the
excellence or defect of his body, but the assertion is made of the
man as a person. He may in like manner be wise or ignorant by
means of the excellence or defects of the faculties of his soul; but
again, the assertion is of the person. And, indeed, if we were to
speak with severe and metaphysical precision, every instance which
the preacher has adduced should be predicated of the Soul, for so far
as they are sensations, they belong properly to the soul; and the body
is but their medium or instrument. By the laws, then, both of
thought and language, whatever Christ affirms of himself, he affirms
of his person, be the elements what they may that enter into its
constitution. But how are we to think of the dogma for which such
hair-splitting distinctions are adduced; distinctions which, had not
the solemnity of the subject forbidden the use of ridicule, might be
shown by all forms of speech to be as incongruous as they are
puerile, and as ridiculous as they are false.
On the supposition of our Lord’s simple humanity, this chapter
exhibits a most sublime revelation of his nature. On any other hypothesis
it loses all its moral beauty, and leaves us nothing but inconsistency.
The belief of his simple human nature gives a more
sacred awe to the circumstances in which he was placed, explains to
us those struggles and workings of his inmost soul, which were deepening
the bitterness of his hour of travail. We can then appreciate
the grandeur with which, in the spirit of duty, he arose to meet the
approaching storm; and we can also appreciate the tenderness and
sensibility with which he shrunk for a moment from the anguish that
awaited him. To say that the godhead withdrew its support from
him is a solution unintelligible in any sense. For through every
moment of his existence he must have been conscious of his proper
Deity, or he was not; if he was, why tremble? if not, then during
that period his godhead was virtually extinguished, and he remained
simply man. But every utterance of his in this profound chapter is
truly human,—breathings of that nature from its inmost recesses,
strong in duty, but struggling with fear and grief.
There is no period of our Lord’s mission in which we see so
profound a solemnity around him. He had come from the quiet and
hospitable home of his friends in Bethany, had made his public and
triumphant entry into Jerusalem, but the awful close and consummation
was at hand; he knew that these hosannahs would scarcely have
died on the ear, before their change into hootings and revilings; and
the hands which spread the palm were ready to drag him to the
cross. The next day was big with sorrows and tortures. The mysteries
of death and the grave were to be resolved; and it is no
dishonour to our Lord to suppose such a prospect should fill his heart
with trouble; for the most finely constituted nature is ever the most
sensitive, and those who perceive clearly and vividly, apprehend circumstances
which it never enters into coarser minds to discern. In
proportion as our personal sensations are acute, is the victory of duty
noble that overcomes them, in the same proportion also is the
strength of submission, or the beauty of patience. With these
views, we can well interpret for our consolation and example the
anguished exclamation of Christ,—“Now is my soul troubled, and
what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour; but for this
cause came I to this hour.”
If Christ were God as well as man, words like these are absolutely
unaccountable; and as we cannot be so profane as to think
that Christ spoke for mere effect, we have only to conclude that it was
the fervent and simple exclamation of a being who felt he needed
help from Heaven. This were impiety of the darkest die, if Jesus in
one portion of his own person was infinite and omnipotent.
“Priestley, loaded with glory, was modest enough to be
astonished at his good fortune, and at the multitude of beautiful
facts which nature seemed to reveal to him alone. He forgot
that her favours were not gratuitous, and that if she had so
well explained herself, it was because he had known how to constrain
her by his indefatigable perseverance in questioning her, and
by a thousand ingenious means of wresting from her her answers.
Others carefully conceal what they owe to accident. Priestley seemed
to wish to ascribe to it all his merit. He records, with unexampled
candour, how many times he had profited by it without knowing it,
how many times he was in possession of new substances without
having perceived them; and he never concealed the erroneous views
which sometimes directed his efforts, and which he renounced only
from experience. These confessions did honour to his modesty,
without disarming jealousy. Those whose views and methods had
never led them to discovery, called him a mere maker of experiments,
without method, and without an object:—“It is not astonishing,”
they added, “that among so many trials and combinations he should
find some that were successful. But real natural Philosophers were
not duped by these selfish criticisms.”—After some remarks on
Priestley’s changes in religious opinions, and tracing rapidly his
progress from fiercest Calvinism to simple humanitarianism, he thus
beautifully describes the close of his laborious life:—“His last moments
were full of those feelings of piety which animated his whole
life, and the improper controul of which had been the foundation of
all his errors. He caused the gospel to be read to him, and thanked
God for having allowed him to lead an useful life, and granted him
a peaceful death. Among the list of the principal blessings, he
ranked that of having personally known almost all his contemporaries.
‘I am going to sleep as you do,’ said he to his grand-children,
who were brought to him, ‘but we shall wake again together,
and, I hope, to eternal happiness;’ thus evincing in what belief he
died. These were his last words. Such was the end of that man,
whom his enemies accused of wishing to overthrow all morality and
religion, and yet whose greatest error was to mistake his vocation,
and to attach too much importance to his individual sentiments in
matters when the most important of all feelings ought to be the love
of peace.”[162]
The Edinburgh Review,[163] from which this extract is taken, introduces
it with the following liberal and generous remarks:—
“We cannot pass unnoticed the Eloge of Dr. Priestley, which
brought his biographer into the field of theological discussion, and
which deserves to be studied in a country where the Character of that
extraordinary man, both as a Philosopher and a Christian, has been
so greatly misrepresented.”
The conclusion of the following extract is earnestly recommended
to the consideration of those pious men who have been misled by the
intolerant spirit of the day; and who, on lending their aid, without
being conscious of what they are doing, to break the cords of affection
which ought to unite the professors of our common Christianity.
A great mass of the religious world, in the orthodox meaning of that
phrase, is now called evangelical, and although that term, I admit, does
not necessarily imply absolute Calvinism, yet, in point of fact, the
greater number of those whom it designates are Calvinists. The
opponents of Calvinism are often accused of misrepresenting it. For
this reason I have endeavoured here to make it speak for itself—by some
of its principal formularies, by one or two of its popular writers, and
by the author of it himself, in his own words,—Many will say they
hold no such sentiments: for the sake of human nature I sincerely
believe them; if I thought such a faith (the terms being understood)
could be extensively entertained, confidence in my species would be
turned into fear. But, notwithstanding, many opinions which they
do hold, logically pursued, lead directly to the conclusions contained
in the extracts, the writers of which were perfectly consistent with
their system. Numbers who are called Calvinists, I am aware, not
only do not believe its worst doctrines, but do not understand
them. In the statement, however, of opinions, we cannot be guided
by individual feelings, except in cases where we have individual protest
to the contrary. The members of the Church of England may
object to the Westminster confession of Faith, not being a formulary
of their Church: it is, however, the sworn authority of a large body
of clergy with whom, when purpose needs, they refuse not to hold
friendly communion. It is, however, an accurate digest of Calvinism:
in that relation I have used it,—to such of the English clergy
as are not Calvinists it can have no reference. I wish to quote it as
a theological, and not as an ecclesical authority. But the seventeenth
article of the English Church, though softened in expression, is the
same in sense. Burnet I know has made the unsuccessful effort to
suit it to both sides for the sake of tender consciences; but that
must be a most convenient and comprehensive latitude of phraseology
which can sound all the notes of the theological scale, from high
Calvinism down to low Arminianism. That the meaning of the article
is properly Calvinistic, is plain from the times in which it was composed,
from the opinions of the men who drew it up, and from the terms in
which it is expressed. Yet many thousand ministers with all varieties
and shades of opinions, solemnly affirm they believe it, although the
law demands that the articles shall be taken in their plain and grammatical
sense. This is one proof of the consistency of creeds. I
quote one author, Boston, who seems actually to feast and luxuriate
amidst the dark monstrocities which he pictures; his spirit appears to
bound, and his heart to exult within him, at the sound of the dreadful
trumpet which calls the wicked to their final doom; and one can
almost imagine the rapture of his eye, as in fancy he saw the flame
kindling, and the smoke of torment arising in which they were to
burn for ever. In his description of hell he displays no ordinary
degree of graphic and geographical talent, and when he comes to
paint the sufferings of damned bodies, he is so accurate and anatomical,
that as Paley at 60 learned anatomy, to write on natural theology,
you would suppose that Boston learned it to enlarge with correctness
on the physical tortures of the lost. I wish not to fix his
opinions upon any man or body of men; substantially, however, they
are no more than Calvinism, though some might object to his mode
of expressing them. This I may fairly say to any of those who do
not agree with Boston in their Calvinism, and would yet fix the
Improved Version on us, that they are as bound to receive the one
as we the other. Nay, more so, inasmuch as Boston’s work is in
a wider circulation, and with the evidence of most extensive approval.
It is published by the London Tract Society, and I have an
edition before me as late as 1838; it is sold by every evangelical
bookseller, and it is to be found on the shelves of every evangelical
circulating library. We are accused of rebellion against God and
Christ; but let any one read dispassionately the extracts contained in
this, and reflect on the sentiments to be deduced from their collective
testimony, and then let him say whether deeper injury was ever done
to God, or Christ, or man, than is inflicted by these repulsive dogmas.
By these descriptions, if God is a being of love or justice, then language
has no meaning, or we are to interpret the terms by their contradictories.
If you were only to disguise the words, but preserve
the sentiments, and attribute the character implied in them to the
parent of the most zealous of Calvinists, he would spurn the aspersion
with honest indignation. And, if we mean not by goodness in
God, something analogous to goodness in man, what is it that we
can mean? The abstractions in which these dogmas are involved by
scholastic mysticism, blinds the mind to their ordinary import. But
let us suppose an illustration. Take the case of a human father, who,
granting he had the power, should pre-ordain his child to misery;
should attribute a guilt to him, he never knew; should require
from him what he had no power to accomplish, and condemn him because
he had not fulfilled it; should place him in circumstances in
which he was sure to grow worse, and yet withhold the help that
could make him better; should, as the son sunk deeper in iniquity,
heap heavier malediction on the wretch he abandoned; should see
without pity the ruin that continually grew darker, and gaze ruthlessly
on the suffering that was finally to be consummated in despair.—Suppose
further, and you render the picture complete, that such
conduct was defined as the vindication of parental dignity, the very
glory of justice; and he who practised it as a father of exceeding love.
But we will go further, and suppose this father has the power to
cast his child into misery everlasting, and that he does it; must we
close the analogy here? No: we can carry it one step higher:
swell out this being into infinite existence, make him omnipotent
and omniscient, place him on the throne of the universe, and put all
creatures within his boundless control, he is then the God of Calvin’s
theology. This view I give not rashly, nor without foundation;
it is more than justified by the quotations that I bring forward.
Our faith is characterized as a blasphemous heresy: we employ no
epithet, but we are not afraid to have it contrasted with Calvinistic
orthodoxy.
Character of God.
“Predestination is the everlasting purpose of God; whereby (before
the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed
by his counsel, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation
those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to
bring them to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour.”—From
the 17th Article of the Church of England.
“By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some
men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others fore-ordained
to everlasting death. These angels and men, thus predestined
and fore-ordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed;
and their number is so certain and definite, that it cannot be either
increased or diminished.”
“The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable
counsel of his own will; whereby he extendeth or withholdeth
mercy as he pleaseth, for the glory of his sovereign power
over his creatures, to pass by and to ordain them to dishonour and
wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice.”
“As for those wicked and ungodly men whom God, as a righteous
judge, for former sins doth blind and harden, from them he not only
withholdeth his grace, whereby they might have been enlightened in
their understandings, and wrought upon in their hearts, but sometimes
also withdraweth the gifts which they had, and exposeth them
to such objects as their conception makes occasion of sin; and
withal, gives them over to their own lusts, the temptations of the
world, and the power of Satan; whereby it cometh to pass, that
they harden themselves, even under those means which God useth
for the softening of others.”—Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. iii,
§ 3, 4, 7; ch. v, § 6.
“God, in his providence, permitted some angels wilfully and irrecoverably
to fall into sin and damnation, limiting and ordering that
and all their sins to his own glory; and established the rest in holiness
and happiness, employing them all, at his pleasure, in the administrations
of his power, wisdom, and justice.”—Larger Catechism,
q. 19.
“I grant, indeed,” says Calvin, “that all the children of Adam
fell, by the will of God, into that misery of state whereby they be now
bound; and this is it that I said at the beginning, that at length we
must alway return to the determination of the will of God, the cause
whereof is hidden in himself. The angels which stood fast in their
uprightness, Paul calleth the elect. If their steadfastness was grounded
on the good pleasure of God, the falling away of the others proveth
that they were forsaken; of which thing there can be no other cause
alleged than reprobation, which is hidden in the secret counsel of
God.”—Inst. note, b. iii, ch. 23, § 4.
“Predestination, whereby God adopteth some into the hope of
life, and adjudgeth some to eternal death, no man, that would be accounted
godly, dare deny.” “Predestination we call the eternal decree
of God: he had it determined with himself what he willed to
become of every man. For all are not created to like estate; but to
some eternal life, and to some eternal damnation, is fore-appointed.
Therefore every man is created to one or the other end. So we say
he is predestinated to life or to death.”—Ibid. b. iii, ch. 21, § 5.
“The Scripture crieth out that all men were in the person of one
man made bound to eternal death. Since this cannot be imputed to
nature, it is plain it proceeded from the wondrous counsel of God.
But it is too much absurdity that these, the good patrons of the
righteousness of God, do so stumble at a straw and leap over beams.
Again I ask, how came it that the fall of Adam did wrap up in eternal
death so many nations, with their children, being infants, without
remedy, but because it so pleased God? Here their tongues, which
are otherwise so prattling, must be dumb. It is a terrible decree, I
grant; yet no man shall be able to deny but that God foreknew what
end man should have ere he created him, and therefore foreknew because
he had so ordained by his decree.”—Ibid. b. iii, ch. 23, § 7.
These quotations, did space permit, or the patience of my readers,
might be multiplied to a much greater extent; and might do something,
perhaps, to illustrate the character of the persecutor of Servetus.
His actions, as a man, were not inconsistent with his ideas of
God as a theologian.
“Who can fully describe,” asks Boston, “the wrath of an angry
God? None can do it.” “Wrath,” he says, “is a fire in the affections
of man, tormenting the man himself; but there is no perturbation
in God. His wrath does not in the least mar that infinite repose
which he hath in himself.” Then, speaking of man generally,
he says, “There is a wrath in the heart of God against him; there
is a wrath in the word of God against him; there is a wrath in the
hand of God against him.” We have here his statement of wrath
in God as an agent; and, through pages of gloomiest description, he
makes man its unsheltered object. “There is a wrath on his body.
It is a piece of accursed clay, which wrath is sinking into, by virtue
of the first covenant. There is a wrath on the natural man’s enjoyments.
Wrath is on all he has: on the bread he eats, the liquor he
drinks, and the clothes he wears.”—Boston’s Fourfold State.
Character and Condition of Man.
“With such bondage of sin then as will is detained, it cannot
move itself to goodness, much less apply itself.”—Calvin Inst., b. ii,
ch. 3, § 5, London Edition, 634.
“Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of
them they may be things which God commands, and of good use
both to themselves and others, yet because they proceed not from a
heart purified by faith, nor are done in a right manner, according to
the word, nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore
sinful, and cannot please God, or make a man meet to receive grace
from God: and yet their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing
unto God.”—Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. xvi. § 7.
“Man in his depraved state is under an utter inability to do anything
truly good.”—Boston.
The same doctrine is taught more leniently in the 13th article of
the Church of England, so that amongst the theologians, “the natural
man,” as they call him, is in a sad condition, for act as he will he
cannot but sin: if he does good works, he commits sin, and if he
neglects them he is guilty of still greater sins. Quotations in the
spirit of those already adduced might be swelled into volumes from
the vast treasures of Calvinistic divinity. But I shall close these by
an extract from the author I have before mentioned and quoted from,
an author, as I have said, highly popular and largely circulated; and
here is a passage of his on Christ and the last judgment.—“The
judge will pronounce the sentence of damnation on the ungodly multitude.
Then shall he say also to them on the left hand, ‘Depart
from me ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his
angels:’ ... The Lamb of God shall roar as a lion
against them; he shall excommunicate and cast them out of his presence
for ever, by a sentence from the throne, saying, ‘Depart from
me, ye cursed.’ He shall adjudge them to everlasting fire, and to
the society of devils for evermore. And this sentence also we suppose,
will be pronounced with an audible voice by the man Christ.
And all the saints shall cry, ‘Hallelujah! true and righteous are his
judgments!’ None were so compassionate as the saints when on
earth, during the time of God’s patience: but now that time is at
an end; their compassion for the ungodly is swallowed up in joy in
the Mediator’s glory, and his executing of just judgment, by which
his enemies are made his footstool. Though when on earth the
righteous man wept in secret places for their pride, and because they
would not hear, yet he shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance;
he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked (Ps. lviii. 10). No
pity shall then be shown them from their nearest relations. The
godly wife shall applaud the justice of the judge in the condemnation
of her ungodly husband: the godly husband shall say Amen to the
condemnation of her who lay in his bosom; the godly parent shall
say Hallelujah at the passing of the sentence against their ungodly
child; and the godly child shall, from the bottom of his heart, approve
the condemnation of his wicked parents,—the father who begat
him, and the mother who bore him. The sentence is just, they are
judged according to their work.”—Rev. xx. 12.
It were surely preferable to labour under the blindest mistakes concerning
the essence of God, or the person of Christ, than be guilty
of believing such atrocious representations as these of their moral
character. The zealous may scout us if they choose, as infidels; but
if Calvinism and Christianity were identical, infidelity would be
virtue, it would be but the righteous rebellion of human nature
against creeds, in vindication of the truth of its own affections, and
the rectitude of its God.
THE PROPOSITION “THAT CHRIST IS GOD,” PROVED TO BE FALSE FROM THE JEWISH AND THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES. — PREFACE.
The length of the following Discourse rendered it necessary to omit large
portions of it in the delivery; the remainder has undergone no alteration in
preparing the Lecture for the press.
It is one of the duties of the controversialist to drop each subject of debate so
soon as everything materially affecting it has been advanced; and to seize the
time for silence, as promptly as the time for speech. This consideration would
have led me to abstain from any further remarks respecting the Improved Version,
did it not appear that it is considered disrespectful to pass without notice
any argument adduced by our opponents. In briefly adverting to Mr. Byrth’s
strictures on my former Lecture, contained in the preface to his own, I am more
anxious to avert from myself the imputation of discourtesy to him than to disprove
his charge of “Pitiful Evasion;” which even the accuser himself, I
imagine, cannot permanently esteem just.
Notwithstanding the criticisms of my respected opponent, I still maintain
that a Subscriber to the British and Foreign Unitarian Association is no more
responsible for the alleged delinquencies of the Improved Version, than is a
Subscriber to the British and Foreign Bible Society for the known departures
from the true standard of the text which its funds are employed to circulate.
Mr. Byrth appears to enumerate three particulars, in which he thinks that the
parallelism between these two cases fails:
First; “The Authorised Version does not profess to be a systematic Interpretation.
It is not, in one word, a Creed and an Exposition. It is only a literal
translation, without note or comment.” So much the worse, must we not say?
Whatever deception a false text can produce, is thus wholly concealed and undiscoverable;
the counterfeit passes into circulation, undistinguished from the pure
gold of the Divine Word, bearing on its front the very same image and superscription.
Did this version “profess to be a systematic Interpretation,” readers
would be on their guard; but while professing to be “without note or comment,”
it inserts “a note” or gloss (in the case of the Heavenly Witnesses) into the text
itself. The doctrinal bearing of this and other readings, in which Griesbach’s
differs from the Received Text, makes the Authorised Version, quoad hoc, a creed,
while it disclaims this character.
Secondly; To constitute the Parallelism, the Bible Society ought to be, “The
Trinitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,” avowedly publishing
an “Improved Version of the Scriptures,” &c. So long, then, as Churchmen
abstain from proposing “an Improved Version,” and designate their societies
by neutral names, they may be acquitted, “in foro conscientiæ,” for retaining
any corruptions which may happen to exist in the un-improved Translation.
It is easy to conjecture that, on this principle, it will be long before
the Church incurs the needless guilt of an “Improved Version.” Surely the
frank avowal, by the words “Trinitarian Society,” of a party purpose, would
rather abate than augment the culpability of retaining a Trinitarian gloss;
since the reader would have fair warning that the work was edited under Theological
bias. And one of the most serious charges against “the Improved
Version” was precisely this: that its first edition was without party badge (the
word Unitarian not appearing in the title); so that it might possibly deceive the
unwary.
Thirdly; The parallelism is said to fail in extent; the peculiarities of the
Improved Version being much more numerous, and sustained by less evidence,
than the false readings of the Authorized Translation. I cannot concur in this
remark, so far as it affects the evidence against 1 John v. 7. But I pass by this
matter of opinion, to protest against the unjust exaggeration of a matter of fact,
contained in Mr. Byrth’s supposition of a Trinitarian counterpart to the Improved
Version. He speaks of “a text corrected on the principle of” “Theological
criticism and conjecture:”—he knows that not one text is so corrected; that
Griesbach’s second edition is followed without variation; that any proposed deviations
from it are only typographically indicated, or suggested and defended in
the notes. He speaks of the retention of “questionable passages,” without
“notice that their authenticity had ever been doubted;” and the expunging of
as many perplexing doctrinal texts as possible:—he knows that not one word of
the most approved text is expunged, or of any less perfect text retained; and
that notice is given of every deviation on the part of the Editors, in questions
either of authenticity or of translation, from their standards, Griesbach
and Newcome, and from the Received Text. Mr. Byrth is aware that
his opponents in this controversy do not altogether admire the Improved
Version; but it is not fit that advantage should be taken of this to publish
extravagant descriptions of it, in which the accuracy of the scholar, and
even the justice of the Christian, are for the moment lost in the vehemence of
the partisan.
It is desirable to add, that the Society which originally published the Improved
Version, has long since been merged in the British and Foreign Unitarian Association.
In this larger body three other societies (of which one, at least, surpassed
in scale and influence the unfortunate object of our opponent’s hostility) are
consolidated; and its subscription list contains the names of those who previously
supported any of the constituent elements of the Association. Hence it can,
with no propriety, be called “The Society instituted for the circulation” of the
Improved Version. It cannot be alleged that a subscriber is bound to anything
more than a general and preponderant approbation of the complex objects of the
Association; nor does he, by retaining his name on the list of its supporters,
forego his right of dissenting from particular modes of action which its Directors
may adopt.
May I assure Mr. Byrth, that I did not intend to insinuate, that his
strictures were produced “second-hand:” except in the sense that many
of them had, in fact, been anticipated. I expressly guarded myself against
any construction reflecting on the originality and literary honour of our
opponents.
The remaining animadversions of Mr Byrth, involving no public interest, and
having merely personal reference to myself, I willingly pass by; knowing that
they can have no power but in their truth; and in that case I should be sorry to
weaken them.
LECTURE V. — NOTES. — A. On Impossibility, Physical and Logical. — B. — C. — D. — E. — F. — Footnotes for Lecture V.
THE PROPOSITION “THAT CHRIST IS GOD,” PROVED
TO BE FALSE FROM THE JEWISH AND THE
CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES.
BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU.
“FOR THOUGH THERE BE THAT ARE CALLED GODS, WHETHER IN HEAVEN
OR IN EARTH (AS THERE BE GODS MANY, AND LORDS MANY), BUT
TO US THERE IS BUT ONE GOD,THE FATHER, OF WHOM ARE ALL
THINGS, AND WE IN HIM; AND ONE LORD JESUS CHRIST, BY WHOM
ARE ALL THINGS, AND WE BY HIM.”—1 Cor. viii. 5, 6.
Scarcely had Christ retired from our world, before his
influence began to be felt by mankind in two different ways.
He transformed their Worship, and purified their interpretation
of Duty. They have ever since adored a holier God,
and obeyed a more exalted rule of right. Looking upward,
they have discerned in heaven a Providence more true and
tender than they had believed; looking around, they have
seen on earth a service allotted to their conscience, nobler
and more responsible than they had thought before.
Watched from above by an object of infinite trust and
veneration, they have found below a work of life most
sacred, to be performed by obedient wills beneath his
sight. Faith has flown to its rest there, and conscience
has toiled in its task here, with a tranquil energy never
seen in a world not yet evangelized.
To suppose that a set of moral precepts, however wise and
authoritative, could ever have produced, in either of these
respects, the effects which have flowed from Christianity,
seems to me altogether unreasonable. Had Christ done no
more than leave in the world a sound code of ethics, his
work would probably have expired in a few centuries, and
have been very imperfect while it endured. A few prudential
and dispassionate minds would have profited by its
excellence; but never would it have trained the affections
of childhood, or overawed the energy of guilt, or refined the
rugged heart of ignorance, or consecrated the vigils of grief.
The power of Christ’s religion is not in his precepts, but
in his person; not in the memory of his maxims, but in the
image of Himself. He is his own system; and, apart from
him, his teachings do but take their place with the sublimest
efforts of speculation, to be admired and forgotten with the
colloquies of Socrates, and the meditations of Plato. Himself
first, and his lessons afterwards, have the hearts of
the people ever loved: his doctrines, indeed, have been obscured,
his sayings perverted, his commands neglected, the
distinctive features of his instructions obliterated, but he
himself has been venerated still; his unmistakable spirit
has corrected the ill-construed letter of the Gospel; and
preserved some unity of life amid the various, and even
opposing developments of Christian civilization.
The person of Christ may be contemplated as an object of
religious reverence, or as an object of moral imitation. He
may appear to our minds as the representative of Deity, or
as the model of humanity; teaching us, in the one case,
what we should believe, and trust, and adore in heaven;
in the other, what we should do on earth:—the rule of
faith in the one relation, the rule of life in the other.
Did his office extend only to the latter, were he simply an
example to us, displaying to us merely what manhood ought
to be, he might indeed constitute the centre of our morality;
but he would not properly belong to our religion: he would
be the object of affections equal and social, not devout; he
would take a place among things human, not divine;
would be the symbol of visible and definite duties, not of
unseen and everlasting realities. A Christianity which
should reduce him to this relation, would indeed be a step
removed above the mere cold preceptive system, which
depresses him into a law-giver; but it would no more be
entitled to the name of a religion, than the Ethics of
Aristotle, or the Offices of Cicero.
It is then as the type of God, the human image of the
everlasting Mind, that Christ becomes an object of our Faith.
Once did a dark and doubting world cry, like Philip on the
evening of Gethsemane, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth
us:” but now has Christ “been so long with us” that
we, “who have seen him, have seen the Father.” This I
conceive to have been the peculiar office of Jesus; to show
us, not to tell us, the spirit of that Being who spreads round
us in Infinitude, and leads us through Eternity. The universe
had prepared before us the scale of Deity; Christ has
filled it with his own spirit; and we worship now, not
the cold intellectual deity of natural religion; not the
distant majesty, the bleak immensity, the mechanical omnipotence,
the immutable stillness, of the speculative Theist’s
God: but One far nearer to our worn and wearied hearts;
One whose likeness is seen in Jesus of Nazareth, and whose
portraiture, suffused with the tints of that soul, is impressed
upon creation; One, therefore, who concerns himself with
our humblest humanities, and views our world with a
domestic eye, whose sanctity pierces the guilty mind with
repentance, and then shelters the penitent from rebuke;
who hath mercy for the victims of infirmity, and a recall
for the sleepers in the grave. Let Messiah’s mind pass
forth to fill all time and space; and you behold the Father,
to whom we render a loving worship.
In order to fulfil this office of revealing, in his own person,
the character of the Father, Christ possessed and manifested
all the moral attributes of Deity. His absolute
holiness; his ineffable perceptions of right; his majestic
rebuke of sin; his profound insight into the corrupt core
of worldly and hypocritical natures, and to the central
point of life in the affectionate and genuine soul; his well-proportioned
mercies and disinterested love, fill the whole
meaning of the word Divine: God can have no other, and
no more, perfection of character intelligible to us.
These moral attributes of God, we conceive to have been
compressed, in Christ, within the physical and intellectual
limits of humanity; to have been unfolded and displayed
amid the infirmities of a suffering and tempted nature;
and, during the brevity of a mortal life, swiftly hurried to
its close. And this immersion of divine perfection in the
darkness of weakness and sorrow, so far from forfeiting
our appreciation of him, incalculably deepens it. The
addition of infinite force, mechanical or mental, would contribute
no new ingredient to our veneration, since force is
not an object of reverence; and it would take away the
wonder and grandeur of his soul, by rendering temptation
impossible, and conflict a pretence. Since God cannot be
pious, or submissive to his own providence, or cast down in
doubt of his own future, or agonized by the insults of his
own creatures, such a combination seems to confuse and
destroy all the grounds of veneration, and to cause the
perfection of Christ to pass in unreality away.
To this view, however, of the person of Christ, Trinitarians
object as defective; and proceed to add one other
ingredient to the conception, viz., that he possessed the
physical and intellectual attributes of Deity;—that he is
to be esteemed no less eternal, omnipotent and omnipresent,
than the Infinite Father; the actual creator of the
visible universe, of the very world into which he was born
and of the mother who bare him, of the disciples who
followed and of the enemies who destroyed him. These
essential properties of Deity by no means, we are assured,
interfered with the completeness of his humanity; so that
he had the body, the soul, the consciousness, of a man;
and, in union with these, the infinite mind of God. But
in a question of mere words, in which the guidance of ideas
is altogether lost, I dare not trust myself to my own language.
To disturb the juxtaposition of charmed sounds,
is to endanger orthodoxy; and, in describing the true
doctrine, I therefore present you with a portion of that
unexampled congeries of luminous phrases, commonly called
the Athanasian Creed. “The Catholic faith is this: that
we worship One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son,
and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the
Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the
glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is,
such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost: ... the Father
eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal; and
yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.... So the
Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God;
and yet they are not three Gods, but one God.... So there
is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons;
one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And, in this Trinity,
none is afore or after other; none is greater or less than
another; but the whole three persons are co-eternal together
and co-equal.”
Of the second of these three persons, the second article
of the Church of England gives the following account:—
“The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten
from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God,
and of one substance with the Father, took man’s nature
in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance; so
that two whole and perfect natures,—that is to say, the
Godhead and the Manhood,—were joined together in one
Person, never to be divided; whereof is One Christ, very
God and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead,
and buried, to reconcile his Father to us.”
In opposition to this theory, we maintain the Personal
Unity of God, and the simplicity of nature in Christ. It
is my duty at present to submit these contrasted schemes
to the test of Scripture. In order to effect this, I advance
these three positions:
(1.) That if the Athanasian doctrine be found in Scripture,
then, on our opponents’ own principles, Scripture does
not contain a revelation from God.
(2.) That if it be really in the Bible, certain definable
traces of it there may justly be demanded; and, before opening
the record, we should settle what these traces must be.
(3.) That such traces cannot be found in Scripture.
I. “If,” says Bishop Butler, “a supposed revelation
contain clear immoralities or contradictions, either of these
would prove it false.”[164] This principle, generally recognized
by competent reasoners, has been distinctly admitted in the
present discussion; and Dr. Tattershall, in particular, has
employed much ingenuity to prove that the doctrine of the
Trinity, containing no absurdity or contradiction, involves
in no danger the authority of the writings supposed to teach
it. But no subtlety can avail to remove the inherent incredibility
of this tenet, which even its believers cannot, without
uneasiness, distinctly and steadily contemplate. Long usage
and Church authority alone prevent men from perceiving
that the propositions, announcing it, are either simple contradictions,
or statements empty of all meaning. The same remark
is applicable to the notion of the two natures in Christ.
Before proceeding to justify this assertion, let me guard
myself from the imputation of rejecting this doctrine because
it is mysterious; or of supporting a system which insists
on banishing all mysteries from religion. On any such
system I should look with unqualified aversion, as excluding
from faith one of its primary elements; as obliterating the
distinction between logic and devotion, and tending only
to produce an irreverent and narrow-minded dogmatism.
“Religion without mystery” is a combination of terms, than
which the Athanasian Creed contains nothing more contradictory;
and the sentiment of which it is the motto, I take
to be a fatal caricature of rationalism, tending to bring all
piety into contempt. Until we touch upon the mysterious,
we are not in contact with religion; nor are any objects
reverently regarded by us, except such as, from their nature
or their vastness, are felt to transcend our comprehension.
God, of whose inscrutable immensity creation is but the
superficial film; Christ, the love of whom surpasseth knowledge;
futurity, veiled in awful shadows, yet illumined by
a point or two of light; these, which are slightly known,
and greatly unknown, with something definite, representing
a vast indefinite, are the peculiar objects of trust and veneration.
And the station which the soul occupies, when its
devout affections are awakened, is always this: on the twilight,
between immeasurable darkness and refreshing light;
on the confines, between the seen and the unseen; where a
little is discerned, and an infinitude concealed; where a few
distinct conceptions stand, in confessed inadequacy, as
symbols of ineffable realities: and we say, “Lo! these are
part of his ways; but the thunder of his power, who can
understand?” And if this be true, the sense of what we
do not know is as essential to our religion as the impression
of what we do know: the thought of the boundless, the incomprehensible,
must blend in our mind with the perception
of the clear and true; the little knowledge we have
must be clung to, as the margin of an invisible immensity;
and all our positive ideas be regarded as the mere float to
show the surface of the infinite deep.
But mystery, thus represented, offers anything but objects
of belief: it presents nothing to be appreciated by the
understanding; but a realm of possibilities to be explored
by a reverential imagination; and a darkness that may be
felt to the centre of the heart. Being, by its very nature,
the blank and privative space, offered to our contemplation,
nothing affirmative can be derived thence; and to shape
into definite words the things indefinite that dwell there is
to forget its character. We can no more delineate anything
within it than an artist, stationed at midnight on an
Alpine precipice can paint the rayless scene beneath him.
There cannot, however, be a greater abuse of words, than
to call the doctrine of the Trinity a mystery; and all the
analogies by which it is attempted to give it this appearance,
will instantly vanish on near inspection. It does not
follow, because a mystery is something which we cannot
understand, that everything unintelligible is a mystery; and
we must discriminate between that which is denied admittance
to our reason, from its fulness of ideas, and that which
is excluded by its emptiness; between a verbal puzzle and
a symbolical and finite statement of an infinite truth. If I
were to say of a triangle, each of the sides of this figure
has an angle opposite to it, yet are there not three angles
but one angle, I should be unable to shelter myself, under
the plea of mystery, from the charge of bald absurdity;
and the reply would be obviously this: ‘Never was anything
less mysterious put into words; all your terms are
precise and sharp, of definable meaning, and suggestive of
nothing beyond: the difficulty is, not in understanding
your propositions separately, but in reconciling them together;
and this difficulty is so palpable, that either you have
affirmed a direct contradiction, or you are playing tricks
with words, and using them in a way which, being unknown
to me, turns them into mere nonsense.’ If to this I should
answer, that the contradiction was only apparent, for that
the three and the one were affirmed in different senses;
and that it would be very unfair to expect, in so deep a
mystery, the word angle to be restrained to its usual signification;
I should no doubt be called upon to explain in
what novel sense this familiar term was here employed, since,
in the interval between the expulsion of the old meaning
and the introduction of the new, it is mere worthless vacancy.
And if, then, I should confess that the strange meaning was
some inscrutable and superhuman idea, which it would be
impossible to reach, and presumption to conjecture, I should
not be surprised to hear the following rejoinder; ‘you are
talking of human language as if it were something more than
an implement of human thought, and were like the works
of nature, full of unfathomable wonders and unsuspected relations;
hidden properties of things there doubtless are, but
occult meanings of words there cannot be. Words are simply
the signs of ideas, the media of exchange, invented to carry
on the commerce of minds,—the counters, either stamped
with thought, or worthless counterfeits. Nay more, in this
monetary system of the intellectual world, there are no
coins of precious metal that retain an intrinsic value of
their own, when the image and superscription imprinted
by the royalty of intelligence are gone; but mere paper-currency,
whose whole value is conventional, and dependent
on the mental credit of those who issue it: and to urge
propositions on my acceptance, with the assurance that they
have some invisible and mystic force, is as direct a cheat,
as to pay me a debt with a bill palpably marked as of
trivial value, but, in the illegible types of your imagination,
printed to be worth the wealth of Crœsus.’
“Verbal mysteries,” then, cannot exist, and the phrase
is but a fine name for a contradiction or a riddle. The metaphysics
which are invoked to palliate their absurdity, are
fundamentally fallacious; and equally vain is it to attempt
to press natural science into the service of defence. In the
case of a Theological mystery, we are asked to assent to two
ideas, the one of which excludes the other; in the case of
a natural mystery, we assent to two ideas, one of which does
not imply the other. In the one case, conceptions which
destroy each other are forced into conjunction; in the other,
conceptions which had never suggested each other, are found
to be related. When, for example, we say that the union, in
our own constitution, of body and mind is perfectly mysterious,
what do we really mean? Simply, that in the properties
of body there is nothing which would lead us, antecedently,
to expect any combination with the properties of
mind; that we might have entertained for ever the notions of
solidity, extension, colour, organization, without the remotest
suspicion of such things as sensation, thought, volition, affection,
being associated with them. The relation is unanticipated
and surprising; for thought does not imply solidity:
but then neither does it exclude it; the two notions stand
altogether apart, nor does the one comprise any element
inconsistent with the other. It is evident that it is far otherwise
with the union of the two natures in Christ; the properties
of the Divine nature, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence,
directly exclude the properties of the human nature,—weakness,
fallibility, local movement and position; to
affirm the one is the only method we have of denying the
other; and to say of any Being, that besides having the omniscience
of God, he had the partial knowledge of man, is to say
that in addition to having all ideas, he possessed some ideas.
All the natural analogies at which theologians hint in self-justification,
fail in the same point. They tell me truly that
it is a mystery to me how the grass grows. But by this is
meant only, that from the causes which produce this phenomenon,
I could not have antecendently predicted it; that if I
had been a fresh comer on the globe, the meteorological conditions
of the earth in spring might have been perceived by
me without my suspecting, as a sequence, the development
of a green substance from the soil. We have again an example
of an unforeseen relation; but between the members
of that relation there is not even a seeming contradiction.
Nor do I know of any other signification of the word mystery,
as applied to our knowledge or belief, except in its usage to
express magnitudes too great to be filled by our imaginations;
as when we speak of the mysterious vastness of space, or
duration of time: or, viewing these as the attributes of a
Being, stand in awe of the immensity and eternity of God.
But neither in this case is there any approach to the admission
of ideas which exclude each other; on the contrary,
our minds think of a small portion,—take into consideration
a representative sample, of those immeasurable magnitudes,
and necessarily conceive of all that is left behind, as perfectly
similar, and believe the unknown to be an endless repetition
of the known.
It is constantly affirmed that the doctrines of the Trinity,
and of the two natures in Christ, comprise no contradiction;
that it is not stated in the former that there are three Gods,
but that God is three in one sense, and one in another; and in
the latter, that Christ is two in one sense, and one in another.
I repeat and proceed to justify my statement, that if, in
the enunciation of these tenets, language is used with any
appreciable meaning, they are contradictions; and if not,
they are senseless. I enter upon this miserable logomachy
with the utmost repugnance; and am ashamed that in vindication
of the simplicity of Christ, we should be dragged
back into the barren conflicts of the schools.
“If,” says Dr. Tattershall, “it had been said that He is ONE
GOD and also THREE GODS, then the statement would have
been self-contradictory, and no evidence could have established
the truth of such a proposition.”[165] Now I take it as
admitted that this being is called ONE GOD; and that there
are THREE GODS, is undoubtedly affirmed distributively,
though not collectively; each of the three persons being
separately announced as God. In the successive instances,
which we are warned to keep distinct, and not confound, of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, proper Deity is
affirmed; in three separate cases, all that is requisite to constitute
the proper notion of God, is said to exist; and this
is exactly what is meant, and all that can be meant, by the
statement, that there are three Gods. I submit then that
the same creed teaches that there are three Gods, and also
that there are not three Gods.
From this contradiction there is but one escape, and that
is, by declaring that the word God is used in different
senses; being applied to the triad in one meaning, and to the
persons in another. If this be alleged, I wait to be informed
of the new signification which is to be attached to this title,
hitherto expressive of all the ideas I can form of intellectual
and moral perfection. More than this, which exhausts all
the resources of my thought, it cannot mean; and if it is to
mean less, then it withholds from Him to whom it is applied
something which I have hitherto esteemed as essential to
God. Meanwhile, a word with an occult meaning is a
word with no meaning; and the proposition containing it
is altogether senseless.
But the favourite way of propounding this doctrine is
the following: that God is three in one sense, and one in
another; Three in Person, but only One Individual, Subsistence,
or Being. The sense, then, if I understand aright,
of the word Person, is different from the sense of the words
Individual, Being, or Subsistence; and if so, I may ask
what the respective senses are, and wherein they differ
from each other. In reply I am assured, that by person
is to be understood “a subject in which resides” “an
entire set or series of those properties which are understood
to constitute personality; viz. the property of Life, that
of Intelligence, that of Volition, and that of Activity, or
power of Action.”[166] Very well; this is distinct and satisfactory;
and now for the other sense, viz. of the words
Individual, Being, and Subsistence. About this an ominous
silence is observed; and all information is withheld
respecting the quite different meaning which these terms
contain. Now I say, that their signification is the very same
with that of the word Person, as above defined; that when
you have enumerated to me a complete “set of personal
attributes,” you have called up the idea of an Individual,
Being, or Subsistence; and that when you have mentioned
to me these phrases, you have made me think of a complete
set of personal attributes; that if you introduce me to two
or three series of personal attributes, you force me to conceive
of two or three beings; that a complete set of properties
makes up an entire subsistence, and that an entire
subsistence contains nothing else than its aggregate of properties.
To take, for example, from Dr. Tattershall’s list of
qualities which are essential to personality; tell me of two
lives, and I cannot but think of two individuals; of two
intelligences, and I am necessitated to conceive of two intelligent
beings; of two wills or powers of action, and it is
impossible to restrain me from the idea of two Agents; and
if each of these lives, intelligences, and volitions, be divine,
of two Gods. The word substance, in fact, will hold no more
than the word person; and to the mind, though not to the
ear, the announcement in question really is, that there are
three persons, and yet only one person. Thus men “slide
insensibly,” to use the words of Archbishop Whately, “into
the unthought-of, but, I fear, not uncommon, error of Tritheism;
from which they think themselves the more secure,
because they always maintain the Unity of the Deity;
though they gradually come to understand that Unity in a
merely figurative sense; viz. as a Unity of substance,—a
Unity of purpose, concert of action, &c.; just as any one
commonly says, ‘My friend such-an-one and myself are
one;’ meaning that they pursue the same designs with
entire mutual confidence, and perfect co-operation, and have
that exact agreement in opinions, views, tastes, &c., which
is often denoted by the expression one mind.”[167]
No doubt this excellent writer is correct in his impression,
that the belief in three Gods is prevalent in this
country, and kept alive by the creeds of his own church.
And how does he avoid this consequence himself? By
understanding the word Persons, not in Dr. Tattershall’s,
which is the ordinary English sense, but in the Latin signification,
to denote the relations, or capacities, or characters,
which an individual may sustain, the several parts
which he may perform; so that the doctrine of the Trinity
amounts only to this, that the One Infinite Deity bears
three relations to us. This is plain Unitarianism, veiled
behind the thinnest disguise of speech. Between this and
Tritheism, it is vain to seek for any third estate.[168]
The contradiction involved in the doctrine of the two
natures of Christ is of precisely the same nature and extent.
We are assured that he had a perfect human constitution,
consisting of the growing body and progressing mind of a
man; and also a proper divine personality, comprising all the
attributes of God. Now, during this conjunction, either the
human mind within him was, or it was not, conscious of the
co-existence and operation of the divine. If it was not, if
the earthly and celestial intelligence dwelt together in the
same body without mutual recognition, like two persons
enclosed in the same dark chamber, in ignorance of each
other, then were there two distinct beings, whom it is a
mockery to call “one Christ;” the humanity of our Lord
was unaffected by his Deity, and in all respects the same
as if disjoined from it; and his person was but a movable
sign, indicating the place and presence of a God, who was as
much foreign to him as to any other human being. If the
human nature had a joint consciousness with the divine, then
nothing can be affirmed of his humanity separately; and
from his sorrows, his doubts, his prayers, his temptations,
his death, every trace of reality vanish away. If he were
conscious, in any sense, of omnipotence, nothing but duplicity
could make him say, “of mine own self I can do
nothing;” if of omniscience, it was mere deception to affirm
that he was ignorant of the time of his second advent; if
of his equality with the Father, it was a quibble to say,
“my Father is greater than I.” I reject this hypothesis
with unmitigated abhorrence, as involving in utter ruin the
character of the most perfect of created beings.
The intrinsic incredibility then of these doctrines, involving,
as they do, “clear immoralities and self contradictions,”
would throw discredit on the claims of any work professing
to reveal them on the authority of God. And whether we
listen to the demands of Scripture on our reverential attention,
must depend on this:—whether these tenets are found
there or not. And to this enquiry let us now proceed.
One remark I would make in passing, on the supposed
value of the theory of the two natures, as a key to unlock
certain difficult passages of the Bible, and to reconcile their
apparent contradictions. Christ, it is affirmed, is sometimes
spoken of as possessing human qualities, sometimes as possessing
divine; on the supposition of his being simply man,
one class of these passages contradicts us; on the assumption
of his being simply God, another. Let us then pronounce
him both, and everything is set right; every part
of the document becomes clear and intelligible.[169]
Now which, let me ask, is the greater difficulty: the
obscure language, which we wish to make consistent, or the
prodigious hypothesis, devised for the reconcilement of its
parts? The sole perplexity in these portions of Scripture
consists in this,—that the divine and the human nature are
felt to be incompatible, and not to be predicable of the same
being: if we did not feel this, we should be conscious of
no opposition; and the ingenious device for relieving the
bewilderment, is to deny the incompatibility, and boldly to
affirm the union. If you will but believe both sides of the
contradiction, you will find the contradiction disappear!
What would be thought of such a principle of interpretation
applied to similar cases of verbal discrepancy? It is
stated, for example, in the Book of Genesis, that Abraham
and Lot received a divine communication respecting the
destruction of Sodom; and the bearers of the message are
spoken of, in one place, as Jehovah himself; in another, as
angels; in a third, as men.[170] What attention would be given
to any interpreter who should say; ‘it is clear that these
persons could not be simply God, for they are called men;
nor simply men, for they are called angels; nor simply
angels, for they are called God: they must have had a triple
nature, and been at the same time perfect God, perfect angel,
and perfect man?’ Would such an explanation be felt to
solve anything? Or take one other case, in which Moses is
called God with a distinctness which cannot be equalled in
the case of Christ: “Moses called together all Israel, and
said to them: ... I have led you forty years in the wilderness;
your clothes have not waxen old upon you, and thy
shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. Ye have not eaten
bread, neither have ye drunk wine or strong drink; that ye
might know that I am the Lord your God.”[171] What relief,
let me ask, should we obtain from the difficulty of this passage,
by being told that Moses had two natures in one person,
and must be received as God-man? Who would accept “a
key” like this, and not feel that in loosening one difficulty,
it locked fast another, and left us in labyrinthine darkness?
II. When a Trinitarian, and a Unitarian, agree to consult
Scripture together, and to bring their respective systems to
this written standard, it is essential that they should determine
beforehand what it is that they must look for: what internal
characters of the books are to be admitted in evidence;
what kind and degree of proof each is entitled to expect.
Each should say to the other before the Bible is opened, “Tell
me now, distinctly, what are the marks and indications in
these records, which you admit would disprove your scheme:
what must I succeed in establishing, in order to convince you
that you are mistaken?” The mutual exchange of some such
tests is indispensable to all useful discussion. I am not
aware that any rules of this kind have ever been laid down,
or I would willingly adopt them. Meanwhile I will propose
a few; and state the phenomena which I think a Unitarian
has a right to expect in the Bible, if the Athanasian doctrine[172]
be revealed there, and its reception made a condition of salvation.
If the criteria be in any respect unreasonable, let it be
shown where they are erroneous or unfair. I am not conscious
of making any extravagant or immodest petition for evidence.
If, then, the existence of three Persons, each God, in the
One Infinite Deity,—and the temporary union of the second
of these Persons, with a perfect man, so as to constitute
One Christ,—be among the prominent facts communicated
in the written Revelation of the Bible, we may expect to
find there the following characters:
(1.) That somewhere or other, among its thousand pages,
these doctrines so easily and compendiously expressed, will
be plainly stated.
(2.) That as it is important not to confound the three persons
in the Godhead, they will be kept distinct, having some
discriminative and not interchangeable titles; and, moreover,
since each has precisely the same claim to be called
God, that word will be assigned to them with something
like an impartial distribution.
(3.) That as, in consistency with the Unity, the term
God will always be restricted to one only being or substance;
so, in consistency with the Trinity, it will never be limited
to ONE PERSON to the exclusion of the OTHER TWO.
(4.) That when the PERSONS are named by their distinctive
divine titles, their equality will be observed, nor any
one of them be represented as subordinate to any other.
(5.) That since the MANHOOD of Christ commenced, and
its peculiar functions ceased, with his incarnation, it will
never be found ascribed to him in relation to events, before
or after this period.
All these phenomena, I submit, are essential to make
scripture consistent with Athanasianism; and not one of
these phenomena does scripture contain. This it is now
my business to show.
III. (1.) Is then our expectation realized, of finding
somewhere within the limits of the Bible, a plain, unequivocal
statement of these doctrines? Confessedly not;
and notions which, in one breath, are pronounced to be indispensable
to salvation, are in another admitted to be no matters
of revelation at all, but rather left to be gathered by human
deduction from the sacred writings. “The doctrine of the
Trinity,” says a respectable Calvinistic writer, Mr. Carlile of
Dublin, “is rather a doctrine of inference and of indirect
intimation, deduced from what is revealed respecting the
Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and intimated in
the notices of a plurality of persons in the Godhead, than a
doctrine directly and explicitly declared.” And elsewhere
the same author says, “A doctrine of inference ought never
to be placed on a footing of equality with a doctrine of direct
and explicit revelation.”[173] If this be so (and the method
of successive steps by which it is attempted, in this very
controversy, to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, proves
Mr. Carlile to be right), then to deny this mere inference is
not to deny a revelation. But why, we may be permitted
to enquire, this shyness and hesitancy in the scriptures in
communicating such cardinal truths? Whence this reserve
in the Holy Spirit about matters so momentous?[174] What is
the source of this strange contrast between the formularies
of the Church of England, and those of the primitive Church
of Christ? The Prayer-book would seem to have greatly
the advantage over the Bible; for it removes all doubts
at once, and makes the essentials most satisfactorily plain;
compensating, shall we say, by “frequent repetitions,” for the
defects and ambiguities of Holy Writ? Nay, it is a singular
fact, that in the original languages of the Old and New
Testaments, no phraseology exists in which it is possible
to express the creeds of the Church. We give to the most
learned of our opponents the whole vocabulary of the
Hebrew and the Greek Scriptures, and we say, “with these
materials translate for us into either language, or any mixture
of both, your own Athanasian Creed,” They well know,
that it cannot be done: and ought not then this question to
be well weighed? if the terms indispensable for the expression
of certain ideas are absent from the Bible, how can the
ideas themselves be present? Scarcely can men have any
important notions without the corresponding words,—which
the mind coins as fast as it feels the need; and most
assuredly they cannot reveal them. Let us hear no more
the rash assertion that these tenets may be proved from
any page of scripture; we frankly offer every page, with
unrestricted liberty to rewrite the whole; and we say, with
all this, they cannot be expressed.
(2.) Let us proceed to apply our second criterion, and
ascertain whether the divine persons, whom it is essential
to distinguish, are so distinguished by characteristic titles
in scripture; and share among them, with any approach to
equality, the name of God.
It is self-evident, that a verbal revelation can make
known distinctions only by distinctive words; that if
two or more objects of thought receive interchangeable
names, and the term which had seemed to be appropriated
to the one is transferred to the other, those objects are not
discriminated, but confounded. We require, then, separate
words in scripture to denote the following notions; of the
One Divine Substance, or Triune Being; of the First, of the
Second, of the Third person, in this infinite existence;—of
the Divine Nature and of the Human Nature of Christ.
For the Trinity, it is acknowledged, there is no scripture
name; unless, indeed, the plural form of the word God
in the Hebrew language is to be claimed for this purpose;
and thus an attempt be still made to confirm our faith
by argument which an orthodox commentator calls “weak
and vain, not to say silly and absurd.”[175] “From the
plural sense of the word Elohim,” says the great Calvin,
“it is usual to infer that there are three persons in the
Godhead. But as this proof of so important a point appears
to me by no means solid, I will not insist upon the
word. Let me then warn my readers against such VIOLENT
INTERPRETATIONS.”[176] “I must be allowed,” says Dr. Lee,
Arabic Professor in the University of Cambridge, “to object
to such methods of supporting an article of faith,
which stands in need of no such support.”[177] Of the first
person in the Trinity, the word “Father,” it is to be presumed,
may be considered as the distinctive name; of the
Second person, the terms Son, Son of God, and the Word
or Logos; of the Third person, the phrase Holy Ghost,
Spirit, Paraclete; and of the human nature of Christ, as
distinguished from the Second distinction in the Trinity,
the names Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Man, the Man Christ
Jesus. If these names be not distinctive, there certainly
are no others; and if there be none at all, then the distinctions
themselves are not impressed upon the record;
they are altogether destitute of signs and expressions,
and must be pronounced purely imaginary. Meanwhile
we will assume the titles, which I have just enumerated,
to be appropriated to the purposes which have been assigned.
To the use of the words Father and Son I shall have
particular occasion to revert.
The usage of the word God, in the New Testament, presents
us with some remarkable phenomena. The Athanasian
doctrine offers to our belief four objects of thought, to
which this word is equally and indifferently applicable;
the Triune Divine Being; and each of the three Persons;
and its advocates profess to have learned from Scripture
the well-adjusted equipoise of these claims upon the great
and sacred name. We are hardly then prepared by its
instructions, distinct and emphatic as they are, for the following
fact; allowing every one of the Trinitarian interpretations
to be correct, the word God is used in the New
Testament TEN times of Christ; and of some other object,
upwards of THIRTEEN HUNDRED times.[178] Whence this
astonishing disproportion? Some cause,—something corresponding
to it in the minds of the writers, it must have
had; nor is it easy to understand, how an equal disposition
of the Divine Persons in the habitual conceptions of
the Authors, could lead to so unequal an award of the
grand expression of Divinity.
Even the few instances, which for the moment I have
allowed, will disappear on a nearer examination. This
appears to be the proper place to pass under review the
most remarkable passages, which, under Trinitarian exposition,
appear to sanction the doctrine of the proper Deity
of Christ.
(a.) The evangelist Matthew applies to Christ[179] the
following words of the prophet Isaiah, which, in order to
give the truest impression of the original, I will quote
from the translation of Bishop Lowth: “Behold the Virgin
conceiveth, and beareth a son; and she shall call his
name Emmanuel.”[180] As this name is significant, and
means “God with us,” it is argued, that it could not be
assigned to any one who was not properly God.
Now even if this name were really assigned by the prophet
to Christ, the most superficial Hebraist must be aware
that it teaches us nothing respecting the nature and person
of our Lord. “The fact is unquestionable,” says Dr.
Pye Smith, “that the gratitude or hope of individuals, in
the ancient scriptural times, was often expressed by the
imposition of significant appellations on persons or other
objects, in the composition of which Divine names and
titles were frequently employed; these are, therefore,
nothing but short sentences, declarative of some blessing
possessed or expected.”[181] Thus the name Lemuel means
God with them; Elijah, God the Lord; Elihu, God is he.
So that to use the words of one of the ablest of living
Trinitarian writers, “to maintain that the name Immanuel
proves the doctrine in question is a fallacious argument.”[182]
But, in truth, this name is not given to the Messiah by
the prophet; and the citation of it in this connection by
the evangelist is an example of those loose accommodations,
or even misapplications, of passages in the Old
Testament by writers in the New, which the most resolute
orthodoxy is unable to deny; and which (though
utterly destructive of the theory of verbal inspiration)
the real dignity of the Gospel in no way requires us to
deny. Turning to the original prophecy, and not neglecting
the context and historical facts which illustrate it, we
find that Jerusalem was threatened with instant destruction
by the confederated kings of Syria and Samaria;
that, to the terrified Jewish monarch Ahaz, the prophet is
commissioned to promise the deliverance of his metropolis
and ruin to his enemies; that he even fixes the date of
this happy reverse; and that he does this, not in a direct
way, by telling the number of months or years that shall
elapse, but by stating that ere a certain child, either already
born, or about to be born within a year, shall be old enough
to distinguish between good and evil, the foe shall be
overthrown; and that this same child, whose infancy is
thus chronologically used, shall eat the honey of a land
peaceful and fertile once more. Nor is this interpretation
any piece of mere heretical ingenuity. Dr. Pye Smith
observes: “It seems to be as clear as words can make it,
that the Son promised was born within a year after the
giving of the prediction; that his being so born at the
assigned period, was the sign or pledge that the political
deliverance announced to Ahaz should certainly take
place.”[183] Without assenting to the latter part of this
remark, I quote it simply to show that, in the opinion of
this excellent and learned Divine, the Emmanuel could
not have been born later than a year after the delivery of
the prophecy. It will immediately appear that there is
nothing to preclude the supposition of his being already
born, at the very time when it was uttered.
Who this child, and who his mother, really were, are
questions wholly unconnected with the present argument.
As the date, and not the person, was the chief subject of
the Prophet’s declaration, any son of Jerusalem, arriving at
years of discretion within the stated time, would fulfil the
main conditions of the announcement; and as a sign of Divine
deliverance, might receive the name Emmanuel. In fact,
however, the child, in the view of Isaiah, seems to have
been no other than the King’s own son, Hezekiah; and the
Virgin Mother to have been, in conformity with a phraseology
familiar to every careful reader of the Old Testament,
the royal and holy city of Jerusalem. Amos, speaking of
the city, says, “The virgin of Israel is fallen,”[184] Jeremiah,
lamenting over its desolation, exclaims, “Let mine eyes run
down with tears night and day, and let them not cease; for
the virgin daughter of my people is broken, with a great
breach, with a very grievous blow.”[185] Micah, apostrophizing
the citadel, bursts out, “O tower,”—“stronghold
of the daughter of Zion,”—“is there no king in thee? Is
thy counsellor perished? For pangs have taken thee, as a
woman in travail.”[186] The fact that Hezekiah was already
born, seems to confirm rather than to invalidate this interpretation.
A living child to his parents, he was yet the
city’s embryo king. What sign more fitted to reassure the
terrified and faithless monarch than this; that, ere his own
first-born should reach the years of judgment, his twofold
enemy should be cast down? What language, indeed, could
be more natural respecting an heir to the throne, of whom
great expectations were excited in grievous times? The
royal city dreamt of his promised life with gladness; he
was the child of Jerusalem, in the hour of her anguish given
to her hopes; in after years of peace fulfilling them.[187]
(b.) This prince appears evidently to have been the person
described also in another passage, from which, though
never cited in the New Testament as applicable to Christ
at all, modern theologians are accustomed to infer his Deity.
It is as follows: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son
is given; and his name shall be called wonderful; counsellor;
the mighty God; the everlasting Father; the Prince
of Peace.”[188] We have only to look at the terms in which
this great one’s dominion is described, and the characters
that are to mark his reign, in order to assure ourselves that
he is some person very different from Christ; the Northern
district of Palestine is to be delivered by him from the sufferings
of an Assyrian invasion; he is to break the yoke
which Tiglath-Pileser had imposed on the land of Gennesareth;
to destroy the rod of the oppressor; to make a
conflagration of the spoils of the battle-field, and burn the
greaves and blood-stained garments of his country’s enemies.[189]
It seems to me impossible to imagine a more violent distortion
of Scripture than the application of this passage to
Christ. But, be it even otherwise, there are only two of
these titles which can be thought of any avail in this argument.
One is, the “everlasting Father;” which if it proves
anything, establishes that the second person in the Trinity
is the first person, or else that the word Father must be
given up as a distinctive name, a concession destructive of
the whole doctrine. The other is the phrase, “the mighty
God,” or by inversion, “God the mighty;” on which I presume
no stress would have been laid if, instead of being
presented to us in a translation, it had been given in the
original, and called Gabriel. For the word God, Martin
Luther substitutes (Held) hero, as the juster rendering.[190] But,
in truth, it is sad trifling thus to crumble Hebrew names
to pieces, in order to yield a few scarce visible atoms of
argument to replenish the precarious pile of church orthodoxy,
wasted by the attrition of reason, the healthful dews
of nature, and the sunshine and the air of God.[191]
(c.) Let us turn to the Proem of St. John’s Gospel;
that most venerable and beautiful of all the delineations
which Scripture furnishes, of the twofold relation of Christ’s
spirit, to the Father who gave it its illumination, and to
the brethren who were blessed by its light. To our cold
understandings, indeed, this passage must inevitably be
obscure; for it deals with some of the characteristic conceptions
of that lofty speculative reason, which, blending the
refinements of Platonism with the imaginative license of
the oriental schools, assumed in early times the intellectual
empire of the church, and has kept the world ever since in
deliberation on its creations. I do not mean that the
Apostle was a Platonist, or a disciple of any philosophical
system. But he wrote in Asia Minor, where he was surrounded
by the influences, in constant familiarity with the
terms, and accustomed to the modes of thought, peculiar to
the sects of speculative religionists most prevalent in his
time. At all events, it is a fact that he uses language nowhere
employed by the other Evangelists or Apostles; and
that this language is the very same which is the common
stock, and technical vocabulary of Philo, the Platonizing
Jew, and several Christian writers of the same or a kindred
school. Before, however, endeavouring to suggest the idea
which the Apostle did mean to convey, let me call your
attention to that which he did not.
There cannot be a more misplaced confidence, than that
with which the introductory verses of St. John’s Gospel
are appealed to by the holders of the Athanasian doctrine.
Whatever explanation is adopted, which does not throw
contempt upon the composition of the Evangelist, is at all
events subversive of their system: and I do not hesitate to
say, that this is the only thing which I can regard as certain
respecting this passage; that it never could have been
written by an Athanasian. In order to test this assertion,
it is not necessary to look beyond the first verse; and before
we read it, let us allow the Trinitarian to choose any
sense he pleases of the word God, which is its leading term.
Let us suppose that he accepts it as meaning here “the
Father,” and that the Word or Logos means God the Son.
With these substitutions the verse reads thus:—
In the beginning was the Son; and the Son was with
the Father; and the Son was the Father. This surely is
to “confound the persons.”
Let us then suppose the meaning different, and the whole
Godhead or Trinity to be denoted by the word God. The
verse would then read thus:—
In the beginning was the Son; and the Son was with
the Trinity, and the Son was the Trinity.
We are no nearer to consistency than before: and it is
evident that before the Trinitarian can find in the passage
any distinct enunciation, the term God must be conceived
to bear two different meanings in this short verse,—a verse
so symmetrical in its construction as to put the reader
altogether off his guard against such a change. He must
read it thus:—
In the beginning was the second person in the Trinity;
and the second person was with the first; and the second
person was possessed of divine attributes as such.
We might surely ask, without unreasonableness, why,
when the society or personal affinity of the Son in the Godhead,
is mentioned in the middle clause, the companionship
of the Father only is noticed, and silence observed respecting
the Holy Spirit; who at that moment could not possibly
have been absent from the conceptions of any Athanasian
writer. But independently of this, the awkwardness of
the construction, the violence of the leading transition of
meaning, render the interpretation altogether untenable.
If it be true, never surely was there a form of speech worse
devised for the conveyance of the intended ideas.
In order to give the passage its true force, there is no occasion
to assign to the word God any but its usual signification;
as the name of the One infinite Person or Being who
created and rules the universe. But it is less easy to embrace
and exhibit with any distinctness, the notion implied
in the phrase Word or Logos. The ancient speculative
schools, seeing that the Deity had existed from eternity, and
therefore in a long solitude before the origin of creation,
distinguished between his intrinsic nature,—deep, remote,
primeval, unfathomable,[192]—and that portion of his mind
which put itself forth, or expressed itself by works, so as to
come into voluntary and intelligible relations to men.[193] This
section of the Divine Mind, to which was attributable the
authorship of the divine works, they called the Logos, or
the Image of God; both terms denoting the expression or
power which outwardly reveals internal qualities; the one
taking its metaphor from the ear, through which we make
known our sentiments by speech; the other from the eye, to
which is addressed the natural language of feature and lineament.
If I might venture on an illustration which may
sound strangely to modern hearers, I should say that the
Logos was conceived of in relation to God, much as with us
Genius is, in relation to the soul of its possessor; to denote
that peculiar combination of intellectual and moral attributes,
which produces great, original, creative works,—works
which let you into the spirit and affections, as well as the
understanding, of the Author. Any one who can so possess
himself with the speculative temper of Christian antiquity,
as to use with reverence the phrase genius of God, would
find it, I am persuaded, a useful English substitute (though I
am well aware, not a perfect equivalent) for the word Logos.
Dwelling within the blank immensity of God, was this illuminated
region of Divine ideas; in which, as in the fancy
and the studio of an artist, the formative conceptions, the
original sketches and designs, the inventive projects of beauty
and good, shaped and perfected themselves; and from which
they issued forth, to imprint themselves upon matter and
life, and pass into executed and visible realities. From the
energy of this creative spirit, or blessed genius of God, two
very different orders of results were conceived to flow:—the
forms and symmetrical arrangements of the material universe,
by which, as by the engraving of a seal, Deity stamped
his perfections into vision: and the intuitions of pure reason
and conscience in the human soul, by which, as by a heavenly
tone or vibration, Deity thrilled himself into consciousness.
And when I say Deity, I mean the Logos of Deity; for this
alone, it was conceived, stood in any relation to us; the rest
was an unexpressed and unfathomable Essence.
This portion of the Divine Infinitude was incessantly and
vividly personified; so as to assume, even in the writings
of the Jew and undoubted Monotheist Philo, the frequent
aspect of a second God: though scarcely have you taken up
this idea from one series of passages, before you are recalled
and corrected by others, clearly showing that this is a false
impression, too hastily derived from the intensity of the
imagery and language. Indeed the distinction between a
mere personification and a positive mythological personage is
very faint. When a writer personifies an abstraction, for the
moment he conceives of this object of thought as a person;
and were this state of mind perpetuated, he would believe it
to be a person. But his mental attitude changes; and in a less
excited hour, that which had constructed and painted itself
almost into a being, fades away again into an attribute. Hence
the fluctuation of writers, at once imaginative and speculative,
like Philo and some of the early Christian Fathers, between
the logical and the mythical method of speaking of the
properties of the Divine nature. And it may be remarked,
that the Apostle John partook, though in a very slight degree,
of the same tendency. He was fond of abstract words:
calling our Saviour the way, rather than the guide; the truth,
rather than the teacher; the light, rather than the illuminator;
and so I conceive, in the commencement of his Gospel,
the inspiration, rather than the inspired of God. And then,
as if to remedy the indistinctness of this mode of representation,
he resorts to personification: thus, at the dictation of his
reverence, first reducing the living person to an abstraction;
and afterwards, at the bidding of his imagination, recreating
the abstraction into a person. The extent to which this
personification may be carried, by an author who certainly
had no notion but of One personal God, may be estimated
from a few sentences, referring to this very conception of
the Logos, from the Jewish Philo. The invisible and intellectual
Logos, he says, is the image of God, by whom the
world was fashioned; his first-born son, his vicegerent in
the government of the world; the mediator between God
and his creatures; the healer of ills; God’s divine Son,
whose mother is wisdom. In another place, the Logos is
the very same with the wisdom of God; the most ancient
angel, the first-born of God; to the resemblance of whom
every one, who would be a son of God, must fashion himself.
He is even the “second God,” “To the Archangel,
and most ancient Logos,” says this writer, “God granted
this distinguished office, that he should stand on the confines
of creation, and separate between it and its Creator.
With the incorruptible being he is the suppliant for perishable
mortality. He is the ambassador of the Supreme to
the subject creation. He announces the will of the Ruler
to his subjects. And he delights in the office, and boasts
of it, saying; I had stood between you and the Lord as
mediator; being neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten
as you, but between the two extremes, and acting as hostage
to both,”[194] All this sounds very mysterious; the important
thing to bear in mind is, that the writer is certainly speaking
not of any separate divine person, but of the impersonated
attributes of One Sole Supreme.
St. John then, I conceive, does the very same; only he
carefully warns us against thinking of his personification as
otherwise than identical with the Supreme, by saying outright,
that the Logos is God; and therefore that whatever
he may say about the former, is really to be understood as
spoken of the latter. The whole proem divides itself into
two ideas: that from the Genius or Logos of God have proceeded
two sets of divine works; the material world; and
the soul and inspiration of heaven shed upon the world
through Christ. His object, I believe, is to link together
these two effects as successive and analogous results, physical
in one case, spiritual in the other, of the same divine and
holy energy. Having warned us, as I have said, in the very
first verse, that this energy is not really a person distinct
from the Supreme, he abandons himself without reserve to
the beautiful personification which follows; assuring us that
thereby were all things made at first, and thereby were all
men being enlightened now; that our very world, which felt
that forming hand of old, had not discerned the blessed influence
which again descended to regenerate it: ungrateful
treatment! as of one who came unto his own, and his own
received him not. Yet were there some of more perceptive
conscience and better hearts; and they, be they Jew or
Gentile, whose spirits sprung to the divine embrace, were
permitted to become, by reflected similitude, the Sons of
God.
Thus far, that is, to the end of the thirteenth verse, there
is no mention of Jesus Christ as an individual; there is only
the unembodied personification of the abstract energy of God
in the original design, and the newer regeneration of the
world. Nor should there be any difficulty in this separation
of the Divine Spirit from its positive and personal results.
Of the Creative Mind of God we can easily think, as not
only prior to the act of creation, but still apart from the
forms of matter; and so can we of the illuminating or
regenerative Mind of God, as not only prior to its manifestation
in Christ, but apart from its embodiment in his person.
In the next verse, however, the heavenly personification
is dropped upon the man Jesus; the mystic divine light
is permitted to sink into the deeps of his humanity; it
vanishes from separate sight: and there comes before us, and
henceforth lives within our view throughout the Gospel,
the Man of Sorrows, the Child of God, with the tears and
infirmities of our mortal nature, and the moral perfection of
the Divine. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt
among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten
of the Father), full of grace and truth.”[195]
(d.) The spirit of this exposition is directly applicable to
another passage, adduced to prove the deity of Christ: “God
was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of
angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world,
received up into glory.”[196] It is well known that in the most
approved text, the word God does not exist, and the passage
reads, “He who was manifest in the flesh,” &c. Were it
permitted to indulge personal wishes in such matters, I could
desire that the common rendering were the true one. I know
of no more exact description of Christ, than that he was a
living and human manifestation of the character of God.[197]
(e.) Let us now turn to the introductory verses of the
Epistle to the Hebrews; a passage which is claimed as the
clearest disclosure of the Deity of Christ; for no discoverable
reason, except that from its great obscurity, it reveals
less, perhaps, than any other portion of Scripture, except the
Revelations. From the earliest times it has been justly
regarded as exceedingly doubtful whether the Apostle Paul
was the author of this letter; the difficulties and darkness of
which are of a very different character from those which embarrass
us in his noble writings, and arise from mental habits
far more artificial and less healthy than his. But whatever
be the authority of this work, and whatever the doctrine of
its introductory portion, it is so far from giving any support
to the Trinitarian sentiments, that it affords, even in its
most exalted language, arguments sufficient to disprove them.
The first verses of the epistle, altered slightly from the
common translation, in order to exhibit more faithfully the
meaning of the original, are as follows:—
“God who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake
in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath, at the
close of these days, spoken unto us by his Son; whom he
hath appointed heir of all things; through whom also he
made the ages of the world; who, being the brightness of
his glory, and the image of his nature, and ruling all things by
the word of his power, having by himself made purification
of our sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty on
high; being become so much greater than the angels, as he
hath obtained by inheritance a more excellent name than they.
For unto which of the angels said he at any time, ‘thou art
my son; I have this day begotten thee?’ And again, ‘I will
be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son.’ And when
ever he may again introduce his first-born into the world,
it (i.e. the Scripture) saith, ‘let all the angels of God pay
homage to him.’ And with reference to the angels, it saith,
‘who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of
fire.’ But with reference to the son, it saith, ‘thy throne,
O God! is for ever and ever, a sceptre of righteousness is
the sceptre of thy kingdom; thou hast loved righteousness
and hated iniquity; therefore, O God! thy God hath anointed
thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.’”
I terminate the quotation here, because I do not believe
that the following words have any relation to Christ. The
writer’s argument not only admits, but requires, that they
should be referred to the supreme God and Father of all.
Now observe with what distinctness the most lofty
phrases applied to our Lord in this passage, affirm his subordination,
and deny his equality with the infinite Father.
At the very moment when he is addressed as God, he is said
to have fellows, and to be set above them as a reward for
his goodness; in the same breath which declares his throne
to be for ever and ever, he is described as having a God
who anoints him with the oil of gladness. He is greater
than the angels, not by nature, but by the gift of a better
inheritance. He is not the original divine effulgence, but
an emanation of that glory, an image of that perfection;
and in constituting the worlds, or rather the great æras of its
appointed history, he is not the designer of its revolutions,
but the instrument of God in effecting them.[198] If this
teaches the supreme Deity of Christ, in what language is it
possible to disclaim and to deny supremacy?
With respect to the peculiar terms of dignity applied in
this passage to Christ, I would observe as follows:—
The words “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever,”
were originally addressed by a poetical courtier to Solomon
or some other Hebrew monarch, on his accession and marriage;[199]
nor can the slightest reason be assigned for supposing
that the ode in which the words occur had any reference more
remote than the immediate occasion of its composition. The
first half of the Psalm[200] is addressed to the prince; the remainder
to his bride,[201] who is exhorted to give her undivided
affection to the new relation which she has formed; to
“forget her own people, and the house of her father;” and
who is consoled with the hope, that “instead of her fathers
she shall have her sons, whom she shall make princes through
all the land.” Those who can satisfy themselves with the
theological conceit, that this is a prophetic allegory, descriptive
of the relation between Christ and his Church, appear to
have placed themselves so far beyond the reach of all the rules
of interpretation, that argument becomes fruitless; no possible
media of refutation exist. They must belong to the class who
have succeeded in spiritualizing the Song of Solomon; to
whom therefore it has ceased to be a matter of the smallest
consequence, what words are presented to them in Scripture,
as they have attained the faculty of seeing one set of ideas,
wherever they look, and an incapacity to see anything else.
Bishop Young, convinced that the prophetic claims of this
Psalm must be relinquished, and that the term God in it is
addressed merely to the Hebrew monarch, and therefore used
in an inferior sense, renders the passage thus; “thy throne
O mighty prince, is for ever and ever.”[202] And surely, even
those who can persuade themselves that scripture can have
two intended meanings, and who imagine the poem in question
to have referred primarily to Solomon, and remotely to
the Messiah, must perceive that a word by which the Jewish
prince might be accosted, cannot imply the supreme deity of
Christ. Christ is said, in the common translation, to have
made the worlds; but it is generally admitted that the phrase
does not denote the construction of the material universe,
and is even incapable of bearing this meaning. It describes
Jesus as the agent of God in bringing about the successive
states of our social world; in introducing the preluding revolutions,
and the final catastrophe of human affairs. If it
be asked, what ages, what revolutions, are thus attributed to
the instrumentality of Christ? the answer must be sought in
the fact, that the author was a Hebrew, writing to Hebrews.
He seized on the grand Jewish division of time and Providence
into two portions—the period before, and the period
after, the coming of the Messiah; and these were the two
AGES, frequently called “the present world,” and “the world
to come,” which Christ is said to have constituted. Does
any one inquire, in what way our Lord, if he were not at least
pre-existent, could administer the arrangements of Providence
in the former of these periods, that is, before his own mission
to mankind? I submit, in answer, a suggestion which seems
to me essential to the clear understanding of all the Christian
records, and especially of those which relate to the years
after the ascension. The advent of the Messiah was represented,
during those years, not as past, but as still future;[203]
they were regarded as the close of the old and earthly epoch,
not the commencement of the new and heavenly; so that all
that Jesus of Nazareth had already done, the mighty changes
which he had set in operation,—were an action upon the
former of the two great ages; nor would the latter be introduced
till he returned from heaven; to rule, for a period vast
or even indefinite, as the personal vicegerent of God over his
faithful children here. This event, which in our own days
Millenarians are expecting soon, and which the early Christians
expected sooner, was regarded as the true coming of
the Messiah—the point of demarcation between the ages—the
introduction of “the new heaven and the new earth
wherein dwelleth righteousness.”[204] Meanwhile the old world
was drawing to a close, of which a warning (like that given
to Noah before the flood)[205] had been given by the preliminary
visit, with unmistakable credentials, of him who was to be
the Messiah; he had come in the flesh, and retired in the
spirit; and was leaving time for the tidings of his appointment
and his approach to spread, by the voice of witnesses and
preachers who published the pledges of his power. Of those
pledges, which marked him out as the future prince of life
and earth, none were so distinguished as his resurrection and
ascension, by which God had given assurance that he would
one day judge or rule the world in righteousness;[206] by which
he was declared to be the son of God with power;[207] and on
the very day of which he became the first-born or the begotten
child of God;[208] and sat down on the right hand of the
majesty on high.[209] Invested with his office, he yet abstained
from immediately coming to claim its prerogatives; he continued
sequestered in the heavens, allowing to the world
a time of preparation, a solemn pause before judgment;[210]
repressing the impatient moment of the great revolution,
and by his powerful word, bearing a while and upholding all
things as they are.[211] If this were really the conception of the
apostles, it follows, no doubt, that they prematurely expected
the return of their Lord; but that they did so, is no new
assumption; and in adopting it I protect myself by the
authority of Mr. Locke, who says in a note on a passage of
the Epistle to the Romans, “It seems, by these two verses, as
if St. Paul looked upon Christ’s coming as not far off; to which
there are several other occurrent passages in his epistles.”[212]
If the foregoing interpretation of the introduction to this
epistle be true, it follows that all the power and dignity there
ascribed to Christ are described as acquisition after his ascension;
that not till then was he accosted with the title of
divinity previously applied to Solomon; not till then did he
become greater than the angels, or receive an anointment of
gladness above his fellows; not till then did he receive his heirship,
his filiation, his vicegerency of God. Of his supreme Deity
scarcely could any more emphatic denial be conceived.[213]
(f.) The following passage is sometimes quoted as affirmative
of the Deity of Christ: “We know that the Son of God
is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may
know him that is true; and we are in him that is true, in (or
by) his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal
life.”[214] But it is surely evident that with Calvin, Newcome,
Dr. Adam Clarke,[215] we must consider the concluding pair of
epithets as parallel respectively with the two penultimates.
“By him that is true,” says the Apostle, “I mean the true
God,” “and this Jesus Christ is eternal life.”[216] As to the
pretence of over-nice grammarians, that the pronoun “this”
must refer to Jesus Christ as the nearest antecedent, the
Apostle John himself dismisses it with this one sentence:
“Many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not
that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This (not Jesus Christ,
it is to be presumed) is a deceiver and an antichrist.”[217] The
antecedent, in this case, is not only remote, but plural.
(g.) I know of only one other set of passages requiring
explanation from a Unitarian; and of these I take the following
as an example; giving, you will observe, a translation
slightly differing from the authorized version, but to which
no competent judge will probably object:—“Let this mind
be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the
form of God, never thought his equality with God a thing to
be eagerly retained; but divested himself of it, and took on
him the form of a servant, and assumed the likeness of men;
and being in the common condition of man, still humbled
himself, and became obedient unto death, aye, and the death
of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him
&c.”[218] Elsewhere Paul briefly expresses this sentiment thus:
being rich, for your sakes he became poor.[219]
Now, in order to appreciate the striking beauty of this passage,
it is necessary to remember that the Apostle is writing
to Gentiles; and to enter into his remarkable conception
respecting the relation of the Messiah to them. This great
object of promise was, according to the original idea of him,
a mere national appropriation of the Jews; made their own
by birth and lineage as well as by office. So long as these
peculiarities belonged to him, he could not, without breaking
through all the restraints of the sacred Mosaic law, stand in
any friendly connection with the Gentiles; nor did our Lord,
during his mortal life, ever extend his ministry beyond his
native land. Moreover, there was nothing, Paul conceived,
to prevent his realizing at once, had he willed it, all the
splendid anticipations of the Hebrews; nothing to obstruct
his seizing, from the hills of Galilee, or the heights of Jerusalem,
the promised royal sceptre, and making himself, without
delay, the Lord of all below; nothing but his holy resolve
to be no mere Jewish Messiah, and his desire to
embrace the Gentiles, too, within the blessings of his sway.
And how could this be accomplished? Never, so long as the
personal characteristics of the Israelite attached to him. He
determined then to lay these aside, which could be done by
death alone. On the cross, or in the ascension, he parted
from the coil of mortality, in which were enveloped all the
distinctions that made him national rather than human; the
lineage, the blood, the locality, the alliance, passed away;
the immortal spirit alone remained, and departed to the rest
of God; and this his soul was not Hebrew, but was human;
and so his relations expanded, and the princely Son of David
became, through death, the divine Messiah of humanity.
Writing then to Gentiles, the Apostle reminds them of this;
tells them of what attainable splendours Jesus had deprived
himself, what rightful glories he had resigned, what anguish
he had endured, to what death he had submitted, in order to
drop his mortal peculiarities which had excluded the nations
from the peace of his dominion, and to assume that spiritual
state to which they might stand related. It was not his
Godhead, not the application of his miracles to his personal
advantage, but the dignities of the Prince of Israel, the prerogatives
and triumphs of God’s vicegerent, of which he
emptied himself, and for the Gentiles’ sakes became poor.
He whose office made him as God, became, by his pure will,
a servant; he who, without the slightest strain of his rights,
might have assumed an equivalence to Providence on earth,
and administered at once the promised theocracy of heaven,
was in no eager haste to seize the privilege; but, that he
might call in those who else had been the exile and the outcast
people, entered first the shadow of suffering and shame;
he who might have been exempt from death, took the humiliation
of the cross; showing a divine and self-forgetful love,
which disregards his own rights to pity others’ privations;
and which gave a resistless force to the exhortation, “Look
not every man on his own things, but every man also on
the things of others.”[220]
(h.) In direct contrast with this past humiliation of
Christ, is the present glory and future dominion with which,
in the verses immediately following, the Apostle describes
him as invested by the rewarding complacency of God.
And here the passage enters the same class with three
others,[221] of which the introduction of the Epistle to the
Hebrews is one, but the most remarkable is the following:
“Christ, ... who is the image of the invisible God, the
first-born of every creature; for by him were all things
created, that are in Heaven and that are in earth, visible
and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers, all things, were created through
him and for him; and he is before all things, and by him
all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the
church; who is the beginning, the first-born from the dead;
that in all things he might have pre-eminence; for it
pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell.”[222]
Calvin himself warns us that “the circumstances of this
place require us to understand it as spoken,” not of the
original formation of the universe, but “of the renovation
which is included in the benefit of Redemption.”[223] Indeed
a very superficial acquaintance with the phraseology of the
Apostle, is sufficient to convince us that the language which
we have here is very unlike that in which he speaks of the
construction of the material system of things and very like
that in which he describes the regeneration of the world
by the faith of Christ. Describing the natural creation, he
makes no such strange selection of objects as thrones, principalities,
dominions, powers, with unintelligible avoidance
of everything palpable: but says plainly, “The living God,
who made Heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things
that are in them.”[224] And characterizing, on the other hand,
the effects of the Gospel, he says, “We are God’s workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus unto good works;”[225] and “If
any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things
have passed away, behold all things have become new.”[226]
Nor does the language of this passage appear so violently
figurative as commentators have usually supposed. Apply to
it the Apostle’s conception respecting the return of his Lord
from Heaven, to reign visibly upon earth, over a community
holy and immortal, and the obscurity will no longer be felt.
That advent, introducing the future age or world to come,
would be attended by a revolution which could be called no
less than a “new creation.” No term less emphatic would
adequately describe the superseding of all existing arrangements,
the extinction of earthly rule, authority, and power;[227]
the recal to earth of the spirits of the just;[228] the immortalizing
of the saints who had not slept;[229] the gathering together
the whole family of the holy in Heaven or earth;[230] the
everlasting destruction of the faithless from the presence of
the Lord, and the glory of his power;[231] the bowing of every
knee before the Prince of Life;[232] the opening of the kingdom
that cannot be moved;[233] and the award of recompense
to those who, having suffered, should reign with him.[234]
Already were the elements of this blessed society drawing
themselves together, some in Heaven, others upon earth; the
investiture with immortality had commenced. Christ was
the beginning, the first-born from the dead: and the departed
saints sharing his heavenly rest, and ready for the Lord to
bring with him;[235] the afflicted Church below, in earnest
expectation of the manifestation of those Sons of God, and
though waiting for the redemption of the body, yet risen
together with Christ to that spiritual mind which is life and
peace;[236] all these were kept by the power of God unto
the salvation, which was ready to be revealed in the last
time.[237] The multitude of the holy was thronging in, showing
that no scant dominion was forming; but that it pleased
the Father that, in his vicegerent, all fulness should dwell,
and whatever is perfect be united. Lifted above the hostile
reach of human might and dominion, above all mean comparison
with earthly names of dignity, he sees all things
already beneath his feet in the world as it is, and all things
prospectively submissive in the world as it is to be.[238] Nor
was Jesus, in his retirement above, unoccupied with the
glories of his commission, or indifferent to the recompense
of his followers; rather is he preparing and allotting to the
glorified there, and the toiling here, the privileges and
powers of the everlasting age which shall take place of
the thrones and principalities of this. Over both portions
of the community of Saints, the seen and the unseen, the
Heavenly and the earthly, he is the living head, and his
spirit filleth all.[239]
This vision of the Advent, with all the magnificent ideas
which gathered round it, seems to me to have given rise to
the glorious “rapture” of this passage; to have thrown in,
at first, its light and darkness, and when applied now to its
interpretation, to disclose the dim outline of its plan. And
though, in form, the anticipation itself was at least premature,
in spirit it receives, in the providence of the Gospel, one
prolonged fulfilment; and many of its accompanying conceptions
realize themselves perpetually. Though as yet Christ
comes not back to us, yet do the faithful go to him, and
there, not here, are for ever with the Lord. Though with
no visible sway he dwells on earth, he more and more rules
it from afar; wins and blesses the hearts of its people, bends
their wills, sends his image to be their conscience; and long
has he had a might and name among us, far above our principalities
and powers, and made the cross superior to the
crown. And who can deny that he hath united in one the
family in heaven and earth, compelled death to fasten innumerable
ties of love between the kindred spheres, and trained
our rejoicing sympathies to see in creation but one society of
the good, whether they toil in service and exile here, or have
joined the colony above of the emancipated sons of God.
What then is the result of our inquiry into the scriptural
use of the word God? That it is once applied, by way of
transference, to Christ, in a passage of whose honours Solomon
was the first proprietor. The views of the writer, and the
purpose of his letter, might make this secondary application
of the Hebrew poem right and useful. But now, how miserably
barren must be that religion, how unspeakably poor
that appreciation of Christ, which thinks to glorify him, by
throwing around him the cast-off dignities of a Jewish
prince! All these convulsive efforts to lift up the rank of
Jesus, do but turn men from that greatness in him which
is truly divine. And after all they utterly fail—except in
turning into caricature the image of perfect holiness, and
into a riddle the statement of the grandest truths: for the
scanty evidence will not bear the strain that is put upon it.
Nothing short of centuries of indoctrination could empower
so small a testimony to sustain so enormous a scheme, and
enable ecclesiastics, by sleight of words, to metamorphose
the simplicity of the Bible into the contradictions of the
Athanasian creed.
Our remaining criteria may be very briefly applied.
(3.) Our next demand from a Trinitarian Bible is this;
that as there are three persons equally entitled to the
name of God, that word must never be limited to One of
these, to the exclusion of the other two.
Yet do the Scriptures repeatedly restrict this title to the
Father so positively, that no more emphatic language remains,
by which it would be possible to exclude all other
persons from the Godhead. If the texts we shall adduce
of this class do not teach the personal unity of God, let it
be stated what terms would teach it; or whether we are to
consider it as a doctrine incapable of being revealed at all,
however true in itself. Meanwhile, I would ask, whether
the most skilful logician could propose a form of speech,
closing the Godhead against all but the Father, more absolutely
than these passages; “There is but One God, the
Father.”[240] “Father! ... this is life eternal, to know
Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou
hast sent.”[241] “The true worshippers shall worship the
Father in spirit and in truth; the Father seeketh such to
worship him; God is a spirit, and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth.”[242] “There is
one God and Father of all.”[243]
If such passages as these do not deny the Deity of all
persons but One, it must be because the word “Father” is
used in them to denote the whole Trinity; and if this be
so, then this name ceases to be distinctive of the first person
in the Godhead; no discriminative title of that person
remains; it becomes impossible for language to characterize
him; and the whole mechanism of speech, by which alone
a verbal revelation could disclose the distinctions in the
divine nature, vanishes away. You must either confess
absence of the distinctions themselves, or show the presence
of distinctive names.
(4.) Our next demand from a Trinitarian Bible would
be this; that when the persons are named, by their distinctive
Divine titles, their equality will be recognized, nor
any one of them be represented as subordinate to another.
If an Athanasian received a divine commission to prepare
a Gospel,—a statement of the essentials of Christianity,—for
the use of some unevangelized nation, he
would not, we may presume, habitually represent the Son,
in his very highest offices, as inferior to the Father, as destitute
of independent power, as without underived knowledge,
and possessed only of a secondary and awarded
glory. At all events, these representations would not be
made without instant explanation; and the writer would
accuse himself of rashly periling the mysteries of God, if
he committed himself to such statements without guard or
qualification, in broad unlimited propositions. Yet these
are precisely the phenomena of Scripture. It is perpetually
maintained by Trinitarians, that the miracles of Christ
were acts of power, inexplicable except by proper Deity,
united with his humanity; and that his superhuman wisdom
was an expression of that Divine Nature which
blended itself with his mortal constitution. If so, his
miracles were wrought and his teachings dictated by that
element of his personality which was God,—that is, by
GOD THE SON;[244] but this, our Lord unequivocally denies;
“The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth
the Father do;” “I can of mine own self do nothing.”[245]
“The words which I speak unto you, I speak not of myself;
but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the
works;”[246] “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live
by the Father;”[247] “The works which the Father hath
given me to perform.”[248] These passages declare, with all
the precision of which language admits, that the wisdom
and the might which dwelt in Christ, were not those of
the Son, but those of the Father; the incarnate God had
no concern with them, for they are ascribed exclusively to
him who never became incarnate. Indeed we ask, and we
ask in vain, for any one divine act or inspiration ascribed
by our Lord to this humanized Deity with whom his
mortal nature was united: his teachings are one prolonged
declaration that the divinity that dwelleth within him
was THE FATHER. If he felt within him a co-equal Godhead,
how could he make the unqualified affirmation, “My
Father is greater than all?”[249] Or can a more specific
disclaimer of Omniscience be framed than this; “Of that
day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels
who are in Heaven, NEITHER THE SON, but the Father?”[250]
Dr. Adam Clarke, unable to resist this overpowering text,
expresses his suspicion that it is not altogether genuine,
and that the words, “neither the Son,” should be expunged.
It would appear that the temptations to “mutilation”
are felt by other parties than the Editors of the
Improved Version. If it be said, that in the passages
which have been cited, the subordination alleged of Christ,
refers to his human nature, and his mediatorial office, then
it follows that his highest title may become the name of
what is called his lowest capacity; and if this be so, no
medium of verbal proof remains by which to establish
any higher nature.[251] But can any supposition be more
monstrous than this; that whenever our Lord used the
familiar language of personality, and discoursed with the
peasants of Galilee, and the populace of Jerusalem, he
was perpetually performing a metaphysical resolution of
himself into natures, characters, and offices, and putting
forth, now a phrase from the divine, now another from the
human capacity; here a sentence from the pre-existent,
and there another from the mediatorial compartment of his
individuality? And the absurdity is crowned, when writings,
crowded thus with mental reservations, are handed over to
us as a Revelation.
(5.) Our last expectation from a Trinitarian Bible is this;
that, since with the incarnation began and ended the peculiar
office of Christ’s humanity, he will not be spoken of as
man, in relation to the events before or after this period.
The glory which our Lord is thought to have possessed
before his entrance into this world, was the essential, underived,
inalienable glory, which belonged to his Divinity;
nor was his highest nature yet blended with the suffering
elements, or capable of being described by the inferior titles,
of his mediatorial office, or his mortal existence. Yet is it
under the designation of SON OF MAN that he is described,
according to the prevalent interpretation, as pre-existent;
it is the SON OF MAN who “was before,” in that state,
whither he was to “ascend up again;”[252] it was, “He that
came down from Heaven,—even the SON OF MAN, who is in
Heaven.”[253] Whatever doubt there may be respecting the
precise import of this title, it certainly cannot be thought
to denote the separate divine nature of Christ, as it existed
before the incarnation. In perfect consistency with this
language, it appears that for the restoration of this original
glory, Jesus declares himself wholly dependent on the Father;
“And now, O Father, glorify me with thine own self, with
the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”[254]
Here, if there be truth in the Trinitarian hypothesis, it was
the man that prayed for a re-bestowal of that which the
man never possessed, and which the God never lost or could
receive from another. It must be admitted that no expression
of dependence can be more solemn and absolute, than
that which pours itself forth in prayer; and if our Lord
was able to resume his former state, by the energy of his
own Omnipotence, this act of supplication loses all semblance
of sincerity. Yet, if here his dependence on the Father
is acknowledged to be implied, with what consistency can
another passage, relating also to his departure from earth
to Heaven, be seized upon to prove that he raised himself
from the dead, by that inextinguishable and glorious power,
which, nevertheless, he entreats the Father to restore? If
his proper Deity brought back to life the crucified humanity,
it was a mockery for his manhood to concern itself in
prayer, for the restoration of the proper Deity. That his
resurrection is not ascribed to inherent power of his own,
is evident, not merely from the habitual language of the
preachers of this great miracle, who declare without reserve
that “this Jesus hath God raised up;”[255] nor from the
words of Paul, who calls himself “an Apostle by Jesus
Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the
dead;”[256] but even from the very text (when read without
curtailment) which is adduced to prove the contrary; “No
man taketh it (my life) from me, but I lay it down of
myself; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to
take it again; this commandment have I received of my
Father.”[257] “The Messiah is privileged to be immortal;
and my seeming fall by hostile hands will neither disprove
my claim to the office, nor deprive it of this peculiar
feature; my mission gives me a right to live, which will
not be forfeited, though I exercise the right to die. Let no
one think that my life is forced from me without consent
of my own will; you can no more take it from me, than
you can restore it to me. It is by the arrangement of the
Father, whose will is also mine, that I take my Messianic
immortality, not at once, but through a process of suffering
and death.”
If we pass forward beyond the mortal life, to the final
exaltation of Christ, he is still presented to us undivested
of his humanity. Listen to the modern preachers of
Orthodoxy, and they will tell you that the judicial capacity
of the Saviour could be filled by Deity alone; that to pass
judgment on an assembled world, to read the secrets of all
hearts, and allot their final doom, are offices demanding
nothing less than Omniscience, Omnipotence, Independence.[258]
But from the Apostle Paul we learn, that “God will judge
the world in righteousness by that MAN whom he hath
ordained;”[259] and our Lord himself says, “I can of mine
own self do nothing; as I hear I judge;”[260] “The Father
hath given him authority to execute judgment also, BECAUSE
HE IS THE SON OF MAN.”[261] Nor is it the presumption of
heresy alone that esteems it possible for God to confer on
a human being the requisites for so august an office; for it
is Archbishop Tillotson who says, “We may promise to ourselves
a fair and equal trial at the judgment of the Great
Day, because we shall then be judged by a man like ourselves.
Our Saviour and judge himself hath told us, that for this
reason God hath committed all judgment to the Son, because
he is the Son of man. And this in human judgments is
accounted a great privilege, to be judged by those who are
of the same rank and condition with ourselves, and who are
likely to understand best, and most carefully to examine and
consider all our circumstances, and to render our case as if it
were their own. So equitably doth God deal with us, that
we shall be acquitted or condemned by such a judge as,
according to human measures, we ourselves should have
chosen, by one in our own nature, who was made in all
things like unto us, that only excepted which would have
rendered him incapable of being our judge, because it would
have made him a criminal like ourselves. And therefore
the Apostle offers this as a firm ground of assurance to us
that God will judge the world in righteousness, because
this judgment shall be administered by a man like ourselves;
He hath, saith he, appointed a day wherein he will judge
the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath
ordained,” &c.[262]
It is, then, in his humanity, that this high prerogative
belongs to Jesus. Yet are our opponents right in their
assertion that, if there be any office attributed to him,
requiring divine perfection, it is this; no higher exaltation
remains, no superior glory is referred to him from which,
with any better reason, we can conclude his equality with
the Father. Human in this, he is human in all things.
Not one then of the proper characteristics of a Trinitarian
Bible can be found in the Scriptures; and it is vain for
the Athanasian system to claim their support. This conclusion
can be subverted only in two ways; either by showing, that
the criteria which I have laid down, for ascertaining the
theology of the sacred writings, are unreasonable and incorrect;
or by showing, that the application of them does not
yield any of the results which I have stated. I say any of
the results; for if all the phenomena which I have assumed
as tests, would be necessary to give a Trinitarian complexion
to the Scriptures, the absence of even a portion of them
would decide the controversy against our opponents’ scheme,
whatever difficulties might remain to embarrass our own.
If the list of criteria be thought materially wrong, let it
be shown where and why; let it be explained how there
can be a verbal revelation of “distinctions,” without any
distinctive names; how, without such discriminative words,
we are to know, unless we assume the whole doctrine to be
proved, when the human nature of Christ speaks, or is
spoken of, when the divine; how the poor, who first had
the gospel preached to them, ascertained this with the requisite
degree of nicety; and above all, we would request
to be furnished with a better set of criteria; and to be distinctly
informed, what scriptural phenomena would be required,
in order to disprove the Trinitarian scheme. If,
on the other hand, I have erred in the application of my
tests, let it be shown how far into the substance of the
argument the error extends. I cannot hope that the exposition
which I have given will be found free from mistake
and inaccuracy; and let these be exposed with such severity
as they may deserve. Only let it be remembered, that the
real question is not about the skill of the advocate, but respecting
the truth of the scheme; and when all the errors
of the one have been cleared away, let it be still asked, in
what condition stands the evidence of the other. I have
purposely taken my principal station on the least favourable
ground of the Unitarian argument; I have exhausted the
strongest passages adduced against our theology: and I
have done this the more readily, because these portions of
scripture appear to possess an excellence and beauty, which
are obscured by their unresisted controversial repetition, and
marred by the lacerations of Orthodoxy.
And may we not, without immodesty, ask any candid
Trinitarian, are these passages so very plain and easy, are
they so numerous, are our interpretations so irrational and
ignorant, as to justify the imputation of deceit, of blasphemy,
of wilful mutilation of the word of God, which we are condemned
perpetually to hear? As to that excellent man, who
on Wednesday last, treated in this way our most cherished
convictions, and our most innocent actions, I have said nothing
in reply to his accusations; for I well know them to
have failed in benevolence, only from excess of mistaken
piety. Had he a little more power of imagination, to put
himself into the feelings and ideas of others, doubtless he
would understand both his Bible and his fellow-disciples
better than he does. Meanwhile, I would not stir, with the
breath of disrespect, one of his grey hairs; or by any
severity of expostulation disturb the peace of an old age, so
affectionate and good as his. He and we must ere long
pass to a world, where the film will fall from the eye of
error, and we shall know, even as we are known.[263]
In conclusion, then, I revert with freshened persuasion,
to the statement with which I commenced. Jesus Christ of
Nazareth, God hath presented to us simply in his inspired
humanity. Him we accept, not indeed as very God, but as
the true image of God, commissioned to show what no
written doctrinal record could declare, the entire moral perfections
of Deity. We accept,—not indeed his body, not
the struggles of his sensitive nature, not the travail of his
soul, but his purity, his tenderness, his absolute devotion
to the great idea of right, his patient and compassionate
warfare against misery and guilt, as the most distinct and
beautiful expression of the Divine mind. The peculiar office
of Christ is to supply a new moral image of Providence;
and everything therefore except the moral complexion of
his mind, we leave behind as human and historical merely,
and apply to no religious use. I have already stated in
what way nature and the gospel combine to bring before us
the great object of our trust and worship. The universe
gives us the scale of God, and Christ his Spirit. We climb
to the Infinitude of his nature by the awful pathway of the
stars, where whole forests of worlds silently quiver here and
there, like a small leaf of light. We dive into his Eternity,
through the ocean waves of Time, that roll and solemnly
break on the imagination, as we trace the wrecks of departed
things upon our present globe. The scope of his Intellect,
and the majesty of his Rule, are seen in the tranquil order
and everlasting silence that reign through the fields of his
volition. And the Spirit that animates the whole is like
that of the Prophet of Nazareth; the thoughts that fly
upon the swift light throughout creation, charged with fates
unnumbered, are like the healing mercies of One that passed
no sorrow by. The government of this world, its mysterious
allotments of good and ill, its successions of birth and
death, its hopes of progress and of peace, each life of individual
or nation, is under the administration of One, of
whose rectitude and benevolence, whose sympathy with all
the holiest aspirations of our virtue and our love, Christ is
the appointed emblem. A faith that spreads around and
within the mind a Deity thus sublime and holy, feeds the
light of every pure affection, and presses with Omnipotent
power on the conscience; and our only prayer is, that we
may walk as children of such light.
In order to break the force of all reasonings respecting the inherent
incredibility of the Trinitarian doctrine, the principle has been
frequently advanced, that a statement which would be contradictory,
if made respecting an object within reach of our knowledge, cannot
be affirmed to be so, if applied to an object beyond our knowledge;
since in the one case we have, in the other we have not, some
experience to guide our judgment, and serve as a criterion of truth.
Thus, it is said, to affirm of man, that his nature comprises more
than one personality, might, without presumption, be pronounced a
contradiction; because we are familiar with his constitution; but
knowing nothing of the mode of God’s existence, except what he is
pleased to reveal, we cannot prove the same statement to be contradictory,
when made respecting his essence.
This rule, like all the Trinitarian reasonings on this subject,
derives its plausibility from an ambiguous use of terms. It has one
sense in which it is true, but inapplicable to this subject; and another,
in which it is applicable, but false. The rule is sound or unsound,
according to the meaning which we assign to the word contradiction;
a word which, in other arguments besides this, has made dupes of
men’s understandings. There are obviously two kinds of contradiction:—one
relating to questions of fact, as when we say, it is
contradictory to experience that ice should continue solid in the fire;
the other, relating to questions of mere thought, as when we say, it
is contradictory to affirm that force is inert, or that the diameters of
a circle are unequal. The former of these suggests something at
variance with the established order of causes and effects, and constitutes
a natural or physical impossibility; the latter suggests a
combination of irreconcileable ideas, constituting a logical or metaphysical
impossibility, or more properly, a self-contradiction.
It is almost self-evident that, in order to pronounce upon a physical
impossibility, we must possess experience, and have a knowledge of
the properties of objects and successions of events external to us;
and that to pronounce on a metaphysical impossibility, we require
only to have the ideas to which it refers; of the coincidence or
incompatibility of which with each other, our own consciousness is
the sole judge. When I deny that ice will remain frozen in the fire,
I do so after frequent observation of the effect of heat in reducing
bodies, especially water, from the solid to the liquid form; and in
reliance on the intuitive expectation which all men entertain, of like
results from like causes. Experience is the only justification of this
denial; and à priori, no belief could be held on the subject; a
person introduced for the first time to a piece of ice and to fire,
could form no conjecture about the changes which would follow on
their juxtaposition. And as our judgment in such cases has its
origin, so does it find its limits, in experience; and should it be
affirmed that, in a distant planet, ice did not melt on the application
of fire, the right of denial would not extend to this statement,
because, our knowledge does not extend to the world to which the
phenomenon is referred. The natural state of mind, on hearing
such an announcement, might be expressed as follows; “If what
you affirm be true, either some new cause must be called into
operation, counteracting the result which else would follow; or,
some of the causes existing here are withheld: the sequence, I am
compelled to believe, would be the same, unless the antecedents
were somehow different. Were the fact even a miracle, this would
still be true; for the introduction of a new or different divine
volition would be in itself a change in the previous causes. But I
am not authorized to pronounce the alleged fact impossible; its
variance from all the analogies of experience, justifies me in
demanding extraordinary evidence in its favour; but I do not say
that, in the infinite receptacle of causes unknown to the human
understanding, there cannot exist any from which such an effect
might arise.”
There is then, I conceive, no physical impossibility, which might
not be rendered credible by adequate evidence; there is nothing, in
the constitution of our minds, to forbid its reception under certain
conditions of proof sufficiently cogent. It simply violates an
expectation which, though necessary and intuitive before the fact, is
not incapable of correction by the fact; it presents two successive
phenomena, dissimilar instead of similar; and between two occurrences,
allocated on different points of time, however much analogy
may fail, there can be no proper contradiction. The improbability
that both should be true, may attain a force almost, but never
altogether infinite; a force, therefore, surmountable by a greater.
The thoughts can at least entertain the conception of them both;
nor is it more difficult to form the mental image of a piece of ice
unmelted on the fire, than of the same substance melting away.
It is quite otherwise with a metaphysical impossibility or proper
contradiction. The variance is, in this case, not between successive
phenomena, but between synchronous ideas. We deny that the
diameters of a circle are unequal, without experience, without
measurement, and just as confidently respecting a circle in the
remotest space, as respecting one before our eyes. As soon as we
have the ideas of “circle,” “diameter,” “equality,” this judgment
necessarily follows. Our own consciousness makes us aware of the
incompatibility between the idea expressed by the word “circle,”
and that expressed by the phrase “unequal diameters;” the former
word being simply the name of a curve having equal diameters. The
variance, in this case, is not between two external occurrences, but
between two notions within our own minds; and simply to have the
notions is to perceive their disagreement. It would be vain to urge
upon us that, possibly, in regions of knowledge beyond our reach,
circles with unequal diameters might exist: we should reply, that
the words employed were merely the symbols of ideas in our consciousness,
between which we felt agreement to be out of the question;
that so long as the words meant what they now mean, this
must continue to be the case; and that if there were any one, to
whom the same sound of speech suggested a truth instead of a
falsehood, this would only show, that the terms did not stand for
the same things with him as with us. It will be observed that, in
this case, we cannot even attain any conception of the thing affirmed;
no mental image can be formed of a circle with unequal diameters;
make the diameters unequal, and it is a circle no more.
A further analysis might, I believe, reduce more nearly under the
same class a physical and a metaphysical impossibility; and might
show that some of the language in which I have endeavoured to contrast
them, is not strictly correct. But the main difference, which the
present argument requires, (viz., that no experience can reconcile the
terms of a logical contradiction,) would only be brought out more
clearly than ever. I am aware, for instance, that the distinction which
I have drawn between my two examples,—that the latter deals with
ideas within us, the former with facts without us,—does not penetrate
to the roots of the question; that external phenomena are nothing to
us, till they become internal; nothing, except through the perceptions
and notions we form of them; and that the variance therefore, even
in the case of a physical impossibility, must lie between our own
ideas. I may accordingly be reminded, that the notion of “melting
with fire” is as essentially a part of our idea of “ice,” as the notion
of “equal diameters” is of our idea of a “circle;” so that the final
appeal might, with as much reason, be made to our own consciousness
in the one case as in the other. Might it not be said, “so long
as the word ice retains its meaning, the proposition in question is a
self-contradiction; for that word signifies a certain substance that
will melt on the application of heat?” This is true; and resolves
the distinction which I have endeavoured to explain into this form;
the word “ice” may be kept open to modifications of meaning, the
word “circle” cannot. And the reason is obvious. The idea of the
material substance is a highly complex idea, comprising the notion of
many independent properties, introduced to us through several of our
senses: such as solidity, crystalline form, transparency, coldness,
smoothness, whiteness, &c.; the quality of fusion by heat is only one
among many of the ingredients composing the conception; and should
this even be found to be accidental, and be withdrawn, the idea
would still retain so vast a majority of its elements, that its identity
would not be lost, nor its name undergo dismissal. But the notion of
the circle is perfectly simple; being wholly made up of the idea of
equal diameters, and of other properties dependent on this; so that
if this be removed, the whole conception disappears, and nothing
remains to be denoted by the word. Hence, a physical contradiction
proposes to exclude from our notion of an object or event one out of
many of its constituents,—an alteration perfectly akin to that which
further experience itself often makes; a metaphysical contradiction
denies of a term all, or the essential part, of the ideas attached to it.
The materials for some sort of conception remain in the one case,
vanish in the other.
Now the terms employed in the statement of the doctrine of the
Trinity are abstract words; “person,” “substance,” “being:” and
the numerical words “One” and “Three,” are all names for very
simple ideas; not indeed (except the two last) having the precision
of quantitative and mathematical terms; but having none of that
complexity which would allow them to lose any meaning, and yet keep
any; to change their sense without forfeiting their identity. The ideas
which we have of these words are as much within ourselves, and as
capable of comparison by our own consciousness, as the ideas belonging
to the words angle and triangle; and when, on hearing the
assertion that there are three persons in one mind or being, I proceed
to compare them, I find the word “person” so far synonymous with
the word “mind” or “being,” that the self-contradiction would not
be greater, were it affirmed that there are three angles in one γωνία—the
mere form of speech being varied to hide the absurdity from eye
and ear. To say that our ideas of the words are wrong, is vain; for
the words were invented on purpose to denote these ideas: and if
they are used to denote other ideas, which we have not, they are
vacant sounds. To assert that higher beings perceive this proposition
to be true, really amounts to this; that higher beings speak English,
(or at all events not Hebrew, or Hellenistic Greek,) but have recast
the meaning of these terms; and to say that we shall hereafter find
them to be true, is to say that our vocabulary will undergo a revolution;
and words used now to express one set of ideas, will hereafter
express some other. Meanwhile, to our present minds all these future
notions are nonentities; and using the words in question in the only
sense they have, they declare a plain logical contradiction. Hence,
every attempt to give consistency to the statement of the Trinity, has
broken out into a heresy; and the Indwelling and the Swedenborgian
schemes, the model Trinity of Wallis and Whately, the tritheistic
doctrine of Dr. W. Sherlock, are so many results of the rash propensity
to seek for clear ideas in a form of unintelligible or contradictory
speech. Σαφὴς ἔλεγχος ἀπιστίας τὸ πῶς περὶ Θεοῦ λέγειν.
On the Hebrew Plural Elohim.
The perseverance with which this argument from the Hebrew plural
is repeated, only proves the extent to which learning may be degraded
into the service of a system. The use of a noun, plural in form,
but singular in sense, and the subject of a singular verb, to denote
the dignity of the person named by the noun, is known to be an
idiom common to all the Semitic languages. Every one who can
read a Hebrew Bible is aware that this peculiarity is not confined
to the name of God; and that it occurs in many passages, which
render absurd the inference deduced from it. For instance, from
Ezek. xxix. 3, it would follow that there is a plurality of natures
or “distinctions” in the crocodile, the name of which is there found
in the plural, with a singular adjective and singular
verb;—התנים הגדול הרבץ בתוך יאריו,
“The great crocodile that lieth
in the midst of his rivers.” So in Gen. xxiv. 51, the plural form
אדונים, Lord, so constantly used of a human individual, is applied
to Abraham: ותחי אשה לבו אדוניך, “And she shall be a wife
to the son of thy masters,” i.e., thy master Abraham. It is unnecessary
to multiply instances, which any Hebrew Concordance will
supply in abundance. I subjoin one or two additional authorities
from eminent Hebraists, whose theological impartiality is above
suspicion.
Schroeder says, “Hebræi sermonis proprietas, quâ Pluralis, tam
masculinus, quam femininus, usurpari potest de unâ re, quæ in suo
genere magna est et quodammodo excellens; ut ימים, maria, pro
mari magno; תנים, dracones, pro dracone prægrandi; אדונים,
domini, pro domino magno et potente; אלהים, numina, pro numine
admodum colendo; קדשׁים, sancti, pro deo sanctissimo; בהמות,
bestiæ, pro bestiâ grandi, qualis est elephas; מכותplagæ, pro plagâ
gravi; נחרותּ, flumina, pro flumine magno.” N. G. Schroederi Institutiones
ad fundamm. ling. Hebr. Reg. 100. not. i.
Simonis. “Plur. adhibetur de Deo vero; ad insinuandam, ut
multis visum est, personarum divinarum pluralitatem; quod etiam
alii, maxime Judæi rectè negant: quoniam vel ibi in plurali ponitur,
ubi ex mente Theologorum de unâ modo triadis sacræ personâ sermo
est, velut Ps. xlv. 7, adeoque gentium unus aliquis deus pluraliter
אלהים dicitur, ut Astarte 1 Reg. xi. 33; Baal muscarum et quidem
is, qui Ekronæ colebatur 2, Reg. i. 2, 3. Denique sanctam triadem
si אלהים significasset, multo notior usuque adeo linguæ quotidiano
tritior sub prisco fœdere hæc doctrina fuisset, quam sub novo. Ex
nostrâ sententiâ hic plur. indicio est, linguam Hebræam sub Polytheismo
adolevisse; eo vero profligato plur. hic in sensum abiit
majestatis et dignitatis.” Eichhorn’s Joh. Simonis’ Lexicon Hebr. in
verb. אלה, p. 120.
Buxtorf. אלהים, plurale pro singulari: Lex Chaldaicum, Talmudicum
et Rabbinicum; in verb.
Gesenius. אלהיםpluralis excellentiæ: Gott, von der Einheit; wie
בעלים, אדנים. Hebr. und Chald. Handwörterbuch: in verb.
Even Lewis Capel, in his defence of this verbal indication of the
Trinity, admits the absurdity of using the argument with Anti-trinitarians:
“Siquis ergo vellet adversus Judæos, Samosatenianos, aliosque
sanctissimæ Trinitatis præfractos hostes, urgere hoc argumentum,
eoque uno et nudo uti, frustra omnino esset: ni prius demonstraret
falsam esse quam illi causantur phraseos istius rationem, evinceretque
eam in voce istâ אלהים locum habere non posse: quod forte non
usque adeo facile demonstrari posset. Atque eatenus tantùm jure
possunt suggillari Theologi, si argumento illo nudo, et solo, non
aliâ ratione fulto, utantur ad Judæos et Samosatenianos coarguendos
et convincendos; non vero si eo utantur ad piorum fidem jam ante
aliunde stabilitam, porro augendam atque fovendam.” Lud. Cappelli
Critica Sacra. De nom. אלהים Diatriba. c. vii. Ed. 1650, p. 676.
May we ask of our learned opponents, how long the mysterious
contents of this plural have been ascertained? Who was the discoverer,
forgotten now by the ingratitude of Learning, but doubtless
living still in the more faithful memory of Orthodoxy? And why
those of the Christian Fathers, who devoted themselves to Hebrew
literature, were not permitted to discern the Trinitarianism of the
Israelitish syntax? They had not usually so dull an eye for verbal
wonders.
The celebrated Brahmin, Rammohun Roy, whose knowledge of
oriental languages can be as little disputed, I presume, as the
singular greatness and simplicity of his mind, says: “It could
scarcely be believed, if the fact were not too notorious, that such
eminent scholars ... could be liable to such a mistake, as to rely on
this verse (Gen. i. 26. And God said, let us make man in our
image, after our likeness,) as a ground of argument in support of the
Trinity. It shows how easily prejudice, in favour of an already
acquired opinion, gets the better of learning.” And he proceeds to
argue on “the idiom of the Hebrew, Arabic, and of almost all
Asiatic languages, in which the plural number is often used for the
singular to express the respect due to the person denoted by the
noun.” Rammohun Roy was, I believe, the first to call attention to
the fact, obvious to any one who will read a few pages of the Koran,
that Mohammed, whose belief in the strict personal Unity of the
Divine Nature gave the leading feature to his religion, constantly
represents God as speaking in these plural forms. I extract a few
instances from Sale’s Koran. Lond. 1734:
“God said; when we said unto the angels, worship Adam,” &c.
“God said; and we said, O Adam, dwell thou,” &c.—Ch. ii.
p. 31.
“We formerly created man of a finer sort of clay; ... and we have
created over you seven heavens; and we are not negligent of what
we have created: and we send down rain from heaven by measure;
and we cause it to remain on the earth,” &c. “And we revealed our
orders unto him, saying; ... speak not unto me in behalf of those
who have been unjust.” “God will say, did ye think that we had
created you in sport,” &c.—Ch. xxiv. pp. 281, 282, 287.
In the very passages in which Mohammed condemns the doctrine
of the Trinity, the same form abounds: “We have prepared for such
of them as are unbelievers a painful punishment.” “We have revealed
our will unto thee.” “We have given thee the Koran, as we
gave the psalms to David.” “O ye who have received the Scriptures,
exceed not the just bounds in your religion; neither say of God any
other than the truth. Verily Christ Jesus, the Son of Mary, is the
apostle of God, and his Word, which he conveyed into Mary, and a
spirit proceeding from him. Believe therefore in God and his apostles,
and say not, There are three Gods: forbear this; it will be better for
you. God is but one God. Far be it from him that he should have
a Son! Unto him belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth.”—Ch.
iv. pp. 80, 81.
On the Prophecy of an “Immanuel.”
For the Interpretation which identifies “the Virgin” with the
city of Jerusalem, I am indebted to Rammohun Roy, who has justified
it by reasons which appear to me satisfactory. See his Second
Appeal to the Christian Public. Appendix II. Calcutta, 1821, p. 128
seqq. The use of the definite article with the word (העלמה)
points out the Virgin as some known object, who would be recognized
by King Ahaz, without further description. It will hardly be maintained
that this prince was so familiar with evangelical futurities, as
to understand the phrase of Mary of Nazareth. Nor does it seem
at all likely that either the prophet’s wife, or any other person not
previously the subject of discourse, should be thus obscurely and
abruptly described. But if “the Virgin” was a well-understood mode
of speaking of Jerusalem, Ahaz would be at no loss to interpret the
allusion. And that this metaphor was one of the common-places of
Hebrew speech, in the time of the prophets, might be shown from
every part of their writings. “Thou shalt be built, O virgin of
Israel; thou shalt again be adorned with thy tabrets, and shalt go
forth in the dances of them that make merry.”[264] “Then shall theVirgin rejoice in the dance.”[265] “The Lord hath trodden the Virgin,
the daughter of Judah, as in a wine-press.”[266] And Isaiah himself
uses this expression respecting a foreign city: “Thou shalt no more
rejoice, O thou oppressed Virgin, daughter of Sidon.”[267] And expressing
to the invader Sennacherib, the contempt which God authorized
Jerusalem to entertain for his threats, he says, “The Virgin, the
daughter of Zion, hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn.”[268]
It should he remembered, however, that the establishment of this
interpretation is by no means necessary to the proof of invalidity in
the Trinitarian application of the prophecy. The reasons which I
have adduced, together with the use in a neighbouring passage, of
the phrase “over the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel,”[269] appear
to me to point out some prince as the Virgin’s Son. But many
eminent interpreters consider him as only one of the Prophet’s own
children, “whom the Lord had given him, for signs and for wonders
in Israel.”[270] And the first four verses of the next chapter certainly
speak of Isaiah’s son in a manner so strikingly similar, as to give a
strong support to this interpretation. But whatever obscurity there
may be in the passage, the one clear certainty in it is this: that it
does not refer to any person to be born seven or eight hundred years
after the delivery of the prediction. And it is surely unworthy of
any educated Theologian, possessing a full knowledge of the embarrassments
attending the Trinitarian appeal to such texts, still to reiterate
that appeal, without any specification of the mode in which
he proposes to sustain it. Is it maintained that Jesus of Nazareth
was the primary object of the prophecy? Or will any one be found
deliberately to defend the hypothesis of a double sense? Or must
we fear, that a lax and unscrupulous use is often made of allusions
which sound well in the popular ear, without any distinct estimate of
their real argumentative value?
It is no doubt convenient to cut the knot of every difficulty by the
appeal to inspiration; to say, e.g., that Matthew applies the word
Emmanuel to Christ, and with a correctness which his infallibility
forbids us to impeach. But are our opponents prepared to abide by
this rule, to prove its truth, to apply it, without qualification, to the
New Testament citations from the Hebrew Scriptures? Will they,
for instance, find and expound, for the benefit of the church, the
prophecy stated by Matthew to have been fulfilled in Jesus, “He
shall be called a Nazarene?”[271] The words are declared to have
been “spoken by the prophets.” But they are not discoverable in
any of the canonical prophecies: so that either the Evangelist took
them from some inspired work now lost,—in which case the canon is
imperfect, and Christianity is deprived of the benefit of certain predictions
intended for its support; or, he has cited them so incorrectly
from our existing Scriptures, that the quotation cannot be identified.
I cannot refrain from expressing my amazement, that those, whose
constant duty it is to expound the New Testament writings should be
conscious of no danger to their authority, when it is strained so far
as to include an infallible interpretation of the Older Scriptures.
On Isaiah ix. 6.
The translation of this passage is not unattended with difficulties:
and many of the versions which learned men have proposed leave
nothing on which the Trinitarian argument can rest. It is clear that
divines ought to establish the meaning of the verse, before they
reason from its theology. I subjoin a few of the most remarkable
translations.
The Septuagint; “And his name shall be called ‘Messenger of
a great counsel;’ for I will bring peace upon the rulers, and health
to him.”
The Targum of Jonathan; “And by the Wonderful in counsel,
by the Mighty God who endureth for ever, his name shall be called
the Messiah (the anointed), in whose days peace shall be multiplied
upon us.” The following allusion to the titles in this passage from
Talmud Sanhedrim, 11 ch., will show to whom they were applied by
Jewish commentators: “God said, let Hezekiah, who has five
names, take vengeance on the king of Assyria, who has taken on
himself five names also.”
Grotius; “Wonderful; Counsellor of the Mighty God; Father
of the future age; Prince of Peace.”
Editor of Calmet; “Admirable, Counsellor, Divine Interpreter,
Mighty, Father of Future time, Prince of Peace.”
Bishop Lowth; “Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the
Father of the everlasting age, the Prince of Peace.”
Many other translations might be added: and even if the prophecy
were not obviously spoken of Hezekiah, we might reasonably
ask, what doctrinal certainty can be found in so uncertain an announcement?
And how is the fact accounted for that, important as
it was to the apostles’ success to make the largest possible use of
their ancient scriptures, not one of them ever alludes to this prediction?
On the Proem of John.
The objection which is most commonly entertained to the foregoing
interpretation of the Proem of St. John’s Gospel, arises from the
strength and vividness of the personification of the Logos. A real
personality, it is said, must be assumed, in order to satisfy the terms
of the description, which could never have been applied by the
apostle to a mere mental creation.
I am by no means insensible to the force of this objection: though
I think it of less weight than the difficulties which beset every other
explanation. And it appears to be greatly relieved by two considerations;
first, that a considerable part of the difficulty arises from a
want of correspondence between the Greek and the English usage
of language; secondly, that this personification did not originate with
the apostle, but had become, by slow and definable gradations, an
established formula of speech.
1. The first of these considerations I will introduce to my readers
in the words of Archbishop Whately: “Our language possesses one
remarkable advantage, with a view to this kind of Energy, in the
constitution of its genders. All nouns in English, which express objects
that are really neuter, are considered as strictly of the neuter
gender; the Greek and Latin, though possessing the advantage
(which is wanting in the languages derived from them) of having a
neuter gender, yet lose the benefit of it, by fixing the masculine or
feminine genders upon many nouns denoting things inanimate;
whereas in English, when we speak of any such object in the masculine
or feminine gender, that form of expression at once confers
personality upon it. When ‘Virtue,’ e.g. or our ‘Country’ are
spoken of as females, or ‘Ocean’ as a male, &c., they are, by that
very circumstance, personified; and a stimulus is thus given to the
imagination, from the very circumstance that in calm discussion or
description, all of these would be neuter; whereas in Greek or
Latin, as in French or Italian, no such distinction could be made.
The employment of ‘Virtus,’ and Ἀρετὴ in the feminine gender, can
contribute, accordingly, no animation to the style, when they could
not, without a solecism, be employed otherwise.”[272]
Now let any one read the English Proem of John, and ask
himself, how much of the appearance of personality is due to the
occurrence, again and again, of the pronouns “he,” “him,” “his,”
applied to the Logos; let him remember that this much is a mere
imposition practised unavoidably upon him by the idiom of our language,
and “gives no animation to the style” in the original; and I
am persuaded that the violence of the personification will be tamed
down to the apprehension of a very moderate imagination. It is
true that the Logos does not, by this allowance, become impersonal;
other parts of the personal conception remain, in the acts of creation
and of illumination, attributed to this Divine Power: and hence the
substitution of the neuter pronouns “it” and “its;” for the masculines
“he,” “him,” “his,” though useful, provisionally, for shaking
off the English illusion to which I have referred, cannot be allowed
to represent the sentiment of the passage faithfully.
There appears to be another peculiarity of our language and modes
of thought, as contrasted with the Greek, which exaggerates, in the
Common Translation, the force of the personification. The English
language leaves to an author a free choice of either gender for his
personifications: and the practical effect of this has been, that the
feminine prosopopeia has been selected as most appropriate to abstract
qualities and attributes of the mind; and although instances are
not wanting of masculine representations of several of the human
passions, the figure is felt, in such cases, to be much more vehement
and more entirely beyond the limits of prose, than the employment
of the other gender. What imagination would naturally think of
Pity, of Fear, of Joy, of Genius, of Hope, as male beings? It may
be doubted whether our most imaginative prose writers present any
example of a male personification of an attribute: I can call to mind
instances in the writings of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, of this figure
so applied to certain material objects, as the Sun, the Ocean, but not
to abstract qualities or modes, unless when a conception is borrowed
(as of “Old Time”) from the ancient mythology. And accordingly,
to an English reader, such a style of representation must always appear
forced and strange. But a writer in a language like the Greek
cannot choose the sex of his personifications; it is decided for him,
by the gender already assigned to the abstraction, about which he is
occupied; and both he and his readers must accommodate their conceptions
to this idiomatic necessity. In the German, the Moon is
masculine; the Sun feminine; and every reader of that language
knows the strange incongruities which, to English perceptions, this
peculiarity introduces into its poetical imagery. For example, there
is a German translation of Mrs. Barbauld’s Hymns in prose; a passage
of which, rendered literally into English would read thus: “I
will show you what is glorious. The Sun is glorious. When She
shineth in the clear sky, when She sitteth on the bright throne in the
heavens, and looketh abroad over all the earth, She is the most excellent
and glorious creature the eye can behold. The Sun is glorious;
but He that made the Sun is more glorious than She.” Again;
“There is the Moon, bending His bright horns, like a silver bow,
and shedding His mild light, like liquid silver, over the blue firmament.”
In the Greek literature, accordingly, the masculine personification
of abstractions is as easy and common as the feminine; and
the former occurs in many instances in which an English author,
having free choice, would prefer the latter: thus in Homer, Fear is a
son of Mars:
And common as it is for English writers to give a feminine personification
to Wisdom and Genius, Philo expressly says they are of the
masculine gender (τῆς ἄῤῥενος γενεᾶς νοῦς καὶ λογισμὸς);[278] and the
husband of the other faculties of the soul.
The divine attributes are, I think, uniformly represented by the
pronoun she, in imaginative religious writers, like Bishop Taylor;
mercy, justice, goodness, thus assume, in the works of that great
man, the same form as Wisdom in the book of Proverbs; and it
may be doubted whether, if the apostle John had written in the
English language and with English feelings, the personification in
his proem might not have presented itself in the same shape. Any
one who will read over the passage, with this idea, will find, I think,
that the figure, thus modified, appears by no means inconceivable.
Have we not, in the peculiarity of our language to which I have
alluded, one reason why English theologians appear to have felt more
difficulty than foreign divines in seizing the true idea of the Logos;
and why the disposition to consider it as an objective and absolute
Person has been much more prevalent among all parties here, than
on the Continent?
2. But a more important consideration, for the understanding of
this Proem, is this: that the Apostle is not the originator of the conception
respecting the Logos, but simply adopted it in the shape,
towards which it had been organizing itself for centuries. Three
successive states of the idea can be traced; in the Old Testament, it
appears (in Prov. viii.) as a mere transient personification of Divine
Wisdom; in the Apocryphal Books of Ecclesiasticus and of Wisdom,
it presents itself in a more permanent and mythical character; and,
in the writings of Philo, it assumes so embodied and hypostatized
a form, as to perplex the simplicity of his Monotheism. From his
writings, the whole Proem of his contemporary John (except where the
Baptist and Jesus are mentioned by name) might be constructed. This
coincidence in phraseology so remarkable, cannot be considered as
accidental. Is it thought impossible that John should say of an
attribute of God, that it was with him from the first? We reply,
Philo does say so; calling Goodness the most ancient of God’s qualities;
Wisdom older than the universe; Logos, the Assessor (πάρεδρος
and ὀπαδὸς) of God prior to all creations, a needful companion of
Deity, as the joint originator with him of all things.[279] And the Son
of Sirach says, in his personification of Wisdom: “I am come out
of the mouth of the most High, first-born before all creatures:”
“He created me from the beginning, and before the world.”[280] Is it
said that such a statement is unworthy of Revelation? We reply, it
occurs in the writings of Solomon: “The Lord possessed me in the
beginning of his way, before his works of old;” “then I was by
him as one brought up with him:”[281] where the feminine form
(vv. 2, 3) totally excludes the idea of Wisdom being anything more
than a personification. Is it thought impossible that an attribute of
God should be called the only-begotten Son of God? We turn to
Philo, and find this same Logos entitled the most Ancient Son of
God (ὁ πρεσβύτατος υἱὸς θεοῦ), the First-begotten (ὁ πρωτόγονος). Is
it inconceivable that, through this transforming energy of God, those
who received it should be said to become Sons of God? Philo says,
“If you are not yet worthy to be denominated a Son of God, be
earnest to put on the graces of his First-begotten Logos,—the most
ancient angel, and, we may say, an archangel of various titles:”
“for if we are not prepared to be esteemed children of God, we
may at all events be thus related to the most Holy Logos, his eternal
Image; for the most Ancient Logos is the Image of God.”[282]
As all Theological considerations, suggested by heretics, are apt to
be dismissed with mere expressions of surprise and contempt, I am
happy to refer, in confirmation of the foregoing views, in the most
essential particulars, to an Orthodox Writer, whose accurate and
various learning, and sound and grave judgment, have given him
a merited pre-eminence among the Commentators on the Gospel of
John. I allude to Professor Lücke, whose “Commentar über das
Evangelium des Johannes” I have had the opportunity, since the
delivery of this Lecture, of consulting. I wish that I could lay
before my readers the whole of his admirable history of the rise and
progress of the idea of the Logos; but I must content myself with
translating a few brief extracts.[283]
“The origin and germ,” he says, “of the theological Formula of
the Logos, are furnished in the Canonical Hebrew Books (alluding to
certain passages, especially Prov. viii. which he has been showing to
be mere poetical personifications of Divine Attributes). It obtained
its full development in the Jewish Theology, in the writings of
the Alexandrine Philo. And, in an intermediate state of formation,
we find it in the Greek Apocryphal books of the Old Testament.”
Lücke examines the conception in all these stages; and, from his
analysis of Philo’s mode of thought, I extract the following:
“According to Philo, God, in his interior Essence, is inconceivable,
occult, solitary (das absolute), self-comprised, and without relations
to any other existence.... Although the absolute cause of all
that is, God cannot, in his own essence, and immediately, operate
on the universe, either in the way of creation, preservation, or
government. Concealed in his absolute separation, God is manifest
and an object of knowledge in the world, only through his Powers
(δυνάμεις): these, external forces of God in the universe, apart from
his absolute essence, are the necessary media of his presence in the
universe.... These divine δυνάμεις Philo calls sometimes Ideas,
sometimes Angels, sometimes Logoi. This identification of notions,
powers, ideas, angels, logoi, which is frequent in the writings of
Philo, is of great importance for the right apprehension of his doctrine
of the Divine Logos. This Logos he considers in a twofold
relation. Sometimes he regards it as inherent (immanent), and refers
it to him as a capacity (facultativ); when it is the Divine νοῦς, analogous
to the human. But this attributive conception gives way to
that of the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος, as a living, energetic δύναμις, which tends
to external action. Of this, Philo, in the spirit of Platonism, conceives
as ἰδέα ἰδεῶν, the Ideal of things, the archetypal Idea, the
pattern World, the νοητὸς κόσμος, which is extant in God as a reality,
before all outward creations of the actual universe. In this sense
the λόγος is the primary energy of God,—the ἐννόησις, the λογισμὸς
θεοῦ λογιζομένου.
But, at the same time, the λόγος is also προφορικός; and, as a forming
activity, goes forth out of God. But as this is only another relation
of the Divine Logos, viz., relation to the world, so is it the
product of the former; yet essentially one with it, like the οἶκος of
the inherent Logos,—as human speech is the resident point of the idea,
its form of manifestation. All living, active relations of God to the
world, all his objective manifestations, are comprised in this emanated
Logos. He forms the world or creates it, imprinting himself on
matter as a Divine seal (σφραγὶς). And as he has created the world
(or otherwise, God through him, δι’ αὐτοῦ,) so he preserves it; he is
the indwelling and sustaining power, full of light and life, and filling
everything with Divine light and life. So in the human world, he is
both the natural divine power of every soul, the pure intellect, the
conscience; and the bestower of wisdom, and the watch of virtue.
He is the same with the Wisdom of God, the Holy Spirit of God in
his objective manifestation in the world; partly because animating
and inspiring men, particularly in the capacity of Prophetic Spirit.
“Hence the Logos is the eldest Creation of God, the Eternal
Father’s eldest Son, God’s Image, Mediator between God and the
World, the Highest Angel, the Second God, the High-priest, the
Reconciler, Intercessor for the World and Men, whose manifestation
is especially visible in the history of the Jewish people.”[284]
It ought to be added, that some able writers, as Grossman and
Gfrörer, conceive that Philo invested his Logos with a real personality.
The reasons for this opinion do not appear to me to be satisfactory.
Even those who adopt it assign to this hypostasis a rank
wholly subordinate, in Philo’s estimation, to the Supreme God: and
Lücke strenuously maintains that both the Alexandrine philosopher
and the apostle John apply the name God to the Logos only in a
figurative sense (ἐν καταχρήσει). He considers the clause “the Word
was God,” merely incidental, and unimportant compared with the
preceding clause, “the Word was with God.” “John,” he observes,
“sums up the purpose of the first verse in the words of the second;
οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν. From his not taking up again the
idea θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, we must conclude, that he considered this position
only an accessory. Thus the πρὸς τὸν θεὸν is evidently to be the
more prominently marked assertion.” “John would say, the primeval
Logos is πρὸς τὸν θεὸν; that is, is in such communion with
God, stands in such relation to him, that he may be called θεός.
Looking at the historical connection between the mode of expression
in Philo and in John, there is no room for doubt, that θεὸς is to
be taken in the sense in which Philo applies the name θεός to the
ποιητικὴ δύναμις τοῦ θεοῦ,—and explicitly calls the λόγος God—ὁ δεύτερος
θεός ; but to prevent misunderstanding, expressly subjoins that this is
only ἐν καταχρήσει. Though John, as we have seen, understands by
the Logos, a real Divine Person, he yet, as a Christian Apostle, held
the monotheistic conception of God in a still higher degree, and
an incomparably purer form (xvii. 3; 1 John v. 20) than Philo:
and are we then at liberty to suppose, that by him, less than by
Philo, the position θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος is meant simply ἐν καταχρήσει? It
is true that the substitution for θεὸς of the adjective θεῖος is at variance
with the analogy of New Testament diction: but must we not,
with the Alexandrine Fathers, especially Origen, conclude that θεὸς
without the article, is to be taken as marking the difference between
the indefinite sense of ‘Divine nature,’ and the definite, absolute,
conception of God, expressed by ὁ θεὸς? Thus would John’s θεὸς
correspond with Paul’s εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ. Such an accordance between
the manner of Paul and of John is an advantage which must appear
an equally desirable result of exegesis, whether we consider it in its
dogmatical or its historical relations.”[285]
From this extract it appears, that if the author does not approve
of the old Socinian interpretation, which considers the Logos as
synonymous from the first with Jesus Christ; it is not because he
knows, that θεὸς in the predicate cannot signify a god; or slights
Origen’s opinion on the usage of N. T. and Hellenistic Greek. We
have here an authority, than which no higher can be produced from
among the living or the dead, in favour of a meaning which, to the
fastidious scholarship of Liverpool theologians, is absolutely intolerable.
Lücke of course admits the general rule, respecting the
omission of the article with the predicative noun; but he conceives
(greatly to the horror, no doubt, of those whose soul resides in
syntax) that the good old Apostle would even have committed a
solecism in respect of a Greek article, for the sake of clearing a great
truth in respect of God. “If there had been any intention to express
the substantial unity of the Logos and God, we should have expected
the Apostle to write ὁ θεός. On account of the equivocal meaning
of θεὸς without the article, the article could not possibly have been
absent.”[286] It is vain to say that such corrupt Greek as this cannot
be ascribed to the Apostles. Here are examples from John;
ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀνομία; [287]
Τὸ πνεῦμά ἐστιν ἡ ἀλήθεια: [288]
and here are others from Paul; ὁ κύριος τὸ πνεῦμά ἐστιν: [289]
Παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἡ κεφαλὴ ὁ
Χριστός ἐστιν. [290] Nay, we have an example in the following text, of a
total inversion of the rule, the article being attached to the predicate,
and not to the subject; εἰ ἔστι Κύριος (יהוה) ὁ Θεὸς.[291]
It will be perceived by the text of this Lecture that I do not adopt
the rendering of the Alexandrine Fathers; but I am anxious, in
rejecting it, to pass no slight on the learning of those who maintain
it; and to show that, out of England, orthodoxy can afford to be
wise and just.
I think it right to add, that to the view which has been given of
the Proem, an objection of some weight occurs in the twelfth verse.
The clause ‘to them that believe on his name’ presents the question,
‘who is denoted by the pronoun his,—the Logos or Jesus
Christ personally?’ According to the interpretation which I have
recommended, it should mean the former; according to the analogy
of Scriptural diction, certainly the latter. Feeling the force of the
difficulty, I yet think it less serious than those which attend every
other hypothesis: and incline to think, that the clause is an anticipation
of the personal introduction of the Incarnate Logos which immediately
follows; a point of transition from the personification to the
history.
In conclusion, may I take occasion to correct an erroneous statement
in Mr. Byrth’s Lecture;—that Samuel Crell was a convert
to Trinitarianism before his death. “He died,” we are told, “a
believer in the Supreme Divinity of Christ, and the efficacy of his
atoning sacrifice.”[292] I have before me the most authentic collection
of Socinian Memoirs which has been published, by Dr. F. S. Bock,
Greek Professor, and Royal Librarian at Königsberg. The work is
principally from original sources; and the testimony of the following
passage will probably be received as unimpeachable. It appears that
a vague statement in the Hamburgh Literary News gave rise to the
report of Crell’s conversion: “Obiit Crellius Amstelodami, a. 1747.
d. 12. Maii, anno æt. 87. In novis litterariis Hamburg. 1747,
p. 703, narratur, quod circa vitæ finem errorum suorum ipsum
pœnituerit, hujusque pœnitentiæ non simulatæ haud obscura dederit
documenta, quod Paulo Burgero, Archidiacono Herspruccensi in
iisdem novis publicis Hamb. 1748, p. 345, eam ob caussam veri
haud absimile videtur, quia sibi Amstelodami degenti Crellius,
a. 1731, oretenus testatus fuerit, in colloquiis cum Celeb. Schaffio
Lugdunensi institutis, quædam placita, jam sibi dubia reddita esse,
adeo ut jam anceps circa eadem hæreat. Sed in iisdem novis 1749,
p. 92, et p. 480, certiores reddimur: Crellium ad ultimum vitæ suæ
halitum perstitisse Unitarium, quod etiam frater ipsius, Paulus, mihi
coram pluribus vicibus testatus est.”[293]
In the rendering which I have given to this passage the word
ἁρπαγμὸς is considered as equivalent to ἅρπαγμα. The interpretation,
however, in no way requires this; and if it should be thought necessary
to maintain the distinction between them, to which the analogy
of Greek formation, in the case of verbal nouns, undoubtedly points,
and to limit the former to the active sense of the “operation of
seizing,” the latter to the passive sense of “the object seized;” the
general meaning will remain wholly unaffected. The only difference
will be this; that the whole of the sixth verse must, in that case, be
considered as descriptive of the rightful glory of Christ; and the
transition to his voluntary afflictions will not commence till the 7th.
The signification of this doubtful word simply determines, whether
the clause in which it stands shall be the last in the account of our
Lord’s dignity, or the first in the notice of his humiliation. The
rendering, however, which I have adopted, is confirmed by the use
made of this passage in the most ancient citation from this epistle.
In the letter of the churches of Vienne and Lyons, the 6th verse is
quoted, without the sequel, and the fact that Christ thought it not
ἁρπαγμὸν to be equal with God, is adduced as an example of humility;
“who showed themselves so far emulators and imitators of Christ;
who being in the form of God thought not his equality with God, a
thing to be eagerly seized.”—Euseb. Eccl. Hist. Lib. V. § 2. Heinichen,
vol. ii. p. 36.
With considerable variation of expression, the same idea occurs
in the (1st) Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians.
“Christ is theirs who are humble. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the
sceptre of the majesty of God, came not in the show of pride and
pre-eminence, though he could have done so; but in humility. Ye
see, beloved, what is the model which has been given us.” C. xvi.
If the Trinitarian view of the mediatorial office of Christ be correct,
it is not easy to perceive how he could have come in the show of
pride and pre-eminence; had he not laid aside the glories of his
Deity, and clothed himself with a suffering humanity, his mission, as
commonly conceived, could have had no existence, nor any one purpose
of it have been answered. But he might have been the great
Hebrew Messiah, had he not chosen rather, by a process of suffering
and death, to put himself into universal and spiritual relations to
all men.
172. It is hardly necessary to observe, that I use the word “Athanasian” to denote
the doctrine of the Creed so called; not of St. Athanasius himself, who is
known to have had no hand in the composition of that formula.
173. Jesus Christ, the great God our Saviour, pp. 81, 369.
174. It is orthodox, at the present day, to affirm that the mysteries of the Godhead
and Incarnation of our Lord were explicitly taught by himself throughout his
ministry, as well as by his apostles afterwards; and Mr. Jones (Lecture, p. 237)
assures us that he “received divine homage, whilst on earth, from inspired men
and angelic spirits.” This shows how much more clear-sighted is modern orthodoxy
than was ancient: for the Fathers thought that a great part of the “mystery”
of these doctrines consisted in the secrecy in which they were long wrapped.
“In the silence of God,” Ignatius assures us, were the Incarnation and the Lord’s
death accomplished; and the ecclesiastical writers of the first six centuries seem
not only to have admitted that our Lord concealed his divinity from his disciples,
and enjoined on his apostles great caution in this matter, but to have discerned in
this suppression a profound wisdom, of which they frequently express their admiration.
They urge that the Jews could never have been brought round to the
faith, if these doctrines had not been kept back for a while,—a strange thing, by
the way, if the whole ritual and Scriptures of this people were created to prefigure
these mysteries. But Ignatius threw out a suggestion, which, from the
eagerness wherewith it was caught up by succeeding writers, was evidently thought
a happy discovery: it was necessary to conceal these mysteries from the Devil, or
he would have been on his guard, and defeated everything. The hint of the venerable
saint is brief: “The Virginity of Mary, and the Birth and Death of the
Lord were hidden from the Prince of this world.” But the idea is variously enlarged
upon by the later Fathers; for, as Cotelier observes, “Res ipsa quam Ignatius
exprimit, passim apud sanctos Patres invenitur.” Jerome adds, that the
vigilance of the Devil, who expected the Messiah to be born in some Jewish
family, was thus eluded; and the Author of an anonymous fragment of the same
age, cited by Isaac Vos, suggests that, if Satan had known, he would never have
put it into men’s hearts to crucify Jesus. And Jobius, a monk of the sixth century,
quoted by Photius in his Bibliotheca, and complimented by the learned Patriarch
as τῶν ἱερῶν γραφῶν μελέτης οὐκ ἄπειρος, says, “It was necessary to keep
in the shade the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, both for the sake of
conciliating the hearers, and in order to escape the notice of the Prince of Darkness.”—See
S. Ignat. Ep. ad Magnes. ch. xix.; Patr. Apost. Le Clerc’s Ed. Notes;
and Priestley’s Early Opinions, b. iii, ch. 3, 4.
175. Lambertus Danaus, cited by Drusius, in his Diss. de nom. Elohim. Crit. Sacr. Tractatt. t. 1. See also Drus. de quæsitis per Epist. 66.
176. Comment. in Gen. i. 1. Calvin adds, “Imagining that they have here a proof
against the Arians, they involve themselves in the Sabellian error: because Moses
afterwards subjoins that Elohim spake, and that the Spirit of Elohim brooded over
the waters. If we are to understand that the three Persons are indicated, there
will be no distinction among them: for it will follow that the Son was self-generated,
and that the Spirit is not of the Father, but of himself.” For further
notice of this point see Note B.
177. Grammar of the Hebrew Language, art. 228, 6. Note.
178. See Scripture Proofs and Scriptural Illustrations of Unitarianism, by John
Wilson, second edition, 1837, p. 33, where will be found a curious table, exhibiting
the usage of the word God, in every book of the New Testament. Mr. Wilson
has collected his materials with great industry, and arranged them with
skill.
194. Phil. Jud. Op. Schrey et H. J. Meyer. Francof. 1691. De Mundi opific. p. 5.
C. p. 6. C. Leg. Alleg. p. 93. B, C, D. De somniis, pp. 574. E. 575. C. E. 576. E.
De confus. Ling. p. 341. B. C. Quis rer. div. hæres. p. 509. B. C. Euseb. Prep.
Evang. VII. 13.
202. New Translation of the Psalms, by Dr. M. Young, Bishop of Clonfert; in loc.
Comp. Preface.—When resident in Dublin, I enjoyed the advantage of consulting
this posthumous work, suppressed before its publication, for reasons sufficiently
obvious to those who know the work, and have noticed the reception which orthodoxy
gives to honest and impartial biblical criticism and exegesis. See Mr. Wellbeloved’s
Bible in loc. where Bishop Young’s translation is cited. May I venture
to refer our learned opponents to the last-mentioned work, whenever they think
proper to examine what kind of Old Testament theology a Unitarian may hold?
It would be curious to know, probably perplexing even to “ordained clergymen”
to determine, on which horn of the dilemma the Rev. Hebraists in Christ Church
must fix Mr. Wellbeloved;—“defective scholarship?”—or “uncandid and dishonest
criticism?”
203. See Acts iii. 19-21; xiii. 33-37; xxvi. 6-8. Hebrews ii. 5. Titus ii. 12, 13.
1 Tim. iv. 1. James v. 3, 7, 8. 1 Cor. x. 11. Phil. iv. 5. 2 Thess. ii. 2.
212. Paraphrase on the Epistles; Rom. xiii. 11, 12. Note.
213. From the word God, supposed to be addressed to Christ, in the clause
“Thy throne, O God, &c.,” the Deity of our Lord, as a second person in the Trinity,
is inferred. Yet this word, in the original, is Elohim, whose plural form,
we are told, is intended to prevent our thinking of only One Person, and which
cannot mean less than the whole Trinity.
244. This is the source to which our opponents in the present controversy have
explicitly referred the divine wisdom of Christ. Mr. Jones says, “Unaided by
the fulness of the Godhead which dwelt within him bodily,” (did the Father, according
to the Creeds, dwell in him bodily?) “his human soul was, necessarily,
finite in its operations.” And again, “Nor could he, as we have already intimated,
know anything beyond the ken of a finite intelligence, except it were revealed to
him by theETERNAL WORD, with which he was mysteriously united.” Christ says,
“as My fatherhath taught me, I speak these things.” Was his “Father”
“the eternal Word?”—See Lect. on the Proper Humanity, &c. pp. 221, 243.
251. With respect to the meaning of the name, “THE SON,” our opponents appear
to vary their statements in a way which serves the ends of controversy more
than those of truth. Mr. Jones says that in the passages which I have adduced,
the Trinitarian hypothesis “finds no hindrance whatever,” because the word
SON denotes in them our Lord’s human and Mediatorial character. Mr. Bates
denies that the word can have any such meaning. In defending the supreme
Divinity of Christ, as well as of the Holy Spirit, from what is incorrectly called
the Baptismal Form, (“baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost,”) he begs us to observe that it is not into the name of
Christ the Mediator that converts are to be baptized. “Our Saviour’s words,”
he affirms, “not only fail to sanction, but expressly exclude, such a construction;
for he does not say, ‘the name of the Father and of myself,’ but ‘of THE
SON,’ that is, of THE ETERNAL WORD.” Mr. Bates’s Lecture is not published;
but he is aware that this statement is correct. Since this name “the Son” “expressly
excludes” the Mediatorial character, and must mean the Eternal Word,
may we ask Mr. Bates, how it is the Eternal Word did not know the day and the
hour, and could do nothing of himself?—Mr. Jones’s Lect. p. 242.
261. John v. 29. It is very difficult to determine whether this class of passages
is rightly interpreted as referring to a final and collective judgment of mankind.
The discussion of this point does not properly belong to our present subject; and
the assumption, for the sake of brevity of argument, of the usual interpretation,
does not imply assent to it.
262. Tillotson’s Sermons, xlvi. Lond. 1704. pp. 549, 550.
I am aware that the name of this admirable writer is not likely to have much
weight with our opponents; for in speaking of Socinian writers he has indulged
in a spirit of justice, which the modern Orthodoxy of his Church appears to consider
altogether old-fashioned. The Archbishop gives the following character of the
school which took its name from the Socini; “And yet to do right to the writers
on that side, I must own, that generally they are a pattern of the fair way of disputing,
and of debating matters of religion without heat and unseemly reflections
upon their adversaries, in the number of whom I did not expect that the Primitive
Fathers of the Christian Church would have been reckoned by them. They
generally argue matters with that temper and gravity, and with that freedom from
passion and transport, which becomes a serious and weighty argument; and for the
most part they reason closely and clearly, with extraordinary guard and caution,
with great dexterity and decency, and yet with smartness and subtilty enough; with
a very gentle heat, and few hard words;—virtues to be praised wherever they are
found, yea even in an enemy, and very worthy our imitation.” Yet the Archbishop,
as if aware that his candour might, by a very natural process, excite suspicion of
his Orthodoxy, raises himself above imputation by adding, “In a word, they are the
strongest managers of a weak cause, and which is ill-founded at the bottom, that
perhaps ever yet meddled with controversy; insomuch that some of the Protestants
and the generality of the Popish writers, and even of the Jesuits themselves, who
pretend to all the reason and subtilty in the world, are in comparison of them
but mere scolds and bunglers; upon the whole matter, they have but this one
great defect, that they want a good cause and truth on their side; which if they
had, they have reason and wit and temper enough to defend it.”—Sermon xliv.
p. 521.
263. Mr. Stewart recommends to our imitation the conduct of a Jewish child who
became anxious to pray, like his companions, to Jesus Christ, not, apparently, from
any impulse of the affections, or any convictions of duty; but from a prudent
desire to run no risk of offending any possible power. “When I go to heaven and
see Jesus Christ, if he is God,” calculates the boy, “I shall be ashamed to look him
in the face.” Is it possible that this principle of making sure of one’s self-interest
without regard to sincerity and truth, can be published without a blush, from a
Christian pulpit? And is Christ so little known as yet, that such hollow worship
is thought to be a passport to his favour, instead of winning from him a rebuke
that, in truth, must make ashamed? Is the Infinite hearer of prayer,—whatever
be his name or names,—one who will turn away from a contrite and trustful supplication
of the soul, unless his titles are all set right upon the lips? What then
would become of the millions of entreaties and of cries that daily rise from the
grieving earth to the blessed God? Impossible! ’twould make Heaven a vast
Dead-letter Office, for returning petitions on account of a wrong address.
283. I have an impression of having seen advertised an English translation of this
work; but I have no means of ascertaining the fact.
284. For the sake of brevity I have given rather an abstract than a translation.
Commentar. üb. das Evang. des Johan. von Dr. Friedrich Lücke. Band. i. p. 232-p.
238. Bonn. 1833. It is possible that Professor Lücke’s Orthodoxy, which, in
conformity with the prevailing estimate of his countrymen, I have ventured to
assume, may be called in question. It is always difficult to take the “regula
fidei,” recognized in one Country, and apply it, with any exactitude, to the sentiments
of another, especially when the one is remarkable for the hard and literal
character of its theological conceptions; and the other, for the excessive refinements
by which it has discriminated the shades of religious belief. If tried by the
only German standard which has any near correspondence with English Evangelicism,
I mean the severe school of Guerike, Tholuck, Hahn, Olshausen,
Lücke would, no doubt, be pronounced deficient in the faith. But he belongs to
the class which approaches most nearly to them, both in the interpretation of Scripture,
and in the estimate of its authority. He does not, with them, refuse to
compare the doctrines of Scripture with the conclusions of Reason, and insist that
the authority of the former supersedes all recourse to the latter; but having ascertained
first the fact and the meaning of Revelation, he then permits the comparison
with philosophy, and declares their entire consistency. He thus belongs to the
Scriptural section of what is called the Philosophical School of German Theology.
He is decidedly Trinitarian and Anti-rationalist; and his orthodoxy has never
been suspected, as has that of Schleiermacher, the father of his school. He was
Professor of Theology in Göttingen before the recent political divisions in
Hanover.
293. Historia Antitrinitariorum, maximè Socinianismi et Socinianorum; Fred. Sam.
Bock, Tom. I. P. i. pp. 167, 168.
THE SCHEME OF VICARIOUS REDEMPTION INCONSISTENT WITH ITSELF, AND WITH THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SALVATION . — PREFACE.
It will be apparent, from the unusual length of the following discourse,
that its limits have been much extended since its delivery.
The additional portions furnish, in detail, the interpretation which
appears to me to reach the true meaning of the New Testament
language, respecting the death of Christ. Few passages, I believe,
relating to this subject, will be found unnoticed: and it is probable
that, in the desire to avoid omission, I have been guilty of some
prolixity and repetition.
The friendly diversity of opinion, which prevails among Unitarian
Christians, is perhaps more considerable in reference to the subject
of this Lecture, than to any other of the leading topics of theological
belief. The reader will do justice to all parties, by bearing this in
mind, while attending to the following pages; and by regarding
every statement which he disapproves, as the mere expression of
individual opinion.
It is impossible for me to leave unnoticed the charge of uncharitable
violence and “vulgar personality,” which Mr. M‘Neile has
preferred against me, on the ground of certain strong expressions,
contained in my first Lecture, respecting the late Archbishop Magee.
I readily acknowledge that the instances are rare, which can justify
the language which I employed; and I would never employ such,
did I not feel that it was not simply justified, but demanded. He
must be an unworthy controversialist, who has no generous delight
in admiring and respecting a doctrinal adversary; no concern and
shame at the moral obliquities which prove an opponent wrong,
without proving himself to be right. If Mr. M‘Neile could enable
me to look with his eyes of confidence and regard on “the illustrious
Prelate,” I should esteem it a privilege to recal every word which I
have put on record respecting him. But a careful study of his Treatise
on the Atonement, with the habit of testing his citations, has
revealed to me a system of controversy which, before, I should have
esteemed incredible; and which no terms of censure can too severely
describe. Polemical discipline, it has been observed with too much
truth, is, of all influences, the most dangerous to the moral sense.
It seems to have been thought wrong in me, by my respected
opponents, to state my general impression of Archbishop Magee’s
controversial character, without justifying it by specific arguments.
And so it would have been, if this work had really been “unanswered:”
but every quality which I ascribed to it, has been shown to
belong to it, by Dr. Carpenter; his work has received no reply; and
surely a bystander may express a judgment on the merits of a controversy,
and the polemical characters of its conductors, without the
slightest obligation to lay open the contents of the discussion in self-justification.
This appears to be Mr. Buddicom’s opinion, if we may
judge from the pungent sentence in which he has characterized,
without proof, one of Mr. Harris’s Discourses.[294] In the present
publication, however, I have supplied the deficiency which is the
subject of complaint; and have shown, not only that the late Archbishop
of Dublin dealt in terms of insult, which, if spoken instead
of written, no cultivated and Christian society would endure; but
that, with a shocking eagerness to blast the character of his opponents,
he corrupted the text of their writings, and drew his arguments
from garbled quotations. If any one can convince me of
mistake in what I have advanced, I shall most unfeignedly rejoice
and retract. But till then I cannot qualify any expressions, however
strong, which I have employed; for they are not the utterance of
passion, but the measured language of conviction. Most unwillingly
would I ever incur the risk of wounding “the feelings of the living,”
by animadversions on the character of the dead. But, surely, personal
attachments to the man must not be allowed to silence all
public estimate of the author; and against the attempt, on this
ground, to hold me up as the assailant of private affections, and the
insincere professor of charity, I protest, as cruel and unjust. It is
not true that I attacked “the name and memory” rather than “the
book,” of the late Archbishop: the words which I used described
nothing but his work: and that they were words of moral reprehension,
arose necessarily from the nature of the complaint which
we have to prefer against its contents. I do not understand the
diplomatic arts by which a man may be analyzed into a plurality of
characters, and permitted to do wrong in one capacity, while his
reputation takes a quiet shelter among the rest: nor have I the
ingenuity to rebuke falsehood in a book, yet save the veracity of the
author. If the “outrage” consisted in publishing an impression,
unsustained by evidence, I only fear, that the addition of the proof
will be found to bring no mitigation of the pain.
Let me add, that I entirely acquit our Rev. opponents of any
approbation of the controversial arts employed by the Prelate whom
they defend. Their admiration of his book arises, I am aware, from
ignorance of its real character; to understand which requires a much
greater acquaintance with Unitarian literature than they appear, in
any instance, to possess.
Lest it should be thought disrespectful in me to pass without notice
the strictures on my last published Discourse, contained in the Ninth
Lecture of the Trinitarian series, I will ask the indulgence of my
readers for a few moments more.
Mr. Bates accuses me of making a mutilated quotation from Deut.
xxix. 1-6. The whole passage stands thus; the part which I did
not cite being included in brackets: [“1. These are the words of
the covenant, which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the
children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant, which
he made with them in Horeb. 2. And] Moses called unto all Israel,
and said unto them, [ye have seen all that the Lord did before your
eyes in the land of Egypt unto Pharaoh, and unto all his servants,
and unto all his land; 3. The great temptations which thine eyes
have seen, the signs, and those great miracles: 4. Yet the Lord
hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to
hear, unto this day. 5. And] I have led you forty years in the
wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe
is not waxen old upon thy foot. 6. Ye have not eaten bread, neither
have ye drunk wine, or strong drink; that ye might know that I am
the Lord your God.”
My object was to show, that, if no latitude is to be allowed in the
application of mere grammatical principles of interpretation, we must
admit “that Moses is called God with a distinctness which cannot be
equalled in the case of Christ.” For this purpose, I had no occasion
to quote more than the 5th and 6th verses, containing the phrase,
“I am the Lord your God;” the only question being, who is the
speaker, grammatically denoted by the first personal pronoun “I.” To
make this evident, I went back to the opening of the sentence, which
determined this point: “Moses called together all Israel, AND SAID
to them.” The omitted clauses of his speech have no relation whatever
to the matter in debate, and have no effect, but to separate the
parts, without altering the nature, of the grammatical construction.
So far from proving that Moses speaks, as if personally identified
with the Lord, because teaching in his name, they prove just the
reverse; for Jehovah is introduced in them in the third person, not
the first; “ye have seen all that the Lord (not ‘I’) did before your
eyes,” &c. The first verse I did not quote, because it seems to belong
to the preceding chapter, and to have no reference to the words
cited. The only delinquency in this matter which I have to confess
is, that I wrote by mistake, “Moses called TOGETHER,” instead of
“UNTO, all Israel.” Mr. Bates draws attention to this by Roman
capitals, as if to hint at something very remarkable in the error. I
can only say, that after repeated examination of the word “UNTO,”
I can discover no mysterious significance in it; if it be an orthodox
tetragrammaton, my disregard of its claims was wholly inadvertent.
As to the argument itself which this passage was adduced to enforce,
I cannot perceive that it is in any way affected by the Lecturer’s
remarks: nor can any one reasonably doubt that if the New Testament
had contained such a passage as this, “The Lord Jesus called
unto the multitudes and said, ... I have led you into a desert
place, and fed you with the five loaves; that ye might know that I
am the Lord your God;” Trinitarians would have appealed to it
as a triumphant proof of the Deity of Christ, whatever number of
clauses might have severed the beginning from the end of the sentence,
and however often the name of the Lord, in the third person,
might have occurred in the interval.
Nor have I been successful in discovering in what way I have
misapprehended Mr. Bates’s meaning respecting the word “SON,” in
the following verse; “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost.” I may doubtless have misstated his words; and if in
his eyes the misstatement has any “serious inaccuracy,” I sincerely
regret its occurrence. Nothing but the constant habit of short-hand
writing, enabling me to take verbatim reports of public addresses,
would have given me confidence enough in my correctness to found
an argument on an unpublished verbal criticism. Even short-hand,
however, being fallible, I relinquish the words: and the more
willingly, because Mr. Bates’s own report appears to me absolutely
identical in meaning with my own. He says, that the baptism enjoined
in the verse just cited cannot, so far as our Lord is concerned,
be “baptism in the name of a Mediator;” “our Lord’s words prevent
such misapprehension: he says not ‘In the name of the Father
and in my name’ (my mediatorial name); but ‘In the name of the
Father and of the Son,’—the only begotten, co-essential, co-eternal,
and co-equal, with the Father and the Holy Ghost.” I represented
him as saying, that our Saviour’s words “expressly exclude such a
construction; for he does not say, the name of the Father, and of
myself, but of the Son, that is the Eternal Word.” The difference
between “preventing such misapprehension” and “excluding such
construction” is not very obvious. I understand the argument to be,
that there is something in the form of expression in the second clause,
forbidding us to think of anything less exalted than our Lord’s Divine
Nature; the only expression contained in the clause is “the Son;”
this term then, I imagined, was limited by the Lecturer to Christ’s
Divine Nature; and must have been replaced by some other phrase,
if his mediatorial character had been the subject of discourse. In
drawing a general conclusion from this particular statement, I only
gave the Lecturer credit for understanding the bearing of his own
argument; for of course, all reasoning from the intrinsic force of an
expression must be co-extensive with the occurrence of that expression.
If I have not correctly explained Mr. Bates’s argument, it
evades my apprehension altogether.
LECTURE VI. — NOTES. — A. Relation between Natural Religion and Revelation. — B. Trinitarian and Unitarian Ideas of Justice. — C. The reading in Acts xx. 28. — D. Archbishop Magee’s controversial Character. — Footnotes for Lecture VI.
THE SCHEME OF VICARIOUS REDEMPTION INCONSISTENT WITH ITSELF,
AND WITH THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SALVATION.
BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU.
“NEITHER IS THERE SALVATION IN ANY OTHER; FOR THERE IS NONE
OTHER NAME UNDER HEAVEN GIVEN AMONG MEN, WHEREBY WE
MUST BE SAVED.”—Acts iv. 12.
The scene which we have this evening to visit and explore,
is separated from us by the space of eighteen centuries; yet
of nothing on this earth has Providence left, within the shadows
of the past, so vivid and divine an image. Gently
rising above the mighty “field of the world,” Calvary’s
mournful hill appears, covered with silence now, but distinctly
showing the heavenly light that struggled there
through the stormiest elements of guilt. Nor need we only
gaze, as on a motionless picture that closes the vista of Christian
ages. Permitting history to take us by the hand, we
may pace back in pilgrimage to the hour, till its groups stand
around us, and pass by us, and its voices of passion and of
grief mock and wail upon our ear. As we mingle with the
crowd which, amid noise and dust, follows the condemned
prisoners to the place of execution, and fix our eye on the
faint and panting figure of one that bears his cross, could
we but whisper to the sleek priests close by, how might we
startle them, by telling them the future fate of this brief tragedy,—brief
in act, in blessing everlasting; that this Galilean
convict shall be the world’s confessed deliverer, while they
that have brought him to this, shall be the scorn and by-word of
the nations; that that vile instrument of torture, now so abject
that it makes the dying slave more servile, shall be made, by
this victim and this hour, the symbol of whatever is holy
and sublime; the emblem of hope and love; pressed to the
lips of ages; consecrated by a veneration which makes the
sceptre seem trivial as an infant’s toy. Meanwhile the sacerdotal
hypocrites, unconscious of the part they play, watch to
the end the public murder which they have privately suborned;
stealing a phrase from Scripture, that they may mock
with holy lips; and leaving to the plebeian soldiers the mutual
jest and brutal laugh, that serve to beguile the hired but
hated work of agony, and that draw forth from the sufferer that
burst of forgiving prayer, which sunk at least into their centurion’s
heart. One there is, who should have been spared
the hearing of these scoffs; and perhaps she heard them not;
for before his nature was exhausted more, his eye detects and
his voice addresses her, and twines round her the filial arm
of that disciple who had been ever the most loving as well as
most beloved. She at least lost the religion of that hour in
its humanity, and beheld not the prophet but the son:—had
not her own hands wrought that seamless robe for which the
soldiers’ lot is cast; and her own lips taught him that strain
of sacred poetry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?” but never had she thought to hear it thus. As the
cries became fainter and fainter, scarcely do they reach Peter
standing afar off. The last notice of him had been the
rebuking look that sent him to weep bitterly; and now the
voice that can alone tell him his forgiveness, will soon be
gone! Broken hardly less, though without remorse, is the
youthful John, to see that head, lately resting on his bosom,
drooping passively in death; and to hear the involuntary
shriek of Mary, as the spear struck upon the lifeless body,
moving now only as it is moved;—whence he alone, on whom
she leaned, records the fact. Well might the Galilean friends
stand at a distance gazing; unable to depart, yet not daring
to approach; well might the multitudes that had cried “crucify
him” in the morning, shudder at the thought of that
clamour ere night; “beholding the things that had come to
pass, they smote their breasts and returned.”
This is the scene of which we have to seek the interpretation.
Our first natural impression is, that it requires no
interpretation, but speaks for itself; that it has no mystery,
except that which belongs to the triumphs of deep guilt, and
the sanctities of disinterested love. To raise our eye to that
serene countenance, to listen to that submissive voice, to note
the subjects of its utterance, would give us no idea of any
mystic horror concealed behind the human features of the
scene; of any invisible contortions, as from the lash of demons,
in the soul of that holy victim; of any sympathetic
connection of that cross with the bottomless pit on the one
hand, and the highest Heaven on the other; of any moral
revolution throughout our portion of the universe, of which
this public execution is but the outward signal. The historians
drop no hint that its sufferings, its affections, its
relations, were more than human,—raised indeed to distinction
by miraculous accompaniments; but intrinsically, however
signally, human. They mention, as if bearing some
appreciable proportion to the whole series of incidents, particulars
so slight, as to vanish before any other than the
obvious historical view of the transaction; the thirst, the
sponge, the rent clothes, the mingled drink. They ascribe
no sentiment to the crucified, except such as might be expressed
by one of like nature with ourselves, in the consciousness
of a finished work of duty, and a fidelity never
broken under the strain of heaviest trial. The narrative is
clearly the production of minds filled, not with theological
anticipations, but with historical recollections.
With this view of Christ’s death, which is such as might
be entertained by any of the primitive Churches, having one
of the gospels only, without any of the epistles, we are content.
I conceive of it, then, as manifesting the last degree
of moral perfection in the Holy One of God; and believe that
in thus being an expression of character, it has its primary
and everlasting value. I conceive of it as the needful preliminary
to his resurrection and ascension, by which the severest
difficulties in the theory of Providence, life, and duty,
are alleviated or solved. I conceive of it as immediately
procuring the universality and spirituality of the Gospel; by
dissolving those corporeal ties which give nationality to Jesus,
and making him, in his heavenly and immortal form, the
Messiah of humanity; blessing, sanctifying, regenerating, not
a people from the centre of Jerusalem, but a world from his
station in the Heavens. And these views, under unimportant
modifications, I submit, are the only ones of which Scripture
contains a trace.
All this, however, we are assured, is the mere outside aspect
of the crucifixion; and wholly insignificant compared with
the invisible character and relations of the scene; which,
localized only on earth, has its chief effect in Hell; and
though presenting itself among the occurrences of time, is a
repeal of the decretals of Eternity. The being who hangs
upon that cross is not man alone; but also the everlasting
God, who created and upholds all things, even the sun that now
darkens its face upon him, and the murderers who are waiting
for his expiring cry. The anguish he endures is not
chiefly that which falls so poignantly on the eye and ear of the
spectator; the injured human affections, the dreadful momentary
doubt; the pulses of physical torture, doubling on
him with full and broken wave, till driven back by the overwhelming
power of love disinterested and divine. But he is
judicially abandoned by the Infinite Father; who expends on
him the immeasurable wrath due to an apostate race, gathers
up into an hour the lightnings of Eternity, and lets them
loose upon that bended head. It is the moment of retributive
justice; the expiation of all human guilt; that open
brow hides beneath it the despair of millions of men; and
to the intensity of agony there, no human wail could give
expression. Meanwhile, the future brightens on the Elect;
the tempests that hung over their horizon are spent. The
vengeance of the lawgiver having had its way, the sunshine
of a Father’s grace breaks forth, and lights up, with
hope and beauty, the earth, which had been a desert of
despair and sin. According to this theory, Christ, in his
death, was a proper expiatory sacrifice; he turned aside,
by enduring it for them, the infinite punishment of sin
from all past or future believers in this efficacy of the
cross; and transferred to them the natural rewards of his
own righteousness. An acceptance of this doctrine is declared
to be the prime condition of the divine forgiveness;
for no one who does not see the pardon, can have it. And
this pardon again, this clear score for the past, is a necessary
preliminary to all sanctification; to all practical
opening of a disinterested heart towards our Creator and
man. Pardon, and the perception of it, are the needful
preludes to that conforming love to God and men, which
is the true Christian salvation.
The evidence in support of this theory is derived partly
from natural appearances, partly from scriptural announcements.
Involving, as it does, statements respecting the
actual condition of human nature, and the world in which
we live, some appeal to experience, and to the rational
interpretation of life and Providence, is inevitable; and
hence certain propositions, affecting to be of a philosophical
character, are laid down as fundamental by the advocates
of this system. Yet it is admitted, that direct
revelation only could have acquainted us, either with our
lost condition, or our vicarious recovery; and that all we
can expect to accomplish with nature, is to harmonize what
we observe there, with what we read in the written
records of God’s will; so that the main stress of the
argument rests on the interpretation of Scripture. The
principles deduced from the nature of things, and laid
down as a basis for this doctrine, may be thus represented:
That man needs a Redeemer; having obviously fallen,
by some disaster, into a state of misery and guilt, from
which the worst penal consequences must be apprehended;
and were it not for the probability of such lapse from the
condition in which it was fashioned, it would be impossible
to reconcile the phenomena of the world with the justice
and benevolence of its Creator.
That Deity only can redeem; since, to preserve veracity,
the penalty of sin must be inflicted; and the diversion
only, not the annihilation, of it, is possible. To let it fall
on angels, would fail of the desired end; because human
sin, having been directed against an infinite Being, has
incurred an infinitude of punishment; which, on no created
beings, could be exhausted in any period short of eternity.
Only a nature strictly infinite can compress within itself,
in the compass of an hour, the woes distributed over the
immortality of mankind. Hence, were God personally
One, like man, no redemption could be effected; for there
would be no Deity to suffer, except the very One who
must punish. But the triplicity of the Godhead relieves all
difficulty; for, while one Infinite inflicts, another Infinite
endures; and resources are furnished for the atonement.
Amid a great variety of forms in which the theory of
atonement exists, I have selected the foregoing; which, if I
understand aright, is that which is vindicated in the present
controversy. I am not aware that I have added anything
to the language in which it is stated by its powerful advocate,
unless it be a few phrases, leaving its essential meaning
the same, but needful to render it compact and clear.
The scriptural evidence is found principally in certain of
the apostolical epistles; and this circumstance will render
it necessary to conduct a separate search into the historical
writings of the New Testament, that we may ascertain
how they express the corresponding set of ideas. Taking up
successively these two branches of the subject, the natural
and the biblical, I propose to show, first, that this doctrine
is inconsistent with itself; secondly, that it is inconsistent
with the Christian idea of Salvation.
I. It is inconsistent with itself.
(1.) In its manner of treating the principles of natural
religion.
Our faith in the infinite benevolence of God is represented
as destitute of adequate support from the testimony
of nature.[295] It requires, we are assured, the suppression
of a mass of appearances, that would scare it away in an
instant, were it to venture into their presence; and is a
dream of sickly and effeminate minds, whose belief is the
inward growth of amiable sentimentality, rather than a
genuine production from God’s own facts. The appeal to
the order and magnificence of creation, to the structures
and relations of the inorganic, the vegetable, the animal,
the spiritual forms, that fill the ascending ranks of this
visible and conscious universe;—to the arrangements
which make it a blessing to be born, far more than a
suffering to die,—which enable us to extract the relish of
life from its toils, the affections of our nature from its sufferings,
the triumphs of goodness from its temptations;—to
the seeming plan of general progress, which elicits
truth by the self-destruction of error, and by the extinction
of generations gives perpetual rejuveniscence to the
world; this appeal, which is another name for the scheme
of natural religion, is dismissed with scorn; and sin
and sorrow and death are flung in defiance across our
path;—barriers which we must remove, ere we can reach
the presence of a benignant God. Come with us, it is
said, and listen to the wail of the sick infant; look into
the dingy haunts where poverty moans its life away;
bend down your ear to the accursed hum that strays from
the busy hives of guilt; spy into the hold of the slave-ship;
from the factory follow the wasted child to the gin-shop
first, and then to the cellar called its home; or look
even at your own tempted and sin-bound souls, and your
own perishing race, snatched off into the dark by handfuls
through the activity of a destroying God; and tell
us, did our benevolent Creator make a creature and a world
like this? A Calvinist who puts this question is playing
with fire. But I answer the question explicitly: all these
things we have met steadily and face to face; in full view of
them, we have taken up our faith in the goodness of God;
and in full view of them we will hold fast that faith. Nor
is it just or true to affirm, that our system hides these
evils, or that our practice refuses to grapple with them.
And if you confess, that these ills of life would be too
much for your natural piety; if you declare, that these
rugged foundations and tempestuous elements of Providence
would starve and crush your confidence in God, while
ours strikes its roots in the rock, and throws out its
branches to brave the storm, are you entitled to taunt us
with a faith of puny growth? Meanwhile, we willingly
assent to the principle which this appeal to evil is designed
to establish; that, with much apparent order, there is some
apparent disorder in the phenomena of the world; that
from the latter, by itself, we should be unable to infer any
goodness and benevolence in God; and that were not the
former clearly the predominant result of natural laws, the
character of the Great Cause of all things would be involved
in agonizing gloom. The mass of physical and
moral evil we do not profess fully to explain; we think
that in no system whatever is there any approach to an
explanation; and we are accustomed to touch on that
dread subject with the humility of filial trust, not with
the confidence of dogmatic elucidation.
Surely the fall of our first parents, I shall be reminded,
gives the requisite solution. The disaster which then befell
the human race, has changed the primeval constitution of
things; introduced mortality, and all the infirmities of which
it is the result; introduced sin, and all the seeds of vile affections
which it compels us to inherit; introduced also the
penalties of sin, visible in part on this scene of life, and developing
themselves in another in anguish everlasting. Fresh
from the hand of his Creator, man was innocent, happy and
holy; and he it is, not God, who has deformed the world
with guilt and grief.
Now, as a statement of fact, all this may or may not be
true. Of this I say nothing. But who does not see that, as an
explanation, it is inconsistent with itself, partial in its application,
and leaves matters incomparably worse than it found
them? It is inconsistent with itself; for Adam, perfectly
pure and holy as he is reputed to have been, gave the only
proof that could exist of his being neither, by succumbing to
the first temptation that came in his way; and though finding
no enjoyment but in the contemplation of God, gave
himself up to the first advances of the devil. Never surely
was a reputation for sanctity so cheaply won. The canonizations
of the Romish Calendar have been curiously bestowed,
on beings sufficiently remote from just ideas of excellence;
but, usually, there is something to be affirmed of them, legendary
or otherwise, which, if true, might justify a momentary
admiration. But our first parent was not laid even under
this necessity, to obtain a glory greater than canonization;
he had simply to do nothing, except to fall, in order to be
esteemed the most perfectly holy of created minds. Most
partial, too, is this theory in its application; for disease and
hardship, and death unmerited as the infant’s, afflict the
lower animal creation. Is this, too, the result of the fall? If
so, it is an unredeemed effect; if not, it presses on the benevolence
of the Maker; and by the physical analogies which
connect man with the inferior creatures, force on us the impression,
that his corporeal sufferings have an original source
not dissimilar from theirs. And again, this explanation only
serves to make matters worse than before. For how puerile
is it to suppose, that men will rest satisfied with tracing back
their ills to Adam, and refrain from asking, who was Adam’s
cause! And then comes upon us at once the ancient dilemma
about evil; was it mistake, or was it malignity, that created
so poor a creature as our progenitor, and staked on so precarious
a will the blessedness of a race and the well-being
of a world? So far, this theory, falsely and injuriously ascribed
to Christianity, would leave us where we were: but
it carries us into deeper and gratuitous difficulties, of which
natural religion knows nothing, by appending eternal consequences
to Adam’s transgression; a large portion of which,
after the most sanguine extension of the efficacy of the
atonement, must remain unredeemed. So that if, under the
eye of naturalism, the world, with its generations dropping
into the grave, must appear (as we heard it recently described)[296]
like the populous precincts of some castle, whose
governor called his servants, after a brief indulgence of liberty
and peace, into a dark and inscrutable dungeon, never to
return or be seen again: the only new feature which this
theory introduces into the prospect is this; that the interior
of that cavernous prison-house is disclosed; and while a few of
the departed are seen to have emerged into a fairer light, and
to be traversing greener fields, and sharing a more blessed
liberty than they knew before, the vast multitude are discerned
in the gripe of everlasting chains, and the twist of
unimaginable torture. And all this infliction is a penal consequence
of a first ancestor’s transgression! Singular spectacle
to be offered in vindication of the character of God!
We are warned, however, not to start back from this representation,
or to indulge in any rash expression at the view
which it gives of the justice of the Most High; for that, beyond
all doubt, parallel instances occur in the operations of
nature; and that if the system deduced from Scripture accords
with that which is in action in the creation, there arises
a strong presumption that both are from the same Author.
The arrangement which is the prime subject of objection in
the foregoing theory, viz., the vicarious transmission of consequences
from acts of vice and virtue, is said to be familiar
to our observation as a fact; and ought, therefore, to present
no difficulties in the way of the admission of a doctrine. Is
it not obvious, for example, that the guilt of a parent may
entail disease and premature death on his child, or even remoter
descendants? And if it be consistent with the divine
perfections, that the innocent should suffer for others’ sins
at the distance of one generation, why not at the distance
of a thousand? The guiltless victim is not more completely
severed from identity with Adam, than he is from identity
with his own father. My reply is brief: I admit both the
fact and the analogy; but the fact is of the exceptional kind,
from which, by itself, I could not infer the justice or the benevolence
of the Creator; and which, were it of large and prevalent
amount, I could not even reconcile with these perfections.
If then you take it out of the list of exceptions and difficulties,
and erect it into a cardinal rule, if you interpret by it the
whole invisible portion of God’s government, you turn the
scale at once against the character of the Supreme, and plant
creation under a tyrant’s sway. And this is the fatal principle
pervading all analogical arguments in defence of Trinitarian
Christianity. No resemblances to the system can be found in
the universe, except in those anomalies and seeming deformities
which perplex the student of Providence, and which
would undermine his faith, were they not lost in the vast
spectacle of beauty and of good. These disorders are selected
and spread out to view, as specimens of the divine government
of nature; the mysteries and horrors which offend us
in the popular theology are extended by their side; the comparison
is made, point by point, till the similitude is undeniably
made out; and when the argument is closed, it amounts
to this: do you doubt whether God could break mens’ limbs?
You mistake his strength of character; only see how he puts
out their eyes! What kind of impression this reasoning
may have, seems to me doubtful even to agony. Both Trinitarian
theology and nature, it is triumphantly urged, must proceed
from the same Author; aye, but what sort of Author is
that? You have led me in your quest after analogies, through
the great infirmary of God’s creation! and so haunted am I
by the sights and sounds of the lazar-house, that scarce can
I believe in anything but pestilence; so sick of soul have I
become, that the mountain breeze has lost its scent of health;
and you say, it is all the same in the other world, and
wherever the same rule extends: then I know my fate, that
in this Universe Justice has no throne. And thus, my friends,
it comes to pass, that these reasoners often gain indeed their
victory; but it is known only to the Searcher of Hearts,
whether it is a victory against natural religion, or in favour
of revealed. For this reason, I consider the “Analogy” of
Bishop Butler (one of the profoundest of thinkers, and on
purely moral subjects one of the justest too,) as containing,
with a design directly contrary, the most terrible persuasives
to Atheism that have ever been produced. The essential
error consists in selecting the difficulties,—which are the
rare, exceptional phenomena of nature,—as the basis of analogy
and argument. In the comprehensive and generous
study of Providence, the mind may, indeed, already have
overcome the difficulties, and with the lights recently gained
from the harmony, design, and order of creation, have made
those shadows pass imperceptibly away; but when forced
again into their very centre, compelled to adopt them as a
fixed station and point of mental vision, they deepen round
the heart again, and, instead of illustrating anything, become
solid darkness themselves.
I cannot quit this topic without observing, however, that
there appears to be nothing in nature and life, at all analogous
to the vicarious principle attributed to God in the
Trinitarian scheme of redemption. There is nowhere to be
found any proper transfer or exchange, either of the qualities,
or of the consequences, of vice and virtue. The good and
evil acts of men do indeed affect others as well as themselves;
the innocent suffer with the guilty, as in the case before adduced,
of a child suffering in health by the excesses of a
parent. But there is here no endurance for another, similar
to Christ’s alleged endurance in the place of men; the infliction
on the child is not deducted from the parent; it does
nothing to lighten his load, or make it less than it would
have been, had he been without descendants; nor does any
one suppose his guilt alleviated by the existence of this
innocent fellow-sufferer. There is a nearer approach to analogy
in those cases of crime where the perpetrator seems to
escape, and to leave the consequences of his act to descend
on others; as when the successful cheat eludes pursuit, and
from the stolen gains of neighbours constructs a life of luxury
for himself; or when a spendthrift government, forgetful of
its high trust, turning the professions of patriotism into a
lie, is permitted to run a prosperous career for one generation,
and is personally gone before the popular retribution
falls, in the next, on innocent successors. Here no doubt
the harmless suffer by the guilty, in a certain sense in the
place of the guilty; but not in the sense which the analogy
requires. For there is still no substitution; the distress of
the unoffending party is not struck out of the offender’s
punishment; does not lessen, but rather aggravates his guilt;
and instead of fitting him for pardon, tempts the natural
sentiments of justice to follow him with severer condemnation.
Nor does the scheme receive any better illustration
from the fact, that whoever attempts the cure of misery must
himself suffer; must have the shadows of ill cast upon his
spirit from every sadness he alleviates; and interpose himself
to stay the plague which, in a world diseased, threatens to
pass to the living from the dead. The parallel fails, because
there is still no transference: the appropriate sufferings of
sin are not given to the philanthropist; and the noble pains
of goodness in him, the glorious strife of his self-sacrifice,
are no part of the penal consequences of others’ guilt; they
do not cancel one iota of those consequences, or make the
crimes which have demanded them, in any way, more ready
for forgiveness. Indeed, it is not in the good man’s sufferings,
considered as such, that any efficacy resides; but in
his efforts, which may be made with great sacrifice or without
it, as the case may be. Nor, at best, is there any proper
annihilation of consequences at all, accruing from his toils; the
past acts of wrong which call up his resisting energies, are
irrevocable, the guilt incurred, the penalty indestructible;
the series of effects, foreign to the mind of the perpetrator,
may be abbreviated; prevention may be applied to new ills
which threaten to arise; but, by all this, the personal fitness
of the delinquent for forgiveness is wholly unaffected; the
volition of sin has gone forth; and on it, flies, as surely as
sound on a vibration of the air, the verdict of judgment.
Those who are affected by slight and failing analogies
like these, would do well to consider one, sufficiently obvious,
which seems to throw doubt upon their scheme. The
atonement is thought to be, in respect to all believers, a
reversal of the fall: the effects of the fall are partly visible
and temporal, partly invisible and eternal; linked, however,
together as inseparable portions of the same penal system.
Now it is evident, that the supposed redemption on the cross
has left precisely where they were, all the visible effects of
the first transgression: sorrow and toil are the lot of all,
as they have been from of old; the baptized infant utters
a cry as sad as the unbaptized; and between the holiness
of the true believer and the worth of the devout heretic,
there is not discernible such a difference as there must
have been between Adam pure and perfect, and Adam
lapsed and lost. And is it presumptuous to reason from
the seen to the unseen, from the part which we experience
to that which we can only conceive? If the known effects
are unredeemed, the suspicion is not unnatural, that so are
the unknown.
I sum up, then, this part of my subject by observing, that
besides many inconclusive appeals to nature, the advocates
of the vicarious scheme are chargeable with this fundamental
inconsistency. They appear to deny that the justice and
benevolence of God can be reconciled with the phenomena
of nature; and say that the evidence must be helped out by
resort to their interpretation of scripture. When, having
heard this auxiliary system, we protest that it renders the
case sadder than before, they assure us that it is all benevolent
and just, because it has its parallel in creation. They
renounce and adopt, in the same breath, the religious appeal
to the universe of God.
(2.) Another inconsistency appears, in the view which
this theory gives of the character of God.
It is assumed that, at the æra of creation, the Maker of
mankind had announced the infinite penalties which must
follow the violation of his law; and that their amount
did not exceed the measure which his abhorrence of wrong
required. “And that which he saith, he would not be God
if he did not perform: that which he perceived right, he
would be unworthy of our trust, did he not fulfil. His
veracity and justice, therefore, were pledged to adhere to
the word that had gone forth: and excluded the possibility
of any free and unconditional forgiveness.” Now I would
note in passing, that this announcement to Adam of an
eternal punishment impending over his first sin, is simply a
fiction; for the warning to him is stated thus; “In the day
that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die;”[297] from which
our progenitor must have been as ingenious as a theologian, to
extract the idea of endless life in Hell. But to say no more
of this, what notions of veracity have we here? When a
sentence is proclaimed against crime, is it indifferent to judicial
truth, upon whom it falls? Personally addressed to the
guilty, may it descend without a lie upon the guiltless?
Provided there is the suffering, is it no matter where? Is
this the sense in which God is no respecter of persons?
Oh! what deplorable reflection of human artifice is this,
that Heaven is too veracious to abandon its proclamation of
menace against transgressors; yet is content to vent it on
goodness the most perfect. No darker deed can be imagined,
than is thus ascribed to the Source of all perfection, under
the insulted names of truth and holiness. What reliance
could we have on the faithfulness of such a Being? If it
be consistent with his nature to punish by substitution,
what security is there that he will not reward vicariously?
All must be loose and unsettled, the sentiments of reverence
confused, the perceptions of conscience indistinct, where the
terms expressive of those great moral qualities which render
God himself most venerable, are thus sported with and
profaned.
The same extraordinary departure from all intelligible
meaning of words is apparent, when our charge of vindictiveness
against the doctrine of sacrifice is repelled as a slander.
If the rigorous refusal of pardon, till the whole penalty has
been inflicted (when, indeed, it is no pardon at all) be not
vindictive, we may ask to be furnished with some better
definition. And though it is said, that God’s love was manifested
to us by the gift of his Son, this does but change the
object on which this quality is exercised, without removing
the quality itself; putting us indeed into the sunshine of his
grace, but the Saviour into the tempest of his wrath. Did we
desire to sketch the most dreadful form of character, what
more emphatic combination could we invent than this; rigour
in the exaction of penal suffering; and indifference as to the
person on whom it falls?
But in truth this system, in its delineations of the Great
Ruler of creation, bids defiance to all the analogies by which
Christ and the Christian heart have delighted to illustrate
his nature. A God who could accept the spontaneously
returning sinner, and restore him by corrective discipline,
is pronounced not worth serving, and an object of contempt.[298]
If so, Jesus sketched an object of contempt when
he drew the father of the prodigal son, opening his arms to
the poor penitent, and needing only the sight of his misery
to fall on his neck with the kiss of welcome home. Let
the assertions be true, that sacrifice and satisfaction are
needful preliminaries to pardon, that to pay any attention
to repentance without these is mere weakness, and that it
is a perilous deception to teach the doctrine of mercy apart
from the atonement; and this parable of our Saviour’s becomes
the most pernicious instrument of delusion; a statement,
absolute and unqualified, of a feeble and sentimental
heresy. Who does not see what follows from this scornful
exclusion of corrective punishment? Suppose the infliction
not to be corrective, that is, not to be designed for any good,
what then remains as the cause of the Divine retribution?
The sense of insult offered to a law. And thus we are
virtually told, that God must be regarded with a mixture
of contempt, unless he be susceptible of personal affront.[299]
(3.) The last inconsistency with itself which I shall
point out in this doctrine, will be found in the view which
it gives of the work of Christ. Sin, we are assured, is
necessarily infinite. Its infinitude arises from its reference
to an Infinite Being; and involves as a consequence the
necessity of redemption by Deity himself.
The position, that guilt be estimated not by its amount
or its motive, but by the dignity of the being against whom
it is directed, is illustrated by the case of an insubordinate
soldier, whose punishment is increased, according as his
rebellion assails an equal, or any of the many grades amongst
his superiors. It is evident, however, that it is not the
dignity of the person, but the magnitude of the effect,
which determines the severity of the sanction by which, in
such an instance, law enforces order. Insult to a monarch
is more sternly treated than injury to a subject, because it
incurs the risk of wider and more disastrous consequences,
and superadds to the personal injury a peril to an official
power which, not resting on individual superiority, but on
conventional arrangement, is always precarious. It is not
indeed easy to form a distinct notion of an infinite act in
a finite agent; and still less is it easy to evade the inference,
that if an immoral deed against God be an infinite demerit,
a moral deed towards him must be an infinite merit.
Passing by an assertion so unmeaning, and conceding it
for the sake of progress in our argument, I would inquire
what is intended by that other statement, that only Deity
can redeem, and that by Deity the sacrifice was made? The
union of the divine and human natures in Christ is said to
have made his sufferings meritorious in an infinite degree.
Yet we are repeatedly assured, that it was in his manhood
only that he endured and died. If the divine nature in
our Lord had a joint consciousness with the human, then
did God suffer and perish; if not, then did the man only
die, Deity being no more affected by his anguish, than by
that of the malefactors on either side. In the one case
the perfections of God, in the other the reality of the atonement,
must be relinquished. No doubt, the popular belief
is, that the Creator literally expired; the hymns in common
use declare it; the language of pulpits sanctions it; the
consistency of creeds requires it; but professed theologians
repudiate the idea with indignation. Yet by silence or
ambiguous speech, they encourage, in those whom they are
bound to enlighten, this degrading humanization of Deity;
which renders it impossible for common minds to avoid
ascribing to him emotions and infirmities, totally irreconcileable
with the serene perfections of the Universal Mind.
In his influence on the worshipper, He is no Spirit, who
can be invoked by his agony and bloody sweat, his cross
and passion. And the piety that is thus taught to bring
its incense, however sincere, before the mental image of a
being with convulsed features and expiring cry, has little
left of that which makes Christian devotion characteristically
venerable.
II. I proceed to notice the inconsistency of the doctrine
under review with the Christian idea of salvation.
There is one significant scriptural fact, which suggests to
us the best mode of treating this part of our subject. It
is this; that the language supposed to teach the atoning
efficacy of the cross, does not appear in the New Testament
till the Gentile controversy commences, nor ever occurs
apart from the treatment of that subject, under some of
its relations. The cause of this phenomenon will presently
appear; meanwhile I state it, in the place of an assertion
sometimes incorrectly made, viz., that the phraseology in
question is confined to the epistles. Even this mechanical
limitation of sacrificial passages is indeed nearly true, as not
above three or four have strayed beyond the epistolary
boundary, into the Gospels and the book of Acts: but the
restriction in respect of subject, which I have stated, will
be found, I believe, to be absolutely exact, and to furnish
the real interpretation to the whole system of language.
(1.) Let us then first test the vicarious scheme by reference
to the sentiments of Scripture generally, and of our Lord
and his apostles especially, where this controversy is out of
the way. Are their ideas respecting human character, the
forgiveness of sins, the terms of everlasting life, accordant
with the cardinal notions of a believer in the atonement?
Do they, or do they not, insist on the necessity of a sacrifice
for human sin, as a preliminary to pardon, to sanctification,
to the love of God? Do they, or do they not, direct a
marked and almost exclusive attention to the cross, as the
object to which, far more than to the life and resurrection
of our Lord, all faithful eyes should be directed?
(a.) Now to the fundamental assertion of the vicarious
system, that the Deity cannot, without inconsistency and
imperfection, pardon on simple repentance, the whole tenor
of the Bible is one protracted and unequivocal contradiction.
So copious is its testimony on this head, that if the passages
containing it were removed, scarcely a shred of Scripture
relating to the subject would remain. “Pardon, I beseech
thee,” said Moses, pleading for the Israelites, “the iniquity of
this people, according to the greatness of thy mercy, and
as thou hast forgiven this people, from Egypt even until
now; and the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy
word.”[300] Will it be affirmed, that this chosen people had
their eyes perpetually fixed in faith on the great propitiation,
which was to close their dispensation, and of which
their own ceremonial was a type?—that whenever penitence
and pardon are named amongst them, this reference is implied,
and that as this faith was called to mind and expressed
in the shedding of blood at the altar, such sacrificial offerings
take the place, in Judaism, of the atoning trust in Christianity?
Well then, let us quit the chosen nation altogether,
and go to a heathen people, who were aliens to their laws,
their blood, their hopes, and their religion; to whom no
sacrifice was appointed, and no Messiah promised. If we
can discover the dealings of God with such a people, the
case, I presume, must be deemed conclusive. Hear then,
what happened on the banks of the Tigris. “Jonah began
to enter into the city,” (Nineveh,) “and he cried and said,
yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the
people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and
put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even unto the
least of them.” “Who can tell,” (said the decree of the
king ordaining the fast), “if God will turn and repent, and
turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? And
God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way;
and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do
unto them; and he did it not.”[301] And when the prophet
was offended, first at this clemency to Nineveh, and afterwards
that the canker was sent to destroy his own favourite
plant, beneath whose shadow he sat, what did Jehovah say?
“Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not
laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night
and perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh,
that great city, wherein are more than six-score thousand
persons that cannot discern between their right hand and
their left hand?”[302] —and who are not likely, one would
think, to have discerned the future merits of the Redeemer.
In truth, if even the Israelites had any such prospective
views to Calvary, if their sacrifices conveyed the idea of the
cross erected there, and were established for this purpose,
the fact must have been privately revealed to modern theologians;
for not a trace of it can be found in the Hebrew
writings. It must be thought strange, that a prophetic reference
so habitual, should be always a secret reference; that
a faith so fundamental should be so mysteriously suppressed;
that the uppermost idea of a nation’s mind should never
have found its way to lips or pen. “But if it were not so,”
we are reminded, “if the Jewish ritual prefigured nothing
ulterior, it was revolting, trifling, savage; its worship a
butchery, and the temple courts no better than a slaughter
house.” And were they not equally so, though the theory
of types be true? If neither priest nor people could see at
the time the very thing which the ceremonial was constructed
to reveal, what advantage is it that divines can see it now?
And even if the notion was conveyed to the Jewish mind,
(which the whole history shows not to have been the fact,)
was it necessary that hecatombs should be slain, age after
age, to intimate obscurely an idea, which one brief sentence
might have lucidly expressed? The idea, however, it is
evident, slipped through after all; for when Messiah actually
came, the one great thing which the Jews did not know and
believe about him was, that he could die at all. So much
for the preparatory discipline of fifteen centuries!
There is no reason then why anything should be supplied
in our thoughts, to alter the plain meaning of the announcements
of prophets and holy men, of God’s unconditional
forgiveness on repentance. “Thou desirest not sacrifice,
else would I give it; thou delightest not in burnt offering;
the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a
contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”[303] “Wash
you, make you clean,” says the prophet Isaiah in the name
of the Lord; “put away the evil of your doings from before
mine eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek
judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead
for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith
the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be
white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall
be as wool.”[304] Once more, “When I say unto the wicked,
thou shalt surely die; if he turn from his sin, and do that
which is lawful and right; if the wicked restore the pledge,
give again that he had robbed, walk in the statutes of life
without committing iniquity; he shall surely live, he shall
not die.”[305] Nor are the teachings of the Gospel at all less
explicit. Our Lord treats largely and expressly on the
doctrine of forgiveness in several parables, and especially
that of the prodigal son; and omits all allusion to the
propitiation for the past. He furnishes an express definition
of the terms of eternal life; “Good master, what good thing
shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto
him, why callest thou me good; there is none good save one,
that is God; but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.”
And Jesus adds, “if thou wilt be perfect, go
and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt
have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”[306] This
silence on the prime condition of pardon cannot be explained
by the fact, that the crucifixion had not yet taken place,
and could not safely be alluded to, before the course of
events had brought it into prominent notice. For we have
the preaching of the Apostles, after the ascension, recorded
at great length, and under very various circumstances, in
the book of Acts. We have the very “words whereby,”
according to the testimony of an angel, “Cornelius and all
his house shall be saved;” these, one would think, would
be worth hearing in this cause: “God anointed Jesus of
Nazareth with the Holy Ghost, and with power; who went
about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of
the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of
all things which he did, both in the land of the Jews and
in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree; him
God raised up the third day, and showed openly; not to
all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God,
even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose
from the dead. And he commanded us to preach unto the
people, and to testify, that it is he who was ordained of
God to be the judge of quick and dead. To him give all
the prophets witness, that, through his name, whosoever
believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.”[307] Did an
Evangelical missionary dare to preach in this style now,
he would be immediately disowned by his employers, and
dismissed as a disguised Socinian, who kept back all the
“peculiar doctrines of the Gospel.”
(b.) The emphatic mention of the resurrection by the
apostle Peter in this address, is only a particular instance of
a system which pervades the whole preaching of the first
missionaries of Christ. This, and not the cross, with its
supposed effects, is the grand object to which they call the
attention and the faith of their hearers. I cannot quote to
you the whole book of Acts; but every reader knows, that
“Jesus and the resurrection” constitutes the leading theme,
the central combination of ideas in all its discourses. This
truth was shed, from Peter’s tongue of fire, on the multitudes
that heard amazed the inspiration of the day of Pentecost.[308]
Again, it was his text, when passing beneath the
beautiful gate, he made the cripple leap for joy; and then,
with the flush of this deed still fresh upon him, leaned
against a pillar in Solomon’s porch, and spake in explanation
to the awe-struck people, thronging in at the hour of
prayer.[309] Before priests and rulers, before Sanhedrim and
populace, the same tale is told again, to the utter exclusion,
be it observed, of the essential doctrine of the cross.[310] The
authorities of the temple, we are told, were galled and
terrified at the apostle’s preaching; “naturally enough,” it
will be said, “since, the real sacrifice having been offered,
their vocation, which was to make the prefatory and
typical oblation, was threatened with destruction.” But
no, this is not the reason given: “They were grieved
because they preached, through Jesus, the resurrection from
the dead.”[311] Paul, too, while his preaching was spontaneous
and free, and until he had to argue certain controversies
which have long ago become obselete, manifested
a no less remarkable predilection for this topic. Before
Felix, he declares what was the grand indictment of his
countrymen against him; “touching the resurrection of the
dead, I am called in question of you this day.”[312] Follow
him far away from his own land; and, with foreigners, he
harps upon the same subject, as if he were a man of one
idea; which, indeed, according to our opponents’ scheme, he
ought to have been, only it should have been another idea.
Seldom, however, can we meet with a more exuberant mind
than Paul’s; yet the resurrection obviously haunts him
wherever he goes: in the synagogue of Antioch, you hear
him dwelling on it with all the energy of his inspiration;[313]
and, at Athens, it was this on which the scepticism of Epicureans
and Stoics fastened for a scoff.[314] In his epistles, too,
where he enlarges so much on justification by faith, when we
inquire what precisely is this faith, and what the object it is
to contemplate and embrace, this remarkable fact presents
itself: that the one only important thing respecting Christ,
which is never once mentioned as the object of justifying
faith is his death, and blood, and cross. “Faith” by itself,
the “faith of Jesus Christ,” “faith of the Gospel,” “faith of
the Son of God,” are expressions of constant occurrence;
and wherever this general description is replaced by a more
specific account of this justifying state of mind, it is faith in
the resurrection on which attention is fastened. “It is Christ
that died, yea rather, that is risen again.”[315] “He was delivered
for our offences, and raised again for our justification.”[316]
“Faith shall be imputed to us for righteousness, if
we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the
dead.”[317] Hear too, the Apostle’s definition of saving faith:
“If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and
shalt believe in thy heart that God hath raised him from the
dead, thou shalt be saved.”[318] The only instance, in which the
writings of St. Paul appear to associate the word faith with
the death of Christ, is the following text: “whom God hath
set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood;”[319]
and in this case the Apostle’s meaning would, I conceive, be
more faithfully given by destroying this conjunction, and
disposing the words thus: “whom God hath set forth to be a
propitiation by his blood, through faith.” The idea of his
blood, or death, belongs to the word ‘propitiation,’ not to the
word ‘faith.’ To this translation no Trinitarian scholar, I am
persuaded, can object;[320] and when the true meaning of the
writer’s sacrificial language is explained, the distinction will
appear to be not unimportant. At present I am concerned
only with the defence of my position, that the death of
Christ is never mentioned as the object of saving faith; but
that his resurrection unquestionably is. This phenomenon
in Scripture phraseology is so extraordinary, so utterly repugnant
to everything which a hearer of orthodox preaching
would expect, that I hardly expect my affirmation of it to
be believed. The two ideas of faith, and of our Lord’s death,
are so naturally and perpetually united in the mind of every
believer in the atonement, that it must appear to him incredible,
that they should never fall together in the writings
of the Apostles. However, I have stated my fact; and
it is for you to bring it to the test of Scripture.
(c.) Independently of all written testimony, moral reasons,
we are assured, exist, which render an absolute remission for
the past essential to a regenerated life for the future. Our
human nature is said to be so constituted, that the burden
of sin, on the conscience once awakened, is intolerable:
our spirit cries aloud for mercy; yet is so straitened by the
bands of sin, so conscious of the sad alliance lingering still,
so full of hesitancy and shame when seeking the relief of
prayer, so blinded by its tears when scanning the heavens
for an opening of light and hope, that there is no freedom,
no unrestrained and happy love to God; but a pinched and
anxious mind, bereft of power, striving to work with bandaged
or paralytic will, instead of trusting itself to loosened
and self-oblivious affections. Hence it is thought, that the
sin of the past must be cancelled, before the holiness of the
future can be commenced; that it is a false order to represent
repentance as leading to pardon; because to be forgiven
is the pre-requisite to love. We cannot forget, however,
how distinctly and emphatically he who, after God, best
knew what is in man, has contradicted this sentiment; for
when that sinful woman, whose presence in the house shocked
the sanctimonious Pharisee, stood at his feet as he reclined,
washing them with her tears, and kissing them with reverential
lips; Jesus turned to her and said, “her sins, which
are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.”[321] From him,
then, we learn what our own hearts would almost teach, that
love may be the prelude to forgiveness, as well as forgiveness
the preparative for love.
At the same time let me acknowledge, that this statement
respecting the moral effects of conscious pardon, to which I
have invoked Jesus to reply, is by no means an unmixed error.
It touches upon a very profound and important truth; and
I can never bring myself to regard that assurance of divine
forgiveness, which the doctrine of atonement imparts, as a
demoralizing state of mind, encouraging laxity of conscience
and a continuance in sin. The sense of pardon doubtless
reaches the secret springs of gratitude, presents the soul with
an object, strange before, of new and divine affection; and
binds the child of redemption, by all generous and filial
obligations, to serve with free and willing heart the God who
hath gone forth to meet him. That the motives of self-interest
are diminished in such a case, is a trifle that need
occasion small anxiety. For the human heart is no labourer
for hire; and, where there is opportunity afforded for true
and noble love, will thrust away the proffered wages, and toil
rather in a free and thankful spirit. If we are to compare,
as a source of duty, the grateful with the merely prudential
temper, rather may we trust the first, as not the worthier
only, but the stronger too; and till we obtain emancipation
from the latter,—forget the computations of hope and fear,
and precipitate ourselves for better for worse on some object
of divine love and trust,—our nature will be puny and
weak, our wills will turn in sickness from their duty, and
our affections shrink in aversion from their heaven. But
though personal gratitude is better than prudence, there is
a higher service still. A more disinterested love may
spring from the contemplation of what God is in himself,
than from the recollection of what he has done for us; and
when this mingles most largely as an element among our
springs of action; when, humbled indeed by a knowledge
of dangers that await us, and thankful, too, for the blessings
spread around us, we yet desire chiefly to be fitting
children of the everlasting Father and the holy God;
when we venerate him for the graciousness and purity
and majesty of his spirit, impersonated in Jesus; and
resolve to serve him truly, before he has granted the
desire of our heart, and because he is of a nature so sublime
and merciful and good; then are we in the condition
of her who bent over the feet of Christ; and we are forgiven,
because we have loved much.
(2.) Let us now, in conclusion, turn our attention to
those portions of the New Testament, which speak of the
death of Christ as the means of redemption.
I have said, that these are to be found exclusively in passages
of the sacred writings which treat of the Gentile
controversy, or of topics immediately connected with it.
This controversy arose naturally out of the design of Providence
to make the narrow, exclusive, ceremonial system of
Judaism, give birth to the universal and spiritual religion of
the Gospel; from God’s method of expanding the Hebrew
Messiah into the Saviour of humanity. For this the nation
was not prepared; to this even the Hebrew Christians could
not easily conform their faith; and in the achievement of this,
or in persuading the world that it was achieved, did Paul
spend his noble life, and write his astonishing epistles. The
Jews knew that the Deliverer was to be of their peculiar stock,
and their royal lineage; they believed that he would gather
upon himself all the singularities of their race, and be a
Hebrew to intensity; that he would literally restore the
kingdom to Israel; aye, and extend it too, immeasurably
beyond the bounds of its former greatness; till, in fact, it
swallowed up all existing principalities and powers, and
thrones, and dominions, and became co-extensive with the
earth. Then in Jerusalem, as the centre of the vanquished nations,—before
the temple, as the altar of a humbled world,
did they expect the Messiah to erect his throne; and when he
had taken the seat of judgment, to summon all the tribes before
his tribunal, and pass on the Gentiles, excepting the few who
might submit to the law, a sentence of perpetual exclusion
from his realm; while his own people would be invited to the
seats of honour, occupy the place of authority and sit down
with him (the greatest at his right hand and his left) at his
table in his kingdom. The holy men of old were to come on
earth again to see this day. And many thought that every part
of the realm thus constituted, and all its inhabitants, would
never die: but like the Messiah himself, and the patriarchs
whom he was to call to life, would be invested with immortality.
None were to be admitted to these golden days except
themselves; all else to be left in outer darkness from this
region of light, and there to perish and be seen no more. The
grand title to admission was conformity with the Mosaic law;
the most ritually scrupulous were the most secure; and the
careless Israelite, who forgot or omitted an offering, a tithe,
a Sabbath duty, might incur the penalty of exclusion and
death: the law prescribed such mortal punishment for the
smallest offence; and no one, therefore, could feel himself ready
with his claim, if he had not yielded a perfect obedience. If
God were to admit him on any other plea, it would be of
pure grace and goodness, and not in fulfilment of any
promise.
The Jews, being scattered over the civilized world, and
having synagogues in every city, came into perpetual contact
with other people. Nor was it possible that the Gentiles,
among whom they lived, should notice the singular purity
and simplicity of the Israelitish Theism, without some of
them being struck with its spirit, attracted by its sublime
principles, and disposed to place themselves in religious relations
with that singular people. Having been led into
admiration and even profession of the nation’s theology,
they could not but desire to share their hopes; which indeed
were an integral part of their religion, and, at the Christian
era, the one element in it to which they were most passionately
attached. But this was a stretch of charity too great
for any Hebrew; or, at all events, if such admission were
ever to be thought of, it must only be on condition of absolute
submission to the requirements of the law. The Gentile
would naturally plead, that as God had not made him of
the chosen nation, he had given him no law, except that of
conscience; that, being without the law, he must be a law
unto himself; and that if he had lived according to his
light, he could not be justly excluded on the ground of accidental
disqualification. Possibly, in the provocation of
dispute, the Gentile might sometimes become froward and
insolent in his assertion of claim; and, in the pride of his
heart, demand as a right that which, at most, could only be
humbly hoped for as a privilege and a free gift.
Thus were the parties mutually placed to whom the
Deliverer came. Thus dense and complicated was the web
of prejudice which clung round the early steps of the Gospel;
and which must be burst or disentangled ere the glad
tidings could have free course and be glorified. How did
Providence develop from such elements the divine and everlasting
truth? Not by neglecting them, and speaking to
mankind as if they had no such ideas; not by forbidding
his messengers and teachers to have any patience with
them; but, on the contrary, by using these very notions as
temporary means to his everlasting ends; by touching this
and that with light before the eyes of apostles, as if to say,
there are good capabilities in these; the truth may be
educed from them so gently and so wisely, that the world
will find itself in light, without perceiving how it has been
quitting the darkness.
So long as Christ remained on earth, he necessarily confined
his ministry to his nation. He would not have been
the Messiah had he done otherwise. By birth, by lineage,
by locality, by habit, he was altogether theirs. Whoever
then, of his own people, during his mortal life, believed in
him and followed him, became a subject of the Messiah;
ready, it was supposed even by the apostles themselves, to
enter the glory of his kingdom, whenever it should please
him to assume it; qualified at once, by the combination of
pedigree and of belief, to enter into life, to become a member
of the kingdom of God, to take a place among the elect;
for, by all these phrases, was described the admission to the
expected realm. If, then, Jesus had never suffered and
died, if he had never retired from this world, but stayed to
fulfil the anticipations of his first followers, his Messianic
kingdom might have included all the converts of the Israelitish
stock. From the exclusion which fell on others, they
would have obtained salvation. Hence, it is never in connection
with the first Jewish Christians that the death
of Christ is mentioned.
It was otherwise, however, with the Gentiles. They could
not become his followers in his mortal lifetime; and had a
Messianic reign then been set up, they must have been excluded;
no missionary would have been justified in addressing
them with invitation; they could not, as it was said, have
entered into life. The Messiah must cease to be Jewish,
before he could become universal; and this implied his death
by which alone the personal relations, which made him the
property of a nation, could be annihilated. To this he
submitted; he disrobed himself of his corporeality, he became
an immortal spirit; thereby instantly burst his religion
open to the dimensions of the world; and, as he ascended
to the skies, sent it forth to scatter the seeds of blessing
over the field of the world, long ploughed with cares, and
moist with griefs, and softened now to nourish in its bosom
the tree of Life.
Now, how would the effect of this great revolution be
described to the proselyte Gentiles, so long vainly praying
for admission to the Israelitish hope. At once it destroyed
their exclusion; put away as valueless the Jewish claims
of circumcision and law; nailed the hand-writing of ordinances
to the cross; reconciled them that had been afar off;
redeemed them to God by his blood, out of every tongue, and
kindred, and people, and nation; washed them in his blood;
justified them by his resurrection and ascension; an expression,
I would remark, unmeaning on any other explanation.
Even during our Lord’s personal ministry, his approaching
death is mentioned, as the means of introducing the
Gentiles into his Messianic kingdom. He adverts repeatedly
to his cross, as designed to widen, by their admission, the
extent of his sway: and according to Scripture phrase, to
yield to him “much fruit.” He was already on his last
fatal visit to Jerusalem, when, taking the hint from the visit
of some Greeks to him, he exclaimed: “The hour is come,
that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I
say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground
and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth
much fruit.” He adds, in allusion to the death he should
die; “and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw
all men unto me.”[322] It is for this end that he resigns for
awhile his life,—that he may bring in the wanderers who are
not of the commonwealth of Israel: “Other sheep I have,
which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and
they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and
one shepherd: therefore doth my Father love me, because I
lay down my life, that I may take it again.”[323] Many a
parable did Jesus utter, proclaiming his Father’s intended
mercy to the uncovenanted nations: but for himself personally
he declared, “I am not sent, but to the lost sheep of the house
of Israel.”[324] His advent was a promise of their economy;
his office, the traditionary hope of their fathers; his birth,
his life, his person, were under the Law, and excluded him
from relations to those who were beyond its obligations.
On the cross, all the connate peculiarities of the Nazarene
ceased to exist: when, the seal of the sepulchre gave way,
the seal of the law was broken too; the nationality of his
person passed away; for how can an immortal be a Jew?
This then was the time to open wide the scope of his mission,
and to invite to God’s acceptance those that fear
him in every nation. Though, before, the disciple might
“have known Christ after the flesh,” and followed his
steps as the Hebrew Messiah, “yet now henceforth was he
to know him so no more;” these “old things had passed
away,” since he had “died for all,”—died to become universal,—to
drop all exclusive relations, and “reconcile the
world,” the Gentile world, to God.[325] Observe to whom this
“ministry of reconciliation” is especially confided. As if
to show that it is exclusively the risen Christ who belongs
to all men, and that his death was the instrument of the
Gentiles’ admission, their great Apostle was one Paul, who
had not known the Saviour in his mortal life; who never
listened to his voice, till it spake from heaven; who himself
was the convert of his ascension; and bore to him the relation,
not of subject to the person of a Hebrew king, but of
spirit to spirit, unembarrassed by anything earthly, legal, or
historical. Well did Paul understand the freedom and the
sanctity of this relation; and around the idea of the Heavenly
Messiah gathered all his conceptions of the spirituality of
the gospel, of its power over the unconscious affections,
rather than a reluctant will. His believing countrymen were
afraid to disregard the observances of the law, lest it should
be a disloyalty to God, and disqualify them for the Messiah’s
welcome, when he came to take his power and reign. Paul
tells them, that while their Lord remained in this mortal
state, they were right; as representative of the law, and
filling an office created by the religion of Judaism, he could
not but have held them then to its obligations; nor could
they, without infidelity, have neglected its claims, any more
than a wife can innocently separate herself from a living
husband. But as the death of the man sets the woman
free, and makes null the law of their union, so the decease
of Christ’s body emancipates his followers from all legal
relations to him; and they are at liberty to wed themselves
anew to the risen Christ, who dwells where no ordinance is
needful, no tie permitted but of the spirit, and all are as
the angels of God.[326] Surely, then, this mode of conception
explains, why the death of Jesus constitutes a great date
in the Christian economy, especially as expounded by the
friend and apostle of those who were not “Jews by nature,
but sinners of the Gentiles.”[327] Had he never died, they
must have remained aliens from his sway; the enemies
against whom his power must be directed; without hope in
the day of his might; strangers to God and his vicegerent.
But, while thus they “were yet without strength, Christ
died for” these “ungodly;”[328] died to put himself into connection
with them, else impossible; and rising from death
drew them after him into spiritual existence on earth, analogous
to that which he passed in heaven. “You,” says
their Apostle, “being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision
of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him;”
giving you, as “risen with him,” a life above the world
and its law of exclusion,—a life not “subject to ordinances,”
but of secret love and heavenly faith, “hid with Christ in
God;” “blotting out the hand-writing of ordinances that
was against us, which was contrary to us, and taking it out
of the way, nailing it to his cross.”[329] God had never intended
to perpetuate the division between Israel and the
world, receiving the one as the sons, and shutting out the
other as the slaves of his household. If there had been an
appearance of such partiality, he had always designed to
set these bondmen free, and to make them “heirs of God
through Christ;”[330] “in whom they had redemption through
his blood” from their servile state, the forgiveness of disqualifying
sins, according to the riches of his grace.[331] Though
the Hebrews boasted that “theirs was the adoption,”[332] and
till Messiah’s death had boasted truly; yet in that event,
God “before the foundation of the world,” had “blessed
us” (Gentiles) “with all spiritual blessings, in heavenly
places;” “having predestinated us unto the adoption of
children, by Jesus Christ, according” (not indeed to any
right or promise, but) “to the good pleasure of his will,”[333]
“and when we were enemies, having reconciled us, by
the death of his son;”[334] “that in the fulness of times he
might gather together in one all things in Christ;”[335] “by
whom we” (Gentiles) “have now received this atonement”
(reconciliation);[336] that he might have no partial empire,
but that “in him might all fulness dwell.”[337] “Wherefore,”
says their Apostle, “remember that ye, Gentiles in
the flesh, were in time past without Messiah, being aliens
from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the
covenant of promise, having no hope, and without God in
the world; but now in Christ Jesus, ye, who sometime
were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For
he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken
down the middle wall of partition between us” (not between
God and man, but between Jew and Gentile); “having
abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments,
contained in ordinances; for to make in himself, of
twain, one new man, so making peace; and that he might
reconcile both unto God, in one body, by the cross,
having slain the enmity thereby; and came and preached
peace to you who were afar off, as well as to them that were
nigh. For through him we both have access by one spirit
unto the Father.”[338]
The way, then, is clear and intelligible, in which the
death and ascension of the Messiah rendered him universal,
by giving spirituality to his rule; and, on the simple
condition of faith, added the uncovenanted nations to
his dominion, so far as they were willing to receive him.
This idea, and this only, will be found in almost every
passage of the New Testament (excepting the Epistle to
the Hebrews) usually adduced to prove the doctrine of
the Atonement. Some of the strongest of these I have
already quoted; and my readers must judge whether they
have received a satisfactory meaning. There are others, in
which the Gentiles are not so distinctly stated to be the
sole objects of the redemption of the cross: but with
scarcely an exception, so far as I can discover, this limitation
is implied; and either creeps out through some
adjacent expression in the context; or betrays itself, when
we recur to the general course of the Apostle’s argument, or
to the character and circumstances of his correspondents.
Thus Paul says, that Christ “gave himself a ransom for
all, to be testified in due time;” the next verse shows what
is in his mind, when he adds, “whereunto I am ordained a
preacher, and an apostle, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith
and verity:” and the whole sentiment of the context is
the Universality of the Gospel, and the duty of praying for
Gentile kings and people, as not abandoned to a foreign
God and another Mediator; for since Messiah’s death, to
us all “there is but One God, and One Mediator between
God and men, the man Christ Jesus:” wherefore the Apostle
wills, that for all, “men pray everywhere, lifting up holy
hands, without wrath, and doubting,”—without wrath at
their admission, or doubt of their adoption.[339] And wherever
emphasis is laid on the vast number benefited by the cross,
a contrast is implied with the few (only the Jews) who
could have been his subjects, had he not died: and when it
is said, “he gave his life a ransom for many;”[340] his blood
was “shed for many, for the remission of sins;”[341] “thou
wast slain, and hast redeemed us by thy blood, out of
every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; and
hast made us unto our God kings and priests; and we
shall reign on the earth;”[342] “behold the Lamb of God
that taketh away the sin of the world;”[343] —by all these
expressions is still denoted the efficacy of Christ’s death in
removing the Gentile disqualification, and making his dispensation
spiritual as his celestial existence, and universal
as the Fatherhood of God. Does Paul exhort certain of
his disciples, “to feed the church of the Lord, which he
hath purchased with his own blood?”[344] We find that he
is speaking of the Gentile church of Ephesus, whose
elders he is instructing in the management of their charge,
and to which he afterwards wrote the well-known epistle,
on their Gentile freedom and adoption obtained by the
Messiah’s death. When Peter says, “ye know that ye
were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and
gold, from your vain conversation, received by tradition
from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ,
as of a lamb without blemish and without spot,”[345] we
must inquire to whom he is addressing these words. If it
be to the Jews, the interpretation which I have hitherto
given of such language will not apply, and we must seek
an explanation altogether different. But the whole manner
of this epistle, the complexion of its phraseology
throughout, convinces me that it was addressed especially
to the Gentile converts of Asia Minor; and that the redemption
of which it speaks is no other than that which
is the frequent theme of their own apostle.
In the passage just quoted, the form of expression itself
suggests the idea, that Peter is addressing a class which did
not include himself; “YE were not redeemed, &c.:” further
on in the same epistle the same sentiment occurs, however,
without any such visible restriction. Exhorting to
patient suffering for conscience sake, he appeals to the
example of Christ; “who, when he suffered, threatened
not, but committed himself to Him that judgeth righteously:
who, his own self, bare our sins in his own body
on the tree; that we, being dead to sin, should live unto
righteousness:” yet, with instant change in the expression,
revealing his correspondents to us, the Apostle adds,
“by whose stripes YE were healed. For ye were as sheep
going astray; but are now returned unto the shepherd and
bishop of your souls.”[346] With the instinct of a gentle and
generous heart, the writer, treating in plain terms of the
former sins of those whom he addresses, puts himself in
with them; and avoids every appearance of that spiritual
pride, by which the Jew constantly rendered himself offensive
to the Gentile.
Again, in this letter, he recommends the duty of patient
endurance, by appeal to the same consideration of Christ’s
disinterested self-sacrifice. “It is better, if the will of
God be so, that ye suffer for well doing than for evil doing:
for Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the
unjust, that he might bring us to God.” And who are
these “unjust” that are thus brought to God? The
Apostle instantly explains, by describing how the “Jews
by nature” lost possession of Messiah by the death of his
person, and “sinners of the Gentiles” gained him by the
resurrection of his immortal nature; “being put to death
in flesh, but quickened in spirit; and thereby he went and
preached unto the spirits in prison, who formerly were
without faith.” This is clearly a description of the Heathen
world, ere it was brought into relation to the Messianic
promises. Still further confirmation, however, follows.
The Apostle adds: “forasmuch, then, as Christ hath
suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with
the same mind; for the time past of our life may suffice
us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles; when we
walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings,
banquettings, and abominable idolatries.”[347] If we cannot
admit this to be a just description of the holy Apostle’s
former life, we must perceive that, writing to Pagans of
whom it was all true, he beautifully withholds from his
language every trace of invidious distinction, puts himself
for the moment into the same class, and seems to take his
share of the distressing recollection.
The habitual delicacy with which Paul, likewise, classed
himself with every order of persons in turn, to whom he
had any thing painful to say, is known to every intelligent
reader of his epistles. Hence, in his writings too, we
have often to consider with whom it is that he is holding his
dialogue, and to make our interpretation dependent on the
answer. When, for example, he says, that Jesus “was delivered
for our offences, and was raised again for our justification;”
I ask, “for whose?—was it for every body’s?—or
for the Jews’, since Paul was a Hebrew?” On looking closely
into the argument, I find it beyond doubt that neither of
these answers is correct; and that the Apostle, in conformity
with his frequent practice, is certainly identifying himself,
Israelite though he was, with the Gentiles, to whom, at that
moment, his reasoning applies itself. The neighbouring verses
have expressions which clearly enough declare this; “when
we were yet without strength,” and “while we were yet
sinners,” Christ died for us. It is to the Gentile Church
at Corinth, and while expatiating on their privileges and
relations as such, that Paul speaks of the disqualifications
and legal unholiness of the Heathen, as vanishing in the
death of the Messiah; as the recovered leper’s uncleanness
was removed, and his banishment reversed, and his exclusion
from the temple ended, when the lamb without blemish,
which the law prescribed as his sin-offering, bled beneath the
knife, so did God provide, in Jesus, a lamb without blemish
for the exiled and unsanctified Gentiles, to bring them from
their far dwelling in the leprous haunts of this world’s
wilderness, and admit them to the sanctuary of spiritual
health and worship: “He hath made him to be a sin-offering
for us (Gentiles), who knew no sin; that we might be
made the justified of God in him;”[348] entering, under the
Messiah, the community of saints. That, in this sacrificial
allusion, the Gentile adoption is still the Apostle’s only
theme, is evident hence; that twice in this very passage, he
declares that he is speaking of that peculiar “reconciliation,”
the word and ministry of which have been committed to
himself; he is dwelling on the topic most natural to one
who “magnified his office,” as “Apostle of the Gentiles.”
To the same parties was Paul writing, when he said,
“Christ, our passover, is sacrificed for us.”[349] Frequently
as this sentence is cited in evidence of the doctrine of Atonement,
there is hardly a verse in Scripture more utterly inapplicable;
nor, if the doctrine were true, could anything be
more inept than an allusion to it in this place. I do not
dwell on the fact that the paschal lamb was neither sin-offering
nor proper sacrifice at all: for the elucidation of the
death of Jesus by sacrificial analogies is as easy and
welcome, as any other mode of representing it. But I
turn to the whole context, and seek for the leading idea
before multiplying inferences from a subordinate illustration.
I find the author treating, not of the deliverance of
believers from curse or exclusion, but of their duty to keep
the churches cleansed, by the expulsion of notoriously profligate
members. Such persons they are to cast from them,
as the Jews, at the passover, swept from their houses all
the leaven they contained; and as, for eight days at that
season, only pure unleavened bread was allowed for use, so
the church must keep the Gospel-festival, free from the ferment
of malice and wickedness, and tasting nothing but
sincerity and truth. This comparison is the primary sentiment
of the whole passage; under cover of which, the
Apostle is urging the Corinthians to expel a certain licentious
offender: and only because the feast of unleavened
bread, on which his fancy has alighted, set in with the day of
passover, does he allude to this in completion of the figure.
As his correspondents were Gentiles, their Christianity first
became possible with the death of Christ; with him, as an
immortal, their spiritual relations commenced; when he rose,
they rose with him, as by a divine attraction, from an earthly
to a heavenly state; their old and corrupt man had been
buried together with him, and, with the human infirmities of
his person left behind for ever in his sepulchre; and it became
them, “to seek those things which are above,” and to “yield
themselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead.”
This period of the Lord’s sequestration in the heavens, Paul
represents as a festival of purity to the disciples on earth,
ushered in by the self-sacrifice of Christ. The time is come,
he says; cast away the leaven, for the passover is slain,
blessed bread of heaven to them that taste it! let nothing
now be seen in all the household of the church, but the
unleavened cake of simplicity and love.
Paul again appears as the advocate of the Gentiles, when
he protests that now between them and the Jews “there is
no difference; since all have sinned and come short of the
glory of God:” that the Hebrew has lost all claim to the
Messianic adoption, and can have no hope but in that free
grace of God, which has a sovereign right to embrace the
Heathen too; and which, in fact, has compassed the Gentiles
within its redemption, by causing Jesus the Messiah to die;
“by whose blood God hath set forth a propitiation, through
faith; to evince his justice, while overlooking, with the forbearance
of God, transgressions past;—to evince his justice
in the arrangements of the present crisis; which preserve his
justice (to the Israelite), yet justify on mere discipleship
to Jesus.”[350] The great question which the Apostle discusses
throughout this epistle, is this: “on what terms is a
man now admitted as a subject to the Messiah, so as to be
acknowledged by him, when he comes to erect his kingdom?”
“He must be one of the circumcised, to whom alone the holy
law and promises are given,” says the Jew. “That is well,”
replies Paul: “only the promises, you remember, are conditional
on obedience; and he who claims by the law must
stand the judgment of the law. Can your nation abide this
test, and will you stake your hopes upon the issue? Or is
there on record against you a violation of every condition of
your boasted covenant; wholesale and national transgression,
which your favourite code itself menaces with ‘cutting off?’
Have you even rejected and crucified the very Messiah, who
was tendered to you in due fulfilment of the promises? Take
your trial by the principles of your law, and you must be
cast off, and perish, as certainly as the Heathen whom you
despise; and whose rebellion against the natural law, gross
as it is, does not surpass your own offences against the tables
of Moses. You must abandon the claim of right, the high
talk of God’s Justice and plighted faith;—which are alike
ill-suited to you both. The rules of law are out of the question,
and would admit nobody; and we must ascend again
to the sovereign will and free mercy of him, who is the
source of law; and who, to bestow a blessing which its
resources cannot confer, may devise new methods of beneficence.
God has violated no pledge. Messiah came to
Israel, and never went beyond its bounds; the uncircumcised
had no part in him; and every Hebrew who desired
it, was received as his subject. But when the people would
not have him, and threw away their ancient title, was God
either to abandon his vicegerent, or to force him on the
unwilling? No: rather did it befit him to say; ‘if they
will reject and crucify my servant,—why, let him die, and
then he is Israelite no more; I will raise him, and take him
apart in his immortality; where his blood of David is lost;
and the holiness of his humanity is glorified; and all shall
be his, who will believe, and love him, as he there exists,
spiritually and truly.’” Thus, according to Paul, does God
provide a new method of adoption or justification, without
violating any promises of the old. Thus he makes Faith
in Jesus,—a moral act instead of a genealogical accident,—the
single condition of reception into the Divine kingdom
upon earth. Thus, after the passage of Christ from this
world to another, Jew and Gentile are on an equality in
relation to the Messiah; the one gaining nothing by his
past privileges; the other, not visited with exclusion for
past idolatry and sins; but assured, in Messiah’s death,
that these are to be overlooked, and treated as if cleansed
away. He finds himself invited into the very penetralia
of that sanctuary of pure faith and hope, from which before
he had been repelled as an unclean thing; as if its ark of
mercy had been purified for ever from his unworthy touch,
or he himself had been sprinkled by some sudden consecration.
And all this was the inevitable and instant effect of
that death on Calvary; which took Messiah from the Jews,
and gave him to the world.
With emphasis, not less earnest than that of Paul, does
the apostle John repudiate the notion of any claim on the
Divine admission by law or righteousness; and insist on
humble and unqualified acceptance of God’s free grace and
remission for the past, as the sole avenue of entrance to the
kingdom. This avenue was open, however, to all “who
confessed that Jesus the Messiah had come in the flesh;”[351]
in other words, that, during his mortal life, Jesus had been
indicated as this future Prince; and that his ministry was
the Messiah’s preliminary visit to that earth on which shortly
he would re-appear to reign. The great object of that visit
was to prepare the world for his real coming; for as yet it
was very unfit for so great a crisis; and especially to open,
by his death, a way of admission for the Gentiles, and frame,
on their behalf, an act of oblivion for the past. “If,” says
the apostle to them, “we walk in the light, as he is in the
light” (of love and heaven), “we have fellowship one with
another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us
from all sin:”[352] the Israelite will embrace the Gentiles in
fraternal relations, knowing that the cross has removed their
past unholiness. Nor let the Hebrew rely on anything now
but the divine forbearance; to appeal to rights will serve no
longer: “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us.”[353] Nor let any one despair of a
reception, or even a restoration, because he has been an
idolater and sinner: “Jesus Christ the righteous” is “an
advocate with the Father” for admitting all who are willing
to be his; “and he is the propitiation for our sins:
and not for ours only (not merely for our small portion of
Gentiles, already converted); but also for the whole world,”[354]
if they will but accept him. He died to become universal;
to make all his own; to spread an oblivion, wide as the
earth, over all that had embarrassed the relations to the
Messiah, and made men aliens, instead of Sons of God. Yet
did no spontaneous movement of their good affections solicit
this change. It was “not that we (Gentiles) loved God;
but that he loved us, and sent his Son, the propitiation for
our sins;” “he sent his only-begotten Son into the world,
that we might live through him.”[355] That this epistle was
addressed to Gentiles, and is therefore occupied with the
same leading idea respecting the cross, which pervades the
writings of Paul, is rendered probable by its concluding
words, which could hardly be appropriate to Jews: “keep
yourselves from idols.”[356] How little the apostle associated
any vicarious idea even with a form of phrase most constantly
employed by modern theology to express it, is evident
from the parallel which he draws, in the following
words, between the death of our Lord and that of the
Christian martyrs; “hereby perceive we love, because
Christ laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay
down our lives for the brethren.”[357]
Are then the Gentiles alone beneficially affected by the
death of Christ; and is no wider efficacy ever assigned to it
in Scripture? The great number of passages to which I have
already applied this single interpretation, will show that I
consider it as comprising the great leading idea of the apostolic
theology on this subject; nor do I think that there is
(out of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which I shall soon notice)
a single doctrinal allusion to the cross, from which this
conception is wholly absent. At the same time, I am not
prepared to maintain, that this is the only view of the crucifixion
and resurrection ever present to the mind of the
apostles. Jews themselves, they naturally inquired, how
Israel, in particular, stood affected by the unanticipated
death of its Messiah; in what way its relations were changed,
when the offered Prince became the executed victim; and
how far matters would have been different, if, as had been
expected, the Anointed had assumed his rights and
taken his power at once; and, instead of making his first
advent a mere preliminary and warning visit “in the flesh,”
had set up the kingdom forthwith, and gathered with him
his few followers to “reign on the earth.” Had this—instead
of submission to death, removal, and delay—been
his adopted course, what would have become of his own
nation, who had rejected him;—who must have been tried
by that law which was their boast, and under which he
came; who had long been notorious offenders against its
conditions, and now brought down its final curse by despising
the claims of the accredited Messiah? They must
have been utterly “cut off,” and cast out among the “aliens
from the commonwealth of Israel,” “without Messiah,”
“without hope,” “without God;” for while “circumcision
profiteth, if thou keep the law; yet if thou be a breaker
of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision.”[358] Had
he come then “to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired
in all them that believe;”—had he then been “revealed
with his mighty angels” (whom he might have
summoned by “legions”);—it must have been “in flaming
fire, taking vengeance on them that knew not God, nor
obeyed the glad tidings of the Lord Jesus Christ;” to
“punish with everlasting destruction from the presence of
the Lord and the glory of his power.”[359] The sins and prospects
of Israel being thus terrible, and its rejection imminent
(for Messiah was already in the midst of them),—he
withheld his hand; refused to precipitate their just fate;
and said, “Let us give them time and wait; I will go
apart into the heavens, and peradventure they will repent;
only they must receive me then spiritually, and by hearty
faith, not by carnal right, admitting thus the willing Gentile
with themselves.” And so he prepared to die and
retire; he did not permit them to be cut off, but was cut
off himself instead; he restrained the curse of their own
law from falling on them, and rather perished himself by a
foul and accursed lot, which that same law pronounces to be
the vilest and most polluted of deaths. Thus says St. Paul
to the Jews: “he hath redeemed us from the curse of the
law, being made a curse for us; for it is written ‘cursed is
every one that hangeth on a tree.’”[360] In this way, but
for the death of the Messiah, Israel too must have been
lost; and by that event they received time for repentance,
and a way for remission of sins; found a means of reconciliation
still; saw their providence, which had been
lowering for judgment, opening over them in propitiation
once more; the just had died for the unjust, to bring them
to God. What was this delay,—this suspension of judgment,—this
opportunity of return and faith,—but an
instance of “the long-suffering of God,” with which “he
endures the vessels of wrath (Jews) fitted to destruction;
and makes known the riches of his glory on the vessels of
mercy; which he had afore prepared unto glory?”[361] If
Christ had not withdrawn awhile,—if his power had been
taken up at once, and wielded in stern and legal justice, a
deluge of judgment must have overwhelmed the earth, and
swept away both Jew and Gentile, leaving but a remnant
safe. But in mercy was the mortal life of Jesus turned
into a preluding message of notice and warning, like the
tidings which Noah received of the flood; and as the
growing frame of the ark gave signal to the world of the
coming calamity, afforded an interval for repentance, and
made the patriarch, as he built, a constant “preacher of
righteousness;”[362] so the increasing body of the Church,
since the warning retreat of Christ to heaven, proclaims the
approaching “day of the Lord,” admonishes that “all
should come to repentance,”[363] and fly betimes to that faith
and baptism which Messiah’s death and resurrection have
left as an ark of safety. “Once in the days of Noah, the
long-suffering of God waited while the ark was preparing,
wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water: a
representation, this, of the way in which baptism (not, of
course, carnal washing, but the engagement of a good conscience
with God,) saves us now, by the resurrection of
Jesus Christ; who is gone into heaven, and is on the right
hand of God; angels, and authorities, and powers, being
made subject to him.”[364] Yet, “the time is short,”[365] and
must be “redeemed;”[366] “it is the last hour;”[367] “the
Lord,” “the coming of the Lord,” “the end of all things,”
are “at hand.”[368]
I have described one aspect, which the death of the Messiah
presented to the Jews; and, in this, we have found
another primary conception, explanatory of the scriptural
language respecting the cross. Of the two relations in
which this event appeared (the Gentile and the Israelitish)
I believe the former to be by far the most familiar to the
New Testament authors, and to furnish the true interpretation
of almost all their phraseology on the subject. But,
as my readers may have noticed, many passages receive
illustration by reference to either notion; and some may
have a meaning compounded of both. I must not pause to
make any minute adjustment of these claims, on the part
of the two interpreting ideas: it is enough that, either
separately or in union, they have now been taken round
the whole circle of apostolic language respecting the cross,
and detected in every difficult passage the presence of sense
and truth, and the absence of all hint of vicarious atonement.
It was on the unbelieving portion of the Jewish people,
that the death of their Messiah conferred the national blessings
and opportunities to which I have adverted. But to
the converts who had been received by him during his mortal
life, and who would have been heirs of his glory, had he
assumed it at once, it was less easy to point out any personal
benefits from the cross. That the Christ had retired
from this world was but a disappointing postponement of
their hopes: that he had perished as a felon, was shocking
to their pride, and turned their ancient boast into a present
scorn: that he had become spiritual and immortal made him
no longer theirs “as concerning the flesh,” and, by admitting
Gentiles with themselves, set aside their favourite law. So
offensive to them was this unexpected slight on the institutions
of Moses, immemorially reverenced as the ordinances
of God, that it became important to give some turn to the
death of Jesus, by which that event might be harmonized
with the national system, and be shown to effect the abrogation
of the Law, on principles strictly legal. This was
the object of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews;
who thus gives us a third idea of the relations of the cross,—bearing,
indeed, an essential resemblance to St. Paul’s
Gentile view, but illustrated in a manner altogether different.
No trace is to be observed here of Paul’s noble
glorying in the Cross: so studiously is every allusion to
the crucifixion avoided, till all the argumentative part of
the epistle has been completed, that a reader finds the conclusion
already in sight, without having gained any notion
of the mode of the Lord’s death, whether even it was natural
or violent,—a literal human sacrifice, or a voluntary self-immolation.
Its ignominy and its agonies are wholly unmentioned;
and his mortal infirmities and sufferings are
explained, not as the spontaneous adoptions of previous
compassion in him, but as God’s fitting discipline for rendering
him “a merciful and faithful high priest.”[369] They
are referred to in the tone of apology, not of pride; as
needing rather to be reconciled with his office, than to be
boldly expounded as its grand essential. The object of
the author clearly is, to find a place for the death of Jesus
among the Messianic functions; and he persuades the Hebrew
Christians that it is (not a satisfaction for moral
guilt, but) a commutation for the Mosaic Law. In order
to understand his argument, we must advert for a moment
to the prejudices which it was designed to conciliate and
correct.
It is not easy for us to realize the feelings with which
the Israelite, in the yet palmy days of the Levitical worship,
would hear of an abrogation of the Law;—the anger
and contempt with which the mere bigot would repudiate
the suggestion;—the terror with which the new convert
would make trial of his freedom;—the blank and infidel
feeling with which he would look round, and find
himself drifted away from his anchorage of ceremony; the
sinking heart, with which he would hear the reproaches of
his countrymen against his apostacy. Every authoritative
ritual draws towards itself an attachment too strong for
reason and the sense of right; and transfers the feeling of
obligation from realities to symbols. Among the Hebrews,
this effect was the more marked and the more pernicious,
because their ceremonies were, in many instances, only
remotely connected with any important truth or excellent
end; they were separated by several removes from any
spiritual utility. Rites were enacted to sustain other rites;
institution lay beneath institution, through so many successive
steps, that the crowning principle at the summit
easily passed out of sight. To keep alive the grand truth
of the Divine Unity, there was a gorgeous temple worship:
to perform this worship there was a priesthood: to
support the priesthood, there were (among other sources of
income) dues paid in the form of sacrifice: to provide
against the non-payment of dues there were penalties:
to prevent an injurious pressure of these penalties, there
were exemptions, as in cases of sickness: and to put a
check on trivial claims of exemption, it must be purchased
by submission to a fee, under name of an atonement.
Wherever such a system is received as divine, and based
on the same authority with the great law of duty, it will
always, by its definiteness and precision, attract attention
from graver moral obligations. Its materiality renders it
calculable: its account with the conscience can be exactly
ascertained: as it has little obvious utility to men, it
appears the more directly paid to God; it is regarded as
the special means of pleasing him, of placating his anger,
and purchasing his promises. Hence it may often happen,
that the more the offences against the spirit of duty,
the more are rites multiplied in propitiation; and the
harvest of ceremonies and that of crimes ripen together.
At a state not far from this, had the Jews arrived, when
Christianity was preached. Their moral sentiments were
so far perverted, that they valued nothing in themselves,
in comparison with their legal exactitude, and hated all
beyond themselves for the want of this. They were
eagerly expecting the Deliverer’s kingdom, nursing up their
ambition for his triumphs: curling the lip, as the lash of
oppression fell upon them, in suppressed anticipation of
vengeance; satiating a temper, at once fierce and servile,
with dreams of Messiah’s coming judgment, when the
blood of the Patriarchs should be the title of the world’s
nobles, and the everlasting reign should begin in Jerusalem.
Why was the hour delayed, they impatiently asked
themselves? Was it that they had offended Jehovah, and
secretly sinned against some requirement of his law?
And then they set themselves to a renewed precision, a
more slavish punctiliousness than before. Ascribing their
continued depression to their imperfect legal obedience,
they strained their ceremonialism tighter than ever: and
hoped to be soon justified from their past sins, and ready
for the mighty prince and the latter days.
What then must have been the feeling of the Hebrew,
when told that all his punctualities had been thrown
away; that at the advent, faith in Jesus, not obedience
to the law, was to be the title to admission; and that
the redeemed at that day would be, not the scrupulous
Pharisee,—whose dead works would be of no avail; but
all who, with the heart, have worthily confessed the name
of the Lord Jesus? What doctrine could be more unwelcome
to the haughty Israelite? it dashed his pride of
ancestry to the ground. It brought to the same level
with himself the polluted Gentile, whose presence would
alone render all unclean in the Messiah’s kingdom. It
proved his past ritual anxieties to have been all wasted.
It cast aside for the future the venerated law; left it in
neglect to die; and made all the apparatus of Providence
for its maintenance end in absolutely nothing. Was then
the Messiah to supersede, and not to vindicate the law?
How different this from the picture which prophets had
drawn of his golden age, when Jerusalem was to be the
pride of the earth, and her temple the praise of nations,
sought by the feet of countless pilgrims, and decked with
the splendour of their gifts! How could a true Hebrew
be justified in a life without law? How think himself
safe in a profession, which was without temple, without
priest, without altar, without victim?
Not unnaturally, then, did the Hebrews regard with
reluctance two of the leading features of Christianity;
the death of the Messiah, and the freedom from the law.
The epistle addressed to them was designed to soothe their
uneasiness, and to show, that if the Mosaic institutions
were superseded, it was in conformity with principles
and analogies contained within themselves. With great
address, the writer links the two difficulties together, and
makes the one explain the other. He finds a ready
means of effecting this, in the sacrificial ideas familiar to
every Hebrew; for by representing the death of Jesus as
commutation for legal observances, he is only ascribing to
it an operation, acknowledged to have place in the death
of every lamb slain as a sin-offering at the altar. These
offerings were a distinct recognition on the part of the
Levitical code, of a principle of equivalents for its ordinances;
a proof that, under certain conditions, they might
yield: nothing more, therefore, was necessary, than to show
that the death of Christ established those conditions. And
such a method of argument was attended by this advantage,
that while the practical end would be obtained of
terminating all ceremonial observance, the Law was yet
treated as in theory perpetual; not as ignominiously
abrogated, but as legitimately commuted. Just as the
Israelite, in paying his offering at the altar to compensate
for ritual omissions, recognized thereby the claims of the
law, while he obtained impunity for its neglect; so, if
Providence could be shown to have provided a legal substitute
for the system, its authority was acknowledged, at
the moment that its abolition was secured.
Let us advert then to the functions of the Mosaic sin-offerings,
to which the writer has recourse to illustrate his
main position. They were of the nature of a mulct or
acknowledgment rendered, for unconscious or inevitable
disregard of ceremonial liabilities, and contraction of
ceremonial uncleanness. Such uncleanness might be incurred
from various causes; and while unremoved by the
appointed methods of purification, disqualified from attendance
at the sanctuary, and “cut off” “the guilty” “from
among the congregation.” To touch a dead body, to enter
a tent where a corpse lay, rendered a person “unclean for
seven days;” to come in contact with a forbidden animal,
a bone, a grave; to be next to any one struck with
sudden death; to be afflicted with certain kinds of
bodily disease and infirmity; unwittingly to lay a
finger on a person unclean, occasioned defilement, and
necessitated a purification or an atonement.[370] Independently
of these offences, enforced upon the Israelite by the
accidents of life, it was not easy for even the most cautious
worshipper to keep pace with the complicated series of
petty debts which the law of ordinances was always
running up against him. If his offering had an invisible
blemish; if he omitted a tithe, because “he wist it not;”
or inadvertently fell into arrear, by a single day, with
respect to a known liability; if absent from disease, he
was compelled to let his ritual account accumulate;
“though it be hidden from him,” he must “be guilty,
and bear his iniquity,” and bring his victim.[371] On the
birth of a child, the mother, after the lapse of a prescribed
period, made her pilgrimage to the temple, presented
her sin-offering, and “the priest made atonement
for her.”[372] The poor leper, long banished from the face of
men, and unclean by the nature of his disease, became a
debtor to the sanctuary, and on return from his tedious
quarantine, brought his lamb of atonement, and departed
thence, clear from neglected obligations to his law.[373] It
was impossible, however, to provide by specific enactment
for every case of ritual transgression and impurity, arising
from inadvertency or necessity. Scarcely could it be
expected that the courts of worship themselves would
escape defilement, from imperfections in the offerings, or
unconscious disqualification in people or in priest. To
clear off the whole invisible residue of such sins, an
annual “day of atonement” was appointed; the people
thronged the avenues and approaches of the tabernacle;
in their presence a kid was slain for their own transgressions,
and for the high-priest the more dignified expiation
of a heifer: charged with the blood of each successively,
he sprinkled not only the exterior altar open to the sky,
but, passing through the first and Holy chamber into
the Holy of Holies, (never entered else), he touched, with
finger dipped in blood, the sacred lid (the Mercy-seat)
and foreground of the Ark.[374] At that moment, while he
yet lingers behind the veil, the purification is complete;
on no worshipper of Israel does any legal unholiness rest;
and were it possible for the high-priest to remain in that
interior retreat of Jehovah, still protracting the expiatory
act, so long would this national purity continue, and the
debt of ordinances be effaced as it arose. But he must
return; the sanctifying rite must end; the people be dismissed;
the priests resume the daily ministrations; the
law open its stern account afresh; and in the mixture of
national exactitude and neglects, defilements multiply
again till the recurring anniversary lifts off the burden
once more. Every year, then, the necessity comes round of
“making atonement for the Holy sanctuary,” “for the
tabernacle,” “for the altar,” “for the priests, and for all
the people of the congregation.” Yet, though requiring
periodical renewal, the rite, so far as it went, had an efficacy
which no Hebrew could deny; for ceremonial sins,
unconscious or inevitable (to which all atonement was
limited[375]), it was accepted as an indemnity; and put it
beyond doubt that Mosaic obedience was commutable.
Such was the system of ideas, by availing himself of
which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews would
persuade his correspondents to forsake their legal observances.
“You can look without uneasiness,” he suggests,
“on your ritual omissions, when the blood of some victim
has been presented instead, and the penetralia of your
sanctuary have been sprinkled with the offering: well, on
no other terms would I soothe your anxiety; precisely
such equivalent sacrifice does Christianity exhibit, only of
so peculiar a nature, that for all ceremonial neglects, intentional
no less than inadvertent, you may rely upon indemnity.”
The Jews entertained a belief respecting their
temple, which enabled the writer to give a singular force
and precision to his analogy. They conceived, that the
tabernacle of their worship was but the copy of a divine
structure, devised by God himself, made by no created
hand, and preserved eternally in heaven: this was “the
true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man;”
which no mortal had beheld, except Moses in the mount
that he might “make all things according to that pattern;”[376]
within whose Holy of Holies dwelt no emblem
or emanation of God’s presence, but his own immediate
Spirit; and the celestial furniture of which required, in
proportion to its dignity, the purification of a nobler sacrifice,
and the ministrations of a diviner priest, than befitted
the “worldly sanctuary”[377] below. And who then can
mistake the meaning of Christ’s departure from this
world, or doubt what office he conducts above? He is
called by his ascension to the Pontificate of heaven; consecrated,
“not after the law of any carnal commandment,
but after the power of an endless life;”[378] he drew aside
the veil of his mortality, and passed into the inmost
court of God: and as he must needs “have somewhat to
offer,”[379] he takes the only blood he had ever shed,—which
was his own,—and like the high-priest before the Mercy-seat,
sanctifies therewith the people that stand without,
“redeeming the transgressions” which “the first covenant”
of rites entailed.[380] And he has not returned; still
is he hid within that holiest place; and still the multitude
he serves turn thither a silent and expectant gaze; he
prolongs the purification still; and while he appears not,
no other rites can be resumed, nor any legal defilement be
contracted. Thus, meanwhile, ordinances cease their obligation,
and the sin against them has lost its power. How
different this from the offerings of Jerusalem, whose temple
was but the “symbol and shadow” of that sanctuary
above.[381] In the Hebrew “sacrifices there was a remembrance
again made of sins every year;”[382] “the high-priest
annually entered the holy place;”[383] being but a
mortal, he could not go in with his own blood and remain
but must take that of other creatures and return; and
hence it became “not possible that the blood of bulls
and of goats should take away sins,”[384] for instantly they
began to accumulate again. But to the very nature of
Christ’s offering, a perpetuity of efficacy belongs; bearing
no other than his own blood,” he was immortal when his
ministration began, and “ever liveth to make his intercession;[385]
he could “not offer himself often, for then must
he often have suffered since the foundation of the world,”—and
“it is appointed unto men only once to die:” so
that “once for all he entered into the holy place, and
obtained a redemption that is perpetual;” “once in the
end of the world hath he appeared, and by sacrificing
himself hath absolutely put away sin;” “this man, after
he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on
the right hand of God,” “for by one offering he hath
perfected for ever them that are sanctified,”[386] The ceremonial
then, with its periodical transgressions, and atonements,
is suspended; the services of the outer tabernacle
cease, for the holiest of all is made manifest;[387] one who is
“priest for ever” dwells therein: one “consecrated for
evermore,” “holy, harmless, undefiled, in his celestial
dwelling quite separate from sinners;[388] who needeth not
daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for
his own sins, and then for the people’s; for this he did
once for all when he offered up himself.”[389]
Nor is it in its perpetuity alone, that the efficacy of the
Christian sacrifice transcends the atonements of the law;
it removes a higher order of ritual transgressions. It cannot
be supposed, indeed, that Messiah’s life is no nobler
offering than that of a creature from the herd or flock,
and will confer no more immunity. Accordingly, it goes
beyond those “sins of ignorance,” those ceremonial inadvertences,
for which alone there was remission in Israel;
and reaches to voluntary neglects of the sacerdotal ordinances;
ensuring indemnity for legal omissions, when
incurred not simply by the accidents of the flesh, but
even by intention of the conscience. This is no greater
boon than the dignity of the sacrifice requires; and does
but give to his people below that living relation of soul to
God, which he himself sustains above. “If the blood of
bulls and of goats ... sanctifieth to the purifying of the
flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who
through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to
God, purify (even) your conscience from dead works (ritual
observances) to serve the living God!”[390] Let then the
ordinances go, and the Lord “put his laws into the mind
and write them in the heart;” and let all have “boldness
to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by
this new and living way which he hath consecrated for
us;” “provoking each other to love and to good works.”[391]
See, then, in brief, the objection of the Hebrews to the
gospel; and the reply of their instructor. They said;
“What a blank is this; you have no temple, no priest, no
ritual! How is it that, in his ancient covenant, God is so
strict about ceremonial service, and permits no neglect,
however incidental, without atonement; yet in this new
economy, throws the whole system away; letting us run
up an everlasting debt to a law confessedly unrepealed,
without redemption of it, or atonement for it?”
“Not without redemption and atonement,” replies their
evangelical teacher; “temple, sacrifice, priest, remain to us
also, only glorified into proportions worthy of a heavenly
dispensation; our temple, in the skies; our sacrifice,
Messiah’s mortal person; our priest, his ever-living spirit.
How poor the efficacy of your former offerings! year after
year, your ritual debt began again: for the blood dried
and vanished from the tabernacle which it purified; the
priest returned from the inner shrine; and when there, he
stood, with the interceding blood, before the emblem, not
the reality of God. But Christ, not at the end of a
year, but at the end of the great world-era of the Lord,
has come to offer up himself,—no lamb so unblemished as
he; his voluntary and immortal spirit, than which was
nothing ever more divinely consecrate, becomes officiating
priest, and strikes his own person with immolating blow;
it falls and bleeds on earth, as on the outer altar, standing
on the threshold of the sanctuary of heaven: thither he
ascends with the memorials of his death, vanishes into the
Holy of Holies of the skies, presents himself before the
very living God, and sanctifies the temple there and worshippers
here: saying to us, ‘drop now for ever the legal
burdens that weigh you down; doubt not that you are
free, as my glorified spirit here, from the defilements you
are wont to dread; I stay behind this veil of visible things
to clear you of all such taint, and put away such sin
eternally. Trust then in me, and take up the freedom of
your souls: burst the dead works, that cling round your
conscience like cerements of the grave; and rise to me, by
the living power of duty, and loving allegiance to God.’”
So far then, as the death of Christ is treated in scripture
dogmatically, rather than historically, its effects are
viewed in contrast with the different order of things
which must have been expected, had he, as Messiah, not
died. And thus regarded, it presented itself to the minds
of the Apostles in three relations;
First, to the Gentiles, whom it drew in to be subjects of
the Messiah, by breaking down the barriers of his Hebrew
personality, and rendering him spiritual as well as immortal.
Secondly, to the unbelieving Jews; whom his retirement
from this world delivered from the judgment due to
them, on the principles of their own law, both for their
general violation of the conditions of their covenant, and
for their positive rejection of him. His absence re-opened
their opportunities; and to tender them this act of long-suffering,
he took on himself the death which had been
incurred by them.
Thirdly, to the believing Jews; the terms of whose
discipleship the Messiah’s death had changed, destroying
all the benefits of their lineage, and substituting an act of
the mind, the simpler claim of faith. It was therefore a
commutation for the Ritual Law, and gave them impunity
and atonement for all its violations.
With the last two of these relations, beyond their remarkable
historical interest, we have no personal concern.
The first remains, and ever will remain, worthy of the
glorious joy, with which Paul regarded and expounded it.
God has committed the rule of this world to no exclusive
Prince, and no sacerdotal power, and no earthly majesty;
but to one whose spirit, too divine to be limited to place
and time, broke through clouds of sorrow into the clearest
heaven; and thither has since been drawing our human
love, though for ages now he has been unseen and immortal.
An impartial God, a holy and spiritual Law, an
infinite hope for all men,—are given to us by that generous
cross.
It is evident that all three of the relations which I have
described, belonged to the death of Jesus, in his capacity
of Messiah; and could have had no existence, if he had
not borne this character, but had been simply a private
martyr to his convictions. The foregoing exposition gives
a direct answer to the inquiry, pressed without the slightest
pertinence upon the Unitarian, why the phraseology of
the cross is never found applied to Paul or Peter, or any
other noble confessor, who died in attestation of the truth;
why “no record is given that we are justified by the
blood of Stephen; or that he bare our sins in his own
body, and made reconciliation for us.”[392] I know not why
such a question should be submitted to us; we have
assuredly no concern with it; having never dreamt that
the Apostles could have written as they did respecting the
death on Calvary, if they had thought of it only as a
scene of martyrdom. We have passed under review the
whole language of the New Testament on this subject;
and in the interpretation of it have not even once had
recourse to this, which is said to be our only view of the
cross. We have seen the apostles justly announcing their
Lord’s death, as a proper propitiation; because it placed
whole classes of men, without any meritorious change in
their character, in saving relations: declaring it a strict
substitute for others’ punishment; on the ground that
there were those who must have perished, if he had not;
and that he died and retired, that they might remain and
live: describing it as a sacrifice which put away sin;
because it did that for ever, which the Levitical atonements
achieved for a day: but we have not found them
ever appealing to it either as a satisfaction to the justice of
God, or an example of martyrdom to men. The Trinitarians
have one idea of this event themselves; and their
fancy provides their opponents with one idea of it; of the
former not a trace exists, on any page of Scripture; and
of the latter, the Unitarian need not avail himself at all,
in explaining the language, whereof it is said to be his
solitary key.
Nowhere, then, in Scripture do we meet with anything
corresponding with the prevailing notions of vicarious
redemption; everywhere, and most emphatically in the
personal instructions of our Lord, do we find a doctrine
of forgiveness, and an idea of salvation, utterly inconsistent
with it. He spake often of the unqualified
clemency of God to his returning children; never once of
the satisfaction demanded by his justice. He spake of
the joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth; but was
silent on the sacrificial faith, without which penitence is
said to be unavailing. Nor did he, like his modern disciples,
teach that there are two separate salvations, which
must follow each other in a fixed order; first, redemption
from the penalty, secondly from the spirit, of sin; pardon
for the past, before sanctification in the present; a removal
of the “hindrance in God,” previous to its annihilation in
ourselves. If indeed there were in Christianity two deliverances,
discriminating and successive, it would be more
in accordance with its spirit to invert this order;—to recal
from alienation first, and announce forgiveness afterwards;
to restore from guilt, before cancelling the penalty; and
permit the healing to anticipate the pardoning love. At
least, there would seem, in such arrangement, to be a
greater jealousy for the holiness of the divine law, a
severer reservation of God’s complacency for those who
have broken from the service of sin, than in the system,
which proclaims impunity to the rebel will, ere yet its
estrangement is renounced. If the outward remission
precedes the inward sanctification, then does God admit to
favour the yet unsanctified; guilt keeps us in no exile
from him: and though the holy Spirit is to follow afterwards,
it becomes the peculiar office of the cross to lift us
as we are, with every stain upon the soul and every vile
habit unretraced, from the brink of perdition to the assurance
of glory: the divine lot is given to us, before the
divine love is awakened in us; and the heirs of heaven
have yet to become the children of holiness. With what
consistency can the advocates of such an economy accuse its
opponents of dealing lightly with sin, of deluding men into
a false trust, and administering seductive flatteries to
human nature?[393] What! shall we, who plant in every
soul of sin a Hell, whence no foreign force, no external
God, can pluck us, any more than they can tear us from
our identity;—we, who hide the fires of torment in no
viewless gulf, but make them ubiquitous as guilt;—we,
who suffer no outward agent from Eden, or the Abyss, or
Calvary, to encroach upon the solitude of man’s responsibility,
and confuse the simplicity of conscience;—we, who
teach that God will not, and even cannot, spare the froward,
till they be froward no more, but must permit the burning
lash to fall, till they cry aloud for mercy, and throw themselves
freely into his embrace;—shall we be rebuked for a
lax administration of peace, by those who think that a
moment may turn the alien into the elect? It is no flattery
of our nature, to reverence deeply its moral capacities:
we only discern in them the more solemn trust; and see
in their abuse the fouler shame. And it is not of what
men are, but of what they might be, that we encourage
noble and cheerful thoughts. Doubtless, we think exaggeration
possible (which our opponents apparently do not)
even in the portraiture of their actual character: and perhaps
we are not the less likely to awaken true convictions
of sin, that we strive to speak of it with the voice of discriminative
justice, instead of the monotonous thunders of
vengeance; and to draw its image in the natural tints provided
by the conscience, rather than in the præternatural
flame-colour mingled in the crucibles of Hell.
In making penal redemption and moral redemption
separate and successive, the vicarious scheme, we submit,
is inconsistent with the Christian idea of salvation. Not
that we take the second, and reject the first, as our Trinitarian
friends imagine; nor that we invert their order.
We accept them both; putting them however, not in succession,
but in super-position, so that they coalesce. The
power and the punishment of sin perish together; and
together begin the holiness and the bliss of heaven. Whatever
extracts the poison, cools the sting: nor can the divine
vigour of spiritual health enter, without its freedom and its
joy. That there can be any separate dealings with our
past guilt and with our present character, is not a truth of
God, but a fiction of the schools. The sanctification of the
one is the redemption of the other. The mind given up
to passion, or chained to self, or any how alienated from
the love and life divine, dwells, whatever be its faith, in the
dark and terrible abyss: while he, and he only, that in the
freedom and tranquillity of great affections, communes with
God and toils for men, understands the meaning, and wins
the promises, of heaven. Am I asked, ‘What then is to
persuade the sinful heart, thus to draw near to God;—what,
but a proclamation of absolute pardon, can break
down the secret distrust, which keeps our nature back,
wrapped in the reserve of conscious guilt?’ I reply; however
much these fears and hesitations might cling round us,
and restrain us from the mystic Deity of Nature, they can
have no place in our intercourse with the Father whom
Jesus represents. It needs only that Christ be truly his
image, to know “that the hindrance is not with him, but
entirely in ourselves:”[394] to see that there is no anger in
his look; to feel that he invites us to unreserved confession,
and accepts our self-abandonment to him; that he lifts the
repentant, prostrate at his feet, and speaks the words of
severe, but truest hope. Am I told, ‘that only the gratitude
excited by personal rescue from tremendous danger,
by an unconditional and entire deliverance, is capable of
winning our reluctant nature, of opening the soul to the
access of the Divine Spirit, and bringing it to the service
of the Everlasting Will?’ I rejoice to acknowledge, that
some such disinterested power must be awakened, some
mighty forces of the heart be called out, ere the regeneration
can take place that renders us children of the Highest; ere
we can break, with true new-birth, from the shell of self,
and try and train our wings in the atmosphere of God.
The permanent work of duty must be wrought by the
affections; not by the constraint, however solemn, of hope
and fear; no self-perfectionating process, elaborated by an
anxious will, has warmth enough to ripen the soul’s diviner
fruits; the walks of outward morality, and the slopes of
deliberate meditation, it may keep smooth and trim; but
cannot make the true life-blossoms set, as in a garden of
the Lord, and the foliage wave as with the voice of God
among the trees. I gladly admit that to a believer in the
vicarious sacrifice, the sense of pardon, the love of the great
deliverer, may well fulfil this blessed office, of carrying him
out of himself in genuine allegiance to a being most benign
and holy. And perceiving that, if this doctrine were removed,
there is not, in the system of which it forms a part,
and which else would be all terror, anything that could
perform the same generous part, I can understand why it
seems to its advocates, an essential power in the renovation
of the character. But great as it may be, within the limits
of its own narrow scheme, ideas possessed of higher moral
efficacy are not wanting, when we pass into a region of
nobler and more Christian thought. Shall we say that the
view of the infinite Ruler, given in the spoken wisdom
or the living spirit of Christ, has no sanctifying power?
Yet where is there any trace in it of the satisfactionist’s
redemption? When we sit at Messiah’s feet, that transforming
gratitude for an extinguished penalty on which the
prevailing theology insists, as its central emotion, becomes
replaced by a similar and profounder sentiment towards
the eternal Father. If to rescue men from a dreadful fate
in the future be a just title to our reverence, never to have
designed that fate claims an affection yet more devoted; if
there be a divine mercy in annihilating an awful curse, in
shedding only blessing there is surely a diviner still. Shall
the love restored to us after long delay, and in consideration
of an equivalent, work mightily on the heart; and
shall that which asked no purchase, which has been veiled
by no cloud, which has enfolded us always in its tranquillity,
nor can ever quit the soul opened to receive it, fail to penetrate
the conscience, and dissolve the frosts of our self-love
by some holier flame? Never shall it be found true, that
God must threaten us with vengeance, ere we can feel the
shelter of his grace!
In truth, the Christian idea of salvation cannot be better
illustrated, than by the doubt which has been entertained
respecting the proper translation of my text. Some, referring
it to spiritual redemption, adhere to the common version;
others, seeing that the apostle Peter is explaining
“by what power, or by what name” he had cured the
lame man at the temple gate, refer the words to this miracle
of deliverance, and render them thus; “neither is there
healing in any other; for there is none other name under
heaven given among men, whereby we can be healed.” It
matters little which it is; for whether we speak of body or
of mind, Jesus “saves” us by “making us whole;” by putting
forth upon us a divine and healing power, through which
past suffering and present decrepitude disappear together;
which supplies the defective elements of our nature; cools
the burning of inward fever; or calls into being new senses
and perceptions, opening a diviner universe to our experience.
The deformed and crooked will, bowed by Satan,
lo! these many years, and nowise able to lift up itself, he
loosens and makes straight in uprightness. The moral
paralytic, collapsed and prostrate amid the stir of life, and
incapably gazing on the moving waters in which others
find their health, has often started up at the summons of
that voice, though perchance “he wist not who it was;”
and going his way, has found it to be “the sabbath,” and
owned the “work” of one who is in the spirit of “the
Father.” From the eye long dark and blind to duty and
to God, he has caused the film to pass away, and shown
the solemn look of life beneath a heaven so tranquil and
sublime. Even the dead of soul, close wrapped in bandages
of selfishness,—that greediest of graves,—have been
quickened by his piercing call, and have come forth; to
learn, “when risen,” that only in the meekness that can
obey is there the power to command, only in the love that
serves is there the life of heart-felt liberty. To call, then,
on the name and trust in the spirit of Christ, is to invoke
the restoring power of God; to give symmetry and speed
to our lame affections, and the vigour of an athlete to our
limping wills. There is not any Christian salvation that
is not thus identical with Christian perfection: “nor any
other name under heaven given among men, whereby we
may be (thus) made whole.” Let all that would “be perfect
be thus minded;”[395] seek “the measure of the stature of
the fulness of Christ;”[396] and they shall find in him a
“power to become the Sons of God.”[397]
It is not easy to determine, with any precision, what is Mr. M‘Neile’s
estimate of the capabilities and defects of natural religion. It is subjected
to a vague and indistinct disparagement throughout his lecture;
the impression is left, that the character of God cannot be vindicated
by appeal to his works; but I do not perceive that the lecturer commits
himself to any logical proposition on the subject. One of his
coadjutors,[398] however, has supplied this deficiency; and taking, as an
antagonist, a sentence from the second Lecture of the present series,
has argued at length, that “The moral Character and Unity of God
are not discoverable from the works of Creation.” He affirms that
“to talk of ‘discerning the moral attributes of God on the material
structures of the universe,’ is not only idle, but unreasonable:” and
the justification which he offers of this bold statement seems to
comprise the two following arguments:—
That the universe is analogous to a cathedral or other human edifice;
which discloses something of the Architect’s genius and power, but
nothing of his moral qualities: and
That the mixture of good and evil in the world perplexes the mind
with opposite reports of the Creator’s character.
If scepticism were a just object of moral rebuke, in what terms
might we not speak of this “infidel” rejection of God’s ancient and
everlasting oracles of nature? For the serious doubts and perplexities
of the devout student of creation, an unqualified respect may be entertained.
But it is to be regretted that the necessities of a system should
tempt the expounder of revelation to assail, with reckless indifference,
the primitive sentiments of all religion. The aversion of orthodoxy to
the theology of the unsophisticated reason and heart is, however, to be
classed among the natural antipathies. Among all the extravagances
of modern English divinity, unknown to the sound and healthy era
of our national church, it is perhaps the most significant; indicating
that final obscuration of Christianity, in which it cannot be made to
shine without putting out every other light. This destructive mode
of argumentation, which discredits everything foreign to the favourite
system, is the evident result of fear, not of faith: it is a theological
adoption of the Chinese policy; and keeps the Celestial Empire safe,
by regarding every stranger as a possible spy; and excluding all alien
ideas as forerunners of revolution. The citadel of faith is defended,
by making the most dreadful havoc of every power which ought to
be its strength and ornament. Put out reason, but save the Trinity;
suborn experience, but prove depravity; disparage conscience, but
secure the Atonement; bewilder the sentiments of justice and
benevolence, only guard the everlasting Hell;—have long been the
instructions of orthodoxy to its defenders: and now we are asked to
silence the anthem of nature to the God of love, that priests without
disturbance may prove him the God of vengeance; and to withdraw
our eye from the telescope of science, which reveals the ONENESS of
the Creator’s work, that we may examine, through a church microscope,
the plurality of a Hebrew noun. Can those who taunt the
Unitarians with the negative character of their system, give a satisfactory
account of the positive merits of a religion which disbelieves
reason, distrusts the moral sense, dislikes science, discredits nature,
and for all who are without the Bible and a fit interpreter, disowns
the moral character of God?
In commenting upon Mr. James’s position on this last point, I will
confine myself to three observations:—the first, relating to the consequences
of his doctrine, if true; the others explaining, by separate
reference to his two arguments, why I conceive it to be false.
(1.) If there is no trace in nature of the moral attributes of God,
there can be no disclosure of them in Scripture. The character of
the Revealer is our only guarantee for the truth and excellence of the
Revelation: and if his character is antecedently unknown, if there
is nothing to preclude the idea of his being deceitful and malignant,
how can we be assured that his communication is not a seduction
and a lie? It is not the præternatural rank, but the just and holy
mind, of a celestial Being, that entitles his messages to reception:
and surely it is this alone which, in our opponents’ own system, makes
the whole difference between the suggestions of Satan and the inspiration
of God. But let us hear, in this matter, the judgment of one
who adorned the English church in times when solidity of thought
and truth of sentiment were still in esteem among her clergy. Archbishop
Tillotson observes; “Unless the knowledge of God and his
essential perfections be natural, I do not see what sufficient and certain
foundation there can be of revealed religion. For unless we
naturally know God to be a Being of all perfection, and consequently
that whatever he says is true, I cannot see what divine revelation can
signify. For God’s revealing or declaring such a thing to us, is no
necessary argument that it is so, unless antecedently to this revelation,
we be possessed firmly with this principle, that whatever God
says is true. And whatever is known antecedently to revelation,
must be known by natural light, and by reasonings and deductions
from natural principles. I might further add to this argument, that
the only standard and measure to judge of divine revelations, and to
distinguish between what are true, and what are counterfeit, are the
natural notions which men have of God, and of his essential perfections.”[399]
And elsewhere, still more explicitly; “The strongest and
surest reasonings in religion are grounded upon the essential perfections
of God; so that even divine revelation itself doth suppose these
for its foundation, and can signify nothing to us, unless these be first
known and believed. Unless we be first persuaded of the providence
of God, and his particular care of mankind, why should we believe
that he would make any revelation of himself to men? Unless it be
naturally known to us, that God is true, what foundation is there for
the belief of his word? And what signifies the laws and promises of
God, unless natural light do first assure us of his sovereign authority
and faithfulness? So that the principles of natural religion, are the
foundation of that which is revealed; and therefore in reason nothing
can be admitted to be a revelation from God, which plainly contradicts
his essential perfection; and consequently if any pretends
divine revelation for this doctrine, that God hath from all eternity
absolutely decreed the eternal ruin of the greatest part of mankind,
without any respect to the sins and demerits of men, I am as certain
that this doctrine cannot be of God, as I am sure that God is good
and just; because this grates upon the notion that mankind have of
goodness and justice. This is that which no good man would do,
and therefore cannot be believed of infinite goodness; and therefore
if an Apostle or Angel from heaven teach any doctrine which plainly
overthrows the goodness and justice of God, let him be accursed.
For every man hath greater assurance that God is good and just,
than he can have of any subtle speculations about predestination and
the decrees of God.”[400]
It is somewhat curious, that in the position which they have
assumed with respect to natural religion, our reverend opponents are
allying themselves with Socinus: and that, in answering them, I
should find myself citing the words of an Archbishop of their own
church in direct reply to this great heresiarch. On the adjoining
page to the first from which I have quoted, Tillotson says, “God is
naturally known to men: the contrary whereof Socinus positively
maintains, though therein he be forsaken by most of his followers,—an
opinion, in my judgment, very unworthy of one who, not without
reason, was esteemed so great a master of reason; and (though
I believe he did not see it) undermining the strongest and surest
foundation of all religion, which, when the natural notions of God
are once taken away, will certainly want its best support. Besides
that, by denying any natural knowledge of God and his essential
perfections, he freely gives away one of the most plausible grounds
of opposing the doctrine of the Trinity.” That which Socinus
could afford “freely to give away,” our reverend opponents, it seems,
find it necessary violently to take away.[401]
(2.) The arguments by which Mr. James endeavours to justify his
repudiation of the primary sentiments of unrevealed religion, might
be sufficiently answered by a reference to any work treating of natural
theology, from the Memorabilia of Socrates to the last Bridgewater
Treatise. But as a phrase occurring in my first lecture appears to
have been concerned in their production, it is incumbent on me to
show where their fallacy lies.
The lecturer’s reasoning stands thus: The universe is a material
structure; and so is a cathedral; but a cathedral gives no report
of the moral character of its architect: neither, therefore, does the
universe:—an excellent example, when reduced to form, of the
violation of the first general rule of the syllogism, forbidding an
undistributed middle term.
Did it never occur to our reverend opponent that “the material
structures of the universe” are of various kinds, not all of them
resembling a cathedral; nay, that he himself (not being able “to sit
in a thimble,” or even “in the smallest compass imaginable,” “without
inconvenience from want of room,”)[402] is a “material structure,”
in one part of his human constitution?—a circumstance which might
have suggested the distinction between organized and unorganized
nature. Admitting even (what is by no means true) that the arrangements
of the latter terminate, like the design of a minster, in the
mere production of beauty, and indicate only genius and skill, the
contrivances of the former fulfil their end in the creation of happiness
in the animal world, and the maintenance of a retributive discipline
in human life: results which are the appropriate fruit and expression
of benevolence and equity. Even the beauty of creation, however,
cannot be attributed to sentiments as little moral in their character,
as those which may actuate the human artist; for He who has called
into being whatever is lovely and glorious, has created also percipient
minds to behold it, and transmute it from a material adjustment into
a mental possession.
It is not even true that a work of art, like a cathedral, expresses
no moral quality. The individual builder’s character, indeed, it may
not reveal. But no architect ever produced a cathedral; he is but
the tool wielded by the spirit of his age; and Phidias could no more
have designed York Minster, than the associated masons could have
adorned the Parthenon. Ages must contribute to the origination
of such works: and when they appear, they embody, not indistinctly,
some of the great sentiments which possess the period of
their birth.
(3.) The mixture of good and evil in the world is said to confuse
our reasonings respecting the Divine Being, by presenting us with
opposite reports of his character.
This argument is evidently inconsistent with the former. While
that declared the silence of creation on the moral attributes of its
Author, this affirms its double (and therefore doubtful) speech. After
all, then, there are phenomena which depose to the character of the
Creator, if we can only interpret their attestation aright.
The rules for the treatment of conflicting evidence are plain and
intelligible; nor is there any reason why they should not be applied
to the great problems of natural religion. The preponderant testimony
being permitted to determine our convictions, the evils and
inequalities of the world cannot disturb our faith in the benevolence
and holiness of God; but must stand over, as a residue of unreduced
phenomena, to be hereafter brought under the dominion of that law
of love, which the visible systematic arrangements of Providence
show to be general.
Happily, no sceptical reasonings, like those on which I am animadverting,
can permanently prevent the natural sentiments of men from
asserting their supremacy. To use the words of Bishop Butler,
“Our whole nature leads us to ascribe all moral perfection to God,
and to deny all imperfection of him. And this will for ever be a
practical proof of his moral character, to such as will consider what
a practical proof is; because it is the voice of God speaking in us.”[403]
From the opposite appearances of good and evil in the world, Mr.
James derives an argument against the Unity of God, and affirms
that “reason thinks it more reasonable to admit the existence of two
almighty and independent Beings, the one eternally good, the other
eternally evil.”[404] If the lecturer’s “reason” really recommends to
him such extraordinary conclusions, and insists on patronizing the
Manichean heresy, the intellectual faculty may well be in bad theological
repute with him. The constant origin of pain and enjoyment,
good and evil, from the very same arrangements and structures,
renders the partition of the creative work between two antagonistic
principles not very easy of conception; and it yet remains to be
explained, how the laws which produce the breeze can proceed from
one Being, and those which speed the hurricane from another; how
hunger can have one author, and the refreshment of food another;
how the power of right moral choice can be the gift of God, and
that of wrong moral choice of a Demon.
The reverend lecturer attempts to weaken the argument from the
unity of the creation to that of the Creator. His eccentric remarks
on comets I must leave to the consideration of astronomers. The
rest of the argument is entitled to such reply as the following words
of Robert Hall may give to it. “To prove the unity of this great
Being, in opposition to a plurality of Gods, it is not necessary to have
recourse to metaphysical abstractions. It is sufficient to observe,
that the notion of more than one author of nature is inconsistent
with that harmony of design which pervades her works; that it
solves no appearances, is supported by no evidence, and serves no
purpose but to embarrass and perplex our conceptions.”[405]
It is only natural that the parable of the Prodigal Son should be
no favourite with those, who deny the unconditional mercy of God.
The place which this divine tale occupies in the Unitarian theology
appears to be filled, in the orthodox scheme, by the story of Zaleucus,
king of the Locrians; which has been appealed to in the
present controversy by both the Lecturers on the Atonement, and
seems to be the only endurable illustration presented, even by Pagan
history, of the execution of vicarious punishment. This monarch
had passed a law, condemning adulterers to the loss of both eyes.
His own son was convicted of the crime: and to satisfy at once the
claims of law and of clemency, the royal parent “commanded one
of his own eyes to be pulled out, and one of his son’s.” Is it too
bold a heresy to confess, that there seems to me something heathenish
in this example, and that, as an exponent of the Divine character, I
more willingly revere the Father of the prodigal, than the father of
the adulterer?
Without entering, however, into any comparison between the
Locrian and the Galilean parable, I would observe, that the vicarious
theory receives no illustration from this fragment of ancient history.
There is no analogy between the cases, except in the violation of
truth and wisdom which both exhibit; and whatever we are instructed
to admire in Zaleucus, will be found, on close inspection,
to be absent from the orthodox representation of God. We pity
the Grecian king, who had made a law without foresight of its
application, and so sympathize with his desire to evade it, that any
quibble which legal ingenuity can devise for this purpose, passes
with slight condemnation: casuistry refuses to be severe with a man
implicated in such a difficulty. But the Creator and Legislator of
the human race, having perfect knowledge of the future, can never
be surprised into a similar perplexity; or ever pass a law at one
time, which at another he desires to evade. Even were it so, there
would seem to be less that is unworthy of his moral perfection, in
saying plainly, with the ancient Hebrews, that he “repented of the
evil he thought to do,” and said, “it shall not be;” than in ascribing
to him a device for preserving consistency, in which no one capable
of appreciating veracity can pretend to discern any sincere fulfilment
of the law. However barbarous the idea of Divine “repentance,”
it is at least ingenuous. Nor does this incident of Zaleucus and his
son present any parallel to the alleged relation between the Divine
Father who receives, and the Divine Son who gives, the satisfaction
for human guilt. The Locrian king took a part of the penalty himself,
and left the remainder where it was due; but the Sovereign
Law-giver of Calvinism puts the whole upon another. To sustain
the analogy, Zaleucus should have permitted an innocent son to
have both his eyes put out, and the convicted adulterer to escape.
The doctrine of Atonement has introduced among Trinitarians a
mode of speaking respecting God, which grates most painfully against
the reverential affections due to him. His nature is dismembered
into a number of attributes, foreign to each other, and preferring rival
claims; the Divine tranquillity appears as the equilibrium of opposing
pressures,—the Divine administration as a resultant from the collision
of hostile forces. Goodness pleads for that which holiness
forbids; and the Paternal God would do many a mercy, did the
Sovereign God allow. The idea of a conflict or embarrassment in
the Supreme Mind being thus introduced, and the believer being
haunted by the feeling of some tremendous difficulty affecting the
Infinite government, the vicarious economy is brought forward as the
relief, the solution of the whole perplexity; the union, by a blessed
compromise, of attributes that could never combine in any scheme
before. The main business of theology is made to consist, in stating
the conditions, and expounding the solution, of this imaginary problem.
The cardinal difficulty is thought to be, the reconciliation of
Justice and Mercy; and, as the one is represented under the image
of a Sovereign, the other under that of a Father, the question assumes
this form: how can the same being at every moment possess both
these characters, without abandoning any function or feeling appropriate
to either? how, especially, can the Judge remit,—it is beyond
his power; yet, how can the Parent punish to the uttermost?—it is
contrary to his nature.
All this difficulty is merely fictitious; arising out of the determination
to make out that God is both wholly Judge, and wholly
Father; from an anxiety, that is, to adhere to two metaphors, as
applicable, in every particular, to the Divine Being. It is evident
that both must be, to a great extent, inappropriate; and in nothing
surely is the impropriety more manifest, than in the assertion that,
as Sovereign, God is naturally bound to execute laws which, nevertheless,
it would be desirable to remit, or change in their operation.
Whatever painful necessities the imperfection of human legislation
and judicial procedure may impose, the Omniscient Ruler can make
no law which he will not to all eternity, and with entire consent of
his whole nature, deem it well to execute. This is the Unitarian
answer to the constant question, “How can God forgive in defiance
of his own law?” It is not in defiance of his laws: every one of
which will be fulfilled to the uttermost, in conformity with his first
intent; but nowhere has he declared that he will not forgive. All
justice consists in treating moral agents according to their character;
the inexorability of human law arises solely from the imperfection
with which it can attain this end, and is not the essence, but the
alloy, of equity: but God, who searches and controls the heart,
exercises that perfect justice, which permits the penal suffering to
depart only with the moral guilt; and pardons, not by cancelling
any sentence, but by obeying his eternal purpose to meet the wanderer
returning homeward, and give his blessing to the restored.
Only by such restoration can any past guilt be effaced. The
thoughts, emotions, and sufferings of sin, once committed, are woven
into the fabric of the soul; and are as incapable of being absolutely
obliterated thence and put back into non-existence, as moments of
being struck from the past, or the parts of space from infinitude.
Herein we behold alike “the goodness and the severity of God;”
and adore in him not the balance of contrary tendencies, but the
harmony of consentaneous perfections. How plainly does experience
show that, if his personal unity be given up, his moral unity cannot
be preserved!
The representation of God as a Creditor, to whom his responsible
creatures are in debt to the amount of their moral obligations, is no
less unfit to serve as the foundation of serious reasonings, than the
idea of him as a Sovereign. As a loose analogy, likely to produce a
vivid impression on minds filled with ideas borrowed from the institution
of property, it unavoidably and innocently occurs to us; but to
force any doctrinal sentiments from it, is to strain it beyond its capabilities.
Mr. Buddicom describes it as a favourite with the Unitarians:
“our opponents assert, that sins are to be regarded as debts
and as debts only.”[406] I will venture to affirm that no Unitarian who
heard this believed his own ears, till he saw it in print; so incredibly
great must be the ignorance of Unitarian theology which could dictate
the statement. The sentiment attributed to us is one, against
which our whole body of moral doctrine is one systematic protest,
and which has place in our arguments against the vicarious scheme,
only because it is the fundamental idea, on which that scheme is usually
declared to rest. In one of the most recent and deservedly popular
Unitarian publications on this subject, I find a long note devoted to
the destruction of this pecuniary analogy, which, the Author observes,
“seems very incomplete and unsatisfactory. Punishment is compared
to a debt, supposed to be incurred by the commission of the
offence. To a certain degree there is a resemblance between the
two things, which may be the foundation of a metaphor; but when
we proceed to argue upon this metaphor, we fall into a variety of
errors.”[407] That orthodoxy does incessantly “argue upon this metaphor,”
is notorious; and the present controversy is not deficient in
specimens. “All that the creature can accomplish is a debt due to
the Creator,”[408] says Mr. James, who reasons out the mercantile view
of redemption with an unshrinking precision, unequalled since the
days of Shylock; who insists on “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life
for life,” and condemns any alteration (of course, our Lord’s) of this
rule, as “false charity, or mistaken compassion;”[409] who inquires
whether, in the payment of redemption, an angel might not go for a
number of men, and decides in the negative, because “the highest
created angel in existence” (having as much as he can do for himself)
“could not produce the smallest amount of supererogatory obedience
or merit to transfer to a fellow angel, or to man;”[410] and who, in reply
to the question, “What price will God accept for the lives that are
justly sentenced to eternal death?” says, “the answer to this is very
simple: he will accept nothing but what will be a real equivalent—a
full compensation—an adequate price.”[411] In what bible of Moloch
or of Mammon all this is found, I know not; sure I am, it was
never learned at the feet of Christ.
Unitarians object to the cruelty and injustice attributed to the
Eternal Father, in laying upon the innocent Jesus the punishment of
guilty men. Mr. Buddicom’s reply, though not new, is remarkable.
“Do we, however, assert anything as to the fact of our Lord’s sufferings,
which they who deny his atonement do not also assert? If,
then, it be a truth historical, that he did suffer through life, agonize
in the garden, and die on the cross, does it not appear much greater
cruelty in God, to impose those sufferings, which Jesus is admitted
to have undergone, without any benefit to the transgressor, or any
vindication of his own glory?”[412]
I had always thought, and still think, that our Trinitarian friends
do assert a great deal “as to the fact” (i.e., the amount and intrinsic
character, apart from the effects) “of our Lord’s sufferings, which we
cannot admit. A human being, says the Unitarian, died on the cross,
with such suffering as a perfect human being may endure.” Will Mr.
Buddicom be content with this description of “the fact?” and does
he merely wish to subjoin, that on the death of “this man,” God
took occasion to forgive all men who are to be saved at all? If so,
I admit that the imputation of cruelty is groundless; and have only
to observe, that there is no perceptible relation of cause and effect
between the occasion and the boon; and that the cross becomes
simply the date, the chronological sign, of a Divine volition, arbitrarily
attached to that point of human history. But then, how can
Mr. Buddicom defend (as he does) the phrase “blood of God”?[413]
Theology can perform strange feats, and to its sleight of words nothing
is impossible. The doctrine of the communication of properties
between the two natures of our Lord, comes in to relieve the difficulty;
and having established that whatever is true of either nature
may be affirmed of Christ, and by inference, even of the other, it
proves the propriety of saying, both that the Divine nature cannot
suffer, and yet that God bled.[414] Heterodoxy, however, in its perverseness,
still thinks with Le Clerc of this κοινωνία ἰδιωμάτων, that it
is “as intelligible, as if we were to say, there is a circle so united
with a triangle, that the circle has the properties of the triangle, and
the triangle those of the circle.”[415]
No competent critic, I apprehend, can read without surprise Mr.
Buddicom’s note (H.) on the reading of this verse. The slight
manner in which Griesbach is set aside, to make way for the authority
of critical editions of the N. T. since his time; the vague commendation
of the edition of Dr. Scholtz, “which, it may well be
hoped, leaves us little more to expect or desire,”—as if there were
nothing peculiar or controverted in the critical principles of that work;
the citation of a passage from this Roman Catholic editor, in which
the critic becomes the theologian, and makes use of his own reading
of Θεοῦ to prove “that Christ is God;” together with the statement
that the reading is of no doctrinal importance; combine to render this
a remarkable piece of criticism. If the learned Lecturer had defended
his dissent from Griesbach, or attempted to invalidate the reasoning
of that Editor’s elaborate note on the passage, some materials for
consideration and argument would have been afforded. But no reason
is assigned for the preference of Θεοῦ over κυρίου, except that Dr.
Scholtz adopts it, and says nothing about it; though Griesbach rejects
it, and says a great deal about it; and very conclusively too, in
the opinion of most scholars, not excepting Mr. Byrth. Surely the
paradoxical preference which Scholtz gives to the Byzantine recension
is not a reason for hoping that he has left us nothing more to
expect, in the determination of the text of the N. T.; still less is it
a reason why his readings, simply because they are his, should supersede
Griesbach’s;—from whom, I submit, no sober critic should
venture to depart, without at least intimating the grounds of his
judgment. I have not seen the critical edition of the learned Roman
Catholic; but unless its Prolegomena contain some much better
reasons than are adduced in his “Biblisch-kritische Reise,” for his
attachment to the Constantinopolitan family of manuscripts, it may
be safely affirmed, that Griesbach will no more be superseded by
Scholtz, than he was anticipated by Matthæi.
The text in question is not one, on the reading of which Griesbach
expresses his opinion with any hesitation. “Ex his omnibus luculenter
apparet, pro lectione θεοῦ ne unicum quidem militare codicem,
qui sive vetustate, sive internâ bonitate suâ testis idonei et incorrupti
laude ornari queat. Non reperitur, nisi in libris recentioribus, iisdemque
vel penitus contemnendis, vel misere, multis saltem in locis,
interpolatis.”—“Quomodo igitur, salvis criticæ artis legibus, lectio
θεοῦ, utpote omni auctoritate justa destituta, defendi queat, equidem
haud intelligo.” In the face of this decision, Mr. Buddicom reads
θεοῦ: and does any one then believe, that in Unitarians alone theological
bias influences the choice of a reading?
The attempt to elicit from the word κυρίου the same argument for
the Deity of Christ, which might be derived from the reading θεοῦ, I
confess myself unable to comprehend. Does Mr. Buddicom intend
to assert, that when any person is called κύριος (Lord) in the N. T.,
it means that he is Jehovah? Or, when this is denoted, is there
some peculiarity of grammatical usage, indicating the fact? If so,
it is of moment that this should be pointed out, and illustrated by
examples: the idiom not being adequately described by saying that
“the word” is “put in the form of an unqualified and unequalled
preference.”
In the year 1815 a discussion arose out of the general controversy
on the doctrine of the Trinity, respecting the proper use of the word
Unitarian. Those who were anxious to be designated by this name
were divided in opinion as to the latitude with which it should be
employed. One class proposed to limit it to believers in the simple
humanity of our Lord, and to exclude from it all who held his pre-existence,
from the lowest Arian to the highest Athanasian. Another
class protested against this restriction; suggested that, both by its
construction and its usage, the word primarily referred, not to the
nature of Christ, but to the personality of the Godhead; that as Trinitarians
denoted, by the prefix (Tri) to their name, the three persons
of their Deity, so by the prefix (Un) should Unitarians express the
one person of theirs; that in no other way could the numerical antithesis,
promised to the ear, be afforded to the mind; and accordingly
that under the title Unitarian should be included all Christians who
directed their worship to one personal God, whatever they might
think of the nature of Christ. It is evident that, in this latter sense,
the name must comprehend a much larger class than in the former.
The discussion between the two parties was conducted in the pages of
the Monthly Repository, at that time the organ of the English Unitarian
theology.
Meanwhile the defenders of orthodoxy were not indifferent to the
subject of debate; nor at all more agreed about it than their theological
opponents. The majority regarded the word Unitarian as a
creditable name, which was by no means to be abandoned to a set of
heretics, hitherto held up to opprobrium by the title of Socinian.
They accordingly proposed to consider it as expressing the belief in
One God (without reference to the number of persons), in contradistinction
to the belief in many Gods; so that its opposite should be,
not as the analogy of language seemed to require, Trinitarian, but
Polytheist. Thus defined, the appellation belonged to Trinitarians as
well as to others; and the assumption of it, by those who dissented
from the doctrine of the Trinity, was construed into a charge of
Tritheism against the orthodox. Another party, however, comprising
especially Archbishop Magee in the church, and the High Arians out
of it, treated the name as one, not of honour, but of disgrace;—were
anxious to fix it exclusively on Mr. Belsham’s school of humanitarians,
and to rescue the believers in the pre-existence of Christ, of
every shade, from its pollution;—and affected to regard every extension
of it to these, as a disingenuous trick, designed to swell the appearance
of numbers, and to act as “a decoy” for drawing “to Mr.
Belsham” all who were “against Athanasius.”[416] And so the poor
Unitarians could please nobody, and were in imminent danger of
being altogether anonymous. If they did not extend their name so
as take in every church, Athanasian and all, they were guilty of
false imputation on Trinitarians, and of monopolizing an honour
which was no property of theirs. If they did not narrow it to
“Mr. Belsham’s class,” they were accused of “equivocation,” and
of cunningly dragging the harmless Arians into participation of their
disgrace. If they denied that the whole Church of England was
Unitarian, they committed an act of impudent exclusion; if they
affirmed that Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton were Unitarian, they
were chargeable with a no less impudent assumption, and rebuked
for “posthumous proselytism.”
Of the three possible meanings of the word, the Humanitarian, the
Uni-personal, and the Monotheistic,—Mr. Aspland ably and successfully
vindicated the second; in opposition to Mr. Norris, a Trinitarian
controversialist, who insisted on the third, and declared he would call
his opponents Socinians; and amid the reproaches of Archbishop
Magee, who clung to the first, and denounced the wider application
as a “dishonest” “management of the term.” With these things in
mind, let the reader attend to the following passage from that prelate’s
celebrated work:
“How great are the advantages of a well-chosen name! Mr.
Aspland, in his warm recommendation of the continuance of the use
of the word Unitarian, in that ambiguous sense in which it had
already done so much good to the cause, very justly observes, from
Dr. South, that ‘the generality of mankind is wholly and absolutely
governed by words and names;’ and that ‘he who will set up for a
skilful manager of the rabble, so long as they have but ears to hear,
needs never enquire whether they have any understanding whereby
to judge: but with two or three popular empty words, well tuned
and humoured, may whistle them backwards and forwards, upwards
and downwards, till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he
is so.’ Month. Rep. vol. x. p. 481.—And what does Mr. Aspland
deduce from all this? Why, neither more nor less than this,—that
the name Unitarian must never be given up; but all possible
changes rung upon it, let the opinions of those who bear that name
be ever so various and contradictory.”[417]
Now what does the reader think of Mr. Aspland? He despises
him, as the deliberate proposer of an imposture; as one who sets up
for “a skilful manager of the rabble,” and who argues for the name
“Unitarian,” because it may enable his party to “get upon the
backs” of the multitude. The Archbishop, I presume, means to
leave this impression. Let us look then to the facts.
The quotation is from Mr. Aspland’s “Plea for Unitarian Dissenters.”
The author is expostulating with Mr. Norris, who had
vowed still to fasten the term Socinian on dissentients from the
doctrine of the Trinity; and is urging the impropriety of irritating a
religious body by giving them a disowned and confessedly unsuitable
designation. Mr. Aspland introduces his reference to Dr. South by
the following passage:
“It is not without design that you cling to a known error. The
name of Socinian is refused by us; this is one reason why an
ungenerous adversary may choose to give it: and again, the term
having been used (with some degree of propriety) at the first appearance
of this class of Unitarians, which was at a period when penal
laws were not a dead letter, and when theological controversies were
personal quarrels, it is associated in books with a set of useful phrases
such as pestilent heretics, wretched blasphemers, and the like, which
suit the convenience of writers who have an abundance of enmity
but a lack of argument, and who, whilst they are reduced to the
necessity of borrowing, are not secured by their good taste or sense
of decorum from taking, in loan, the excrescences of defunct authors;
this is a second reason why the name ‘Socinian’ is made to linger in
books, long after Socinians have departed from the stage.”
Then follows the note from which Archbishop Magee has quoted:
but from which he has omitted the parts inclosed in brackets.
[“Once more, I must beg leave to refer you to Dr. South, for an
appropriate observation or two, on the fatal imposture and force of
words.]
“‘The generality of mankind is wholly and absolutely governed
by words and names; [without, nay, for the most part, even against
the knowledge men have of things. The multitude or common
route, like a drove of sheep, or an herd of oxen, may be managed by
any noise, or cry, which their drivers shall accustom them to.
“‘And] he who will set up for a skilful manager of the rabble, so
long as they have but ears to hear, needs never enquire whether they
have any understanding whereby to judge: but with two or three
popular, empty words,’ ‘well-tuned and humoured, may whistle them
backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, till he is weary;
and get upon their backs when he is so.’”[418]
And now, may I not ask, what does the reader think of Archbishop
Magee? Mr. Aspland indignantly CONDEMNS the “imposture”
practised by false names; and, by a garbled quotation he is
held up as RESORTING to it. He really says to his opponents, “Call
us Socinians no more, for you must know it is unjust;” he is represented
as saying to his friends, “We will never cease to call ourselves
Unitarians, for it is a capital trick.” And thus, by scoring out and
interlining, his own expostulation against a base policy is metamorphosed
into an indictment, charging him with the very same.
Mr. Byrth and Mr. M‘Neile are men, as I believe, of honourable
minds: and the latter has rebuked, as they deserve, “garbled quotations.”
I ask them to acquit me of “outraging the memory of
departed greatness.”
“My respected opponents know as well as I do,” “that dishonest
criticism, as well as dishonesty of every kind, consists not in the
number of the acts which are perpetrated, but in the unprincipled
disposition which led to the perpetration.”[419] I might therefore be
content with the example of “misrepresentation the most black”
which I have given. But from the list which lies before me, I think it
right to take one or two instances more, admitting of brief exposure.
In the Authorized Version, 1 Cor. xv. 47, stands thus; “The
first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from
heaven;” the substantive verb in both parts of the verse having
nothing, as the Italics indicate, to correspond with it in the original;
but being inserted at the discretion of the translators to complete the
sense. From the second clause Trinitarians usually derive an argument
for the pre-existence of Christ, conceiving that it teaches the
origin of our Lord from heaven. Some of their best commentators,
however, understand the clause as referring not to Christ’s past
entrance into this world, but to his future coming to judgment.
Thus Archbishop Newcome renders, “The second man will be [the
Lord] from heaven.” And Dr. Whitby paraphrases, ”The second
man is the Lord [descending] from heaven [to raise our bodies, and
advance them to that place];” and he defends this interpretation in a
note.[420] Mr. Belsham adopts this rendering, both in the “Improved
Version” and in his “Calm Enquiry,” giving, with the sanction of
the authorities I have cited, a past verb to the first clause, a future verb
to the second. The admirable Newcome and Whitby, then, must
share the Archbishop’s rebuke, for “the total inadmissibility of this
arbitrary rendering of the Unitarians, and the grossness of their
endeavour to pervert the sense of Scripture.” “Here,” he observes,
“we have a change of tense, which not only has no foundation in either
the Greek or Latin text, but is in direct opposition to both; since in
both the perfect sameness of the corresponding clauses obviously
determines the sameness of the tense.”[421] Of the “unscholarlike
exaggeration” of this criticism I say nothing, merely wishing it to be
observed in passing, that Mr. Belsham’s version is not of Unitarian
origin, and proves no doctrinal bias, much less any “dishonesty.”
But a question arises respecting the text, as well as the translation,
of this verse; the phrase “the Lord,” in the second clause, being
marked by Griesbach as probably to be omitted; and the word
“heavenly” to be appended at the close. The original of the common
translation stands thus: Ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος, ἐκ γῆς χοϊκός· ὁ δεύτερος
ἄνθρωπος, ὁ κύριος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. With the probable emendations the latter
clause would read thus: ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ὁ οὐράνιος:
and Archbishop Newcome’s translation, conformed to this text,
becomes that of Mr. Belsham; “The first man was from the ground,
earthy: the second man will be from heaven, heavenly.”
There are then two points to be determined respecting this passage—the
reading, and the rendering, which, in this case, is equivalent
to the interpretation also. Mr. Belsham, in his Calm Inquiry,
treats of both; and is accused by the Archbishop, in the following
passage, of discussing the “unimportant matter” of the text with
great pomp; while adducing, in favour of his translation and the future
tense, no authority except the Vulgate: “primus homo de terra, terrenus:
secundus homo de cœlo, cælestis.” The indictment and argument
run thus:—“The grand point to be established for the Unitarians
is, as we have seen, the use of the future in the second clause
of the text:—‘the second man WILL BE from heaven:’—for, if we
read ‘WAS from heaven,’ actum est! it is all over with the Unitarians;
inasmuch as, in this passage, the origin of the BEING, without
any possible pretence as to the doctrines, is unequivocally the subject.
How does Mr. Belsham proceed? Having made a good deal of
flourish, as the Improved Version had also done before him, about the
words κύριος and οὐράνιος; having also lumped together some irrelevant
matter about the Polish Socinians and Dr. Price; and having
observed somewhat upon the interpretation of Newcome, Whitby,
and Alexander; having, in short, appeared to say a good deal, whilst
he took care to preserve a profound silence throughout (as the
Improved Version also has done,) respecting any arguments in
favour of the future tense in the second clause—the single point on
which the entire question rests,—he all of a sudden, very calmly and
composedly asserts, ‘The Vulgate renders the text, “The first man
was of the earth, earthy. The second man will be from heaven,
heavenly.”’ (Calm Inq. p. 121.[422]) He then triumphantly concludes,
and all is settled. In this manner, one text after another, of those
that proclaim our Lord’s pre-existence, is extinguished by the Calm
Inquirer and his coadjutors. And so the cause of Socinian expurgation
goes forward.
“Perhaps, in the annals of dishonest controversy, another instance
like this is not to be found. A discussion of unimportant matter is
busily kept up: the main point of difference, and in truth the only
one deserving of attention, the change of tense, is passed over, as if
it were a thing not at all in dispute: the Vulgate is then quoted, in
direct opposition to the truth, as reading the words ‘WAS’ and ‘WILL
BE’ in the two corresponding clauses: and thus, indirectly, the false
rendering of the text by the Unitarians is sustained by a false quotation
from the Vulgate; and by a quotation which the author, if his
memory had lasted from one page to the other, must have known to
be false; since, in the preceding page, he had himself cited the very
words of the Vulgate:—‘Primus homo de terra, terrenus; secundus
homo de cœlo, cælestis:’—in which, words there is not only no justification
of the change from WAS to WILL BE; but there is, on the contrary,
as in the original Greek, a declaration, as strong as the analogies
of language will admit, that the tense employed in the first clause must
pass unchanged into the second. In a word, there is given by the
Vulgate itself a direct contradiction to the report which is made of
it by the Calm Inquirer. The man of ‘sound understanding,’ however,
whom he addressed in English on the one page, being possibly
not exactly acquainted with what was contained in the Latin on the
other, and being consequently unaware that his author was imposing
on him a false translation, would of course be fully satisfied on the
authority of the Vulgate (more especially as so much had been said
to leave the general impression of uncertainty as to the true reading
of the Greek text, and the consequent opinion, that the Vulgate was
the only ancient authority to be relied on,) that in this passage could
be found no proof of our Lord’s pre-existence! What are we to
think of the cause that needs such support; and what of the interests
that can attract such supporters?”[423]
We are to understand, then, that Mr. Belsham’s only authority for
the tenses of his version is a wilful mistranslation of the Vulgate; and
that he cunningly conceals from the mere English reader the circumstance
that the Vulgate, having no verb, has no tenses. Now, as to
the last point, he distinctly informs his reader that there is no verb in
the Latin; and as to the former, he never appeals to theRENDERINGof the Vulgate at all but to theREADINGonly. “How can this be?”
I shall be asked; “for the Archbishop cites his words, ‘The Vulgate
RENDERS the text,’ &c.” True, but the Archbishop quotes him falsely;
and the real words are, “The Vulgate READS the text,” &c. Let
the original and the citation appear side by side.
Mr. Belsham’s words.
Archbishop Magee’s quotation.
“The Vulgate READS the text, ‘The first man was of the earth, earthly. The second man will be from heaven, heavenly.’
“The Vulgate RENDERS the text, ‘The first man was of the earth, earthy. The second man will be from heaven, heavenly,’”[424]
“This is not improbably the TRUE READING.”
The verbs, in both clauses, Mr. Belsham has printed in italics, to
indicate (in conformity with the usual practice in his work, and the
Improved Version, as well as in our common translation) the absence
of any corresponding words in the Latin text. This circumstance,
which destroys the whole accusation, his accuser has suppressed.
And as to the “preserving a profound silence throughout respecting
any arguments in favour of the future tense in the second clause,”
it so happens that the “somewhat” which is observed “upon the
interpretation of Newcome, Whitby, and Alexander,” is simply an
appeal to these authorities on this very matter of the future tense,—“the
single point on which the entire question rests.”
On the whole, can our upright and learned opponents tell, whether
“in the annals of dishonest controversy, another instance like” the
foregoing “is to be found?” I can assure them, that from the same
work, I could produce many more.
In our present controversy, our Rev. opponents have been misled
by their reliance on this unscrupulous adversary of the Unitarians:
and by not referring to his pages, have taken his heavy responsibilities
on themselves. In the first Lecture of the series, Mr. Ould has
represented Dr. Priestley as saying, that the sacred writers produced
“lame accounts, improper quotations, and inconclusive reasonings.”[425]
Dr. Magee has exhibited this sentence as a citation from Priestley’s
12th Letter to Mr. Burn;[426] the fact being, that he wrote only six
letters to Mr. Burn; and that neither in these, nor anywhere else, is
such a sentence to be found. The first phrase, indeed (“lame
account”) was once applied by Dr. Priestley to the early chapters in
Genesis; but deliberately retracted with an expression of regret that
it had been used. Let the learned prelate pass sentence on himself:
he says, “It is surely a gross falsification of his author, to give,
as one continued quotation from him (as the established meaning of
the form here employed, unequivocally implies), that which is an
arbitrary selection of words drawn violently together from a lengthened
context.”[427] I can assure our respected opponents, that their
Lectures contain other citations, drawn from the same source, which,
after the most careful search, I believe to be no less false. And is
not an ungenerous use made of obnoxious writings, when we find
enumerated and quoted among Unitarian authors, Evanson, whose
scepticism received its most effectual replies from Priestley and his
friends; and Gagneius, who was an orthodox professor of the
Sorbonne, and preacher to Francis the First?
For other instances of Archbishop Magee’s flagrant injustice and
misrepresentation, I must refer to the “Examination of his charges
against Unitarians and Unitarianism,” by my learned and venerated
friend Dr. Carpenter, who has found it only too easy to fill a volume
with the exposure of a mere portion of them. I have purposely
taken fresh examples, not hitherto noticed, so far as I know, and it
may be supposed that the earlier gleaning by Dr. Carpenter would
naturally yield the most remarkable results; so that the cases now
adduced cannot be thought to be peculiarly unfavourable specimens.
If our reverend opponents, having read this Prelate’s work, really
think my charge against him, of “abuse the most coarse,” an “unwarrantable
attack on the reputation of the dead,” I cannot hope to
justify myself in their estimation: there must be an irremediable
variance between their notion of “coarse abuse” and mine. I regret
that we cannot agree in a matter of taste which, to say the least,
borders so closely on morals as to be scarcely distinguishable from
them, and to be connected with the same strong feelings of approbation
or disgust. With what levity must a writer sport with moral
terms, what indistinct impressions must he have of moral qualities,
who having pronounced an opponent (I quote the language of the
Archbishop of Mr. Belsham) “incapable of duplicity,”[428] can yet
proceed to charge him with “artifice and dishonesty,”[429] with “huddling
up a matter,”[430] with “filching away a portion of evidence,”[431]
with “direct violations of known truth,”[432] and with “bad faith,
unchecked by learning and unabashed by shame!”[433] I cannot
wonder at the spirit pervading Mr. Byrth’s letter to my friend and
colleague Mr. Thom, when I find that he sees nothing coarse or
abusive, but only the expression of “departed greatness,” in accusing
an opponent of “miserable stupidity,”[434] of “downright and irremediable
nonsense,”[435] of “proposing” a suggestion “(as heAVERS)
with great diffidence,”[436] of furnishing “twenty-eight pages of the
most extraordinary quagmire;”[437] in begging him to “rest assured,
that to know the Greek language it must be learned;”[438] in proclaiming
that he “stands in a pillory”[439] erected for him by a
Bishop; that he belongs to “the family of Botherims in Morals and
Metaphysics,” and is “connected with that of Malaprops in Mathematics;”[440]
in ridiculing the idea of publishing his portrait;[441]
in asking him whether he has “lost his senses;”[442] and hinting
that, whereas he knows not “how to choose between two bundles”
of evidence, he is an Ass.[443] Are we to consider it a condescension
in this distinguished Prelate, that he bends from his Episcopal
dignity to console the Dissenting ministers in their “contemplation
of the advantages of the national clergy,” and assures them that
they have “not only more of positive profit,” but, “in addition to
this,” “the indulgence of vanity, and the gratification of spleen,—qualities
which, time out of mind, have belonged to the family of
Dissent;” nay, further, that in preparation for their ministry, they
have a much lighter “outfit” “in point of expenditure,” since among
Nonconformists, in some cases at least, “the individual is his own
University; confers his own degrees and orders; and has little more
difficulty in the way of his vocation, than to find a new hat, a stout
pony, and a pair of saddle-bags.”[444] This is very smart, no doubt;
but does the Church exclude us from the Universities, that her
Bishops may enjoy the entertainment of making us their laughing-stock,
and inditing lampoons against us? Does she injure us first,
that we may be insulted afterwards?
Mr. M‘Neile speaks of the late Archbishop’s work as “a barrier
in the way of Unitarianism.”[445] It is so; and if its influence were
only that of fair argument, we should wish the barrier to stand in all
its strength. But the book has become a standard authority for
every kind of false and malignant impression respecting Unitarians,
and prevents, instead of advancing, the knowledge of what we are.
To be held up as entertaining “the cool and deliberate purpose of
falsifying the word of God;”[446] as guilty of “machinations” to
“subvert through fraud what had been found impregnable by force;”[447]
as “staking” our “very salvation on the adoption of a reading which
is against evidence;”[448] as distinguished for “steady and immovable
effrontery,”[449] and “shameful disingenuousness;”[450] as discerning
in our Lord “that oneHATEDform on which we are terrified to look;”[451]
as so “determined to resist and subvert one great truth,” that we
“set but little value on every other,” and make a “prevailing practice”
of “DIRECT AND DELIBERATE FALSEHOOD:”[452] to be thus
slandered by one, for whom his station and accomplishments have
procured, from the party spirit of the age, a credit denied to any
possible learning or excellence of ours; this, being a grievous wrong
to the character of Christianity as much as to our own, we confess to
be a trial hard to bear: and we may well feel like the good man
under successful calumny, which wounds himself a little, but truth
and virtue more. Meanwhile, injury may have its compensations;
and since, to prove his accusations, even this distinguished Prelate
had occasion to tamper with the evidence, we have a fresh presumption
that our cause is one, against which learning and acuteness,
under the restraints of justice, find themselves of no avail.
298. “Either he” (“the Deity of the Unitarians”) “must show no mercy,
in order to continue true; or he must show no truth, in order to exercise mercy.
If he overlook man’s guilt, admit him to the enjoyment of his favour, and proceed
by corrective discipline to restore his character, he unsettles the foundations of
all equitable government, obliterates the everlasting distinctions between right
and wrong, spreads consternation in Heaven, and proclaims impunity in Hell.
Such a God would not be worth serving. Such tenderness, instead of inspiring
filial affection, would lead only to reckless contempt.”—Mr. M‘Neile’s Lecture,
p. 313.
Surely this is a description, not of the Unitarian, but of the Lecturer’s own
creed. It certainly is no part of his opponents’ belief, that God first admits the
guilty to his favour, and then “proceeds” “to restore his character.” This arrangement,
by which pardon precedes moral restoration, is that feature in the orthodox
theory of the Divine dealings against which Unitarians protest, and which Mr.
M‘Neile himself insists upon as essential throughout his Lecture. “We
think,” he says, “that before man can be introduced to the only true process of
improvement, he must first have forgiveness of his guilt.” What is this “first”
step of pardon, but an “overlooking of man’s guilt;” and what is the second, of
“sanctification,” but a “restoring of character;” whether we say by “corrective
discipline,” or the “influence of the Holy Spirit,” matters not. Is it said that
the guilt is not overlooked, if Christ endured its penalty? I ask again, whether
justice regards only the infliction of suffering, or its quantity, without caring about
its direction? Was it impossible for the stern righteousness of God freely to forgive
the penitent? And how was the injustice of liberating the guilty mended by
the torments of the innocent? Here is the verdict against sin,—“The soul that
sinneth, it shall die.” And how is this verdict executed? The soul that had
sinned does not die; and one “that knew no sin” dies instead. And this is called
a divine union of truth and mercy; being the most precise negation of both, of
which any conception can be formed. First, to hang the destinies of all mankind
upon a solitary volition of their first parents, and then let loose a diabolic power
on that volition to break it down; to vitiate the human constitution in punishment
for the fall, and yet continue to demand obedience to the original and perfect
moral law; to assert the absolute inflexibility of that holy law, yet all the while
have in view for the offenders a method of escape, which violates every one of
its provisions, and makes it all a solemn pretence; to forgive that which is in itself
unpardonable, on condition of the suicide of a God, is to shock and confound all
notions of rectitude, without affording even the sublimity of a savage grandeur.
This will be called “blasphemy;” and it is so; but the blasphemy is not in the
words, but in the thing.
Unitarians are falsely accused of representing God as “overlooking man’s guilt.”
They hold, that no guilt is overlooked till it is eradicated from the soul; and that
pardon proceeds, pari passu, with sanctification.
320. Mr. Buddicom has the following note, intimating his approbation of this rendering:
“Some of the best commentators have connected ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι,
not with διὰ τῆς πίστεως, but with ἱλαστήριον and, accordingly, Bishop Bull
renders the passage, ‘Quem proposuit Deus placamentum in sanguine suo per
fidem.’”—Lecture on Atonement, p. 496.
343. John i. 29. For an example of the use of the word “world” to denote the
Gentiles, see Rom. xi. 12-15; where St. Paul, speaking of the rejection of the
Messiah by the Jews, declares that it is only temporary; and as it has given occasion
for the adoption of the Gentiles, so will this lead, by ultimate reaction, to
the re-admission of Israel; a consummation in which the Gentiles should rejoice
without boasting or highmindedness. “If,” he says, “the fall of them (the Israelites)
be the riches of the world (the Gentiles), and the diminishing of them,
the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness! For I speak to you,
Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify my office; if,
by any means, I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh (the Jews,)
and save some of them; for if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the
world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?”
344. Acts xx. 28. It is hardly necessary to say, that the reading of our common
version “church of God” wants the support of the best authorities; and that
with the general consent of the most competent critics, Griesbach reads “church
of the Lord.” See Note C.
360. Gal. iii. 13: even here the apostle cannot refrain from adverting to his Gentile
interpretation of the cross; for he adds,—“that the blessing of Abraham
might come on the Gentiles, through Jesus Christ.”
375. In three or four instances, it is true, a sin-offering is demanded from the perpetrator
of some act of moral wrong. But in all these cases a suitable punishment
was ordained also; a circumstance inconsistent with the idea, that the expiation
procurred remission of guilt. The sacrifice appended to the penal infliction, indicates
the two-fold character of the act;—at once a ceremonial defilement and a
crime; and requiring, to remedy the one, an atoning rite,—to chastise the other, a
judicial penalty. See an excellent tract by Rev. Edward Higginson, of Hull, entitled,
“The Sacrifice of Christ scripturally and rationally interpreted:” particularly
pp. 30-34.
389. vii. 27. Let the reader look carefully again into the verbal and logical
structure of this verse; and then ask himself, whether it is not as plain as words
can make it, that Christ “once for all” offered up “a sacrifice first forHIS OWN
SINS, and then for the peoples.” The argument surely is this; “he need not do the
daily thing, for he has done it once for all; the never-finished work of other
pontiffs, a single act of his achieved.” The sentiment loses its meaning, unless
that which he did once is the self-same thing which they did always; and what was
that?—the offering by the High-priest of a sacrifice first for his own sins, and then
for the people’s. With what propriety, then, can Mr. Buddicom ask us this question:
“Why is he said to have excelled the Jewish High-priest in not offering a sacrifice
for himself?” I submit, that no such thing is said: but that, on the contrary, it
is positively affirmed that Christ did offer sacrifice for his own sins. So plain
indeed is this, that Trinitarian commentators are forced to slip in a restraining
word and an additional sentiment, into the last clause of the verse. Thus Peirce;
“Who has no need, like the priests under the law, from time to time to offer up
sacrifice first for his own sins, and after that for the people’s. For this latter he
did once for all when he offered up himself; and as to the former, he had no occasion
to do it at all.” And no doubt the writer of the epistle ought to have said just this,
if he intended to draw the kind of contrast, which orthodox theology requires,
between Jesus and the Hebrew priests. He limits the opposition between them
to one particular;—the Son of Aaron made offering daily,—the Son of God once
for all. Divines must add another particular; that the Jewish priest atoned for
two classes of sins, his own and the people’s,—Christ for the people’s only. Suppose
for a moment that this was the author’s design; that the word “this,” instead
of having its proper grammatical antecedent, may be restrained, as in the commentary
cited above, to the sacrifice for the people’s sins; then the word “daily”
may be left out, without disturbance to the other substantive particular of the contrast:
the verse will then stand thus; “who needeth not, as those High-priests,
to offer up sacrifice for his own sins; for he offered up sacrifice for the people’s
sins, when he offered up himself.” Here, all the reasoning is obviously gone, and
the sentence becomes a mere inanity: to make sense, we want, instead of the
latter clause, the sentiment of Peirce,—for “he had no occasion to do this at all.”
This, however, is an invention of the expositor, more jealous for his author’s
orthodoxy, than for his composition. I think it necessary to add that, by leaving
out the most emphatic word in this verse (the word once) Mr. Buddicom has suppressed
the author’s antithesis, and favoured the suggestion of his own. I have
no doubt that this was unconsciously done; but it shows how system rubs off the
angles of Scriptural difficulties.—I subjoin a part of the note of John Crell on the
passage: “de pontifice Christo loquitur. Quid vero fecit semel Christus? quid
aliud, quam quod Pontifex antiquus stata die quotannis[a]
faciebat? Principaliter
autem hic non de oblatione pro peccatis populi; sed de oblatione pro ipsius Pontificis
peccatis agi, ex superioribus, ipsoque rationum contextu manifestum est.”
The sins which his sacrifice cancelled must have been of the same order in the
people, and in himself; certainly therefore not moral in their character, but ceremonial.
His death was, for himself no less than for his Hebrew disciples,
commutation for the Mosaic ordinances. Had he not died, he must have continued
under their power; “were he on earth, he would not be a priest,” or have
“obtained that more excellent ministry,” by which he clears away, in the courts
above, all possibilities of ritual sin below, and himself emerges from legal to
spiritual relations.
a. This is obviously the meaning of καθ’ ἡμέραν
in this passage; from time to
time, and in the case alluded to, yearly; not, as in the common version, daily.
398. Rev. D. James, in his Lecture entitled “The doctrine of the Trinity, proved
as a consequence from the Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ,” pp. 366-375.
399. Tillotson’s Works, London, 1717, vol. i. p. 405.
400. Tillotson’s Works, London, 1717, vol. i. p. 579.
401. Socinus thus states the opinion which he attempts to confute: “Receptior
hodie sententia est, homini naturaliter ejusque animo insitam esse divinitatis
alicujus opinionem, cujus vi cuncta regantur ac gubernentur, quæque humanarum
rerum imprimis curam gerat, hominibus consulat atque prospiciat. Hæc sententia,
quam nos falsam esse arbitramur,” &c.—Prælectiones Theol. Fausti Socini
Senensis, c. ii.
402. Mr. James’s illustration of the nature of a spirit.
416. Magee on the Atonement, vol. iii. p. 335. Note. 5th Edition. This note
is a broad caricature of the discussion in the Monthly Repository: and shows that
the Author might have been the Cruikshanks of theology, had his humour always
been good-humour.
417. Magee on the Atonement, vol. iii. pp. 343, 344. Note.
418. Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, vol. x. p. 481. 1815.
I quote from this work, rather than from Mr. Aspland’s “Plea for Unitarian Dissenters,”
in obedience to the Archbishop’s own reference.
419. Preface to Mr. Byrth’s Lecture, part i. p. vii.
422. In the 2nd Edition it is p. 78. All my citations are made from this edition
of Mr. B’s work, published in 1816; and from the 5th Edition of Archbishop
Magee’s, published in 1832.
423. Magee on the Atonement, vol. iii. pp. 223, 224.
424. There is a possibility, which I think it right to suggest, of a difference between
the two Editions of Mr. B’s work; as, however, the accusation is still found in
the newest Edition of the Archbishop’s book, I conclude that this is not the case.
Indeed, even if the Prelate’s quotation had been verbally true, it would in spirit
have been no less false: for, at all events, Mr. B. cites the Vulgate, to give evidence
as to the text, not the translation; and had he used the word renders, it
would only have been because the term naturally occurs when a Version is adduced
to determine a Reading.
The Rev. D. James commences the Preface to his Lecture with these
words: “Modern Unitarianism is a compound of Infidelity and
Heresy.” It would be very easy for me to say what modern Trinitarianism
is, and to attach to it two epithets which Mr. James would
relish no more than I do Infidelity and Heresy. It is evident, however,
that this calling of names proves nothing but the unfitness of
the mind which so indulges its temper and feeling to be engaged in
intellectual and argumentative controversy. Does Mr. James expect
to convince or persuade any Unitarians, by calling them Infidels and
Heretics? The Christ Church method of Conversion is very well for Infallibles,
who have only to denounce, and for “ordained Clergymen,”
who, with a simplicity of extravagance approaching the sublime,
shrink from no consequences of their first principles, and boldly assert
that the Holy Spirit is their Interpreter of Scripture,—but it
displays a strange ignorance or contempt of the only avenues by
which the minds of their fellow Christians can be approached, and of
the moral and argumentative means by which alone conviction can
be produced.
In what sense does Mr. James use the word ‘Heresy,’ in the sentence
quoted? If in the sense of error, then is he of the infallible Church
that he decides authoritatively on such points? If in the sense of
schism and division, who does not know that the Creed-making
Church is the Mother of the Sects, the fomentor of our religious
strifes? With what grace or justice does that man call another an
infidel, who is himself an infidel in respect to the primal and universal
Revelation, and applies himself to blot out the divine signatures from
the soul of man, and the material works of God? There is no infidelity
so bad as this. The Apostle speaks of the law written on the
heart, and of the Gentiles who had not the Jewish Law, being yet a
Law unto themselves, and the Psalmist speaks of the moral fidelity
and constancy of God being shadowed forth by the unfailingness of
His material Laws,—but Mr. James, who makes strange work with
scripture, maintains in opposition to both Scripture and Philosophy,
“the moral character and unity of God not discoverable from the
works of Creation.” I have been long prepared for this. Those who
must maintain Trinitarianism have no other resource than to blot out
the lights of the Original Revelation.[453]Nature and the Soul
must be discredited if the Trinitarian Theology is to hold its place.
This has been long evident to all who have watched the progress of
knowledge, and the signs of the times. The works of God, and the
oracles of the Soul, must be insulted, that the Church, the Creed,
and the Priest may remain.
I have referred but slightly to Mr. James’s Lecture in the following
pages, because I wished to build up an independent argument of great
importance, and would not be led out of my way to answer reasonings
and statements which, being answered, would leave the real controversy
unaffected, and without a step of advancement. Nor could
it be of much moment to discuss the Criticism that finds the Trinity
in a Hebrew plural—the Reasoning that, (in violation of one of the
maxims of Philosophy, to attribute no more Causes than are adequate
to the effects,) in the Works of an Omnipotent Creator finds in unity
of Design no proof of Unity of Being—the Scriptural Argumentation
that lays down the Mosaic Law of Vengeance, “an eye for
an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” expressly condemned by Christ, as
unworthy even of men, as the morality of God himself, “the principle
of eternal right, and the law of his own government”[454]—the transcendental
Metaphysics that sees no difficulty in the infinite and
omnipresent Deity becoming incarnate in a human frame, on the
ground that “spirits occupy no space, and that thousands of them
might be within a thimble, and the thimble on the finger of the
seamstress, and her finger touch none of them.”[455]
There are, however, some statements in the Preface to Mr. James’s
Lecture, professing to be testimonies from Antiquity to the Trinitarian
Doctrine, which demand some notice. To establish his inaccuracy
I shall simply oppose to his statements the statements of
Professor Burton.
1. “[The word Trinity] is found in the writings of Justin Martyr,
who was converted to the Christian faith about the year of our Lord
140.”—p. v. Mr. James mentions in a note that some divines dispute
the authenticity of the work in which the word is found: but Mr.
James is not one of those divines, for he proceeds to assert, that the
passage in Justin Martyr “brings the use of the word within half a
century of the apostolic age.”
Now let us hear Dr. Burton.—“‘Theophili ad Autolycum, lib. ii.
c. 15.’ I quote this passage, not on account of the sentiment which
it contains, (for the allusion is sufficiently puerile,) but because it is
the earliest passage (A. D. 180) in the works of any of the fathers,
where we find the Greek word Τριας, Trinity: and we can thus prove
that the term was applied to the three persons of the Trinity as early
as toward the end of the second century.
“Theophilus had been giving an account of the creation, as described
by Moses in the book of Genesis; and following that allegorical
method of interpretation, which the fathers borrowed too freely
from the schools of Alexandria, he extracts a hidden meaning from
the fact of the heavenly bodies being created on the fourth day. ‘In
like manner also the three days, which preceded the luminaries, are
types of the Trinity, of God, and his Word, and his Wisdom.’”
Burton adds in a note—“This passage is overlooked by Suicer in his
Thesaurus, v. Τριὰς, who very properly observes, that the Expositio
rectæ confessionis, in which the word occurs, and which has been ascribed
to Justin Martyr, is later than that writer by some centuries.”—Theol.
Works, vol. ii. 2nd part, p. 34.
2. “The next who makes use of the word in his writings is Theophilus,
a Gentile convert.”—p. vi. Let us hear what Burton says of
this Theophilus, and of his use of the word Trinity, the first who
used it in such connection.
“Some doubts have been raised concerning the identity and date
of Theophilus: but it seems to be generally agreed, that the person
whose works have come down to us was the sixth bishop of Antioch,
and was appointed to that see about the year 168. He tells us himself
that he had been bred up in heathenism, and it is plain that his
language and thoughts retained a lasting impression from the Platonic
philosophy.”—p. 33.
“We perhaps ought not to infer from the words of Theophilus
that the term Τριας had come in his day to bear the signification of a
trinity in unity. He may have used it merely to express three things;
and the three days, which he compares with the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, might have been spoken of by him as τριὰς τῶν ἡμερῶν, a
triad, or trinity of days. In this sense Clement of Alexandria speaks
of ‘the holy triad, or trinity, faith, hope, and charity;’ and Origen
uses the terms τριὰς and τετρὰς for periods of three and four years respectively.
Tertullian also, at the end of the second century, used
the term trinitas in the same ordinary sense, for any three things.
“I would not therefore argue from the mere occurrence of the word
in the writings of Theophilus, that τριας contained a signification of
unity, as well as of trinity: but this much is at least evident, that
Theophilus must have considered some resemblance, if not equality,
to have existed between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or he
would not have included them in the same type”—p. 38.
3. “Polycarp, a disciple of St. John, when at the stake, addressed a
prayer to God, which he concluded in this manner:—‘For all things
I praise thee, I bless thee, I glorify thee, together with the eternal and
heavenly Jesus Christ: with whom, unto thee, and the Holy Spirit, be
glory, both now and for ever, world without end. Amen.’”—p. vii.
Professor Burton:—“Such are the concluding words of the
prayer in the edition of Archbishop Usher: but Eusebius has quoted
them differently, ‘I glorify thee, through the eternal High Priest,
Jesus Christ, thy beloved Son, through whom be glory to thee, with
him in the Holy Ghost, both now and for evermore. Amen.’”
“The early orthodox writers,” as Bishop Bull goes on to remark,
“while they glorified the Father through the Son, intended to express
the subordination of the Son, in his relation of Son, and the
pre-eminence of the Father, in his relation of Father: but by adoring
the Son together with the Father, they intended to express his being
of one substance, and his existing in the same divine essence and
nature with the Father.”—“Theodoret informs us, that in the middle
of the fourth century the clergy and people of Antioch were divided,
some using the conjunction and, when they glorified the Son, (i. e.,
saying and to the Son,) and others applying the preposition through to
the Son, and in to the Holy Ghost. This was the period when the
dispute concerning the form of doxology became general: and Philistorgius,
the Arian historian, is speaking of the same time and
place, when he says, ‘Flavianus was the first person who used the
words Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, for
before his time some had said, Glory to the Father through the Son in
the Holy Ghost, which was the expression in most general use: and
others Glory to the Father in the Son and Holy Ghost.’”—pp. 7, 8, 9.
“It is true that Eusebius appears to have found a different reading
in his copy of Polycarp’s prayer: and a critical question like this
can never be demonstrably settled.”—p. 13.
4. “[Justin Martyr] says—‘Him (the Father) and that Son who
hath proceeded from him, and the prophetical Spirit, we worship
and adore.’”—p. vii.
Where did Mr. James find this quotation? I shall supply some
words which he has omitted, coming in between two clauses, which
he has printed as continuous parts of the sentence. The omitted
words supply a good test for a fundamental principle of Trinitarian interpretation,
that of equalizing all persons joined together by the conjunctive
conjunction. I shall give the omitted words in italics.
“Justin is answering the charge of atheism, which was brought
against the Christians, and observes, that they were punished for
not worshipping evil demons, which were not really gods. ‘Hence
it is that we are called atheists: and we confess that we are atheists
with respect to such reputed Gods as these: but not with respect to
the true God, the Father of justice, temperance, and every other
virtue, with whom is no mixture of evil. But Him, and the Son
who came from him, and gave us this instruction, and the host of the
other good angels which attend upon and resemble them, and the prophetic
spirit, we worship and adore, paying them a reasonable and
true honour, and not refusing to deliver to any one else, who wishes
to be taught, what we ourselves have learnt.’”
After such careless quotations, to say the best of them, I am not
surprised to find Mr. James, with singular self-devotion, placing
himself beside Mr. Byrth, to share the condemnation that falls upon
injurious representations, not only unproved, but disproved. Mr.
James speaks of the Unitarian crime of distorted representations, as
proved by Mr. Byrth. Mr. James may make common cause with
Mr. Byrth, if he is unwise enough to do so; but I can assure him
that his own burden is heavy enough to bear, without encumbering
himself with any portion of another’s.
To the greatest part of his quotations Mr. James has given no
reference, so that it is impossible to verify them. If he is correct,
he has been more fortunate in some cases than Professor Burton. I
should be glad to have the means of testing his extracts from Origen.
He ought to have stated, that both Bishop Bull and Dr. Priestley, when
speaking of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, never confounded the Trinity
of these Fathers with the Post-Nicene Trinity, or with modern
Orthodoxy.
Nothing can be more unphilosophical than the manner in which
testimonies to modern opinions have been found in the Fathers. Any
words that will bear the sense have been pushed forward as authorities.
No distinction has been made between the ideas suggested by
the words to modern readers, and the ideas of the writers originally
suggesting the words. The suggested and the suggesting ideas would
be found strangely different. Whoever wishes to have clear ideas on
this question, the opinions of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and the origin
of the Trinity, should read the portions of Cudworth’s Intellectual
System that bear upon the subject.
LECTURE VII. THE UNSCRIPTURAL ORIGIN AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM. — The Apostles’ Creed. — Justin Martyr , A.D. 140. — Irenæus , A.D. 178. — Clemens Alexandrinus , A.D. 194. — Tertullian , A.D. 200. — Origen , A.D. 230. — Novatian , A.D. 251. — Lactantius , A.D. 310. — Athanasius , A.D. 325. — The Nicene Creed , A.D. 325. — The Athanasian Creed. ( A.D. 500-800.) — Footnotes for Lecture VII.
“THE FATHER THAT DWELLETH IN ME, HE DOETH THE WORKS.”—John xiv. 10.
It is a profound observation of Professor Dugald Stewart,
that you never destroy an error until you have traced it to
its sources, until you have accounted for its origin. A popular
doctrine, full of life in the strong faith of those who hold it,
cannot be encountered at the height of its power, and struck
down at once by an argument; the world is apt to take for
granted that whatever is widely believed must have some
roots in truth, and you must go up the stream of opinion, if
you would gradually remove this idea so supporting to error,
of its strength and fulness, stripping away the impressions
of magnitude as you ascend, until at last you have left all
the strength behind you, and have come to where you can
contemplate, undeceived, the weak and miserable beginnings
of the turbid flood. Were some Grecian idolater to have
followed the gliding steps of his river God, until his majestic
movements were shortened into the tricklings of the mountain
spring, if the deity did not entirely disappear, it would at
least have changed its form, and melted into the minor nymph
of the Fountain.
Whenever we encounter the doctrine of the Trinity, as it
is received at the present day, and attempt to arrest it by the
strength of Reason and the strength of Scripture, the flood is
too strong for us, the faith of the world flows upon the current,
and we are swept aside as things that had vainly interposed
to intercept the rushings of some mighty tide. We
must travel up to the first droppings if we would demonstrate
the derived nature of this now full stream of faith. If
the ascent terminates before it reaches Christ and the Apostles,
then its origin is not Scriptural but Ecclesiastical; its
fountain is not in the depths of the nature of God, but in
the airy speculations of the vain philosophy of man.
My subject is entitled “The unscriptural Origin and
Ecclesiastical History of the Doctrine of the Trinity.” I
shall invert the order of these topics. I shall show first
where it has its origin, that we may be saved the unnecessary
toil of straining and distorting our vision, in searching
for it where it is not to be found. If I can exhibit its birth
in Ecclesiastical history, this will so far be a proof that it
had no previous birth in Evangelical History. If I can cut it
off from the living fountain of Revelation, and show it proceeding
from other springs, this will so far be a proof that it
is human and not divine. The positive assertion contained in
my title, if established, will establish also the negative portion
of it:—for the Ecclesiastical rise and progress of the
Trinity are the negation of its Scriptural origin.
Christianity was originally delivered to Jews; and the
question naturally arises, how could their pure theism ever
assume the Trinitarian modification of Unity; how, to use
the early language of this Controversy, could the MONARCHY
ever be diluted into the ECONOMY, if it had not been constrained
to adopt this form by the overpowering distinctness
of a Revelation? Now we are able to prove that the Jewish
Christians never did accept the doctrine of the deity of Christ;
that on this account they are classed with Heretics by the
Greek and Latin Fathers, under the names of Nazarenes
and Ebionites; and that not until after the Gospel passed
out of the keeping of the Apostles, and, cut off from its
Jewish spring, was cast into the midst of the Gentile world,
to modify and to be modified, did it come into contact
with Heathen Philosophy, and slowly take the impress of its
spirit.
There were two very marked divisions of the Jewish people,
under widely different influences of Religion and Philosophy,
and not acquainted, perhaps, with the same language,—the
Jews of Palestine, and the Jews of Egypt. The Jews of
Palestine, sheltered from commerce with the world, more by
their unsocial Faith, than by the deep and quiet vallies of
their sequestered land, partook little of the spirit of the
Times, and imparted to it nothing; and though after the
Babylonish Captivity, Gentile Philosophy had tinctured and
in some sense expanded their religious views, yet when they
returned again to their homes that influence was cut off, the
living connection was no longer maintained, and its effects
were rather traditionary mixtures, than seeds of progress.
In contrast with the insulated life of the Jews of Palestine,
the Jews of Alexandria lived in the very centre of the world’s
freshest ideas—their dwelling was the mart of nations—and
Grecian and Oriental Philosophy met together in their far-famed
Schools, and mingled their Wisdom. “The arms of
the Macedonians,” says Gibbon, “diffused over Asia and
Egypt the language and learning of Greece; and the theological
system of Plato (before Christ, 360) was taught, with
less reserve, and perhaps with some improvements, in the
celebrated School of Alexandria. A numerous colony of
Jews had been invited, by the favour of the Ptolemies, to
settle in their new capital. While the bulk of the nation
practised their legal ceremonies, and pursued the lucrative
operations of Commerce, a few Hebrews, of a more liberal
spirit, devoted their lives to religious and philosophical contemplation.
They cultivated with diligence, and embraced
with ardour, the theological system of the Athenian Sage.
But their national pride would have been mortified by a fair
confession of their former poverty: and they boldly marked,
as the sacred inheritance of their ancestors, the gold and
jewels which they had so lately stolen from their Egyptian
masters. One hundred years before the birth of Christ, a
philosophical treatise, which manifestly betrays the style and
sentiments of the School of Plato, was produced by the
Alexandrian Jews, and unanimously received as a genuine
and valuable relic of the inspired Wisdom of Solomon. A
similar union of the Mosaic faith and the Grecian philosophy,
distinguishes the works of Philo, which were composed for
the most part under the reign of Augustus. The material
soul of the Universe might offend the piety of the Hebrews:
but they applied the character of the LOGOS to the Jehovah
of Moses and the patriarchs; and the Son of God was introduced
upon earth under a visible, and even human appearance,
to perform those familiar offices which seem incompatible
with the nature and attributes of the Universal cause.”[456]
It is not necessary that I should inquire here with great
accuracy into the nature of the Trinity as taught by Plato. I
think it is most probable that Plato’s Trinity was a Trinity of
Attributes rather than a Trinity of Persons; that it corresponded
rather with Sabellianism than with the Orthodox
form of the Doctrine. This is a question, however, on which
it is impossible to speak with certainty, owing, partly, to the
nature of the ideas which constitute this compound conception
of Deity, and partly to the gorgeous style of the
imaginative metaphysician, whose figures we hardly know
whether we are to harden into Realities, or to fuse into Ideas.
Authorities are divided upon this point—and we have the
name of Cudworth upon the one side, and the scarcely less
illustrious one of Guizot upon the other. Whatever may
have been the view of Plato himself,[457] it is certain that before
Christ, his followers, some of the purer of the later Platonists,
as they are called, taught a doctrine of the Trinity
exactly corresponding to the form in which it was established
nearly three hundred years after the death of our Saviour, by
the first General Council of the Christian Church. The Platonists
contemplated one original fountain of being, a simple
unity, “which virtually containeth all things,” from whence
all other things, whether temporal or eternal, whether created
or uncreated, were altogether derived. This Monad or
Unity the Platonists considered as the only absolute or perfect
existence, superior to intellect or wisdom, (Logos) for
these two reasons—first, because Intellect being concerned
with ideas, implies numbers and multiplicity; whereas the
Supreme is Unity; and secondly, that because “Knowledge
is not the highest good, there must be some substantial thing
in order of Nature superior to Intellect.” In the same way
that Goodness and Unity, the properties of the self-existent
God, were supposed to be superior to Mind or Wisdom,
the second principle, so in its turn Intellect was supposed
to be superior to the moving spirit or energy which
carried ideas (the ideas of the Logos) into Action. The
Monad, or Supreme Unity, generated Intellect, and Intellect
as containing the intelligible ideas or archetypes of all sensible
things, generated Soul or the spirit of Action. Hence
the Platonic Trinity: the one Good; Intellect (Logos or
Nous); Psyche, or operating energy.[458] In Platonic language,
the FIRST in this Trinity is said to be All things Unitively;
the SECOND, All things intellectually; and the THIRD,
All things actively or productively. I shall give one example
of the style of the Platonists in expressing these Trinitarian
conceptions. It is exactly that which the earlier Fathers
would have used when speaking of the Christian Trinity.
“That which is always perfect generates what is Eternal, and
that which it generates is always less than itself. What shall
we say therefore of the most absolutely perfect Being of all?
Does that produce nothing from itself? Or rather, does it
not produce the greatest of all things after it? Now the
greatest of all things after the most absolutely perfect Being
is Mind or Intellect; and this is Second to it. For Mind
beholdeth this as its Father, and standeth in need of nothing
else besides it; whereas that First Principle standeth in need
of no (Logos) Mind or Intellect. What is generated from that
which is better than Mind, must needs be Mind or Intellect,
because Mind is better than all other things, they being all
in order of nature after it, and junior to it; as Psyche itself,
or the First Soul; for this is also the Word or Energy of
Mind (Logos), as that is the Word or Energy of the First
Good.[459] Perfect Intellect,” (Logos, the second in the Trinity,)
“generates Soul” (Psyche, or Moving Spirit, the third in the
Platonic Trinity), “and it being perfect must needs generate,
for so great a Power could not remain steril. But that which
is here begotten also, cannot be greater than its Begetter;
but must needs be Inferior to it, as being the Image thereof.”—(Plotinus.
Cudworth, p. 580.)
Now to connect such speculations as these with Gentile
Christianity we have the intermediate link of the Platonizing
or Alexandrian Jews. About two hundred years before
Christ the Hebrew Scriptures were made accessible to Grecian
curiosity through the medium of the Septuagint Translation:
and when comparison came to be instituted between the wisdom
of their Sacred Books, and the wisdom of the Schools,
a strong temptation came into force upon the Jewish Platonists,
by a system of allegory and fanciful interpretation to
make their Scriptures divulge recondite doctrines, and by
such imaginative means to metamorphose its simplest statements
into the likeness of the deep and mysterious teachings
of Philosophy. Hence arose the whole system of allegorizing
which prevailed so extensively among the Jews of Alexandria.
They were under two sets of influences, an affection for the
Platonic or Eclectic Philosophy of their Schools, and a
jealousy for their Religion that made them shrink from the
idea that any Philosophy should contain secrets not there
divulged.[460] They combined these two affections, and made
their Scriptures speak the language of the Schools by means
of the transforming process of allegorical interpretation.
Examples without end might be given of the most extravagant
transfigurations of the events of Hebrew History.
As a preparation for the manner of speaking on these subjects
afterwards adopted by the earlier Christian Trinitarians,
I will extract one passage, which perhaps most faithfully represents
the purer views of Philo of Alexandria, the most
eminent of the Jewish Platonizers, and whose influence operating
upon Christianity through the minds of the Gentile
philosophical believers, is to this day felt upon the popular
forms of our faith. I have only to premise that he is speaking
of the Attributes of God abstractly from God himself;
and though it is more than probable that Philo as well as
Plato never separated these Attributes from the Supreme
Deity, still it was the necessary tendency of such personifications
to harden into distinct persons, and with common
minds personified Attributes very soon came to be considered
as Real Beings. This then was the original source of the
Christian Trinity. To keep the lofty and retired Essence of
God apart from all contact with matter which was looked
upon as evil, and from number which was looked upon as
imperfect, the Powers of God were first considered as Emanations
from Him by successive generation—Intellect
proceeding from the One Good, and operating Energy or
Spirit proceeding from Intellect (Logos) to consummate its
Ideas, and then gradually came to be separated from Him, by
a very natural process of philosophic deteriorations, and to
be fixed down into independent personalities. With these
explanations I now quote from Philo. He belonged to the
age of Christ, but was born some time anterior to the Christian
era: Brucker says twenty years. Philo is allegorizing the
appearance of the three angels to Abraham, into a threefold
manifestation of the One God: “The Father is in the
middle of all, who in Holy Scripture is by a peculiar name
styled the Being [He who is]: and on each side are [two]
most ancient Powers next to the Being, whereof one is
called the Effective (creative Power) and the other Royal;
and the Effective, God, for by this [the Father] made and
adorned the Universe; and the Royal, Lord, for it is fit he
should rule and govern what he has made. Being therefore
attended on both sides with his Powers, to a discerning understanding
he appears one while to be One, and another
while to be Three. One when the mind being in the highest
degree purified, and passing over not only a multitude of numbers,
but also that which is next to an Unit,” (the Monad)
“the number of two,” (the other two, Logos and Psyche)
“endeavours after a simple and uncompounded Idea, perfect
of itself: and Three, when not as yet sufficiently exercised
in great mysteries, it busies itself about lesser, and is not able
to conceive the Being, [He who is,] without any other,
of itself, but by his Works, and either as creating or governing.”[461]
Such, then, were the prevalent modes of Conception at
the time when the Gospel passed out of the hands of strictly
Jewish interpreters, and came to be inspected by the eyes of
Gentile Philosophers. With more or less purity of conception,
all the Platonists personified the divine Attributes; and
some of them represented these personified Attributes as distinct
Existences, not hesitating to speak of a second God,
though holding him to be derived and dependent. There is
no trace among the purer Platonists of any belief of three
co-equal Gods, each possessing within himself the fullness of
Deity, yet mysteriously united. The second and third persons
in the Platonic Trinity were carefully represented as derived,
dependent, and subordinate, under the similitudes of
the stream and the fountain, the branch and the vine, the
sun and its outshining effulgence; the relation between them
being like that of three apparent Suns,—“two of them being
but the parhelii of the other, and essentially dependent on it:
for as much as the second would be but the reflected Image
of the first, and the third but the second refracted.”[462]
Now it so happened that the Apostle John, living at
Ephesus, “the centre of the mingling opinions of the East
and West,” made use of this term “Logos” as already familiar
to those for whom he wrote, and with the purpose of
impressing upon the word the higher and purer meaning attached
to it by the Jews of Palestine; wresting it from the
philosophical to the strictly Jewish or Christian sense. Nothing
could be more natural than that the Apostle should
adopt the style of the philosophic schools in the midst of
which he wrote, especially since it was not peculiar to them,
but already in use among the Jews; and that endeavouring to
connect truth with familiar modes of speaking, he should
attempt to infuse into the word the more spiritual ideas with
which it was already associated in his own language.
“St. John,” says Guizot, “was a Jew, born and educated
in Palestine; he would naturally, then, attach to the word
Logos the sense attached to it by the Jews of Palestine.
Closely examined, the ideas which he gives of the Logos cannot
agree with those of Philo and the school of Alexandria;
they correspond, on the contrary, with those of the Jews of
Palestine. Perhaps St. John, employing a well known term
to explain a doctrine which was yet unknown, has slightly
altered the sense: it is this alteration which we appear to discover
on comparing different passages of his writings. It is
worthy of remark, that the Jews of Palestine, who did not
perceive this alteration, could find nothing extraordinary in
what St. John said of the Logos; at least they comprehended
it without difficulty; while the Greeks and Grecising Jews,
on their parts, brought to it prejudices and preconceptions
easily reconciled with those of the Evangelist, who did not
expressly contradict them. This circumstance must have
much favoured the progress of Christianity. Thus the fathers
of the Church, in the two first centuries and later, formed
almost all in the school of Alexandria, gave to the Logos of
St. John a sense nearly similar to that which it received from
Philo.[463] Their doctrine approached very near to that which,
in the fourth century, the Council of Nice condemned in the
person of Arius.”[464]
It would not be possible, within my present limits, to trace,
with a minute accuracy, how the Logos of the schools became
connected with the Logos of the Gospel; and afterwards,
under the necessity of adjusting these conceptions
with the nominal Unity of God, changed its form into the
present theory of the Trinity. It will readily be imagined
that the Gentile Christians, accustomed to associate ideas of
external power with their Deities, and at the same time to
contemplate them in connection with humanity, would
shrink from the bare and unclothed conception of the crucified
Jesus; would endeavour to throw around their new faith
a mystic splendour that might protect it from the ridicule of
Heathen scoffers, and naturally seize upon means so obvious,
the language offered by St. John, and the ideas offered by
their own philosophy, to connect the pre-existent soul of
Jesus not with Humanity, but with God. In this way they
could remove the shame and odium of the cross, that stumbling
block to the Jews, and to the Greeks foolishness. We
little realize with what distaste and abhorrence a Hebrew
looking for the Messiah, and a Philosopher speculating on
the nature of the divine Emanations that were the Mediators
between God and men, would contemplate the despised Galilean
executed as a malefactor. Neither do we realize, as we
ought to do in this connection, the magnanimity of Paul: “I
determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus
Christ and him crucified;” so much has the technical jargon
of theology overcast the moral sublimity of the Apostle’s
spiritual meaning.
I shall now, with as much distinctness as a subject purely
literary will admit, attempt to exhibit to you the gradual transformations,
by which these Conceptions slowly assumed the
present orthodox form of the doctrine of the Trinity. If this
had been a doctrine of Revelation, it would, of course, have
been perfect at once; but arising out of accidental circumstances
and accidental ideas, it naturally required many fresh
adjustments to make it consistent with itself, and to protect
it, by skilfully chosen words, against all the troublesome attacks
of theological ingenuity. This was not the work of a
moment nor of a century,—hundreds of years passed over
before the doctrine assumed any fixed form; nor was it until
the thirteenth century that the present form of the doctrine
of three Gods, numerically one, was authoritatively decreed.[465]
Those who tell us of an “unimproved and unimprovable
Revelation,” must surely be strangely ignorant of the history
of Trinitarian Theology.
There are three Creeds of the Church of England, each
of them to be referred to distinct Periods of Ecclesiastical
History, and becoming more Unitarian in proportion as we
approach the Apostolical times, more Trinitarian in proportion
as we recede from those times. These three Creeds I
shall make serve as heads under which to introduce my proofs
of the rise and progress of the Trinitarian Doctrine.
The first Creed is Unitarian. It was the only Creed
known to the Church for three hundred and twenty-five
years.
The second Creed is partlyTrinitarian, fixing the Deity
of Christ, but saying nothing of the Deity of the Holy
Spirit.
The third Creed contains Trinitarianism, though not in its
final and perfected, yet in its boldest and most extravagant,
forms.
The first Creed is known by the name of the Apostles’
Creed. It is not known by whom it was written, nor when
it was written;[466] but though we have no verbatim copy of it
until after the Nicene Council, but only more or less of the substance,
and some of its clauses are evidently of a later date, it
may substantially be regarded as descriptive of the faith of the
Church at an early age.[467] “The Christian system,” says
Mosheim, “as it was hitherto taught, preserved its native
and beautiful simplicity, and was comprehended in a small
number of articles. The public teachers inculcated no other
doctrines than those that are contained in what is commonly
called the Apostles’ Creed; and in the method of illustrating
them, all vain subtleties, all mysterious researches, everything
that was beyond the reach of common capacities, was carefully
avoided. This will by no means appear surprising to those
who consider that, at this time, there was not the least controversy
about those capital doctrines of Christianity which
were afterwards so keenly debated in the Church; and who
reflect that the bishops of those primitive times were, for the
most part, plain and illiterate men, remarkable rather for their
piety and zeal than for their learning and eloquence.”—(Eccles.
Hist. cent. ii. p. 11. ch. 3.)
Here, then, is the first Creed of the Church, long reverenced
as a formula drawn up by the Apostles themselves,
and perhaps still by some unwittingly honoured as such. It
contains some departures from the simplicity of Gospel language,
as in creed-making must necessarily happen; for
creeds are required only by those for whom the Scriptures
are not sufficiently definite or sufficiently safe. So far as it
is a Confession of faith, it demonstrates that the belief of
the primitive Church was strictly Unitarian.
I believe in God (or, as the earlier notices of this Creed
have it, “in one God,” also, “one only God the Father
Almighty”) the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, who was
conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered
under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried:
he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the
dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand
of God, the Father Almighty: from thence he shall
come to judge the quick and the dead: I believe in the Holy
Ghost; the holy Catholic Church; the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and
the life everlasting. Amen.
From the various transformations of this Creed in the
pages of Ecclesiastical writers, it is evident that it was not a
fixed but a growing formula, and that additions were freely
made to it according as the heresies of the time might seem
to require the introduction of a new clause. One thing, however,
is plain, that the Ages which had their faith stated in
this creed had not yet confounded Jesus with God; that he
who is simply and solely described as the Son of God, crucified
and dying, rising from the grave, and sitting now on the
right hand of the Father Almighty, was not yet exalted into
the Second Person of the Trinity, equal to God in all
things.
Now it is not a little remarkable, that many orthodox
writers perceived and deplored the lamentable deficiency of
this faith of the primitive Church; and some of them boldly
declare, that the Christian Fathers were not yet initiated in
these high mysteries. “M. Jurieu,” quoted by Jortin, “whose
zeal against heresy is well known, assures us that the fundamental
articles of Christianity were not understood by the
Fathers of the three first centuries; that the true system began
to be modelled into some shape by the Nicene bishops,
and was afterwards immensely improved and beautified by the
following synods and councils.”[468]
Bishop Bull declares, “that almost all the Catholic writers
before Arius’ time seem not to have known any thing of the
invisibility and immensity of the Son of God; and that they
often speak of him in such a manner as if, even in respect of
his divine nature, he was finite, visible, and circumscribed in
place.” Such sentiments are only to be paralleled by some
passages from these Fathers themselves, who declare that
such notions as they had of the divinity of Christ they had
derived solely from the Gospel of St. John, and that the
other Evangelists had but an obscure knowledge of this subject.
“None of them,” says Origen, “disclosed his divinity
so purely as John.”[469] “John,” says Eusebius, “commenced
with the doctrine of the divinity, that having been
reserved by the divine Spirit for him as the most worthy.”[470]
And, later, Chrysostom declares that the other Evangelists
were like “little children, who hear, but do not understand
what they hear, being occupied with cakes and childish playthings;”
but John taught, “what the angels themselves did
not know before he declared it.” “This doctrine was not
published at first, for the world was not advanced to it. Matthew,
Mark, and Luke did not state what was suitable to his
dignity, but what was fitting for their hearers. John, the
Son of Thunder, advanced at last to the doctrine of the divinity.”[471]
I shall now cite some proofs from the Christian writers of
the three first centuries, to show that though, in correspondence
with Platonic doctrines, a derived and subordinate divinity
was ascribed to Jesus, nothing like the present orthodox
faith was dreamed of, and that the highest authorities on
these subjects, Cudworth for instance, are fully aware that,
for nearly four hundred years, the Creeds of the Church embraced
nothing more than the Platonic Trinity.
And, first, I shall give one distinct testimony from Origen,
to which others might be added from Irenæus and Tertullian,
of the Unitarianism of the Jewish Christians:
“And when you consider the faith concerning our Saviour
of those of the Jews who believe in Jesus, some thinking
him to be the son of Joseph and Mary, and others of Mary
only, and the divine Spirit, but still without any belief in his
divinity.”[472] “And they of the Jews who have received Jesus
as the Christ, go by the name of Ebionites.”[473]
I am next to cite evidence that, for the first three hundred
years, the Christian writers acknowledged the inferiority of
Jesus to hisFather, though ascribing to him a derived divinity.
It is not until A. D. 140 that we find any very distinct
mention even of this description of divinity as belonging to
Jesus.[474]
“I will endeavour to show that he who appeared to Abraham,
Jacob, and Moses, and who is called God, is different
from the God that made all things,—numerically different,
though not in will; for I say that he never did any thing but
what that God who made all things, and above whom
there is no god, willed that he should do and say.”[475]
“We hold the Rule of Truth, that there is one God Almighty,
who created all things by his Logos.” ... “This is the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; and of Him it is that Paul
declared, There is one God, even the Father, who is
above all, and through all, and in us all.”[476]
“There is one unbegotten almighty Father, and one first
begotten, by whom all things were, and without whom nothing
was made. For one is truly God, who made the beginning
of all things, meaning his first-begotten son.”[477]
“I do not speak of Gods and Lords; but I follow the
Apostle; so that if the Father and the Son are to be named
together, I call the Father God, and Jesus Christ Lord:
though I can call Christ God when speaking of himself
alone.” And he goes on to explain this by declaring, that a
ray of the sun may, with sufficient propriety, be called the
sun.[478]
“We may by this means solve the doubts which terrify
many men, who pretend to great piety, and who are afraid
of making two Gods, and, through this, fall into vain and impious
opinions; denying that the nature of the Son is different
from that of the Father, and who acknowledge that he
is God in name only; or denying the divinity of the Son,
and then maintaining that his nature and essence is different
from that of the Father. For we must tell them that he
who is God of himself, is The God, as the Saviour states in
his prayer to the Father, ‘that they may know thee, The
only true God;’ but that whosoever becomes divine by partaking
of his divinity, cannot be styled The God, but a God,
among whom especially is the first born of all creatures.”[479]
“He, although he was in the form of God, did not think of
the robbery of being equal with God. For though he knew
that he was God, from God the Father, he never likened or
compared himself with God the Father, remembering that
he was from the Father, and that he had what he had because
the Father had given it to him.”[480]
“He showed his fidelity to God, in that he taught that
there is one God, and that he alone ought to be worshipped.
Nor did he ever say that he himself was God. For he would
not have preserved his fidelity if, being sent to take away a
number of gods, and to assert one God, he had introduced
another besides that one. Wherefore, because he was so
faithful, because he arrogated nothing to himself, that he
might fulfil the commands of Him who sent him, he received
the dignity of perpetual priest, and the honour of Supreme
King, the power of a judge, and the title of God.”[481]
And not inconveniently to multiply evidence, let us come
at once to the very orthodox Athanasius himself, and we shall
find how little this Father knew of the nice adjustments of
that Creed which now passes under his name.
“For there is one God, and there is not another besides
Him. When it is said that the Father is the only God, that
he is one God, ‘I am the First,’ and ‘I am the Last,’ it is
well said. This is not said, however, to take away from the
Son; for he also is inTHE ONE, FIRST, and ONLY ONE, as
being the only Logos, Wisdom, and Effulgence of him who
is THE ONE, and THE ALONE, and the Supreme.”[482]
“And Athanasius himself, who is commonly accounted the
very Rule of Orthodoxality in this point, when he doth so
often resemble the Father to the Sun, or the original Light;
and the Son to the splendour or brightness of it, (as likewise
doth the Nicene Council and the Scripture itself,) he seems
hereby to imply some dependence of the Second upon the
First, and subordination to it. Especially when he declareth,
that the Three Persons of the Trinity are not to be
looked upon as Three Principles, nor to be resembled to
Three Suns, but to the Sun, and its splendour, and its derivative
light.”[483]
Now I may sum up the impression of these passages in
the words of the very learned Cudworth:—“But particularly
as to their gradual subordination of the Second Hypostasis
to the First, and of the Third to the First and Second,
our Platonick Christian doubtless would therefore plead
them the more excusable, because the generality of Christian
Doctors, for the first three hundred years after the Apostles’
times, plainly asserted the same; as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras,
Tatianus, Irenæus, the Author of the Recognitions,
Tertullian, Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, Gregorius Thaumaturgus,
Dionysius of Alexandria, Lactantius, and many
others. All whose testimonies, because it would be too tedious
to set down here, we shall content ourselves with one
of the last mentioned;—‘Both the Father and Son is God:
but he as it were an exuberant fountain, this as a stream derived
from him: He like to the sun, this like to a ray extended
from the sun.’ And though it be true, that Athanasius,
writing against the Arians, does appeal to the tradition
of the antient Church, and amongst others cites Origen’s
testimony too; yet this was only for the Eternity and Divinity
of the Son of God, but not at all for such an absolute
co-equality of him with the Father as would exclude all dependence,
subordination, and inferiority;[484] those antients so
unanimously agreeing therein, that they are by Petavius
therefore taxed for Platonism, and having by that means
corrupted the purity of the Christian Faith, in this article of
the Trinity. Which how it can be reconciled with those
other opinions, of Ecclesiastic Tradition being a Rule of
Faith, and impossibility of the visible Churches erring in
any fundamental point, cannot easily be understood. However,
this general Tradition, or Consent of the Christian
Church, for three hundred years together after the Apostles’
times, though it cannot justify the Platonists in anything
discrepant from the Scripture, yet may it in some measure
doubtless plead their excuse, who had no Scripture Revelation
at all to guide them herein; and so at least make their
error more tolerable or pardonable.”[485]
We come now to a time when these floating and indefinite
conceptions were to assume more fixed forms. It is apparent
that so far the Christian Fathers fluctuated between
their desire to exalt Jesus into the Logos of God, and the
restraining fear of adopting ideas or expressions not reconcilable
with the strict unity of the Deity. “The suspense
and fluctuation,” says Gibbon, “produced in the minds of
the Christians by these opposite tendencies, may be observed
in the writings of the theologians who flourished after the
end of the apostolic age, and before the origin of the Arian
controversy. Their suffrage is claimed with equal confidence
by the orthodox and by the heretical parties; and the most
inquisitive critics have fairly allowed that if they had the good
fortune of possessing the Catholic Verity, they have delivered
their conceptions in loose, inaccurate, and sometimes
contradictory language.” Ideas so naturally irreconcilable,
as Jesus when contemplated as the Son of God, and Jesus
when contemplated as the Wisdom of God (Logos), with personality
attached to it, were certain sooner or later to betray
their inconsistency, and to stand out from one another in opposing
attitudes. They could be held in combination only so
long as two very strong but opposite influences, (a desire to
meet the conceptions of the prevalent Philosophy, and a
desire at the same time to preserve unviolated the Jewish and
Christian doctrine of the Unity of God,) operated together to
prevent theologians looking too closely into their Faith, or
attempting too strictly to harmonize its elements.
The elements of a necessary separation existed in that confused
system by which the earlier Fathers brought together
Jesus the Christ, and the Logos of the purer Platonists, into
the same conception; some of them inclining to the idea of the
Son of God being an eternal emanation from the Father, like
light from the sun, veiling the difficulty of a Son being co-eternal
with his Father under the unmeaning phrase, ‘everlasting
generation’—and some adopting the lower view that
he was only the highest emanation from the origin of all
Spirits, the first of created Beings, and the instrument of
God in all the other works of Creation. “These speculations,”
says Gibbon, “became the most serious business of
the present, and most useful preparation for a future life.
A theology which it was incumbent to believe, which it was
impious to doubt, and which it might be dangerous and even
fatal to mistake, became the familiar topic of private meditation
and popular discourse.[486] The cold indifference of philosophy
was inflamed by the fervent spirit of devotion; and
even the metaphors of common language suggested the fallacious
prejudices of sense and experience. The Christians,
who abhorred the gross and impure generation of the Greek
mythology, were tempted to argue from the familiar analogy
of the filial and paternal relations. The character of
Son seemed to imply a perpetual subordination to the voluntary
author of his existence; but as the act of generation
in the most spiritual and abstracted sense, must be supposed
to transmit the properties of a common nature, they durst
not presume to circumscribe the powers or the duration of
the Son of an eternal and omnipotent Father.—Their tender
reverence for the memory of Christ, and their horror for
the profane worship of any created being, would have engaged
them to assert the equal and absolute divinity of the
Logos, if their rapid ascent toward the throne of heaven
had not been imperceptibly checked by the apprehension of
violating the unity and sole supremacy of the great Father
of Christ and of the Universe.”
Christ, when viewed as the Wisdom or Logos of God,
was by a natural transition of thought placed within the effulgence
of the divine glory; but when viewed not as an
Attribute but as a Person, the Son and Messiah of the
Father, this dim idea would pass away, and the distinction
between God and Christ become too visible to be confused.
In this state of opinion two parties naturally appeared, separating
the two ideas that entered into the prevalent conception
of Christ, each taking up one of them as representing
the whole truth respecting his nature and person. The Arians,
alarmed at the idea of two Gods, inclined to that part of the
conception which represented Jesus as the Son and Messenger
of the Father, but at the same time elevating him
above all other created beings, and giving him an existence
before the worlds were. The Athanasians, on the other
hand, inclined to that part of the conception which represented
him as the Logos of the Deity, and under the reaction,
and the necessity for more strictly defining the hidden
sense of doctrines, produced by the Arian Creed, attempted
to conquer the difficulty of his Sonship by representing him
as an eternal emanation from the very substance of the Deity,
and exalted him into an equality with God, though at the
same time they described it as a derived and subordinate
equality. It is unavoidable in describing these views to
make use of contradictory words. The ideas are irreconcilable,
and were only saved from plainly appearing so by being
involved in a cloud of mystical or rather no meaning words;
for words must either be significant of ideas, or no-sense.
This then was the subject of the great Arian and Trinitarian
Controversy, which in the fourth Century shook the
peace of the world. It turned upon this point, whether
Christ was of the same essence as the Father, and therefore
not created but begotten or emanating; or whether he was as
the Arians thought, made out of nothing, and therefore a
created Being. Neither of them contemplated him as independent
of the Supreme Deity, but the Athanasians regarded
him as a con-substantial and co-eternal emanation;
the Arians, though assigning him the highest rank, regarded
him as created like other beings. Such are the great questions
of a metaphysical and dogmatical religion. Such are the
mysteries on which Synods and Councils have legislated.
Such are the subjects in which Ecclesiastics have shown
more interest than in the spirit of the life of Christ, and
the moral hopes and preparations of Immortality. Such
are the subject matter of Creeds, the dry husks of doctrine,
the spiritless formulas on which souls are starved, the bread
of Christ converted into a stone, and yet in the eyes of many,
superior to practical discipleship, to Charity and the Love of
God, to the spirit of Brotherhood and the trustful faith of
Duty.
It was to settle this dispute that the first general Council
of the Church was assembled at Nice A. D. 325. The Emperor
Constantine attended in person. He had previously
remonstrated with the contending parties, and entreated them
not to disturb the peace of the Empire and of the Church,
for matters the most insignificant and small.[487] But he did
not know the temper of Controversialists; nor what things
become important in their eyes.[488] The Athanasians prevailed,
and “the con-substantiality of the Father and the Son was
established by the Council of Nice.” Under this word however
lurked future Controversies, and by con-substantiality
the Council of Nice meant, not the present doctrine of three
persons in one God, but merely sameness of nature or kind,
such a sameness as three men may possess who are generically
the same but numerically different; and this is openly
admitted by the highest authorities, Petavius, Cudworth,
Le Clerc, Jortin. “The majority,” says Gibbon, “was divided
into two parties, distinguished by a contrary tendency
to the sentiments of the Tritheists, and of the Sabellians.
But as those opposite extremes seemed to overthrow the
foundations either of natural or revealed religion, they mutually
agreed to qualify the rigour of their principles; and to disavow
the just, but invidious, consequences which might be
urged by their antagonists. The interest of the common
cause inclined them to join their numbers, and to conceal
their differences; their animosities were softened by the
healing counsels of toleration, and their disputes were suspended
by the use of the mysterious Homoousion (Consubstantial),
which either party was free to interpret according
to their peculiar tenets. The Sabellian sense, which about
fifty years before had obliged the Council of Antioch to prohibit
this celebrated term, had endeared it to those theologians
who entertained a secret but partial affection for a
nominal Trinity. But the more fashionable saints of the
Arian times, the intrepid Athanasius, the learned Gregory
Nazianzen, and the other pillars of the Church, who supported
with ability and success the Nicene doctrine, appeared
to consider the expression of substance as if it had been
synonymous with that of nature; and they ventured to illustrate
their meaning, by affirming that three men, as they
belong to the same common species, are con-substantial or
homoousian to each other. This pure and distinct equality
was tempered on the one hand by the internal connection,
and spiritual penetration, which indissolubly unites the divine
persons, and on the other by the pre-eminence of the Father,
which was acknowledged as far as it is compatible with the
independence of the son. Within these limits the almost invisible
and tremulous ball of Orthodoxy was allowed securely
to vibrate. On either side beyond this consecrated ground
the heretics and the dæmons lurked in ambush to surprise
and devour the unhappy wanderer. But as the degrees of
theological hatred depend on the Spirit of the war, rather
than on the importance of the Controversy, the heretics who
degraded, were treated with more severity than those who
annihilated the person of the Son.”[489]
We are now arrived at that great period in the faith of the
Church, when the dignity of the Son was authoritatively
settled by the Nicene Council. Here is a brief account of
its proceedings. “The Bishops began by much personal
dissension, and presented to the Emperor a variety of written
accusations against each other; the Emperor burnt all their
libels and exhorted them to peace and unity. They then
proceeded to examine the momentous question proposed to
them. It was soon discovered that the differences which it
was intended to reconcile might in their principle be reduced
to one point, and that point might be expressed by one word,
and thus the question appears to have been speedily simplified
(as indeed was necessary that so many persons might
come to one conclusion on so mysterious a subject) and reduced
to this—whether the Son was or was not consubstantial
with the Father. Then arose subtile disceptations respecting
the meaning of the word, ‘about which some conflicted with
each other, dwelling on the term and minutely dissecting it;
it was like a battle fought in the dark; for neither party
seemed at all to understand on what ground they vilified each
other.’ However the result was perfectly conclusive; they
finally decided against the Arian opinions, and established
respecting the two first persons in the Trinity, the doctrine
which the Church still professes in the Nicene Creed.”[490]
This doctrine is as follows:—you will perceive that it is
partly Trinitarian, and only partly, a derived deity being attributed
to the Son, and no deity whatsoever attributed to the
Holy Spirit. Changes were afterwards introduced into this
Creed to adapt it to the growing orthodoxy of the times. I
shall mention these in their proper places; meanwhile I give
the Nicene Creed of the Nicene Council:—
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of
all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, begotten and only begotten of the Father;
that is of the substance of the Father, God of (out of) God,
Light of (from) Light, very God of very God, begotten, not
made, consubstantial with the Father, by whom all things
were made both in heaven and in earth: who for us men, and
for our salvation, descended and was incarnate, and was made
man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into the
heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead.
(We believe) also in the Holy Ghost.
“The holy Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes
those who say that there was a time when the Son of God
was not, and that before he was begotten he was not, and
that he was made out of nothing, or out of another substance
or essence, and is created, changeable, or alterable.”
“Such,” says Jortin, “was the Nicene Creed, as it stood
originally and before it was interpolated by subsequent Councils.
Our church hath dropped the anathematizing clauses
at the end, and one cannot help wishing that the Nicene
Fathers had done the same. The Christians in times following
were perpetually making anathematisms, even upon the
slightest and poorest occasions; and it is really a wonder that
they did not at last insert in their Litanies, ‘We beseech
Thee to curse and confound the Pelagians, Semi-pelagians,
Nestorians, Eutychians, Monothelites, Jacobites, Iconoclasts,
and all heretics and schismatics.’”[491]
The history of the fourth century is almost entirely taken
up with the persecutions of Consubstantialists against Arians,
Arians against Consubstantialists, and the minor strifes of the
subdivisions of these sects. After the death of Constantine,
the Emperor Constantius sided with the Arians, and then the
persecuted became the persecutors, for wherever a dogmatical
Religion is held, wherever Creeds are the Essentials of Salvation,
of course no Charity can be learned in the School of
Suffering. There is an admirable passage contained in Archdeacon
Jortin’s most instructive remarks on Ecclesiastical
History. It extorts a smile to observe with what unconsciousness
dogmatic Theologians of all ages insult their fellow-disciples,
in the name and for the love of God, and close their
acts of persecution with the words of affection and blessing:—
“In the fourth century were held thirteen Councils against
Arius, fifteen for him, and seventeen for the Semiarians; in
all forty-five.[492]
“How could the Arians, in the time of Constantius and
Valens, bring themselves to such an un-christian persecuting
temper? How could they oppress their fellow-Christians, the
Consubstantialists, who, supposing them to have been in
error, fell into it through a religious fear of ascribing too little
to their Redeemer, and of not paying him sufficient honour?
Can a man love his saviour, and hate his brother for a mistake
of this kind?
“And how could the Consubstantialists persuade themselves
that an Arian, who perhaps had suffered for professing
Christianity in times of distress, who believed Christ to be
his Maker, his Saviour, his King, and his Judge, would choose
to detract from his dignity, and to offend him in whom he
placed all his hopes of salvation? Human nature is not capable
of this folly; and if the man were in an error, yet in
such a person the error must have been involuntary, a mere
defect of the understanding, and not a fault of the will.
“A Christian and a lover of peace, who lived in obscurity,
and whose name I cannot tell, stood up and said:—‘My
brethren, the things to be believed are few, the things to be
done are many: but you behave yourselves as if the reverse
of this were true. St. Paul tells you, “The grace of God
that bringeth Salvation hath appeared to all men; teaching
us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live
soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world, looking
for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearance of the great
God, and (of) our Saviour, Jesus Christ.” Concerning the nature
of Jesus you can dispute incessantly, and concerning the
word Grace, you will probably dispute no less; but the rest of
the sentence you disregard as of small consequence or importance.
What, I beseech you, must the Jews and the Pagans
conceive of you and of your religion? And what do the holy
angels think, who look down upon your contentions? Those
blessed and compassionate spirits pity you, and think you
mere children. But when from contending you proceed to
beating your fellow-servants, to persecuting and destroying,
they consider you as most malicious and wicked children;
their pity is changed into indignation, and they would strike
you dead, if the Supreme Governor did not stay their hand,
and remind them that such disorders must needs arise, and
shall one day be rectified.’
“So said this Unknown; but behold the consequence! The
Consubstantialists called him an Arian, and the Arians called
him a Consubstantialist.
“The Nicene Fathers having anathematized the Arians, the
Emperor seconded them, and banished Arius and the bishops
who sided with him, and ordered the books of Arius to be
burnt; and added, ‘If any man be found to have concealed
a copy of those books, and not to have instantly produced it
and thrown it into the fire, he shall be put to death. The
Lord be with you all!’”[493]—(Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 205.)
I shall now summon two authorities, the one Cudworth,
the other Jortin, to prove that the Nicene Fathers had no
knowledge of the present doctrine of the Trinity, and that
they believed Christ to be the same with God, not numerically,
but as partaking of the same nature, belonging to the
same class of beings:—“Wherefore it seemeth to be unquestionably
evident, that when the ancient orthodox Fathers
of the Christian Church maintained against Arius, the Son
to be Co-essential or Consubstantial with the Father, though
the word be thus interpreted, of the same essence or substance,
yet they universally understood thereby, not a sameness of
singular and numerical, but of common or universal essence
only; that is the generical or specifical Essence of the Godhead;
that the Son was no Creature, but truly and properly
God.” * * *
“We have now given a full account of the true and genuine
Platonic Trinity; from which it may clearly appear, how far
it either agreeth or disagreeth with the Christian. First,
therefore, though some of the later Platonists have partly
misunderstood, and partly adulterated that ancient Cabala of
the Trinity, as was before declared, confounding therein the
differences between God and the Creature, and thereby laying
a foundation for infinite Polytheism; yet did Plato himself and
some of his genuine followers, (though living before Christianity,)
approach so near to the doctrine thereof, as in some
manner to correspond therewith.” ... “From whence
it may be concluded, that as Arianism is commonly supposed
to approach nearer to the truth of Christianity than Photinianism,
so is Platonism undoubtedly more agreeable thereunto
than Arianism, it being a certain middle thing, betwixt that and
Sabellianism, which in general was that mark that the Nicene
Council also aimed at.”
This is more fully explained in the next extract:—
“Athanasius in sundry places still further supposes those
three divine hypostases to make up one entire divinity, after
the same manner as the Fountain and the Stream make up
one entire river; or the root, and the stock, and the branches,
one entire tree. And in this sense also is the whole Trinity
said by him to be one Divinity, and one Nature, and one
Essence, and one God. And accordingly, the word Homoousios
(Consubstantial) seems here to be taken by Athanasius
in a further sense besides that before mentioned; not only
for things agreeing in one common and general essence, as
Three individual men are co-essential with one another; but
also for such as concurrently together, make up one entire
thing, and are therefore jointly essential thereunto.—In all
which doctrine of his there is nothing but what a true and
genuine Platonist would readily subscribe to. From whence
it may be concluded, that the right Platonic Trinity differs
not so much from the doctrine of the Ancient Church, as
some late writers have supposed.”—(Intellec. Sys. p. 591,
608, 619-20.)[494]
“But here it will be asked, perhaps, what was the doctrine
of the Nicene Fathers, and what did they mean by Consubstantiality.
It is impossible to answer this question without
using logical and metaphysical terms.
“By the word Consubstantial, they meant not of the same
numerical, or individual substance, but of the same generical
substance or subsistence. As, amongst men, a son is consubstantial
with his father; so, in their opinion, the Son of
God is consubstantial with the Father, that is, of the same
divine nature.
“By this word therefore they intended to express the same
kind of nature, and so far, a natural equality. But according
to them, this natural equality excluded not a relative inequality;
a majority and minority, founded upon the everlasting
difference between giving and receiving, causing, and
being caused.
“They had no notion of distinguishing between person and
being, between an intelligent agent, and an intelligent active
substance, subsistence, or entity.
“When they said that the Father was God, they meant
that he was God of himself, originally, and underived.
“When they said that the Son was God, they meant that
he was God by generation or derivation.
“The Unity of God they maintained, and they defended
it, first, by considering the Father as the First Cause, the
only underived and self-existing; secondly, by supposing an
intimate, inseparable, and incomprehensible union, connection,
indwelling, and co-existence, by which the Father was
in the Son, and the Son in the Father; and thirdly, by saying
that in the Father and the Son there was an unity of will,
design, and consent, and one divine power and dominion,
originally in the Father, and derivatively in the Son.
“In process of time, Christians went into a notion that
the Son was ‘of the same individual substance with the
Father, and with the Holy Spirit,’ and they seem to have
done this with a view to secure the doctrine of the Unity.
“The schoolmen took up the subject, and treated it in
their way, which they call explaining, and which men of
sense call impenetrable jargon.”—(Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii.
p. 202.)
You will observe, that so far no mention had been made
of the separate deity of the Holy Spirit. The original Nicene
Creed is silent upon the subject. It was a question that
grew out of the deity of Christ. The philosophy of the times,
no less than the reluctance to be deemed the followers of a
crucified man, led to the deification of Jesus, and afterwards,
from the personifications of the Holy Spirit, in such expressions
as “I will send unto you the Comforter, even the Spirit
of Truth,” and from its frequent connection with the name
and mission of Christ, arose the idea of a separate divinity,
a third person in the Trinity. The Platonic Trinity would
indeed have naturally led the early Fathers to the conception
of a third principle, and in some of the Anti-Nicene Writers
this conception appears; but the Controversy was carried on
with almost exclusive reference to the deity of Christ, which
independent of the general burden of their writings, clearly
appears from the fact, that when defending themselves against
the charge of violating the Unity of God, they always state
the objection, so as to show that the accusation against them
was that they were “introducing a second God.”
Accordingly it was after the Council at Nice, when the
deity of the Son was established, that orthodoxy took a
second and consequent step, and proceeded to establish the
deity of the third person in the Trinity.[495]
This was effected towards the close of the fourth century,
A.D. 381, by the Second General Council, that of Constantinople,
when the following addition was made to the previously
deficient orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed. The Nicene
Creed had simply stated, “We believe in the Holy
Ghost.” The Council of Constantinople rectified the error
thus: “We believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver
of life; who proceedeth from the Father; who with the Father
and Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spake
by the prophets.” Still, however, the adjustments were not
correct, nor the formula of perfect orthodoxy. It occurred
to the Church, centuries after, that the Holy Spirit was described
in the Scriptures as being dependent not upon the
Father alone, but as being “sent” by the Son; and that
therefore the Third Person must hold that relation to the
Second which the Second did to the Third, and must therefore
be derived not from the Father alone, but from the Father
and Son together.[496] Accordingly this new idea, essential
to Salvation, was included in the formula so long in this
respect defective, with what fatal consequences we are not
told; and at last, in the ninth century, a perfectly accurate
and saving description of the procession of the Holy Spirit
from the Father and the Son was embodied in the Nicene
Creed, some five hundred years after its first construction.
So slowly did the “unimproved and unimprovable revelation”
of dogmatic divines advance to its perfection. Yet we are
gravely told of the faith of the Church,—a faith human all
over; and of the traditions of Christian antiquity,—traditions
whose origin we can trace at a great distance from apostolic
times, and whose constant increase, in proportion as we
recede from those times, would seem to imply that the further
Councils of the Church were removed from the Apostles
the more they knew about them—the accuracy of
inspired Tradition differing, as of course it should, from
common Memory and common History, by being in an inverse
ratio to the distance. This is no subject for ridicule;
but only the sacred feelings and high themes that are necessarily
associated with such extravagance, have so long saved
it from the most merciless exposure. Those solemn themes,
the awe and loveliness of which Ecclesiastical History has
done its best to lower and degrade, have yet repaid the disservice
by dropping something of their own solemnity on its
unworthy pages, and by taking every thing that is associated
with God and Christ within the protection of the sentiment
of reverence, have shielded Ecclesiastical History from that
unsparing criticism which perhaps would have been more serviceable
to Truth, and productive of a reverence higher and
more profitable towards both Christ and God.
In the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, the settlement
of one Controversy always gave birth to another, in
the progressive attempt to make mysteries intelligible. The
deity of Christ naturally gave rise to some curiosity respecting
the humanity of Christ. Hitherto all parties, Arians,
Athanasians, and Unitarians, according to their respective
views, had for the most part agreed that the Christ consisted
of one body and one spirit; and their controversies related
simply to the rank and nature of that spirit. The Arians
believed the soul of Jesus to be the first of created intelligences,
the highest Emanation from God. The Platonic
Christians thought that the Logos used instrumentally the
body of Jesus, and supplied the place of a human soul.
When the Council of Nice, however, established that the
spirit of Jesus was consubstantial with that of God, the idea
naturally presented itself that, since Jesus expired upon the
cross, this was to represent the divine nature as capable of
suffering and death. Now those who were the most orthodox,
whose views and language receded to the extremest distance
from those of the heretical Arians, would necessarily
fall into modes of conception and expression which implied
this revolting extravagance. Accordingly Apollinaris, one of
the most zealous Athanasians, and the bitter enemy of Arius,
freely, and unconscious of heresy, followed out his principles
with perverse consistency, and openly spoke of the
Logos of God supplying the place of a human soul in the
body of Christ; and, of course, undergoing all that a spirit,
so situated, could suffer.[497] But so narrow is the way of
orthodoxy, that the zealous Father was made quickly to discover
that by starting aside from one heresy, only a little too
sharply, he had immediately fallen into another; for the pitfalls
of damnable error lie upon each side of the hair-breadth
way of Salvation. By pursuing too exclusively the deity of
Christ, Apollinaris overlooked his humanity, and taught the
heresy of “one incarnate nature,” and the consequent sufferings
and death of God. This impious extreme, being
condemned by the Asiatic Church, though popular in Egypt,
orthodoxy naturally took a rebound; and Apollinaris, having
confused the two natures into one, Nestorius separated them
into two, to such an extent, as virtually to destroy the mystical
union. Here was another and an opposite heresy equally
fatal to the orthodoxy of the Church and the salvation of
mankind; for if such was the loose connection of the two
natures, then, God being incapable of suffering, only the
human nature of Jesus underwent crucifixion and death. But,
on the other hand, if this was so, then the sufferings of
Christ were only those of a man; and all the mystery of the
Incarnation was dissipated, and became ineffectual for any
theological purpose.
A new controversy consequently arose, respecting the
right adjustments of these saving connections between the
humanity and the deity of the Christ. “Before this time,”
says Mosheim, “it had been settled by the decrees of former
Councils, that Christ was truly God and truly man; but there
had as yet been no controversy, and no decision of any council,
concerning the mode and effect of the union of the two
natures in Christ. In consequence, there was a want of
agreement among the Christian Teachers in their language
concerning this mystery.” This controversy, which, for
some time had been carried on without attracting towards it
definitively the public authorities of the Church, drew at last
the eager notice of all Christendom; when Nestorius, the
Prelate of Constantinople, carried the distinction between
the two natures to so definite a point as to deny that the Virgin
Mary could, with any propriety, be denominated the
“Mother of God;” and that her titles should be limited to
that of “Mother of Christ” or “Mother of Man.” This was
regarded, by the orthodox, as reducing the death of Christ to
that of a mere man, and the mystery of the Incarnation to
little better than a trick of words. It was no easy matter in
those times to avoid, on the one hand, confounding the two
natures; and, on the other, separating them so distinctly as
to destroy the whole theological value of the mystical combination:
nor have modern Theologians been more successful
in adjusting this puzzle than their perplexed and perplexing
predecessors.
The chief alarmist upon this occasion of the heresy of
Nestorius was Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, an arrogant
and aspiring man, who gladly seized upon a tempting
opportunity to humble his rival, the bishop of Constantinople.
“Some jealousy which at that time subsisted respecting
the relative dignity of the two sees, probably heightened
the contention, and is believed by some to have caused
it. Whether that be or not, the two Patriarchs anathematized
each other with mutual violence; and such troubles
were raised that the Emperor (Theodosius the younger)
deemed it necessary to convoke a General Council for the
purpose of appeasing them. It was assembled at Ephesus
A.D. 431, and stands in the annals of the Church as the
Third General Council. Cyril was appointed to preside,
and consequently to judge the cause of his adversary:
and he carried into this office such little show of impartiality,
that he refused even to wait for the arrival of the bishop of
Antioch and others, who were held friendly to Nestorius,
and proceeded to pronounce sentence, while the meeting was
yet incomplete. To secure or prosecute his advantages, he
had brought with him from Egypt a number of robust and
daring fanatics, who acted as his soldiery; and it had been
skilfully arranged that Ephesus should be chosen for the decision
of a difference respecting the dignity of the Virgin;
since popular tradition had buried her in that city, and the
imperfect Christianity of its inhabitants had readily transferred
to her the worship which their ancestors had offered to
Diana.”[498]
Such are the assemblies from which our Creeds date their
birth; by whose authority the Rule of Faith was determined;
and whose character is described in the words of the Emperor
Theodosius when dismissing this very Council of
Ephesus—“God is my witness, that I am not the author of
this confusion. His providence will discern and punish the
guilty. Return to your provinces; and may your private
virtues repair the mischief and scandal of your meeting.”
At this council it was decreed, by bishops who could not
write their own names,[499] that the Union of the human and divine
nature in Christ was so intimate that Mary might properly
be called the Mother of God. The influence of Cyril
prevailed chiefly by intimidating the bishops and bribing the
imperial household. “Thanks to the purse of St. Cyril,”
says Le Clerc, “the Romish Church which regards Councils
as infallible, is not, at the present day, Nestorian.” “The
Creeds of Protestants are equally indebted to St. Cyril for
their purity.”[500]
The triumphant opponents of Nestorius, as is invariably
found in the history of Church Controversies, pushed their
triumph to such an excess, as to fall into the opposite error,
and revived the formerly condemned heresy of Apollinaris,
of the incarnation of but one nature. Eutyches the friend of
St. Cyril and the bitter enemy of Nestorius, openly preached
“that in Christ there was but one nature, that of the incarnate
Word.” The Church was again in a blaze, and again
the Emperor summoned a Council at Ephesus, A.D. 449,
over which presided Dioscorus, the successor of St. Cyril as
Patriarch of Alexandria. Here the sentence of the last Council
was reversed, and Orthodoxy was pronounced to be the
doctrine of one divine nature in Christ, and only one. This
Council, however, owing principally to the opposition made
to it by the Bishop of Rome, was never authoritatively recognized
by the Church, and such was its character for tumult
and brutality that it is marked in Ecclesiastical History by
the expressive name of the Assembly of Banditti.
Speedily then was this heresy, inconveniently sanctioned by
a Council of the Church, of only one nature in Christ, which
in effect represented God as subject to suffering and death,
replaced by the orthodoxy of two natures in one person,
which was attended, however, with the opposite difficulty of
so separating the God from the Man as to nullify the mystical
efficacy of his sufferings.[501] But who will devise a form of
words in which irreconcilable ideas shall be reconciled, and
no weak point be exposed in the skilful statement of a fiction?
The fourth general council of the Church was held at
Chalcedon, A.D. 451. There are two things most remarkable
respecting this Council; first—that it declared Jesus to
be of the same essence with God as to his divine nature, only
in the sense in which he was of the same essence with other
men as to his human nature, thus denying his numerical oneness
with God, and merely referring him to the same class of
Beings, making him generically one, as two men are;[502] and
secondly—that though the majority of the Bishops favoured
the doctrine of one nature, they were obliged by the obstinacy
of the Emperor Marcian, in conjunction with the Bishop of
Rome, to reverse at one of their sittings their decision at a
former, and finally to decree that orthodoxy consisted in believing
“Jesus Christ to be one person in two distinct natures,
without any confusion or mixture.” “It was in vain,”
says Gibbon, “that a multitude of episcopal voices (the advocates
for only one nature) repeated in chorus ‘The definition
of the Fathers is orthodox and immutable! The heretics
are now discovered! Anathema to the Nestorians! Let
them depart from the synod! Let them repair to Rome!’
The Legates threatened, the Emperor was absolute, and a
committee of eighteen bishops prepared a new decree, which
was imposed on the reluctant assembly. In the name of the
fourth general Council, the Christ in one person, but in two
natures, was announced to the Catholic world: an invisible
line was drawn between the heresy of Apollinaris and the
faith of St. Cyril; and the road to paradise, a bridge as sharp
as a razor, was suspended over the abyss by the master hand
of the theological artist. During ten centuries of blindness
and servitude, Europe received her religious opinions from
the Oracle of the Vatican; and the same doctrine, already
varnished with the rust of antiquity, was admitted without
dispute into the creed of the Reformers, who disclaimed the
supremacy of the Roman pontiff. The synod of Chalcedon
still triumphs in the Protestant churches; but the ferment of
controversy has subsided, and the most pious Christians of
the present day are ignorant, or careless, of their own belief
concerning the mystery of the incarnation.”[503]
Still the great difficulty pressed upon this decision, that the
God was so separable from the man as to destroy the mystical
value of the incarnation with respect to the sufferings of
Jesus. A resource was found, (for when are Theologians
without resources?) in what has been called the doctrine of the
Communication of Properties, which meant that though God
was incapable of sufferings or death, yet that through the
mystical union of the human and divine, there might be a
transmission of qualities from the one to the other, so as to
attach an infinite efficacy to the sufferings and death of the
human part of the compound Christ. “The doctrine of the
Communication of Properties,” says Le Clerc, “is as intelligible
as if one were to say, that there is a circle which is so
united with a triangle, that the circle has the properties of the
triangle, and the triangle those of the circle.” “What sense
those who have asserted the sufferings of God have fancied
that the words might have, is a question which, after all that
has been written upon the subject, is left very much to conjecture.
I imagine that it is at the present day, the gross conception
of some who think themselves orthodox on this point,
that the divine and human natures being united in Christ as
the Mediator, a compound nature different from either, capable
of suffering, was thus formed.”[504]
I have now detailed the progress of the doctrine of the
Trinity, as it gained accessions from the various controversies
that arose out of the Nicene Creed. We come now to the
Third Creed of the English Church, that of Athanasius.
Orthodoxy in this creed approaches to its perfection
of precise, if not intelligible, statements; though, strange to
say, we shall find that even here something of completeness is
wanting, and that the later schemes of the Trinity have corrected
the Athanasian formula, as dwelling too much upon
the derived nature of the Son, and not asserting with sufficient
force his independent identity.
No general Council of the Church established the Athanasian
creed; nor does any one know who wrote it, nor when it
was first introduced. From one of its clauses, the procession
of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Son, which secret was
not made known to the Church until the eighth century, it
becomes evident that this theological paradox proceeded from
the ingenuity of some monk of the dark ages. The whole
force of this Creed depends upon two distinctions, which I
presume no one can perceive, between “created” and “begotten,”
and between “begotten” and “proceeding.” The
Son is not created but begotten—and the Holy Ghost is not
begotten but proceeding. And this is saving truth! food for the
Soul! the heavenly light sent from God to refresh man’s
inner spirit, and to fill him with the aspirations after perfection,
which in this world of temptation are to keep him
true to his immortal destinies, to connect him with his
Example and Fore-runner, once tried upon the Earth, now
peaceful amid the skies! To one asking, “What shall I do to
inherit eternal life?” the answer of Jesus addressed itself to
the spiritual life of the disciple, but the answer of the Church
of England addresses itself to a perception of certain metaphysical
distinctions, and is contained in that creed which
“unless a man keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he
shall perish everlastingly.”
Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary
that he hold the Catholick Faith.
Which Faith, except every one do keep whole and undefiled:
without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
And the Catholick Faith is this: that we worship one God
in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son:
and another of the Holy Ghost.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost, is all one: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son: and such is the
Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy
Ghost uncreate.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible:
and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal: and the Holy Ghost
eternal.
And yet they are not three eternals: but one eternal.
As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three
uncreated: but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.
So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty:
and the Holy Ghost Almighty.
And yet they are not three Almighties: but one Almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son is God: and the Holy
Ghost is God.
And yet they are not three Gods: but one God.
So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord: and the
Holy Ghost Lord.
And yet not three Lords: but one Lord.
For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity: to
acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord;
So are we forbidden by the Catholick Religion: to say,
There be three Gods, or three Lords.
The Father is made of none: neither created, nor begotten.
The Son is of the Father alone: not made, nor created,
but begotten.
The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son: neither
made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not
three Sons: one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.
And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other: none is
greater, or less than another;
But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together: and
co-equal.
So that in all things, as is aforesaid: the Unity in Trinity,
and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshipped.
He therefore that will be saved: must thus think of the
Trinity.
Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation: that
he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess: that
our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;
God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the
worlds: and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in
the world;
Perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and
human flesh subsisting;
Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior
to the Father, as touching his Manhood.
Who although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but
one Christ;
One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but
by taking of the Manhood into God;
One altogether; not by confusion of Substance: but by
unity of Person.
For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man: so God
and Man is one Christ;
Who suffered for our salvation: descended into hell, rose
again the third day from the dead.
He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of the
Father, God Almighty: from whence he shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies:
and shall give account for their own works.
And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting:
and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.
This is the Catholick Faith: which, except a man believe
faithfully, he cannot be saved.
I shall now give you the history and character of this
Athanasian Creed in the words of Waddington, one of the
ablest Ecclesiastical Historians, I might say the ablest, for
Jortin did not pretend to write a History, that the Church
of England has produced. You will recollect that one of the
Lectures, to be delivered at Christ Church, announces “the
Athanasian Creed to be explained and defended.” Without
wishing to anticipate that Lecture, hear now, and recollect
then, the opposing voices of the Church.
“Before we take leave of this period, (from A.D. 600, to
A.D. 800,) it is proper to mention, that the first appearance
of the Creed, commonly called Athanasian, is ascribed to it
with great probability. There can be no doubt that this exposition
of faith was composed in the West, and in Latin;
but the exact date of its composition has been the subject of
much difference. The very definite terms, in which it expresses
the Church doctrine of the Incarnation, are sufficient
to prove it posterior to the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon,
or later than the middle of the fifth century.[505] Again,
if we are to consider the doctrine of the double procession of
the Holy Spirit, as being expressly declared in it, since that
mystery was scarcely made matter of public controversy until
the eighth century, it might seem difficult to refer a creed,
positively asserting the more recent doctrine, to an earlier age.
But the historical monuments of the Church do not quite
support this supposition; the Creed, such probably as it now
exists, is mentioned by the Council of Autun, in the year
670, and its faithful repetition by the Clergy enjoined; and
we find the same injunction repeated in the beginning of the
ninth age. Thus it gradually gained ground; nevertheless
there seems to be great reason for the opinion, that it was
not universally received even in the western church until
nearly two centuries afterwards.
“Considered as an exposition of doctrine, the Athanasian
Creed contains a faithful summary of the high mysteries of
Christianity as interpreted by the Church of Rome. Considered
as a rule of necessary faith enforced by the penalty
of Eternal Condemnation, the same Creed again expresses
one of the most rigid principles of the same Church. The
Unity of the Church comprehended Unity of belief: there
could be no salvation out of it; nor any hope for those who
deviated even from the most mysterious among its tenets.
And thus, by constant familiarity with the declarations of an
exclusive faith, the heart of many a Romish priest may have
been closed against the sufferings of the heretic, rescued (as
he might think) by the merciful chastisement of the Church
from the flames which are never quenched!
“It would be irrelevant in this work, and wholly unprofitable,
to inquire how far any temporary circumstances may
have justified the introduction of the Athanasian Creed into
the Liturgy of our own Church—constructed as that Church
is on the very opposite principle of Universal Charity. But
we cannot forbear to offer one remark naturally suggested by
the character and history of this Creed, that if at any future
time, it should be judged expedient to expunge it, there is
no reason, there is scarcely any prejudice which could be
offended by such erasure.[506] The sublime truths which it
contains are not expressed in the language of Holy Scripture;
nor could they possibly have been so expressed, since the
inspired writers were not studious minutely to expound inscrutable
mysteries, neither can it plead any sanction from
high antiquity, or even traditional authority; since it was
composed many centuries after the times of the Apostles, in
a very corrupt age of a corrupt Church, and composed in so
much obscurity, that the very pen from which it proceeded
is not certainly known to us. The inventions of men, when
they have been associated for ages with the exercises of religion,
should indeed be touched with respect and discretion;
but it is a dangerous error to treat them as inviolable; and
it is something worse than error to confound them in holiness
and reverence with the words and things of God.”[507]
In reading these words the wish involuntarily arises that
the temper, as well as the sound learning and philosophical
spirit, of the able writer was shared by all his brethren. Yet
it does sound strange to hear a dignitary of the Church of
England describe a Creed of his own Church, as having its
only use, during the days of Romish intolerance, in shutting
up, through familiarity with its persecuting spirit, the avenues
of relenting mercy in the hard hearts of priests; and now
in the milder Church of England, constructed, we are told,
though we had not discovered it, on the “principle of
Universal Charity,” of absolutely no use whatever, so that
there hardly exists even a prejudice which its erasure would
offend. Yet this is the very Creed which, in the course of
this controversy is to be explained and defended. If the
Church of England is, indeed, founded in the principle of
Universal Charity, some of its Ministers are very heretical
interpreters of its spirit, and yet we must do them the justice
of confessing that the Creeds and Articles of the Church are
equally unfortunate expounders of the spirit of Universal
Charity. Men of Christian and gentle temper interpret
Articles of Faith through their own gentle spirit; but fanatics
read hard formulas with different eyes. We can only wish
that the religion of this excellent historian was the religion
of his Church, and that his Creed was as Christian as his
heart.
I have now only to mention the more modern and final
form of the doctrine of the Trinity. It arose out of the still
unsettled meaning of the long used word Consubstantial,
which, as I have before stated, was used by many of the later
Fathers, and those considered pre-eminently orthodox, as
Cyril, to signify not a numerical sameness, but merely a
sameness of species or nature, and so the Trinity virtually
taught the doctrine of three Gods. And this conception was
prevalent not only after the Council of Nice, A.D. 325, but
after the later Councils of Constantinople, A.D. 381, and of
Ephesus, A.D. 431. I give the history of the last transformation
of the Trinity in the words, and with the authority of
Cudworth:—
“It is certain that not a few of those Ancient Fathers, who
were therefore reputed orthodox, because they zealously opposed
Arianism, did entertain this opinion, that the three
hypostases or Persons of the Trinity had not only one General
and Universal Essence of the Godhead, belonging to
them all, they being all God; but were also Three Individuals,
under one and the same ultimate species, or specific
essence and substance of the Godhead; just as three individual
men, (Thomas, Peter, and John,) under that ultimate species
of Man, or that specific essence of Humanity, which have
only a numerical difference from one another.” ...
“And because it seems plainly to follow from hence, that
therefore they must needs be as much three Gods as there
are Three Men, these learned Fathers endeavoured with their
logic to prove, that Three Men are but abusively and improperly
so called Three; they being really and truly but One,
because there is but one and the same Specific Essence or Substance
of human nature in them all; and seriously persuaded
men to lay aside all that kind of language. By which same
logic of theirs, they might as well prove also, that all the men
in the world are but One Man, and that all Epicurus’s Gods
were but one God neither. But not to urge here that, according
to this hypothesis, there cannot possibly be any reason
given why there should be as many as Three such individuals
in the species of God which differ only numerically
from one another, they being but the very same thing thrice
repeated; and yet that there should be no more than Three
such neither, and not Three Hundred, or Three Thousand,
or as many as there are individuals in the species of Man;
we say not to urge this, it seems plain that this Trinity, is no
other than a kind of Tritheism, and that of Gods independent
and co-ordinate too. And, therefore, some would think that
the ancient and genuine Platonic Trinity, taken with all its
faults, is to be preferred before this Trinity of St. Cyril, and
St. Gregory Nyssen, and several other reputed orthodox
Fathers; and more agreeable to the principles both of Christianity
and of Reason. However, it is evident from hence,
that these reputed orthodox Fathers, who were not a few,
were far from thinking the three hypostases of the Trinity
to have the same singular existent essence; they supposing
them to have no otherwise, one and the same essence
of the Godhead in them, nor to be one God, than three individual
Men, have one common specifical essence of Manhood
in them, and are all One Man. But as this Trinity
came afterwards to be decried for Tritheistic, so, in the room
thereof, started up that other Trinity of Persons numerically
the same, or having all one and the same singular existent
essence; a doctrine which seemeth not to have been owned by
any public authority in the Christian Church, save that of the
Lateran Council only.”[508]
Such is the close of the Ecclesiastical History of the doctrine
of the Trinity. The fourth general Lateran Council,
A.D. 1215, which established the doctrine of Transubstantiation,
the growth of the dark ages, passed also out of the
hands of theological artists, in its perfected and orthodox
form, this singular evidence of the fixed and primitive
faith of those who taunt Unitarianism with its want of fixedness,
and describe their own creeds as the “unimproved
and unimprovable revelation.” It is this workmanship of
Councils which is so confidently referred to the inspiration of
Apostles. No wonder that they who preach orthodoxy as
saving Faith, revealed from the first by God in a perfect
form, say so little to their hearers of the history of their
creeds. There is good reason why Ecclesiastical History
should be little encouraged by the divines of the English, or
of any other dogmatical Church. It is with good reason that
the Universities show about the same degree of favour to
Ecclesiastical History and to Moral Philosophy. They have
an instinct that tells them of their enemies.
Let me now summarily restate the obligations of the doctrine
of the Trinity to the human and erring sources of OPINION.
I. Oriental philosophy led the Jews of Alexandria, before
the time of Christ, to allegorize the Old Testament Scriptures.
II. The Jews of Alexandria formed the connecting link
between Christianity and Grecian Philosophy.
III. Platonic Theology put its own mythological meanings
on the expressions Logos, and Son of God.[509]
IV. At the beginning of the fourth century this mythological
conception had gained such ground that, with a severe
struggle, and a controversy that shook the world, a general
Council decreed that Christ in his divine nature belonged to
the same class of Beings with God.
V. In a second general Council, the third Person in the
Platonic Trinity found, by public authority, a parallel in the
Christian Trinity, and became, for the first time, the faith of
the Church.
VI. A third general Council, A.D. 431, distinguished, for
theological purposes, the deity from the humanity of Christ.
VII. A fourth general Council, A.D. 451, found it necessary,
for theological purposes, to unite the deity and humanity
in one person.
VIII. The fourth general Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, consummated
the Trinity and prepared the way for the Inquisition.
Having established such a faith, it became necessary to take
means to enforce it. Persecution is the first-born of Dogmatism.
In the phrase of Robert Hall, quoted with approbation
in Christ Church as a felicitous expression, orthodoxy
is “necessitated” to be a Persecutor, to treat as a Dæmon
and Enemy of Souls every form of Christianity but her own.
It is a necessity of her nature, she pleads,—a simple consistency
with her own principles. True,—the reasoning is without
a flaw;—but then a question arises, does a Nature of
which these are the “necessities” breathe the spirit of Jesus?
Who can think of Jesus as being necessitated to condemn any
thing but sin?
Having shown how much the doctrine of the Trinity has
to do with Ecclesiastical History, I have now to show how
little it has to do with Scripture.
II. It is admitted by all, Trinitarian and Unitarian alike, that
a belief in One God is the first principle of a pure religion.
The slightest departure from this truth involves polytheism
and idolatry. One Creator, one Father, one object for our
worship and our love, is the plain and broad distinction between
an idolatrous religion, and the Supreme Veneration of
that spiritual God who claims an undivided empire throughout
the vastness of creation. A perception of this truth does
not require an advanced state of Society or Mind: nor can
it be proved that even in the thickness of pagan darkness it
was ever doubted. Heathen Philosophy, though it might
associate with the One Spirit, too pure and immoveably serene
to come in contact with matter, subordinate agents of creation
(which does not differ much from the Trinitarian conception[510]),
yet could read the glory of one Mind upon the outward
universe, and see one Intelligence, one Power, one
Will of love diffused through Nature: Judaism had this
idea for its soul: and the Gospel has republished it in such
distinct and resplendent light, that it is the universal faith of
Christendom. So overpowering is the evidence, so clear
is Nature’s testimony to the existence of one God, so conspicuously
has Revelation set it forth in the centre of her
splendours, that Trinitarianism, with what consistency we
shall presently inquire, claims to be received as a believer in
the Unity of Deity. It is a most triumphant acknowledgment
of the brightness with which the great truth, that God
is One, shines out from his Works[511] and from his Word, that
even the Trinitarian perceives the necessity of reconciling
his views with this fundamental principle; and rather than
depart from it, he prefers to maintain that three may be
one, and one may be three;—though the Father, and the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, have each separately all that constitute
an infinite and all-perfect God, and have distinct offices, and
appear in distinct, if not directly opposed characters, yet that
there may be a mysterious unity in the essence of a tri-personal
Deity.
I am relieved then from the necessity of proving that God
is One. It is a truth which no one explicitly denies; which
the Trinitarian professes to hold as firmly as the Unitarian;
and therefore as the undisputed doctrine of the Bible we
take it as the admitted groundwork of our argument. We
might call upon Nature to multiply proofs of the Unity of
the designing Mind, which the universe reveals; we might
appeal to the regularity of her silent movements and to the
sublime order that reigns throughout her gliding worlds, to
attest the Oneness of that Intelligence whose volitions she
obeys: we might ask Philosophy whether one infinite
Cause was not sufficient for the finite or infinite wonders of
creation; whether in all her discoveries she has ever perceived
a single evidence of a divided government; and whether
eternal Laws holding immutable dominion throughout
all worlds that Science has explored, are not sublimest proofs
of the fidelity of the one presiding Spirit who trifles not
with the feeble intellect of man, but reveals himself consistently
to the seeking minds of His children: we might go to
our own hearts, and feel the pressure of one divine hand
upon its tumultuous affections, and ask whether in our sorrows
or our joys, our wants or our aspirations, we resorted
to more than one God, or needed other shelter than that of
one all-sufficing Father and Friend; and, finally, we might
open the volume of Revelation, and read to you the testimony
of Prophets from Moses to Christ, that the Lord our
God is one Lord, and there is none other but He:—but
it appears it would be a needless task to prove a doctrine
which no one doubts, or to treat as a question of controversy
the universal faith of the Christian world.
We stand at once then upon the undisputed truth of the
Oneness of Deity, and taking this as our uncontested vantage
ground, we proceed to inquire how much is involved in
the admission. What are we to understand by this sublime
and unquestioned, and apparently simple truth, that God is
One? There are two answers to this question, and the statement
of each of them will introduce us to the Controversy.
The Unitarian answers, that the words are human words, and
of course used in a human sense; that the revelation was to
man, and that no caution was given to him that he was not
to attach human ideas to the language in which it is conveyed;
that God is too tender and too faithful to sport with
the understandings of His children, to involve their frail intelligence
in inextricable perplexities; and that, therefore, when
He publishes to the World, without explanation, the Unity
of his own nature, he intends men to affix to the words the
ideas always associated with them; he does not use language
to mislead, but asserts the simplest and most intelligible of
truths, that God is one Mind, one Person, one undivided
and indivisible Spirit, to whom alone belong underived existence,
and infinite perfections, and unshared dominion.
These are the only ideas our minds ordinarily attach to such
language,—this is the only experience we have of Unity; and
if the words, when applied to God, bear a different meaning,
and so have a tendency to deceive us, some caution,
we think, would have been given by a God who was delivering
a Revelation to his Children. The Unitarian believes
that a revelation from God is a revelation of light; and without
any temptation to pervert the meaning of words, he receives,
in the simple and ordinary import of the language,
the plain and reiterated announcement that “God is one.”
If God used human words, he surely used them for the
purpose of conveying ideas to human minds; for language is
not necessary to Him, much less would human language be
the vehicle of His infinite thought. If, then, He used the
words in a sense not human, and therefore unknown to us,
instead of instructing, it would betray and mislead.
The Trinitarian answers, that though he believes in the
Unity of God, yet that Unity is totally different from the
unity of all other beings. He believes that in the One God
there are three distinct and infinite persons, presenting
themselves to human contemplation in different characters,
and as the objects of different affections; the first reigning in
Heaven, the second in intimate and inseparable connection
with a dying man upon the Earth; the first immutable in his
immensity, the other coming down from his eternal throne
to wrap his infinite essence in a covering of human flesh; the
Father sending the Son, and the Son satisfying the demands
of the Father; the Father the cause and origin of all things,
but holding himself loftily apart, whilst the Holy Spirit takes
the office of communion with men, and becomes the Comforter,
Teacher, and spiritual Friend of the human souls,
whom the Father’s creative energies, acting through the Son,
have called into existence. This, then, is the doctrine of the
Trinity: three equal Persons, each Supreme, each a perfect
and infinite Deity, and yet so united as to constitute but one
undivided God.
We are tauntingly told of the vague statements of Unitarian
Doctrine. Now nothing can be more unjust than this,
or farther from the facts. “Controversially described,” Unitarianism
is the most definite thing imaginable. It simply
says, No, to every one of the allegations of Trinitarianism.
There are, at the very least, five different forms in which the
doctrine of the Trinity has been explained and defended; and
to every one of these five shifting modifications, we repeat
our definite negative. There is the widest difference among
Trinitarian Theologians as to their method of stating and explaining
the influence of Atonement and of Original Sin; and
to every one of these varieties we equally repeat our simple
negative. Where, then, is the superior definiteness of Trinitarian
statements? We affirm, of all its characteristic doctrines,
that they are untenable in any form whatever. This,
surely, is definite enough.
I am not aware that I have stated the doctrine of the Trinity
in a way which any Trinitarian could disown; and the
first observation I make upon it is this, that in this view of
the oneness of God, in connecting the deity of the Father,
and the deity of the Son, and the deity of the Holy Spirit,
with a strict unity in the godhead, the Trinitarian has at least
departed from the ordinary acceptation of language. We will
not assert the absolute impossibility of his retaining a belief
in the Unity of God, because we have no right to question
his own solemn assertion of the fact, or to set limits to the
powers of another’s faith; but he will not deny that he believes
God to be one, in a sense totally different from that in
which he believes himself to be one; that it is a unity of
three minds, each a perfect God, and capable of acting separately,—in
so much that it is a warning of the Creeds,—not
to confound the Persons. It is not a unity of Mind, nor a
unity of Will, nor a unity of Agency, nor a unity of Person,
which the Trinitarian regards as constituting the Unity of
God, but three Minds, three Wills, three Agents, three Persons,
mysteriously making one Deity. I ask, were it not for
the overpowering brightness with which the Bible reveals the
doctrine of one God, would the Trinitarian encumber himself
with the difficulty of combining it with his other views;
would he not rather simply confess that three persons made
three beings, and not one being; and represent the world as
under the threefold, but harmonious, government of a Creator,
a Saviour, and a sanctifying Spirit?
We have thus, then, two admissions on the part of the
Trinitarian, which I ask you distinctly to bear in mind. He
admits the Unity of God; and he admits that when he
attempts to combine that Unity with a Trinity, he uses the
word in an unintelligible sense, and understands, or rather
marks, by it something entirely different from the oneness of
any other being,—a oneness in short of which he himself is
capable of forming no conception. That is, he retains the
form of words that God is one; but these words convey to
him no distinct idea,—and yet words are the signs of human
ideas;—he confesses that God is not one in any sense of that
word that he can comprehend; and that, therefore, when he
professes his faith in the Unity of God, he is using language
which is unintelligible even to himself. This he must acknowledge,
for he calls the Trinity a mystery; but the mystery
he will admit is in the Unity, not in the Trinity: the
mystery (that is, the no-meaningness to man, for this is the
only meaning the word will here bear, the difficulty being
not in the vastness or spirituality of the Conceptions, but in
their irreconcilableness,) is not that there are three Persons,
but that the three are one. Now this is the confession of
every Trinitarian: he can form very distinct notions of the
Trinity, but he admits that he cannot reconcile these notions
with any human idea of unity; it is unintelligible, it is inconceivable,
it is an apparent contradiction to all other men,
to him only a paradox; it is an unfathomable mystery (a sad
desecration of that solemn word); but still he professes to
believe it,—he maintains that he can hold “the form of
sound words;” and as to thoughts, it is his duty to have
none upon the subject. He knows that it is revealed that
God is One; and he thinks it is revealed that God is in
Three; and without any attempt to harmonize these two
statements, he professes to believe them both.
Now taking our stand on the conceded truth that God is
revealed to be one, we ask for equal evidence that He is revealed
to be Three Persons. We ask throughout the Bible
for one plain assertion of this doctrine. We shall be satisfied
with even one, and we think it is not asking much. We
ask but for a single text in which it is declared that there
are three infinite Minds in the Unity of but one infinite God.
It is admitted that there is no distinct statement of this
doctrine in any part of the Scriptures; and here again we rest
upon another confession of all instructed Trinitarians,[512] that
this mystery is nowhere found in express terms; that if
taught at all it is taught by implication; that it is no part of
the direct revelation, but merely an inference which may be
collected from certain appearances, certain verbal phenomena.
Now I ask if this doctrine was intended to be revealed, could
it have been so left? If the Trinity is as strictly true as the
Unity, could the one have had the witness of Prophets and
Apostles, and shine forth as the clearest light on the revealed
page, whilst the other was left to be gathered from some obscure
and incidental intimations which the most gifted minds
have not been able to perceive? Is it credible that if the
Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, were three Persons
in one God, there should be nowhere in the Bible a singlestatement of that truth;[513] and ought not this extraordinary
fact make us very cautious to try the soundness of the inferences,
human and erring modes of reasoning, upon which, as
upon its foundation, this stupendous doctrine is laid?
There are two passages in the Bible, and only two, in which
God, and Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are mentioned
together. It is recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel as the last
words of the risen Jesus, that he ascended to his Father,
leaving to the world the legacy of his truth—“Go ye therefore
and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name
(properly into the name) of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Ghost”—baptizing them into a belief of God,
and of Christ, and of the power and comfort of the Holy
Spirit accompanying the truth, and witnessing to it in the
hearts of all who receive it purely.[514] The Apostle declares
of the Jews that they were baptized into Moses, and the
Evangelist declares of Christians that they were baptized into
Christ, (see also Rom. vi. 3; Gal. iii. 27,) and the plain meaning
of such language is that they were baptized into the
Truth which God had revealed through Moses and through
Christ. What support then is there here for the doctrine of
a Trinity? Is this indeed the strongest scriptural evidence
that Trinitarianism can boast of—that because three distinctions
follow one another—God, and his Prophet, and his
Spirit witnessing to his truth in the hearts and before the
eyes of His children—therefore the Holy Spirit, the Spirit
of God in communication with man, must be a person, distinct
from God, because the other two words express persons—and
therefore these three are co-equal and are one. Such
is the Interpretation that produces Trinitarianism. Is there
a single hint in this passage of three persons in one God?
What can be made out of it more than the Saviour’s last
injunction to his followers, to carry through the world that
glorious and sanctifying truth, which the one God manifested
through his well-beloved Son, and accompanied with the
energy of his spirit. The Holy Spirit is a Scripture expression
for God in communication with man, naturally or
supernaturally.
The only other passage in which Jesus Christ, and God,
and the Holy Spirit, are mentioned in the same sentence,
must receive a precisely similar explanation. St. Paul concludes
the Second Epistle to the Corinthians in these words—“The
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.”
Now what is this but a beautiful and affectionate prayer that
the Corinthians might be partakers of the grace of God that
was in Jesus Christ, of the love of their Heavenly Father,
and of the gifts and influences of his holy spirit? Indeed
this passage, like all others brought to prove the Trinity, is
of itself quite sufficient to overthrow that doctrine. The
name God in it, is not applied to Jesus Christ nor to the holy
spirit: and to prove that holy spirit does not mean a person,
but the spiritual energies of God in communication with man,
the word communion is used:—a participation or communion
of a person is without meaning—a communion in holy
and heavenly influences is beautiful and everlasting truth.
Such are the only pretences that Trinitarianism puts forth,
that it is openly taught in Scripture! We ask for no other
passages scripturally to disprove the doctrine.
Let us now attend to that inferential reasoning by which
it is attempted to be proved that Jesus Christ and the Holy
Spirit are united with the Father, to form three persons in
one God. There are some texts in which divine attributes
are supposed to be ascribed to Jesus, and the same mode of
reasoning being applied to the Holy Spirit, it is inferred that
Christ is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God—and that to
preserve the consistency of Scripture, it is necessary to maintain
both that God is One, and that God is Three. Now I ask,
does not this look like a seeking of evidence for the doctrine
after Ecclesiastical History had introduced it, under the influences
and motives already described, rather than like the
natural way in which such a doctrine would break from Revelation
itself upon the notice of the world? Had not the
doctrine its true origin in human and worldly influences, and
then was not an origin sought for it in the Orientalisms of
Scripture language? This then is the method of reasoning by
which this doctrine, so vast, so awful, if it be true, is attempted
to be proved; and upon the soundness of this inferential
process does Trinitarianism depend. So that Orthodoxy
after all its sneers against the pride of Human Reason, depends
for its own life upon the correctness of human reasonings,—and
then erects the results of this process of fallible
reasoning into the Essentials of Salvation.
There are several passages in which Christ is supposed to
be called God, though there is not, I think, one clear instance
of such an application of the word; and even if there was, we
have Christ’s own interpretation of the only sense in which
such language could be applied to him. “Jesus answered
them, Is it not written in your law, I said ye are gods? if he
called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the
Scripture cannot be broken; say ye of him whom the Father
hath sanctified and sent into the world, ‘Thou blasphemest;’
because I said I am the Son of God?”[515]
There are only two passages in the whole gospels, in which
the title has ever been supposed to be given to Christ, and
these both occurring in the same gospel, so that three of the
gospels never were even supposed to have a trace of such
language. One of these passages in the Proem of St. John’s
Gospel has already been explained in the course of the present
Controversy, and the other is the expression of Thomas,
who, the moment before he made the exclamation, knew so
little of Christ and of Christianity that he would not believe
that Jesus was risen from the dead. It is from the lips of
the unbeliever of one moment, and the inspired of the next,
that we are to receive the high mystery of the Trinity. But
in truth the exclamation of Thomas will not bear to be
sobered down into a revelation of doctrines—“My Lord,
and my God!” The first of these clauses was an exclamation
of surprise, a sudden and passionate recognition of
Jesus; the second was the natural and immediate transference
(common in cases of supernatural impression, with all minds,
pious or profane,) of the thoughts of Thomas to that awful
and wonder-working God, whose power and presence were
so visibly manifested in the resurrection of his Christ. There
is no evidence, in the remainder of the gospel, or in the book
of the Acts, or throughout the New Testament, that Thomas,
or the rest of the Apostles, for a moment believed that Jesus
was God. Now, since this was a doctrine that they certainly
had no conception of, previous to the death of Christ, there
must have been an occasion, when, if true, it broke for the
first time on the astonished minds of the disciples. Now is
it possible to believe that such an occasion could have passed
unmarked—that no amazement, no awe would be expressed—and
that as we follow them in their course, we should be unable
to distinguish between the moments when they did not, and
the moments when they did understand, that the being with
whom they had been living in familiar intercourse was the
everlasting God? Could such a discovery burst upon any
human mind, and that mind manifest no emotion—not a
ripple on the current of sentiment and feeling to show when
it was that these disciples first began to know that they had
been the familiar friends of the living God? I confidently
state that the thing is not credible nor possible. The disciples
would not have been human, if such things could be.
We know that after the ascension, as before, they always
speak of him as “the man approved by God, by signs and
miracles which God did by him, and whom God raised from
the dead?” Do such things admit of explanation from the
known course of human sentiments and emotions, if Trinitarianism
is true? We think not.
There is another passage in the Gospels supposed to teach
the deity of Christ—and hence so far used as an inferential
proof of the doctrine of the Trinity:—“I and my Father are
one.” Beautiful expression of the soul of Christ, excelled
in beauty only by that life which yet more spiritually declared
that He and his Father were one, for “what the Son
seeth the Father do, these also doeth the Son likewise!” Why
are we compelled to examine coldly, or turn an instant from
the deep religious meaning of this perfect filial utterance of
the Son of God? It expresses that harmony of purpose with
God which is the result and peace of the spirit of true religion,
and which was perfect in the mind of Jesus, because
in him was perfect the spirit of faith in Providence, of trustful
submission to his Father’s will. “The cup that my Father
hath given me, shall I not drink of it?” Well might he say,
and yet how wondrous it is that any being could say, and yet
retain his intense humanity, “I and my Father are one!”
Clear proof of the inspiration of the Christ! But how the
beauty fades away if this very being was God himself, and all
his submission of will is but an artifice of words! How hard,
artificial, and unlovely, does the ever fresh gospel become
when submitted to the tortures of systems, and system-makers!
What a difference in genuine spiritual power on the heart
of man between Jesus living and dying in the peace of faith,
in the trust that a holy God will keep the destinies of a holy
mind, that his Providence will recompense the Right—and
Jesus not living and dying in the strength of the moral elements
of faith, but actually associated with the omniscient
mind of God, so as to be an inseparable person! Such should
be the difference between the genuine spiritual energy of
Unitarian and Trinitarian representations of Christianity.
Jesus, in the context, explains in what sense he uses this
beautiful expression, “I and my Father are one,” and he
there positively denies that the employment of it implies any
claim of equality with God. Let our Lord be his own interpreter,
and let the solemn and affecting words I am about
to quote, silence for ever the vain plea, that this exquisite
expression of the moral sentiment and spirit of Jesus, was
intended to be doctrinal and Trinitarian. If so, there is
equal proof for all Christians being portions of the Godhead.
“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which
shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be
one; as thou Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also
may be one in us:—and the glory which thou gavest me I
have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one;
I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect
in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me,
and hast loved them as thou hast loved me.”[516]
The only other passage of any force in which deity is supposed
to be accorded to Jesus,[517] I do not notice here, because
it has already been abundantly examined in the present Controversy.
I would now call your attention to the precise state of the
argument so far as we have advanced in it. We have taken
for granted the Unity of God, which no Christian denies.
We have found that the belief of three persons in one God
is not reconcilable with any human conception of that admitted
unity: we have found that there was no direct evidence
in the Bible for the doctrine of the Trinity: and lastly,
we have examined some of the very strongest passages of
Scripture, on which that doctrine is attempted to be established,
through an inferential mode of reasoning.
I might stop here then, and without looking at the Scripture
evidence against the doctrine, but only the evidence in
its favour, declare that such a doctrine could not possibly
have such an insufficient publication. The very passages
brought forward to sustain it, disprove it. They all speak of
derived powers, and of glory communicated. They are all in
the strain,—“Therefore God, even his God, hath highly exalted
him, and given him a name that is above every name.”
Nay, take that passage, than which there is none in which
dominion is more emphatically ascribed to Christ, and see
how it closes:—“and when all things shall be subdued unto
him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that
did put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”—1
Cor. xv. 28. We shall not, however, treat Trinitarianism so
lightly as to dismiss it, unproved upon its own showing; we
shall not rest satisfied with pointing out the insufficiency of
its Scriptural authority, but bring against it the overpowering
force of opposing Scripture; and as we have given specimens
of the biblical evidence for, advance something of the biblical
evidence against, the Trinity.
In the first place, then, this doctrine cannot be true, because
there are some passages in which it is expressly and
plainly declared that the Father alone is the one God, not the
Father, and the Son, and the Spirit, but the Father.
“Father!—this is life eternal, that they might know thee the
only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.”
“But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom
are all things, and we in Him, and one Lord Jesus Christ,
by whom are all things, and we by him.”
“There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God
and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in
you all.”
“Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no not the
angels which are in Heaven; neither the Son, but the Father.”
These declarations are surely sufficient to protect Unitarianism
from having no warrant in Scripture. They contain
direct, positive, definite assertions; they assert that there is
one God, and that Jesus Christ is not that God. It is not
possible for human language to express more clearly or more
guardedly the simple faith of Unitarian Christianity. Yet we
are told that only the ingenuity of heretics has obliged Trinitarians
to have recourse to unscriptural language. Strange,
certainly, that Holy Writ should have itself expressed the
creeds of heresy and damnable error, and rendered it impossible
to express in its sacred words the Creeds of
Truth!
I quote, in the second place, some passages out of a multitude,
in which ideas are connected with Christ which are
utterly inconsistent with the supposition of his deity. “I
came not to do mine own will.” “I can of myself do nothing.”
“If I honour myself, my honour is nothing; it is
my Father that honoureth me.”—John viii. 54. “For as the
Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to
have life in himself.”—John v. 26. “As the living Father
hath sent me, and I live by the Father.”—John vi. 57. “I
have not spoken of myself, but the Father who sent me, He
gave me a commandment what I should say, and what I
should speak.”—John xii. 49, 50.
“The word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s
which sent me.”—John xiv. 24.
“I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God
and your God.”—John xx. 17.
“When ye have lifted up the Son of man on high, then
shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself;
but as my Father hath taught me I speak these things”—John
viii. 28.
Ecclesiastical History has already acquainted us with the
device that sets aside the plain meaning of these passages. It
is said that Jesus Christ had two natures, was composed of
two minds, that he was both man and God; and thus does
Trinitarianism openly assert mysteries of an opposite character.
Three Persons in one Essence is unintelligible enough;
but no sooner is this propounded to us, than we are called off
to a directly opposite mystery of two Essences in one Person.
And here we cannot be put off with the metaphysical sophistry
that we do not know the nature of God, for we do
know something of the nature of man; and we do say that
never was there a greater abuse of the moral meanings of the
word Faith, than to set forth, that God’s nature and man’s
nature so united together as to form one inseparable person,
may be embraced as an object of Faith. The true nature
and office of Faith is to carry us from the seen to the unseen,—to
give us moral confidence in that world which we do not
see, from our moral experience in this world which we do
see,—and in that portion of God’s ways which the future
conceals, from what we know of that portion of them which
the present unfolds. Faith is moral, not metaphysical; and,
above all, finds no merit and no efficacy in assenting to unmeaning
words.
As before, of the doctrine of the Trinity, so now of this
doctrine of the Hypostatic Union, as it is called, I ask for a
single hint throughout the New Testament of the inconceivable
fact that, in the body of Jesus, resided the mind of
God and the mind of man,—two natures, the one finite, the
other infinite, yet making but one person,—a difficulty you
will perceive the very opposite of that of the Trinity; for
whereas it teaches three persons in one nature, this teaches
two natures in one person. But we have already traced, in
Ecclesiastical History, the origin of this view, and the necessity
of its appearance, in subservience to the doctrine of the
Trinity.
I will only apply one scriptural test to this theory of the
two natures in Christ. And it is one from which Trinitarians
cannot escape by their ordinary refuge of avoiding one
set of statements by referring them to the humanity of Jesus,
and another set of statements by referring them to his deity.
It is God the Son, whom Trinitarians represent as becoming
incarnate in the body of Jesus; it was God the Son who
took humanity into union with deity; therefore whenever
Jesus, in his human nature, speaks of the divinity that dwelt
within him, inspired him, and wrought through him, it must
be God the Son to whom he refers. But this is never the
case: Scripture does not know this doctrine, nor support its
requisitions. It is always, “the Father who dwelleth in me,
He doeth the works.”
It was asserted in Christ Church, that if there is not a
plurality of persons in the godhead, the oriental style, “let
us make man in our own image,” and the use of the plural
where we use the singular, made the word of God an agent of
deception, and affected the morality of the divine mind.
This is bold language; and, considering the evidence, as unscholarlike
as bold. We refrain from a retort in the same
spirit. We look with unaffected wonder upon the mind that
is reckless enough, and ignorant enough of the sources of
error within itself, to dare to say, “if I am not right in my
interpretation of Scripture, God is a deceiver.” Yet such
men can charge others with making themselves judges of revelation,
and saying what God must mean.
I have not taken up that other thread of supposed scriptural
intimations, which is thought to connect the Holy Spirit
as a third Person in the unity of the godhead. This portion
of the argument, strangely neglected by Trinitarians,
who generally take for granted the deity and personality of the
Holy Ghost as following without debate from the deity of
Christ, since three not two is the favourite mythological and
theological number, is however to form the subject of a separate
Lecture in Christ Church, not yet delivered. Why
there should be any necessity, on Trinitarian principles of
theology, for a third person in the Godhead to perform “the
work,” as it is called, of the spirit of God in communication
with man, after the sacrifice of Christ had left the Father’s
love free to operate, we cannot perceive, except upon
the Platonic principle, that the Supreme One in the Trinity
is an Essence perfectly abstracted, immoveable, and without
action. Not wishing, however, to anticipate the argument,
I shall only adduce one remarkable passage, in proof that
the Holy Spirit could not, in the first age of the Gospel,
have a deity and personality ascribed to it distinct from the
deity and personality of God the Father. When Paul came
to Ephesus, he found there some disciples, of whom he inquired,—“Have
you received the Holy Ghost since you believed?”
The answer is remarkable: “We have not so much
as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.” Now is it possible
that the Holy Ghost should be the third person of the
Trinity, a constituent person in the Christian God, and
that these “believers,” though only disciples of John, should
have been uninstructed in the doctrine? The Holy Spirit is
the Spirit of God, God himself in communication with man,
naturally or supernaturally, the enlightening influence of the
Spiritual Father revealing Himself to the spiritual nature of
His children.
I do not know what may appear convincing to other
minds, but to me the Ecclesiastical History of the doctrine
of the Trinity, with its rise in human sources of Philosophy
and Motive, and not in Revelation, seems a fact capable of
being most clearly traced. Rarely indeed does the origin of
an error so conspicuously disclose itself: rarely is its course
so open to observation. On the other hand, if there is not
decisive proof in Scripture of the strict and personal Unity
of God, I must think that it is vain to prove any doctrine
from the words of the Bible—for sure I am that there is no
doctrine more distinctly, more guardedly, more simply, more
repeatedly stated, than the great doctrine, that there is One
God, and that the Father is that God.
We are told that the “invisible things of God are clearly
seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his
eternal power and godhead.” Yet the Universe reveals no
Trinity. Reason knows and requires no Trinity. Natural
Religion is not Trinitarian. Scripture speaks of One God
the Father, and of One Lord Jesus Christ. Gentile Philosophy
and Ecclesiastical History are Trinitarian. In their
pages we find this subject. Ecclesiastical History has narrated
the rise and progress of these doctrines—and to Ecclesiastical
History shall they finally be referred,—when another
chapter is added, a chapter that unhappily yet remains to be
written, the history of their decline and fall.
457. “That this Trinity (Monad or Good, Wisdom, Spirit or Energy) was not first
of all a mere invention of Plato’s, but much ancienter than him, is plainly affirmed
by Plotinus in these words,—‘That these doctrines are not new nor of yesterday,
but have been very anciently delivered, though obscurely (the discourses now
extant being but Explications of them) appears from Plato’s own writings;
Parmenides before having insisted on them.’” Cudworth. Intel. Syst. p. 546.—See
also Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, sections 341-365.
458. “The principle of every thing is more simple than the thing itself. Wherefore
the sensible world was made from Intellect, or the intelligible; and before this
must there needs be something more simple still. For many did not proceed from
many, but this multiform thing Intellect proceeded from that which is not multiform but simple; as Number from Unity. If that which understands be many, or contain
multitude in it, then that which contains no multitude, does not properly understand;
and this is the first thing;—to understand is not the First; neither in
Essence nor in Dignity; but the Second; a thing in order of nature, after the
First Good, and springing up from thence, as that which is moved with desire
towards it.”—Plotinus. Cudworth, p. 584.
459. “The First is above all manner of action: neither is it fit to attribute the architecture
of the world to the First God, but rather to account him the Father of
that God, who is the Artificer. The Second, to whom the energy of Intellection
is attributed, is therefore properly called the Demiurgus, as the contriving Architect,
in whom the Archetypal World is contained, and the First Pattern, or Paradigm
of the Whole Universe. The Third is that which moveth about Mind or
Intellect, the Light or Effulgency thereof, and its Print or Signature, which always
dependeth upon it, and acteth according to it. This is that which reduces both the
Fecundity of the First Simple Good, and the Architectonick Contrivance of the Second
into Act and Energy. This is the Immediate and as it were Manuary Opificer
of the whole world, that which actually Governs, Rules, and Presideth over
all.”—Plotinus. ap. Cudw. p. 583.
460. “Since the introduction of the Greek or Chaldean Philosophy, the Jews were
persuaded of the pre-existence, transmigration, and immortality of souls; and
Providence was justified by a supposition, that they were confined in their earthly
prisons to expiate the stains which they had contracted in a former state. But the
degrees of purity and corruption are almost immeasurable. It might be fairly presumed
that the most sublime and virtuous of human spirits was infused into the
offspring of Mary and the Holy Ghost; that his abasement was the result of his
voluntary choice; and that the object of his mission was to purify, not his own,
but the sins of the world. On his return to his native skies he received the immense
reward of his obedience; the everlasting kingdom of the Messiah, which
had been darkly foretold by the prophets, under the carnal images of peace, of
conquest, and of dominion. Omnipotence could enlarge the human faculties of
Christ to the extent of his celestial office. In the language of antiquity, the
title of God has not been severely confined to the first parent; and his incomparable
minister, his only begotten son, might claim, without presumption, the
religious, though secondary worship of a subject world.
“The seeds of the faith, which had slowly arisen in the rocky and ungrateful
soil of Judea, were transplanted, in full maturity, to the happier climes of the
Gentiles; and the strangers of Rome or Asia, who never beheld the manhood,
were the more readily disposed to embrace the divinity of Christ. The polytheist
and the philosopher, the Greek and the Barbarian, were alike accustomed to conceive
a long succession, an infinite chain of angels or dæmons, or deities, or æons,
or emanations, issuing from the throne of light. Nor could it seem strange or incredible,
that the first of these æons, the Logos, or word of God, of the same substance
with the Father, should descend upon earth, to deliver the human race from
vice and error, and to conduct them in the path of life and immortality.”—Gibbon,
vol. viii. p. 271.
461. Philo de Abrahamo. Le Clerc’s Supplement to Hammond, p. 168.
463. “It was in this mode of apprehending the Divine Being that the doctrine of
the Trinity had its origin. The Logos of the first four centuries was in the view
of the Fathers both an attribute or attributes of God, and a proper person. Their
philosophy was, in general, that of the later Platonists, and they transferred from
it into Christianity this mode of Conception. In treating of this fact, so strange,
and one which will be so new to many of my readers, I will first quote a passage
from Origen, the coincidence of which with the conceptions of Philo and the later
Platonists is apparent. ‘Nor must we omit, that Christ is properly the Wisdom
of God; and is therefore so denominated. For the wisdom of the God and Father
of All has not its being in bare conceptions, analogous to the conceptions in human
minds. But if any one be capable of forming an idea of an incorporeal being of
diverse forms of thought, which comprehend theLogoi [the archetypal forms] of all
things, a being indued with life, and having as it were a soul, he will know that the
Wisdom of God, who is above every creature, pronounced rightly concerning herself;
The Lord created me, the beginning, his way to his works.’”—Origen, Opp.
iv. 39, 40,—quoted by Norton on the Trinity, p. 271-2.
466. “The creed which was first adopted, and that perhaps in the very earliest
age, by the Church of Rome, was that which is now called the Apostles’ Creed,
and it was the general opinion, from the fourth century downwards, that it was
actually the production of those blessed persons assembled for that purpose. Our
evidence is not sufficient to establish that fact, and some writers very confidently
reject it. But there is reasonable ground for our assurance that the form of faith
which we still repeat and inculcate was in use and honour in the very early propagation
of our religion.”—Waddington’s History of the Church, p. 27.
467. “Ignatius, Justin, and Irenæus make no mention of it, but they occasionally
repeat some words contained in it, which is held as proof that they knew it by
heart.”—Waddington.
474. Professor Burton gives some instances of the use of the word God by Ignatius,
A. D. 107, in connection with Christ. Nothing can be more slender and insufficient
than his other evidences of the recognition of these doctrines by the Apostolical
Fathers.
484. Inattention to this distinction vitiates the whole reasonings of Dr. Burton’s
learned work on the Anti-Nicene Fathers. There is no doubt that the deity of
the Son and even of the Holy Ghost is spoken of before the Council of Nice, but
always in the Platonic or derived sense, never in the present orthodox sense of
co-equal and independent. The word con-substantial proves nothing to the contrary,
for a Platonist would not have objected to the application of the word to
the second and third persons in his Trinity, as partaking of, or derived from the
Essence of the one Supreme. See Cudworth’s argument to this effect (Intel. Sys.
p. 597), who contends that by co-essential and consubstantial, the Nicene Council
meant nothing more than that the Son was generically God, of the same nature,
but numerically different, having his own distinct Essence. See also Dr. Burton
on a passage similar to one from Tertullian already quoted, where he is misled by
not attending to this distinction.—Theol. Works, vol. ii. p. 89.
486. “It had been the vice of the Christians of the third century, to involve themselves,
‘in certain metaphysical questions which if considered in one light, are too sublime
to become the subject of human wit; if in another too trifling to gain the attention
of reasonable men.’ (Warburton.) The rage for such disputations had been
communicated to religion by the contagion of philosophy; but the manner in
which it operated on the one and on the other was essentially different. With the
philosopher such questions were objects of the understanding only, subjects of
comparatively dispassionate speculation, whereon the versatile ingenuity of a minute
mind might employ or waste itself. But with the Christian they were matters of truth
or falsehood, of belief or disbelief. Hence arose an intense anxiety respecting
the result, and thus the passions were awakened, and presently broke loose and
proceeded to every excess. From the moment that the solution of these questions
was attempted by any other method than the fair interpretation of the words of Scripture;
as soon as the copious language of Greece was eagerly applied to the
definition of spiritual things, and the explanation of heavenly mysteries, the
field of contention seemed to be removed from earth to air—where the foot found
nothing stable to rest upon; where arguments were easily eluded, and where the
space to fly and to rally was infinite; so that the contest grew more noisy as
it was less decisive, and more angry as it became more prolonged and complicated.
Add to this the nature and genius of the disputants: for the origin of these disputes
may be traced without any exception to the restless imaginations of the
East.” * * *
“We must also mention the loose and unsettled principles of that age, which
had prevailed before the appearance of Christianity, and had been to a certain
extent adopted by its professors—those, for instance, which justified the means by
the end, and admitted fraud and forgery into the service of religion.”—Waddington,
Church Hist. p. 89.
488. “Let us imagine, then, a council called by a Christian Emperor, by a Constantine,
a Constantius, a Theodosius, a Justinian, and three, or four, or five hundred
prelates, assembled from all quarters, to decide a theological debate.”
“Let us consider a little by what various motives these various men may be influenced,
as by reverence to the emperor, or to his councillors and favourites, his
slaves and eunuchs; by fear of offending some great prelate, as a Bishop of Rome
or of Alexandria, who had it in his power to insult, vex, and plague all the bishops
within and without his jurisdiction; by the dread of passing for heretics, and of
being calumniated, reviled, hated, anathematized, excommunicated, imprisoned,
banished, fined, beggared, starved, if they refused to submit; by compliance with
some active, leading, and imperious spirits, by a deference to a majority, by a love
dictating and domineering, of applause and respect, by vanity and ambition, by
a total ignorance of the question in debate, or a total indifference about it, by private
friendships, by enmity and resentment, by old prejudices, by hopes of gain, by
an indolent disposition, by good nature, by the fatigue of attending, and a desire
to be at home, by the love of peace and quiet, and a hatred of contention, &c.
“Whosoever takes these things into due consideration, will not be disposed to
pay a blind deference to the authority of general Councils, and will rather be inclined
to judge that ‘the Council held by the Apostles was the first and the last
in which the Holy Spirit may be affirmed to have presided.’
“Thus far we may safely go, and submit to an Apostolical Synod; but if once
we proceed one step beyond this, we go we know not whither. If we admit the
infallibility of one General Council, why not of another? And where shall we
stop? At the first Nicene Council, A. D. 325, or at the second Nicene Council,
A. D. 787? They who disclaim private judgment, and believe the infallibility of
the Church, act consistently in holding the infallibility of Councils; but they who
take their faith from the Scriptures, and not from the Church, should be careful
not to require nor to yield too much regard to such assemblies, how numerous
soever. Numbers, in this case, go for little, and to them the old Proverb may
be applied;—
‘Est turba semper argumentum pessimi.’
“If such Councils make righteous decrees, it must have been by strange good
luck.”—Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. ii. p. 183-4.
492. “The Christian Religion, which in itself is plain and simple, he (Constantius)
confounded by the dotage of superstition. Instead of reconciling the parties by
the weight of his authority, he cherished and propagated, by verbal disputes, the
differences which his vain curiosity had excited. The highways were covered
with troops of bishops, galloping from every side to the Assemblies, which they
call synods; and while they laboured to reduce the whole sect to their own particular
opinions, the public establishment of the posts was almost ruined by their
hasty and repeated journeys.”—Ammianus, as quoted by Gibbon, vol. iii. p. 347.
493. “Constantine’s conduct was variable afterwards, for he certainly understood
not this perplexed and obscure controversy, and he acted as he was influenced at
different times by the ecclesiastics of each party, who accused one another, not
only of heterodoxy, but of being enemies to the Emperor, and of other faults and
misdemeanors.”—Jortin.
494. “Notwithstanding all which it must be granted, that though this co-essentiality
of the three persons in the Trinity does imply them to be all God, yet does
it not follow from thence of necessity that they are therefore One God.”—Cudworth,
p. 596.
495. “That little is said concerning the separate divinity of the Spirit of God in
the Scripture is evident to every body; but the reason that Epiphanius gives
for it, will not be easily imagined. In order to account for the Apostles saying
so little concerning the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and omitting the mention
of him after that of the Father and the Son, (as when Paul says, ‘there
is one God and Father of all, of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus
Christ, by whom are all things,’) he says that ‘the Apostles writing by the inspiration
of the Spirit, He did not choose to introduce much commendation of
Himself, lest it should give us an example of commending ourselves.’”—Priestley’s
History of the Corruptions of Christianity, p. 60.
496. “The Holy Spirit, if he be God, as the objection is stated by Basil, must
either be begotten or unbegotten. If he be unbegotten, he is the Father; if begotten,
the Son; and if he is neither begotten nor unbegotten, he is a creature.”—Priestley’s
Hist. Early Opinions, vol. ii. 331.
This is the least offensive specimen I could find of the common objections made
to the separate deity of the Holy Ghost at the time the doctrine was first proposed.
The plainer and coarser forms of the objection, unhesitatingly handled by the
Fathers, I withhold from reverence. But let the reader consult the Ecclesiastical
History of the Period. The difficulty stated by Athanasius, Basil, and others,
was overcome by establishing a certain mysterious or rather no-meaning difference
between begotten and proceeding. Such is always the easy refuge of mystics. The
line is a faint one between unintelligible ideas and no ideas at all. “The nativity
of the Son,” says Austin, “differs from the procession of the Spirit, otherwise they
would be brothers.” I doubt whether it is right to disclose to all eyes the morbid
anatomy of Theology; but I assure my readers that I am reverentially forbearing.
497. “In the age of religious freedom, which was determined by the Council of
Nice, the dignity of Christ was measured by private judgment, according to the
indefinite rule of Scripture, or reason, or tradition. But when his pure and proper
divinity had been established on the ruins of Arianism, the faith of the Catholics
trembled on the edge of a precipice, where it was impossible to recede, dangerous
to stand, dreadful to fall; and the manifold inconveniences of this creed were aggravated
by the sublime character of their theology. They hesitated to pronounce;
that God himself, the second person of an equal and consubstantial Trinity, was
manifested in the flesh; that a being who pervades the universe, had been confined
in the womb of Mary; that his eternal duration had been marked by the
days, and months, and years of human existence; that the Almighty had been
scourged and crucified; that his impassible essence had felt pain and anguish;
that his omniscience was not exempt from ignorance; and that the source of life
and immortality expired on Mount Calvary. These alarming consequences were
affirmed with unblushing simplicity by Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicea, and one
of the luminaries of the church. The son of a learned grammarian, he was skilled
in all the sciences of Greece; eloquence, erudition, and philosophy, conspicuous
in the volumes of Apollinaris, were humbly devoted to the service of religion.
The worthy friend of Athanasius, the worthy antagonist of Julian, he bravely
wrestled with the Arians and Polytheists, and though he affected the rigour of
geometrical demonstration, his Commentaries revealed the literal and allegorical
sense of the Scriptures. A mystery which had long floated in the looseness of
popular belief, was defined by his perverse diligence in a technical form; and he
first proclaimed the memorable words, “One incarnate nature of Christ,” which
are still re-echoed with hostile clamours in the churches of Asia, Egypt, and
Æthiopia. He taught that the Godhead was united or mingled with the body of
a man; and that the Logos, the eternal wisdom, supplied in the flesh the place and
office of a human soul.”—Gibbon, vol. viii. p. 279.
501. “Hence many questions arose, which gave rise to as many controversies.
For example, it was debated, Whether the two natures in Christ were so united as
to become one; or whether they remained distinct? Whether, since Christ was
born, and died, and rose again, it could be said that God was born and died, and
rose again?
“Whether the Virgin Mary, who was the Mother of Christ, could be called the
Mother of God?
“Whether Christ were two persons, or only one?
“Whether Christ was everywhere present, in his human, as in his divine
nature?
“Whether one person of the Trinity could be said to suffer for us?
“Whether the whole Trinity could be said to suffer for us?
“Whether in Christ there were three substances, or only two?
“These questions produced altercation and strife, and then anathematisms, and
then fightings and murders.”—Jortin, vol. iii. p. 117.
To these might be added the question proposed by the Emperor Heraclius,
A.D. 629, to his Bishops—“Whether Christ, of one person but two natures, was
actuated by a single or a double will?” This gave rise to what was called the
Monothelite (one will) Controversy, as that respecting the single nature was called
the Monophysite (one nature) Controversy.
505. “Vigilius Tapsensis hath been supposed, by many, to have been the Maker
of the Athanasian Creed about this time (the close of the fifth century). Others
are of a different opinion. But it matters little by whom, or where, or when it was
composed.”—Jortin, Eccles. Hist. vol. iii. p. 131.
506. “The opinions of some of our own Churchmen on this subject are collected
by Clarke in his book on the Trinity. The expression of Bishop Tomline cannot
be too generally known. ‘We know,’ he says, ‘that different persons have deduced
different, and even opposite doctrines from the words of Scripture, and consequently
there must be many errors among Christians; but since the Gospel
no where informs us what degree of error will exclude from eternal happiness,
I am ready to acknowledge that in my judgment, notwithstanding the authority of
former times, our church would have acted more wisely and more consistently
with its general principles of mildness and toleration, if it had not adopted the
damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed. Though I firmly believe that the
doctrines themselves of this creed are all founded in Scripture, I cannot but conceive
it both unnecessary and presumptuous to say, that except every one do keep
them whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’”—Exposition,
part iii. art. viii.
509. “It must be acknowledged that the first converts from the Platonic school
took advantage of the resemblance between Evangelic and Platonic doctrine on
the subject of the Godhead, to apply the principles of their old philosophy to the
explication and confirmation of the articles of their faith. They defended it by
arguments drawn from Platonic principles, and even propounded it in Platonic
language.”—Bishop Horsley.
510. See the Rev. D. James’s acknowledgment of the Subordination of the Son and
the Holy Spirit to the Father—of their official inferiority: and the illustrations
of the King and the Duke of Wellington, which Trinitarian Theology thinks
apposite.
511. We were told, indeed, in Christ Church, by the Rev. D. James, that there
might exist any number of persons in the divine Essence, three thousand as well
as three, and that only because Scripture had revealed no more had Christians
fixed upon that number as making up the divine Unity. And this is so clear a
consequence of the principles of Trinitarian Theology, that the view must be
ascribed to all Trinitarians. Scripture, however, though it has only revealed
three, has not declared that there are no more persons in the Godhead—so that it
is being wise above what is written to limit the divine Monarchy to the Economy
of three Persons.
But farther than this it was declared by the Rev. D. James that nature contained
no evidence of One God, not even in the Trinitarian sense of Oneness, for
that many Gods might unite to build the world, as many men had united to build
the Liverpool Custom House. What would the Architect of that building say to
this invasion of the unity of his designing mind? Mr. James repeatedly informed
his audience that he always appealed to reason! Such is Trinitarianism when it
reasons. But I suppose this view must be considered as a peculiarity of the individual
preacher.
512. Who are the competent Critics, of whom Mr. Byrth speaks as retaining the
text of the three Heavenly Witnesses? The Bishop of Salisbury, I suppose.
If this had been Unitarian Criticism, Mr. Byrth would have called it defective
Scholarship or dishonesty. He can discriminate in favour of those who err upon
his own side. See a curious statement of the external evidence affecting this
text, 1 John v. 7, in the second volume of Burton’s Theological Works, p. 114,
2nd part.
513. “It is reasonable to expect, that those doctrines, which form the leading articles
of any system, should be plainly stated in the book which professes to make
that system known.”—Wardlaw.
514. “‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’ That is, ‘Go ye therefore into
all the world, and teach or disciple all nations, baptizing them into the profession
of faith in, and an obligation to obey the doctrine taught by Christ, with authority
from God the Father, and confirmed by the Holy Ghost.’”—Lardner.
LECTURE VIII. MAN, THE IMAGE OF GOD. BY REV. HENRY GILES. — NOTES. — Note 1. See page 13 . — Note 2. See page 19 . — Additional Remarks, &c. — Footnotes for Lecture VIII.
“FOR A MAN INDEED OUGHT NOT TO COVER HIS HEAD, FORASMUCH AS
HE IS THE IMAGE AND GLORY OF GOD.”—1 Cor. xi. 7.
“AND WHEN HE CAME TO HIMSELF, HE SAID—HOW MANY HIRED SERVANTS
OF MY FATHER’S HAVE BREAD ENOUGH AND TO SPARE, AND I
PERISH WITH HUNGER. I WILL ARISE, AND GO TO MY FATHER, AND
WILL SAY UNTO HIM,—FATHER, I HAVE SINNED AGAINST HEAVEN AND
BEFORE THEE, AND AM NO MORE WORTHY TO BE CALLED THY SON;
MAKE ME AS ONE OF THY HIRED SERVANTS.”—Luke xv. 17-19.
We are often told that man was originally created in the
image of his Maker; and, in the same connection, we are
told that, in his fall, he lost it. If this be true, we might
expect that Scripture writers, in alluding to fallen man, would
never ascribe to him so holy a resemblance. Paul, however,
does it in one of the texts I have quoted; and Paul is not
alone in this ascription. In an ordinance to Noah, immediately
after the deluge, we find the same truth made the
foundation of a most solemn injunction. “Whoso sheddeth
man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the
image of God made he man.”[518] Had the resemblance of God
been effaced from the soul of man in the fall of Adam, there
had been in this ordinance neither meaning nor solemnity.
Since, therefore, the sacred writer uses the fact of man’s likeness
to God to stamp deeper guilt on the crime of murder;
since, moreover, that fact is alleged after the narration of the
fall,—we are justified by Scripture in claiming this high and
glorious distinction for our universal nature.
I have quoted the second text, because the principle implied
in it is identical with that which I stand here to maintain,
namely, that sin is not of our nature, but against it;
that it is not consistent with it, but contradictory to it; that
to be sinful, is not to be natural, but unnatural. Sin, properly
speaking, is moral delirium; and the progress towards
that last paroxysm which, by revulsion, arouses the soul
from its madness, is eloquently symbolised in the parable
from which my second text is taken. Having tried all that
sin could offer him; having sunk to the very husks of carnal
appetites, and vainly sought thus to satisfy the hunger of an
immortal soul, wearied, disappointed, and disgusted; satiated,
but not satisfied, the prodigal arises from his torpor;
he awakens from his wildering dream; the delirium that so
long beset him is dispersed; with a calm and clear brain he
finds himself in open day-light, and discerns the empty and
unsubstantial vanities for which, in a false hope, he spent his
labour and his strength, to reap at last, in the bitterness of
a repentant heart, nothing but grief, tribulation, and anguish.
Sin is not a following of nature, but a violence on it;
not conformity, but contradiction to it. And so, as when
returning life beats in the palsied heart, or the dawn of reason
bursts again on the madman’s brain, the prodigal is said
“to come to himself;” when the spirit of moral renovation
opens on him with compunctuous visitings of nature, and
reveals to him a full sense of his condition. In his guilt he
was at variance with all the moral instincts of humanity;
and, in the sorrow of repentance, he needed as much to be
at peace with himself as with his father. It is universally
thus. God has established a certain order and harmony in
our nature, appointed to each faculty a place and a purpose;
and, in disturbing this arrangement, we become transgressors.
We cannot sin against God without also sinning
against our own souls, for in them is the primitive revelation
of God; and in thus sinning against our own souls, we may
practically resist all the divine attributes of which our weak
faculties are the dim reflection; God’s wisdom in the abuse of
our intellect; his greatness in the loss of our moral dignity;
his goodness in the destruction of our charities; his purity
in the corruption of our hearts. Unitarians are accused of
making sin a light matter. We protest against the justice of
the accusation. We hold sin to be the greatest of evils, and
the most dire of miseries. We hold it not as a mere social impropriety,
but we regard it as a dark disloyalty against conscience
and against God. Much suffering, we know, it inflicts
on society; but slight, indeed, is it compared with the
ruin and devastation it works in our own souls. Here, at
first, God impressed his image; here, at last, he fixes his
tribunal: it is here his voice was heard in kindness, it is here
it shall be also heard in judgment. God’s government is, like
himself, spiritual. Man rules by outward power, God by
inward inspiration; and it is the peculiarity of the divine
legislation that, in the same individual, it attaches the condemnation
to the crime; forces transgression, to pronounce
its own sentence, and to inflict its own punishment. Human
society has set up various bulwarks to guard its security;
human law-givers have accompanied their enactments with
fiercest penalties; and before Draco, and since, millions upon
millions of God’s erring creatures have been offered, a sanguinary
sacrifice to justice: superstition has personified all
hideous evil in Satan,—the mighty sinner of creation,—the
minister of eternal vengeance,—the great executioner of the
universe; superstition has spread the limitless prisons of hell,
and filled them with tortures, and lit those flames which it
asserts are kept burning by the breath of an angry God, and
are never to be quenched during his everlasting existence;
but we assert, there is no scorn of society, there is no torture
of most cruel laws, there is no hell of superstition,
deep, burning, and eternal as it may be, that can equal the
agonies which man’s own sense of wrong and degradation
heap upon his overwhelmed and sunken spirit. The glory of
an immortal soul is beyond all outward glories; the majesty
of empires and crowns, the splendour of the sun, the beauty
of the firmament, the riches of the universe, are nothing in
comparison. We say to those to whom it is our privilege to
minister, though you were stripped of all that constitute your
frail and present happiness; though saddest reverses became
your lot; though God laid his hand heavily upon you and
your family, tore you from that rank and station that now
make your glory; though your children and friends were one
by one snatched from you, until you stood in the world-wilderness
like a branchless and a blasted tree; though all illness
of body and grief of mind were yours,—having an upright
soul, it is but a light affliction compared with a guilty conscience,
which could wield over earth a universal sceptre.
The wages of sin is death,—death in the most tremendous
meaning of that tremendous word,—death of purity, death
of holy confidence, death of self-respect, death of inward
and outward peace. Sin is misery, and the worst of miseries,—one
that carries with it its own vengeance, is self-punished
and self-cursed. True, we recognize no omnipresent and
invisible tempter; true, we hold no gross and eternal punishment;
we preach no original malediction, and no inherent
depravity; we proclaim no sin which blots out all light and
hope around the mercy-seat of God, and scathes the heart of
man with everlasting despair. True, we show you no maniac
penitents, bewildered in the madness of remorse, shrieking
on the death-bed which conscience peoples with furies. We
announce no deity coming from heaven, putting on the frail
existence of humanity, and expiating on the cross the sin
which had closed all access to peace. We cannot, and if we
could we would not, freeze your hearts with ideas of torture,
nor appal you with threatenings, nor echo on your ears the
groans that never cease, the weepings, the wailings, the
knashing of teeth, the sighs and hopeless complainings that
swell for ever and ever a thickening smoke of torment. Independently
of these things, there are other considerations
more solemn,—more solemn, because more true,—there is
our conscience; there is our peace; there is the dignity of
our whole spiritual nature; there is reverence for duty; there
is the power to enjoy what is pure and beautiful; there is
fitness for communion with God, with all the righteous and
the excellent,—these may be lost, or clouded by sin; and
they may be so lost as never fully to be recovered. We count
sin no slight evil, either as to its inward spirit or outward influence:
as I have stated, so we preach. And here, once for
all, I enter my protest against the impeachment which charges
us with stripping guilt of its danger and its awfulness.
I. Human nature, according to the point from which we
regard it, has a good or an evil aspect, each perfectly distinct,
and each perfectly true. The whole truth is then in
neither separately, but in both conjointly. Fixing too intently
on either, and carrying our ideas to extremes, we may,
on the one side, flatter human nature above its merits; or,
on the other, be guilty towards it of injustice: on the one
side see in it all possible good, and on the other nothing but
incorrigible evil: on the one side soar into Utopianism, and
on the other descend into Calvinism. The Calvinistic view
we hold to be false, the Utopian impossible. We have no
idea of any perfect goodness or perfect happiness in this
world, either possessed or to be attained. Whilst we pace
our way in this earthly pilgrimage, sin and suffering must
more or less track our steps; the prodigal’s confession, and
the publican’s prayer, must still be ours; the most favoured
of God’s children have to meet, and bear their allotted
griefs,—to see their glory grow dim, the desire of their eyes
vanish, and to look onward and backward through the mist
of tears. Sufficient of stern realities press upon us to crush
at once the vision of a painless and sinless beatitude. Physical
wants and sufferings, the inevitable condition of our
mortal nature, were there no other, are of themselves equal
to the purpose. While an hospital exists among men, breathing
with groans and sickly in its very look; while a death-bed
is found, steeped in the weepings of affliction; whilst a
stone marks and commemorates a spot where the dust is
sacred to affection and to sorrow; the wildest dreamer has
enough to rebuke his enthusiasm, and to cool it into soberness.
And extreme or exaggerated expectations of our nature,
are in still stronger contradiction to our moral constitution
than our physical. In every individual, however
humble his grade, and however sluggish his faculties, there is
abundance to make him aware that perfection here is neither
his condition nor his destiny,—numberless desires, passions,
hopes, fears, expectancies; and no one imagines that all his
desires are to be gratified, all his passions fulfilled, all his
hopes accomplished, all his fears removed, all his expectancies
realized. Want and wish pursue their strife to the
end. As it is with the individual, so is it with society: for
as society is an aggregate of individual persons, social character
is an aggregate of individual characters. Evils, sins,
and sorrows, must always, we fear, exist, both in the depths
and on the surface of the great community: we look for no
period in future time, when those antagonist passions and
rivalries shall be extinct—which place man into resisting contact
to man, when riches, and fame, and power, shall not be
sought for with avidity and strife, and create the throng of
passions which spring from their desire and their abuse: we
look for no period when the strong universally will use their
strength in righteousness and mercy, when the poor and the
weak shall cease to be victims, and have full justice done to
them: we dare scarcely hope for a period when the massive
throne of tyranny, whether political or sacerdotal, should be
swept away upon the flood of emancipated progression; and,
with equal fear, we think of the tyrannies of caste and creed, not
less dark or obstinate; and although not entirely in despair,
we look forward with timid anticipation to a time when the
war of opinion shall be changed for Christian peace, and the
fierce cry of bigotry give place to the hymn with which the
angels sung our Saviour’s birth. We see no prospect that men
shall lay aside their selfishness, and act in the spirit of universal
charity, or that they shall so curb it as to harmonize
it with the good of others! that they shall become universally
disinterested, forbearing, candid, and generous; that the
proud man will put off his scorn, and the oppressor break or
throw away his sceptre. Moral and social evils will unquestionably
be mitigated, but the sources of them lie too deep
for extinction,—were extinction desirable, which it is not: for
these elements of our nature are wrong only accidentally;
while, essentially, they are right. Knowing that an argument
gains nothing by concealing the objections to it, I have
thus far been liberal in admissions: I will make one admission
more. I acknowledge that an over-estimate of the actual
condition and prospects of human nature, as well as their
undue depreciation, is likely to have injurious consequences.
One of the worst is this: that, creating vivid and unreal
hopes, they rebound with harsh and cruel disappointments;
the fervour of expectation turns into despair; the glow of
generous, but blasted enthusiasm, cools down into apathy,
if it does not wither into cynicism; exstacy that was too intense
to last, and too extravagant to be well founded, either
renounces altogether its early faith, or, casting away its hope,
complains through life in grief and despondency. Desires,
bright and beautiful, are broken, and their light scattered in the
dust. Aspirations, once too big for utterance, turn back to the
bosom that nourished them,—hitherto their palace, now their
prison,—and there waste away in hopeless thinking, or die in
the echoes of unavailing murmurs. Such mistakes are to be
lamented, but not to be scorned; for that suffering is not to
be despised which has its foundation in profound and extensive
sympathy. And it is not in the power of minds more
obtuse and slow to measure or conceive the pain of those
who, with a moral imagination that goes out to the very
limits of humanity, and a piercing sensibility that enters into
the hidden places where suffering weeps unnoted, and sin lies
down unredeemed, that in the spirit of unselfish love feels
the woe and guilt of a race, as though they were personal
afflictions, it is not easy, I say, to estimate the pain such
men undergo: when some conjuncture of events, which
seemed the dawn of virtue, of liberty, of peace, of brotherhood,
turns out a mockery and a contradiction; when they
live to see that their noblest aspirings were but as the babblings
of vanity; that the circumstances of which they
augured most hopefully, proved as empty as shapes of vapour
painted by the rising sun; that changes, of which they prophesied
in most exulting strains, reversed all their calculations.
This is no vague speculation; there have been many
instances in fact, and we can imagine many more. Had
Luther been defeated in his attempt for religious reformation;
had Howard departed to his rest with the sorrowful conviction
that he left cells as dark, and prisoners as hopeless, as
he found them; had Wilberforce closed his life in despair of
all redemption for the slave; had Washington fought in vain
the fight for independence, seeing no prospect for his
country, but submissively to bear the yoke for ever; we have
no doubt that each would have experienced a more oppressive
anguish than from the keenest of personal afflictions. In
such cases there were, of course, the soundness of conception
and wisdom of execution which ensure success; but in
others, it often happens that the disappointment is not the
less bitter because the expectations were baseless.
Opposed to this scheme is that of rigid Calvinism. By
the latter system the whole nature is described as hopelessly
corrupt, and language affords no colouring which can give
shades deep enough for the theological picture. Minutest
analysis is used to prove man such a being, that when considered
you find him to be a compound of fiend and brute—such
a being that you wonder God would allow him to disgrace
existence, to pollute creation, and not annihilate, and
blot him out from the universe, such a being that if correctly
described the very continuance of society becomes a
miracle and a marvel. His intellect, we are told, is utterly
and spiritually darkened, his will the slave of sin, set to work
iniquity greedily, his imagination corrupt, his passions rebellious,
his affections perverted, incapable of good in thought,
word, or deed, and completely devoted to evil. Taking this
view as correct, we might suppose the prime use of man’s
understanding was to devise wickedness, of his memory to
prolong the thoughts of it, of his will to form only guilty resolves,
and of his passions to riot in all that is vile and ungodly.
We have thus the whole spiritual and moral man
steeped in black and hateful infamy. To sustain these assertions,
appeal is made to experience; and proof is found of
entire and universal depravity in history, laws, and literature.
Any conclusion drawn from these goes but to testify what we
are ready to concede, that man is an imperfect being, and
that the evidence of his imperfection is stamped upon most
of his actions and productions. But the testimony is partially
and unjustly quoted. Another estimate of the same
evidence would argue as strongly, and even more so, for the
inherent goodness of man. If we take the instance of human
laws it will at once illustrate and confirm my assertion.
If laws prove the existence and universality of crime, they
prove also the existence and universality of the sense of
justice, for laws, so far as they embody general principles, are
the expression of common and collective sentiments. Indirectly,
they prove yet more: for, after all, the great mass of
truth and rectitude exists independently of laws, is such as
no law could reach, is in fact such that without it no laws
could have a moment’s force. In the effort to make good an
indictment against human nature, an industry and labour
are expended, as perverse as they are pertinacious; the lowest
purlieus of depravity are raked, the deepest mines of wickedness
are worked with a zeal as ardent as the veriest miser would
seek for hidden treasure, the blackest evils of the worst times
are adduced, the pages of history that are the most darkly
stained, are torn out and severed from the context; and for
what purpose is all this? Why, to make the noblest work of
God odious; to vilify that nature which was glorified in the
person of our Lord Jesus Christ. If human nature is so
thoroughly depraved and vile, as so frequently asserted, the
scheme of orthodoxy is most improbable, and a fallen humanity,
as it paints humanity, instead of giving Christianity consistency,
renders it the most perplexing of paradoxes. For if
man be thus naturally vile and depraved—corrupted in every
faculty, whence these high counsels in heaven concerning
him; whence the union of three infinite and co-eternal persons
to save a wretch, the extinction of whom would have been
mercy to the universe; whence the counsels of the Father,
the incarnation of the Son, and that death of a God-man on
Calvary, at which we are told the angels trembled and creation
stood aghast; along with all, the constant and supernatural
agency of the Holy Spirit? If man be really as worthless
and as wicked as we are often told he is, all this, (with reverence
I speak it,) seems a want of wisdom and a waste of
strength. Though it may be considered over bold I will go
a step further. If the one sin of Adam was to work such
complete ruin in all his countless posterity; if it was to be
the source of such an irremediable wickedness, and unrelieved
misery, if notwithstanding the united work of three infinite
agents, there was still to be a bottomless pit and an everlasting
smoke of torment, a black and boundless ocean of guilt
and pain, swelled by gloomy streams ever and ever flowing
in from earth, for which infants were sealed in their birth,
to which the lost are consigned in their death—if this be the
lot to which the great mass of our species is destined—of
which the first tear is a symbol, and the last sigh a passport,—if
hell still is more peopled than heaven, then the infinite
agencies of redemption might have been spared, this hopeless
and illimitable anguish might have been extinguished, and
the annihilation of our first parents would have been the
greater mercy and the greater salvation.
Appeal is made to scripture with still greater confidence
than to experience. There is one to whom reference is never
made for testimony to this doctrine, and that is our Lord
Jesus Christ; and if such doctrine were true, it is strange
that he who needeth not that any should testify of man, because
he knew what was in man, did not reveal it, and stamp
it with all the solemnity of his authority. It may with confidence
be asserted that such a dogma as the inherent and
universal corruption of human nature is neither asserted nor
justified by any Scripture from Genesis to Revelations. The
Bible, I admit to be a moral, and also a providential history;
and in this relation, I admit also, that it contains many strong
statements of human wickedness; but they all refer to periods
of peculiar degeneracy, and a fair study of the context will
plainly show they have defined limitations. In the appendix
to this lecture I will subjoin a list of texts usually pleaded
for this doctrine, the mere exhibition of which is sufficient to
expose its utter want of a Scriptural foundation.[519] On the
present occasion I shall confine my remarks to the proofs
alleged from Paul to the Romans. Stripping the subject
of all the mysticism with which it has been encumbered,
and identifying ourselves with the mind and times
of the apostle, let us clearly see what was his object, and
then we shall truly apprehend the nature of his argument.
Paul’s object was twofold: first, to show that the Gospel was
universal. This was opposed to the circumscribed nationality
of Judaism. Secondly, that it was inward and spiritual.
This was again opposed to the ritual and legal exactitude of
Judaism. The General course, therefore, of the argument
is directed against Jewish thoughts and Jewish prejudices,
and to maintain the admissibility of the Gentiles to the Christian
church. He has then to make good two propositions:—namely,
“that God is impartially and equally the God of all
men; and that fidelity of heart is the essence of all true religion.”
We might sum up the whole system of the Apostle
in two simple sentences of his letter: “Is he the God of
the Jews only? is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes,
of the Gentiles also.” The other assertion is, that “with
the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” Proving these
two principles, he utterly demolishes all Jewish claims. The
Apostle proceeds to open the new aspect which Jesus presented
of the character of God—that of grace or mercy.
Moses proclaimed Jehovah as a God of law, Jesus revealed
him as a God of grace. Paul cautiously, but with power,
argues most convincingly that in this relation only can men
confidently approach him, but in this relation there is free
access for all. None have a claim from merit, for all are
guilty. With remarkable prudence, he takes, first, the case of
the Gentile, and the state of the world in his own time supplied
him examples in melancholy abundance. There was,
therefore, no ground for Gentile exultation or Jewish jealousy,
for the gospel was offered to the Heathens, not as a thing of
merit but of favour, not as reward for their holiness, but as
a remedy for their sin. To the Jews, who looked with bitter
contempt on all men but themselves, who imagined every spiritual
advantage was for them alone, this would be most
offensive. The next question which thence arose was this:—As
the Gentiles obviously were accepted before God, only on
the ground of his mercy, whether the Jews could claim acceptance
on any other ground? The Apostle had most convincingly
shown that the Gentiles had violated the sense of
duty inscribed upon their hearts, with equal force of reasoning
he proves that the Jews had violated the precepts written in
their law; one, therefore, had no right to accuse the other—both
were guilty in the sight of God, and both had equal need
of his mercy.—But, the Jews were not only wrong in their
ideas on the extent of the Creator’s goodness, but also on the
true nature of human virtue. As they considered his special
providence confined to themselves, so they imagined the only
acceptable obedience was in the rigid observance of their own
minute precepts and ceremonies. In opposition to this Paul
contends that justification is by faith, and not by the works
of the law—not a faith which implies a mere assent to
a series of scholastic propositions, but a faith which consists
in a trusting and confiding spirit. The Apostle places
saving holiness, not in outward and measured precepts, but
in living and inward principles—in allegiance to God and
Christ, in the loyalty of a true and pure heart—in the spirit
that makes obedience more a life than a law. To say then
that God holds man sternly to a code of inevitable condemnation,
to say that any one transgression, however slight,
sets at naught the whole tendency of the character and life,
not only leaves Paul’s reasoning without force, but subverts
the gospel to its very foundations. Our Lord in the parable
represents a master as thus addressing his unforgiving servant,
“O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt because
thou desiredst me—shouldest not thou also have had compassion
on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?”
The character of God as described by orthodoxy is the contradictory
of this. But we are informed that God is a Judge,
and, analogous to human judges, on the tribunal of the universe,
lays aside all private considerations. The assimilation
is at once low and false. God has no evidence to examine,
no probabilities to balance, no decision to arrive at, no formal
sentence to pronounce—there is no distinction in the
case between God and man, analogous to that between an
earthly judge, and his accused fellow-mortal; there is no such
distinction with God as a personal relation and a public one,
for God is the same in all relations. His dominion is in the
spirit; there he rewards, and there he punishes; there is no
reward separate from the direct results of righteousness itself
issuing in blessedness, and no penalty separate from the results
of sin itself issuing suffering, and each in the proportion
in which the character is sanctified or depraved. Forgiveness
of sin then, is peace of conscience, springing from a
regenerated heart, and when man with a thoughtful and enlightened
spirit can forgive himself, God forgives him. We,
at least those of us personally engaged in this controversy,
maintain no such doctrine as the pardon of sin on condition
of repentance—as if repentance were something offered
and remission an equivalent received instead. On the contrary,
we see in repentance but the painful revulsion of a soul
from a moral state found by sad experience to be unworthy
of it: a struggle upward in many sighs and fears to the high
estate from which it has fallen, in repentance itself we see
but an additional instance of the anguish which sin never
fails to entail. We regard it not as a merit, but a penalty.
We grant the universality of sin, as fully as any can assert it.
We know it is written, “all men have sinned and come
short of the glory of God”—and we admit the truth of the
assertion. Wherever man is, there will be sin, for we expect
in no place—no, not in heaven itself—to find in man
the perfection of a deity. It has been asserted, that every
man has an ideal in his soul above his actual conduct. This
has been used for condemnation of our nature, we take it as
the glory of it—as an evidence that the spirit of God is extinguished
in no man. We are ready to concede, not that
the open transgressor comes short of the glory of God, but
the best men come far short of the glory of their own ideal,
and the sense of that short coming is acute, in the degree
that their apprehensions of moral loveliness are clear and
purified. Every man with his conscience in a right state
laments with more heart-felt sorrow the sins which are inward
than those which are outward, not those which have been exposed
to the world, but those which only God has seen.
We desire in no sense to mitigate the deep injury of sinfulness;
but when we are told, that God, in vindication of his
holy law, must subject man to an unsparing standard of
judgment, orthodoxy to be consistent should have the unmitigated
penalty inflicted on every personal transgressor.
We are unable to conceive how the righteousness of any
law can be vindicated by contriving an escape for the guilty
by the suffering of the innocent. We do not make void the
law—nay, we establish it, for we hold, and we preach it also,
that transgression vindicates in the person of the sinner the
claims of holiness, righteously and completely, in anguish
and tribulation. I here close the polemical division of this
lecture, and now for the remaining time I shall dwell on views
more positive.
II. Having elucidated two extreme and false systems
of human nature, I shall now adduce some of these essentials
which properly entitle it to be considered in the likeness
of God. I shall pass over the faculties of mere intellect and
taste, for these are not denied. I do this for the sake of
brevity, for it would be easy to prove that without sense of
moral beauty in the soul, even these could have no high developement,
philosophy would lose its wisdom, science its
uses, painting its glow, architecture its majesty, sculpture
its grace, poetry and eloquence their inspiration. It would
be easy, I maintain, to show, that without conceptions of
the divine, the true, the right, and the beautiful, there would
be neither power nor materials in human nature from which
to create a single great work of mind, nothing to evince the
might of genius or the immortality of thought. I shall,
however, in all my subsequent remarks, confine myself to
what without dispute is strictly moral. We contend not for
an infallibility in man’s reason, neither do we assert impeccability
in his will; as we admit error in the one, we can
admit sin in the other. But when we speak of the moral
nature of man, we regard it not partially, but as a whole,
not in its accidental exceptions, but in its essential constitution.
Of this constitution we assert that virtue and goodness
are the true and native attributes. For the position that
sin is not natural but unnatural, not in accordance with humanity
but contrary to it, we have the testimony of the great
bishop Butler.[520]—“Every work,” he says, “of nature and
art is a system; and as every particular thing, both natural
and artificial, is for some use or purpose, out of or beyond
itself, one may add to what has already been brought into
the true idea of a system, its conduciveness to this or more
ends. Let us instance in a watch: Suppose the several
parts taken to pieces and placed apart from each other; let a
man have ever so exact a notion of these several parts, unless
he considers the respect and relations which they have to
each other, he will not have any thing like the idea of a
watch. Suppose these several parts brought together, and
any how united, neither will he yet, be the union ever so
close, have an idea which will bear any resemblance to that
of a watch. But let him view these several parts put together,
or consider them as to be put together in the manner
of a watch—let him form a notion of the relation which
these several parts have to each other, all conducive in their
several ways to this purpose, showing the hour of the day,—and
then he has the idea of a watch. Thus it is with the
inward nature of man. Appetites, passions, affections, and
the principle of reflection, conscience, considered severally
as the inward parts of our inward nature, do not at all give
us an idea of the system of this nature. And this our nature
is adapted to virtue, as from the idea of a watch it appears,
that its nature, that is, constitution or system, is
adapted to measure time. What in fact commonly happens
is nothing to the question. Every work of art is apt to be
out of order: but this is so far from being according to its
system, that let the disorder increase, and it will destroy it.”
The author then goes on to say, that—“Nothing can possibly
be more contrary to our nature than vice, meaning by
nature not only the several parts of our internal frame, but
also the constitution of it. Poverty and disgrace, tortures
and death, are not so contrary to it. Misery and injustice
are indeed equally contrary to some different parts of our
nature taken singly, but injustice is moreover contrary to the
whole constitution of the nature.” And here I will repeat a
fine remark from the same noble thinker, used already, in a
note by one of my fellow-labourers in this discussion.—“We
should learn,” says the philosophical prelate, “to be
cautious lest we charge God foolishly, by ascribing that to
him, or the nature he has given us, which is wholly owing to
its abuse. Men may speak of the degeneracy and corruption
of the world, according to the experience they have had
of it, but human nature considered as the divine workmanship
should, methinks, be treated as sacred: for in the image
of God made he man.”[521]
In human nature, under all its forms, we recognize two
eternal moral elements; which, though frequently perverted,
can never be destroyed. I mean sympathy and conscience,
the feeling of a common nature, and the sense of right and
wrong. If we consider the truth, the power, and extent of
sympathy, though nothing else remained in man, this alone
would prove his assimilation to God; would prove, to use
the language of the Apostle, that he was still a partaker of
the divine nature. In what numberless forms is it manifested!—rising
from instinct to godliness. We see it in
family affections. Wherever we meet a home, however rude
the beings that it shelters, whether it be scooped in the
snow, or be a tent on the desert, wherever the loves of
parents and children, of brothers and sisters, are interchanged
within the sphere of its operation, we have the spirit of a
common heart. We see it also in love of country. From those
who surround him in his dwelling, man enlarges the compass
of his affections, until they embrace those who, with himself,
tread the same soil, and speak the same tongue. The general
glory, honour, and prosperity of his country, become dear to
him; and from habits of loving association, there, more than
any where else, the heavens have a brighter smile, and nature
wears a kinder face. Every nation has had its patriots; and,
whether successful or not, whether victorious in the field or
bleeding on the scaffold, they evince the power with which
the sentiment of common good can overcome the force of
selfish interests. We see the strength of sympathy in the
love of man generally, and especially in that species of it
which assumes the form of compassion. Whence else the
mass of goodness which proves that humanity, with all its
evils and its errors, is a most merciful nature. Misery, in
any form, is an appeal that is rarely disregarded. The stranger,
whose face we never saw before, if it be seamed and
marred by suffering, in his misfortune becomes a brother;
and what is yet harder, our foe, in his sorrow, seems once
more a friend. Men find it hard to pardon a prosperous
enemy; but there are few so callous whom a fallen one
would not disarm of hatred. Hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness,
desertion, orphanage, imprisonment, sickness—every
want that afflict the wretched—have their provision in human
mercy, not only from individual hands, but from collective
hearts. When man is maligned as utterly corrupt—as at
enmity with God and his kind, we may point to thousands
occupied in works of beneficence, and to refugees for
misery in every land, and claim as witnesses against the accusers.
And we stop not with the woes that fall directly
under the senses;—sufferers who wasted their sighs and
their tears in darkness, have been thought of with grief by
those whom they knew not, and visited with glad tidings
when they least expected. The piercing supplication of
wretchedness has been sometimes wafted across continents and
oceans without failing, or being weakened by the distance;
and the cry of anguish, uttered at one extreme of earth, has
fallen with power on human hearts at the other. We speak
not of bodily wants alone, but equally of the soul’s wants.
The ignorant have those who feel and work for them, and
there are some who do not scorn the most guilty; there are
many pure souls who never themselves knew contamination,
who can turn with mercy to the despised, and bleed with sorrow
that the work of God should lie so deep in ruin. And,
whether with right or wrong principles, whether by right or
wrong agencies, whether in right or wrong methods, this sentiment
can have no illustration so sublime as the various exertions
here, and throughout the globe, for the religious
regeneration of mankind. Is there, then, nothing godlike
in the spirit which gives unity and love to home; nothing
godlike in the spirit which, with unselfish devotion, causes a
man to sacrifice his own interests in his nation’s good; nothing
godlike in the spirit which makes the sufferer a brother,
whether stranger or enemy; which can pierce the
haunts of loathsome want; which can feel for the body and
the soul, and draw near, in generous pity, both to distress
and crime; which dreams, with tortured imagination, of the
unseen tribulation of the dungeon, and rests not until the
fresh breeze is on the prisoner’s brow, and the bright and
cheerful sunshine on his eye; which stretches forth its ample
charity to the utmost regions of earth; and, wherever there
is a complaint of physical or spiritual need, admits it is a
brother’s cry, and hears it not in vain?
The very passions, which might seemingly be urged against
this reasoning, are but so many confirmations of it. Men
have sometimes tried to be independent of others; they
failed. Men have tried to live apart from others, and to dispense
with the general affections of life; they failed. Men
have tried to set opinion at defiance, and to disregard esteem;
they also failed. And, in the few rare and extreme cases in
which men have been more than usually sordid, selfish, and
anti-social, the isolation to which they have been abandoned
evinced their conduct to be averse to nature; and, whilst it
proved their folly, inflicted their chastisement. Emulation,
envy, jealousy, vanity, ambition, and various other passions,
afford evidence to the same purpose: for, what is
emulation, but the struggle for the greatest share of appreciation;
and envy, but the malignity of disappointment; and
jealousy, but the suspicion of not possessing it,—perchance,
of not deserving it; and vanity, but the puny desire to attain,
or the timid hope that it already has it; and ambition,
but the strong effort of a strong nature to have a lasting life
in the admiration and memory of men: all, in their several
ways, converging in evidence of one truth, namely, that
community of feeling is amongst the greatest distinctions of
our nature. In truth, it is only by this that man understands
man. It is this that opens to man the heart of man; that,
from the first human being to the last, forms a chain of common
emotion, which indissolubly links mankind of all generations
into one brotherhood. Without this, history would
be a dead letter; laws and customs, but puzzles; arts, confused
and shapeless; past languages and literature, but empty
babble; and by-gone religions and philosophy, but unintelligible
names. This common sympathy is that by which we
know the meaning of history; by which we know the force
of laws and customs; by which we know the beauty and immortality
of art; by which we are enabled to interpret language,
literature, philosophy, and religion; by which we are
made one with our race, and identified in kindred with all
that have ever ennobled or adorned it.
A second characteristic I have mentioned, in man, is the
sense of duty, the sense of right and wrong. In this more
than in any other quality he bears the impress of his divine
original. The sense of duty is an essential part of human
nature. A man might as well endeavour to lay aside the
consciousness of his rational existence as to get rid of the
idea of an immoveable distinction between good and evil,
between virtue and vice. I know that, in the operations of
the moral sense, there have been apparent contradictions; but
if we were to deny it on this ground, we should deny the existence
even of reason itself, for many of its conclusions are
apparently contradictory. We assert the reality of the rational
faculty, but not its infallibility; in like manner, we
assert the reality of the moral faculty, but not its infallibility.
I know that it seems various in its operation, not only from
national and religious differences, but also from individual
sophistries. Men pronounce just judgment on the sins of
others; but when they come to pass sentence on their own,
they invent a thousand excuses for justification or leniency:
but these excuses do not satisfy themselves. And when they
are alone with their own hearts, in silent and sober thought,
the deception will not bear to be scrutinized, and truth is
justified by conscience. The sense of duty is universal.
Wherever we meet man, we meet one who, in some way or
other, is the creature of moral feeling; and although the
moral sentiment may be superstitiously or fanatically directed,
there are essential ideas in which it never changes. Wild
actions and awful evils may, I know, be perpetrated under a
mistaken sense of duty, and done with the fiercer zeal because
they are considered to be duty. Under its influence,
men can not only sacrifice others but themselves: in one age
or country, a man can lacerate himself before an image or an
idol, or look calmly on the rack on which a tortured fellow
creature shivers, or he can come from his retreat of self-infliction
to the place where he persecutes; and, if the case
compelled, he could go himself from that to the stake of
martyrdom. The sentiment is true to itself, and the misdirection
of it lies in other sources: yet with all its diversities,
justice, mercy, and truth, have ever the instinctive approval
of conscience, whilst wrong, cruelty, and falsehood, under
whatever forms disguised, are abhorrent to it. The sense of
duty presents man to us in the most glorious aspects of his
nature; and that sentiment is not always misdirected. By its
power in the soul, we observe appetites governed, passions
subjected, and temptation overcome; by its inspiration, when
necessity calls, we observe men devoting themselves in the
spirit of martyrdom to truth and right, casting pleasure
aside, forsaking whatever was dear to them, and despising life
itself. Whatever change for good has occurred in the history
of man, is a witness for the force of duty, for it has been
worked out in much travail and self-denial; whatever we have
most precious in our spiritual or social blessings, whether
our liberties or our religion, we owe to the spirit of duty; it
is enshrined in the memory of all our benefactors; it is consecrated
in the blood of martyrs. Signal instances of this
kind may strike more forcibly from their distinctness and
saliency; but the mightiest energy of duty is in the economy
of general life. Go into the open mart of the world, and,
in all the astonishing complexities that are spread over that
wide scene, consider to what an extent man trusts man, and
is trusted in return, mutual confidence forming the immutable
foundation of the vast social structure. It is base injustice
to human nature to assert that all this is the effect of
interest or fear; without pervading conscience, mere interest
or fear would be as powerless to sustain society as the arm of
man to move the orbs of heaven; without conscience, human
laws could either have no existence or no power,—mere ropes
of sand, that a touch could sever; passion would have no
scruple, desire no limit, but power; and selfishness no control,
but a superior opposing force: the strong would prostrate
the weak by violence, and the weak would in turn overreach
the strong by guile, deceit, and fraud.
I am willing to admit, as I have before admitted, that social
man is encompassed with many injurious influences, and I
know that he does not always escape guiltless: I know that
many vices are generated in society, and nourished by its
corruptions; that pride, both worldly and religious, walks
through life with anti-social heart and clouded brow, wrapped
up in its own miserable importance, exulting in vanities,
self-worshipping and self-enslaved; that covetousness, surfeited
with acquisition, still works on, and still cries “more;”
that licentiousness goes its way in darkness, and leaves destruction
in its path; that envy broods over its own solitary
and unacknowledged malice, sickens at the pleasure or the
fame it cannot reach; that gospel charity is often slain in the
collision of creeds and passions, and Christian zeal heated into
bigotry; but these, I repeat again, are not our nature, and
judgment against it on such grounds is quite as unjust, as if
we should seek out the hospitals to test the health of a
community, visit but prisons to decide on its morals, and
pass only through asylums for lunatics to form an opinion of
its intelligence. But even in its sins, humanity loses not the
evidence of its divine relationship. The image of God may
be darkened, but the impress is deep as ever. The capacity
of sin equally implies the capacity of holiness; transgression
implies the knowledge of a law, inspired or revealed;
the violation, therefore, of moral injunctions includes the
high capability of moral perception. Whence but from the
greatness of our nature is the deep misery of sin—whence,
I might say, but from its holiness?—whence but from its
adaptation to goodness, are the ruin and the dislocation
which guilt can work in our whole inward frame and constitution?
Thence it is, that it is that the conscience, dethroned
and humiliated, is torn by remorse, worse incomparably
than bodily torture: thence it is, that the affections
either become a total and disorganized wreck, or, wounded
by a sense of shame and lost dignity, bow down with sorrow
or wither in despair. Thence it is, that the good and pure
are shunned, and the evil sought, for the one cause a feeling
of contrast too painful to be borne, the other afford a refuge
by their moral assimilation, and the spirit needs support
wherever it can be found. Thence it is, that when the
guilty have utterly lost their own respect, and the approbation
of the virtuous, that crime becomes desperation and remorse
madness,—that conscience is silenced in delirious self-defence,
and that plunge after plunge sinks them lower and
lower in the gulf of spiritual perdition. And yet human character
is rarely ever such a wreck as not to have some remnant
to justify its origin and parentage; some embers of the
sacred fire smouldering in the sanctuary,—some gleams of
affection,—some dawnings of memory, that open to the weary
spirit the quiet and happiness of better days,—some touches
of mercy that has yet a sigh for wretchedness,—some visitings
of compunction,—some unconscious desires to be good
once more,—some timid hopes of pardon,—some secret
prayers to be made better. The human soul is a great mystery,
and so indeed is human life; we observe a few palpable
and external manifestations, but how little know we
of the secret and unseen workings! That the good in every
human being, even such as strikes us as the worst, preponderates
over the evil, is, I am persuaded, not the imagination
of a fanciful charity, but a fact and a reality.
But though more crime existed in actual life than has ever
been alleged, our doctrine would yet be true. We enter on
no defence of man in the whole of his conduct. We contend
for his inherent capacities, and in arguing for these, we
are entitled to select our illustrations from the highest specimens
of nature, and not from the lowest. We contend for
its capacity to subjugate passion to principle—to sacrifice
present desires to progressive good—to resign selfish interests
to human ones—to give the spiritual and eternal a predominance
over the sensual and the temporal: and we contend
for this, not as a thing possible, but a thing proved:
we contend for what has its evidence in abundance of examples.
If we could point to one patriot, to one philanthropist,
to one martyr, to one holy man, in each of these
the fact would have sufficient attestation: but humanity has
its armies of patriots, and philanthropists, and martyrs, and
saints. With these the lowest of us are united in a kindred
nature, and dignified by a common brotherhood. But passing
from characters of this magnitude, come we to the ordinary
existence that is common to us all. Every life, from
the palace to the cottage, is one more or less of self-denial
and labour—one in which we must continually defer to others
and work for them. Cast your imagination over the vast
throng of this busy world: consider the countless modes in
which they are all toiling with head and hand, from the man
of genius to the labourer of field or factory,—from the proudest
merchant to his meanest servant,—scarcely a movement
in it all that has not a reference to others beyond the agent,—scarcely
a movement that has not some connection with a
human love or a human duty. Retire from the crowd to
their dwellings, and, except in cases of last degradation, they
are, on the whole, retreats of mutual kindness. If there be
grief, there is compassion,—if there be illness, there is unwearied
tenderness,—if there be death, there is sorrow. It
will perhaps be said, that all this may very well consist with
a reprobate state. If so, it only proves that no state is so
reprobate, as not to be consistent with a great mass of excellence.
If to confer happiness and show mercy be not
goodness, we are at a loss to explain the goodness of God or
of Christ. And as we descend in the scale of society, we discover
human nature with peculiar trials, and also with peculiar
virtues. Amongst the poor and laborious classes we may find
some grossness, but we find much goodness; and to a considerate
mind the wonder will be, that their grossness is not more,
and their goodness less. We behold them often patient under
manifold oppressions, forbearing against many wrongs; uncomplaining
in the midst of afflictions, toiling on from youth
to age in the same routine of laborious monotony; resigned
in illness, though it takes that strength from them which is
their only refuge, merciful to each other, giving aid to want
out of want; all divine evidence that there is in humanity a
godlike spirit, which nothing can suppress, not sin, ignorance,
poverty, nor any ill of life.
I have spoken of our divine affinity chiefly in the goodness
that unites us to our species, but there is a tendency towards
God himself in which that affinity is still more clearly seen.
It is made manifest in our capacity to know God. God is a
spirit, and must be spiritually apprehended. We must therefore
have some attributes in common. If there be not some
qualities in our souls corresponding to the nature of God, he
would be to us a nonentity, and we could neither know him
nor love him. The knowledge of God is a spiritual revelation,
and by that which is within us we interpret the revelation
and give to it a meaning—his power in the movement of
our will—his intelligence in the rectitude of our reason—his
goodness in the sympathies of our affections—his holiness in
the law of our conscience. It is made manifest in our capacity
to imitate God. The apostle says, “Be ye followers of
God as dear children;” and our Saviour himself exhorts us
to “be merciful even as he is merciful,” and to be “perfect
even as he is perfect.” To imitate any being with whom we
had no assimilation of nature, it requires no argument to
prove an utter impossibility. But this principle has a moral
value far beyond its theological import—in breaking down the
distance which we usually place between our hearts and God;
in drawing him within the circle of our nearest affections; in
uniting us to him in a more filial trust, in taking fear from
our love and inspiring life in our obedience—proving to us
that God is verily and indeed our Father, as Christ is our
brother; that God our Father is imitable by his children;
that Christ our brother by a perfect conformity to his will
has revealed and proved its truth. That we have affinity
with God is further made manifest by our need of him.
Consciously or unconsciously every man is seeking after
God, or after what God alone can give him. Whether blindly
or otherwise, we all feel the want of him in our souls, for in
whatever direction we turn our desires, we are yearning after
the perfect and the infinite: we have the proof of it in our
disgust, our dissatisfactions, and discontents. Who does not
hear of the insufficiency of the world? And what does that
mean? The vanity of pleasure. But why is pleasure vain?
why does he who tries it in all its enchantments, weary at last
even to repugnance? The vexations of wealth? But why
are riches vexatious? Why do they disappoint the hope
that longed so deeply for them, and leave complaints still in
all the fullness of success? The fatigues of power? But,
why again is power fatiguing, when no sacrifices were too
painful, and no toils too harrassing in the career for its attainment?
It is simply because pleasure, wealth, or power,
can never fully occupy the human soul, unlimited in capacity
and desire, perishable things bring it only chagrin, when in
lavish expectation it looks for complete fruition. Nor is it
alone that we call the world, which proves insufficient, but
still higher, the pursuits of knowledge, and the creations of
genius; the greatest sage feels himself at last a child, and
the most inspired poet wishes for things more beautiful than
he has ever conceived, and scenes brighter than he has ever
imagined. Even in truest religion this sentiment may be
discerned in operation, in alternations between fear and faith,
between despondency and hope. A longing for the invisible
and the boundless may be traced in all the higher forms of
superstition—in every effort to overcome the thraldom of the
body and to achieve the spiritual emancipation, from the
ascetics that in the first centuries peopled the deserts of Asia
to the flagellants that in the middle centuries overran the
continent of Europe; from the penitent that scorches himself
on an Indian plain, to the monk that lashes himself in a
Spanish cloister. Now to what do all these, some true and
some mistaken, refer, to what do they point? Evidently to
something which the soul cannot find on earth, to God, perfect
and infinite, in whom at last it will attain repose and fullness.
And thus we have two great truths intimated at the
same time; for the conscious want that tells us of our need
of God reveals also our immortality, and the one is the glory
of the other.
Now, in conclusion, let me ask to what purpose is all this
blackening of human nature? It cannot promote humility;
for to be humble is not to be degraded. If a sense of
degradation corresponded with humility, we should be more
humble as we descended to the level of the brutes. It cannot
inspire a poignant sense of guilt, nor a true feeling of
confession, for as it takes away natural dignity it leaves nothing
from which a man can fall; and as it denies personal
capacity, it must in the same degree weaken the feeling of
personal accountability. He whose moral sorrow will ever
lie most profoundly is one that has the consciousness of
having abused high and great capacities; of having, by
his own sins, become unworthy of his nature; of having
done despite to the spirit of God within him, the light
that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world;
of having apostatised from his godlike destiny. But to
tell a man, as orthodoxy does, first that he is morally imbecile,
and then that he is personally guilty, is an absolute
derangement and confusion of all our moral ideas. It is
well that essentially the sources of our conduct in general,
are beyond the reach of theology; or doctrines like these,
would stop all motives to exertion, would destroy the
hopes of the good, and strike dead the efforts of the penitent.
As it is they are not without great and serious evils. They
take from virtue that which is its most noble distinction.
when rightly understood, a sense of individual and independent
action:—they attach a slavish spirit to religion, which,
to a great extent, stifles the free and voluntary service of the
heart. Yet worse still, to maintain an extreme theory, men
are driven to malign their nature, and to seek for all manner
of blame against it—to deny the excellence and reality of
virtues—of which an unsophisticated observer could not
entertain a doubt, to invent all motives for goodness but
the true ones. It is a sad necessity in which men place
themselves when they are compelled to violence to their own
hearts, and injustice to those of others, when their system
forces them to repress their rising pleasure in the beauty of
virtue, and to change their unbidden admiration into qualified
condemnation. If the man called heretical, or one called
unregenerate, visit the sick, clothe the naked, do in fact
every work of mercy, have a heart of love and a hand of
bounty—revere his God in all sincerity, and worship him in
truth, the evangelical moralist must assert, that it is all
worthless, and is, in fact, of the nature of sin. Though one
who is called regenerate should do no more, and to all evidence,
not in a better spirit, he is esteemed a most godly and
pious Christian. The man who cannot believe as the creeds
or a party require, may do every work which Christ will
judge him by, and be refused his name; but if he has the
blessing of his master in heaven, he may care little for the
anathema of men upon earth. If Unitarianism delivered us
from nothing else than this spiritual injustice, it is a great redemption.
If I am asked, in turn, why I maintain the doctrine of
human dignity, I answer, first, because it raises my homage
to God. I understand him no otherwise than as he is emblemed
in the human soul, exalted and purified: without this
creation is a blank to me, and the scripture a dead letter.
Regarding it also as his work, I revere him through his work,
the more profoundly, the more I believe it worthy of him.
I cannot conceive it an honour to God, that the only being
here who has capacity to know him, the only being who
reflects his attributes, the only being who admires his universe
and discerns him in it, should be wholly corrupt: I
cannot think that such a doctrine gives him glory. I answer
secondly—because it teaches me to hope for man; teaches
me to hope for him in this world and the next: while
I have faith in the capacity, I can never lose hope in
the developement, but if man be powerless as well as depressed,
I have no proper ground for expectation, and the
difficulties of the present are softened by no light from the
future. But as it is, believing that man has great inherent
capabilities, for knowledge, for liberty, for virtue, and for
happiness—I lose not my confidence, I observe him as in the
struggle of discipline, and in preparation for the period of
redemption; and wherever I see ignorance, or slavery, or vice,
or misery, I do not despair of a time, when these heavenly
faculties shall have achieved their emancipation. I answer,
lastly, I maintain the doctrine because it teaches me to honour
man. I feel how necessary it is for us in this world of outward
show, and where outward show has so much power,
that we should have some strong sentiment by which to give
our appreciation to those who have no external dazzle with
which to attach us: in this world of grades and inequalities,
where rank and wealth, and genius, so continually throw
their enchantments about us, we need a sentiment before
which rank and wealth and genius are nothing, in regarding
those who have them not, and also those who have: and no
sentiment can be more powerful, more holy, or more sublime
than this, that they are the immortal children of God, destined
for his presence, and made after his likeness. Having this
faith, then, ignorance, sin, poverty, may come safely before
us, without any fear of that infidel contempt with which they
are too often treated. Show me then a man, and no matter
what his condition, if I be true to this faith, you point me
to an object of most solemn interest. Show me the red man
of the American forests, or the black man of tropical deserts,
and untame and ferocious though he be, he has within him
an indelible title to my reverence. His rude and unclothed
form enshrines a soul in the image of God, as well as the
most polished of his civilized brethren. Show me the veriest
serf or slave who seems chained to the soil—the gospel which
is equal to bond and free, tells me to behold in him the heir
of a glorious inheritance; his title is his nature; it burns in
his blood, and it is stamped upon his brow, its appeal is in
the fire or moisture of his eye—no power can efface it,
for the hand of God has impressed it:—show me even the
criminal who seems all but lost to every sense of duty, I am
not justified in despairing, much less have I any title to scorn.
We dare not despise in the lowest state the child whom God
regards—we dare not cast off whom Christ has not rejected,
nor disown the brother for whom he died. If we be right-minded,
and have any sympathy with the spirit of Jesus, his
moral wretchedness should be his most eloquent appeal. We
never know the whole power of Christianity until we have interest
in man as the child of God, and revere him as God’s
image, until we behold the throng around us in relation to their
mighty and improvable capacities—until we see in the lowest
and the worst, objects of hope and moral influence, with undying
souls which no vice or passion should conceal. In
this faith the messenger of God may go with confidence to
guilt and suffering, and bring with him no mocking offers of
blessedness and peace: then may he call on souls to rejoice
which were ready to perish in despair, pour the dews
of heaven on many a closing hour, and silence the doubts of
many a fearing spirit. Thus, believing we should have trust
unshaken, look forward to the consummation, when that
humanity which here has only its trials, shall be hallowed
with the infinity and eternity of its maker.
Having in the Appendix of my former lecture stated from sources of
authority the doctrines of Calvinism on the nature of man, I here
enumerate some of the principal texts on which those doctrines are
said to be founded. The question, it is to be kept in mind, is not
whether man is or is not capable of great depravity, whether sin of
various degrees and extent has not existed in all ages, and does not
exist at present in all places. That sin has entered into the world is
a fact undisputed, no matter when or how; that sin is universal is a
point also, upon which we are on both sides agreed. The true subject
of dispute between us is, simply, this. Is human nature a nature
of radical and inherent depravity? or is not goodness more properly
its characteristic than evil? Now we maintain that all its essential
tendencies establish the latter question in the affirmative, and no
Scriptures prove the former. I shall take those quoted in the most
approved Calvinistic formularies.
Gen. iii. is alleged as giving an account of the origin of sin:
“And the Lord said to the woman, what is this thou hast done?
And the woman said, the serpent beguiled me and I did eat.” There
we have the account of Adam’s temptation and transgression, with
the penalties pronounced upon the beguiler and his dupes. Now in
whatever light we regard this passage, whether as a mythos, an allegory,
or a literal narrative, it implies nothing of the doctrine asserted,
or the consequences attributed to it; namely, the loss of all original
righteousness, and entire defilement in all the faculties and parts of
the soul and body: the imputation of their sin to mankind, burdened
with the penalty of eternal death. When we find these ideas
extracted out of one obscure passage, we may well ask is it Unitarianism
or orthodoxy which adds to the Scriptures? These ideas are not
in the passage itself, nor in any other supposed to be co-relative, nor
in any number of passages fairly conjoined and fairly interpreted.
Gen. vi. 5. “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth.” This states merely a general fact, that of an evil condition
of society, for which judgment of God is represented as poured out
from heaven. But it is alleged, that in the same connection we read
“that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually.”
This clause only expresses the original idea with more impressive
force. No one in the worst state of an individual or a nation will
attempt to maintain that such words can have a rigid and literal application.
Besides, in that very time, Noah is made an express exception; for
we read that “the Lord said unto Noah, come thou and all thy house
into the ark, for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.”[522]
But though the literal meaning were insisted on, it could
but literally extend to men of that time; and the rule of interpretation
by which our opponents define the character of man, we are entitled
in the next verse to apply to the character of God. “It
repented him,” we are told, “that he had made man on the earth,
and it grieved him at his heart.”[523] If on the literal principle we are
to conclude man wicked in every thought and imagination, on the
same principle we are to conclude that God can repent, and that he
can be grieved at the heart.
Jer. xvii. 9. “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately
wicked,” is an exaggeration of the same kind with that we
are considering. It was uttered when the Jewish nation was in a
state of sad corruption, and the prophet’s feelings were passionate
against his countrymen in grief and indignation. If we are to take
all the prophet’s words as coolly and deliberately uttered, then what
shall we say to the tremendous language in which he curses his existence
and his birth.
Eccl. vii. 29. “God hath made man upright, but they have
sought many inventions.” This expression contains no matter of
controversy; the first part states our view, and the latter clause of
the verse, by no torture of criticism can be made to imply inherent
and entire depravity.
Psalm li. 5. “Behold I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my
mother conceive me.” The import of this expression is to be judged
of from the general tone of the Psalm, which is most passionate and
penetential, inspired by the deepest spirit of remorse. David uttered
these complainings in profoundest self-accusation; but there would
be little for repentance to deplore, if he could remove the blame from
himself to his nature, and bury individual guilt in a corruption to
which he was subjected in common with all men. The force and
meaning—the piercing and eloquent deprecation of the whole composition,
combine to show it is one of individual experience, the idea
of original sin leaves it vapid and pointless, makes it, not the anguish
of a convicted sinner, but the sophistry of a deluded hypocrite; not
a lamentation for vice, but an excuse for it. These passages are the
few which can be found in the Old Testament that have any direct
reference to a tenet said to be inculcated throughout the whole of
Scripture. If we turn to the New Testament we find the evidence
quite as scanty, and quite as inconclusive. The texts advanced are
commonly taken from the epistles, principally from those of Paul, and
of Paul’s, mostly from the Romans. Few or none can be advanced
from the gospel histories, and the discourses of Christ have no reference
to such a doctrine.
Rom. iii. 10. “There is none righteous, no not one: there is
none that understandeth,” &c., &c. Correspondent to this passage
is the 14th Psalm. Both David and Paul refer to the peculiar depravity
of their times. But, in the sense of absolute and guiltless
perfection, unquestionably, the general assertion may be made of all
men.
Rom. v. 12-19, and 1 Cor. xv. 21, 22, 45, 49. The apostle, I
apprehend, institutes a comparison between the imperfect man, symbolized
in Adam, and the perfect man revealed in Christ; between
the earthly and the heavenly, the mortal and the immortal; death
shown forth in the one—life manifested in the other.
Rom. vii. 18. “For I know that in me, (that is, in my flesh)
dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me, but how to
perform that which is good, I find not.” Ver. 25. “So then with my
mind, I serve the law of God, but with my flesh the law of sin.”
And the apostle had said in the preceding verses, “I delight in the
law of God after the inward man; but I find a law in my members
warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity
to the law of sin which is in my members.” This is an eloquent and
fervent out-pouring of individual experience, no more intended as a
universal description than any passage in the journal of John Wesley
or Thomas Scott. Involving as human nature does, a twofold constitution,
a struggle between desire and conscience is a necessary condition
of its moral existence. This is inevitable, unless a being is
above or beneath temptation; but the very struggle implies the power
of the moral sense; the possession of the moral sense is an element
of human dignity even in defeat, how much more in triumph. Without
the power of transgression or the danger of falling, there is of course no
trial, and in the human sense no virtue. But there are some expressions
of Paul’s more general and comprehensive, and to these I shall
devote one or two remarks.
Rom. viii. 7. “The carnal mind (τὸ φρονημα τῆς σαρκος—the mind
of the flesh) is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of
God, neither indeed can be.”
Gal. v. 17. “For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, (Ἡ γὰρ σὰρξ
ἐπιθυμεῖ κατα του πνευματος) and the spirit against the flesh; and these
are contrary the one to the other.” The scriptural use of the word
“flesh” (σαρξ) implies two meanings; first, the excess of the inferior
desires, which is in reality contrary to God, and therefore sin; for God,
though he has implanted these subordinate desires, has subjected them
to certain laws, beyond which they are at variance with his will and with
his providence. In this view the carnal mind is properly at enmity with
God, and is not subject to the law of God. Secondly, the inferior desires,
parenthetically not actually sin, but in general the causes of sin. When
St. Paul says money is the root of all evil, we do not surely understand
him to mean that the pursuit of gain is in all cases a root of wickedness;
for we may conceive innumerable instances in which the struggle
for money is connected with the sublimest of virtues. We merely
conclude that it is a very dangerous desire, and liable to very dangerous
abuses. Under the designation, therefore, of earthly or fleshly,
may be classed three orders of desire—that of gain, that of pleasure,
and that of power. These are essentially evil in themselves or they
are not. If we conclude they are, we must then charge the fault on
God who has given them, or we must become Manachees, and suppose
the existence of two principles, one good, and the other evil;
if they are not, the sin is in their abuse, and not in their existence,
and though the criminal be condemned the nature is absolved. I
shall mention but a very few more texts advanced in favour of this
doctrine.
Eph. ii. 1-3. “And you hath he quickened,” &c. A mere description
this, of the age, answerable both to Jews and Gentiles:
and to the same purpose is the passage from the same epistle,
(c. ix. v. 18.) “having the understanding darkened—being alienated
from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because
of the blindness of their hearts.” Such is the scriptural evidence
for one of the most appalling and destructive doctrines that ever
clouded humanity; a doctrine which impugns the best and truest
affections, and destroys at one fell stroke the idea of spontaneous
virtue,—which is compelled to classify the most beautiful and most
base, if devoid of certain doctrinal distinctions, under one appellative,—which
debases human nature—gives man the vileness of a slave,
but does not honour God with the glory of a sovereign. To exhort
man to have the perfection of an angel, and to tell him he has the
nature of a fiend, to tell him that he is “utterly indisposed, disabled,
and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil,” amidst
absurd pranks of theology, is surely the most absurd. And between
believing this, or rejecting it, the only alternative left us, is to
be at one side or the other of the gulf which separated Lazarus from
Abraham.
See Drummond’s excellent Essay on Original Sin, and a very admirable
tract on the same subject, by the late Dr. Cogan, entitled
“A Layman’s Letters to Mr. Wilberforce.”
There is no writer in modern times to whom we owe so much for a
true and elevated Philosophy on Human nature as to Bishop Butler,
the most profound and accurate analyst of the moral faculties of man
that has ever illustrated the principles of Christian ethics. He was
not a man to take wholesale assertions; he subjected our moral nature
to the exact and rigid test of philosophical anatomy, and one deliberate
sentence of his, is worth ten thousand disquisitions from traditional
theologians, who, parrot-like, repeat and repeat again the
jargon, that has grown as stale from mouth to mouth, as the starling’s
“let me out, let me out”—many of whom have no other reason than
that they have heard it so cried out before them. Bishop Butler has
examined human nature, and he has given testimony in its favour—he
has vindicated its dignity, and he has by a deep philosophy, which
seemed to be little comprehended by those who would debase humanity
demonstrated its essential excellence. He has proved by irrefutable
arguments, its natural disinterestedness, its goodness, its necessary
conformity with truth and virtue. These are to be sure but its
general tendencies, with many exceptions—yet, why such a line of
argument should be deemed insufficient in moral philosophy, and be
admitted as cogent in natural theology, it is difficult to conceive.—Take
for instance—in the body the case of the eye or the ear: no
one questions, that the eye is admirably adapted for seeing, and the
ear for hearing; and though the one may grow dim or the other become
deaf, it is never asserted that the constitution or nature of each—on
the whole—is contradictory to that for which it was intended.
There are, it is true, various evil manifestations in human nature;
but there are others good—at least, in seeming. Cynical Philosophers
and Calvinistic Theologians concur in making the evil substantial,
and the good factitious. The answer which this profound reasoner
gives to the philosophical opponents of human nature will be a sufficient
reply to both. “Suppose,” he says, “a man of learning to be
writing a grave book upon human nature—and to show in several
parts of it, that he had an insight into the subject he was considering.
Amongst other things the following one would require to be
accounted for; the appearance of benevolence or good-will in men
towards each other in the instances of natural relation and in others.
Cautious of being deceived with outward show, he retires within himself,
to see exactly what that is in the mind of man from whence this
appearance proceeds; and upon deep reflection asserts the principle
in the mind to be only the love of power and delight in the exercise
of it. Would not everybody think here was a mistake of one word
for another? That the philosopher was contemplating and accounting
for some other human actions, some other behaviour of man to
man? And could any one be thoroughly satisfied, that what is commonly
called benevolence or good-will was really the affection meant,
but only by being made to understand that this learned person had a
general hypothesis, to which the appearance of good-will could no
otherwise be reconciled? That what has this appearance is often
nothing but ambition; that delight in superiority—often (suppose
always) mixes itself with benevolence, only makes it more specious
to call it ambition than hunger of the two; but in reality that passion
does no more account for the whole appearances of good-will, than
this appetite does. Is there not often the appearance of one man’s
wishing that good to another, which he knows himself unable to procure
him; and rejoicing in it, though procured by a third person?
And, can love of power any way possibly come into account for this
desire or delight? Is there not often the appearance of men’s distinguishing
between two or more persons, preferring one before another,
to do good to, in cases where the love of power cannot in the
least account for the distinction or preference? For this principle
can no otherwise distinguish between objects, than as it is a greater
instance and exertion of power to do good to one rather than to another.
Again, suppose good-will in the mind of man be nothing but
delight in the exercise of power; men might indeed be restrained by
distant and accidental considerations, but these restraints being removed,
they would have a disposition to, and a delight in mischief as
an exercise and proof of power; and this disposition and delight
would arise from the same principle in the mind, as a disposition to,
and a delight in charity. Thus cruelty as distinct from resentment,
would be exactly the same in the mind of man as good-will; that one
tends to the happiness, the other to the misery of our fellow-creatures,
is, it seems, merely an accidental circumstance, which the mind
has not the least regard to. These are absurdities which even men
of capacity run into, when they have occasion to belie their nature;
and will perversely disclaim that image of God which was originally
stamped upon it: the traces of which, however faint, are plainly discernible
upon the mind of man.” Many passages might be quoted
from this great writer in vindication of humanity, but I shall adduce
but one other: it is from the same discourse, (The first sermon on Human
Nature,) as that I have already extracted—and much to the same
purpose. “Mankind,” he says, “have ungoverned passions, which
they will gratify at any rate, as well to the injury of others as in contradiction
to known private interests, but as there is no such thing as
self-hatred, so neither is there any such thing as ill-will in one man
towards another, emulation or resentment being away: whereas there
is plainly benevolence or good-will: there is no such thing as love of
injustice, oppression, treachery, ingratitude; but only eager desire
after such and such external goods, which, according to a very
ancient observation, the most abandoned would choose to obtain by
innocent means, if they were as easy and effectual to their end: even
emulation and resentment by any who will consider what these passions
really are in nature, will be found nothing to the purpose of this
objection, and the principles and passions in the mind of man which
are distinct both from self-love and benevolence, primarily and most
directly lead to right behaviour with regard to others as well as to
himself, and only secondarily and accidentally to what is evil. Thus
though men to avoid the shame of one villany are often guilty of a
greater, yet it is easy to see that the original tendency of shame is
to prevent the doing of shameful actions; and its leading men to
conceal such actions when done, is only the consequence of their
being done, that is, of the passions not having answered its first end.”—(See
also the acute and original Essay of Mr. Hazlitt’s, on The
Principles of Human Actions, in which the leading idea of Butler’s
Philosophy is rigidly examined and illustrated.)
Pascal vindicates the dignity of Human nature in some of his most
beautiful thoughts. Those who are acquainted with the theology of
Pascal (and who are not?) will scarcely suspect him of leaning too
partially to the brighter side of our nature. I quote a few passages
from his writings, as much for the pleasure of copying them, as for
the support they afford to my general argument.
“L’homme est si grand,” he observes, “que, sa grandeur parait
même en ce qu’il se connaît misérable. Un arbre ne se connaît
pas misérable: il est vrai que c’est être misérable que de se connaître,
qu’on misérable; mais aussi c’est grand que de connaître qu’on est
misérable. Ainsi toutes misères prouvent sa grandeur:—ce sont
miseres de grand seigneur, miseres d’un roi dépossédé.
“Nous avons si grande idée de l’ame de l’homme que nous ne pouvons
souffrir d’en être méprisé, et d’ n’être pas dans l’esteme d’une
âme: et toute la félicité des hommes consiste dans cette estime.
“Si d’un côté cette fausse gloire que les hommes cherchent est une
grande marque de leur misère et de leur bassesse, c’en une aussi de
leur excellence; car quelque possessions qu’il ait sur la terre, de
quelque santé et commodité essentielle qu’il jouisse il n’est pas satisfait,
s’il n’est pas dans l’estime des hommes. Il estime si grande la
raison de l’homme que quelque avantage, qu’il ait dans le monde, il
se croit malheureux s’il n’est placé aussi avantegeusement dans la
raison de l’homme c’est la plus belle place du monde: rien ne peut le
détourner de ce désir, et c’est la qualité la plus ineffacable du cœur
de l’homme: jusque-là que ceux que méprisent le plus les hommes,
et qui les égalent aux bêtes veulent encore en être admirés, et contradisent
á eux-mêmes par leur propre sentiment: la nature, qui est
plus puisante que toute leur raison, les convainquant plus fortement
de la grandeur de l’homme que la raison ne les convainc de sa baissesse.”—“L’homme
n’est qu’un roseau le plus faíble de la nature;
mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier
s’arme pour l’écraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d’eau suffit pour le
tuer. Mais quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus
noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt, et l’avantage que
l’univers a sur lui, l’univers n’en sait rien. Ainsi toute notre dignité
consiste dans la pensée c’est de la qu’il faut nous relever, non de
l’espace et de la durée.” “Il est dangereux de trop voir l’homme
combien il est égal aux bêtes sans lui montrer sa grandeur. Il est encore
dangereux de lui fair trop voir sa grandeur sans sa bassesse. Il
est plus dangereux de lui laisser ignorer l’un et l’autre: mais est
tres avantegeux de lui representer l’un et l’autre.” (Pensées de
Pascal.)
I have adduced the testimony of Bishop Butler as to the soundness
of our views on human nature: I shall here transcribe a few passages
from a writer, in whose language a kindred philosophy
becomes most eloquent and inspiring—I mean Doctor Channing.—“I
repeat it,” he says, “showing the moral power of faith in the
divine capacities of man, to resemble our Maker we need not quarrel
with our nature or our lot. Our present state, made up as it is, of
aids and trials, is worthy of God, and may be used throughout to
assimilate us to him. For example: our domestic ties, the relations
of neighbourhood and country, the daily interchanges of thoughts and
feelings, the daily occasions of kindness, the daily claims of want and
suffering, these and other circumstances of our social state, form the
best sphere and school for that benevolence which is God’s brightest
attribute; and we should make a sad exchange by substituting for
these natural aids any self-invented artificial means of sanctity.
Christianity, our great guide to God, never leads us away from the
path of nature, and never wars with the unsophisticated dictates of
conscience. We approach our Creator by every right exercise of the
powers he gives us. Whenever we invigorate the understanding
by honestly and resolutely seeking truth, and by withstanding whatever
might warp the judgment; whenever we invigorate the conscience
by following it in opposition to the passions; whenever we
receive a blessing gratefully, bear a trial patiently, or encounter peril
or scorn with moral courage; whenever we perform a disinterested
deed; whenever we lift up the heart in true adoration to God;
whenever we war against a habit or desire which is strengthening
itself against our higher principles; whenever we think, speak or act
with moral energy, and devotion to duty, be the occasion ever so
humble or familiar; then the divinity is growing within us, and we
are ascending towards our Author. The religion thus blends with
common life. We thus draw nigh to God without forsaking men.
We are thus without parting with our human nature, to clothe ourselves
with the divine.” (Discourse at the ordination of the Rev.
F. A. Farley.) Honour is due to all men on the ground of the worth
and dignity of their nature, and of this the eloquent writer shows
Christianity a proof and an illustration. “The whole of this religion
is a testimony to the worth of man in the sight of God—to the importance
of human nature—to the infinite purposes for which we were
framed. God is there set forth as sending, to the succour of his
human family, his beloved Son, the bright image and representative
of his own perfections; and sending him, not simply to roll away a
burden of pain and punishment, (for this, however magnified in systems
of theology is not his highest work) but to create man after that
divine image which he himself bears, to purify the soul from every
stain, to communicate to it new power over evil, and to open before
it immortality as its aim and destination—immortality by which we
are to understand, not merely a perpetual, but an ever-improving and
celestial being. Such are the views of Christianity. And these
blessings it proffers, not to a few, not to the educated, not to the
eminent, but to all human beings, to the poorest and the most fallen;
and we know that through the power of its promises, it has, in not a
few instances, raised the fallen to true greatness, and given them in
their present virtue and peace, an earnest of the heaven which it unfolds.
Such is Christianity. Men viewed in the light of this religion,
are beings cared for by God, to whom he has given his Son, on whom
he pours forth his spirit; and whom he has created for the highest
good in the universe, the participation of his own perfections and
happiness. Such is Christianity. Our scepticism in our own nature
cannot quench the bright light which religion sheds on the soul and
on the prospects of mankind; and just so far as we receive its truth
we shall honour all men.” (Discourse on “Honour due to All
Men.”)
“Theologians,” remarks a powerful writer, “say, that the very infant
comes into the world under the wrath and curse of the Deity. They
never learned that by observing the glory of God in the face of
Christ. No such withering frown ever sat on his benignant countenance.
Think of Christ’s wrath with a child! Think of Christ
cursing a child! I must read in the Gospel that he did so, before I
believe that God does so, and that the Calvinistic doctrine of original
sin is true. In the strong horror of the human heart at the monstrous
combination of such a person with such an action, I read the condemnation
of that gloomiest article of a gloomy creed; and if it be a
foul calumny on Christ, it must, exalted as he was, be a yet fouler
calumny on God. I would sooner believe the one than the other. I
would sooner imagine some Jesus of Nazareth encountering some
fond father and fonder mother, in the first freshness of their parental
feelings, as they pass beneath ‘the gate of the temple which was
called the Beautiful;’ less beautiful in the sculptured forms of marble
on which its gorgeous architecture rested than in the living human
group which were there bearing the babe to the altar to dedicate it to
the God of its fathers; and encountering them with that solemn malediction
which would sink into their souls and corrode their lives;
than I would imagine Omniscience, which witnesses each man’s
birth, life, and death, to be in all earth’s scenes of parental anxiousness
and fondness over helpless infancy, the all-pervading presence of
an Almighty curse. Yet this is the doctrine into which thousands
upon thousands of children are catechised. Why will not parents and
teachers lead them, not to Calvin, but to Christ? So should they receive
a blessing, even as did those children, notwithstanding that there
were not wanting, even then, erring disciples to intercept their approach
and forbid their coming. As his blessing was on them, so is
that of his and our God. His doctrine, his conduct. ‘Their angels,’
he says, ‘do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven;’
they are the peculiar objects of the providential care which, by
the number, and swiftness, and power of those supposed winged messengers,
was pictorial typified; and again, ‘Suffer little children, and
forbid them not, to come to me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven!’”—Christ
and Christianity, a series of Sermons, by the Rev.
W. J. Fox: which for energy of thought, richness and beauty of
imagery, truth of moral analysis and description, force and eloquence
of language, may be placed in the very highest class of pulpit oratory,
and even in that class be ranged with its rarest specimens. The taint
of heresy has robbed them of their due fame, for in those days, without
the proper admixture of orthodoxy, logic only beats the air, and
eloquence speaks to the deaf adder that will not hear the voice of the
charmer, charm he never so sweetly.
I quote with great pleasure one or two passages from Mr. Dewey,
as illustrative of our common doctrine on human nature:
“The theologian says that human nature is bad and corrupt.
Now taking this language in the practical and popular sense, I find
no difficulty in agreeing with the theologian. And indeed, if he
would confine himself—leaving vague and general declamation and
technical phraseology—if he would confine himself to facts; if he
would confine himself to a description of actual bad qualities and dispositions
in men, I think he could not well go too far. Nay more, I
am not certain that any theologian’s description, so far as it is of this
nature, has gone deep enough into the frightful mass of human depravity.
For it requires an acute perception that is rarely possessed,
and a higher and holier conscience, perhaps than belongs to any, to
discover and declare how bad, and degraded, and unworthy a being a
bad man is. I confess that nothing would beget in me a higher respect
for man, a real—not a theological and factitious—but a real and
deep sense of human sinfulness and unworthiness—of the mighty
wrong which man does to himself, to his religion, and his God, when
he yields to the evil and accursed inclinations that find place in him.
This moral indignation is not half strong enough in those who profess
to talk the most about human depravity. And the objection to them
is, not that they feel too much or speak too strongly, the actual
wickedness, the actual and distinct sins of the wicked; but they speak
too vaguely and generally of human wickedness; that they speak with
too little discrimination to every man as if he were a murderer or a
monster; that they speak, in fine, too argumentatively, and too much
(if I may say so) with a sort of argumentative satisfaction, as if they
were glad that they could make this point so strong.”
The next extract is in advocacy of human nature, eloquently pleading
for it in a low and guilty condition.
“The very pirate that dyes the ocean wave with the blood of his
fellow-beings; that meets his defenceless victims in some lonely sea
where no cry for help can be heard, and plunges his dagger to the
heart that is pleading for life, which is calling upon him by all means
of kindred, of children, and of home, to spare—yes, the very pirate
is such a man as you or I might have been. Orphanage and childhood;
an unfriended youth; an evil companion; a resort to sinful
pleasure; familiarity with vice; a scorned and blighted name; seared
and crushed affections; desperate fortunes—these are the steps that
might have led any one amongst us to unfurl on the high seas the
bloody flag of universal defiance; to have waged war with our kind;
to have put on the terrific attributes; to have done the dreadful
deeds; and to have died the awful death of the ocean robber.
How many affecting relationships of humanity plead with us to pity
him! That head that is doomed to pay the price of blood once rested
upon a mother’s bosom. The hand that did that accursed work, and
shall soon be stretched cold and nerveless in the felon’s grave, was
once taken and cherished by a father’s hand, and led in the ways
of sportive childhood and innocent pleasure. The dreaded monster
of crime has once been the object of sisterly love and all domestic
endearment. Pity him, then. Pity his blighted hope and his crushed
heart. It is a wholesome sensibility, it is meet for frail and sinning
creatures like us to cherish. It forgoes no moral discrimination. It
feels the crime, but feels it as a weak, tempted, and rescued creature
should. It imitates the great Master; and looks with indignation
upon the offender, and yet is grieved for him.”—Dewey.
“Our Lord Jesus Christ,” says Mr. Buddicom, “hath solemnly
and emphatically said, ‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be
saved, but that believeth not shall be damned.’” (Yes, but is this to
believe what our opponents tell us, and to be baptized into the faith
of Athanasius?) “Unitarians,” he continues, “assert that they fulfil
the requirement, and therefore are safe from the penalty. We, on
the other hand, are assured, that as it would be treason against the
sovereign of these realms, to acknowledge her claim only to a part
of her dominions, while her royalty over the remainder was utterly
denied; so the Unitarian scheme which would give unto the Saviour
the honours of a prophet and a witness, while it would unsphere him
from that full-orbed glory wherein He shines through the revelation
of his grace, is treason against him and against the Majesty of God,
who willeth ‘that all men should honour the son, even as they honour
the father.’ Thus convinced, we deem the professors of that system
to be under sentence of spiritual outlawry, which if it be not reversed,
will end in the terrors of the second death.”—Lect. 8. pp. 438, 439.
The tone in which we have often been spoken of in this controversy
appears to assume that we in some degree doubt the sincerity or
charity of our opponents. We deny them neither. We know the
history of religion well enough to be aware that as severe things
have been done in sincerity as to pronounce that men dishonour
Christ and God, that they are under sentence of spiritual outlawry,
and if they repent not (i.e. do not turn to the opinion of their
antagonists) shall surely endure the second death; we can easily believe
that men say these things sincerely; for except from the necessity
of conviction, we do not imagine they would reiterate perdition
and denunciation as often as they do. We deny not the sincerity in
which an opponent may hold an opinion or resist one: but though
the motive may not be impeachable, the quality of the opinion itself
may be in the last degree anti-social and pernicious. The men who
built the Inquisition did it in perfect sincerity: the men who sat on
its judgment-seats were for the most part sincere, so were those who
dragged the heretic from his home to the dungeon, and from the
dungeon to the stake. And so are those who tell us that our faith is
damnable. Men may on account of belief consign antagonists to
hell-fire for eternity; but unless the evidence be most clear, to pronounce
the judgment requires a goodly quantity of courage. As little
willing are we to refuse our opponents the charity they claim, if by
that be meant a desire to promote good in their idea of it: but we
may very fairly doubt the justness of that idea. Believing that heretics,
such as we, are in the way to eternal destruction, it is neither
inconsistent with candour or charity to tell us so, in the hope of reclaiming
us; and if theologians imagined that inflicting bodily suffering
might have a similar effect, we are compelled to admit them to
the same merit. The worst effect of harsh and austere doctrines is
that they produce harsh and austere feelings; and the professors of
them, under their indurating process, can do deeds from principle
which even bad men would rarely do from passion. One perverted motive
is worse than a thousand evil actions. Charity in her own native
sweetness is meek and gentle as the dove, and yet theology has often
made her ravenous as the vulture; charity as she came from heaven
marked her way in tears of mercy, but theology could so pervert her
as to cause her wade to the lips in blood. The charity of the heart
is very different from the charity of creeds; and when we hear
English clergymen condemn the Romish Church as uncharitable, we
naturally ask on what ground? Is it because she condemned heretics?
So do you. Is it because she has a wrong test of heresy? Her test
is substantially the same as your own. You assume that we do not
believe in Christ, because we do not believe in your creed: she assumes
that you do not believe in Christ because you do not believe
in her councils: you denounce eternal torments on us for want of
your faith; and she delivers you to the same destiny for want of her
faith: the tabooed ground of heresy and orthodoxy may be circumscribed
or extensive—the points may be few or many, the principle is
the same, or if there be any difference, it is but breaking the big end
or the little end of the egg. We are accused as traitors against God
and Christ, and to make the indictment clear against us, it is illustrated
by the instance of rebellion against a sovereign. This is a
heavy charge, but one both unjust and false. It is evil intention that
constitutes crime: a traitor opposes his sovereign and intends his dethronement;
but though we should even mistake the nature of Christ,
can any one who thinks for a moment venture to say our intention is
for his dethronement? Let us suppose the case, no uncommon one,
of an Eastern monarch who should disguise himself, and that some
of his subjects failed, in their ignorance of his rank, to pay him the
customary honours; what should we think of his justice, if he should
call this treason, and impale the wretches who were unconscious of
having offended him. It is too monstrous even for Eastern despotism.
Or take the case in our own history; what should we think of
Alfred’s rectitude and clemency, if when he ascended the throne from
his poverty, he should have thrown the shepherd’s wife into a dungeon
and chains, because, in his disguise, she uttered against him a
surly rebuke. The instance is not entirely parallel, but the analogy
goes far enough for my purpose. Now, though Christ were in reality
the Deity which orthodoxy proclaims him, the circumstances of his
earthly life, and the concealment of his infinite nature, were certainly
sufficient to excuse some in ignorance for taking him to be that which
he appeared; and to punish them for so natural an error, would not
be a vindication of majesty, but a capricious exhibition of cruelty.
The legal and political mode of illustration is a favourite with the
reverend lecturer. P. 450, we have a quotation from Blackstone,
and the distinction very admirably elucidated of private wrongs and
public wrongs, civil injuries, crimes and misdemeanours, &c. Sir
William Blackstone never, I imagine, anticipated the honour that his
Commentaries would be used to illustrate the principles of the divine
government; and one of the last ideas, I apprehend, that entered
his brain in delivering his lectures, was, that he was giving expositions
on the ways of Providence. The Preacher in the order of illustration,
gave a passing blow “at those wretched and guilty disturbers
of the public peace in one of our own colonies who lately crossed the
borders of a friendly state to slay and ruin and destroy, under the
name of sympathizers.” An allusion, doubtless, extremely loyal; but
in the present case not very logical. (Lect. p. 452.) In this part of
the discourse we have other distinctions, showing that man is a public
offender, that God is not a person but a sovereign, in relation to guilty
man, and that a sovereign is different from a person; that God is not
a creditor but a judge, and that a judge is different from a creditor.
All this may be very acute, very legal, but, theologically, it has one
imperfection, that of mistaking entirely the relation between God
and man, of turning false analogies into false premises, and, of
course, deducing from them false conclusions: of properly having
nothing to do with the true matter in hand, and leaving the question
precisely where it was before. “Our opponents,” says the Preacher,
“assert that sins are to be regarded as debts, and as debts only.” We
assert no such thing, have never asserted it, but all the contrary, and
to such an idea the whole tone of our argument and of our system is
in most perfect contradiction. We have no such low view of God
as to think that man could owe him anything, nor any such presumptuous
view of man as to imagine he could make payment to his
God. Yet upon this poor assumption whole pages of declamation are
wasted, for if it serves any purpose it is but to beat down the man of
straw which the lecturer himself had fashioned. We hold no such
view, and therefore we have never defended any such. We do our
best to maintain what we assert; if others assert doctrines for us,
we leave them the pleasure of the refutation; although it is only when
men invent opinions for opponents that they have the double enjoyment
of first building up and then pulling down. We do not regard
sins as debts for which payment can be made to God; but we may
fairly assert that on this principle rests the whole scheme of orthodoxy.
What are the atonement and righteousness of Christ but a payment
or equivalent to God for the salvation of the elect?—the very nature
of the system implies this idea, and in truth it is the only idea that
gives it even the appearance of consistency; for crime as such cannot
be punished in the person of another, but a debt can be fairly paid
by the money of another. If I commit high treason against the sovereign—to
borrow an analogy from the Preacher—it would be sad
work to lay the head of some one else on the block for it—but if I
owe a severe creditor a thousand pounds, a rich and generous friend
may pay it in my stead, and no social principle is violated by the substitute.
Mr. Buddicom makes the following modest apology for the presumed
infallibility of himself and brethren, and their right to attack
all heretical deniers of it. “While, however,” he observes, “we
are prepared to contend for the lawfulness and duty of an affectionate
inroad upon the regions of spiritual error, we remember that our
movement is not purely and primarily aggressive. A volume of Lectures,
preached expressly on the controverted doctrines of Christianity
(as the lecturer denominated his subjects), in a chapel now
occupied by one of our respected opponents, has been before the
world. In these and other similar measures, the fortress of true
Christianity, the only safe munition of rocks for the souls of men,
hath been attacked by mine, and sap, and open assault. And shall
there be no attempt to countermine, no sally made, no arm raised, in
a forward movement for the truth as it is in Jesus? Our regret is
rather due to the culpable silence of the past, than to the proceeding
of the present time.” (Lect. p. 440.) The reverend and respected
Preacher refers to a volume of Lectures, by the Rev. George Harris,
delivered in this town some years ago: those Lectures, unfortunately,
I do not possess; but I have read them with much pleasure, and
many passages of them I should wish to quote in support of my own
general arguments. But the Lecturer greatly mistakes if he imagines
that we complain of orthodox aggression. Controversy, political and
religious, is the fair expression of civilised and progressive opinion. We
do not blame those who oppose us,—we have never done it,—we have
not complained that war was made on us, but we did most righteously
complain that the fair laws of warfare were denied us. Our people were
invited to go to Christ Church to listen to wise and learned men, to
be converted, by hearing their religion spoken of as blasphemy and
outlawry—to hear themselves designated as enemies to their God, and
dethroners of their Saviour, and the spiritual slayers of their kind.
They were denied any religious equality. They were abused, and
vituperated, and denounced; but they were not listened to—their
condemnation was sternly uttered—but their defence had not even the
poor tribute of a hearing. Nay, grave clergymen pleaded that they
could not have their religious sensibilities disturbed or hurt by Unitarian
roughness, as if manly controversialists were to shrink from opposition
with the fastidious delicacy of timid devotees. We neither
complained of controversy, nor avoided it; on the contrary, we met
it promptly, sincerely, and willingly—with ability, it is possible, inferior
to our opponents—but not with less zeal, less alacrity, or less
honesty. When our respected opponents challenged our attendance,
it was not as antagonists on the opposite sides of a subject open to
discussion, but as accused to give in their confession of repentance,
or as criminals to hear their last sentence of punishment. We, however,
blame not the Lecturer, nor his party—we rather agree with him
and them. We have received a lesson which we needed; Unitarians
have stood too long on the defensive, when they should have been
on the aggressive: had they been faithful to their trust, it may be that
the degrading dogma of original sin, and the atrocious doctrines of
election and reprobation could not now, in this country, be matters of
dispute. “Our regret (to use the words of the Lecturer) is rather due
to the culpable silence of the past than to the proceedings of the present
time.” It is a remarkable fact in the history of religion, that
all the doctrines which have been most generally condemned as heresy,
have been pure or benignant ones; and all persecutions and religious
hatreds, bodily or social, have been directed against their professors.
Not to mention the Christians, who burned Jerome and
Huss; we might refer even to the heathens who poisoned Socrates—to
uphold the personality of Satan—the reality of his existence, and
the malignity of his nature,—to declaim upon hell’s torments and to
announce eternal perdition on the great mass of God’s family—to
create excitement by the grossest pictures of vice and misery is the
certain way to popularity. The popular taste, as it has yet been
developed or nurtured, has been coarse and ferocious, and if any thing
could prove to me the doctrine of universal depravity, it would be the
toleration of the horrors of Calvinistic orthodoxy.
In preparing this Lecture for the press, after an examination in its printed
form of that to which it is a Reply, I do not find that the Trinitarian argument
has been strengthened by additional evidence, or by a more logical
statement, so as to require any modification of my impressions of its weight
and character.
Mr. Bates has in his Appendix drawn out some of his scriptural evidence,
and I can only require any one to examine it, in order not only to
estimate its cogency in reference to this particular question, but also to
obtain a very accurate idea of the peculiar genius of Trinitarian interpretation.
I shall select two passages as perfectly descriptive of the manner in
which the believer in a verbal and logical revelation draws doctrinal conclusions
from the mere words of scripture.
Here is one of the Trinitarian Scriptural proofs of Three Persons in the
Unity of the Godhead.
“2 Thess. iii. 5. ‘The Lord direct your hearts into the love of GOD,
and into the patient waiting for Christ.’
“In these passages the Three Persons are distinguished. The Lord to
whom the prayer is in both instances directed; God, even our Father; and
our Lord JesusChrist. That the Lord thus distinguished from God the
Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, and addressed in prayer, is the Holy
Ghost, is evident from the analogy of Scripture, which teaches that sanctification,
for which the Apostle prays, is the peculiar work of the Holy
Ghost.”—Mr. Bates’ Appendix, p. 590.
Now, using the same description of logic, we have only to quote a passage
in which sanctification is ascribed not to the Holy Ghost, but to God
our Father, in order to overthrow the whole of this verbal and mournful
trifling with the sublime and vast purport of revelation.
“Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast
given me, that they may be one, as we are.... Sanctify them through thy
truth: thy word is truth.”—John xvii. 11, 17.
The second descriptive specimen I select, of the genius of Trinitarian
interpretation, is the following alleged scriptural proof of the separate
Deity and Personality of the Holy Spirit.
“Rev. i. 4. ‘John to the seven Churches which are in Asia: Grace be
unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to
come; and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne.’”
The seven Spirits, we are told, is a symbolical designation of the One
Spirit. Nothing however can be more clear, even on the verbal principle,
than that the seven Spirits are the seven Messengers, Angels, or Ministers,
which, partaking themselves of God’s Spirit, were His instruments of communication
with the seven Churches of Asia enumerated by the Author of
the Apocalypse, and which are represented as being before his throne, deriving
their own inspiration from Him.—“The mystery of the seven stars
which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks.
The seven stars are the angels of the seven Churches; and the seven candlesticks
which thou sawest are the seven Churches.”—Rev. i. 20.
On this, the last opportunity, perhaps, which I may have, of saying any
thing in connexion with these Lectures, I cannot but express my own
regret, and point it out to public notice, that we have been necessitated by
circumstances, not to prepare merely and deliver as pulpit addresses, but
to print and fix in a permanent form, dissertations upon most important
and agitated questions, within a period of time altogether insufficient to do
any justice, I will not say to the subjects, but even to our own ideas of the
subjects. The accidental advantage, in this respect, obtained by the Lecturers
on the Trinitarian Theology, with ample time and undivided
strength to bring out a single Lecture on a single topic, ought to be included
as an element of judgment, if the real value of the contrasted views
is to be estimated by any, by the results of the present controversy. For
myself, it is with great pain that I think of so much written, in the most
sacred cause, almost extempore. That this necessity has occasioned any
defects except such as have been an injury to our own views of Truth, by
failing to bring out its full strength, I am not aware. I am not aware
that, in any respect, we have, through haste, overstated our case. I am
aware, for my own part, that it might have been much strengthened by
additional force of evidence, and clearness of statement. I may be allowed
to state, that in the course of three months I have been obliged to write
and print to the extent of an octavo volume of nearly four hundred pages.
It is impossible that such an exposition of our views should not be crowded
with imperfections, and indefinitely feebler than it might be. May we ask that
this consideration will be taken into the account by all those who are now
forming an opinion of the merits of the Trinitarian and Unitarian Theology,
from this discussion of it. May we ask those who, in the love of the
Truth, and in confidence in the God of Truth that no Truth can injure
them, wish the real evidence to be presented to their minds, to read the
original sources, the New and the Old Scriptures, afresh, without fear, without
an unfair and biassing horror of what they have been cradled to dread as
heresy, without the intellectual infidelity of studying a revelation from God
with the previous interpretations of men, colouring all their associations
with the very words of the document, and preventing their ever receiving
a pure impression from the original evidence unmixed with the whispers
and suggestions of some self-authorized Interpreter who is in terror lest
they should miss the essentials of the revealed religion, and derive from it
some ideas that would destroy.
Liverpool, April 1839.
LECTURE IX. THE COMFORTER, EVEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH, WHO DWELLETH IN US, AND TEACHETH ALL THINGS. By REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM. — Footnotes for Lecture IX.
“IF YE LOVE ME, KEEP MY COMMANDMENTS: AND I WILL PRAY THE
FATHER, AND HE SHALL GIVE YOU ANOTHER COMFORTER, THAT HE
MAY ABIDE WITH YOU FOR EVER; EVEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH; WHOM
THE WORLD CANNOT RECEIVE, BECAUSE IT SEETH HIM NOT, NEITHER
KNOWETH HIM: BUT YE KNOW HIM, FOR HE DWELLETH WITH YOU, AND
SHALL BE IN YOU. I WILL NOT LEAVE YOU COMFORTLESS; I WILL COME
TO YOU.”—John xiv. 15-18
It is very remarkable that whenever the doctrine of the
Trinity is discussed, the debate is almost always exclusively
occupied by the single question of the deity of the Christ,
and if that can be established, the controversy is considered
at an end. Controversialists glide from the doctrine of the
deity of the Son to the separate deity of the Holy Spirit, in a
way which plainly shows that one inroad being effected on
the personal unity of God, and the principle once loosened,
another division of it is conceded upon much easier terms,
without fear, without caution, without reverence. Why indeed
should men scruple to admit three persons into the
unity of the Godhead after having got over the first great
difficulty of admitting two? A third person adds nothing to
the difficulty of a second person, and if we cannot maintain
unbroken the principle of one God, in our own sense of oneness,
then the extent to which the principle is violated, whether
by three persons, or any other number, is really a matter
of a very minor importance. Having admitted that there
may be two persons in the godhead, it would be very absurd
to take an objection against there being three; for the analogy
of unity, in the only sense we are acquainted with it,
the unity of a human being, having once failed us, we must
never plead it again. The principle that admits two minds
in the being of one God will equally admit any number
whatever, provided Scripture accords to them the dignity,
and our struggle and reluctance will be felt most strongly on
the first of these invasions of our own idea of unity, and
will yield more and more readily at each successive one.
This is the only explanation I can conceive, and a very
natural one it is, of the weak and unguarded state in which
Trinitarians have left the separate personality and deity of
the Holy Ghost. I do not wonder at their preference for
that word, Ghost, in this connection. It materializes the
word Spirit, puts the true idea out of immediate sight, and is
so far a preparation for introducing the conception of a third
person, which never would naturally have arisen from the use
of the more intelligible expression “the Holy Spirit,” “the
Spirit of God.” I apprehend that all minds, though long
familiarized with the idea of a plurality of persons in the
godhead, would be greatly shocked, if that plurality was conceived
to be either more or less than the mystic number
three. A multitude of deities, discharging different offices,
but partaking of the one Essence of the godhead, would be
thought a completely Heathen conception—and a reduction
of the present orthodox idea, so as to represent only two
persons in the one God, would strike a Christian mind as
scarcely less pagan. Yet upon Trinitarian principles this is
evidently a mere prejudice of Custom. There is no more
reason, so far as our understanding is concerned, for there
being three persons in the godhead than for there being
only two, and whether there be one, two, three, or a
countless number, is a question to which our Reason ought
to be entirely indifferent, having no a priori opinion or principle
of its own upon the subject: and submitting to the
letter of the Revelation with equal readiness, whether it distributes
the Essence of the Deity among a Trinity, or among
any other plurality of minds. Now I would ask Trinitarians
whether they have schooled themselves into submission to this
principle—whether they would receive four persons in the
Godhead as readily as they receive three, provided the same
mode of inferential interpretation which now establishes the
Trinity, succeeded in showing that a further distribution of
the essence of the godhead was required, in order to make
our Theology consistent with the exact wording of the Scriptures.
I apprehend that most minds amongst us would revolt
at the idea of four persons in one God, contemplated as a mere
possibility. Yet surely in a Trinitarian this would be very
unreasonable. As a Scripture doctrine he might reasonably
discard it as unfounded—but as a possibility, as a subject on
which, previous to Revelation, he ought to have no prejudice
whatever, he must on his own principles have no objection
to the plurality of divine persons extending to any number,
and be as prompt, to submit his faith to five as to three, provided
five can be shown to be the proper inference from the
words of Scripture. A consistent Trinitarian must feel no a
priori objection to any number of divine persons united together.
Having conceded that on this subject his Reason is
no guide, and his Nature no analogy, there is but one question
he has a right to ask,—“Is it so written?”
And even if it should be granted that Scripture reveals
three divine persons and reveals no more, yet upon his own
principles, a consistent Trinitarian should be cautious in asserting
that there are no more. Scripture nowhere asserts
that there are only three persons in the godhead—and surely
it is being wise above what is written, for a Trinitarian to
confine God’s essence within the limits in which He has been
pleased to reveal Himself, and to make the communications
He has opened upon us the measures of the infinite possibilities
of His being. A Trinitarian reverently and with becoming
modesty stating his own doctrine, and not presuming
to know more of God than is revealed, ought to content himself
with saying—that Scripture discloses three divine minds
in one Deity, but that whether there are any more than three,
Scripture does not declare, and he would hold it arrogant to
assert. If the Unitarian is wise contrary to what is written
in confining the unity of God to one person; the Trinitarian
is wise above what is written in confining it to three persons,
and with less excuse, for that one is neither more nor less
than one is at least a natural supposition—but after having
admitted that one may be three, there is nothing but precipitancy
and dogmatism in determining that it can be only three.
A consistent and scripturally modest Trinitarian should simply
state, that God his Father, God his Redeemer, and God
his Sanctifier, contained all the revelation that was required
for the salvation of his soul—but as to whether there might
not be other divine persons in the plurality of the godhead, he
held it to be a high mystery, which he did not presume to
speak upon—that only these were revealed, and therefore he
knew no more, but yet he did not dare to assert that his necessities,
the requirements of a being so feeble, comprised and
exhausted the whole capabilities and personalities of the
godhead. But Trinitarians are not so modest. They charge
the Unitarian with presumption for limiting the divine essence
to one Person—and then they proceed themselves,
with no warrant from Scripture, and none they assert from
Reason, to limit it to Three.
If two not three had been the favourite mythological
number, if a Duality and not a Trinity had been the Platonic
conception, then, I am satisfied, that the Christian world,
though it might have witnessed the deification of the Christ,
would never have heard of the separate deity of the Holy
Spirit. And this assertion is amply borne out by the historical
fact, that the deification of the Spirit followed afterwards
as a consequence from the deification of the Son, and
that the earliest form of the charge made against the Platonizing
Christians by stricter believers in the unity of the
Deity, states the whole extent of their heresy to be that of
introducing a second God,—nothing as yet being said about
third.
It is well known to all in whom duty has so far prevailed
over distaste, as to make them turn in sorrow the heavy
pages of Ecclesiastical History, that there was no discussion
respecting the divinity of the third person in the Trinity
until nearly the end of the fourth century. Nothing can
surpass the cool and easy confidence which sets aside this
undeniable fact by boldly asserting that up to this time the
doctrine was never disputed—and that the absence of evidence
in support of this doctrine only arises from the absence
of doubt, that nobody stated what nobody denied. What,
the separate deity and personality of the Holy Ghost never
doubted, and yet not one prayer addressed to Him in Scripture,
not one ascription of praise, not one doxology in which
his name is introduced, so that when the Church desired to
associate the third person in the honours of Christian worship
it could find no Scripture formula, and had to make one
for the occasion;—not one debate for nearly four hundred
years upon the deity of the Holy Ghost, although the deity of
the Second Person, to whom the Third Person even after his
deification was held to be subordinate, was constantly debated,
and yet the doctrine never doubted nor denied! Now if the
doctrine was never doubted or denied, since the doctrine of
the deity of the Son was most certainly both doubted and
denied, why is it that the Holy Spirit does not appear as the
Second person in the Trinity instead of the Third—why is it
that the Council of Nice previous to this time, when the doctrine
began to be doubted and denied, asserts the deity of the
Father, and the deity of the Son, but does not assert the deity
of the Holy Ghost—and why is it that the earliest charge
against the philosophizing Christians was that of introducing
a second God, if there was already a second divine person acknowledged,
and therefore the true charge should have been
that of introducing a third? It is remarkable that the same
very learned writer, the late Professor Burton, who is the
great Trinitarian authority upon these subjects, after having
resolved the absence of controversy into the possible absence
of doubt as to the deity of the holy Ghost, records the very
first instance in which the Holy Spirit is introduced into a
doxology of the Church as taking place in the fourth century.
He quotes Philostorgius the Arian historian, who declares,
“that Flavianus of Antioch, having assembled a number of
monks, was the first to shout out, Glory to the Father, and to
the Son, and to the holy Spirit; for before his time some had
said, Glory to the Father, through the Son in the holy Spirit,
which was the expression in most general use; and others,
Glory to the Father, in the Son and holy Spirit.”[524] Gibbon
relates this matter thus. He is speaking of a temporary
triumph of the Arians over the Athanasians, and of the
means employed by the Athanasian laity to manifest their
unwilling acceptance of the Arian Bishops. “The Catholics,”
says the historian, “might prove to the world, that
they were not involved in the guilt and heresy of their ecclesiastical
governor, by publicly testifying their dissent, or by
totally separating themselves from his communion. The first
of these methods was invented at Antioch, and practised with
such success, that it was soon diffused over the Christian
world. The doxology, or sacred hymn, which celebrates the
glory of the Trinity, is susceptible of very nice, but material
inflections; and the substance of an orthodox or heretical
creed, may be expressed by the difference of a disjunctive or
a copulative particle. Alternate responses, and a more regular
psalmody were introduced into the public Service by
Flavianus and Diodorus, two devout and active laymen, who
were attached to the Nicene faith. Under their conduct, a
swarm of monks issued from the adjacent desert, bands of
well-disciplined singers were stationed in the cathedral of
Antioch, the Glory to the Father, AND the Son, AND the
Holy Ghost, was triumphantly chaunted by a full chorus of
voices: and the Catholics insulted, by the purity of their
doctrine, the Arian prelate, who had usurped the throne of
the venerable Eustathius.” Out of such disorders in the
Church, from the rebellious device of laymen to insult an
heretical Bishop, sprung the doxology of our present creeds.
It is very instructive to look a little closely into some of
the passages from the early Fathers which are brought by
Trinitarians as evidence of the recognition of their doctrines
by the primitive Church. There is unquestionably much
vague language that will readily coalesce with the conceptions
of a modern orthodox believer; but as soon as you examine
with any strictness, you find that though they use language
very loosely, nothing could be further from their modes
of thinking than modern orthodoxy. For instance, we find
the Son and the Holy Spirit mentioned as objects of a Christian’s
reverence—but it is very remarkable how many of
these cases occur when the writers are defending themselves
against a charge of Atheism, as if they were desirous when
repelling such charge to show how many sources of veneration
their religion disclosed. The early Christians who believed
in only one God were called Atheists by the Heathens.
To believe in only one God was in their estimation the next
thing to believing in none at all. Those who believed in
many gods were likely enough to call the Christians Atheists,
just as in the present day lecturers in Christ Church call
Unitarianism a God denying Heresy.[525] In vindicating themselves
against this dangerous calumny the early Christians
were naturally led to extend rather than to diminish their
objects of worship, and accordingly in a passage quoted by
Professor Burton, from the earliest Father on whom dependence
can be placed, we find not only the Son and the Spirit,
but interposed between the Son and the Spirit, the angels of
Heaven, associated together in their reverence. Hence the
passage is quoted by Roman Catholics in support of the worship
of Angels. And if it is good for the one purpose, it is
equally good for the other; nay, if it is any proof of the separate
deity of the Holy Spirit, it is equally proof of the deity
of the angels who are mentioned before him. The passage
is from Justin Martyr whom Professor Burton places A. D.
150. “Hence it is that we are called Atheists: and we confess
that we are Atheists with respect to such reputed gods as
these: but not with respect to the true God, the Father of
justice, temperance, and every other virtue, with whom is no
mixture of evil. But Him, and the Son who came from
Him and gave us this instruction, and the host of the other
good angels which attend upon and resemble them, and the
prophetic Spirit we worship and adore, paying them a reasonable
and true honour, and not refusing to deliver to any one
else, who wishes to be taught, what we ourselves have learnt.”[526]
There is another passage from Justin Martyr, also given by
Burton as evidence of the early recognition of the Trinity,
but which is manifestly nothing more than the natural anxiety
of the writer when meeting a charge that perilled his life, the
charge of Atheism, to show the full extent of his sentiments
of reverence. “That we are not Atheists,” says Justin Martyr,
“who would not acknowledge, when we worship the
Creator of this Universe, and Jesus Christ who was our
instructor in these things, knowing him to be the Son of this
true God, and assigning to him the Second place. And I
shall prove presently, that we honour the prophetic Spirit in
the third rank, and that we are reasonable in so doing.”[527]
Now let it be recollected that these two passages, extending
as far as possible the objects of a Christian’s reverence, occur
in Justin Martyr’s Apology for Christianity against its Gentile
oppressors, in which he complains that the Christians
were treated as Atheists, and unjustly punished for not worshipping
the gods. I shall only quote one other passage
exhibiting the modes of thinking respecting the Holy Spirit
among the early Fathers. It is from Origen, A. D. 240, perhaps
the most eminent of them all, and shows clearly, notwithstanding
the frequent vagueness and obscurity of their
writings, how far they were removed from modern Trinitarianism,
and that their forms of thought were derived from
Platonism much more than from Christianity, or more strictly
from Platonism engrafted on Christianity. He is speaking
of the Son, and commenting on those words at the beginning
of St. John’s Gospel—“all things were made by him.”
“If it is true,” says Origen, “that all things were made by
him, we must inquire whether the Holy Ghost was made by
him: for as it seems to me, if a person says that the Holy
Ghost was made, and if he grants that all things were made
by the Logos, he must necessarily admit that the Holy Ghost
was also made by the Logos, the latter preceding him in
order of time. But if a person does not choose to say that
the Holy Ghost was made by Christ, it follows that he must
call him unproduced, if he thinks that this passage in the gospel
is true. But there may be a third opinion, beside that of
admitting that the Holy Ghost was made by the Logos, and
that of supposing him to be uncreated, namely, the notion of
there being no substantial individual existence of the Holy
Ghost distinct from the Father and the Son. We, however,
being persuaded that there are three hypostases (persons),
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and believing
that nothing is unproduced beside the Father, adopt this as
the more pious and the true opinion, that all things being
made by the Logos, the Holy Ghost is more honourable than
all of them, and more so in rank than all the things which
were made by the Father through Christ. And perhaps this
is the reason why he is not called the very Son of God, there
being only one who by nature and origin is Son, viz. the only
begotten, who seems to have been necessary to the Holy Ghost,
and to have assisted in forming his hypostasis, not only that
he might exist, but also that he might have wisdom, and
reason, and righteousness, and whatever else we suppose him
to have, according to his participation in those qualities
which we have before mentioned as attributed to Christ.”
“Such,” says Burton, “is this extraordinary, and I must
add unfortunate passage of Origen, which I have quoted at
length, and have endeavoured to translate with the utmost
fairness. If the reader should decide from it that Origen did
not believe in the eternity of the Holy Ghost, he will think
that the enemies of Origen were not without grounds when
they questioned his orthodoxy. It is not my intention
entirely to exculpate him. He is at least guilty of indiscretion
in entering upon such perilous grounds and in speculating
so deeply upon points which after all must elude the
grasp of human ideas and phraseology.” Professor Burton
calls this passage “unfortunate,” for no reason that we can
see, except that it discloses too plainly Origen’s ignorance of
Modern Trinitarianism, and shows too clearly in what sense
we are to understand the Platonic language of the Fathers.
There are two modes of proof by which Trinitarians undertake
to establish the separate existence of the Holy Spirit as
a third person in the godhead. The first mode is by inferences
from such passages of scripture as seem to attribute the
titles and offices of deity to the Holy Spirit. The second
method of proof is by independent considerations of Theology
which profess to demonstrate the necessity of a third person in
the godhead in order to compleat the work of man’s salvation.
Trinitarians say, that Scripture both calls the Holy Spirit
God, and assigns to Him a work which none but God could
accomplish. Now in both these respects we have not a
shadow of difference with the Trinitarians. We believe as
firmly and we hope as fervently as they do, that the Holy
Spirit is God, and that the Holy Spirit has connections with
our souls which none but our God could hold. We have no
controversy with the Trinitarians, when they assert the
Deity, and Personality, and Operations of the Holy Spirit.
It is a mere piece of controversial dexterity to put these
points prominently forward as the true grounds of our difference—and,
whether designedly or not, an unfair impression
is produced against us, by such a mode of statement, as if we
were deniers of the deity and agency of the spirit of God—if
indeed any meaning could be found in such a denial, supposing
we were extravagant enough to make it. To deny the
deity of the Spirit of God, would be a proposition as absolutely
without meaning as to deny the humanity of the spirit
of man. We were told by the Lecturer in Christ Church to
whom this subject was committed, that it was of no avail for
Unitarians to advance passages in which the Holy Spirit signified
not God himself, but his power and influence exerted
upon man, for that these occasional meanings of the expression
were fully conceded; and that what we have to do, is to
disprove the Trinitarian interpretation of other passages which
attribute to the Holy Spirit, deity, personality, and operation.
Now the Trinitarians must allow us the privilege of
taking our faith from ourselves, not from them, and in carving
out for us this employment, the Lecturer at Christ Church
would set us to the task of disproving our own convictions,
of overthrowing our own interpretations, of answering and
opposing ourselves. There is only one point of difference
between the Trinitarians and ourselves upon this subject, and
that is the only point to which their arguments never have a
reference. They maintain and we maintain that the Holy
Spirit is God. They concede and we concede that the expression
“Holy Spirit” in scripture frequently signifies that
portion of God’s spirit which is given to man naturally or
supernaturally. They maintain however that the Holy Spirit
is, not the one God, but a third person in the godhead—and
here we separate from them, maintaining that the Scripture
evidence for such a distribution of the Godhead among several
persons is totally imaginary, and that the theological reasons
for such a distribution betray the most arbitrary and
unworthy limitations assigned by man to the infinite and spiritual
nature of God. Now will it be believed that when
Trinitarian controversialists treat this subject they uniformly
put forward those views of it which we do not deny, as if we
denied them, and they as uniformly pass over the only point
of difference between us, and avoid all close grappling with
it, laboriously proving that the holy Spirit is God, which of
course we believe, and then taking for granted that he is a
third person in a Trinity, leaving the argument at the very
point where argument ought to have commenced? Will it
be believed that the Lecturer at Christ Church exhausted his
strength and time in assiduously proving that the spirit of
God was God, and that it had understanding, will, and
power? Will it be believed that of nearly a three hours’ lecture,
certainly not more than five minutes was devoted to the
only point of difference between us—that the common parts
of our faith were laboriously proved—if indeed such an identical
proposition, as that the spirit of God is God, can be
called faith—and the single controverted part left intact? I
in my turn take the liberty of declaring that it is of no avail
that Trinitarians adduce passages of scripture attesting the
Deity, Personality, and Operations of the Holy Spirit, for
that this is conceded, if an identical proposition can be conceded,—and
that what they have to do is to prove that the
spirit of God is not the one God, but a third person in the
godhead—and if the Lecturer had devoted his three hours to
this, the only point in controversy, he might have greatly
aided, or greatly injured his cause, and have afforded an
opportunity for testing the mutual strength of our views in a
way which is now not possible. Disappointed of finding the
controversy conducted with any closeness by the Lecturer in
Christ Church on the only point by us denied, namely a deity
of the Holy Spirit, personally separate from the deity of our
one God, I turn to a published sermon of Dr. Tattershall’s, in
the hope of finding some discussion of our true difference
from an associated authority. But here unfortunately again
precisely the same principle is pursued of proving what is not
denied, and of passing most slightly over the only point of
difference. In a sermon consisting of thirty-four pages just
three are devoted to the matter in controversy,[528] and these I
grieve to say occupied with reasonings so verbal and unsatisfactory,
that one is amazed that a manly and reverential
mind could offer or could accept them as the solid and substantial
proofs of a doctrine that affects to such an extent the
being and nature of God. I think it not unbecoming here to
declare, that with respect to the two modes of proof adopted
by Trinitarians to establish the separate deity of the Holy
Spirit, the Scriptural proof, and the Theological proof, I have
long and laboriously sought in their own writers, for some distinct
controversial statement of the scriptural and theological
adjustments of this subject; I have examined their scholars and
critics for the verbal part of the argument, and their divines
for the theological part of it, and nowhere can I find anything
definite or tangible to grapple with or oppose. It is at least
my conviction that never was so serious a doctrine as that of
a third person in the godhead admitted upon evidence so
small, and I cannot conceal my strengthened impression, that
it has glided into most minds as an easy consequence from
the deity of Christ. Again we avow our belief that the Holy
Spirit is God, but we declare that we cannot find any scriptural
evidence that he is a separate God (personally) from
God our Father, or any theological evidence that He performs
a work within our souls, which work may not be performed by
God our Father. If Trinitarians wish to establish their own
doctrine, it is to these two points that they ought to confine
themselves.
Abandoned then to our own methods of discussing this
subject by opponents who assert a doctrine that we deny, and
prove only those portions of it that we admit, I shall endeavour
to ascertain, first, the Scriptural meaning of the expression,
“the Holy Spirit” or “Spirit of God.”
I shall examine the more difficult passages which are
usually appealed to in this controversy.
I shall examine what Trinitarians call “the work of the
Spirit,” in order to ascertain whether it requires a third person
in the godhead, or whether God our Father is not sufficient
for it.
And I shall close with some statement of our own views of
the connections of the spirit of God with the spirit of man.
The expression “Holy Spirit” when used in scripture will
I think always be found to designate not God as he is in
Himself, whom no man knoweth, but God in communication
with the spirit of man. Whether the Deity holds intercourse
with his creatures naturally or supernaturally, the name applied
to Him in scripture, with respect to those felt or manifested
connections, is that of the Holy Spirit. And there is
most holy and beautiful reason for this peculiar usage. God
is a spirit; and he is therefore only spiritually discerned.
Through our spirits He speaks to us. In our spirits He
abides with us. Eye hath not seen him; ear hath not heard
him—but through that portion of his spirit which He has
given us, we know Him, and are His. It is not God without
us, but God within us that we know and feel. Externally
we know Him not; personally we conceive him not; as He
is, in his own essence and perfections we cannot think of
Him—but He has put His own spirit within us, and that, in
proportion as we have it and cherish it, reveals Him unto us—He
has lighted up from Himself a candle of the Lord in
our spiritual being, and if by communion with Him we keep
oil in our lamps, and our lamps trimmed and burning, His
spirit which bloweth where it listeth, listeth to blow upon us
and to feed our flame. And how shall the spirit of man prepare
itself for fresh communications from the spirit of God?
Only by removing from his own spirit whatever is at variance
with the spirit of God—by cleansing the temple, that the holy
one may be able to come to us and manifest himself to a nature
that has reverently sought to put away all deadening impurity,
and to brighten the spiritual image in which it was
made—by courting the voices of the soul—by listening amid
the tumults of the world to hear God speaking in our conscience—by
cherishing through obedience, and inviting
through prayer the intimations, that by His spirit, from which
ours are derived, He gives us of His will. The spirit of God
originally made the spirit of Man: the spirit of God retains
its connections with the spirit of Man so long as man does
not by unholiness and alien sympathies drive out that holy
Spirit: and in measures more abundantly as we prepare ourselves
to receive of His, does He hold communion with us
through affections and affinities fitted to apprehend Him;
and He transforms the will that obeys Him from glory to
glory as by the spirit of the Lord. I apprehend that the
preparation which was made by God for the reception
of the gospel and spirit of Jesus Christ, shows the preparation
which all men must make who would qualify themselves
for fresh communications from the Holy Spirit of our Father.
The baptism of repentance prepared the way for the baptism
of the holy spirit and of fire. The heart had to be cleansed
before the spirit of God could descend upon it, and hold communication
with it. And ever must there be a Baptist Ministry
breaking the dread repose of sin, awakening the dead
heart, and creating the consciousness of want, before the
Christ of God can breathe in his gentle breath upon our
souls, saying unto us, “receive ye the holy spirit.” The
holy spirit of God reveals itself to the spirit of man in proportion
as we remove unholiness from us. What use of language
then can be more affectingly elevating and solemn than
that which designates God, when in communication with man,
as the Holy Spirit? A spirit, he is spiritually discerned:
and holy, only those that are holy have affinities with
Him.
Such then is the primary signification of the expression
Holy Spirit when used in the Scriptures—the Holy Spirit of
God naturally or supernaturally in communication with the
spirit of man, and in fuller communication in proportion as
man by holiness seeks it and prepares himself for it. From
this however there is derived a secondary signification, and
so natural and easy is the derivative meaning, that it is a
strong confirmation of its primary. That portion of his spirit
which God communicates to man, may be regarded as separated
from Him. It has entered into man and become
his. It is a gift, an inspiration from our God. Man
has become the possessor of it, but still God is the
origin of it, and therefore though imparted to us it may
still be spoken of as God’s holy spirit. There are therefore
in Scripture two significations of the Holy Spirit—the
primary one—God in communication with man—and the
secondary one—that portion of his spirit which God has
communicated, naturally or supernaturally, and which has
become ours. We have received the Holy Spirit, when we
have spiritually received what only God can communicate.
These two comprise, I believe, all the meanings of the expression,
Holy Spirit, first, God communicating to man, and
secondly that portion of His spirit, which, by communication,
man’s spirit has received.
I shall give some instances of each of these applications of
the phrase.
There can be no difficulty in all those cases in which the
holy Spirit signifies God himself in spiritual communication
with man.—“And when they bring you into the synagogues,
and unto magistrates, and powers; take ye no thought how
or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say. For
the Holy Ghost shall teach you, in that same hour, what ye
ought to say.”—Luke xii. 11, 12. Now in the parallel passage
in St. Matthew’s Gospel we have the expression, the
Holy Ghost, explained to mean the spirit of God our Father.
“But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or
what ye shall speak. For it shall be given you in that same
hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but
the spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.”—Matt. x.
19, 20. “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture
is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came
not in old time by the will of man: but holy men spake, as
they were moved by the Holy Spirit.” “As they ministered
to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, Separate me
Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called
them—so they being sent forth by the Holy Spirit departed
unto Seleucia.”—Acts xiii. 2, 4.
The expression the “Spirit of God” is sometimes
used with the same signification, only with this difference,
that “the Spirit of God” frequently signifies the essence
and being of God as He is in Himself, whilst the expression
“the Holy Spirit” is I believe never employed
except to designate our heavenly Father when in living
communication with the spirits of his children. “What
man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a man
that is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man
[or no one] but the spirit of God.”—1 Cor. ii. 11. Here if
the spirit of man means man, the spirit of God must mean
God, and how in opposition to language so precise and definite,
a separate personality could be introduced into the godhead,
called the spirit of God, it is difficult to imagine.
“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee
from thy presence?”—Ps. cxxxix. “By his spirit he has
garnished the heavens: his hand has formed the crooked
serpent (the galaxy).”—Job, xxvi. 13.
I shall now adduce some of the more remarkable cases in
which the various expressions, “spirit,” “holy spirit,” and
“spirit of God,” are used to designate that portion of God’s
spirit which naturally or supernaturally has entered into man,
and become ours, but which in reference to Him from whom
it was derived, and with whom it retains blessed connections,
is called the spirit of God. God being a Spirit, and man
being a spirit, whatever man knows or feels of God, may,
not figuratively, but with the strictest truth, be called the
Holy Spirit within him. “If ye then being evil, know how
to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall
your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask
him.”—Luke, xi. 13. Now that the Holy Spirit signifies
here not a third person in the godhead, but our heavenly
Father’s gifts and inspirations to the soul, is clearly shown by
the parallel passage in St. Matthew’s gospel—“If ye then,
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your Father which is in Heaven give
good things to them that ask Him.”—Matt. vii. 11. “But
as it is written, eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither
have entered into the heart of man, the things which God
hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed
them unto us by his spirit: for the spirit searcheth
all things, yea, the deep things of God.”—1 Cor. ii. 9, 10.
Now here the spirit is used first in its primary sense of God
in communication with man, and immediately after in its
secondary sense of that portion of His spirit communicated
to man, for it is just in proportion as it partakes of His spirit
that the spirit of man searcheth all things, yea, the deep
things of God. God enlightens and man receives—but the
light which has entered into man, since it came from God,
may well continue to be called the Spirit of God. “Now we
have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which
is of God;—but the natural man receiveth not the things
of the spirit of God: neither can he know them, because they
are spiritually discerned. But we have the mind of Christ.”—1
Cor. ii. 12-16. Here the Apostle distinctly declares
that our portion of the spirit of God is “the mind of Christ.”
In proportion as we have that we know Him, the only true
God, whom to know is life eternal. “Likewise the spirit
also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should
pray for as we ought: but the spirit itself maketh intercession
for us with groanings that cannot be uttered.”—Rom. viii. 26.
Now nothing can be more marvellous in all the marvels of
scripture interpretation, than that this spirit within us which
vents itself in groanings that cannot be uttered should ever
have been referred to a third personality in the godhead.
How beautiful is this passage when truly and spiritually considered!
We know not what to pray for as we ought; our spiritual
apprehension is feeble and dim; and our vague yearnings
after the heavenly and the perfect are not distinct enough
to present clearly-defined objects to our pursuit and love;
yet we have a holy impulse within us, a divine tendency
leading us towards God; God has given us this Spirit, and
partaking of His nature it sighs after the perfection to which
it is akin; it knows not fully its heavenly origin and end, but
still true to the divine instinct it yearns after Him and tends
towards Him; it sighs for a glory and a happiness which it
cannot distinctly conceive or express, but God who gave it
understands the prayer, and hears this intercession of His
own spirit—that divine impulse planted by Himself which
now supplicates Him to make bright its dim longings and to
help it forwards unto that glory towards which the divinity
within it tends—and He who searcheth the heart knoweth
what is the mind of that spirit which He himself put there,
and that it maketh intercession with Him, for all holy ones,[529]
that He would fulfil the promise of the heavenly impulse that
sighs for good.[530] How has Trinitarianism destroyed the spiritual
power of the Scriptures, by taking all this beautiful and
holy meaning out of the individual heart, and for the sighings
which cannot be uttered after the immortal and the good,
which God, who inspired them, comprehends and blesses, substituting
a third Person in the godhead who intercedes for us
to another Person, with groanings that cannot be uttered!
I believe that these two significations of the expression,
“Holy Spirit,” so closely connected as scarcely to be two,
will explain all the cases of its scriptural occurrence; first,
God Himself in communication with the Soul, and secondly,
that portion of His spirit which He has communicated to
man, and which as being His, derived from Him, and a portion
of the true knowledge of His Mind, is called His Holy
Spirit.
I shall now examine the Scriptural evidence which is
chiefly relied upon in this controversy, as proving, not the
personality and deity of the Holy Spirit, for here we agree,
but a personality and deity distinct from those of God our
Father.
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost.”—Matt. xxviii. 19; or, into the Father, and the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, the word, “name,” by an idiom of the
Hebrew language, being redundant.
To baptize into a person was a form of expression signifying
the reception of the religious ideas associated with that
person. Thus the Jews were said to be baptized into Moses,
because they received the religious ideas associated with the
institutions of that Prophet: and on the other hand, the
Samaritans were said to be baptized into Mount Gerizim,
because they received the religious ideas associated with the
belief that there, and not at Jerusalem, was the appointed
place of the Temple. The formula then of baptizing in the
name of the Father, and of the Christ, and of the Holy Spirit,
signified nothing more than the acceptance of the religious
ideas associated with God in this new manifestation of Himself,
revealed through the Christ, and accompanied by the operations
of His Spirit, witnessing, both internally and externally,
to the new light that had come into the world, the promised
reign of the spirit of God. These were the words which most
readily were associated with, and suggested those religious
ideas which were looked upon as constituting the characteristic
faith of one who was willing to enter into the gospel
kingdom of Heaven, that is, to adopt the Christian idea of
God and of Religion. The Father, the Christ, the Spirit of
God in us giving us some communion with that Father, by
uniting us through spiritual sympathies with that Christ—is
not this of the very soul of Christianity? God manifested
in Jesus, and our souls accepting the revelation, because the
spirit of our Father within us draws us towards him who had
the same spirit without measure—is not this to express in a
few words all the characteristic and peculiar ideas of Christianity,
and therefore most fit to be used as suggesting summarily
to matured converts the new faith into which they
were baptized? The same set of ideas might have been as
fully expressed by the shorter form of being baptized “into
Christ,” for this would imply the possession and acceptance
of all the religious ideas associated with his person and ministry—and
accordingly we find that in every recorded case
of baptism or allusion to baptism in the Acts of the Apostles,
and in the Epistles, the expression simply and briefly is to
“baptize into Christ,” and never once is there an allusion to
the form of baptism into the Father, and the Son, and the
Holy Ghost. Now this demonstrates two things: first that
the Apostles did not look upon these words as a form prescribed
by Christ: and secondly, that they did not regard
them as a confession of faith in a tri-personal God, else would
they never have neglected all mention of the first and third
persons, and simply baptized into Christ, that is, into the
religion of the Christ. There is a remarkable confirmation
of this view, if indeed it can be supposed to want confirmation,
in the language of Paul to some disciples at Ephesus,
who had not received the witnessing power and presence of
the Holy Spirit. They declare that they had not so much as
heard whether there was any Holy Spirit. To what, then,
says the Apostle were you baptized; not into whom, observe,
but into what were you baptized,—that is, was not the manifestation
and participation of God’s Spirit one of the religious
ideas and expectations of your faith as converts. And
they answer that they had only been baptized into the baptism
of John, who had promised the Holy Spirit, but had no
power to confer it. And then Paul baptized them into Jesus,
and they received the Holy Spirit. Now can any one read
this passage and believe that the Holy Ghost implies the
third person in a Trinity: was it not simply a portion of
God’s spirit received by the first believers as an attestation
to the religion of the Christ?
Nothing can be more arbitrary than to assert that baptism
implies the personality and deity of that into which a person
is baptized. The Apostle Paul says that Christians were
baptized into the death of Christ. Rom. vi. 3. Is the death
of Christ therefore a person and a God? Is it not simply
one of the religious ideas which their faith embraced?
The personality and deity of the Holy Spirit we indeed do
not deny; but the methods by which Trinitarians attempt
the proof of this self-evident proposition, are, like all proofs of
identical propositions, unsatisfactory to an extreme. The
Lecturer in Christ Church, when meeting the objection, that
baptism into Christ was no proof of his deity, because we
have also the expression, “baptism into Moses,” dropped out
of sight the true bearing of the objection against the deity of
Jesus, and argued that the expression, baptism into Moses,
was so far a proof of the personality of the Holy Spirit, because
Moses was a person. Was the death of Christ, a
person? Was Mount Gerizim, a person? We do not deny
the personality of the Holy Spirit—though this is no way of
proving it. We do deny that the deity of Christ is implied in
baptism into his name, and the force of the expression, baptism
into Moses, in this bearing of it, was either not seen or was
put aside.
The argument, that because three words follow one another,
without any expressed distinction, they must all refer to subjects
of the same nature, co-equal and co-extensive, and this,
too, as the strongest, indeed the only direct evidence of a
Trinity in the Godhead, is really one of those arguments for
a doctrine of revelation, which a mind with any reverence
knows not how properly to discuss. I am glad to be able to
say, that Dr. Tattershall pronounces this to be only a presumptive
proof of the separate personality of the Holy Spirit,
that is, in fact, no proof at all, but merely such a hint as might
lead to the presumption that there may be additional evidence,
and which, therefore, in the absence of such additional
evidence, amounts to nothing. If any one, however, advances
such an argument, we have only to ask first, is any one really
content to rest such a doctrine on such a proof, and call this
Revelation? and secondly, to advance in our turn, other passages
of Scripture, where this principle of interpretation cannot
be maintained. If the concurrence of the words, Father,
and Son, and Holy Spirit, necessarily implies that each of
these refers to a person who is God, and that when taken together
they make up the entire nature of God—then, I ask,
what is the necessary inference from such expressions as
these,—“I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus
Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things?”—1
Tim. v. 21. Now if the argument is conclusive that infers
in the one case the deity of Jesus, it must be equally conclusive,
when it infers, in the other, the deity of the elect angels.
The Trinitarian answer will be,—“We know that the angels
are not God, and in accordance with this knowledge, we interpret
the passage:” and equally do we answer, that when
such a passage is given us as proof of the deity of the Lord
Jesus, we know that he was a man, and in accordance with
this knowledge do we interpret the passage. Other instances
might be given of similar modes of expression:—“And all
the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel,” 1 Sam. xii. 18;
and more strikingly still, Rev. iii. 12, where the name of a
place is associated as a religious idea, with the names of God
and Christ. “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in
the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out; and I
will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of
the city of my God, which is New Jerusalem, which cometh
down out of Heaven from my God, and [I will write upon him]
my new name.”
There is only one other passage in which these three expressions
occur together; and it must have a precisely similar
explanation: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy
Spirit, be with you all.” Now here the expression “communion
of the Holy Spirit,” fixes the meaning of the passage. The
word communion signifies “participation,” “a having in
common.” Thus St. Paul speaks of “the communion of the
sufferings of Christ,” Philipp. iii. 10. In this sense, then,
it can have no reference to a person, and must signify simply
a participation of that spiritual presence, comfort, and power
of God, which was the promise and the witness of the religion
of the Christ. In explaining such passages, we have again and
again to recal ourselves to the belief, that we are actually considering
the strongest Scriptural assertions of the doctrine of
a Trinity of persons in the unity of the Godhead. The first
Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians closes thus: “The
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. My love be with
you all in Christ Jesus.” Who thinks of inferring the equality
of Paul with Jesus? And yet, if such a mode of reasoning is
allowable, from the close of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians,
it is impossible to give any reason for its not being
equally conclusive when applied to the close of the first
Epistle of the Corinthians. But such verbal reasonings are in
every way unworthy of the solemn character of revelation, nor
can the mind long dwell upon them without feeling how painfully
they interfere with the sentiment of Reverence, and what a
lowering it is of Christ and Christianity to place them in such
lights.
The portion of Scripture, however, which is mainly relied
upon to prove the distinct deity and personality of the Holy
Spirit, is that most solemn and faithful promise of Christ to
his disciples, in which the Spirit of Truth is described
as a Comforter which the Father would send in his name,
and who, when he came, would testify of Jesus, and bring
to their remembrance all things that he had said unto them,
but which they had not understood. Now let us connect this
promise of a Comforter previous to his death, with a similar
promise after the resurrection, and then endeavour to ascertain
the meaning. In the first chapter of the Book of Acts,
at the eighth verse, it is written, “Ye shall receive power,
after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall
be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea,
and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”
Now we shall find that the Holy Spirit which came upon
them was the Spirit of Truth, a truer knowledge of Christ,
a portion of the Spirit of God, a sympathy with and an understanding
of the Mind of the Father of Jesus, which they
did not possess before;—in the one case comforting them for
the loss of their friend and their master, by giving them a
participation of his and of his Father’s Spirit,—in the other
case, qualifying them spiritually to be witnesses unto him, to
be his Apostles and Preachers, an office for which their previous
misconceptions of the true character of the Christ, their
alienation from the true Spirit of God, as manifested in
Jesus, had totally disqualified them. Why it was that Jesus
must “go away,” in order that the Spirit of Truth might come
unto them, in order that the Spirit of the world should be
separated from their ideas of the Christ, and the Spirit of
God take its place, we shall fully see. Previous to the death
of Jesus, the views of the Apostles respecting their Messiah
were Jewish and worldly—after the Resurrection and
Ascension they became Christian and Spiritual. How was
it that Jesus must personally leave them, in order that the
Spirit of Truth might come unto them? “It is expedient for
you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will
not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.”
The Death, the Resurrection, and the Ascension of the
Christ, introduced a necessary change into the conceptions
of the Apostles; these drove out of their Messianic idea the
spirit of the World, and introduced into it the spirit of God.
They could not retain their Jewish ideas of the reign
of the Messiah, in connexion with the crucified Jesus.
If they held by their Jewish faith on this matter, they must
abandon Jesus. If they held by Jesus, they must abandon
their Jewish ideas, and remodel their faith. But God takes
care that they shall hold by Jesus: and this is His mode of
spiritualizing their conceptions of Christ and of Christianity.
God lifts him from the dead and places him in Heaven. The
Christ returns to earth to show that God was with him; and
he ascends into Heaven, to repel the imagination which otherwise
might possibly arise, nay, which actually had arisen, that
even yet he might raise his standard on the earth, and realize
the gigantic illusion of the Jew. By this means, the Apostles
were placed in this position:—they must retain their faith in
Jesus, for how could they battle against God, or hold out
against such evidence as the Christ rising from the tomb, and
the Christ passing into the skies;—and yet if they are to regard
Jesus as their Messiah, they must modify all their Jewish
views, and conceive of the Christ anew. And accordingly this
was the plan and process of their conversion, of their introduction
to the true Christianity, of their baptism into the
Spirit of God. Since Jesus was thus evidently the Christ,
and yet could not be adapted to their Jewish views, of course
all their Jewish views must yield, and adapt themselves to him.
His life and destinies were the fixed facts, with which their
conceptions of the Christ must now be harmonized. You
now see how when the Spirit of Truth came upon them, it
testified of Jesus, it took of his and showed it unto them, it
threw illumination upon words and deeds of his, which, when
contemplated from the Jewish point of view, caught not the
sympathies of their souls, and like invisible writing, waited
for the heat and light of Truth to fall upon them, and bring
out the meaning. His Death struck down a principal part of
their errors: and his Exaltation forced upon them a new idea
of his kingdom. Never again could they confound the Messiah
with a temporal prince. Whatever Christianity might
be, henceforth it must be connected with the immortality of
Heaven. Christianity could not be separated from the Christ,
and the Christ was with God; and they remembered his
prayer and promise, that they were to be with him where he
was.
All this would necessarily be suggested to them from their
identifying the Christ with the risen Jesus. Nothing more
would be necessary to unfold this train of spiritual thought.
It was the first fulfilment of that profound prophecy, “When
the Comforter is come, even the Spirit of Truth which proceedeth
from the Father, he shall testify of me, and shall
teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.” And this Spirit
of Truth did lead them into all truth—it gave them no new
revelation, but it called to their remembrance, and taught them
to understand a revelation which Jesus had before offered to
them in vain—and so, in the words of his own promise, it
glorified him, for it “took of his, and showed it unto them.”
The Apostles were now in a position to look upon the Christ
from a right point of view, and to receive the Spirit of Truth
and God. The scales of illusion dropped from their eyes,
and they began to see Jesus as he was. From the hour that
circumstances constrained them to draw their Christianity
from the life and destinies of the Christ, their minds began to
open, and the Spirit of Truth to teach them all things, and to
call to their remembrance whatsoever Jesus had said unto
them, no longer dimly understood, but irradiated with moral
light, because seen in right connexions, and explained by the
interpretation of events. Who can retain his fancies in opposition
to direct experience? and experience was now enlightening
the Apostles. How could they go on dreaming
of an Earthly Prince, when their Christ was in the skies?
From that hour their souls began to be transfigured, and they
walked in the light of the other world, and the Christ to whom
they looked became their leader to Immortality. How could
they go on in their unspiritual imaginations, when the Captain
of their Salvation stood constantly before their eyes, a
crucified man, and a risen immortal? From that hour they
became soldiers of the Cross, and their only victories were
over themselves, and the powers of evil; and the only battle-cry
of the Son of Man, when idol after idol fell prostrate before
the Truth, and their Master in the skies, in the successes
of his faith, led on the movements of humanity, and, wherever
his spirit struck root, banded a new force against the enemies
of man, and mustered fresh hosts for conquest. How could
they go on in their national arrogance, and in their sectarian
intolerance, when they were obliged to draw their moral notions
of Christianity from the life of Christ, and that spoke
such different lessons? From that hour their anti-social
temper began to soften, their exclusiveness to bend and give
way, their deep-cut lines of national distinctness to disappear
in the fully developed features of our common humanity. In
the light of his Spirit, what could they be but children of
God, and brethren of mankind? They had to harmonize his
Kingdom with his Character, and that led them into all truth.
They had to read the glory of God in the face of Christ; and
the light that beamed there was grace and truth. They had
to take their Christianity from the Master’s life, and that kept
them right. Its lesson was of the one fold, and the one
shepherd—of the one God and Father of all, and of one type
of the connexions between humanity and Heaven—one Mediator
between man and God, the man Christ Jesus. And
so at last, when fitted for it by the teaching of events, the
Spirit of Truth, at once their Comforter and their Teacher,
descended upon them, and then they became “witnesses unto
him.” They read his life anew, and reported it to the world,
and the world read it too, and has ever since been studying
that exhaustless revelation. They saw in it more and more of
the Saviour’s spirit and purposes, and after the illumination
had come upon them, the providence of God so disposed the
external events that affected the infant Church, that they
went forth bearing the light that lighted them unto all the
world. Persecution scattered them from land to land, and they
went carrying with them their priceless treasure. They were
hunted from city to city, but all the faster flew the Gospel.
The stake received them, and it became as a new cross of
Christ, and the blood of his martyrs witnessed unto him.
Are we speaking of the same men who in Gethsemane’s garden
forsook their Lord and fled—who in the Temple Court
denied him to his face—who, when he was led to the Cross,
abandoned him in terror, and when he died there, laid their
heads in the dust, because their poor ambition was fallen to
the earth? Are they the same men, who in the Gospels are
narrow-minded, ambitious, and false—that in the Acts of
the Apostles come forth bold, resolute, spiritual witnesses for
Jesus, and dauntless martyrs to his truth? We can scarcely
believe that we are reading of the same men, when we turn
from the page of the Evangelists to the record of their deeds,
after the Death and the Ascension of the Christ annihilated
their errors, and the Spirit of Truth and of God had fallen
upon them. Contrast the prayer,—“Lord grant us to sit
on thy right hand and on thy left in thy kingdom,” or, “Lord
wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”—with
this, “Lord, thou art God, which hast made Heaven and
Earth, and the Sea, and all that in them is; who by the mouth
of thy servant David hast said, why did the heathen rage,
and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the Earth
stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the
Lord, and against his Christ. For of a truth against thy
holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and
Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel,
were gathered together, for to do whatsoever thy hand and
thy counsel determined before to be done: And now, Lord,
behold their threatenings, and grant unto thy servants that
with all boldness they may speak thy word; by stretching
forth thine hand to heal, and that signs and wonders may be
done by the name of thy holy child Jesus!” How came this
difference? What passed over them and turned them into
new men? The Spirit of Truth had come unto them, that
great Comforter, the Spirit of understanding and of God:
they saw it all, and they were worldly and weak no more, but
strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might? And this
Comforter never again left them; the truth broke upon them
and became their stay for ever,—it was the Spirit of God
dwelling in them, and abiding for ever, his imperishable light
in the soul, once given never to be withdrawn. It was just
the difference between Spiritual light and Spiritual darkness,
in their effects upon character. It was just the difference between
the spirit that is of the world, and the spirit that is of
God. It was just the difference between our nature when it
is right and when it is wrong with God; when it is stumbling
in darkness, the dupe of illusions, and when it is furnished
with everlasting principles, and walking in the light of life. In
the Gospels they are men palsied by the feebleness of error—in
the Acts of the Apostles they are men omnipotent in the
power of Truth. Is this change in their characters capable of
being accounted for? Yes, if you grant the facts of Christ’s history,—but
not otherwise. How otherwise you are to get across
the chasm between the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles,
I know not. Take those facts as causes, and the bridge is
easy. What a step is it from the fishermen of Galilee to the
Apostles of Christ—from the ignorance of Jewish peasants,
to the Communicators of the mightiest impulse that Society
has ever felt, the agents of the mightiest influence that ever
Providence has put forth upon the soul of man,—the creators
of new institutions, new forms of character, new civil relationships;—before
whose preaching religions and empires fell,—at
whose word Liberty first started into life, not as a spirit of
opposition, but as the gentle child of brotherhood and love,—and
who are still in the monuments they have left behind
them, the heralds of human progress and the revolutionizers of
the world! Who will deny that the spirit of God was here?
Not we: we are ready to maintain it against the world. Who
denies that the spirit of God still accompanies his Gospel?
Not we: we believe it in the depths of our hearts. How wonderful
the impulse, these men gave, and still give to the heart
of the world! What difficulties had they to conquer! their own
characters, and violent prepossessions—and they conquered
these. The curse of the Priest, the arm of the Ruler, the
scoff of the People—and they conquered these. The attractions
of Heathenism; the licentiousness of its morality; the
gracefulness of its idolatry; its religion for the senses; its
philosophy for the sceptic; its indifference to speculative
truth; its equal regard for all gods, and all forms of worship
that would only be content to dwell together in peace,—and
they conquered these. Think of this wonderful History, and
say whether you can explain it except as the New Testament
explains it. What would account for the fortunes of the
Apostles, if Christianity was not from God? The world of
Causes and Effects is but a game of Chance, if such things
can be, and their origin an accidental imagination, their foundation
a falsehood or a dream. Who will account for such
men being enlightened against their own wills, and forced
into the front ranks of humanity contrary to their own desires—if
the history is not true? But rob not the History
of its true power—take not the spirit of life out of the gospel—by
telling us of a third person in the Trinity whom Jesus
sent to supplant the free minds of the Apostles. No, it was
the free spirit of God acting upon the free spirit of men that
opened their eyes to see the things that were hidden from
them before; and they walked forth in the light of these wondrous
events, and looked now upon their Christ as those from
whose spiritual sight the bandage of the world had been taken
away. The Comforter, which is the Spirit of TRUTH, came
unto them, and taught them all things, and rectifying their former
misconceptions took of the things of Christ, and showed
it unto them. He spoke not of himself. He added nothing
to the revelation already made by Jesus:—the divine characters
were already impressed on the life and destinies of the
Christ—and the Spirit of Truth guided them to it, and
brought out the full meaning of the already finished revelation.
Still does the world want light to read that revelation.
Still does many an interpreter come to the reading of it with
a Jewish veil upon his heart. But there is new light still
to break forth out of God’s word. Although it would almost
seem as if another day of Pentecost would be needed to drive
out the spirit of the world, the spirit of system and of man,
by the mightier Spirit of God—and to guide our exclusive
tempers, our sectarian and narrow hearts into the religion of
reality—of the merciful and perfect Christ, full of grace and
truth.
It is impossible to display with any minuteness the confusion
that is introduced into the Scriptures by the supposition
that the Holy Spirit is a third infinite Mind associated with
the Father and the Son. In one passage it is said, “If I
cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom
of God is come unto you;” in another passage it is said, “If
I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom
of God is come unto you.” Are we to understand then
different things by “the Spirit of God” and “the finger of
God,”—or do they not both plainly signify the power and
presence of the One God who wrought in Christ:—“the
Father who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.”
In one passage it is said, “Wait for the promise of the
Father—ye shall be baptized with the holy spirit not many
days hence.” In another passage of the same writer it is
said, “Tarry ye in the city, until ye be endued with power
from on high.” Are we to understand by the Holy Spirit
anything different from ‘power from on high:’ or rather are
we not to understand by both the fulfilment of the promise
of the Father by His own power and presence?
In one passage it is said, “We are his witnesses of these
things, and so is also the Holy Spirit, which God hath given
to them that obey Him.” In another passage it is said, “The
works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of
me.” Is it not evident then that the works which the Apostles
did, were the works of God, His spirit working by them,
witnessing to the truth of their testimony?
If the Holy Spirit is a distinct Person from God the
Father, then the third Person, and not the first person in the
Trinity, nor the second person, must on the Trinitarian view
be regarded as the Father of Jesus, for it is written, “the
Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the
Highest shall overshadow thee.” And yet the Trinitarian
hypothesis is, that it was neither the third person, nor the
first, but the second person in the godhead, that took humanity
into union with his deity. But there is no end of
these painful inconsistencies. So again Jesus is said to be
raised from the dead by God, and again to be “quickened
by the Spirit:” but surely the Trinitarian hypothesis would
require that the divine nature of the Christ, the second person
in the Trinity, should raise up the human Jesus, with
which it had been united. Who will harmonize these things
for us? Who can without pain, nay, without asking pardon
of God for the irreverence, contemplate His spiritual nature
in such representations?
It is said of the Holy Spirit, that He would not speak of
himself. Can He then be a distinct God in the unity of the
godhead, and not speak of Himself? Is this the reason that
Scripture contains no proof of his separate existence? Is it
not evident that the Spirit of Truth, added nothing to the
revelation that was in Christ, but brought it out, illuminated,
by an after influence on the minds of the Apostles, what he
said and did?
It is said in Scripture that no one knows the Son but the
Father—and that no one knows the Father but the Son:—but
if the Holy Spirit is a third person in the godhead, equal
in every respect, this must be an erroneous statement.
The last scriptural proof I shall give that the Holy Spirit
is not a third infinite Person in the godhead is the very decisive
one that Scripture offers not a single ascription of praise
or glory to Him, and contains not a single doxology in which
He is included. Could this be so if he was really and distinctively
God? Scripture contains ascriptions of praise to
Christ, and even to the Angels; it connects together the
names of God and Christ, in innumerable cases where it
makes no mention of the Holy Spirit.—John v. 17. xiv. 21.
“Father!—this is life eternal to know Thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” Now if Trinitarianism
is true, the Father, and even with the addition of
Jesus Christ whom He has sent, does not constitute the only
true God.
“Our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son
Jesus Christ.”—1 John i. 3.
“Grace be with you, mercy, and peace, from God the
Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the
Father, in truth and love.”—2 John i. 3.
“He that abideth in the doctrine of the Christ, he hath
both the Father and the Son.”—2 John i. 9.
“For whoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words,
of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when he shall come
in his own glory, and in his Father’s, and of the holy angels.”—Luke
ix. 26. 1 Tim. v. 21.
“He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white
raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of
life, but I will confess his name before my Father and before
his angels.”—Rev. iii. 5.
“And every creature which is in Heaven, and on the
earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all
that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and
glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth on the throne,
and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.”—Rev. v, 13.
Now if it be a fact that there is not one scriptural ascription
of glory to the Holy Ghost, how is it that the Church of
England can so confidently say, “Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was so in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” The beginning that is
here spoken of must have begun after all the books of the
New Testament were written. We have already traced in
ecclesiastical history the beginning of that doxology, in the
latter part of the fourth century—and a beginning in its attendant
circumstances not very reputable, nor such as should
be countenanced by those who preach submission to Church
Authorities.
The learned and profound Lardner, modest as learned,
remarks upon the assumption contained in this doxology of
the prayer book, “as it was in the beginning.” “Doubtless
this is said by many very frequently, and with great devotion.
But can it be said truly? Does not that deserve consideration?
Is there any such doxology in the New Testament?
If not, how can it be said, to have been in the beginning?
Are not the books of the New Testament the most ancient,
and the most authentic Christian writings in all the world?
It matters not much to inquire, when this doxology was first
used, or how long it has been in use, if it is not in the New
Testament. And whether it is there or not may be known
by those who are pleased to read it with care: as all may, in
Protestant countries, where the Bible lies open, to be seen
and read by all men.” (Postscript I. to “A Letter on the
Logos.”)
Weak and almost incredibly insufficient as is the scriptural
evidence for a third Person in the godhead, the theological
evidence is still weaker and more arbitrary; and betrays most
fully those inadequate conceptions of the divine nature which
form the supports of all the popular creeds and churches.
You are aware of the Trinitarian argument for the necessity
of a second person in the godhead; for these orthodox theologians
presume to reason upon abstract principles about the
nature of God to an extent that the Unitarians whom they
condemn for this very practice never have approached to
and which indeed we hold to be arbitrary and presuming to
the last degree. We are gravely told by divines who profess
the utmost humility and a horror of all speculation, that if
God was one Being in the sense that we are one, He would
have no resources in his own Nature enabling Him to forgive
Sin; and that if there were not at least two persons in the
godhead, the one to make atonement and the other to
receive it, our Father in Heaven would be placed in these
circumstances,—either He must forgive, and since his Law
had been broken without the infliction of an adequate penalty,
exhibit his Character without Truth; or He must
refuse to forgive, and retaining his Truth, exhibit his Character
without Mercy. Now when a human reasoner lays
down these preliminaries as necessary parts of the constitution
of the divine mind, I am amazed that he has ever after
the conscience to charge other men with rash speculations
on the subjects of Theology, or with reasoning upon abstract
principles about the things of God. Atonement is
made for every sin: in that the Trinitarian is right. The
sinner bears upon a burdened soul the weight of the cross,
and faints in sorrow. Through a crucifixion and an agony
does every erring heart return to God. The penalty is paid
in bitter shame and tears, in the consciousness of degradation
and of eternal loss, in the deep humiliation of a spirit that
has quenched within it the divine flame, and treated with no
respect the image of God in which it was made. Can such
a being sin and escape without atonement—can a spiritual
creature darken the angel and cherish the animal, and yet
pay no penalty, start at last with no horror, and throb with
no remorseful agony? No—the sinner must die in his sins, if
he is to escape the piercings of his better nature, the open
eye of his conscience fixed in awful steadiness of gaze upon
the terrors of his state. Who that has ever felt a throb of
penitence, who that has ever known the prostration of a soul
awakened to a sense of sin, the deep misery of the purer
spirit looking sorrowfully on the debasements of our being,
as Christ looked upon Peter, who that has ever felt these
things will deny that sin, every sin, has its atonement, and
instead of questioning the vicarious sacrifice as too dreadful,
will not rather put it away from him only as too easy, too
unreal, too remote from the sense of individual agony and
burden, to meet and satisfy the inward and untransferable
reality? We blame not the Trinitarians for speaking of the
atonement required by sin. We blame them for not treating
that subject with sufficient strictness, with sufficient
severity, with sufficient energy of application to individual
consciences. How much more awakening it is to tell a man
of the atonement that he pays within, of the cross that is
laid upon his humiliated heart, than to tell him of a metaphysical
necessity in God’s nature that required the death
of an infinite being, the blood of God, for this awful expression
is used and defended at Christ Church,[531] to make
satisfaction for the offence of a finite creature. This is the
arbitrary assumption of Trinitarianism that requires most
to be exposed, that the sin of a finite being is an infinite
quantity, and that his penitence cannot atone for it, for his
penitence is not infinite. Now the men who assert this
strange thing, should at least be cautious how they charge
Unitarians with arbitrary reasonings and speculations. Can
Reason exhibit, or does Scripture any where say, that the
sin of finite man is infinite in the sight of God, and yet
unless this most extravagant of all propositions can be established
the whole Trinitarian Theology falls to the ground,
for then the only atonement for sin will be the crucifixion of
the erring and repenting spirit, and none more dreadful can be
given or conceived. I am perfectly aware that cautious and
refined controversialists would not assert the infinite character
of man’s sinfulness, and that they would explain away
the doctrine of the Atonement; but the Lecturers at Christ
Church are not cautious controversialists, they have no notion
of such refinements, and they do assert it without abatement.
If God’s unity, says one of them,[532] was like man’s
unity, He could not forgive, yet preserve His holiness. And
therefore I suppose, since man has no tri-personal resources
in his unity, that he can forgive only because his holiness
is of an imperfect kind, and as his holiness becomes more
strict he will less readily forgive, so that when he becomes
quite perfect he will be quite implacable. But perhaps the
Trinitarian resource in this difficulty, is that man too forgives,
yet keeps his truth and holiness, in consideration of the
atonement offered for all sin. The immoral plea that man is
not the Lawgiver, cannot be offered by those whose difficulty
is one respecting holiness. A holy mind is as much bound
by the laws of holiness, as if it was itself the Lawgiver.
I have introduced here this arbitrary, metaphysical, and
unscriptural speculation, employed by the Trinitarians to
establish, a priori, the necessity of a second person in the
godhead, only to prepare you for a similar mode of reasoning
which is applied to prove the necessity for a third person in
the godhead. There are works, they say, carried on in the
soul of man, that require a Third Person, another infinite
Mind in the godhead. Solemnly we say that this is making
too free with the infinite nature of God. What are those
works, or what works can be conceived, to which God our
Father is not adequate? Is it not very like irreverence for a
human being to say,—my salvation cannot be carried on by
one infinite and perfect Spirit, but requires three infinite and
perfect Spirits? Ought not such conclusions of Reason as
these to be very distinctly supported by Revelation before
they are advanced with any boldness, and other men called
no Christians, and treated accordingly, for no other iniquity
than that of humbly refusing to speak so confidently of
God’s nature, and to put these limitations upon Him without
proof? But even supposing that the orthodox reasonings
about the nature of sin were correct, and the inability of one
perfect mind to forgive his creatures, and rescue a sinner
from his sins, established, what necessities remain that require
the existence of a third infinite Mind—what operations
within the human soul are to be carried on, for which God
the Father and God the Son are not sufficient? I know
nothing more wonderful than that the Christian world should
at this day admit the existence of a third person in the godhead,
without ever raising the question, or having the doubt
suggested to them, is not God our Father sufficient for these
things? I intreat you to discard from your minds the Trinitarian
assertion that we deny the operations attributed by
them to the Holy Spirit—we do not deny them—the connexions
of the Spirit of God with the spirit of man we hold
as the most solemn, intimate and blessed truth, the very
soul of worship, of hope, and of spiritual life—take away
this, and religion has neither power nor meaning—but we do
deny that the Spirit of our Father is insufficient to maintain
every spiritual connexion with the souls of his children; we
bring the secret griefs, penitence, and aspirations of our
being to Him who heard the prayers and strengthened the
soul of Christ;—and when light descends upon us, so that we
almost hear the encouragements of His voice, and see the
beckonings of His hand, we know that it is the Spirit of our
Father who sends the blessing from above, and gives to them
that ask.
We entreat Trinitarians to address themselves to this particular
point, and to explain to us the moral or metaphysical
necessities that require a third person in the godhead, and
render two perfect and infinite Minds inadequate to the work
of Man’s Salvation. They are very explicit and full in their
statement of reasons exhibiting the incompetency of one
infinite spirit to save a sinner, and necessitating the introduction
of a second—we ask them to be equally explicit in
explaining to us the inadequacy of twoBeings, each of them
possessed of the full perfections of godhead, to rescue, teach,
comfort, and bless, that not naturally unkindred spirit of
man, which Scripture tells us is ‘the candle of the Lord,’
and ‘the inspiration of the Almighty.’ It will not serve the
Trinitarian theologians to refuse us this explanation on the
grounds that they take the doctrine as it is revealed, and inquire
no further—for they do enter into very copious explanations
of the theological necessity for a second person in
the godhead, and they very confidently state it as a fact in
divine metaphysics, that if the resources of God could not
have supplied two infinite minds, no sin could ever have
found a pardon—and if after this readiness of explanation
respecting the second person they refuse us all explanation
respecting the third, the conclusion will certainly be suggested,
that they offer no explanations only because they
have none to offer. Conceding for a moment the fundamental
principles of Trinitarian theology, that the Father of
our spirits could not receive the penitence of His children
and shed His blessing upon their returning hearts, until forgiveness
was rendered possible by a co-equal and co-eternal
God meeting the demands of a Righteousness that, if dwelling
in only one perfect Mind, could not pardon;—what is
there I ask after the sacrifice of Christ had removed the difficulty,
and opened the communication between God and his
children, and left the divine spirit free to love, and operate
upon, the justified,—what is there remaining to restrict the
workings of the Omnipotent and Omnipresent Spirit of God
our Father—to render him incompetent for our sanctification,
in addition to the previous incompetency for our redemption,
which Trinitarians are so far from scrupling to
assign to Him that they make it a first principle of their
theology, and attempt to prove it by Reason.
Our One God they tell us, in the human sense of oneness,
would be a helpless Being: on their very first sin, his children
would be plucked out of His hands, and find him a God
unable to save. Or, if He could forgive the repentance of
His creatures, it would imply a Morality so lax, that He
would be a God not worth serving.[533] To such dizzy heights
of Theology do Trinitarians who abjure Reason in religion
carry their reasonings upon the nature of God, and look into
the dread profound, and speak confidently, as if they understood
it all. Again I say, let us grant them all this, and still
the question remains that never has been answered, after
the sacrifice of Christ has set at liberty the Spirit of our Father
to come freely into loving, regenerating, and sanctifying
contact with the spirits of his children, what necessity is there
for a third person in the godhead to bless and save our souls,
or what works are to be carried on within us, which God the
Father and God the Son are not competent to perform?
Has not the spirit of our Father access to His children, who
are brought nigh to Him through Christ; and if so, what is
the office and what the need of a third infinite Mind? We
acknowledge with all our soul’s devotion that every thing
good in man comes, yes, and comes immediately, from the
Spirit of our God; but is not our Father with us, and is His
Spirit straitened that he cannot save? On this matter we
abide with the Apostles who say:—“Every good and every
perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father
of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning.” We are told that the Holy Spirit uses ‘the word,’
as its instrument, in the work of spiritual regeneration. If
so, the Holy Spirit must be God our Father, for the Apostle
goes on to say:—“Of his own will begat He us with the
word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his
creatures.” “Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God
even our Father, which hath loved us, and hath given us
everlasting consolation and good hope through grace, comfort
your hearts and establish you in every good word and
work.”[534] Now here, whilst no mention whatever is made of
the Holy Spirit as a separate agent, the peculiar offices of
the Comforter are ascribed to the spirit of our Father, and,
what to Christians is equivalent, the spirit of Christ, for who
hath seen him, hath seen all that man can see of the moral
perfections and spirit of our God. And not with Apostles
only, but with Christ himself, do we abide in the blessed
faith of our Father being our Comforter. “Holy Father,
keep, through thine one name, those whom thou hast
given me, that they may be one as we are. While I was
with them in the world I kept them through thy name:—I
pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but
that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. Sanctify them
through thy truth: thy word is truth.” Here Christ prays
to God the Father to sanctify the spirits of the disciples,
when he should be no more with them to instruct and keep
them. Now Sanctification is assigned by Trinitarians to the
Holy Spirit as his peculiar office. What then can be more
clear than that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of our Father in
communication with his children, and that this was the Comforter,
even the Spirit of Truth, a portion of the true spirit of
God, which the Christ prayed his Father to communicate to
his darkened disciples,—to take away the Jewish veil from
their hearts, and to guide them into the blessed light of the
pure gospel!
The Apostles pray to the Father to be a Guide[535] and Comforter[536]:
Jesus Christ prays to the Father to be a Sanctifier
and Enlightener; these are the works, and the only works,
ascribed by Trinitarians to the Holy Spirit. No reason has
been offered in the present Controversy for the necessity of a
third person in the Godhead to be the agent of these operations;
nowhere in orthodox theology have I been able to find
a reason: I respectfully invite the attention of our opponents
to this neglected point. Let them not mistake our demand.
We do not deny that the works of the Holy Spirit can be
done by God alone: but we ask for a reason why God our
Father is not sufficient for these things. Until this question
is satisfactorily answered, it must be evident that the Trinitarian
Theology is entirely arbitrary.
It is not a little remarkable that Bishop Sherlock, in attempting
to prove that the Holy Spirit performs the work of
the Gospel within the mind, by the very texts that he himself
adduces identifies this Holy Spirit with the Spirit of God
our Father; “No man can come unto me, except the Father
which hath sent me, draw him.” “No man can come unto
me, except it were given unto him of my Father.” “He that
is of God, heareth God’s word.”[537]
There was only one of the operations ascribed to the Holy
Spirit by the Lecturer in Christ Church, to which I could
not give my assent. We were told that the Holy Spirit interpreted
the Scriptures to all true believers. I believe that
some portion of the Spirit of God is in every man who loves
the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. I believe that every one
who does His will, knows of the doctrine whether it is of God.
Morally and spiritually, I do believe that the Spirit of God is
still a witness to the truth of Christ. The Spirit of the Father
was in Christ, and to those who love him and keep his commandments
the Father still cometh, and maketh His abode
with them. And so far we know that we are of the truth, because
we love and are partakers of the Spirit that dwelt in
Jesus. But if any man presumes to extend this sympathy
with the Spirit of the Christ from moral to controverted truth,
and to pretend that he is not only spiritually but intellectually
instructed, so that he has not only a living faith, but a true
creed, we abandon him to his conviction, satisfied that however
sincere, it is unscriptural and a delusion. How can men
persuade themselves that it is humble, that it is Christian, that
it is in the spirit of a modest self-knowledge, to pretend
to this intellectual infallibility, that God not only inspires the
holiness of their wills, but protects their judgment from all
error? When we ask those who tell us that only their creeds
can save, what infallible interpreter preserves them from all
doctrinal error, they do not scruple to proclaim that the Spirit
of God is their instructer in the controverted tenets of theology.[538]
Now we only ask how this can be made clear either
to other men, or to themselves? Have they alone sincere convictions
on these subjects? Have they alone sought the truth
with the toils and prayers of earnest and humble minds?
Have they alone emptied themselves of all prejudice, and
desired only the pure light from God? Have they alone put
worldly considerations from their hearts, and left all things
that they might follow Christ? What evidence is there in
their position, or in their sacrifices, that only the Spirit of God
can be their guide, for that they are manifestly self-devoted
to the cause of truth? Are they the meek adherents to persecuted
principle, so that against the outward storm nothing
short of the inward witness of the Spirit can be their omnipotent
supports? Do they alone give evidence by the scorn
and insult which they cheerfully bear for Christ’s sake and
the gospel’s, that they must be taught of God, for that no
men could endure this social persecution unless God was with
them? Ah, my friends, does it become the followers of popular
opinions to turn to the persecuted, and say, we who
float upon the world’s favour, we who have no sacrifices to
bear for conscience’ sake, we to whom godliness is a present
income (πορον) of all that men most love—we give evidence
of being supported through all this peace and popularity by
the Holy Spirit—but you, whom we persecute and scorn, you
whom we lecture and libel, you who have to bear upon your
inmost hearts the coarse friction of intolerance and of rude
fanaticism, you, though you have to endure all this, give no
evidence that your convictions of Christ and your faith in God
are dear unto you,—you are voluntary sufferers, and the distresses
of your position, which we shall aggravate in every
way we can, are no proof that you stand the rude peltings of
the pitiless storm, only because you dare not abandon conviction,
or turn away from what you believe to be the light of
God within you? I ask can any thing surpass the unmitigated
Popery of all this, except its unmitigated cruelty and injustice?
How is it that the Minister of a state religion, the
preacher of popular creeds, whose lightest words raise echoes
of assent—who gets the support and sympathy of crouds on far
easier terms than others get bare toleration and existence, can
so remove from him all self-knowledge and mercy, as to have
the heart to tell the man whom he persecutes, we who have
every thing to gain from our religion and nothing to lose, give
evidence of being supported through all this ease and triumph
by the Spirit of God, but you, who in this world have every
thing to lose by your religion, and nothing to gain, give no
evidence of having the Spirit of Truth, and are lovers of your
own selves more than of Conscience and of God?[539] We suspect
them not, God forbid we should, of being immorally tempted
and biassed, and with a true sincerity we declare that we
have no sympathy whatever with the ungenerous vulgarity of
such a charge,—but at the same time, they ought to be aware,
and if they were truly generous in their turn they would be
aware, that all the outward marks by which men may judge
of the sincerity of convictions, and the strength of inward
reliances, and allegiance to God, are upon us, not upon them.
The other offices assigned to the Holy Spirit besides that
of being an infallible interpreter to the orthodox, were the
following:—to bring our souls into sympathy and union with
the Spirit of Jesus—to draw us by spiritual affinities unto the
Christ; to sanctify our nature through communion with the
holy One, cleansing the temple of the spiritual God; to
govern our moral being, and supply the diviner impulses that
lift us to imperishable things, and teach us to love and to
pray aright; and to give us through the spiritual witness
within ourselves, a pledge and earnest of the loving purpose
of God, and of the glory that remaineth.—Must we indeed
renounce these connexions of our spirits with the Spirit of
our God, unless mechanically settling the distribution of
offices, we receive these influences through the departmental
arrangements of the Trinitarian Theology? Will God our
Father not come to us and make His abode with us, if we are
unfortunate enough to find no evidence in Scripture for a
third infinite Mind associated with him, and carry up to Him
the unbroken sum of our love, our faith, our worship, and our
prayers? Will He reject us only because we pour out our all
before Him, and knowing Him to be all-sufficient, feel our
derived spirits to be at every moment within the shelter of His
parental presence?—And yet, if the Trinitarians were right, if
only a believer in a tri-personal God could hold these spiritual
connexions with the source of all good, the fountain head of all
holiness and hope, if these were the only conditions on which
our souls could feel life from above—then should we become
the most grateful, the most devoted, the most submissive of
their disciples—we would entreat them to show us the way of
knowledge, that we might ascend unto the hill of the Lord,
and stand in His holy place,—and to lift up for us, in mercy,
the everlasting doors of our darkened hearts, that the King
of Glory might come in;—and we would flee from our Unitarianism
as we should from Atheism, for it would be Atheism
if it closed our access to the Spirit of God.
But, though not fond of speaking personally of religious experiences,
we do declare, and we do know, that the spirit of man
may hold communion with the Spirit of our Father. Every impulse
after holiness is the Spirit of God. Every “sighing that
cannot be uttered” after the pure, the perfect, and the good, is
the Spirit of God. Every devotion of our souls to things unseen
and eternal, when solicited by things seen and temporal,
is of the Spirit of God. Every dictate of Duty is the spirit of
God. Every answer to the prayer of a pure heart is the spirit of
God. Every movement of disinterested love is the spirit of
God. Every self-sacrifice for the sake of justice or of mercy
is made in the strength of the Spirit of God. Every inward
hope in this world’s darkness, and undying trust amid this
world’s deaths, is an inspiration from Him who is a very present
help in the time of trouble, a spiritual intimation from
the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither
shadow of turning. The spirit that conforms itself to the will
of God, that removes from it whatever is alien to His nature,
that puts away the defiling breath of the passions, that seeks
Him by prayer, by efforts of duty, by struggles of penitence,
by resistance to all sin, by self-purification and constant converse
with His image in the Christ, that spirit mirrors more
and more of the glory of God, feels more and more His
power and peace within the soul, and receives of His fulness,
and grows in His likeness, throughout eternity.
If there are any to whom all this appears visionary,
and who charge the religious mind with mysticism,—we
are ready to bear our share of that charge; for thus far
we confess ourselves to be Mystics. Yet, so far are we
from holding it to be Mysticism, that we are confident
that nothing which sense perceives, or thought takes in, is
so real, so enduring, so full of life, as this spiritual and imperishable
connexion of the soul of man with the Spirit
of God. This connexion, whatever may have been the inspiration
of peculiar times, we now regard as part of the established
providence and operations of our Father’s Spirit. He
gives of His Spirit, to all who observe the conditions on which
He has promised to pour out His Spirit upon them. No pure
mind ever sought Him in vain. No erring heart ever turned
to Him in penitence, and found no peace. Whenever our
holier nature awakes to earnest action, God enters into the
soul. Whenever prayer purifies our desires, and rectifies our
estimates, and places great realities in spiritual lights, God is
present with us. Every effort to sink our imperfections, and
to feel purely, places us within the affinities of His Holy
Spirit. There is no miracle in this. God reveals himself to
the spirit that assimilates itself to Him, and seeks Him by
growing like to Him. There are no limits to those spiritual
communications. He that asketh receiveth; he that seeketh
findeth; and to him that knocketh it is opened. This is of
God’s grace; not now of miracle, but of nature. We are His
children, and in proportion as we love Him purely, and follow
after Him, He reveals Himself to us. Revealing himself
through our spirit, He abides with us for ever. Imaged
within us in juster proportions, as we reject impurity, and impose
the harmony of His will upon all our desires, He guides
us into all truth, and causes us to feel within, the blessed intimations
of His sympathizing Spirit. Correcting our false
estimates, and fixing our trusts upon His own great realities,
He comforts us amid the shadows of Time and Death, whilst
we repose upon a world that cannot be moved, and rely upon
the faithfulness of God.
Jesus Christ is our most perfect image of the Spiritual
Father. He developes within us the ideas that are akin to
God. He brings us through sympathy with himself within
the affinities of the Holy Spirit, for God was with him.
By the baptism of ever fresh penitence, and still fresher
purity, he prepares us for the higher baptism of the Holy
Spirit, and of fire. We grow in light as we grow in purity.
If we keep holy the Temple of the Spirit it abides with us,
and, doing His will, we know of the doctrine whether it be of
God. The soul that quenches not the Spirit, that suffers no
intimation from God to pass unheeded, that looks upon the
face of Christ, and reads in characters of blended grace and
truth the mind of the Father, is continually born again, and
again, into new and still newer light, for the kingdom of heaven
is a reaching forth unto things that are before; and he that
is in Christ Jesus has within him a spring of life, and is ever
a New Creature. And he is ever nearest to God who through
purity and prayer has disposed his own spirit to receive light
from the Holy Spirit of God, and waits and watches for fresh
communications from His unexhausted Christ.
Were another great Teacher to appear amongst us, were
another Christ to come to us, and apart from the narrow
technicalities of system, to unfold sublime and quickening
views of the moral and spiritual world, where might we
expect to find the kindred minds, that would most instantly
recognize the voice of the Divinity, and upon whose ready
sympathies the heavenly words would fall like sparks upon the
fuel? Perhaps those who best understood what it is “to be
born again” might not be of the number of the learned, the
instructed, the Masters in Israel. It is certain that they
would not be found among the adherents of unchanging
systems—the Pharisees of the faith, who think that they already
possess the absolute Truth imprisoned in creeds—and
expect no new light to break forth upon their souls. The
wind bloweth where it listeth—nevertheless its course is not
uncontrolled—it has laws though we know them not—and
where would the Spirit of God list to blow, if it was now
breathing from the lips of some inspired man,—into what
hearts would it find its way, and fan the latent affinities into
the flame of spiritual life? Might it not again pass by the
College of the learned, and the Temple of the Priest, and
descend in living fire upon the poor man’s soul? All that
we can do is to look out for light—to expect it—to keep
near through prayer and inward communion to Him who is
its Fountain—to have the inward sentiments pure, the place of
the Spirit unsoiled, that if light should come into the world,
it may not reject us as unworthy, finding no mirror for itself
in our stained souls—and above all, never to be possessed
with that infatuation of confidence, that blindness of sufficiency,
that self-idolatry of the creature, which looks for no
regeneration to descend upon it—and ignorant of its poverty,
its error, and its want, asks with the young Ruler,
“what lack I yet,” or with Nicodemus, “How can a man be
born again?” We may be born again, and again, if we will
only lay ourselves out for it. The light will come if it is
looked for. It will not open the closed eye that seeks no
more illumination, but it will fall upon every expecting spirit.
The only essential condition of being born again, is that the
sincere heart, listening to God within, and reading the mind
of His Spirit in Christ his image, remove from itself every
moral disqualification, and lie in wait for light and truth.
Wherever they are found, and whatever be their creed, the
Spirit of God “listeth” to blow upon such minds.
524. See Forrest on the origin and progress of the Trinitarian Theology, p. 40.
525. See the Rev. F. Ould’s dedication of his Lecture.
526. Burton, Theol. Works, vol. ii. 2nd part, p. 16.
528. “The deity and personality of the Holy Spirit,” pp. 20-23.
529. “And he that searcheth the heart knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit,
because it maketh intercession for the Saints, according to the will of God.”—Rom.
viii. 27.
530. “It is said that God has promised his Spirit to those who ask for it. But the gift
of the SPIRIT, that unction of which St. John speaks (probably in allusion to the
anointment of the Hebrew priests, the interpreters of the Old Law), was not intended
as a check but as a GUIDE to the rational mind of man. ‘He will guide you into all
the truth,’ namely of the simple Gospel. The Divine Spirit of TRUTH has been
promised to sincere Christians, to guide them into all that concerns their moral
safety. The two SPIRITS—the Spirit (i. e. the mind, so we may call it without
irreverence) of God, and the spirit of man, though infinitely apart from each other
in their nature, are clearly represented by St. Paul as analogous (I might say akin)
to each other. Nor could it be otherwise, since the one is the fountain-head of
reason, the other a derived stream. ‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities:
for we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit
itself maketh intercession for us (with sighs not expressed in words);’ i. e. the
divine impulse after holiness which is in us, makes us sigh for what we cannot
express: but God, who gives us that Spirit, knows what it is we wish for.”—Observations
on Heresy and Orthodoxy, by the Rev. J. B. White.
537. Sacred Classics. Sermons on the Holy Spirit, p. 161. I have lately read
this volume carefully, in the hope of finding some definite statement of argument
for the Trinitarian Theology on this subject, but in vain.
538. See the Rev. J. E. Bates’ Lecture, and the Preface to the Rev. Fielding Ould’s.
539. See the Lecture of the Rev. D. James, and indeed the whole tone and spirit
of the Trinitarian Course. Mr. James declared that we denied the personality of
the Holy Spirit, only because we had never felt his operations.
LECTURE X. CREEDS THE FOES OF HEAVENLY FAITH; THE ALLIES OF WORLDLY POLICY. BY REV. HENRY GILES. — Footnotes for Lecture X.
“LET EVERY MAN BE FULLY PERSUADED IN HIS OWN MIND.”—
Rom. xiv. 5.
The essential spirit of the religious revolution which in the
16th century shook Europe and its thrones, was resistance
to ecclesiastical authority. When Luther burned the Pope’s
bull, in Wirtemberg, in one act pregnant with meaning and
with consequences, he broke the spell which had chained the
minds of men for a thousand years, and spread its fascination
over the whole space of Christendom. That single act was a
virtual denial that any church, however high in pretension,
however venerable in institutions, however universal in dominion,
however mighty in power, had a right to enslave his
intellect or to silence his conscience. The English martyr,
when ready to be offered up, boasted to his fellow-sufferer
that they would that day kindle such a flame in England as
should never be put out; but the blaze of a piece of parchment
in the hand of the German reformer, was a light far
more significant and impressive—a light at which thousands
started from their slumbers, and although it has often since
flickered and been clouded, it does yet, and ever will, point
the way to mental and religious freedom. Luther and the
other reformers, objected to the church of Rome, the usurpation
of unjust authority, and the establishment of a false
standard in faith and practice: they objected to her that she
claimed a dominion over the souls of men which God alone
can hold; and they object that she set aside the supremacy
of Christ by encumbering his gospel with her own traditions.
Not alone for alleged errors in doctrine, but for this error in
the very root and foundation of her constitution, they separated
from her communion, and protested against her jurisdiction.
They declared the Bible to be the only ground of a
Christian’s faith—the only guide of his religious convictions,
and they claimed for themselves the right of private judgment
and of individual interpretation. We make the same
declaration and assert the same claim, and we neither restrict
nor nullify it by creed, catechism or confession, by
tests or articles, by pains or penalties. Modern Protestant
churches, like the reformers, speak proudly of religious liberty,
but like the reformers also, it is a liberty they are
very unwilling to share—a liberty for themselves and not for
others: without claiming infallibility in name, they assume
it in reality; and without giving, as Rome does, the promise
of unerring guidance, they aim at an authority as despotic,
and would wrest a submission as slavish.
The energetic maxim of Chillingworth, “The Bible and
the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,” is ever and
ever repeated even by those who are pledged to find in it
the Athanasian creed and the thirty-nine articles, and by
others who are compelled to extract out of it the Westminster
confession and the longer catechism. With a zeal
that never grows fatigued, it is translated in every tongue
and circulated in every nation; nay, the lisping child must
have it to the very letter, and a fierce war-cry is opened
should a school, by selections or omissions, leave the youthful
mind without an opportunity to study the patriarchal genealogies,
the prophesies of Daniel, or the apocalypse of
Saint John. The wide circulation of the Bible we regard as
a great social blessing; but when it is sometimes asked,
whether its indiscriminate reading is suited to all ages and
classes, the very question is taken as an evidence of popery
or infidelity in the proposer. To doubt the perspicuity of
God’s word, it is said, is to doubt the wisdom of God’s providence.
The first object of man in speaking to man, is to be
understood; how much more in God addressing his creatures,
and on the most momentous concerns! The Bible, it
is asserted, is so plain that the child may understand it, that
he who runs may read, and that way-faring men, though
fools, shall not err therein. If this be true, it is in itself the
death-blow of creeds, for then they are both unnecessary
and absurd—unnecessary, because the statements can be as
clearly, can be as easily found in the Bible as in the creed;
absurd, because it is monstrous folly to attempt making that
more distinct which is manifest enough already. The Bible
being, on the orthodox theory of plenary inspiration, literally
the word of God, there is even a degree of impiety in
the presumption of pretending to give a summary of its
meaning in human fabrications, whether from Trent or
Augsburgh, from the palace of the Lateran or the hall of
Westminster.
That simplicity is a characteristic of the Bible, at least in
its main tendency, I cordially admit; it is the especial quality
of the gospel. I could desire no better test by which to
try the value of creeds. If the evangelists John or Matthew
were again to appear on earth, bringing with them their
first simplicity, ignorant of the wrangling disputes, of the
vain scholasticism which have disturbed this world and the
church since they were taken to their rest—if the Athanasian
document were put into their hands, there is nothing in their
gospels which enables me to think they could understand it;
if moreover they were told that the whole of it could be deduced
from their writings, I speak in all earnest solemnity
when I say, that at such an assertion I can conceive of
them as no otherwise than utterly bewildered and surprized.
Take our Lord’s sayings and discourses as reported by his
evangelists, and contrast them with the creed we are discussing.
With what undisguised simplicity is God ever spoken
of, always presented in some intimate relation to our duty or
his own providence—as an object of worship, of trust, or
of love! Pray to thy Father who is in secret, and thy Father
who seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. If ye
being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more will your heavenly Father give good things
to them that ask him. Touch me not for I have not yet
ascended to my Father and your Father, to my God and
your God. Such is the clear and touching phraseology in
which Christ always speaks of God, and thus gives, not a scholastic
dissertation, but a revelation to human affections. And
in the same spirit of simplicity is his own nature also manifested;
he who in all things was meek and lowly in heart,
who went about doing good, and came to seek and save the
lost. Astonishing mysteries indeed has Athanasian theology
made out of these plain statements, having found in them a
trinity in unity, and a unity in trinity; the Father uncreate,
the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate; the Father
incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy
Ghost incomprehensible; the Father eternal, the Son eternal,
and the Holy Ghost eternal, and so on; and though each
is distinctively asserted to be uncreated, incomprehensible,
and eternal, we are to believe on pain of eternal damnation,
that they are not three eternals, but one eternal—not three
uncreated, but one uncreated—not three incomprehensibles,
but one incomprehensible. Surely of all incomprehensibles
this theological jumble is the most incomprehensible. If to
defy contradiction by the very sublime of absurdity be a
safeguard from refutation, the Athanasian creed must stand
eternally unconfuted. Plausible falsehood, however ingenious,
may be stripped of its sophistries, but there is a certain
degree of wild fabrication which may challenge all the
efforts of philosophers and logicians, yet remain as firm as
before in the bulwarks of its impenetrable nonsense. It
may be truly said that these are things on which we cannot
reason; most certainly they are, for they subvert at once all
possible principles of reason and of truth. But the climax
of these astounding marvels is, that we are assured that if we
do not hold this Catholic faith, “without doubt we shall
perish everlastingly.” And this precious document, this
compilation of monkish mysteries and scholastic jargon, is
set forth as the accurate definition of the Christian faith—the
test of saving belief or of damnable heresy; this production
of crazy or crafty churchmen, this concentration of hoary
absurdities, of bewildered metaphysics, and of savage bigotries,
presumes to utter the judgment of God, and to launch
the thunder of the skies. Beginning with the pride of infallibility,
it closes consistently with a sentence of perdition;
and for this there is pleaded the language of the gospel—language
evidently misinterpreted, as any language must be
which would identify the spirit of Christ with the spirit of
Athanasius. So on the ground of two false assumptions,
those who pride themselves in this Athanasian orthodoxy
are privileged to denounce with a safe and quiet conscience
perdition on their heretical brethren. First, it is assumed
that when the gospel says, “He that believeth not,” it must
mean, he that believeth not the three creeds; and, secondly,
it is assumed that when the gospel says, “He that believeth
not shall be condemned,” the condemnation implied is everlasting
destruction. This is in the genuine spirit of Church
and Creed Christianity, fencing in a little and a barren paradise
with the brambles and the briars of theological definitions,
making holiness and virtue dependent on ecclesiastical
syllogisms, and shutting out all from heaven who may be
compelled to disagree with the doctors of Nice, or the compilers
of our English liturgy, who hold the faith of Milton
and Locke, but cannot be convinced by Bull, Waterland, or
Sherlocke. Creeds pronounce perdition, and Churches hold
up Creeds; and ministers come forth to magnify the glory of
these Churches and to maintain the verity of these Creeds;
but men of meek tempers and tolerant hearts seem half
ashamed of their work, and in the effort to soften dogmatical
ferocity, make a vain effort at compromise between their
consistency and their charity. It is all fruitless: the dark
and damning malediction is written on these Creeds with a
pen of adamant; the preacher’s feelings are of no avail, and
he is commanded by his system to proclaim them aloud and
afar—to hold them as warrants of eternal death to all who
gainsay or deny them. At the best, orthodox charity, after
all admissions, can only embrace different shades of Trinitarians;
Unitarians must still remain outside the pale of hope;
if therefore condemned we must be, it is of but small importance
in what form or on what theory. To those who are to
enter the regions of the lost for ever, questions on essences
and persons, with many other most grave disquisitions, can
signify but little; nor can much consolation be derived
from the reflection, that but a hair’s breadth from the
Unitarian heresy, theology by evasions and distinction might
have given us a refuge in the doctrine of Sabellianism.
We are, however, most gravely told that he who receives
not the Athanasian Creed, cannot be saved—a Creed at
which reason, as it was well said, stands aghast, and Faith
itself is half confounded; a Creed, of which it was better
said, that it is alike contrary to common sense, to common
arithmetic, and to common charity.
Were the exposure of the Athanasian formulary the design
of this Lecture, I should feel that I had undertaken a very
needless and a very presumptuous task, needless, because in
this age there are few that attach any importance to it; presumptuous,
because, if minds are not affected by its self-confutation,
I have not the vanity to pretend to any arguments
which could shake their convictions. But one can scarcely
suppress a feeling of sorrow and surprise at seeing this document
dragged out for defence in the nineteenth century;
this mixture of monkish metaphysics and scholastic bigotry,
a production which multitudes of the orthodox themselves
conspire to repudiate, and of which many of the best and
highest minds in the Church of England have been most
heartily ashamed—of which they desire to be well rid. Were
the defence of such a creed to be taken as a true sign of the
times, there would be cause indeed for pain to think that we
had been rolled back again into the dark ages; but it is not
so; such things are rather marks that show us how far the
advancing tide has moved beyond them. In the course of
the present Lecture I desire it to be distinctly understood,
that I oppose creeds in their very principle: it is not alone
such as I think false, but though I believed them true, I
would yet oppose their use. My opposition is directed
against the spirit of creeds, and if my own opinions were
attempted to be forced in that form, my opposition would be
the same. I am in this place to maintain a principle, the
principle of intellectual, moral, and Christian freedom, and
because creeds, as I think, are at variance with this, I denounce
them. I intend nothing against individual professors.
If I should give them offence, I have no wrong motive
with which to charge myself, and must attribute it to the
necessity of plain speaking on a subject by no means agreeable;
but whether pleasant or not, I have a duty to perform,
and I must as far as my power goes, endeavour to do it honestly
and faithfully.
The title of this Lecture is, that creeds are the foes of
heavenly faith, and the allies of worldly policy. It is my
object to show that this accusation is not lightly or unjustly
advanced; and in making good this two-fold charge, the
greatest perplexity which attends it, is the multifarious and
abundant evidence whereby it can be established.
I. I proceed first to prove them the foes of heavenly
faith.
Creeds disqualify the mind for the pursuit of truth. This
is my first assertion, and I shall establish its correctness in
several particulars. Creeds generate mental apathy and
mental dependence, and this is fatal in the very outset. To
a spirit of inquiry there is needed an impulsive intellectual
activity, and to this activity there is needed a desire for the
thing to be attained, and a sense of its importance. There
is no labour without motive, and if in religious belief, the
creed has defined before-hand all that is necessary for my
salvation, I have no necessity to take any more trouble in
the matter. If I am to rest on authority at last, it is just as
well for me to be satisfied with it at first—if after toilsome
inquiry, at the peril of my soul’s eternal peace, the dogmas
of the creed are those to which my conclusions must return,
I had better be at once content—if I must believe as the
Church believes, if I must believe as the Creed says I should
believe, if I must believe as the priest declares my hope of
heaven requires, if after criticism and research, long and patient,
I must arrive at but one exposition of the Bible, it is
but wisdom to spare myself from such a pressure of useless
labour. But indolence in this case is not merely allowable,
it is, in fact, the safest. If to doubt be danger, and if to disbelieve
be sin, then the curiosity which stimulates examination
may lead me into ruin, whilst implicit submission, that
receives all and questions nothing, is a condition of peaceful
security. The incitements to mental labour are analogous to
those to any other sort of labour; it is that one shall be the
richer and the better for it, and that what he acquires he may
justly possess. But, if by independent inquiry I may become
morally poorer and spiritually worse, if I shall have no right
to my own thoughts, and must be despoiled of my convictions,
or punished for them, when I have worked them out
with the struggle of every faculty, it is exceeding folly to risk
the misery and irritation of being torn between my opinion
and my creed, conscience forcing me to acquiesce, and reason
compelling me to doubt. This view is no supposition; it is
fact. Submission to Creeds and Churches, is the true cause
of that wide spread moral torpor in every country where
Creeds and Churches have dominion. There is nothing so
rare as intelligent, independent religious conviction; and how
can it be otherwise, when each leans upon his priest, and
the priest gives him ready-made opinions, as they were formed
a thousand years ago. There is a general and profound ignorance
of the sources of opinion, the history of opinion, of the
philosophy of opinion, and of the Bible, both in its letter and
in its spirit. Speak to multitudes of religion, in any broad
or liberal sense, and it seems to them as if it were an unknown
tongue. To have any chance of attention, you must
use terms which Creeds have sanctified, you must address
them in traditionary phrases, which have the sectarian or
sacerdotal currency. This never could have been had religion
been recommended as a subject of individual and independent
study, leaving the mind free, both in its pursuit and its conclusion.
That I have stated nothing but what fact justifies,
I may appeal to any one who has considered the religious condition
of this country, or of Europe generally, and considered
it in every rank of society. I speak not of the Spaniard, who has
not yet rid himself from the palsy of the Inquisition, who can go
from the prostration of the confessional to scenes of the wildest
crime; I speak not of the Italian, that compound of profaneness
and credulity, of sin and devotion, who can bow before an
image, and with the same hand cross himself, by which a minute
before he plunged his stiletto in his fellow-creature’s heart.
I speak not of our own peasantry, who Sunday after Sunday,
walk statedly to church or chapel, and know little more than
that they went there and came back again; I speak not of
the fashionable wealthy, who, on this point, are commonly as
ignorant as the boor, and choose religion as they choose every
thing else, as it happens to be the mode; I pass these by,
because it may be said, that pleasure and gaiety leave them
no time for study; but I will refer to multitudes who are esteemed
devout and serious Christians, whose minds passively
receive the mould of their teachers, and to whom religion
never presents itself as a system of various thought and of
independent examination. Now, this ignorant apathy has
bad effects, which are not merely negative; and at the risk
of anticipating, I will allude in a few words to one or two of
them: it gives stability to every error and corruption, and
holds to them with an obstinacy, against which wisdom has
no power; it is the very soil in which priestcraft grows
darkest and foulest; and the hierarchy in any age or country
has never risen to its full stature of lordliness, until the people
have lain lowest in torpid submission. And, in addition to
this, there is no uncharitableness so inveterate, there is no
bigotry so intolerant, as that which this species of character
matures, for as it is unable to comprehend an opposite opinion,
it is equally inadequate and unwilling to weigh the arguments
in its favour, or to estimate the evidence on which it is maintained.
Having no conception of independence itself, independence
in another appears presumption, if not something
worse, and never having imagined that other opinions could
possibly be true except its own, to hold any different could
only be explained by supposing a want of honesty or a want
of grace.
I might dwell upon the fear by which Creeds paralyse the
faculties of weak or sensitive natures, by which they deprive
them of all power for calm and deliberate examination, by the
fear of being excluded from their Church, by the fear of being
discarded by their friends, by the fear of being cast into hell,
above all these, by the fear of losing the favour of God, and
the friendship of Jesus, and with right and true minds, this
is the greatest of all fears. In the midst of so many terrors,
it is too much to expect that our weak humanity could be
calm,—that it could look with unmoved heart at the appalling
indications of so many and dire threatenings, it is like examining
a man on the terms of his faith, while the officials of
persecution are arranging the faggots or putting screws in the
rack. From this topic, disagreeable in any shape, I pass on,
and assert, that Creeds are enemies to truth, because, by preconception
and prejudice, they disqualify the mind to seek or
apprehend it. This is my second, and in this section, my last
position.
The statement of the Church of England respecting the
three Creeds, is this: that they “ought thoroughly to be received
and believed, for they may be proved by most certain
warrants of Holy Scripture.”[540] The Catholic doctrine, with
equal decision, asserts that the Infallibility of the Romish
Church may also be proved by most certain warrants of
Holy Scripture. Suppose then a Church of England Christian
with the Bible before him; he has been previously
indoctrinated in the three Creeds, and these ideas pre-occupying
his mind will so far influence his interpretation. Suppose
a Roman Catholic in a like position; he has ever present
to his mind the Infallibility of his Church, and her
decisions must be the limits of his conclusions. Intellectually
or morally, no position can be conceived worse than
this for the pursuit or discovery of truth. The mind is
biassed from the first; its calmness and its candour are subverted,
and it is no longer a judge, but a partizan; it is not
to decide on evidence, but, (to use a legal term) to act on the
instruction of its brief. That Creeds have the tendency to
distort and fetter the intellectual workings of the mind, we
know from the fact, too palpable to need proof, that Theologians
have always been the most obstinate in resisting the
discoveries of science, and ever the last to yield. Astronomy,
in its glimmerings of scientific truth, was once Church
heresy. A Father of the Church, as it is well known, had
denounced that man as infidel and profane who should dare
to assert that the earth moved round the sun, and not the
sun round the earth. On the other side of this controversy,
we have been told that the arts and sciences have their compendiums
as well as religion. It was a most unfortunate
analogy; for how would it have been now with art and
science, had Astronomy been made a Creed at the Council
of Nice, and a confession on Chemistry been compiled by
the Westminster divines. Galileo was pronounced a heretic;
and the early Chemists laboured under strong suspicion of
witchcraft. Had we been bound in Astronomy as we are in
Theology, Joshua should be our authority, decisive and irrevocable,
and the calculations of Newton and Laplace should
be placed in the index expurgatorius of Ecclesiastical dogmatism.
Even Luther himself, the author of the greatest of
moral revolutions since Christianity, smiled at the idea that
the earth should move round the sun, and said, “that according
to Holy Scripture, Joshua commanded the earth to
stand still, and not the sun.”[541] Had not the progressive
energy of human intellect been stronger, in what a position
should we yet have been as to the true principles of the construction
and motion of the universe? Geology as yet is a
scientific heresy; and, to avoid the stigma, orthodox Geologists
have been driven into all modes of eccentric explanation,
some to disjoin the first verse of Genesis from all that
follows, and others to the supposition that a day may mean
a thousand years, or if the speculator needs it, ten thousand
or a million. The intellectual immorality thus occasioned, it
is not possible to estimate; for it is a coarse view of sin to
place it altogether in the misdirection of the passions: certainly,
the sins which ever afflicted mankind most, were
the moral perversions of the intellect. And this may be
at once conceived if we have read the history of the Church,
and are able to take a calm and impartial review of its
cabals and controversies. I will not mention here the loss
of kindly affections, the loss of charity, the loss of peace;
I merely allude to the immense intellectual waste which has
been occasioned by men setting out on their inquiries with
a foregone conclusion. I shall say nothing on the tomes,
enough to make a library as great as that the Turkish soldier
burned, which have been written to defend the Trinity—I
take an example to Protestants more grateful—I mean,
transubstantiation. What was it that for centuries perpetuated
a false and absurd philosophy in Europe? What was
it that made Aristotle the supreme ruler of the Christian
Church—not Aristotle, as he was, the philosoper, but as
Churchmen used him, a verbal quibbler—was it not for the
purpose of constructing syllogisms with orthodox exactness,
and by theories on essences, species, forms, and so forth, to
make it evident that under the appearance of bread and wine,
the very God who created the heavens and the earth, and the
very man Christ Jesus who died on Calvary, were virtually
present? Go into any great library, and on this subject alone
you may find volumes of which the very names are too many
for memory. Yet, in these there is abundance of talent, of
subtlety, and of acuteness—all in the travail to sustain a
theory. No one can deny, no one will, who knows how
equally the Creator scatters his gifts, that minds of the very
highest order were amongst the schoolmen; yet all these
magnificent powers were expended to sustain one or two absurd
positions, enslaving their own intellect, and by their
authority and their influence, enslaving the intellect of Christendom;
and, from the reformation to this hour, there have
been the same waste and perversion of thought. Just consider
what tortuous logic, what wire-drawing ingenuity have been
exercised to defend guilt by imputation, and righteousness
by imputation—absurdities as great morally, as transubstantiation
is intellectually. This is the work of Creeds.
Dissenters are sometimes taunted with want of scholarship.
The taunt may have foundation in fact; perhaps it
has, but on what are we to place the blame? Dissenters, we
presume, have a measure of intellect on the average of other
men, and are gifted with as many mental faculties as those
who subscribe the articles of our National Church. God
does not distribute his blessings on the ground of subscription,
however Universities may. The gifts of mind are equal
and bountiful like the beneficence of creation. The same
full hand that showers sunlight over hill and valley, that
opens fountains in the rocks, and sows the wilderness with
flowers, without reference to Sect or Church, impregnates all
understandings with the elements of thought, and all fancies
with the germs of beauty. The Dissenter, as the Churchman,
hath eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections.
If then this fair portion of our Maker’s mercy be equally given,
whence are we to trace the want of its proper cultivation?
If the orthodox close the Universities against us by Creeds,
draw fast the iron bolt by an iron theology, take away the
key of knowledge, and repulse those that with all their hearts
would enter, place before us tests which, if stupid enough, we
might subscribe without understanding, and if dishonest
enough we might subscribe without believing, but, candidly
confessing we neither understand them nor believe them,
therefore refuse to sign them,—where then is the magnanimity
or the generosity which throws in our teeth, though
it were true, that we have not the science of Cambridge, or
the classicality of Oxford. Yet, despite of all restrictions,
Dissent has had a goodly number of noble and cultured
minds—minds able and honest, which, in the hour of need,
even the Church herself was not ashamed to acknowledge, or
ashamed to use.
Creeds act as mighty temptations,—as the very Satans of
theology;—and they are not temptations to the covetous
and ambitious only, but also to the weak and good. When
sects and Creeds are the standards of preferment, those
with whom preferment is the great object, are made to add
the sin of sanctimonious hypocrisy to that of Ecclesiastical
covetousness and Ecclesiastical ambition. But there are
others good in their own hearts, yet not mighty enough to
be martyrs, whom Creeds keep in a whole life of agony.
There are those who entered a religious community, believing
its opinions most enthusiastically, who, by the further progress
of intellect or judgment, may be brought to doubt or
deny them. They are then driven to a desperate alternative,
either to belie their conscience, or to do violence to their
hearts. Take the case of many of the curates and incumbents
of the Church of England. Suppose, that on receiving
orders they assented to all the bishop or the Church prescribed,
but that after years of thinking they were compelled to disbelieve
the Athanasian Creed. They are then periodically
reading, with the most serious tones, and from the most solemn
place, a statement of doctrine which they conceive in
their souls to be hideous and false, reading it as the conviction
of their own judgments, and as that which ought to be
the saving faith of all men. If the conscience is not utterly
hacknied, if the religious sensibilities are not torn out from
the heart, this must be continually as the torture of the rack.
Like all human faculties, conscience has a limit; beyond a
certain point it can endure no more, and so when bigoted exaction
has stretched it to the last, it must revolt or expire.
The alternative in the end is, moral apathy or theological rebellion—a
quiescent hypocrisy, or an open opposition. But
few can brave the contest, and they have no refuge except a
tacit and unwilling submission. Honest men, it may be said,
when they ceased to believe the doctrines they solemnly
affirmed, would renounce them with a denial as public as their
profession. It is easy to say this, but, even for honest men,
it is sometimes hard to do it. In the clerical order especially
there are numbers, whose position has been attained by long
study and weary toil—whose very means of life—not to speak
of their station and their friendships—hang upon adherence
to the Creed of their Church. What are these men to do?
To dig they are not able, and to beg they are ashamed. Yet
I can easily conceive that many could abandon rank and
friendship, and count them light, in comparison with their
faith, to conscience, that they could take a cell in the wilderness
for their dwelling, quench their thirst at the running
stream, and seek their food on the briar and the bramble,
sooner than be false to their convictions, and do dishonour to
the integrity of their souls. But it may be, that others with
themselves are to suffer,—those whose lives are bound up in
their lives,—those to whom they are the only earthly support
and refuge, the wife, the child, the aged father, or the widowed
mother,—whom to cast on the friendless world, were worse
than a thousand martyrdoms. Think, then, of the poor curate
of the Church of England, or the humble incumbent, who
has grown long into life, with claims most pressing multiplying
around him—one who once out of his pulpit knows not where
to turn for the bread which his children crave—and we cannot
judge harshly or uncharitably, if the power of his affections is
too strong for the stern demands of duty. I know there have
been those who could commit father, and mother, and wife,
and children, to that good Provider who feedeth the raven and
sheltereth the nest of the sparrow; who could speak the truth
and take the consequences;—I trust there are those yet in the
world who could do the same; but in this or any other age, martyrs
must be few, and the spirit of martyrdom rare. We blame
not too severely those who have not the highest courage of religious
heroism, but we may condemn with honest indignation
those institutions that by fencing their position with Creeds and
Articles, compel them to be hypocrites. I do not apply these
assertions to members or ministers of the Church of England,
or other Churches, individually, but any one who has studied
the history of religion, or watched the tendency of institutions,
knows that in the English Establishment, in the Romish,
in all establishments that have been narrowly restrictive, the
hypocrisy of ambition, or the hypocrisy of fear, has been
deeply and abundantly nourished.
The Church does not deny a small amount of liberty—no
Church can,—it will therefore allow you to read the Bible,
if you desire it, but you must find nothing therein but what
the Church proposes. In the study of the Sacred text, you
must have always before your eyes the three Creeds and the
thirty-nine Articles; find what these prescribe, and it is all
the better for your peace and comfort; miss them, and you
are open to social and spiritual condemnation. Churches
which dictate creeds, use words without meaning, when they
say, that you may read the Bible, for they tell you also, at the
commencement, what you ought to find in the Bible. I shall
give an illustration here of my meaning, by an extract from
one of the Oxford Tract writers:—I know well that some
object to these writers, but so far as I have been able to study
the subject—and I have read, attentively or casually, the whole
of what are called the Oxford Tracts,—I think their statements
and their doctrines are entirely in the spirit of their
system, and in most exact consistency with their asseverations
and their Creed. There is no medium; we require an infallible
tribunal, or we must have a free judgment; but the
authorities of the English Establishment will give us neither;
for with that we must encounter the twofold endurance of an
erring Church and an enslaved understanding. I think, therefore,
the Oxford doctors in most perfect consistency with their
profession; and thus believing, I quote the following passage,
illustrative of these writers, and of the spirit of Ecclesiastical
authority in general. It is a portion of a dialogue between a minister
and his parishioner. Not to spoil the dramatic effect of
it, I shall give you a little more than absolutely belongs to my
subject. Thus speaks the Parishioner to the Pastor:—“My
good mother, said he, not long before her death, said to me
very earnestly, My dear Richard, observe my words: never
dare to trifle with God Almighty. By this I understood her
to mean, that in all religious actions we ought to be very
awful, and seek nothing but what is right and true. And I
knew she had always disapproved of people’s saying, as they
commonly do, that it little matters what a man’s religion is,
if he is but sincere, and that one opinion, or one place of
worship, is as good as another. To say, or think, or act
so, she used to call ‘trifling with God’s truth;’ and do
you not think so, (addressing himself to me,) that she was
right?
“Indeed I do, said I.
“And, he said, I was very much confirmed in these
opinions by constantly reading a very wise, and as I may say
to you, a precious book, which a gentleman gave me some
years ago, whom I met by chance as I was going to see my
father, in the infirmary. It is called, ‘A Selection from
Bishop Wilson’s Works,’ and there are many places which
show what his opinions were on this subject, and I suppose,
Sir, there can be no doubt, that Bishop Wilson was a man of
extraordinary wisdom and piety. Then, after a slight remark
from his interlocutor, he observes, And what Bishop Wilson
says is this, or to this effect, that to reject the government of
bishops is to reject the ordinance of God. Having mentioned
some controversy he had with a Dissenter, he observes,
it seemed to me (and I told the man so,) like going
round and round in a wheel, to say, that if he is God’s minister,
he preaches what is good, and if he preaches what is
good, he is God’s minister; for still the question would be,
what is right or good? And some would say one thing, and
some another; and some would say, there is nothing good or
right in itself, but only as it seems most expedient to every
person for the time being. So, for my own satisfaction, and
hoping for God’s blessing on my future endeavours, I resolved
to search the matter out for myself, as well as I could. My
plan was this: First to see what was said on the subject in
the Church Prayer Book, and then to compare this with the
Scriptures. If, after all, I could not satisfy myself, I should
have taken the liberty of consulting you, Sir, &c. Yours,
replied this Rev. instructor to his prudent catechuman, was
a good plan.”
This passage contains the whole spirit of Creeds and
Churches. Take the Prayer Book with you, keep the
fear of the bishop before your eyes, and walk reverently
in the way of the Articles. Then read the Scriptures if you
will, but read them to show that all this is Holy Writ.
Creeds are, further, at enmity with truth, because they resist
its development, and embarrass its progression. The
world could never have advanced beyond a fixed point, had it
been governed by Churchmen, in the true Church spirit. For
what is it that Creed-makers so insanely attempt? They attempt
what is alike inconsistent with the glory of truth and
the nature of man. Truth is infinite, like its author, and they
would confine it within the limits of the Nicene and Athanasian
formularies. Truth is eternal and progressive, but Creeds
would swear us to the worst barbarisms of the worst ages.
Truth is discovered and carried onward by the independent
working of free and various minds, but Creeds would reduce
all to an apathetic uniformity; and had not truth been greater
than Creeds, all that has been done for religion and science,
would now be in eternal silence. Creeds not only thus retard
the progress of Truth, by the sanction of authority, by the
influence of prejudice, by the tenacity of habit; but give
errors all but immortality. Creeds are foes to whatever is most
heavenly in our nature; to conscience, in its rectitude, and to
charity in its gentleness; to conscience by an utter perversion
of the moral sense, making that to be guilt which is not guilt,
and giving merit to that which deserves none, making it
righteous to believe one proposition, and sinful to doubt another,
thus creating a factitious vice, and as often denying the
evidence of real virtue; to charity, also, Creeds, I have said,
are foes, and such they are by bitter exclusiveness, by wrong
terms of communion and brotherhood, by dissension, by
enmities and contentions, and by hatred in all its most odious
shapes.
Creeds have failed in all the objects for which it is pretended
they were made, and they have infinitely multiplied
the evils against which it is pretended they are the guards.
They are needful, it is said, for the preservation of the Faith,
and instead of preserving the Faith, they have provoked the
wildest unbelief; they are required, it is argued, as bonds of
unity, and instead of this they have bred divisions and heresies
without number; they are means, some will go so far as
to say, of maintaining Christian peace, and instead of this
they have rioted in wars and persecutions the most inhuman
and the most sanguinary. The history of religion shows
that unbelief is never so prevalent as when the Creed is most
rigid. The countries and the times in which Theological
ingenuity left least scope for the free play of intellect, have
always been the country and times, when, under the outward
guise of a uniform faith, there has been the most absolute
contempt for the popular religion, as well as for Christianity in
general. For the proof of this need I refer to the French
Church, and the withering scepticism which it nurtured; the
Spanish Church; the Italian Church; and to sustain the same
principle we might likewise accumulate heaps of evidence
from the Protestant Churches. As to heresies, the case is
still more clear. One heresy may have called forth a Creed,
but one Creed has produced a thousand heresies; and Creed-makers,
when they imagined their work complete, to their
sorrow have found it was but merely commenced. The history
of heresies would be at once humiliating and instructive.
In all varieties we have them on every point in religion, and
on all that has connection with it; on the nature of God.
Men not satisfied with a simple trust, must speculate on the
Divine Being—must ascertain whether he was essentially
one, or numerically divided; Churchmen must define, and
after much labour we have such a document as the Athanasian
Creed, and such a doctrine as the Athanasian Trinity.
On the nature of Christ, we have the same subtleizing process;
we are tossed between Arius and Athanasius, and
having got clear of these, we are again to be bandied between
Nestorius and Eutychus, and to determine whether Christ’s
godhead and manhood were so united as to make one nature,
or so divided as to constitute two natures; whether his divinity
was not instead of a human soul, or in what relation
his human soul stood to his divinity; whether he had one
will or two wills; whether his death was a substitution or
not; whether it was for the elect only, or for the whole race
of man universally. On the Church; what its constitution,
what its extent, what its authority; is it fallible or infallible;
and if infallible, where does that infallibility rest; in the Pope,
in a Council, in both together; in a congregation, or in every
individual Christian? On the Sacraments; are there two or
seven; what is their nature and efficacy; does baptism
cleanse from original sin, or does it not; is it necessary to
salvation or not? Roman Catholics affirm both, and so do
the Oxford Tract writers. Is it to be consequent on personal
belief or not; is it to be administered to infants, or to
persons of mature years, and to be by immersion or by sprinkling?
Again, we have a whole crowd of divisions and heresies
on the Lord’s Supper; are the elements actually changed
into the substance of Christ, or is Christ merely present
along with them, or is he spiritually, but not personally, present;
is it a rite mystically effective, or is it merely commemorative?
All these questions have been sources of endless
division of opinion; even at the present hour, the Oxford
divines teach a doctrine concerning the Eucharist, which it
requires marvellous perspicacity to distinguish from transubstantiation,
while the Calvinistic evangelicals maintain views
which might content the very lowest sacramentarian. But
why speak of Creeds and Articles as means of religious
unity, when the Church of England herself affords us the
means of giving such assertion a flat denial? Within her
pale, she has had men of all and opposite opinions—Arminian
and Calvinist, Unitarian and Tritheist—every possible
hue that orthodoxy could assume. Paley smiles at the idea,
as one of most grotesque absurdity, that men should be
thought to believe the articles they sign; they are, according
to his morality, mere articles of peace, intended to exclude
no one but Papists and Anabaptists. If this be true, a man
might, as an able writer on non-conformity says, take a benefice
with a good conscience from the Grand Turk. Nay, not
to speak of believing the Articles, we have heard it asserted,
in connection with the Universities, that the youthful subscribers
are not supposed to understand them, or in some
cases even to have read them. The Church of England is
perhaps wise in not pushing matters too far, for in her
former efforts to force uniformity, she lost the best of her
sons by thousands; an event that she has cause to regret to
the latest hour of her existence, and for which America
should bless her for ever. The distinction between essentials
and non-essentials, is one of the most quibbling of Theological
vanities. Every one knows that each sect has its
essentials and non-essentials, according to the compass of its
Creed, some many and some few: with the Roman Catholic,
Transubstantiation is as essential as the Trinity; he condemns
the orthodox Protestant to perdition for not holding
one as well as the other, whilst both combine to pass sentence
on the unfortunate Unitarian who can receive neither. Again,
I assert the distinction is petty and quibbling, for who is to
fix it, where is it to stop; who is to decide it, and what are to
be grounds of the decision? All things are important to us,
as they bear relation to our conscience or our convictions;
one man eateth only herbs, another eateth all things; one
man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth
every day alike: let every man be persuaded in his own mind;
that is the Apostle’s view of the subject, and that is the true,
the safe, the charitable one. Protestantism has not lessened
or softened the number or the inveteracy of religious divisions
infinitely more perplexed than Romanism in her views of religious
authority, she has given importance to doctrines
which the Church under that system scarcely noticed: such
as grace, predestination, and other similar disputed theories:
thus the sting of controversy has been added to topics that
were before sufficiently repulsive in their dry and technical
abstruseness. But it is pitiful, it is humiliating, not merely
to our common Christianity, but to our common human nature,
to see the arrogant assumption with which puny men
decree what their brothers are to believe, now and in all future
times, tying down the mind that should be free as heaven,
as it is as progressive as it is eternal: putting themselves
on the throne of God, and dealing judgment where he deals
mercy. The minuteness of theological definition has surpassed
all other efforts of human ingenuity, but it has not
alone deadened the freedom of intellect, but also injured its
honesty. On the Trinity, more especially, heresy has ever
been treading closely on orthodoxy, “until, after revolving
round the theological circle,” as Gibbon says, “we are surprised
to find that the Sabellian ends where the Ebionite had
began.” Each theological speculator has his own Trinity,
his own exposition of the Athanasian mystery, until amidst
the whirl of dogmatical contradictions, the mind grows giddy,
and knows not where to rest. The Church of England, as I have
observed before, has all systems between the extremes of Sherlock’s
Tritheism and South’s Sabellianism: between the three
infinite minds of the one, and the three somewhats of the other.
The ancient Christians afforded full occasion for the caustic
description which Gibbon gives of their disputes, and the
modern Christians have not grown wiser, or learned better.
“The Greek word” he says, “which was chosen to represent
this mysterious resemblance, bears so close an affinity to the
orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age derided the
furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited
between the Homoousians and the Homoisians. As it
frequently happens that sounds and characters which approach
nearest each other, accidentally represent the most opposite
ideas, the observation would be itself ridiculous, if it were
possible to mark any sensible difference between the doctrine
of the Semiarians, as they were improperly styled, and that
of the Catholics themselves. The Bishop of Poictiers, who in
his Phrygian exile, very wisely aimed at a coalition of parties,
endeavours to prove, that by a pious and faithful interpretation,
the Homoousian may be reduced to a consubstantial
sense. Yet he confesses that the word has a dark and suspicious
aspect; and, as if darkness were congenial to theological
disputes, “the Semiarians who advanced to the doors of
the Church, assailed them with the most unrelenting fury.”
If it be said, that the Creeds are not the creators of divisions,
but that divisions are the creators of Creeds, I admit that
they act and react on each other. If they create not the differences
which they make, they give them all their bitterness.
If it be said, that independently of Creeds, there would still
be endless variety of private opinions, I grant it; I go further,
and say, it were most desirable there should be such
divisions. It is Creeds that infuriate religion, and turns dissent
into dissension. A man who felt he could form his
opinion in freedom, and hold it in peace, would never persecute
another; would never hate another; would never pretend
authority over another; he would give the liberty he
used. It is the authority which Creeds pretend, that constitute
one of their greatest evils. The ancient Church then
had Creeds in plenty, but no unity; the Reformed Churches
are in the same position. If it be asserted they have agreement
in essentials, I refer to what I have already said on this
point; but if it be maintained that their difference is only in
name, then, I say, the matter becomes worse, and plainly
shows that Creeds, out of small disputes, can cause gigantic
evils. Nothing could be more bitter than the Sacramentarian
Controversy amongst the Reformers; nothing could be more
vile than the language with which they assailed each other;
nothing more furious than the invectives with which they
pelted one another. Each would fix on his opponent what he
did not believe himself; and yet there occasionally peeps out a
glimmer, that they had some sense of their inconsistency. “It
is of great importance,” says Calvin, in writing to Melancthon,
”that the least suspicion of the divisions that are among
ourselves pass not to future ages; for it is ridiculous beyond
all things that can be imagined, that after we have broken off
from the whole world, we should so little agree among ourselves
since the beginning of the Reformation.” The charity
of Calvin was not equal to his discretion, as we may see by
this extract.
“Honour, glory, and riches,” says he to the Marquis de
Poët, “shall be the reward of your pains; but, above all,
do not fail to rid the country of those zealous scoundrels who
stir up the people to revolt against us. Such monsters should
be exterminated, as I have exterminated Michael Servetus,
the Spaniard.”
In the same spirit is the language of Austin, who was Calvin’s
master, not only in his doctrine, but also in his zeal.
“O, you Arian heretic,” he says, “the thief knew him when
he hung upon the cross; the Jews feared him when he rose
from the dead; and you treat him with contempt, now he is
reigning in heaven. Take care, beloved, of the Arian pestilence!”
(Quoted from Robinson’s Ecclesiastical Researches,
pp. 348, and 181.)
Division and heresy are, in truth, innumerable, and the
ideas of stemming them by Creeds, is to imitate the peasant
standing on the river’s bank, and waiting until it should have
all flowed by. “One doctor of the Lutheran Church,” says
Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, “hath given a comment on
heresy and schism, and hath inserted no less than six hundred
and thirty-two sorts of heretics, heresiarchs, and schismatics,
diversified as the birds of heaven, and agreeing only in one
single point, the crime of not staying in what is called the
Church.”
I have now shown that Creeds did not promote unity in
the ancient Church; that they did not promote it in the
Roman Church; that they did not promote it in the Reformed
Church; that in the present day they do not promote it in
any of the Protestant Churches; not to allude again to our
own Establishment; to many in the Scotch Church, they are
a dead letter; they are entirely so in the French and German
Churches; and in the Genevese Church, the very school
where blackest Calvinism was fabricated, the arena where
the stern persecutor burned Servetus, Calvin’s spirit is extinct,
and his creed repealed. I have shown, then, that they
never produced unity, and I believe the most intrepid Ecclesiastic
will not affirm they have been favourable to Christian
peace. Turn to the page of history; look abroad over the
face of the world, and you have lamentable evidence of the
charge. Creeds have broken the peace of Christendom, and
given unwonted fury to all its strifes; Controversies have
arisen without number, and have been maintained with fanatic
zeal, fury, and detestation. What shame should the opposite
conduct of Philosophers flash in the face of theologians,—men,
who in quietness pursued their own studies, and left
their results for the progressive amelioration of their species—whilst
the janglings of Churchmen, wringing through every
age, have been empty of all things but their enmity. Why
is it, that we in this hour are not more profitably engaged,—why
is it, that we are not rather seeking out the woes that
crush down humanity, and joining forces to remove them,—why
is it with so much of what is positive to be done, so much
of wretchedness to relieve, so much sin to remove, so many
solemn claims on all sides of us, that when we think of it, we
feel as if this were the veriest trifling; why are we thus in
strife, when we might be in union; why are we compelled to
say hard things, and to repel them? It is all to be charged to
Creeds, which with the spirit of Cain, has risen the hand of
brother against brother, and caused contention and an evil
heart, where there ought to be charity and peace. It is all
vain, it is not human nature, no matter how strongly disclaimed,
to think, that polemical contention can be perfectly
free from the wrong passions, and it is better not to pretend
to meekness, when the opposite is frequently but too evident.
The days of physical strife in religion, it is to be hoped, are
gone; but upon the head of Creeds there is a blood-stain, a
blood guiltiness, which the whole ocean could not wash out.
Religion was made the watch-word for war; the cross was
raised as the symbol of destruction, and the gathering of nations
were around it, to carry ruin as a flood, ay, into those
very scenes, where it once bore the dying form of him, who
said, “I came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”
War, in its simplest utterance, is a word of horror; but religious
war leaves nothing darker to be imagined. In worldly
enmities, when the contest is deadliest, there are touches of human
compunction; in the most sanguinary strife, the voice of
mercy is sometimes heard, and the hand of help is given;
fiercest opponents will occasionally be generous—the oppressed,
in the hour of triumph, can be magnanimous to the
tyrant in his fall, but place men against each other with different
religious sentiments, unsheath the sword of the orthodox
against the heretic, the heart becomes steel, the bosom
becomes ruthless, and the man is lost in the fiend. Demand
you evidence of this? It is written in gore over the whole
face of earth; call up the shades of the thousands that
sunk in the valleys and the mountains of Judea, of those in
the solitudes of the Alps, that fell under the sword of Romish
and merciless extermination; of those with whose life-blood
the fierce Spaniard dyed the soil of South America; of those
who were laid low in the glens of Scotland by Episcopalian
fury,—you would have army of witnesses which no man could
number, the accusers of those who for different faith became
the slayers of their brethren. Creeds are naturally allied to
the spirit of persecution, for they establish the principle, and
act on it, that belief may be a sin, and this is the very life of
the persecuting spirit; it was this that built the Inquisition,
which for so many ages spread its ruthless tempest in the
Christianity of Europe; it was this that called forth the rack,
and kindled every fire in which a heretic was ever sacrificed
to the demon-god of bigotry: it was this created a Dominic.
Protestants are fond of calling the Roman Catholic Church a
persecuting Church, but that Church can retort the accusation.
Every Church is in truth a persecuting Church which
acts in the spirit of a Creed. The Reformers maintained the
right of the civil magistrate to punish heretics. This, if it
needed proof, is triumphantly made out by Bossuet. “There
is no need here,” he says, “of explaining on that question,
whether or no Christian princes have a right to use the sword
against their subjects, enemies to sound doctrine and the
Church, the Protestants being agreed with us in this point.
Luther and Calvin have written books to make good the right
and duty of the magistrate in this point. Calvin reduced it
to practice, but against Severus and Valentine Gentili. Melancthon
approved of this procedure by a letter he wrote him
on the subject.” John Knox maintained the same doctrine,
and even quoted the extermination of the Canaanites as a case
which would justify like treatment of heretics. Nay, in the
present day, one of the Oxford theologians asserts, “that
we ought to anticipate the evils of error in the person of the
heresiarch,” because he contends that it is better he should
endure pain, than that his error should be propagated, and
bring ruin on his infatuated but less guilty followers. This is
the true inquisitorial religion. A man who holds sentiments
like these is a persecutor in his heart, and it is only by accident
that he is not a persecutor with his hand. A man who
could send forth that expression, in other days might have
been grand inquisitor or a familiar of the Holy Office, and
would have dragged his victims to the stake, or gloated over
their tortures on the rack. A heresiarch, he maintains, is
unworthy of compassion; and in correspondence with this
are some passages of Irenæus, quoted with approbation in the
Tracts for the Times: “What prospect, then, of peace have we,”
says this reverend and truculent Ecclesiastic, “who are foes
to the brethren? What sacrifice do they think they celebrate,
when they become rivals to the Priesthood? When
gathered together beyond the pale of the Church, do they
think that Christ is still in the midst of them? Though men
like these were killed in the profession of their faith, not even
by their blood would these spots be washed out. The offence
of discord is a weighty offence, it includes no expiation, and
is absolved by no suffering.” “They cannot remain with
God,” he says, “who will not remain with one heart in God’s
Church. Though they be cast to the flame, to the fire to be
burnt, or lay down their lives by being a prey to wild beasts,
they will gain not the crown of faith, but the penalty of perfidy;
their end, not the glorious consummation of religious
excellence, but the death-blow of despair. Such men may
attain unto death, but can never attain unto the crown.”
Creeds have sharpened the sword of persecution, though
the civil arm was used, and if it now be idle in the sheath,
it is more owing to the tolerance of civil governments, than
to any change in the spirit of Churchmen. If Rome had her
Inquisition, England had her Star Chamber; if Rome had
her Dominic, England had her Laud. I wish not, however,
to pass unmitigated censure: I am willing and glad
to acknowledge that the Church of England has had many
men who were the lights of their age, but they had minds
which were not cast in the Athanasian mould. It is not
Churches only that persecute, but also sects; not great
Churches, but little ones equally; thus did the Genevese,
whilst the spirit of Calvin ruled in it; thus did the Dutch
Churches, while the Dort-decrees had power, and even
Socinus himself persecuted Francis David: a Creed, however
simple, can be made an instrument of unjust power, as
well as the most complex one. The persecuting spirit is
not extinct, but changed; it is now a social and a moral
persecution. Long experience has shown that physical torture
is useless, and if the principle remained, the power is
gone. But never can we sum up the whole amount of
evil which Creeds inflicted on the world, until we can
count the sighs that have died unheard in the dungeon;
until we know all the bitterness of heart which waits on
hopeless captivity; until we count the pangs of torture
which gave slow consuming death; until we can follow the
course of merciless wars, unsoftened by a touch of pity;
until we know all the friends that have been made enemies,
and the griefs which have in many cases made life
a martyrdom; until, in fact, we have all laid bare before
us which that day alone will reveal, which reveals all the
hidden works of darkness.
II. I have so far shown that Creeds are the enemies of
truth, and disqualifying the mind to seek truth aright, by
resisting and embarrassing its free development, by ensnaring
conscience and destroying charity; I have shown their failure
in their proposed objects, and their instrumentality in producing
all the evils they pretend to avert, and I proceed in
the remaining observations, to establish the second charge.
It is one, however, which does not need much elaborate
argumentation. It will be easy to discover their tendency,
if we consider who are commonly the framers of Creeds, in
what periods they are formed, and in what temper they are
usually imposed. They are framed by Ecclesiastics, and for
the main purpose of supporting Ecclesiastical supremacy.
If we take a few names connected with Creed-making, or
with furnishing the materials out of which Creeds are made,
we can easily see the spirit in which they are conceived, and
of which they are the expression. We have then an Athanasius,
an intriguing and ambitious Ecclesiastic, not only the
fomenter of spiritual strife in the Church, but by political
intermedling, the fomenter of civil strife in the Empire: a
Cyril, the opponent of Nestorius, and the hater of Origen;
the composer of mighty tomes of divinity, which with much
the same kind since, were equally massive, and equally oblivious;
a popular preacher at first, and afterwards a most
orthodox patriarch; at once the persecutor of the philosophic
Pagans, and the heretical Christians: a Tertullian,
that exulted in the prospective damnation of heretics, with a
zeal that almost rivals some modern Calvinistic writers: a
Dominic, that has left the memory of a sanguinary monk,
and the name of a saint; who has been often commemorated
in the flames of many an auto-de-fe, and has had a durable
monument to his glory in the dark piles of the inquisition:
a Calvin, the stern Theological tyrant of Geneva, and the
slayer of Servetus: a Knox, who pleaded for the extermination
of the heretical after the manner of the Canaanites: a Cranmer,
who caused so many, both of Catholics and Protestants, to be
led to the stake by laws which changed with the fickleness of a
tyrant’s will, who at last himself blenched before the fate
that had been so often prepared for others: a Laud, the
pillar of a star-chamber, and the downfall of a throne. Such
are some of the men concerned in the formation of Creeds—men
of stern natures, of haughty minds, and of boundless
spiritual ambition. And as to the periods in which Creeds are
commonly made, we know they are in times of religious
strife, when different parties are labouring for the ascendancy,
when no pains are spared to gain it, when no acts
however shameful or dishonest are thought too bad to use,
if they assist to humble an opponent, or secure a victory;
when passion is heated and malignant, and the judgment
totally unfit for impartiality. The history of Councils and
Theological cabal is the shame of Christianity. Yet, formularies
thus fabricated are to be made the everlasting standards
of truth, and men are to be punished here and hereafter
because they do not receive as Divine Truth these shapeless
abortions of Churchmen’s folly. And the temper in which
they are imposed is quite in conformity with that in which
they are conceived—oppressive, exclusive, unjust. With
what a vindictive and grasping spirit have not the Clergy of
the English Church laid hold on all they could monopolize
of privilege and power; with what resistance to the last they
have endeavoured to shut out Dissenters from all the rights
of Christians and of citizens. To this hour, had it been in
the power of Ecclesiastics, the Test and Corporation Acts
had never been repealed, or the Catholic disabilities removed.
That which is their power gives sufficient evidence
how they would act if they had exclusive possession of more.
I mean the Universities, which they keep closed against
Dissenters with such an obstinate and gothic bigotry. Nor
does the injustice end here: there is a silent, social injustice,
which Dissenters suffer; every one feels it, though it is not
easily defined. The Churchman, on the strength of signing
a Creed which he does not always believe, assumes to be of
a higher religious caste than the Dissenter. It is not sufficient
that Dissenters contribute from their worldly good
to support a system which has no alliance with their conscience,
but they must still further undergo the humiliation
of being regarded as spiritual and social inferiors. Creeds
are the allies of worldly policy, and ever have been since
Christianity had the misfortune to become a state religion,
for they are the main ties of that unnatural union of Christ’s
religion to human governments—a union injurious to both,
making the government unjust and partial, and religion selfish
and secular. They are worldly in their objects, and they
are worldly in their instruments and means. They are made
the stepping stones to wealth, rank, and power; for if the
Establishment did not give wealth, rank, and power, numbers
of expectants would be moderate enough as to the Articles
and Creeds. It would seem anomalous if universal history
did not make it evident, that a body of men in all ages,
pledged to denounce covetousness and earthly passions,
pledged to preach humility after the example of a crucified
master, pledged to curb by heavenly motives the abuse of
power, should be of all men themselves the most insatiate in
their desires after gain, the most haughty in their elevation
to station, the severest and the most grinding in the exercise
of prerogative, the least willing to mitigate it, and the most
determined not to share it. In every period of the Church,
the worldliness of Ecclesiastics, their ambition, and their love
of lucre, have been proverbial, the scandal of Christians, and
the scorn of unbelievers. The covetousness of the Priest,
has, in all periods, been outstripped by his pride alone; and
under every change in society, the Priesthood have taken
care to secure themselves so that their lines should fall in
the most pleasant places. The struggle is a worldly one
from beginning to end, it is all of the world and the things
of the world; if the prize were not of earth, we should hear
far less noise amongst the combatants. The struggle is a
worldly one, the policy is a worldly one, the means and
ends are worldly. For are there any means so evil, that
Creeds, if there is a purpose to be gained, will not tempt to,
or assist with force, if there be the power to use it; with
fraud, if there is a necessity that demands it? Creeds and
doctrines have been maintained by frauds the most barefaced,
by every artifice and by every falsehood. But Creeds
are indirectly the cause of dire immorality; of immorality
the worst in its kind, and the most evil in its effects: they
corrupt motive in its very source, they weaken that sense of
inward sincerity necessary to all that is true and noble in
human character, they punish honesty, and they bribe to
hypocrisy. How many minds have been robbed of their
truthfulness, how many consciences have been despoiled of
their integrity, how many hearts sacrificed their purity on
the altar of interest and expediency, it would be a long and
dark catalogue to enumerate. And it is truly painful to
think, that this result is prepared for in the brightest and the
best period of life. What must be the effect on a young
man who, at the very threshold of his College studies, must
profess to believe dogmas that he has scarcely read, that he
has never examined; how much worse if he has examined
and disbelieves them: if he be honest, he is excluded; the
fear of his family starts before him; if he spares them, he
ruins his soul; if he speaks the truth, he wrecks, perhaps, all
his worldly fortunes beyond redemption. When he sees then
the most solemn interests made mere matters of form, religious
declarations the tests of honours and of office, the
confessions of grave Ecclesiastics but a pompous and solemn
hypocrisy, the zeal for worldly gain killing the ardour of religion,
the zeal for religion itself only a means to get wealth
and power; when, I say, he beholds all this, he can have no
other feeling than that of unmitigated contempt for the
hollow show of orthodoxy; he must observe that it is only
an instrument, a mere make believe, theatrical acting; and
the chances are many, that, disgusted with the whole affair,
he transfers his disgust to religion in general, and makes
shipwreck both of faith and virtue. Creeds are the support
of Priestly intolerance; these are the statutes of the Priest.
He does not, it is true, require you to believe them, but he
requires you to say you believe them; say but that and your
peace is made. These are his statutes on which he condemns,
or on which he acquits; by which he tries your allegiance
to sacerdotal authority, and by which, if he can, he
will enforce it. Creeds are instruments of worldly and of
spiritual despotism. The relation of the Priesthood to the
civil power, is changeful and capricious; one time its slave,
another time its tyrant. Cunning Kings have always had
the sagacity to see that the safest course was to flatter and
enrich the Priesthood, giving them the shield of the temporal
power, and receiving in return the support of the whole spiritual
armoury either from heaven or hell; and both, thus
agreed and united, have been enabled to enslave the people
with a most hopeless bondage. Let the Prince but heap
good things on the Church, hate her enemies, curse her opponents,
patronise her friends, the Church gratefully in return
submits to him with most obsequious obedience. But
reverse the case, and suppose the Prince not only ventures
to do without the Priests, but attempts to curtail some of
their good things, then no epithet is too strong to mark his
iniquity; he is then profane, heretical, infidel: and if the superstition
of the people give them the power, they compel
him to bend before spiritual prowess, and from being their
master, reduce him to their slave. The spirit of a Creed-enforcing
Clergy is also seen in this fact, that they dislike
the civil power more and more as that power becomes liberal
and enlightened; they oppose it, and abuse it in exact proportion
as it deserves to be admired and praised: if there be
but a symptom that their monopoly is likely to be broken,
and that others are about to share blessings which they had
so long kept to themselves as to think only their own,
immediately the Monarch must be prepared to meet the
fierceness of their enmity. It is a combat to which many a
Monarch has been unequal, and to which many a one has
fallen a victim. Tyranny on their side, and slavery on
that of others, is the congenial element in which most established
Priesthoods move, breathe, and have their being;
the men themselves are the victims of their circumstances,
circumstances which the influence of Creeds have made;
for Creeds are the parents of Priestcraft, and Priestcraft is
identical with religious despotism.
Creeds are the allies of worldly policy; Creeds are the
creatures of the Church, and the Church is the creature of
the state. A national Church with Creeds for its tests, and
legal support and legal penalties, can be nothing else. And
the English Establishment is peculiarly in this condition;
are not her Bishops appointed by the government? Are we
not all aware that every Prelate is virtually the selected of
the minister for the time being? Are we not aware that her
canons and constitution, her catechisms and articles, her
rubrics and her ceremonies, are enforced and established by
acts of parliament? Are we not especially aware that her
wealthy revenues are derived from compulsory exaction, and
that payment is wrenched from Dissenters by the strong arm
of the law?—Whence, but from this source, can the Clergy
claim their wealth? By what other power could they enforce
it? Every one, who is not a simpleton, knows that the vast
possessions in which the Church rejoices, are not free will
offerings, and that they have stronger security in the Courts
of Exchequer and Chancery, than in the consciences of those
who pay them. They were at first endowments to the
Church of Rome; it is by act of parliament that they enrich
those who maintain the Thirty-nine Articles, instead of praying
for souls in Purgatory. The Monarch, in this country,
is acknowledged the supreme head of the Church on earth;
and though that Monarch may be a girl of eighteen, a boy of
eleven, an infant, or an idiot, it is exclusion from the established
ministry to deny it, and was once high treason. To
be persuaded of this fact, we have only to recollect that the
law of the land deposed the Romish Priesthood, and that the
Act of Uniformity excluded from the service of the altar two
thousand non-conforming Ministers. “The second Canon
excommunicates every one who shall endeavour to limit or
extenuate the King’s authority in Ecclesiastical cases, as it is
settled by the laws of the kingdom; and declares he shall not
be restored until he has recanted such impious errors.”
“The thirty-seventh Canon obliges all persons, to their utmost,
to keep and observe all and every one of the statutes
and laws made for restoring to the crown the ancient jurisdiction
it had over the Ecclesiastical state.” “The twelfth
of King James’s Canons declares, that whoever shall affirm
that it is lawful for the order either of Ministers or Laics, to
make canons, decrees, or constitutions, in Ecclesiastical matters,
without the King’s authority, and submits himself to be
governed by them, is, ipso facto, excommunicated, and is not
to be absolved before he has publicly repented and renounced
these Anabaptistical errors.” Queen Anne, in an
angry letter to the Archbishop, made the convocation aware
that “she was resolved to maintain her supremacy as a fundamental
part of the constitution of the Church of England.”
“Archbishop Bancroft, when at the head of all the Clergy
of England, delivered articles to King James for increasing
the Ecclesiastical courts, and for annexing all Ecclesiastical
as well as Civil power to the Crown. This may be seen at
large in Lord Coke’s third institute.” On such grounds as
these, men claim authority to impose Creeds on their fellow-citizens,
to proclaim themselves the commissioned messengers
of heaven, to assert religious supremacy and to arrogate
a divine right; to bind and loose, to condemn and to forgive.
I heard a person lately well remark, that if you gave him the
incomes of the Clergy, he would give you the social status of
those from whom they were taken, and vice versa. At ordination,
they solemnly affirm that they are moved by the Holy
Ghost; but if the extreme stipend were two or three hundred
a year, this inspiration would seldom be found to fall
on the son of a Duke, or the brother of an Earl.
But, whatever be the abuses which Creeds occasion, or
whatever be the evils they inflict, it may still be said the
Church has authority to decree them; and what she has authority
to decree, she has authority to enforce. To one of
the strongest arguments on this point lately renewed, and
more strenuously urged than it had ever been before, I shall
here devote a few general observations.
The claim to dictate and enforce Creeds by the Clergy of
our Establishment, is founded on another claim which, by a
party of divines, is recently asserted with a zeal not inferior
to that of the Romish Priesthood; I allude to the doctrine
of Apostolic succession. It is pretended that the national
Clergy by deriving a mission from the immediate disciples of
Christ, have authority, by a mystical communication of divine
energy transmitted to them from age to age, an authority to
decide what is, and what is not, the true faith. On this
ground the high Churchmen consistently deny to all other
Ministers the power to teach or to preach, and with one fell
stroke, cut off the whole of the Dissenters from the spiritual
body of Christ. On this ground we may ask several questions
which must receive very unsatisfactory, or very contradictory
answers. First—where, in the gospel history, is it
proposed, as an essential qualification of a religious teacher,
that he shall have an uninterrupted succession from the
Apostles? Paul, in his letters to Timothy and Titus, enumerates
many qualities which should distinguish the Christian
Minister; but Apostolical succession is not once mentioned
amongst the number. In the early age of Christianity, we
have abundant evidence, both from Evangelical and Ecclesiastical
history, that many preached the gospel who had no
such authority as Churchmen call Ordination or Holy orders.
Secondly—is it possible that the Apostles could have
any successors? The Apostles had powers to which no Priest
in his highest pride, will dare to lay claim; the Apostles
healed the sick, cast out demons, raised the dead; they
proved their mission by miracles, and this gave a peculiarity
to their office which, it will be admitted, was not transferable.
Besides, between the office of an Apostle and that of
a Bishop, there is no identity, and few analogies. An
Apostle was a missionary, a Bishop is a temporal and spiritual
peer: there is no more resemblance of one to the
other, than of his grace of Canterbury amidst the sumptuous
luxury of his palace, to a Moravian preacher in the snows of
Lapland; than of the Bishop of Exeter declaiming politics
in the senate, to Felix Neff proclaiming Christ amidst the
Alps. An Apostle was a poor man, a Bishop is a rich one;
an Apostle was a pilgrim and wanderer, a Bishop is a mitred
prince; an Apostle was the object of contumely and scorn
to a world which was not worthy of him, a Bishop is the
praised and the applauded by a world of which he is worthy;
an Apostle was the servant of the humble and the lowly, a
Bishop is the companion of the exalted and the great; an
Apostle was the object of state persecution, a Bishop is the
favourite of state patronage: by what paradoxical mistake,
therefore, one office came to be derived from the other, it is
a puzzle to conjecture. Thirdly—by what sort of evidence
is the succession to be proved; what are the conditions
which render it true and genuine? By what signs am I to
know that the Ecclesiastical concatenation is one whole unbroken
chain, without a single heretical flaw? By what signs
am I to know that the sacerdotal mystery is rightly given,
that there is no spuriousness, no falsehood, and no forgery?
Is every peasant, who hears a sermon from his Parson, to
be in possession of that historic lore, which shall enable
him to determine, by erudite tracing of age to age, that
orthodox hands have been laid on orthodox heads, and that
he to whom he commits the salvation of his soul has all the
conditions of a true priesthood? Fourthly—Whence does
the Church of England derive her succession?—That she
derives it from the Church of Rome, all authentic ecclesiastical
history confirms. The establishment of the English
Church can be clearly traced no further than the mission of
Austin the Romish Monk; and it is well known, indeed,
there is no attempt at denial, that all which have since been
called papal errors, were then proclaimed and adopted. The
preacher came with the pope’s sanction, the English received
the pope’s religion, and acknowledged the pope’s authority.
It is vain beyond all vanities to argue for succession in the
English Establishment, and assert its independence on the
Church of Rome. Its origin is from a Roman Missionary;
it admits the validity of Roman ordination; its liturgies and
rituals are but garbled or abridged translations from Roman
formularies. Whence then is the independence? If unbroken
succession be the absolute condition of ecclesiastical authority,
then the English establishment must either admit the
jurisdiction of the Church of Rome, or acknowledge itself
guilty of rebellion, and confess that it is wanting in one of
the prime essentials of a Christian Church. But our Establishment
accuses the Romish system of all manner of errors
and of evils, of idolatry, of tyranny, of persecution, of doing
dishonour to the supremacy of God, and of undermining the
merits of Christ,—of being an awful and fatal apostacy:
surely then the purity of that descent may well be doubted,
which comes from so corrupt a source. The Church of Rome
is called by all our declamatory divines the “mother of
harlots,”—if that of England be one of her daughters, it is
a hard task for a controversialist to defend the legitimacy of
her birth or the purity of her character. Moreover, that
is a queer kind of unbroken succession, which could in
a few years reflect so many hues of doctrine, which turned
from reign to reign like the weathercock before the wind, as
royal caprice determined, from the bigoted half popery of the
Eighth Henry to the whole Protestantism of the Sixth Edward;
from the violent Catholic Mary, to the equally violent
reformed Elizabeth; from a Cranmer to a Gardiner, and from
a Gardiner to a Laud. It is not, therefore, grateful or graceful
in our Establishment to heap odium on her mother, her
from whom she must date her existence, to whom she traces
her clergy, and from whom she has received her creed.
III. In disputing against creeds, and churches which are
the creatures of creeds, I do not deny that religion most
genuine and pure, may exist in many forms—and may be as
fervent amongst the adherents of Establishments as amongst
the most zealous of dissenting churches. Religion, I consider,
a necessity of the human heart; it may grovel in the dust or
aspire to the skies—it may appeal to our fears or to our hopes—it
may create hideous images or rejoice in beautiful picturings;
it may decorate the altar with flowers, or bathe it in
blood; but still it belongs to us, is of us, and that of which
we cannot, if we would, divest ourselves. While man has
within his soul admiration of greatness and power, unsatisfied
desires and perishing pleasures; while he has many griefs and
many tears; while there are those living whom he loves,
and those departed whom he mourns; while his existence
is thus bound to the past and to the future; while he
has speculations that seek but find no limit, musings on
his own and universal destiny,—he must have religion to
destroy these, and you destroy religion, but you also destroy
humanity. If the strongest excitements and the
deepest contrasts could fill and satisfy the human soul, our
age and country supply them; whatever would fix us to the
material and the present we have in all possible varieties, both
in their glory and their grossness. If the spirit is to be seen
anxious with poverty we have but a few steps to walk from
rejoicing splendour to pining misery. Civilization is amongst
us with all its luxuries and with all its woes. Thousands toil
for daily bread, and thousands more languish for daily
pleasures. Yet nobler things have we than these. Our
science, our philosophy, and our literature, are rich beyond
expression. Our mechanism is akin to magic, and our industry
is like the regularity of nature; the stir of many interests
is abroad, and the struggle of many principles. The
power of fresh life is in the social heart, and the courage of
free speech upon the lips. The tide of thought and liberty
moves onward with majestic swell, and no one can say
“Hitherto shalt thou come and no further, and here shall thy
proud waves be staid.” Whatever there be in wealth, in
power, in glory, in ambition, that desires triumphant sway
and secures all it desires; whatever there be in speculation of
boundless enterprize or capacity of gigantic achievement, our
times may boast, yet they remove not the need of religion,
but the religion which the heart demands is not what creeds
or churches can give either to a nation or an individual.
Creeds are the allies of establishments, and establishments
are the friends of the world. Their whole history and tendency
are evidence of this. But, far be it from me to say
that this has no qualification. All old institutions more or
less knit themselves into popular veneration, the religious as
well as others. We cannot look back upon the church of our
country, even in its Romish form, without some of the reverence
with which our nature compels us to gaze on fallen
greatness; and now that the mitre is worn by other heads,
and the crosier passed into other hands, now that its good
deeds reveal themselves in the calm of the past, we can regard
its evil ones more in sorrow than in anger. Zealots,
who would eternalize the darkest creeds that superstition ever
shaped, who would build up the throne of proudest priesthood,
declaim against Popery in the most popish spirit: but
while national feelings have any power, while a single venerable
structure stands upon our soil in which we hear the voices
of our ancestors, and from which a thousand years look down
upon us, the Roman church, with all its errors, is linked by
sacred memories to our history. It laid the foundation of
our civilized existence; it grew with our growth and it
strengthened with our strength. When our country was yet
divided amongst barbarian kings, the monk of Rome lifted
up the cross of Christ, and the heart of the savage was subdued
to the Prince of Peace. It accompanied our national
independence, it trained our fathers’ spirits when living, and
now they are dead it shelters their bones. Through all historic
changes, and through most sanguinary struggles, it
preserved alive the spirit of our common Christianity.
Within it arose many of our greatest men; it nurtured
many of our purest and holiest characters; it reared the altar
at which an Anselm ministered and before which an Alfred
prayed. But wealth commonly brings worldliness, and as it
is with laymen, so is it with ecclesiastics. The church was
fed and fostered by Saxon piety, and when the conquest gave
the island new masters it suffered nothing by the change.
The progress of aggrandizement went forward with a quicker
pace and a more grasping hand. Spiritual authority allied
itself more firmly to temporal majesty; celestial vocation
would have feudal titles; the coil would be transformed to
the coronet; the humble robe to the princely purple; the
voice of humility swelled into absolute command, monks took
their places above barons, and the primate sat only below the
throne.
But under that pomp and ostentation, we say not that
all was hollow—that there was not much of genuine piety
far beyond the reach of history. In the cells of these gorgeous
abbeys there were many who did in reality leave the
world and its wickedness behind them. There were some who
wept and prayed in no feigned prostration, who worshipped,
it may be with superstition, but still with sensibility and an
upright conscience. In that stream of melody which pealed
at solemn midnight through many a dome that now lies mouldering,
there were some hallelujahs which reached the throne
of God and mingled with the hymn of angels. The pavements
over which we tread in many a secluded ruin may have been
worn by kneeling martyrs that now sleep in peace beneath
them: within these massive buildings so grey and time-wrecked,
how often might be found at the evening hour, when the
dim religious light melted through the painted windows, and
the vesper song softened through the lofty vaults, scattered
worshippers who were feeding their immortal life: how frequently
within those temples may the serf in faith and prayer
have forgotten his bonds, and only remembered that he was
the brother of Jesus, and the son of God. And amongst
that priesthood so often stigmatized unjustly by indiscriminate
bigotry, many were worthy of their office; they were
the poor man’s friends when poverty was hopeless; they
were his brethren when to the worldly powers poverty was
slavery; they were his supporters and consolers when he
had many to oppress and few to cheer him; they were with
him in joy and sorrow, in sickness and death, when his joy
and sorrow, his sickness and death, were to the mass of his
worldly superiors, a matter of contemptible indifference. In
the times to which I refer, the Church was a most excellent
antagonist against political assumption, a barrier against despotism,
a shield for the people against the crown; but now
it is an ally of the crown only when the crown is against
the people: in either, the Crown and the Church struggle
may have been only for supremacy, but whatever were their
respective motives, the people were the gainers; the clergy
might make them slaves for another world, but they saved
them from being slaves in this. The power of the priest
could curb the ambition of the ruler; and, in the ruler himself,
the will of the monarch was held in check by the conscience
of the devotee. Ecclesiastical institutions were then
not wholly ineffective, but now the religious and social interests
of man are better secured than by any struggle between
the superstitious fears of the Prince, and the spiritual threatenings
of the Priest. From these social changes, Church Establishments
outliving the slaveries which they meliorated,
become inflictors of slavery in return, and hang as millstones
and dead weights on every effort for freedom and advancement.
But if we are to have authority on conscience
at all in the form of institutions, I would rather it should
be absolute and unchangeable, uniform, solemn, and imposing;
and if there is to be submission, I prefer it should
be to that which is believed to be stedfast and infallible; for
then, if we had not the freedom of thought, we might at
least have the peace of piety; if we had not the independence
of men, we might hope for the meekness of children.
We cannot say that the English Church in its Protestant
state has lost all claims to traditional veneration. We may,
however, safely assert, that in becoming protestant, it has
not become less earthly, and that if transformed in anything,
it is not from the Spirit of the world. We see very clearly,
that it is not in any way distinguished for free or progressive
amendment; and among the Reformed of European churches
it is most the creature of the world, most the lover of the
world, most dependent on the world, both in its origin and
its continuance.
On the continent it commenced with the ecclesiastical
powers; in ours it commenced with the civil; and the church
in this country adopted the new doctrine rather as a matter
of command than as a matter of conscience. Whatever
have been the theological vibrations of the Establishment, or
whatever its theological inconsistencies, we deny not that it
has had within it right noble spirits, and that it has them still,
and while we condemn such systems, we do not so much
condemn, as lament the fine natures which they have misdirected.
Numbers we are aware are now in its ranks, which
are the ornaments of life and to whom the world is in many
ways indebted; and if it were not so, there are those gone
by who would fully dignify her. Amongst her members we
recognise many of the great lights both of our nation and our
nature; a Jeremy Taylor of rich eloquence and rare sweetness
of spirit; a Barrow with a mind as lofty as it was simple and
an oratory as prodigal in thought as it was massive in logic;
a Chillingworth, the prince of reasoners, who never allowed
his polemics to ruffle his meekness, to warp his candour, or
to deaden his charity; a Berkeley, whose genius was only inferior
to his sanctity, and whose subtle philosophy never disturbed
the simplicity of his truly child-like nature; a Bedel,
who was humble and generous when it was the fashion to
oppress, who though the bishop of a foreign faith in the
midst of a people whom his nation had aggrieved, made his
way to their hearts, and was the object of their blessings;
and in our own day there has been the good and sainted
Heber, who combined piety with humanity, and who adorned
practical virtue with all the beauty of the poet and the
Christian.
Names like these might throw a lustre over any system; it
is only to be regretted that any system has not been more
fruitful in their production. In any system, we cannot expect
that such men should be abundant, but observation
compels us to confess that the Church has taken more pride
in the reputation of her heroes, than in resembling them.
If we are to judge results by her possessions and opportunities
compared with her moral or spiritual achievements, her
works of worldliness far surpass her works of godliness. Her
earthly means have been unbounded, but where are her heavenly
trophies? She has nothing in comparison to her opportunities
to produce in justification of her moral and national
stewardship. Wealth she has had even to fulness.
Her lines have fallen in pleasant places; hers have been the
green pastures and hers the still waters; the tenth of the nation’s
produce has been reserved for her altars. Political
power has likewise been hers. Her mitred ministers are
amongst the state’s chief senators. Whether it be seemly
or not, that preachers of the crucified should sit in courts of
proud and worldly legislation, we here forbear to discuss;
but once there, the spirit of the crucified, and of the citizen
sanctified by that spirit, might have been nobly manifested;
even there, Ministers of Christ might have done a glorious
work. Men whose lives had been disciplined by severe and
various study; men of chastened passions and solemn meditation;
men who had gone through the humanizing duties of
pastoral gradation from the village pulpit to the episcopal
throne, might be thought a happy counterpoise to the hoary
worldliness or youthful rashness of mere temporal Peers;
they would rebuke, we might suppose, the assumptions of
aristocracy, and be as the voice of God for the rights of the
poor. Men who proclaimed that gospel which is full of
mercy and compassion, would resist oppression to the last,
and denounce sanguinary laws with the whole force of their
authority; men who were followers of peace would arrest
the blood-hand of war, and quell with all gentle suasion the
horrid spirit of destruction; men appointed to be teachers of
the ignorant, and lights to the blind, would be the friends of
universal instruction; men who were the Priests of that God
before whom all are equal, the Apostles of that Jesus who
lived and died for all, would be ever the friends of liberty and
brotherhood. But, I may ask, when have the Bishops, as a
body, not been against the people, and with the wealthy
and the noble? When have they been the first to come forward
to denounce long existing, tolerated, but oppressive,
abuses? When have they raised their voice, as Ministers of
God, against Ministers of the Crown, to avert the horrid
curse of war? When have they given their influence for a
free and generous education, which should be full and boundless
as the heart of charity? When, rather, have they not
thrown their most inveterate opposition against it? When is
it that a single effort of national liberty or religious has met
their cordial support? To the moment of despair they stood
against the Catholic and the Dissenter, to the last hour they
will also resist the Jew. The defender of the wronged, the
pleader for the weak, the opponent of sanctified prejudices,
the enthusiast for human reforms, the advocate for peace,
the apostle of general education, have never in their most
hopeless hour raised their eyes towards the bench of Bishops
with any expectations of support.
With wealth, with influence, with law, and with scholarship,
the Church has done, and is doing no great spiritual
work for her country, or for mankind, proportioned to her
means. She makes a show of upholding her Creeds, but to
many, even of her own members, they are but empty sounds
or convenient mockeries. When we look for any permanent
impression on the popular mind, we have yet to ask concerning
the Church, what has she done? Has she Christianized
any great tracts of Heathenism? The English Establishment,
as a Church, has exhibited no missionary zeal,
and can show no missionary triumphs. Individuals and
bodies that belong to her communion, have undoubtedly
been active in the great movements that distinguish modern
times, but the impulse has been from outside the Church, and
not from within it—from the zeal of the Sectaries, and not from
the Creeds or Constitution of the Church. On the contrary,
of those who never owned the Establishment, you might
find proofs of Missionary zeal from Indus to the Pole, and
from Andes to the Alps. But has she protestantized our
own empire? Consult the writings of Doctor Baines, or
those of Doctor Wiseman; nay, let the lamentations of Reformation
Society itself, ever wailing over the increase of
Popery, give the answer; look through the villages and the
glens of England, where Roman Catholic Chapels are starting
up as from the earth, and you will find the answer fully
justified. Ask it in the cities and the mountains of Ireland,
the shout of millions will proclaim what Established Protestantism
has done with all her Creeds and Clergy after centuries
of existence, and a countless expenditure. Three
hundred years have nearly expired since the reformed standard
has been planted on that soil, and after all the spoliation
and persecution to which the country has been subjected,
after all the blood and sorrow that have been expended in
the work of compulsory proselytism, Popery has grown
stronger, and Protestantism is expiring. The people pay
with repugnance a priesthood in whom they have not faith,
but no power can force them to the worship in which
they have no heart, and they prefer to be taxed rather
than be taught. They are repelled further and further from
that system which commenced in a blunder, and has been
continued by rapacity, which reverses the precepts of Christ,
using the sword where he commands it to be sheathed—which
reverses the course of the olden Israelites finding a
land of milk and honey, but leaving it a wilderness, having
the pillar of fire always before, and the pillar of cloud ever
behind; the one kept in flame by hatred and strife, and
the other continually dark with maledictions and tears.
But admitting the difficulties of proselytism, examine the
moral state of those over whom the Church has had
undivided control—those with whom there has been least
of foreign interference, and I may appeal to her most
strenuous defenders, whether she has not allowed thousands
of human souls to grow up around her for whom she provided
no shelter, whose hearts and wants she made no effort
to reach: they lived without her teaching, they mourned
without her solace, they sickened without her prayer, and
until she received the fees for their burial, she was ignorant
of their existence. Yet, after all, by many she has been called
“The poor man’s Church.” It is true that for some years past,
and especially at present, there has been a species of excitement
and activity in the church: but so far as these have
moral life in them, so far as they concern the spiritual interests
of the people, whence did they originate? Where
were they before John Wesley and Whitfield raised their
soul-piercing cries, and awoke the sense of immortality that
was dormant in the minds of besotted multitudes? Did the
church join with these men, or rather did it not persecute,
calumniate, expel them—say and do all manner of evil against
them? What at the present hour is the activity of the
church? Much, it may be, is sincere and conscientious, but
greatly more an emulation with dissenters in which the pregnant
elements are jealousy and fear. Much, it may be, of
disinterested action for the souls of men, but more it is to be
feared for the order and the church. Great excitement there
is in the Establishment, but little of calm and healthy action—a
mighty stir of polemics that make few converts, and of societies
that beat the air. The church has neither union within,
nor peace without. Her hand is against all, and the hands of
all are against her. She holds forth creeds as the symbols of
unity, and yet within her own courts are all sorts of divisions,
a chaos of voices that make her the very Babel of theology;
here is one preaching the grace of Palagius, and there another
that of Augustine; one arguing for the hell of Calvin, and
another all but teaching the purgatory of the pope: one a
Boanerges for the Bible, and another an apostle for tradition;
with one, Rome is the mother of abominations, and with
another she is the mistress of churches. Amidst the din,
then, of polemics, politics, and theological contradictions, of
inward confusion and outward strifes, how are we to catch
the voice of moral power and of gospel truth? The truth
must be told, there is no grand or concentrative energy of
any sort in the church; neither faith nor freedom, neither
bold speculation nor a mighty spiritual zeal; there is no room
even for a gigantic fanaticism or a picturesque superstition;
upon the whole the strife is of this world, and for it; a strife
for wealth or place, in which the spiritual is swallowed in the
earthly. With all her riches and honours; with all her show
of dignities and pride of prelacy, she is yet poor in enlightened
esteem, poorer still in general affection; without authority
to sway the superstitious or liberality to attach the thinking,
she has neither the submission of faith nor the approbation
of reason. She has, considering her position and means,
fulfilled no great Christian or Protestant mission; is she then
in a humbler sphere, the friend of general education? Passing
over the Universities, which with a heavy hand she has
bolted against dissenters, is she favourable to the instruction
of the youthful poor? No: except in connection with her
ecclesiastical supremacy. Until recently she had no zeal
whatever in the matter: but other parties becoming active,
under the broad gaze of public observation, both her fears
and her interest were awakened. Whilst others were toiling,
she for very shame could not sit wholly idle, and she therefore
adopted education, so far as it was an instrument to counteract
her rivals or to preserve her authority. But to the last
and to the death, she is the sworn enemy to any system of
popular instruction which is comprehensive, liberal, and unsectarian.
In this great country, where, thanks to law and
not to creeds, each man may hold and speak his own opinion,
she meets with defiance and resistance every movement towards
a large and equal distribution of knowledge, for lack of
which the people are literally perishing. In a country like
this where sects are so many and so various, and where each
has an equal claim on the blessings of civilized institutions,
with a bigotry equalled only by its injustice, she would usurp
the monopoly of national instruction. This is in the true
spirit of creeds, and however repugnant to Christian equity
is fully consistent with worldly policy.
When the church of England seceded from that of Rome,
if she cut off some theological errors, she showed no such disposition
respecting her earthly riches. It cannot be doubted
that in the Reformed Establishment, a greed of lucre remained
as deep as was ever in the Romish, less ideal in its form, and
more selfish in its spirit. In our times men absorb the interests
of their church in the interests of themselves, in olden
times men lost themselves in the glory of their church; in
that was centered every thing, even passion itself, as one great
and mighty sentiment. From this it was arose the solemn
structure of universal empire; from this sprung forth the
vision of a glory that was to fill the universe. It was this
called up a power before which monarchs bowed, which armed
itself with the terrors of hell and crowned itself with the stars
of heaven. It was this which gave genius the sublimity of
religious inspiration, and which has left for a colder age the
forms of beauty to which faith gave life; it was this which
could speak to the world as to single audience with an eloquence
that must live while language has existence. It may
be called fanaticism and ambition, but it is a fanaticism and an
ambition that had something unworldly to dignify them. The
reformed church had preserved the creeds of the ancient one,
but not its creativeness; it has not given conscience freedom,
but it has stripped faith of poetry. Even the ceremonies and
forms which it has preserved are without energy and inspiration—the
mere mimicries of superstition unfraught with a
single breath of its enthusiasm. Writings of no common
eloquence have eulogized the cathedral service; it deserves all
that can be said of it, and so do the temples themselves; no
one can hear the one when it receives right expression without
solemn emotion, and no one can behold the antique majesty
of the other, but in silent veneration. The poetry of these
things is beautiful, but what is the reality? A sad contrast—in
general, a cold and heartless utterance of the service, unoccupied
pews, a few listless hearers, feeble choirs, that seem
rather to sing the requiem than the triumph of the church,
ostentation without grandeur, and formality without grace.
Here, as in every other department, we find the dominant
spirit of worldliness. Though this service depends for much
of its impression on ritual beauty, yet the higher clergy continually
encroach on the revenues and means of sustaining
it. “When we see,” says Dr. Wiseman, “the cathedral
service shrunk into the choir originally designed for the private
daily worship of God’s special ministers, or when we
find the entire congregation scattered over a small portion of
the repaired chancel, while the rest of the edifice is a majestic
ruin, as I but lately witnessed, assuredly one must be more
prone to weep than to exult at the change which has taken
place, since these stately fabricks were erected.” I would
not have the world hurled back into Popery; but if we are
to have Romish creeds, rather than have them in repulsive
nakedness, give them to us covered and adorned with the
grace of Romish ceremonies; if we are to resign our liberty,
give us at least grandeur and pageantry to amuse our slavery.
But creeds exist otherwise than in formal expression. A
creed is the standard of a church, it may be the spirit of a
sect. And from the antagonistic aspect which each sect bears
to another, and the centralized organization which it has
within itself, this spirit may have a fierce and powerful operation.
The Church-creed is defined; the Sect-creed is
vague, and may depend for interpretation on narrow and
bitter prejudice: the Church-creed may possibly lie dormant,
but there is no escape from the wakeful vigilance of a religious
surveillance. What some sects do by enlarged and
rigid co-operation, others effect by compact and separate
unions. The smallness of the assemblies, or the gradations
of dependency, puts one individual within the immediate ken
of another, and thus, if by chance a free thought should be
born, there is little hope that it shall live. Take methodism
as an illustration; so gigantic and yet so minute: with its
band-meetings, its class-meetings, its district assemblies, and
its general conference—leaving not a spot where a heretic
could hide himself. In such a system there is neither room
nor a name for liberty, from the preacher who is under
the brow of his conference to the member who lives in the
eye of his class-leader. It is not that such a system creates
a terror of expression, from the first it initiates a slavish intellect—and
tends to all the vices of rancour, bigotry, hypocrisy,
and subserviency, to which such an intellect is allied.
It may be said that my own community in being also a
sect, is open to similar accusations. I do not say that a
dictation of belief is essential to a sect, but it may possibly
attach to it with all the despotism of the most formal creed.
If a creed in spirit or expression be necessary to the constitution
of a sect, those then are no sect with whom I
would desire to hold communion. If all in my own belief or
any other, which is great, good, pure, and eternal, inspired
by the mind of God and blessed to the heart of man; if all
which disseminates virtue; which justifies Providence, which
emancipates and glorifies society, goes onward with undeviating
pace, if the Kingdom of Jehovah extends, and the
throne of Christ is reared, and the temple of righteousness
is beautified, then, forgetting ourselves and forgetting our
sect, we should rejoice with an honest and generous exultation.
We trust the day will come, when the spirit and the
life of Christ, and not the formularies of men, will be the
standards of true religion; when we shall have unity instead
of divisions, when we shall have charity instead of creeds,
when heretic and orthodox shall be lost in the common name
of Christian.
LECTURE XI. THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF MORAL EVIL. BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU. — NOTES. — A. Origin of the Doctrine of Two Principles. — B. Hebrew Names for the Evil Spirit. — C. The parallel Passages in the Epistles of Jude and 2 Peter. — Footnotes for Lecture XI.
“WOE UNTO THEM THAT SAY, ... LET THE COUNSEL OF THE HOLY ONE OF
ISRAEL DRAW NIGH AND COME, THAT WE MAY KNOW IT; WOE UNTO
THEM THAT CALL EVIL GOOD, AND GOOD EVIL; THAT PUT DARKNESS
FOR LIGHT, AND LIGHT FOR DARKNESS; THAT PUT BITTER FOR
SWEET, AND SWEET FOR BITTER.”—Isaiah v. 18-20.
The Divine sentiments towards right and wrong every man
naturally believes to be a reflexion of whatever is most pure
and solemn in his own. We cannot be sincerely persuaded,
that God looks with aversion on dispositions which we revere
as good and noble; or that he regards with lax indifference
the selfish and criminal passions which awaken our own disgust.
We may well suppose, indeed, his scrutiny more
searching, his estimate more severely true, his rebuking look
more awful, than our self-examination and remorse can fitly
represent; but we cannot doubt that our moral emotions, as
far as they go, are in sympathy with his; that we know, by
our own consciousness, the general direction of his approval
and displeasure; and that, in proportion as our perceptions
of Duty are rendered clear, our judgment more nearly approaches
the precision of the Omniscient award. Our own
conscience is the window of heaven through which we gaze
on God: and, as its colours perpetually change, his aspect
changes too; if they are bright and fair, he dwells as in the
warm light of a rejoicing love; if they are dark and turbid, he
hides himself in robes of cloud and storm. When you have
lost your self-respect, you have never thought yourself an object
of divine complacency. In moments fresh from sin,
flushed with the shame of an insulted mind, when you have
broken another resolve, or turned your back upon a noble
toil, or succumbed to a mean passion, or lapsed into the sickness
of self-indulgence, could you ever turn a clear and open
face to God, nor think it terrible to meet his eye? Could
you imagine yourself in congeniality with him, when you
gave yourself up to the voluble sophistry of self-excuse, and
the loose hurry of forgetfulness? Or did you not discern him
rather in your own accusing heart, and meet him in the silent
anguish of full confession, and find in the recognition of your
alienation the first hope of return? To all unperverted
minds, the verdict of conscience sounds with a preternatural
voice; it is not the homely talk of their own poor judgment,
but an oracle of the sanctuary. There is something of anticipation
in our remorse, as well as of retrospect; and we feel
that it is not the mere survey of a gloomy past with the slow
lamp of our understanding, but a momentary piercing of the
future with the vivid lightning of the skies. Our moral nature,
left to itself, intuitively believes that guilt is an estrangement
from God,—an unqualified opposition to his will,—a literal
service of the enemy; that he abhors it, and will give it no
rest till it is driven from his presence, that is, into annihilation:
that no part of our mind belongs to him but the pure,
and just, and disinterested affections which he fosters; the
faithful will which he strengthens; the virtue, often damped,
whose smoaking flax he will not quench, and the good resolves,
ever frail, whose bruised reed he will not break: and
that he has no relation but of displeasure, no contact but of
resistance, with our selfishness and sin. In the simple faith of
the conscience it is no figure of speech to say, that God “is
angry with the wicked every day” and is “of purer eyes than
to behold iniquity.” So long as the natural religion of the
heart is undisturbed, to sin is, in the plainest and most positive
sense, to set up against Heaven, and frustrate its will.
Soon, however, the understanding disturbs the tranquillity
of this belief, and constructs a rival creed. The primitive
conception of God is acquired, I believe, without reasoning,
and emerges from the affections; it is a transcript of our own
emotions,—an investiture of them with external personality
and infinite magnitude. But a secondary idea of Deity arises
in the intellect, from its reasonings about causation. Curiosity
is felt respecting the origin of things; and the order,
beauty, and mechanism of external nature, are too conspicuous
not to force upon the observation the conviction of
a great architect of the universe, from whose designing
reason its forces and its laws mysteriously sprung. Hence
the intellectual conception of God the Creator, which comes
into inevitable collision with the moral notion of God the holy
watch of virtue. For if the system of creation is the production
of his Omniscience; if he has constituted human
nature as it is, and placed it in the scene whereon it acts; if
the arrangements by which happiness is allotted, and character
is formed, are the contrivance of his thought and the
work of his hand, then the sufferings and the guilt of every
being were objects of his original contemplation, and the
productions of his own design. The deed of crime must, in
this case, be as much an integral part of his Providence as
the efforts and sacrifices of virtue; and the monsters of licentiousness
and tyranny, whose images deform the scenery of
history, are no less truly his appointed instruments than the
martyr and the sage. And though we remain convinced that
he does not make choice of evil in his government, for its
own sake, but only for ultimate ends worthy of his perfections,
still we can no longer see how he can truly hate that
which he employs for the production of good. That which is
his chosen instrument cannot be sincerely regarded as his
everlasting enemy; and only figuratively can he be said to
repudiate a power which he continually wields. There must
be some sense in which it appears, in the eye of Omniscience,
to be eligible; some point of view at which its horrors
vanish; and where the moral distinctions, which we feel
ourselves impelled to venerate, disappear from the regards of
God.
Here, then, is a fearful contradiction between the religion
of conscience and the religion of the understanding: the one
pronouncing evil to be the antagonist, the other to be the
agent, of the divine will. In every age has this difficulty
laid a heavy weight upon the human heart; in every age has
it pointed the sarcasm of the blasphemer; mingled an occasional
sadness with the hopes of benevolence; and tinged the
devotion of the thoughtful with a somewhat melancholy trust.
The whole history of speculative religion is one prolonged
effort of the human mind to destroy this contrariety; system
after system has been born in the struggle to cast the oppression
off; with what result, it will be my object at present
to explain. The question which we have to consider is this:
“How should a Christian think of the origin and existence of
evil?” I propose to advert, first, to the speculative; secondly,
to the scriptural; thirdly, to the moral relations of the subject;
to inquire what relief we can obtain from philosophical
schemes, from biblical doctrine, and from practical Christianity.
I. Notwithstanding the ingenuity of philosophers in varying
the form and language of their systems, there can be but
two solutions offered to the great problem respecting evil. The
benevolence of the Creator may be vindicated, by denying
that he is the author of evil; or, by pronouncing it his mere
tool, unavoidably introduced for the production of greater
good.
(1.) In Greece, the genius of whose people anticipated
most of the great ideas which have since occupied the world,
we find the first clear trace of the doctrine of two original
causes, one good, the other evil, of the order and disorder of
the universe.[542] Amid the almost universal pantheism, which
gave the sanction of philosophy to a corrupting mythology,
one or two great thinkers seized on the true conception of an
intelligent, eternal, infinite Mind; not mixed up in indissoluble
oneness with the universe, like the principle of life with an
animal or vegetable organism, but wholly external to matter,
capable of acting objectively upon it, of moulding it into
form, of assigning to it laws, of disposing it into uniform
arrangements, and subordinating it to the production of
beauty, the reception of life and soul, and the ends of benevolence.
With the absolute perfection, intellectual and
moral, of the creative spirit, there was nothing to interfere;
he called into existence only what is good,—light, life, happiness,
wisdom, harmony, virtue. All else was to be ascribed
to the imperfect materials from which the universe was constructed.
Of these he was not supposed to be the author;
no conception was entertained of creation out of nothing by
the volition of the divine and solitary Spirit. Co-eternally
with him, matter was thought to have existed, inert, and
dark and formless,—the boundless and unworked quarry,
whence the great Artist of earth and skies moulded the orbs
of heaven, and furnished his mansions of space with magnificence
and beauty. The materials thus provided to his hand,
did not afford unlimited facilities for the execution of his
good designs; they had the inherent and obstinate properties
of all matter, of which skill might variously avail itself, but
which Omnipotence could not utterly subdue. They for ever
dragged down every being towards the passiveness and chaos
of the primeval state, and established a universal gravitation
towards nonentity. Hence a ceaseless tendency in all things
to descend from the higher to the lower states of existence,
and to slip from the divine into the inert: on the soul of
man were forces impelling it into the grosser animal life; in
the animal life, a propensity towards disease and death; and,
in lifeless organisms, a law of corruption and return to atoms.
In this unconquerable sluggishness of matter, and not in the
intention of the Creator, was to be found the source of all evil,
natural and moral. The supreme Spirit had called into being
whatever is fair and blessed and pure; and that there is no
more good, was due to the resistance which his materials
offered to his will, and which had made his execution finite,
while his desires were infinite.
In this system, all faults and imperfections are attributed
to the opposition of a passive and evil principle, co-existent
with the First Cause, and restraining him within certain limits
in working out the problem of creation. The essential idea
of the scheme is, that the actual frame of the universe is the
result of a struggle between two conflicting energies, both
primitive and eternal, to the one of which is to be referred
all that is good, to the other whatever is evil. Make then a
slight and superficial change in this scheme; throw aside its
abstract and philosophical dress; personify this impracticable
material principle which stands in the way of the Creator’s
glorious designs: call it, instead of inert, obstinate; instead
of the residence of death, the destroyer of life; instead of a
weight on the Divinity, a force against him; in short, treat
it, not as negative, but as positive; not as impervious to
light, but as the power of darkness; not as a physical obstruction,
but as in real antipathy to God: and by such
assumption of personality, this hostile energy becomes an
active principle of evil, a malignant and antagonist God, busy
in frustrating the purposes of Providential goodness, and
spreading ruin, disorder, and guilt over the fair regions of
nature and the soul.
This doctrine of a good and evil spirit, engaged in perpetual
conflict on the theatre of the universe, is then only the popular
and mythical form of the philosophical speculations on
matter and Deity which I have described. It is commonly
known under the name of the Manichean heresy. It was
from very early times the characteristic idea of the Persian
theology; and thence, as I shall show, by admixture with
Judaism, has given rise to the prevailing belief in a devil.
To this scheme, considered as a metaphysical theory of the
divine perfections, and a solution of the perplexities respecting
natural and moral evil, objections of insurmountable force
will occur to every one. It preserves the infinite benevolence
by sacrificing the omnipotence of God. It sets up a rival to
his government, from whose malignity he can only imperfectly
protect us; so that his Providence becomes precarious,
and we feel ourselves the sport of a conflict the most awful,
beset by pure, unmitigated, indestructible evils, which, however
beaten off in the end, must win against us many a
dreadful success. A believer in this doctrine may indeed presume,
that a Being, omniscient and benign as God, would
never have called a world into existence unless assured, by
his foreknowledge, that he could prevailingly protect it from
the powers which obstructed him, and render life to every
creature on it a blessing on the whole. Under any other conditions,
his goodness would have restrained him from the act
of creation. Still the blessed Ruler sways his works under
constant check; and all limitations on his power must be proportionate
deductions from our peace. This theory, then, fails
to afford us the desired relief. It does not reconcile the God
of our conscience with the God of our understanding: it
simply adheres to the former, and rejects the latter; assuring
us that, as our secret hearts had said, the great Father hates
evil as his enemy; not, as our logic had insinuated, wields it
as his instrument.
(2.) We turn, then, to the second attempt to extricate our
thoughts from this perplexity; which is found, in a consistent
form, only in the system of philosophical necessity.
This scheme assumes the absolute, unlimited monarchy of
God; represents him as originally alone, and without either
universe or materials for its construction; teaches that he
willed all things into existence; conceiving the plan, speaking
the word, beholding the birth, sustaining the order, decreeing
the means, ordaining the end. The compass of his
design is all-embracing; all causes and effects, all enjoyment
and misery, all excellence and guilt, lie within its circuit; nor
can “there be evil in a city,” or in a world, “and the Lord
hath not done it.” We are assured, that in fact it is impossible
to distribute to separate authors the blessing and the
curse which appear to mingle in creation; for the same law
which brings the one introduces the other; the tempest which
blasts the field and flock purifies the air of pestilence; the
necessities of the body are the incentives of labour and the
stimulants of the mind; and industry and art, commerce
and wealth, the whole structure even of society and civilization,
rest on the ultimate basis of hunger. Nor is it possible
to separate suffering, even in conception, from a scene
in which great virtues are to be born, and the diviner forms
of character to be trained. Evil is the resistance, by its conquest
over which moral force can alone be measured and
manifested; without which, conscience and fidelity would have
no field of victory, benevolence no place for glorious toil,
faith and wisdom no consciousness of power. In the sickly
seductions of pleasure, are seen the health and simplicity of
holiness; amid the temptations of selfishness, we discern and
venerate the spirit of self-oblivious love; beneath the arm of
tyranny, and amid examples of hypocrisy, we learn how calm
the front of uprightness, and how noble the magnanimity of
truth. Pain is never the whole of suffering; which spreads in
moral influence beyond itself and its hour, and administers some
of our noblest discipline. The anguish of one human being
is usually the pity of many; even the guilt of one may be the
forbearance, the warning, the affectionate and healing grief,
of many. Scarcely can any ill be found that is not so linked
with visible benefits, so entangled with arrangements in which
we recognize indisputable blessings, that one only author can
be assigned to all; if he has had foresight of any thing, he
must have had foresight of all; if he has devised a part, he
must have devised the whole. Even such free-will as the
human mind possesses is a power of his own deliberate bestowal;
and the whole extent of its disastrous mistakes, its
deluded estimates, its degrading preferences, its faithless
abuse of liberty, must be considered as ordained and introduced
by him for some ultimate and transcendent good.
At present, and for a long future yet, the sufferings are great
which sin must entail upon all who come within its range;
but even its saddest victim is yet a child of God, and must
at last (benevolence requires no less) be enabled to pronounce
his existence a boon. And hence we must believe the
penalties of guilt to be remedial; subduing the stubborn soul,
and leading it back to seek its peace in God; working out
their own remission, because their victim’s restoration; till
the wail of despair shall be softened into the sob of repentance,
and this into the sigh of self-distrustful hope, falling
into the silence of deep resolve; leading to the energy of a
new fidelity, warmed by the refreshment of a returning love,
and bursting at length into grateful chorus with the song of
the redeemed.
The essential idea of this system evidently is, that evil is
a result of God’s will, his temporary instrument for everlasting
ends. This characteristic remaining, it is wholly unimportant
whether he is regarded as producing it immediately
or mediately; distributively or collectively; by detailed volitions
of his own, or by the agency of a being commissioned
to this department of his government. As the blessings,
scattered by the activity of good minds of every order in the
universe, are no less his, than if there were no creature but
himself to shed them forth, so the woes, which any dependent
spirits of evil may diffuse, belong as truly to his providence,
as if they were the personal inflictions of his will. Hence
the doctrine of wicked angels, and of a created Prince of darkness,
is the very same with the system which I have just described;
simply, its popular and mythological form, gathering
up the abstract conception of evil into a person; but still
representing it, in this living dress, as a creature intentionally
formed by the Omniscient and predetermining God. I regard
the belief in the existence of Satan, not as opposed to
the prevailing Unitarian views of Providence, but, so far as
it is consistently held, as in all essential particulars, identical
with them. Its relation to the character of God is the same;
and the sole difference between the two is in the question of
personality; a question of great consequence, when the existence
of a divine person, as the Holy Spirit, is suspended
on the decision; but of small moment when, as in this case, a
mere creature more or less is to be given to the invisible world.
What does it matter to us whether there be any, or a myriad, of
interposing agents between the ills that touch us and our God?
Surely it is with the effects,—with the evils themselves,—that
our practice and duty are concerned, and about their original
cause that our faith is anxious; and, on both these points, the
Necessarian and the Satanic schemes seem to be agreed.
Both refer our thoughts back to a time when no evil existed,
and say that none could have come into existence, had the
creative activity of God never been exercised. Both make the
same estimate of the actual sins and sorrows and temptations
which are in contact with our life; and whichever view be
adopted, these are neither increased nor diminished, their
complexion is neither brightened nor darkened, their insidiousness
and their treatment continue the same. They come
out of the dark upon us; and no more concern us till they
strike upon our experience, than a line of light affects us,
till its end impinges on our eye. Hence I cannot feel much
interest in the mere question respecting the existence of a
Devil; and must be excused for treating it as only an insignificant
part of a subject vast and terrible.
Does, then, this second system resolve our difficulties, and
altogether harmonize the perfections of God? Alas! the
success is no greater than before. Why this circuitous
method of producing a happy universe? Evil is called into
being, as an instrument of good, in this world; and then is
annihilated, by the addition of more evil, in another. If it
be the great object of Providence to get rid of suffering and
sin, if his government be an educative discipline for purifying
the guilt, illuminating the ignorance, and destroying the
misery of souls, must we not ask, why then were these
things created? If God’s providence be thus against them,
why was it ever for them? And how are we to think of those
agencies, as the work of his own hands, on which his whole
administration is said to be aggressive? No answer can be
given, except that the temporary operation of natural and
moral evil was unavoidable,—the essential and only means of
accomplishing results which all admit to be beneficent, especially
the development and progress of mind, and the probationary
discipline of character. It may be so; but, in this
explanation, the benignity of God is again saved at the expense
of his Omnipotence. If no other means were open to
him than those which he has actually employed, his range of
possibilities was mysteriously limited, his choice incomprehensibly
narrowed; and he solved the problem of Creation
under some restraining conditions. And no theory, which
leaves this shadow of necessity lingering behind the throne
of God, justifies its pretensions as the vindicator of his
Power.
Scarcely does this system seem to be reconcileable with the
Holiness of God. I confess myself unable to understand how
a Being, who is held to be the prime cause of all the moral
evil which the universe contains, can be regarded as morally
perfect; or to imagine, if this be consistent with infinite
purity, what phenomena would be inconsistent. It is not
enough to say, that the evil is produced, by no means for its
own sake, but for ultimate good. Often, at least, does a
human being do wrong on no other pretext; and the very
plea admits, that God subordinates moral distinctions to some
other good, and esteems some foreign benefit worth purchasing
by the deed of sin. Is it urged, that the foreknowledge
and infallible certainty of the Divine mind justify this,
and that it is only because man wants the requisite discernment,
that he is forbidden in his blindness to do evil, that
good may come? Then it would seem that moral distinctions
are intended only for the ignorant; and are, to an immeasurable
extent, delusions of intellectual infancy, designed to
vanish, or undergo unimaginable transformations, as our mental
vision is enlarged. And if this be so, none of our ideas
of obligation are applicable to God, and he passes beyond
the range of our moral apprehension, reverence, and love.
No; the language of piety becomes unmeaning, and the
sanctity of religion is in danger of utter ruin, unless the divine
sentiments of right and wrong are perceived to be akin to our
own, recognising the same immutable differences, and spontaneously
observing the same laws. Not even can we admit
that he has created, and could change, the relations of right
and wrong; that his will is the source of obligation, and by
a command could make into a binding duty that which in
itself is sin. Moral excellence is no creature of mere
power, which he has created; for he is, and ever was, excellent
himself, rendered venerable by intrinsic and unoriginated
perfections; by holy sentiments, whose outward action, indeed,
must be dated from the beginning of created things,
but whose consciousness has been from everlasting. I dare
not think, that the Providence of God largely consists in
doing that, which would be guilt in man.
From this scheme then, not less than from the former, we
fail to obtain satisfaction. It does not reconcile the faith of
the conscience with the faith of the understanding; but simply
prefers the latter, to the injury of the former, compromising
God’s abhorrence of evil; and, for the sake of maintaining
his sovereignty, making it his instrument. In fine, philosophy
must make confession of its ignorance, and talk no
more so exceeding proudly. This question of ages is too much
for all its subtlety. Let us pass on to the doctrinal search of
Scripture. Does it either reveal any new view of our subject,
or determine our choice to either of the schemes we have reviewed?
II. Trinitarian theologians maintain, that the Bible reveals
to us the existence of a created spirit of evil, with a host of
subordinate associates in guilt; who seduced our first parents,
and so introduced both the spiritual depravity and the mortality
of our race; who has since tormented the bodies of
men with divers diseases, afflicted their minds with some species
of insanity, and corrupted their conscience with every
variety of horrible and guilty thought; and who especially
assailed the person, and withstood the kingdom of Christ,
knowing that the Messiah’s power would finally overthrow
his own. In opposition to this statement, I submit, that in
neither the Mosaic nor the Christian dispensation have we
any revelation of the existence of such a being, or any doctrinal
solution of the problem respecting the origin of evil.
Let me not, however, be supposed to say, that no such
beings as Satan, the fallen Angels, and demons, are named in
Scripture. I do not pretend to fritter all these away into
personifications and figures of speech. I have no doubt that
some of the sacred authors believed in the real existence and
agency of such beings; I have just as little doubt that others
did not; and that the Hebrew conceptions on this subject
underwent a regular development in the course of their history,
no part of them having any origin in supernatural revelation,
but the whole being either the result of natural
speculation or a gift from foreign tribes. This will be thought
very shocking by those who, maintaining the plenary inspiration
of the Bible, cannot imagine that it contains any traces
of the notions and sentiments of its various times; and cannot
think of admitting even an incidental allusion that is not
an infallible oracle. But until it can be shown, that a person
inspired is unable to form an opinion of his own; that he
has no ideas from education and position, no prepossessions
in common with his age; that, from Moses to the John of
Patmos, every scriptural author is an unerring authority, not
merely in faith and morals, but in cosmogony and physics, in
geology and astronomy, in natural history, physiology, metaphysics
and medicine; we may venture to maintain, on the
ground of historical evidence, that the belief in witchcraft and
charms, in angels and devils with Chaldee names, in demoniacal
possession and Satanic inflictions, may be no result
of revelation, but one of the natural traces of time and locality
with which the Scriptures abound. There prevails, however,
great misapprehension respecting the ideas of the
Scripture writers on these subjects; and especially, the conception
of a Devil is thought to pervade the whole Bible in
one unvarying form. With a view to rectify this mistake, I
will briefly notice the chief passages of the Hebrew and
Greek Scriptures relating to this topic; adverting, in succession,
to the history of the fall; to the growth of the belief
both in Satan and exorcism; and to the temptation of
Christ.
(1.) It is impossible to conceive of a greater outrage upon
an author’s meaning, than is the common representation of
the Fall, on the account of that event in the Book of Genesis.
Not a trace, even of the faintest kind, does the original narrative
contain of all that theologians tell us respecting the
tempter, the curse, the recovery. The tempter was not an
evil spirit, but a serpent, to whose natural and instinctive
cunning, and not to any diabolical instigation, the seducing
thought is attributed: for “The serpent,” it is said, “was
more subtle than all the beasts of the field.”[543] The writer,
indeed, had not apparently any idea of such a being as Satan;
for, throughout his five books, there is not a word in allusion
to such a personage; though he records, I believe, more
temptations, more trials of faith and duty, which it is thought
the office of the evil one to administer, than all the rest of
the Scriptures together. It is nothing to the purpose to say
that, without preternatural possession, it is absurd to suppose
that the serpent could speak, and become an agent in
the transaction at all; for, on any view of the passage, the
author ascribes to the creature the power both of speech and
of walking: and to imagine that the Devil would betray himself
by assuming so improbable a vehicle, and making a dumb
reptile talk, is surely little consonant with the character of so
subtle a diplomatist. The record affirms that, by way of
punishment, the serpent was reduced to the reptile state,
and compelled to crawl instead of walk;[544] and an author,
whose imagination had reconciled itself to this conception,
would feel no additional improbability in supposing the same
occasion to have condemned the animal to silence. This has
always been the interpretation of those Hebrew writers, who
have received the account as literal history. Josephus, a
man of learning and a priest, states, that “all animals at that
period partook of the gift of speech with man;” that “the
serpent lived on familiar terms with Adam and his wife;” and
“from a malicious intention of his own, persuaded the woman
to taste of the tree of knowledge;” that, in consequence,
“God deprived the creature of speech and of the use of his
feet.”[545] If the account be considered as historical, this is its
plain meaning; and the insertion in it of a powerful malignant
spirit, is a mere fiction of later times.[546]
Nor is the usual description of the results of the Fall, a
less extravagant perversion of Scripture. The necessities of
toil to the man, the pangs of travail to the woman, and to
both a consequent abbreviation of the term of life, are all the
effects of which the original speaks, and to which Josephus
refers.[547] St. Paul adds to these the introduction of mortality;
but neither in his writings, nor in any more authoritative
place than the invention of modern divines, do we find the
least hint of any moral corruption entailed by the fall on the
human constitution, or any penal woes prepared for our
lapsed nature after death. Throughout the whole subsequent
Scriptures, there are only three places in which the effects of
the first transgression are mentioned:[548] all of these are in the
epistles of Paul; two, out of the three, are mere passing allusions,
not occupying a line; and in the remaining one, as
well as in the others, natural death alone is said to have passed
on the descendants of Adam; “not” (as Mr. Locke justly
remarks) “either actual or imputed sin,” which, he says, “is
evidently contrary to St. Paul’s design here.”[549] Between the
guilt of men, and the fall of their progenitor, there did not
exist the slightest connexion in the Apostle’s mind; they are
never once mentioned together. When he draws his fearful
pictures of the depravity of both Jews and Gentiles, he is
wholly silent respecting the fall, describing all this corruption
not as constitutional but as actual, not as the growth of a
foul and incapable nature, but rather as the abuse and insult
of one inherently noble.[550] And when again he speaks of the
fall and its issues, he is silent about moral depravity, and
dwells only on physical death. Never was there a writer
more barbarously tortured, more ingeniously forced to speak
in a spirit which he loved to withstand, than this glorious
Apostle. Out of his own writings, by incredible perversion,
his generous conceptions are condemned as heresies, and his
favourite sentiments denounced as blasphemies.
“I will put enmity,” says the book of Genesis, “between
thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her
seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his
heel.”[551] Considered as a description of the mutual hostility
and injuries of the race of venomous reptiles and the human
species,—man naturally attacking the head of the creature,
and the animal, especially among the naked feet of oriental
climes, finding nothing in man so vulnerable as the heel,—a
more vivid sentence can scarcely be conceived. Considered
as a prophecy of Christ, ingenuity could construct nothing
more obscure. And, accordingly, it is never once appealed
to, as a prediction, either by the Messiah himself, or by any
of the New Testament writers; and before the Advent, it
had certainly failed to produce the proper effect of prophecy,
and had not aided in preparing the minds of the Hebrews for
the event. It is indeed acknowledged by “a strenuous advocate
for this application of the passage,” “that the expressions
here used do not necessarily imply the sense thus
attributed to them; and that there is no appearance of our
first parents’ having understood them in this sense, or that
God intended they should so understand them.”[552] If, then,
this prophetic signification escaped the persons to whom
the announcement was made, and the nation before whose
eye it lay for ages, and the Christ himself of whom it spake,
and the Evangelists and Apostles who proclaimed him to
the world, our doubt of its reality can scarcely be deemed
unwarrantable.
But it is, I believe, a misconception of the author, to
treat this passage as a piece of history. Neither Moses, nor
any other scriptural writer, professes to have been miraculously
instructed in the events of the antediluvian world;
and if they make no such pretension themselves, it is altogether
gratuitous in us to make it for them. The slightest
consideration must convince us, that all natural sources of
information respecting so primitive a period must have
ceased to exist, at least in any reliable form: and the earliest
portions of the book of Genesis have every characteristic of
that beautiful mythical composition, which is the first fruit
of the literary activity of every simple-hearted nation, and
which mingles together in one texture, tradition, fact, speculation,
poetical conception, and moral truth. In this
instance, the writer seems to have been oppressed by the
feeling, that human peace and tranquillity were disturbed by
the restless aspirings and inquisitive ambition of the mind.
If man could but be content to take the good which God has
spread within his easy reach, and not permit himself to pry
into the possibilities of having more, his life might be spent
as in a garden of the Lord, in the warmth of sunny days, and
the light sleep of unhaunted nights. But he cannot repress his
insatiable curiosity, his passion for the fruits of knowledge
and dignity, of which Providence has given him the idea,
but which have been set beyond his permitted reach; and
this thirst of his nature he resolves at all hazards to indulge;
this godlike aspiration, imprisoned in a frame to
which it is unsuited, chafes against his quiet, and abbreviates
his days. Hence proceed the struggle and the toil of life;
the thistle and the thorn which he gathers from a soil that
might have yielded only flowers; hence, children are we all
of care and sorrow; hence, by the sweat of the hardy brow
we must live, and soon fret down existence into dust; not
however, without our victory after all; for we subjugate the
earth, and reign thereon.
Observe too, that Adam rules the woman; and the woman
has a heel upon the serpent:—the last seduced is placed the
highest; and the first corrupter sinks into a reptile. Our
temptations are beneath us; and having once detected them,
we are to rule them ever after. Once let the knowledge of
good and evil be tasted, and the primitive equality of things,
which put man and beast upon a level, is destroyed; all
beings fall into the ranks of a moral gradation; and though
none that have free will may escape a fall, he that is last to
yield shall be the first to reign.
(2.) Neither then in the original account, nor in the scanty
subsequent notices of the transgression in Eden, is there any
disclosure of a Satanic existence. Let us rapidly follow
down the course of Hebrew literature, and search in it for
the first and successive indications of this belief. I have
stated that the books of Moses are destitute of all trace of
such a conception; nor can any thing at all corresponding to
the popular idea of the Devil, be found in any part of the
Old Testament. The name itself never once occurs; and it
would be a great mistake to identify the Satan of the Hebrew
Scriptures, with the Devil of the Greek.[553] The Satan
of the former has a very uncertain personality. The name
rather denotes an office, which any agent of Providence
might be appointed to fill, than a definite individual being.
Any person, performing the function of an accuser, or who
prepares matter for accusation, by seducing men into evil,—any
one acting the part of an adversary to another,—is
called Satan. Thus David is called Satan to the Philistines;[554]
a certain captain named Rezon was Satan to Israel;[555] the
angel of Jehovah was Satan to Balaam;[556] nay, even Paul uses
this singular expression, “Hymeneus and Alexander, I have
delivered to Satan” (for what purpose, do you suppose), “that
they may be taught not to blaspheme.”[557] No doubt this idea,
at first vague and indefinite, gradually became individualized;
and that which had been an appellative, passed into a proper
name, yet without ever wholly losing its generic character.[558]
At the commencement of the book of Job occurs its most
distinct and definite use. It is there applied, not to a fallen
Spirit, not to a repudiated subject of the celestial state, but
to an angel near the throne, to a recognized minister of the
Supreme Power, who appears in the courts above among
“the Sons of God.” He is represented as a general inspector
and public prosecutor of the Divine government over
man; going to and fro over the earth, by heavenly commission,
to execute the probationary part of the great Ruler’s
will, and administer to mankind the severities which test
their faith. In the earlier Hebrew writings, this office is said
to be filled by no subordinate instrument: it is Jehovah
himself who is represented as trying his servants,—as the
personal cause of their afflictions, and author of their temptations.
I recently heard the following passage from the
first book of Chronicles adduced in proof of the agency of
Satan in seducing men from their allegiance to God. “And
Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number
Israel.”[559] Now it so happens, that this same event is
recorded also in the much more ancient books of Samuel,
where it is thus introduced: “And again the anger of the
Lord was kindled against Israel, and HE moved David
against them to say, ‘Go, number Israel and Judah.’”[560]
What can more clearly mark the natural progress of opinion
on this point? As the ideas of God became more elevated
and refined, it was felt to be scarcely compatible with his
perfections to seduce his children into violation of the duties
he himself required: and the imagination at least, if not the
understanding, was relieved by assigning that office, of hardening
the heart and tempting the will, (which originally had
been left with Jehovah himself,) to some interposing being,
who might separate between God and guilt.
When we open the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, we
perceive a complete change in this class of ideas. Even the
latest written of the canonical books introduce us to several
angelic beings, unknown to the earlier Scriptures,—as the
Michael and Gabriel of Daniel. But in addition to these,
we find in the Jewish Apocrypha, for the first time, the matured
conception of the Prince of evil;[561] who is thenceforth
represented in the scarcely consistent relations of creature
and enemy of the Most High: and it is in this form that
the notion presents itself to us in the New Testament
writings. Now what is the inference from these facts?
In the books of the ancient dispensation, this malignant
Spirit does not yet appear: in the writings of the new dispensation,
he is mentioned,—not as a novelty of revelation,
but as long familiar to the mind of every reader. The origin
then of the belief in his existence, must be sought between
the close of the Hebrew inspiration and the opening of the
Christian. And what had happened in this interval?
The Jewish people had been in long and intimate relation
with Persia: connected with it by political ties, and united
by the sympathies of monotheism. The characteristic features
of the Persian religion were,—its doctrine of a Spirit
of Evil in perpetual enmity to the Supremely Good;—and
its representation of a heavenly hierarchy, whose spirits were
ranged in ranks of angels and archangels, and received their
separate names. These ideas then naturally passed into the
Jewish mind, with little change; except that the Evil Spirit
was reduced to a somewhat lower station, in obedience to the
stern Mosaic principle, of the absolute Monarchy of God.[562]
And as these notions became perfectly engrafted on the national
faith of Israel, the founders of Christianity were educated
in them; and they were permitted to appear by incidental
allusion, and in conformity with the general sentiments
of the country and the age, in the pages of history and correspondence,
which the evangelists and apostles have left.
Nor can I perceive, either how it can be proved, or why it
should be desired, that God would annihilate from the understanding
of his inspired servants, all the harmless ideas,
foreign to their mission, which constituted the common stock
of thought at the time, and gave them points of necessary
sympathy and intellectual contact with the spirit of their generation.
How slight the sanction which they give to some,
at least, of these mythological imaginations, may be estimated
by a single fact. The whole theory respecting fallen
angels rests upon two verses,[563] each in one of the most
doubtful of the New Testament writings: indeed the texts
can scarcely be regarded as constituting two independent authorities;
for the latter is little else than a repetition of the
former; occurring in a portion of the second epistle of Peter,
which, strangely enough, contains, the sentiments and even the
language of a large part of the epistle of Jude. When such evidence
as this is brought forward, as conclusive and infallible, I
would respectfully ask our opponents, whether they seriously
believe, on the authority of the same epistle, that Michael the
archangel disputed with the Devil about the body of Moses?
and as this is nowhere else mentioned, whether an express
and personal revelation of the fact was imparted to St. Jude?
If so, consistency would require them to maintain, that this
is one of the essential doctrines of the Gospel: for how
much soever our natural and corrupt reason might be
tempted to think the circumstance trivial, if true, it cannot
really be otherwise than fundamental, if privately and explicitly
revealed.[564]
From the foregoing remarks, the general principles, in conformity
with which I would treat the question of demoniacal
possessions, will be so evident, that it will be unnecessary to
enter into any details. The precise relation to each other of
the various orders of evil spirits in which the Jews believed,
it is not possible to define. It is certain, however, that they
made a distinction, which our common translation of the
Scriptures has improperly obliterated, between demons and
devils. The former were thought to be of only human rank,
the souls of the wicked dead: and it was these only that
were supposed to possess and afflict the bodies of the living.
The latter were guilty angels, and had no agency assigned to
them on earth, being kept in durance within the prisons of
the unseen world. There was therefore the same difference
between demons and devils, as with us between ghosts and
fiends. Of the former, Beelzebub was considered as the
chief; of the latter, Satan: and whether these beings were
regarded as standing in any definite relation to each other, is
uncertain; probably the Devil, as the Prince of darkness,
was believed to be the ruler of all the powers of evil, whether
human or angelic. Unlike his incarcerated compeers, Satan
was permitted to be at large, and to practise his arts against
mankind: all gentile kingdoms being absolutely his; and
even the chosen people not protected wholly from his malignity,
at least until the Messiah’s reign, which was to commence
with his dethronement. It may be observed by any
careful reader of the gospels, that the evils of which he was
held to be the author, are not the same that are ascribed to
Beelzebub and his demons. Satan, and he only, was the
moral seducer: and the physical calamities proceeding from
him were only natural and intelligible diseases, regular
enough to fall under the cognizance of science. The demons
had, on the contrary, no concern with the conscience; and
occasioned only the irregular and apparently preternatural
maladies, which science deserted and left to the tender mercies
of superstition;—of which epilepsy and insanity are the
most remarkable examples.
Of this system of notions the evangelists were doubtless
possessed. But that they held them on the tenure of unerring
inspiration can by no means be shown. On the contrary,
the natural causes which produced them can be so clearly
detected in the prevalent sentiments of their age and country,
that not the slightest pretext remains for referring them
to express revelation. So far from requiring a miracle to
excite these conceptions, we must admit, that nothing less
than a miracle could have excluded them, familiar as they
had been to the national mind from the time of its intercourse
with Persia. Had the founders of Christianity never
received any extraordinary mission, they would have entertained
the conception of demoniacal possession; and its hold
upon their thoughts must therefore be regarded as the result
of natural prepossession, not of supernatural communication.
A notion whose human origin can be distinctly traced,—which
was shared by uninspired persons, and existed in
the authors of our religion in their uninspired years,—has no
claim to be considered as a part of Christianity, and is as
open to doubt and examination as any other opinion of antiquity.
To affirm that, were it not true, God must have
blotted it from the mind of his messengers, is not only to
overbear evidence with assertion, but to decide dogmatically
on the obligations of Deity, and, with infinite presumption,
to dictate the fit measure of his gifts. Till it can be shown,
that inspiration is co-extensive with omniscience, it must remain
compatible with error.
The language of the Gospels then, respecting demoniacs,
is not to be regarded as a condescending accommodation to
popular prejudice; but as a genuine expression of the writers’
own state of mind. There is no reason to doubt that the
prevalent ideas were shared by the apostles themselves. By
these did they interpret the facts which they witnessed:
through the colouring of these, their minds beheld the miracles
of Christ, and their own: and at the suggestion of
these arose the language in which they have recorded the
ministry of their Lord. All this has not the smallest effect
on the truth and soundness of their testimony. They no
doubt reported faithfully that which they saw and heard;
only they tell us something more, adding a few phrases, disclosing
also what they thought. Like all witnesses of simple
mind, especially when telling that which awakens their wonder
and affection, they mix up their statements of phenomena
with notions of causation; and present us with a composite
register of sensible impressions and mental interpretations.
It should be our business, as we read, to call up before us
the scene described; to see for ourselves the things visible,
and hear the things audible, of which the record speaks;
and we shall find that this effort will usually make a perfect
and easy separation between the real and the merely ideal,
between the permanent fact and the temporary explanation.
When, for example, it is said, that the demons in a man
possessed spake to Christ, of what are we to think? for what
voice are we to listen? where are the lips from which the
utterance flows?—Certainly it was from the organs of the
poor lunatic himself that the sound must have proceeded:
and modern language would describe this fact by saying, that
he spake; and in thus believing we accept the whole attestation
of the historian.
(3.) The same principle must be applied to the temptation
of Christ. No hint whatever is given, implying any visible
appearance communing with Jesus; nor need we even suppose
any audible voice addressing him.[565] The Evil Spirit,
like God himself, was held to be invisible, and inappreciable
by any human senses: and when words are attributed
to him, they represent only the dialogue which he is
supposed to hold with the silent and tempted heart. His
whole guilty transactions indeed belonged, it was imagined,
to the region of the mind; and his was a viewless and speechless
wrestling with conscience on its throne. Whenever therefore
the seductive assaults of Satan are recorded, the real
fact described is this; that internal moral conflicts have been
going on, and deluding thoughts have been passing, like the
shadow of a dark Spirit, across the purer soul. And in such
case, the first and the only thing of which our consciousness
can be aware, is, the occurrence of these thoughts. To
their antecedent source, our testimony cannot reach; and
whether they are precipitated on us by some enemy from
without, or are of spontaneous origin within our own minds,
is a point accessible indeed to speculation, but beyond
the contact of experience. Till they enter our nature, and
so become a part of our personality, they are nothing and
nowhere: and when they enter and we feel their torment,
they are ours and no other being’s. No one ever sees, hears,
or feels, the Devil; he perceives simply the intrusion of sinful
ideas, and supposes them to be the result of diabolic power.
He experiences the temptation in reality; and refers it to
the tempter in idea. And were this not true of Christ, as
of ourselves, it would be false to say, that he “was tempted
in all points as we are.” The temptation of our Lord then,
stripped of the dress which the historians have thrown
around the central facts, was the natural struggle, by which
he exchanged the imperfect, and local, and ambitious conceptions
of the Messiah, which his cottage training in Nazareth
had imparted,—for that pure, and self-sacrificing, and
comprehensive interpretation of the office, which broke upon
his solitude so awfully. That he learned, at Mary’s knees,
to cherish the common hope of his nation, in the form under
which it prevailed among the peasantry, appears as little
doubtful, as that he caught the language of his native fields.
Yet it is certain that this early vision passed away; and that
when he himself was called to fill the appointed office, he
acted out a conception quite opposite to the dreams imparted
to his childhood. Once he had mused on the widening glory
of Judæa; but he ended with announcing the prospect of
its fall. Once he had exulted in the dignity and power of
the coming messenger, who should break the oppression of
his people, and set forth anew the triumph of their ancient
Providence: he declared himself at length the meek prophet
of penury, and woe and childhood. Once he had thought of
what Jerusalem would be, when the temple should be the
centre of the world’s homage, and multitudes of all nations
should throng its pavement, and its incense should rise in
the pride of freedom, and its hymn spring upward on the
wing of happy melody: but ere his work of life was finished,
he taught a lowlier yet sublimer expectation, not of the
compression of the world into the Hebrew worship,—but of
the diffusion of that worship to cover the world; and revealed
that secret shrine in every human heart, where emotions,
purer than incense, may burn for ever, and tones
sweeter than music be for ever breathed. This revolution of
sentiment, this conflict, by which new thoughts of inspiration
expelled the old ones inherited from education and reputed
prophecy, constituted the temptation in the wilderness;
nor was it possible that ideas the most divine, should
thus burst the shell of custom and tradition, without a convulsion
truly terrible. It would be easy, were it not irrelevant,
to show how this hidden colloquy between the national
prepossessions and the personal intuitions of our Lord’s
mind, would give rise to the separate scenes of which the
temptation is said to have been composed. Possibly, however,
the history, as it stands, is not the record of a single
event, to which a fixed date can be assigned in his ministry:
more probably, it gathers into one view a series of mental
conflicts, distributed over his whole public life; the struggles
between the accidental and the essential portions of his
nature; between the national and the human: between an
historical imagination trained amid the gorgeousness of prophecy,
and a heavenly conscience dwelling with the simplicity
of God; between the conventional and the spiritual;
between, in short, the superinduced faith contracted from
time and place, and the inborn faith of a soul divine and
free.
In the preceding notices of Scripture, no sanction is given
to the interpretations, if such there be, which resolve Satan
into a personification, treat the temptation as a vision or an
allegory, and identify the demoniac phraseology with the
common language of pathological description. I believe, indeed,
that, wherever the Devil and his agency are named,
the only real fact denoted is, the occurrence to some one of
a moral temptation: and that, wherever demons are said to
have been cast out, the only historical event described is, the
cure of some physical or mental disease. But it appears to
me absurd to deny, that the writers meant more than this;
to doubt that they held the popular theory of such facts, and
blended it naturally with their record; that they were sincerely
under the influence of the existing system of demonology,
and referred the seductions of sin to the personal
activity of the malignant Spirit. Nowhere, however, do they
pretend to set forth these ideas as gifts of preternatural revelation,
but simply take them up as part of the common
media of thought belonging to the age, and use them as the
incidental colouring to their narrative of facts. In different
parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, as we have seen, very different,
and even inconsistent notions respecting the origin of
evil prevail: the conception of a powerful diabolic agent
underwent a regular and natural development: and the system
of pneumatology apparent in the Greek Scriptures is
traceable to a foreign origin in an uninspired age. Hence
we must conclude, that respecting the origin of evil, nothing
doctrinal is specially revealed; that even in Palestine, the
human mind has been left to grapple with this great problem
by its own natural forces; and that we rise from the page of
Scripture, as from the speculations of wisdom and genius,
with the difficulty yet unsolved.
By no means, then, can we attain to any theoretical certainty,
or logical consistency of belief, on this great topic.
Revelation is silent, and philosophy perplexed; and the controversy
between the Religion of Conscience and the Religion
of the Understanding, is undecided still. Let the framers
of systems say what they will, the thing is deeper than our
minds, and what can we know? Nothing remains, but to
abandon hopelessly the speculative point of view, and treat
the matter as an object, not of knowledge, but of trust; to
regard it as a question to be decided by its bearings on duty,
rather than its materials for debate. Whenever the means
of attaining to objective truth do not exist, we can but rest
in those views of things which most entirely accord with our
best nature. If we cannot tell what is true of God, we yet
may judge what is fittest for ourselves; what state of mind,
what modes of thought, prepare us best for the work of life;
what mental representation of existence most nobly sustains
those fundamental moral convictions, which it is the end of
Christianity to fix in our implicit faith and constant practice.
To this arbitration we must submit our present doubts respecting
the source of evil; and, while waiting to reach the
realities of reason denied us now, accept, as our best truth,
the conceptions which are most just to our moral nature and
relations.
III. Let us then, for final decision, consult the practical
spirit of Christianity, and ascertain to what view of the
origin of sin it awards the preference. Is it well, for the
consciences and characters of men, to consider God,—either
directly or through his dependant Satan,—either by his
general laws, or by vitiating the constitution of our first parents,—as
the primary source of moral evil? or, on the contrary,
to regard it as, in no sense whatever, willed by the
Supreme Mind, and absolutely inimical to his Providence?
Are we most in harmony with the characteristic spirit of the
gospel, when we call sin his instrument, or when we call it
his enemy? For myself, I can never sit at the feet of Jesus,
and yield up a reverential heart to his great lessons, without
casting myself on the persuasion, that God and evil are everlasting
foes; that never, and for no end, did he create it; that
his will is utterly against it, nor ever touches it, but with annihilating
force. Any other view appears to be injurious to
the characteristic sentiments, and at variance with the distinguishing
genius, of Christian morality.
(1.) Christianity is distinguished by the profound sentiment
of individual responsibility which pervades it. All the
arbitrary forms, and sacerdotal interpositions, and hereditary
rights, through which other systems seek the divine favour,
are disowned by it. It is a religion eminently personal; establishing
the most intimate and solitary dealings between
God and every human soul. It is a religion eminently natural;
eradicating no indigenous affection of our mind, distorting
no primitive moral sentiment; but simply consecrating
the obligations proper to our nature, and taking up
with a divine voice the whispers, scarce articulate before, of
the conscience within us. In this deep harmony with our
inmost consciousness of duty, resides the true power of our
religion. It subdues and governs our hearts, as a wise conqueror
rules the empire he has won; not by imposing a system
of strange laws, but by arming with higher authority,
and administering with more resolute precision, the laws already
recognised and revered.
This sense of individual accountability,—notwithstanding
the ingenuities of orthodox divines on the one hand, and
necessarian philosophers on the other,—is impaired by all
reference of the evil that is in us to any source beyond ourselves.
To look for a remoter cause than our own guilty
wills,—to contemplate it as a Providential instrument, whether
we trace it to Adam, to Satan, or directly to God, bewilders
the simple perceptions of conscience, and throws
doubt on its distinct and solemn judgments. The injury
may be different in character, according to the particular
system we adopt: but any theory which provides the individual
moral agent with participating causes of his guilt, offends
and weakens some one of the feelings essential to the
consciousness of responsibility.
There is no persuasion, for example, more indispensable
to this state of mind, and, consequently, no impression which
Christianity more profoundly leaves upon the heart, than
that of the personal origin and personal identity of sin,—its
individual, incommunicable character. Our own secret souls,
and that divine gospel which confirms all their sincere decisions,
alike declare that my sin cannot be your sin; that by
no compact, even by no miracle, can any exchange of responsibilities,
or transfer of moral qualities, be effected.
What indeed is guilt in its very nature, but a violation of
some venerated rule of action,—a contravention of our own
sentiments of equity, truth, purity, or generosity? and what
is the guilty mind, but a system or habit of desire, which
successfully resists the control of reason and conscience?
That mind which is the seat of the delinquent will,—which
hears the remonstrances of right, and heeds them not,—is the
sole proprietor of the sin, deriving it from none, imparting
it to none: its dwelling is in his volition; and unless that
can cease to be his, the criminality can admit of no alienation.
He may have accomplices indeed: but they are so
many additional agents, each with his separate amount of
guilt, and not partners among whom his one act of free-will
is distributed. The trains of thought and emotion, the adjustment
of tastes and affections, are different in every soul:
each has its own moral complexion; each, its separate moral
relations; each, its distinct responsibility in the sight of
God. In no sense is the gift or transfer of character more
possible, than a barter of genius, or an interchange of sensation.
God may call new life into existence, and determine
what its consciousness shall be: he may annihilate life, and
plunge its memory and experience into nothing: but to shift
the feelings and aims which constitute the identity of one
being into the personality of another, is no more possible,
than to alter the properties of a circle, or to cancel departed
time.
To trifle in any way with this plain and solemn principle,
to invent forms of speech tending to conceal it, to apply to
moral good and ill, language which assimilates them to physical
objects and exchangeable property, implies frivolous
and irreverent ideas of sin and excellence. The whole weight
of this charge evidently falls on the scheme, which speaks of
human guilt as an hereditary entail; a scheme which shocks
and confounds our primary notion of right and wrong, and,
by rendering them impersonal qualities, reduces them to
empty names. No construction can be given to the system,
which does not pass this insult on the conscience. In what
sense do we share the guilt of our progenitor? His concession
to temptation did not occur within our mind, or belong
in any way to our history. And if, without participation in
the act of wrong, we are to have its penalties,—crimes in
the planet Saturn may be expected to shower curses on the
earth; for why may not justice go astray in space, as reasonably
as in time? If nothing more be meant, than that
from our first parents we inherit a constitution liable to intellectual
error and moral transgression;—still, it is evident,
that, until this liability takes actual effect, no sin exists, but
only its possibility; and when it takes effect, there is just so
much guilt and no more, than might be committed by the
individual’s will: so that where there is no volition, as in infancy,
cruelty only could inflict punishment; and where
there is pure volition, as in many a good passage of the
foulest life, equity itself could not withhold approval.
In whatever way, then, you define this hypothesis, it directly
denies the personal character and personal identity of
sin, and thus enfeebles the most essential element comprehended
in the sentiment of responsibility. The practical result
will inevitably be, a system of false views and fictitious
feelings, with respect both to our own characters, and to
those of our fellow-men. That which can be vicariously incurred,
or vicariously removed, cannot be guilt; cannot
therefore, be sincerely felt as such; can awaken no true
shame and self-reproach, and draw forth no burning tears
when we meet the eye of God. It is a shocking mockery to
call sorrow for an ancestor’s sin by the name of penitence,
and to confound the perception (or, as it is termed, ‘application,’)
of Christ’s holiness with the personal peace of conscience:
the one can be nothing else than moral disapprobation,
attended by the sense of personal injury; the other,
moral approval, attended by the sense of personal benefit:
and mean and confused must be the sentiments of duty in a
mind which can mistake these for the private griefs of contrition,
and the serenity of a self-forgetful will. Only counterfeit
emotions, and self-judgments half sincere, can consistently
arise from a faith which mystifies the primitive
ideas of moral excellence, and destroys all distinct perception
of its nature. It is always with danger that we turn
away from the natural hand-writing of God upon the conscience:
from heedless eyes the divine symbols fade away;
unless, indeed, in some preternatural awakening of our
sight, they blaze forth once again, to tell us that the
kingdom of true greatness hath departed from us. Let
each consider his own life as an indivisible unit of responsibility,
no less complete, no less free, no less invested
with solemn and solitary power, than if he dwelt, and
always had dwelt, in the universe alone with God. There is
confided to him, the sole rule of a vast and immortal world
within; whose order can be preserved or violated, whose
peace secured or sacrificed, by no foreign influence. We
cannot, by ancestral or historical relations, renounce our own
free-will, or escape one iota of its awful trusts. No faith
which fails to keep this truth distinct and prominent, no
faith which shuffles with the sinner’s moral identity, contains
the requisites of a “doctrine according to godliness.” It
must pervert, moreover, our estimates of others’ characters,
no less than of our own. If guilt can be hereditary,—guilt
meriting infinite and indiscriminate punishment,—it must be
universal: and whether we see it or not, we must believe it
to exist, with no appreciable variation of degree, in every
human heart. Thus it becomes a prime duty to regard every
thing in life, except its wretchedness, every thing in human
nature, except its displays of foulness and of ruin, as a delusion
and a cheat. We strongly protest against this miserable
distrust of our best and truest perceptions. We maintain
the intelligible and appreciable character of all moral
qualities, in opposition to all schemes which make distinction
between natural and theological excellence, and which propose
imaginary standards of right, different from those that
recommend themselves to a discerning conscience. Sin is no
mysterious thing, no physical poison, no taint in the blood,
which may lurk venomously within us, giving no symptom,
and exciting no consciousness, of its presence. However
insidious in its approaches, and subtle in its manifestations,
vigilance only is needed to detect it: its stealthiness affords,
indeed, a sound reason for circumspection; but not for superstitious
horror at its possible existence, without discoverable
trace, in ourselves or others. To look on the spectacle
of vice, and not feel abhorrence, indicates a depraved state of
sentiment:—to look on the spectacle of virtue, and believe it
sin, to witness all the outward expressions of goodness and
suspect interior corruption, to be invited by natural emotion
to moral admiration, and, by theological stimulants, to galvanise
the heart into loathing (or even “pity”) instead, implies
a falsehood of conscience no less malignant. Let me
not be told that, in thus speaking, we assign too high a value
to mere external moralities, which are but treacherous indications
of character, and may be the visible fruit of various
and dubious motives. We never cease to teach, that no Epicurean
respectabilities, no conformity with conventional rules
of order, can satisfy the claims, or afford any of the peace
of duty, unless they be the native growth of a perceptive,
devout, and loving heart:—that it is not in the hand which
executes, but in the soul which devises and aspires, in the
secret will which makes sacrifice of self, in the conscience
which grapples with temptations and overmasters fears, that
true and immortal virtue dwells; since acts are evanescent,
while the affections are eternal. But it is monstrous to infer
from this superficial character of outward morality, that
there is probably no substratum of genuine goodness. Nay,
it is a mean and degrading scepticism which distrusts, without
assignable cause, the reality of any of the symptoms of excellence;
is tempted by theories of divinity to insinuate that
they are an empty semblance; and plies its pious ingenuity
to blacken the great human heart. He that is pledged to
make out a case against mankind at large, must find of difficult
attainment that charity that “hopeth all things and believeth
all things.” How blunted must be the delicacy of
moral perception, where the gradations of excellence are
swept away into the dark abyss of universal depravity! and
to effect this reduction of all minds to the same level, what
vehement distortion, what wretched sophistries, what devotional
scandal and romance, must become habitual! How
much less place for delusion and insincerity is there, when
we maintain a reverential faith in the natural moral sentiments,
repress no generous admiration, disbelieve no genuine
expression of disinterestedness and integrity, and instead
of whining over guilt, dare to bless God with a manly
voice, for all varieties of noble virtue!
Thus does the habit of tracing sin beyond the individual
will to a progenitor, spread confusion over the moral perceptions,
by mystifying the nature of guilt, and destroying that
feeling of its personal character and identity which belongs to
the Christian sentiment of responsibility.
By a different and directer method the same tendency operates,
when we refer our temptations to the agency of the
Devil, rather than to our descent from Adam. An invisible
power, foreign to ourselves, is held chargeable, to an undefined
extent, with the evil of our own wills; and the conscience
can as ill bear the present distribution, as the past
transmission of its guilt. It is said indeed, that man is not
“less culpable, because Satan seduces him, and blinds his
mind” since there is no power on earth or hell to compel
him to transgress; that he is a willing captive, and no more
to be excused than when a human accomplice entices him to
crime, without (it is admitted) relieving him of any portion
of his criminality.[566] But the cases are obviously not parallel.
Man stands up before his fellow man, equal with equal;
his weapons are fairly measured against his danger, by the
great Arbiter himself; and therefore is he summoned to close
with his temptations, and condemned as a traitor if he yields
or flies. And should it ever be otherwise,—should the feeble-minded
and inexperienced be misled by the cunning of the
strong-headed and practised seducer, the instinctive justice
of mankind mitigates its sentence, and commiserates the fall.
With how much greater force, then, must this palliation be
felt, when the Tempter is admitted to be “possessed of capacity
and power immensely surpassing ours,”[567]—a “master-spirit”
of majestic intellect, with whom we are as an infant
in the giant’s grasp! With such a being, the broken energy,
the purblind vigilance, of a fallen man, can hardly be expected
to cope; at least they will be induced, in so plausible
a case, to esteem themselves unfairly matched against so exalted
a competitor. While it were earnestly to be desired
that the wretched conscience should be allowed no evasion,
and for awhile no alleviation, under the condemning sentence
of its memory and its God,—this doctrine calls up, inevitably
and reasonably, the feeling of a divided criminality, of which
the weaker nature has the smaller share.
These tendencies, so far as they have been truly stated,
must continue to act, so long as we trace the evil that is in
us to any foreign agent. Hence it appears impossible to defend
the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity,—which presents
God to us as the author of sin and suffering,—from the same
charge of invading the sense of personal responsibility. Not
that we are for a moment to sanction the vulgar error which
confounds this scheme, in its theoretical structure and practical
effects, with the system of fatalism; or to imagine, that
an abdication of all free-will, and a total indifference to moral
distinctions, would be its proper and consistent results.
Though, however, it leaves room for individual pursuit, and
motive to individual perfection, one of its chief and most
vaunted features undoubtedly is, the encouragement which it
affords to the passive virtues: and it will be found, I greatly
fear, that it is their passiveness, more than their virtuousness,
which puts them under the protection of this doctrine.
Doubtless, he who can look on all men as the instruments
of heaven, and recognize in their mutual injuries and crimes
the chosen methods of the Divine government, must learn
submission to many a triumph of wrong, and consider anger
against the profligate and oppressor as insubordination against
God. He who is haunted by the immutability of things,
and feels himself locked in with the universal mechanism,
will chafe himself with no rash spirit of resistance, nor vainly
thrust his hand against the fly-wheel of nature. He who
believes that all things are right, that absolute evil does not
exist, that whatever men may be, and whatever they may
do, nothing could possibly be better, must needs discover
that his own wishes are no criterion of good, and look with
a contented eye over the whole surface of the past, as well
as a serene trust on the prospect of the future. Nor can
there be any self-exaggeration in a mind conscious of possessing
but an infinitesimal fraction of the universal power,—and
even that little wielded and directed by an uncontrollable
sovereignty, that turns the hearts of men whithersoever it
pleaseth. Complacency with every lot, resignation to all
events, forbearance under injury, an equal tenderness for all
men, and the lowliest attitude before God, are the unquestionable
results of this religious philosophy. But all this is
attained by a process which, I would submit, the moralist is
bound to regard as illegitimate;—by an appeal to external
mechanical necessity, rendering any thing but these states of
mind intellectually improper; not by any considerations of
duty, or any perception of their intrinsic obligation. The
whole efficacy of the system is negative, not positive. It
prostrates and destroys the turbulent elements of our nature,
and its quietude is the residue left by their exhaustion: it
crumbles beneath us the heights of passion, and deposits us
upon a placid level beneath the infinite expanse. Its characteristic
dispositions are reached by the sacrifice of the
feelings which are distinctively moral:—the feelings, that is,
of which right and wrong acts and propensities are the appropriate
objects;—the feelings of approbation and aversion,
which recognize merit and demerit, and impel to praise and
blame. The Necessarian sees, neither in himself nor others,
any good or ill desert to justify such feelings: he regards
natural and moral qualities in the same light,—contemplating
benevolence as a species of health, and selfishness as
akin to disease: if he utters censure or applause, it is not
from an impulse in himself, but for an effect upon their object.
In his love to men moral distinctions have no place;
for as their sins justify no alienation, their virtues give no
claim to admiration: he loves them apart from the perceptions
of conscience,—without veneration,—without praise,—by
the mere force of the sympathies which take interest in
sentient beings as capable of happiness and misery:—loves
them, may we not say, because there is no cause for hate;
resentment, impatience, disgust, being out of place towards
creatures who are what they were meant to be, nothing
remains but to include them in his complacency. Nor does
the humility which this system inculcates, bear the true
and Christian stamp. It is not the irrepressible aspiration
after moral perfection, the pursuit of an image in the conscience
infinitely beautiful and great, the devoted worship of
the holy, good, and true, which draw forth tears of contrition
for the past, and dwarf the attainments of the present,
though reckoning their thousand victories; but it is rather a
sense of physical and mental insignificance, which annihilates
all worth except such as we may derive from sharing the
regards of God: it is not a perception of want of merit in our
character, but a consciousness of incapacity for it in our
nature.
And who could fairly realize the fundamental idea of this
scheme, without losing all confidence in his own moral convictions,
and constantly distrusting his best feelings as delusions?
For does he not believe, that whatever is brought to
pass is absolutely right and best, and that any different view
of it is an illusion incident to our human point of sight?
The optimist casts his eye over the past, and can see no blot
upon the retrospect: yet does it contain innumerable things,—woes
and crimes the most deplorable,—which, ere they
happened, were repugnant to his worthiest desires, and to
be encountered by the most strenuous resistance of duty.
Is he then to look at these objects, up to the last moment of
the present, as utterly evil; and from the first moment of
the past, as indisputably best? Is he to set up a two-faced
sentiment, gazing with mutable and discriminative expression
on things approaching, but with unvaried complacency
on things departed? Is it possible, that actions and characters
can change their complexion by mere migration in time?
or was it altogether a mistake to think so ill of the iniquities
which, having been summoned into existence, must always
have appeared eligible in the view of God? These perplexities
must perpetually arise to a mind which uses two
standards of good; the moral, which approves the right;
and the eventual, which reveres the past. The latter incessantly
contradicts the former, and insinuates that it is a
blind guide, aiming at that which the All-wise will refuses to
achieve. And thus our theorist, in so far as he is true to his
principles, would lapse into scepticism of his moral judgments;
into a hesitating veneration for the oracles of duty;
a suspicion that they may inculcate provisional superstitions,
rather than eternal truths. It must be difficult to unite
pious acquiescence in the guilt of others, with uncompromising
resistance to our own.
In short, the contemplations presented by this doctrine
do not appear to be favourable to active excellence: rising
too far, and embracing too much, they quit the contact of
this green earth, and lose sight of the interval between the
quiet vales where virtue walks, and the giddy heights it may
not tread. The soul, rendered conscious more of the immensity
around it, than of the obligations upon it, lies still,
without a passion, without a fear,—venturing an approach
to the benignity more than to the energy of God. Perhaps it
is the tendency of all systems which most amply spread forth
the Divine Infinitude, to be less occupied with the conception
of the Divine Holiness: perhaps the mind intensely
occupied with the idea of one solitary Power, absorbing all
subordinate agencies, and willing every change that renders
space or time perceptible, has all its strongest impulses, both
moral and sympathetic, suppressed in the abyss of mystery;
and the distinction between different beings and different
acts appears, in so vast a view, too trivial to be worthy of
deep emotion and resolute volition. Certain it is, that the
oriental religions which have encouraged this sublimity of
devotion and self-annihilation in the Deity, have not been
remarkable for the formation of a sound and vigorous type
of moral character. Indeed we have seen that God himself,
the supreme centre of reverence, no longer remains, under
the Necessarian representation, a really holy object of
thought. If we are to admit no possibility of resisting his
will, and proclaiming him the Only Cause, to drown all other
powers in his immensity, it becomes impossible to feel that
he has any paramount regard to moral distinctions: he cannot
share our feelings towards human guilt, for it is his work:
he objects to no amount of vice, provided it issues in enjoyment:
and not one libertine, or traitor, or murderer, could
his purposes have spared. To reconcile us to this dreadful
thought, we are reminded of his benevolence, which will
bring all things to a glorious result. But how can we discern
any sanctity in a benevolence so indiscriminating in its instruments?
Must all our various apprehensions of God,
the supremely good and supremely fair, shrink into this
one, of ultimate-happiness Maker, by no means fastidious in
his application of means, but secure of producing the end?
Must the harmony of the Divine perfections lapse into this
dull monotone? It can hardly be well for our conscience to
worship a Being whom we could not imitate without guilt:
or, if it be said, that we may imitate his ultimate aim,
though not his intermediate methods,—what is this but to
admit that our moral sympathies with him must be postponed
to the end of time?
This system, then, like others which trace sin to causes
beyond the individual will, does not appear to foster that
deep reverence for moral distinctions, and sense of personal
responsibility, which eminently characterize practical Christianity.
It is favourable indeed to the passive virtues, which
occupy their due place in the morality of the Gospel: but
in producing them, appeals to considerations discouraging to
the active spirit of moral resistance and moral aggression.
To all this, however, an objector might urge the following
reply:—“Human conduct is not influenced by such considerations
as you have supposed. It matters little what men
may think about the origin of their guilt, if they make no
mistake about its consequences: let them only be sure that it
will be punished in the end, and they may please themselves
with speculating about its beginning. Every one will fly an
inevitable suffering, whether self-incurred or induced by foreign
causes: and if he clearly sees the penal sentence, he
will shun the sin, just as much when he imagines that others
have involved him in it, as when he conceives that he alone
has brought it on himself. In short, the will neither is nor
can be determined by anything but the prospect of pleasure
or pain; and so long as consequences of this kind depend
on his decisions, a man will feel himself accountable. The
sense of responsibility can never be weakened by any system
which, like those just noticed, retain the doctrine of future
retribution.”
This statement assumes that self-regarding motives, promises
of happiness, and threats of misery, are the sole powers
for operating on human character.
(2.) In reply, I submit as a second distinguishing feature of
practical Christianity, that it makes no great, certainly no
exclusive, appeal to the prudential feelings, as instruments of
duty; treats them as morally incapable of so sacred a work;
and relies, chiefly and characteristically, on affections of the
heart, which no motives of reward and punishment can
have the smallest tendency to excite.
The Gospel, indeed, like all things divine, is unsystematic
and unbound by technical distinctions, and makes no metaphysical
separation between the will and the affections. It is
too profoundly adapted to our nature, not to address itself
copiously to both. The doctrine of retribution being a solemn
truth, appears with all its native force in the teachings of
Christ, and arms many of his appeals with a persuasion just
and terrible. But never was there a religion (containing
these motives at all) so frugal in the use of them; so able, on
fit occasions, to dispense with them: so rich in those inimitable
touches of moral beauty, and tones that penetrate the
conscience, and generous trust in the better sympathies, which
distinguish a morality of the affections. In Christ himself,
where is there a trace of the obedience of pious self-interest,
computing its everlasting gains, and making out a case for
compensation, by submitting to infinite wisdom? In his
character, which is the impersonation of his religion, we surely
have a perfect image of spontaneous goodness, unhaunted by
the idea of personal enjoyment, and, like that of God, unbidden
but by the intuitions of conscience, and the impulses
of love. And what teacher less divine ever made such high
and bold demands on our disinterestedness? To lend out our
virtue upon interest,—to “love them only who love us” he
pronounced to be the sinners’ morality; nor was the feeling of
duty ever reached, but by those who could “do good, hoping
for nothing again,” except that greatest of rewards to a true
and faithful heart, to be “the children of the Highest” who
“is kind unto the unthankful and the evil.” In the view of
Jesus, all dealings between God and men were not of bargain,
but of affection. We must surrender ourselves to him without
terms; must be ashamed to doubt him who feeds the birds
of the air, and, like the lily of the field, look up to him with a
bright and loving eye; and he, for our much love, will pity
and forgive us. In his own ministry, how much less did our
Lord rely for disciples on the cogency of mere proof, and the
inducements of hope and fear, than on the power of moral
sympathy, by which every one that was of God naturally
loved him and heard his words;[568] by which the good shepherd
knew his sheep, and they listened to his voice, and followed
him;[569] and without which no man could come unto him, for
no spirit of the Father drew him.[570] No condition of discipleship
did Christ impose, save that of “faith in him;” absolute
trust in the spirit of his mind; a desire of self-abandonment
to a love and fidelity like his, without tampering with expediency,
or hesitancy in peril, or shrinking from death.
There is, then, a wide variance between the genius of
Christianity, and that philosophy which teaches, that all men
must be bought over to the side of goodness and of God, by
a price suited to their particular form of selfishness and appetite
for pleasure. Our religion is remarkable for the large
confidence it reposes on the disinterested affections, and the
vast proportion of the work of life it consigns to them. And
in thus seeking to subordinate and tranquillize the prudential
feelings, Christ manifested how well he knew what was in
man. He recognized the truth, which all experience declares,
that in these emotions is nothing great, nothing loveable, nothing
powerful; that their energy is perpetually found incapable
of withstanding the impetuosity of passion; and that
all transcendant virtues, all that brings us to tremble or to
kneel, all the enterprises and conflicts which dignify history,
and have stamped any new feature on human life, have had
their origin in the disinterested region of the mind; in affections,
unconsciously entranced by some object sanctifying and
divine. He knew, for it was his special mission to make all
men feel, that it is the office of true religion to cleanse the
sanctuary of the secret affections, and effect a regeneration
of the heart. And this is a task which no direct nisus of the
will can possibly accomplish, and to which, therefore, all
offers of reward and punishment, operating only on the will,
are quite inapplicable. The single function of volition is to
act; over the executive part of our nature it is supreme; over
the emotional it is powerless; and all the wrestlings of desire
for self-cure and self-elevation, are like the struggles of a child
to lift himself. He who is anxious to be a philanthropist, is
admiring benevolence, instead of loving men; and whoever is
labouring to warm his devotion, yearns after piety, not after
God. The mind can by no spasmodic bound seize on a new
height of emotion, or change the light in which objects appear
before its view. Persuade the judgment, bribe the self-interests,
terrify the expectations, as you will, you can neither
dislodge a favourite, nor enthrone a stranger, in the heart.
Show me a child that flings an affectionate arm around a parent,
and lights up his eyes beneath her face, and I know that
there have been no lectures there upon filial love; but that
the mother, being loveable, has of necessity been loved; for
to genial minds it is as impossible to withhold a pure affection,
when its object is presented, as for the flower to sulk
within the mould, and clasp itself tight within the bud, when
the gentle force of spring invites its petals to curl out into the
warm light. As you reverence all good affections of our nature,
and desire to awaken them, never call them duties,
though they be so; for so doing, you address yourself to the
will; and by hard trying no attachment ever entered the heart.
Never preach on their great desirableness and propriety;
for so doing, you ask audience of the judgment; and by way
of the understanding no glow of noble passion ever came.
Never, above all, reckon up their balance of good and ill; for
so doing, you exhort self-interest; and by that soiled way no
true love will consent to pass. Nay, never talk of them, nor
even gaze curiously at them; for if they be of any worth and
delicacy, they will be instantly looked out of countenance and
fly. Nothing worthy of human veneration will condescend to
be embraced, but for its own sake: grasp it for its excellent
results,—make but the faintest offer to use it as a tool, and it
slips away at the very conception of such insult. The functions
of a healthy body go on, not by knowledge of physiology,
but by the instinctive vigour of nature; and you will
no more brace the spiritual faculties to noble energy and true
life, by study of the uses of every feeling, than you can train
an athlete for the race, by lectures on every muscle of every
limb. The mind is not voluntarily active in the acquisition
of any great idea, any new inspiration of faith; but passive,
fixed on the object which has dawned upon it, and filled it
with fresh light.
If this be true, and if it be the object of practical Christianity,
not only to direct our hands aright, but to inspire our
hearts; then can its ends never be achieved by the mere force
of reward and punishment; then no system can prove its
sufficiency, by showing that it retains the doctrine of retribution,
and must even be held convicted of moral incompetency,
if it trusts the conscience mainly to the prudential feelings,
without due provision for enlisting the co-operation of
many a disinterested affection.
To this objection must any scheme be liable, which represents
the Creator as having made choice of the instrumentality
of evil. I freely admit, that no one urges the personal
motives to duty with more closeness and force than the
Necessarian. Maintaining, with the utmost strictness, the
connexion of moral cause and effect, teaching the alliance of
happiness with excellence, and of misery with vice, by a law
inexorable as fate, he convinces us, that every concession to
temptation, every relaxation of conscientious effort, is an addition
of wretchedness to our future lot; that when the evil
volition has once passed, no fortuity can provide evasion, nor
any mercy give us shelter; that on the decisions of our will is
suspended whatever can make our everlasting destination
blessed. But his doctrine goes on to assure us, that it is only
to ourselves that our sins create any clear increase of suffering;
they are a part of the best possible system, designed for
the general good; and shown, by their occurrence, to be clear
benefits to the world. No love of our fellow-man, then, can
be engaged in behalf of duty; let conscience say what it will,
we hold no power, and incur no risk, of creating injury to
others; and our sympathies with them cannot reasonably determine
any moral choice. No love of God can tender help
to our feeble virtue: for he is not “grieved in our sins;” and
whether, in our conflicts, we succumb or conquer, the issue is
well-pleasing in his sight. He appears to sustain a relation,
not of concern, but of indifference, to our choice; and the
idea of him, as spectator of the strife, inspires no courage, and
brings no victory. If it be urged, that these considerations
are of too high and abstract a kind to influence us in practice,
and that to us our misconduct must always appear injurious
to men, and offensive to God; what is this but to
allow the unfitness of the doctrine to our minds, and to say,
that it is harmless, in proportion as it remains unrealized? It is
a poor plea for the value of a system to exclaim, “Never mind
its threatened mischiefs, conscience is too strong for them.”
The point at which the present argument rests is this, that
in so far as the doctrine operates, it dismisses all but the prudential
feelings from the service of duty.
Our conclusion is evident. The spirit of practical Christianity
gives a double suffrage against the scheme which makes
moral evil the instrument of God; and bids us regard it as his
enemy. Revelation allies itself with the primitive religion of
the conscience.
To the theoretic question, still urged by our wonder and
solicitude, “But whence this foe?” it has been already said,
that no answer can be given. All the ingenuities of logic
and of language, leave it a mystery still: and it is better to
stand within the darkness in the quietude of faith, than
vainly to search for its margin in the restlessness of knowledge.
Were we compelled, for relief of mind, to select
some definite method of representing the case to our apprehensions,
I know not any simpler or better conception than
that of the ancient Platonists;—that the process of creation
consisted, not in the origination of matter itself out of nothing,
but in the production of form, order, beauty, organization,
life, sentiency, out of matter,—in making it the residence
of mind, the receptacle of experience, and the servitor
of souls: that the Divine hand has manifested illimitable
skill, and the Divine love infinite versatility, in the use
and application of the original material; but that, as it is
the negative opposite to his positive perfections, its unsusceptibility
of life and spirit has occasioned the portion of
evil which deforms the universe, and which, however varied
and reduced, and, in the higher gradations of being, attenuated
to the verge of extinction, cannot be utterly annihilated.
From the large proportion of visible evil, natural and moral,
that is traceable to disorganization and its related changes,
this view is easily apprehended, and may indeed be detected,
in many common forms of thought and speech. If it be not
true, no better substitute for the truth is within our reach.
It limits the power of God no more than the rival scheme:
for were we to say, that he became the author of evil, as the
unavoidable means of ulterior benefits, we should admit, that
only on these terms was the contemplated good producible,
even by him whom, in relation to all our measures of force,
we justly call Omnipotent. It is impossible to escape, and
therefore better to confront, the idea of a NECESSITY, restricting
the conditions within which the Divine goodness
operates;—a necessity, mysterious, but not dreadful; not
great enough to be subversive of faith, nor trivial enough to
be reasoned out of sight. I know not why our thoughts
should not find a residence for this necessity, rather in the
materials awaiting the Creative hand, than in any immaterial
laws, under the mystic title of “the Nature of things,” or
(in other words,) any dark Fate behind the throne. But in
saying this, I only propose to state the problem in the most
salutary form, and by no means to offer a solution: mere
pretension to ideas, where truly we have none, only excludes
us from the benefits (which are many) of our allotted portion
of ignorance. I have no sympathy with the confident and
dogmatic spirit, which exclaims, “Let the counsel of the
Holy One draw nigh, that we may know it;” and would
only protest against systems that “call evil good, and good
evil,” that “put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”
Sin, then, in the sight of God and all good men, is to be
esteemed an evil, absolutely and everlastingly. We may
rally the whole power of our nature against it: for it
destroys our personal security; it irremediably wounds our
brother; and it puts us in dreary alienation from our Father
and our Judge. We may let loose our aversion to all that
offends the conscience, and without metaphysical hesitancy,
visit it with uncompromising hate; for so doing, we are indignant
with no instrument of Deity; nor do we fall into
any sentiment at variance with his. We may yield, with
entire self-precipitation, to the love of whatever things are
pure and true and good; never fearing that our affections
will become too exclusive for the enlightened children of the
Highest. When we look into the darker chambers of our
soul, and discern, asleep or awake, the powers of selfishness,
malice, jealousy,—we see therein no nursery of discipline,
where God presides to train us ultimately well; but
the dreadful dwelling of our familiar fiend who wrestles in
apostacy with God;—the palace of the penal furies that at
once tempt and torture us, a place severed by a whole universe
from Heaven;—the inner Hell of our immortal nature,
so plenteous in solitary agonies, that the addition of outward
flames populous with tormented beings would only refresh
us with pity for their woes. The fever of desire, the fires
of revenge, the gnawing of remorse, still busy in our immortality;
the shame of resuscitated memories; the passionate
yearning after strength with the prostrate consciousness
of weakness; the strangeness and desolation of empty
minds and heated appetites carried to the assemblage of the
skies, and gazed on by the pitying eye of a Divine but
alienated purity,—Oh! what flames can burn into tenderer
seats of anguish than these? And so far from planning and
willing the lapse of any into such guilt and suffering, the
Great Ruler never ceases to resist to the last, all such delay of
his benediction and frustration of his desire. He dwells absolutely
apart from all creative contact with the evil which
we are bound to abhor: he comes before us as a being unambiguously
Holy; not in any ultimate and scarce intelligible
way, but in our plain human sense. His name must be reserved
as the exclusive receptacle of all the excellence and
beauty, the majesty and tenderness, the purity and justice,
of which our minds can gather together the ideas. It is no
figure of speech, that there is joy in heaven over the sinner
that repenteth: that part at least of heaven that dwells below
and hides itself within our hearts, that portion of God
that expresses itself through the sanctities of our nature,
yields to our moral restoration not only a ready welcome,
but a mysterious help. When fear has performed its proper
and only function on a responsible being,—which is, not to
create holiness, but to arrest guilt; when it has summoned
us, like the prodigal, to ourselves again; when it has brought
the mad career to halt, and left us weeping, humbled, prostrate
in the dust, crying, “Lord, help us, we perish;”—then
the Divine Spirit dawns on the gloom of our self-abasement,
and refreshes us with the delicious light of a
new and purer love: instead of the vain strivings of an enervated
will, the restless beating of mere prudence against the
iron bars of corrupt desire, the gates of the soul are burst
silently open by some angel affection, and we are free! And
shall we not, with most devout allegiance, follow our Divine
Emancipator? The great work, which his holy energy is
thus ready to carry on within us, he may be discerned conducting
every where without us. On the theatre of the universe
he is himself engaged to grapple eternally with Evil,
and hurl it from the higher portion of his abode. And so,
he waits, with his inspiring sympathy, to hail every victory
of our free-will: and by all the filial love we bear him, by
the generous fear of estrangement from his spirit, by the
hope of growth in his similitude, we are summoned to enter
the field of moral conflict,—to stir up the noble courage of
our hearts, and in the Lord’s own might, do battle with the
confederate fiends of guilt and woe. There is not elsewhere
a combat so glorious, or a trophy so divine.
The prominent place which the doctrine of two principles occupies
in the later theology of the Persians has procured for that people the
reputation of being the first to apprehend it; and for Zoroaster the
credit of assigning to it its due importance in the religious reformation
which he accomplished. So much doubt, however, exists, respecting
the age in which Zoroaster lived, the nature and extent of
the change which he introduced, and even on the question whether
he really taught the dualistic scheme at all, that he cannot justly
deprive the Ionian philosophers of a claim to originality in their
resort to it. If either before the Persian conquest of the Medes, or
in the time of Darius Hystaspes, this doctrine had been entrusted to
the Magi, as conservators of the national religion, it is difficult to
account for the omission of so fundamental a tenet in the account
which Herodotus gives of the Persian theology. The simple monotheism
which the Father of History describes, as seeking the mountain
top in sacrifice, and calling the whole circle of the heavens God,[571]
can scarcely be the same with the elaborate system of dualism,
attributed by Plutarch to Zoroaster and the Magi;[572] and the difference
between the two accounts throws a doubt on the antiquity of the latter
doctrine in the East. Yet, on the other hand, if we assign to it the
most recent date of which the case admits, we must allow that it
formed part of the popular belief in the fourth century before Christ;
in which case, it must have existed, at least in its previous philosophicalform, in the fifth. A doctrine, however, which had not yet assumed
a mythological character, or drawn to itself any external ceremonial,
might easily escape the notice of Herodotus. The Indian books, which
contain the same tenet, are thought by Friedrich von Schlegel to have
borrowed it from Persia;[573] and cannot therefore be adduced in separate
proof of its high antiquity. On the whole, there appears to be no
evidence of its propagation among any native Oriental people, before
the brilliant period of art and philosophy in the Greek cities of Asia
Minor.
Even if it should be chronologically incorrect to affirm, that Ionian
speculation “anticipated” the oriental religions in their theological
and philosophical ideas, there is no sufficient reason to deny its independence
and originality. Though the Greek schools did not arise
till an opening intercourse with Egypt and the interior of Asia afforded
to their founders the opportunity of borrowing from foreign sources, it
does not appear that they estimated this advantage highly enough to
avail themselves of it. Only a truly indigenous philosophy could
have left such distinct traces of a regular and progressive development,
beginning with the poetical cosmogonies of a purely mythological
æra, and growing, under the fostering care of successive teachers,
into vast speculative systems, bearing a relation, continually more
obscure and questionable, to the theology which gave them birth.
Adverting to this natural process, Mr. Thirlwall says: “It can excite
no surprise that in a period such as we are now reviewing, when
thought and inquiry were stimulated in so many new directions, some
active minds should have been attracted by the secrets of nature, and
should have been led to grapple with some of the great questions
which the contemplation of the visible universe suggests. There can
therefore be no need of attempting to trace the impulse by which the
Greeks were now carried toward such researches, to a foreign origin.
But it is an opinion which has found many advocates, that they were
indebted to their widening intercourse with other nations, particularly
with Egypt, Phœnicia, and the interior of Asia, for several of the
views and doctrines which were fundamental or prominent parts of
their earlier philosophical systems. The result, however, of the
maturest investigation, seems to show that there is no sufficient ground
even for this conjecture.[574] On the other hand, it is clear that the
first philosophers were not wholly independent of the earlier intellectual
efforts of their own countrymen, and that, perhaps unconsciously,
they derived the form, if not, in part at least, the substance
of their speculations, from the old theogonies and cosmogonies.[575]
The successive evolutions of the Pantheistic principle, and its final
renunciation by Anaxagoras, are thus succinctly described by Mr.
Thirlwall: “Thales evolved his world out of a single simple substance,
(water) to which he attributed the power of passing spontaneously
through the various transformations necessary for the multiplicity
of natural productions. But he does not seem to have attempted
accurately to define the nature of these transformations. And so
most of his successors, who set out from a similar hypothesis, contented
themselves with some vague notions, or phrases, about the
successive expansions or contractions of the original substance. But
as the contemplation of animal life had led Anaximenes to adopt air
as the basis of his system, a later philosopher, Diogenes of Apollonia,
carried this analogy a step further, and regarded the universe as
issuing from an intelligent principle, by which it was at once vivified
and ordered—a rational, as well as sensitive soul—still without recognizing
any distinction between matter and mind. Much earlier, however,
Anaximander of Miletus, who flourished not long after Thales,
and is generally considered as his immediate disciple, seems to have
been struck by the difficulty of accounting for the changes which a
simple substance must be supposed to undergo, in order to produce an
infinite variety of beings. He found it easier, in conformity with
some of the ancient cosmogonies, to conceive the primitive state of
the universe as a vast chaos, for which he had no other name than
the infinite,—containing all the elements out of which the world was
to be constructed, by a process of separation and combination, which,
however, he considered as the result of a motion, not impressed on
it from without, but inherent in the mass. This hypothesis, which
tended to give an entirely new direction to the speculations of the
school, seems to have been treated with a neglect which it is difficult
to explain, and which has raised a suspicion that some less celebrated
names may have dropped out of the list of the Ionian philosophers.
But a century after Anaximander, Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ revived
his doctrine with some very fanciful additions, and one very important
change. He combined the principle of Anaximander with that
of his contemporary Diogenes, and acknowledged a supreme mind,
distinct from the chaos to which it imparted motion, form, and order.
The Pantheistic systems of the Ionian school were only independent
of the popular creed, and did not exclude it. The language of Thales
and Heraclitus, who declared that the universe was full of gods, left
room for all the fictions of the received mythology, and might even
add new fervour to the superstition of the vulgar. But the system of
Anaxagoras seems to have been felt to be almost irreconcilable with
the prevailing opinions, and hence, as we shall find, drew upon him
hatred and persecution.”[576]
In confirmation of the opinions expressed towards the close of this
Lecture, I cannot refrain from subjoining the following moral estimate
of the doctrine of two principles: it is from F. von Schlegel’s
Treatise, before alluded to, on the Language and Wisdom of the
Indians. “Pantheism inevitably destroys the distinction between
good and evil, however strenuously its advocates may contend
in words against this reproach; the doctrine of emanation depresses
the moral freedom of the will by the idea of an infinite degree
of innate guilt, and the belief that every being is predestined to crime
and misery; the system of two principles, and the warfare between
good and evil, holds the middle place between these extremes: it
becomes, itself, a powerful incentive to a similar contest, and a source
of the purest morality.”[577]
The mere fact, that no proper names for the Evil Spirit exist in
the Hebrew language, except such as are of Apocryphal or Rabbinical
creation, is in itself a sufficient proof of the late and unscriptural
origin of the belief in his existence. A glance at an English concordance
will make it evident, that the word “Devil,” in the singular
number, does not occur in our authorized translation of the Hebrew
Scriptures. It is found in the plural in Lev. xvii. 7, 2 Chron. xi. 15,
Deut. xxxii. 17, Ps. cvi. 37; and in none of these instances can it
for a moment be supposed that the original word, if used in the singular,
would represent any idea corresponding to the popular notion
of the Devil; indeed, when the Rabbinical writers needed a name for
the expression of this idea, they had recourse to other terms than
those which are found in the verses just cited. In the two latter passages,
the Hebrew word is שׁדים, literally, mighty beings; it clearly
denotes false gods, and probably designates them by the title applied
to them by their votaries; for the name is evidently not contemptuous,
and is indeed radically the same which was applied by the
Israelites to Jehovah, and receives in our version the translation
Almighty. In the two former passages, the word is שׂעירים, literally,
goats, and evidently denotes the heathen deities, typified under the
form of that animal; especially, we may suppose, the Egyptian Pan,
worshipped in the Mendesian nome,[578] with rites the most abominable.
In Isaiah xiii. 21, the common translation renders the same word
satyrs.
Several names of evil spirits occur in the Talmudical writings:
and among them are two which are appropriated to the Satanic chief,
viz., סמאל, Samael; and אשמדי, Asmodæus. The latter is the
term by which the evil spirit is designated in Tobit iii. 8: and it
would be easy to show, by a multitude of passages, that the being to
whom both these names were given corresponded to the “Devil” of
modern theology, as far as correspondence can be affirmed to exist
between any two creations of the imagination. Thus we are told, in
words which also show the use of the word Satan as a generic rather
than a proper name; “The wicked angel Samael is prince of all the
Satans,” סמאל הרשע ראש כל השטנים הוא.[579] Again, Jehovah
is represented as saying to him, under his title of Angel of Death
(מלאך המות) “I have made thee Ruler of the world,” שעשיתי איתך
קוזמוקרטור
(κοσμοκράτορα).[580] The same supremacy is attributed
to this being under his other name. Thus it is said, that when
Solomon became too much elated by his prosperity, there was sent
to him “Asmodæus, the Prince of evil spirits,” אשמדיי מלכא דשדים.[581]
And with slight variation of phrase he is described as “the
devil Asmodæus, the Prince of Spirits,” שידא אשמדון רבהון דרוחתא. [582]
Buxtorf identifies Samael and Asmodæus, on the authority
of R. Elias; he says, “Eundem esse Asmodæum, qui alio nomine
Rabbinis dicitur Samael.”[583] And Bertholdt again identifies this being
with the enemy of the Gospel described in 2 Cor. iv. 4, as ὁ θεὸς τοῦ
αἰῶνος τούτου; and in John xiv. 30, as ὁ τοῦ κόσμου [τούτου] ἄρχων: after
quoting these phrases, he says “Apud Targumistas et Rabbinos occurrit
sub nomine סמאל Samael.”[584]
The idea then of which we are in search, is unquestionably of frequent
occurrence among the Talmudists. In expressing it they have
recourse to new names not found in the Canonical writings. Surely
a strong presumption arises, that the Hebrew Scriptures did not furnish
them with the means of designating the personage about whom
they discoursed.
For the sake of those readers of the English Scriptures who may
not have noticed the remarkable similarity between the Epistle of
Jude, and the second chapter of the second Epistle of Peter, I subjoin
a comparison of the two. A reference to the Greek Testament
will make it evident, that the parallelism is fairly exhibited in our
common translation. My present purpose, at least, will be sufficiently
answered by taking the citations thence.
2 Peter ii.
Jude.
1 ... There shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. 3. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.
4. For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
4. For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment:
6. And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.
6. And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly:
7. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
10. But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities.
8. Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities.
11. Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord.
9. Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the Devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.
12. But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.
10. But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.
13 ... Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you.
12. These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear.
17. These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.
12. Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds;... 13. ... Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.
18. For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.
16. These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage.
Very few readers, it is probable, will rise from the examination of
this parallelism, without the persuasion, that the writings betraying
it cannot be independent productions; and without amazement
at the opinion of Lardner, that “the similitude of the subject might
produce,” to such extent, “a resemblance of style. The design,” he
continues, “of St. Peter and St. Jude was to condemn some loose
and erroneous Christians, and to caution others against them. When
speaking of the same sort of persons, their style and figures of speech
would have a great agreement.”[585] Lardner appears to shrink from
attributing to the inspired St. Jude (supposing him to be the later
writer) either plagiarism or a needless repetition of instruction.[586] But
why should his inspiration deter him from such an act? It rather
affords, as Michaelis observes, a conclusive reason for ascribing it
to him. “For the Holy Ghost,” this author suggests, “certainly
knew, while he was dictating the Epistle to St. Jude, that an Epistle
of St. Peter, of a like import, already existed. And if the Holy
Ghost, notwithstanding this knowledge, still thought that an Epistle
of St. Jude was not unnecessary, why shall we suppose that St. Jude
himself would have been prevented from writing by the same knowledge?”[587]
This argument of the learned German certainly renders it
unnecessary to doubt, with the scrupulous Lardner, whether St. Jude
would copy from a fellow-labourer’s letter: but then, it also renders
it unnecessary to believe this: for with the perfect familiarity which
the Holy Ghost possessed (“while dictating”) with the previous
epistle of Peter, there was no occasion whatever for St. Jude to
have the knowledge too. Indeed so completely might any degree of
parallelism be explained in this way, that no conceivable phenomena
of agreement would furnish the slightest proof that the one writer
had seen the production of the other.
For some inscrutable reasons, however, all the ablest theologians
seem to have declined this easy solution, by appeal to the memory of
the Holy Ghost; and to have been convinced that some method,
simply human, must be sought, to account for the accordance between
these two epistles. Some have supposed, with Bishop Sherlock,
that both authors drew their materials from a common source,
the imagery and phraseology of which they freely used. But as
Eichhorn has well observed, “Bare conjecture is an insufficient support
for this supposition; in the absence of all trace of any document
giving plausibility to the suggestion, by disclosing a source in common
relation with the corresponding passages of the two epistles.”[588]
If this explanation be untenable, nothing remains but to conclude that
one of the writers copied from the other; and this, accordingly, has been
the general opinion of theologians. This, however, is the only point
on which critics are agreed: for when the question is proposed, whether
St. Peter or St. Jude were the original writer, it is curious to observe
the confidence with which each of the two answers may be returned,
and the opposite views which may be taken of the considerations
affecting the decision. In the absence of all external evidence, the
intrinsic character of the two compositions must determine our reply:
and the chief impression which results from a comparison of them is,
that St. Jude has expressed his ideas with more succinctness and
unity; St. Peter with more vagueness and amplification. Appealing
to this circumstance, Dr. Hug says, “the critic cannot fail to perceive
which was the original;” “it is evident that the passages of
Peter are periphrases and amplifications;” “the originality of Jude
is clear from the comparison of both authors, and especially from the
language;” “Peter had, therefore, the Epistle of Jude before him,
and in his own manner applied it to his purposes.”[589] Michaelis, however,—who
rejects the Epistle of Jude, and says that, “judging by its
contents,” we “have no inducement to believe it a sacred and divine
work,”—ventures on the following confident statements: “No doubt
can be made, that the second Epistle of St. Peter was, in respect to
the Epistle of St. Jude, the original and not the copy:” “with respect
to the date of this (Jude’s) Epistle, all that I am able to assert
is, that it was written after the second Epistle of St. Peter;” “this
appears from a comparison of the two, which are so similar to each
other both in sentiments and in expressions, as no two epistles could
well be, unless the author of the one had read the epistle of the other.
It is evident therefore that St. Jude borrowed from St. Peter both
expressions and arguments, to which he himself has made some few
additions.”[590]
After reading these positive statements on either side, we are
struck with the justice of the following remark of Eichhorn’s: referring
to the differences between the two epistles in respect to their
style, he says: “These phenomena admit of a twofold explanation.
Peter might be regarded as the original and Jude as the copy; inasmuch
as, in the process of revision, a writing may become more perfect
in the expression and disposition of the ideas: the superfluities
will naturally be retrenched, the march of the thoughts become
quicker, the diction more choice; the copyist having the matter all
before him, and being able to direct his attention exclusively to the
form which it shall assume. But with just as much truth we might
turn round and say,—Jude was the original, whom Peter illustrated,
amplified, and paraphrased. In the process, the style lost its unity,
its compactness, its clear outline: the paraphrast interrupted the
succession of thoughts with several foreign ideas; and the exposition
of the subject thus became more obscure, prolix, and disorderly.
Who can decide between these two possibilities?”
This acute author does not, however, consider the problem of impossible
solution. The suspense in which its difficulty holds us, continues,
he observes, “only so long as we confine ourselves merely to
a mutual comparison of the parallel passages. If we look at them
in their relation to the whole of St. Peter’s second epistle, we find a
reason for concluding that Jude is original, Peter the copyist. The
author of the second chapter of Peter does not stand, as a writer, on
his own ground: if he did, his mode of writing would be the same
as in the first and third chapters, which, however, is not the case. It
is clear that we cannot apply to Jude this test of originality, derived
from consistency of style; for we possess no other composition of
his, with which to compare his epistle. Yet there is a compactness
and unity in his writing, from which its independent character may
be inferred. Whoever is content to take up the thoughts of others,
yet not without introducing something of his own, is easily drawn
aside by accessory ideas; by which the definite outline of a composition
is lost. This is by no means the case in the epistle of
Jude.”[591]
It is generally admitted, then, that these two productions, as far
as their topics coincide, constitute but one authority: and we shall
follow, I think, the most judicious criticism, if we assign that authority,
whatever it may be, to the epistle of Jude. Whence, then,
did he derive his knowledge of such circumstances as those which
are mentioned in the sixth and ninth verses, respecting “the angels
which kept not their first estate,” and “Michael the archangel contending
with the Devil” “about the body of Moses?” There are
but three supposable sources; immediate personal inspiration; the
Hebrew Scriptures; or some non-canonical and unauthoritative
work.
The first of these suppositions I do not find to be maintained by
any creditable theological writer; and it may be dismissed with the
following remarks of Michaelis:—“The dispute between Michael
and the Devil about the body of Moses, has by no means the appearance
of a true history: and the author of our epistle has not
even hinted that he knew it to be true by the aid of Divine inspiration,
or that he distinguished it from other Jewish traditions. On
the contrary, he has introduced it as part of a story, with which his
readers were already acquainted: he does not appear to have had
any other authority for it, than they themselves had: nor does the
part which he has quoted at all imply, either that he himself doubted,
or that he wished his readers should doubt, of the other parts of
it.”[592]
The second supposition, that the writer makes no allusion, on these
points of celestial history, to any thing beyond the Old Testament,
is so universally regarded as untenable, that even Lardner’s great authority
will hardly avail to procure it any further attention. In what
part of the Hebrew Scriptures St. Jude obtained his information respecting
the fallen angels, Lardner, while deploring a like omission
on the part of his predecessors, has neglected to explain. And
when, in order to connect the story of Michael and the Devil with
Zach. iii. 1-3, he is obliged to construe “the body of Moses,”
into the Israelitish people, it surely becomes evident that the consideration
of this passage never fully engaged his incomparable judgment.[593]
Happily, Lardner’s is a reputation of which there is no need
to be economical: and even theological opponents cannot apply to
him the description which, with some truth and more severity, they
have given of Mr. Wakefield, as a “scholar, who was great among
Unitarians, but not among scholars:”—
“Quem bis terque bonum cum risu miror; et idem
Indignor, quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus?”
There remains, then, but the third supposition, that St. Jude derived
these notices of the supernatural world from some apocryphal
and traditional work. And we need the less scruple to admit this, as
he himself intimates the fact, in the fourteenth verse, where he refers
to the Book of Enoch. This work professes to be extant in the
Æthiopic language; and the copies of it contain the passage cited
by St. Jude: and whatever doubts may attach to Bishop Lawrance’s
opinion, that we have it substantially as it was originally written
shortly before the time of Christ, the citations from the “Book of
Enoch,” by Syncellus, and the references to it by both Greek and
Latin Fathers, are too numerous and ancient, to leave it questionable
that such a work existed, and was in use not long after the
Christian era, and probably before. Hug gives this account of it:—“The
Book of Enoch, in fact, was full of Jewish, Theurgical, and
Magical reveries, as indeed the character of the person, to whom
this writing was ascribed, required it to be. According to Eupolemus,
he is said to have been the inventor of Astrology, or rather a
scholar of the Angels in this science, who initiated him into the
mysteries of it; for he had at one time obtained a mission to the
Angels, on which occasion he probably received their instruction.
But it did not suffice, that he was acquainted with the course of the
planets, the position of the Heavens, and their signification; but
he likewise, as the Jews and other Easterns maintained, learned
in addition from the heavenly natures, the art of prognostication,
characters, offerings, purifications, lustrations, and other things of
this description, which he imparted to mankind. According to these
ideas, which were entertained of him far and wide among Jews, Arabians,
and others, we can easily determine, to what sort of literature
his writings must belong. The remains of it, which we find
in the Church-Fathers also, do not deceive this expectation.”[594]
Though this is the only Apocryphal production to which St. Jude
refers by name, Origen informs us, in a passage already cited, that
the adventure between Michael and the Devil was taken from a work
entitled Ἀνάληψις or Ἀνάβασις τοῦ Μωσέως. “From a comparison of the
relation in this book with St. Jude’s quotation,” says Michaelis,
“he was thoroughly persuaded, that it was the book from which
St. Jude quoted. This he asserts without the least hesitation: and
in consequence of this persuasion, he himself has quoted the Assumption
of Moses, as a work of authority, in proof of the temptation
of Adam and Eve by the Devil. But as he has quoted it
merely for this purpose, he has given us only an imperfect account
of what this book contained, relative to the dispute about the body of
Moses. One circumstance, however, he has mentioned, which is
not found in the epistle of St. Jude, namely, that Michael reproached
the Devil with having possessed the serpent which seduced Eve.
In what manner this circumstance is connected with the dispute
about the body of Moses will appear from the following consideration.
The Jews imagined the person of Moses was so holy, that
God could find no reason for permitting him to die: and that nothing
but the sin committed by Adam and Eve in paradise, which
brought death into the world, was the cause why Moses did not live
for ever. The same notions they entertained of some other very
holy persons, for instance of Isai, who, they say, was delivered to
the angel of death, merely on account of the sins of our first parents,
though he himself did not deserve to die. Now in the dispute between
Michael and the Devil about Moses, the Devil was the accuser,
and demanded the death of Moses. Michael therefore replied to
him, that he himself was the cause of that sin, which alone could
occasion the death of Moses. How very little such notions as these
agree, either with the Christian theology, or with Moses’ own
writings, it is unnecessary for me to declare.”[595]
The direct testimony of Origen should be taken in connexion
with the well-known fact, that this story of Michael and the Devil
is one of the standing traditions of the Jewish people; the invention
of a remote antiquity; and repeated ever since by a multitude of
Rabbinical writers. A specimen of the legend may be found by the
curious in the section of Michaelis, from which I have quoted the
foregoing passage. With respect to the reception which we must
give to such an alleged fact, the same author observes—“It lies
without the circle of human experience; and therefore it cannot be
attested by any man, unless he has either divine inspiration, or has
intercourse with beings of a superior order. Consequently, whoever
was the author of the apocryphal book, from which the quotation
was made, his account cannot possibly command assent.”[596] This
remark evidently applies, not only to the story of Michael, but to the
tradition of the Fallen Angels; which, there is every reason to believe,
must have been derived from a like apocryphal source; especially
as we have the express assurance of Tertullian, that the Book
of Enoch treated of the nature, offices, and fate of fallen Beings.[597]
This author, then, has unquestionably “made use of Jewish materials,
which have no existence but in apocryphal books,”[598] and
therefore no claim on our belief. “I know of no other method of
vindicating the quotation,” says Michaelis, “than by supposing
that St. Jude considered the whole story, not as a real fact, which
either he himself believed, or which he required his readers to believe,
but merely as an instructive fable, which served to illustrate the doctrine
which he himself inculcated, that we ought not to speak evil
of dignities.”[599] Hug resorts to an explanation of this kind; and
conceives that St. Jude employs apocryphal weapons of persuasion,
as best adapted to confound the Heretics whom he assailed.[600] It
may be so: but if his illustrations and examples from the supernatural
world be thus destitute of intrinsic authority and truth, and
we must be heretics before we can feel their force, what becomes of the
orthodox doctrine of fallen Angels?
546. The first trace of this fiction presents itself in the Apocryphal book of the
Wisdom of Solomon, ii. 24; “Nevertheless, through envy of the Devil, came
death into the world.” How difficult it appeared, even to the learned and imaginative
Origen, to establish this interpretation on any sound scriptural authority,
may be seen in the fact, that he can quote in its behalf nothing better than
an unknown Jewish work in the Greek language, entitled Ἀνάληψις τοῦ Μωσέως.
In Rufinus’s version of Origen’s “Principles,” occurs the following passage:
“In Genesi serpens Evam seduxisse describitur; de quo in Ascensione Möysi,
cujus libelli meminit in epistolâ suâ Apostolus Judas, Michaël archangelus cum
Diabolo disputans de corpore Möysi, ait, a Diabolo inspiratum serpentem, causam
exstitisse prævaricationis Adæ et Evæ.”—De Princip. lib. iii. c. 2. Though
the learned Father does not hesitate to cite this book, for a theological purpose,
he does not inform us of the grounds on which he was satisfied to invest it with
divine authority.
558. “ שׁטן (1.) adversarius; in antiquiori Hebraismo homo, ut in 1 Sam. xxix. 4;
2 Sam. xix. 23; 1 Reg. v. 4; xi. 14; xxiii. 25: in sequiori, post exilium Babylonicum,
angelus malus sive diabolus, qui κατ’ ἐξοχὴν Satan vocatur, Ps. cix. 6;
Zach. iii. 1, 2; 1 Chron. xxi. 1. (2.) circuitor, qui civium motus observat; secundum
quosdam, Hiob. i. 6, 8; ii. 1.”—Joh. Simonis Lex. Hebr. in verb.
In Ps. cix. 6, and Zach. iii. 1, 2, there is, however, no reason to suppose that
the word is used as a proper name. The former of the two passages is best rendered,
“Let an accuser stand at his right hand:” and in explanation of the latter,
Archbishop Newcome cites the following note from Dr. Blayney; “It appears to
me most probable, that by Satan, or the Adversary, is here meant the adversaries
of the Jewish nation in a body, or perhaps some leading person among
them, Sanballat for instance, who strenuously opposed the rebuilding of the
temple, and of course the restoration of the service of the sanctuary, and the reestablishment
of Joshua in the exercise of his sacerdotal ministry.”—Newcome’s
Minor Prophets, in loc.
562. On entering the creed of the Jews, this doctrine underwent another change,
of which many traces are to be found in all their subsequent writings, and which
throws light on several passages of the New Testament. It is thus stated by
Dr. D. F. Strauss: “When that Satan who appears in the Persian religion as a
wicked being inimical to mankind, passed into the Jewish faith, his character
was accommodated to the Hebrew peculiarity, which confined to the people of
Israel all that is good and worthy of humanity; and he was regarded as at once
the special enemy of their nation, and the Lord of their Gentile foes. The interests
of the Jewish people becoming concentrated in the person of the Messiah,
it was natural that the Satan should be conceived of as the personal opponent
of the Messiah.” “Accordingly,” adds this writer, “in the New Testament
the idea of Jesus as the Messiah everywhere involves that of Satan as the
adversary of his person and work.”[b] We may well object to the unqualified
generalization comprised in this last remark, and therefore to many of the author’s
particular applications of it; and especially we must regard as unsuccessful
his attempt to destroy the historical character of the narrative of our Lord’s
temptation; but no judicious interpreter will wholly neglect the suggestion which
the passage contains.
565. Mr. Stowell, in his Lecture on the Personality and Agency of Satan (pp. 703,
704), intimates that probably no visible form presented itself to Jesus: and
though strongly, and as it appears to me reasonably, objecting to the interpretation
which resolves the whole temptation into a vision, he supposes, with more
latitude than consistency of explanation, that the Devil “showed” to our Lord
all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them,—not really and objectively,—but
by means of “a glowing though scenical representation.” The Lecturer
does not state whether he conceives the solicitations of Satan to have been conveyed
by the method of real and organic talking: but if, in the peculiar style of
this narrative, the Tempter can be described as “showing” things without the
presence of any visible objects, he may be described as “saying” things without
the presence of any audible sounds. English orthodoxy, in conformity with the
gross and hard materialism which pervades it, seems to have encouraged the
idea, that all preternatural communications, whether diabolic or divine, with the
human mind, must be made by articulate noises or sensible images; that the action
of spirit on spirit is inconceivable; and a revelation in silence and darkness
a thing impossible. Adverting to this prejudice, the admirable Barclay says,
“We must not think his” (Abraham’s) “faith was built upon his outward senses,
but proceeded from the secret persuasion of God’s spirit in his heart;”—“by
which many times faith is begotten and strengthened without any of these outward
and visible helps; as we may observe in many passages of the Holy Scriptures,
where it is only mentioned, ‘And God said,’ &c., ‘And the word of the Lord
came’ unto such and such, ‘saying,’ &c. But if any one should pertinaciously
affirm, that this did import an outward audible voice to the carnal ear, I would
gladly know, what other argument such an one could bring, for this his affirmation,
saving his own simple conjecture. It is said indeed, ‘The Spirit witnesseth
with our spirit;’ but not to our outward ears, Rom. viii. 16. And seeing the
Spirit of God is within us, and not without us only, it speaks to our spiritual,
and not to our bodily ear. Therefore I see no reason, where it’s so often said in
Scripture, ‘The Spirit said,’ ‘moved,’ ‘hindered,’ ‘called,’ such or such a one,
to do or forbear such or such a thing, that any have to conclude, that this was
not an inward voice to the ear of the soul, rather than an outward voice to the
bodily ear. If any be otherwise minded, let them, if they can, produce their
arguments, and we may further consider of them.”—Barclay’s Apology for the
true Christian Divinity, Prop. II.
573. See his Treatise, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: an abstract of
which, with a translation of the portions relating to the dualistic system, will be
found in Dr. Prichard’s Analysis of the Egyptian Mythology, Book III.
574. We allude to Ritter (Geschichte der Philosophie), who (i. p. 159-173) has
weighed all the arguments which have been alleged in behalf of this opinion with
an even hand.
575. Thirlwall’s History of Greece, Vol. II. pp. 130, 131.
585. Credibility of the Gospel History. Supplement, ch. xxi.
586. “It seems very unlikely that St. Jude should write so similar an epistle, if
he had seen St. Peter’s. In that case, St. Jude would not have thought it needful
for him to write at all. If he had formed a design of writing, and had met
with an epistle of one of the apostles, very suitable to his own thoughts and intentions,
I think he would have forborne to write.”—Cred. loc. cit.
587. Michaelis’ Introd. to the N. T. ch. xxix. sec. 2.
588. Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das neue Testament, viii. 3.
589. Dr. J. L. Hug’s Introduction to the New Testament: translated by Dr. Wait.
Sec. 169, 170.
590. Marsh’s Michaelis, ch. xxviii. sec. 1; ch. xxix. sec. 2, 5.
599. loc. cit. Michaelis adds a hint, which may perhaps be as appropriate in
England as in Germany: “To the doctrine, which St. Jude inculcates by this
quotation, that we ought not to speak evil of dignities, not even of the fallen
angels, but that we should leave judgment to God, I have no objection. And I
really think, that they transgress the bounds of propriety, who make it their
business, either in the pulpit or in their writings, to represent the devil as an object
of detestation; since, notwithstanding his fall, he is still a being of a superior
order. This reminds me of a certain oriental sect, which Niebuhr met with
in the neighbourhood of the river Zab, in Assyria, and which, for the same reason
as that which I have just assigned, will not suffer any one to speak evil of the
devil.”
LECTURE XII. THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF RETRIBUTION HEREAFTER. BY REV. HENRY GILES. — Footnotes for Lecture XII.
“AND GOD SAID TO JONAH, DOEST THOU WELL TO BE ANGRY FOR THE
GOURD? AND HE SAID, I DO WELL TO BE ANGRY, EVEN UNTO DEATH.
THEN SAID THE LORD, THOU HAST PITY ON THE GOURD FOR WHICH
THOU HAST NOT LABOURED, NEITHER MADEST IT GROW; WHICH CAME
UP IN A NIGHT AND PERISHED IN A NIGHT. AND SHOULD NOT I SPARE
NINEVEH, THAT GREAT CITY, WHEREIN ARE MORE THAN SIX SCORE
THOUSAND PERSONS THAT CANNOT DISCERN BETWEEN THEIR RIGHT
HAND AND THEIR LEFT?”—Jonah iv. 9, 10, 11.
Pain affects us, as it comes near to us. The war or famine,
or any other calamity that afflicts a nation afar off, is but a
vague report or a distant rumour; it may not pass unheard,
but comparatively it is unfelt. It requires that grief shall
touch and sting us in our selfishness; that we may know
fully and truly what it inflicts on others. And it is thus that
God at once rebukes and cures our insensibility, by bringing
loss and sorrow home to our own souls: the withered gourd
wrung tears from the surly and unamiable prophet: but the
prospect of Nineveh with her mighty population in ashes
had nothing with which to touch the fountains of his sorrows.
Admitting as I thus do that there is much of selfishness in
our nature, yet persuaded that there is also much of sympathy
and mercy in it, taking either the character of God, or that
of man as a criterion, I have long regarded the belief of eternal
punishment as one of those moral paradoxes which you
cannot deny, and for which you cannot account. Most of
human creatures, so far as they accord with their humanity,
shrink from inflicting or beholding pain; and when they
can inflict it wantonly, or behold it without compassion, we
can pronounce on them no sentence of deeper reprobation
than to call them inhuman. We tread not knowingly on the
crawling worm; we hear not insensibly the inarticulate voice
of the sick and dumb animal: and yet many of us who
would not look unmoved on the last spasms of an expiring
dog, can believe that God regards with ruthless sternness the
eternal tortures of numberless eternal spirits. We cannot gaze
without compassion on the tear in the infant’s speechless eye,
and yet some of us can believe that God has created such
beings to look up through all eternity from hopeless torture.
We cannot think on the racks by which tyrant-man has tortured
his brother-man—on the dungeons in which he has imprisoned
him, and shut out from him the sun of heaven and
the breath of nature, without a feeling of repugnance and a
sentiment of indignation, and yet Christians can believe that
God, whom they call “the good, the merciful,” has constructed
for his creatures means of undying anguish and dungeons
of boundless darkness, where the smile of hope never
gleams, where the light of mercy never comes. We lament
war, and yet, if orthodox, we believe that God maintains in
his dominions regions of everlasting warfare; we lament the
madness and abuse of passion, and yet, if orthodox, we must
believe that God allows that madness and abuse to be eternalized
in all their extreme malignity. We lament physical
and mental suffering; except on the visitation of mercy none
of us would desire to go through the lazar house, where
despair and anguish lie low together, where the head is heavy
and the pulse is fevered; or through those asylums which give
refuge to humanity in its last calamity, and its worst; and
yet, if orthodox, we can believe that God perpetuates throughout
everlasting ages the worst evils of the body, the fiercest
passions, and the most awful madness of the soul. And yet
this great, this glorious universe is his—is his workmanship—it
came not up in a night, it is not to perish in a night—the
earth is long to be green, and the heavens are to be bright.
Throughout the space that has no limit, throughout the time
that has no end, the stars are to shine, and systems are to
move onward in their unmeasured and their trackless glory.
And yet, if orthodox, we must believe there is an endless
hell whose smoke of torment must ascend for ever against
their brightness. These, the works of God’s hands, are
marred—the majesty of his power defeated—Paradise is
made a wilderness, and hell is made populous. If we think
of the world with any degree of realising truth, we shall feel
this result to be most tremendous, and we shall wonder that
God with infinite power should have created such a lovely
universe to be defaced; that he should have peopled it with
such capacities for good, to be exercised for ever only in the
production of evil; that he should have given them immense
and eternal capacities only to be immense and eternal capacities
for misery. This, if true, is the greatest miracle and
the greatest mystery unquestionably in the divine government.
This subject committed to my charge I feel to be truly
solemn and awful. Next to the idea of a God, that of a
future state is the most important. The character we ascribe
to God operates on our own, or is created by it; and so
our conceptions of the future life reacts on human conduct,
and human sentiments. We may see this painfully in the
mistakes and abuses with which harsh views of the future
life have clouded the Christian church, and poisoned the
heart of Christendom. These gloomy sentiments from many
robbed religion of solace, and the breast of peace. I have
seen beings maddened and convulsed by visions of Calvinism.
I have heard them long for annihilation as a consummation
most desirable—not in the remorse of sin, but in the
tortures of superstition.—I have seen them look forward with
pleasure to the church-yard turf under which they were to
rest for ever from their troubles, and sleep in peace their
“eternal sleep.” This sombre belief has at once desolated
and darkened earth. Faith it has turned to a boundless fear;
the dread of the future it makes the bitterness of the present,
and is equally the parent of stern self-infliction, or of remorseless
intolerance. It was this that in older days drove the
ascetic to the desert; that made nature and the face of his
fellow hateful to him; that filled his ferocious solitude with
unearthly terrors; that trained, instead of a saint, a theological
savage: it was this which aroused religious wars; which
infused into these wars a spirit of fury; that demonised humanity;
that made a most merciful nature a stranger to
mercy: it was this which brought man in nearest resemblance
to that vile and wicked being whom his worst and
blackest passions had formed: it was this belief that tore
out the heart of flesh and put in its place the heart of stone—a
heart which no appeal could soften, and which no appeal
could move. It was not until there was a hell without hope,
that there was a heart without mercy. I believe it to be
quite capable of proof, that no mere worldly wickedness has
ever cursed mankind with so many sufferings as the belief of
this doctrine; that has ever heaped on them so many cruelties,
and made them agents of cruelties in return. Why have wars
for religion ever been the worst? The reason is obvious:
the soldiers of religion are not soldiers of flesh; the soldiers
of religion enter into no earthly service; they enlist
under the god of battles and of vengeance. It is against the
hated, and the vile, and the accursed, and the lost, they carry
destruction; they are but the executioners of the righteous
decrees of God, and theirs are the championship of piety,
and the chivalry of heaven. When the weak contend with the
weak, mutual need begets mutual mercy: but when the
natural ferocity of passion assumes the authority of God, and
clothes itself with the armour of the skies, the gulf in which
all charity is buried, is broad and unfathomable as that which
is commonly placed between heaven and hell. This belief
was one of the main causes of the most horrible religious
persecutions. It was not until the generous and gentle sensibility
of the religious nature was debased by coarse picturings
of physical tortures and of endless miseries, that the sacerdotal
arm became terrible as death, and the sacerdotal spirit
was drenched in wrath as dire and unrelenting as that which
they fashioned beyond the grave. Before priestly and popular
imaginations God became an awful punisher. They created
in heaven a throne of inexorable judgment, and from
that throne the word of fate went forth which could but once
be spoken, and cut off hope for ever. They freed themselves
from human compunctions, and emulated the stern despotism
which they preached or believed. Fear is the parent of
cruelty—and in religion, as in character, the slavish spirit is
ever the most unfeeling. The truth is, that whether in idea
or in act, familiarity with torture stupifies the heart and indurates
the senses. That frequent contemplation of pain
destroys sympathy, and that pain, when once it can be carelessly
seen, can be easily inflicted, are facts which observation
has placed beyond the need of argument, and experience
beyond the reach of contradiction.
In this Lecture I propose two objects:—First, to state my
views on moral retribution, which in essentials I apprehend
are those of Unitarians in general: Secondly, to examine the
arguments which are advanced in favour of eternal torture,
and to state my reasons for not believing them. I shall try
to the utmost of my power to condense what I have to say,
but I hope for your indulgence in return, if on a subject of
such compass—on which so many volumes have been written—there
should be some omissions. The end of this or any
other lecture can never be to expound an important topic in
all its completeness, so much as to suggest and excite inquiry
concerning it.
I. I shall, in the first place, enter on the positive section
of my lecture; and on this point, I am sorry to say that the
frequent re-assertion of mistakes regarding our doctrines will
put me to the painful necessity of much repetition.
1.—I commence with a few remarks on the nature of sin.
One essential characteristic on which we have insisted—and
we believe what we have asserted—is, that sin is a deep
spiritual injury. The source of it is in the soul; it is the
dark corruption of an evil heart. This I take to be one of
the greatest and profoundest revelations of Christ, one which
places him infinitely above all other moral teachers, and which
makes Christianity the highest scheme of moral duty. False
religions and false philosophies have been all at variance with
this inward sense of duty. They have contrived numberless
inventions as substitutes for it, or devised most ingenious
means to nullify it. Priesthoods, with most imposing authority
and mystical influence, have offered all sorts of spiritual
panaceas to ease the wounded conscience. Ceremonies, with
all graceful gesture and solemn import, have presented their
beauty to the senses, and their spell to the fancies of superstition.
Sacrifices without number—from the turtle-dove to
the hecatomb; from the scape-goat driven to the desert, to
the human being slaughtered to God; from the blood of life
swelling round a thousand altars of vengeance, to the flowers
and the fruits that were heaped upon the altars of mercy—all
these have been tried to make religion for the senses, to make
religion a flattery and delusion: but all were not sufficient;
conscience is stronger than rituals, and to that conscience, to
that spirit of God in the soul of man, Christ came; to that
he was the Apostle and to that he preached. Christ went at
once into the soul; he pierced the veil of sophistries and
deceits by which men are ingenious to discover excuses to
cover their selfishness and their wrong doings; he went to
the seat of the evil, and struck at once to the root of bitterness.
Others baptized with water, cleansing merely the outside,
but he baptized with fire and the holy spirit, going to
the innermost thoughts of the heart and the veins;—others
preached on the keeping of feast-days and fast-days, but he
taught of that God who is not the Lord of times or seasons,
but the God of life in every hour—the God of the whole
universe in every motion;—others called men to go to the temple,
Christ called them to go into their closets and commune
with their hearts;—others told them to wash their hands,
Christ exhorted them rather to cleanse their spirits;—others
told them to fear men who could kill the body, Christ warned
them not to fear man who could only kill the body, but to
fear God who could kill the soul as well as the body. He was
truly the prophet of eternity—the preacher for eternity. He
was truly the preacher of the invisible, and the herald of it—he
needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what
was in man—he required no testimony, for he had the knowledge
of humanity in his own nature deep and true, but
guiltless—and he spake out of the fullness of his own full
heart: it was therefore that he spake as never man spake:
it was therefore that the common people heard him gladly—for
his words had power to those thoughts and affections
which are native to bosoms of all men; it was therefore that
he spake with authority, and not as the scribes: for they
discoursed on the traditions of the fathers, but he appealed
to the inspirations of God—they spake of what had been
written on tables of stones, but he spoke of what had been
written on the fleshy tables of the heart. Others made sin
to consist in resistance to the priest or to the king—but
Christ showed it to be an alienation of the soul from God, the
apostacy of the conscience from its own sense of duty. It
is that which is within, he taught, that defiles the man; a
man may wash his hands seven times a-day, but not once
cleanse his heart; he may often wash his hands, and yet never
in innocency. He showed that sepulchres might be beautified
outside, and inside be only rottenness and corruption.—His
apostles learned of him this most profound, most divine philosophy,
and so they preached it to the world. To be carnally
minded, says Paul, is death; to be spiritually minded is
life and peace. Whatsoever, says the same apostle, a man
soweth, that shall he also reap; he that soweth to the flesh,
shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the
spirit, shall of the spirit reap everlasting life. Lust, (or evil
desire,) saith Saint James, when it hath conceived, bringeth
forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
This is the gospel doctrine on the inwardness and spirituality
of sin; and we preach no other gospel, and we teach no other
doctrine. A solemn consequence attaches to our view which
is also powerfully enforced in the New Testament scriptures,
but which the vicarious scheme tends directly to subvert—I
mean the personal nature of transgression. Sin we hold to
be no transferable quality, and this was most lucidly proved
here by one of my brother lecturers. With the sinner himself
lies the guilt; with him who contracts it it must lie;
it cannot be acquired by imputation, nor can it be punished
by imputation. If one doctrine be more clearly taught in
scripture than another, it is this, that the offender shall be
answerable only for his own sins; and for these, as surely as
there are a conscience, a future world, and a God, he must
be answerable.—Every man, our Saviour declares, shall be
judged according to his own works. Every one of us, the
Apostle Paul asserts, shall give an account of himself to God.
But no, saith orthodoxy, you must also be answerable for
Adam, and upon your head must be a guilt that darkened
the very dawn of creation; and so upon this principle guilt
should descend from sire to son; the later we are in existence,
the more tremendous should be this growing mountain
of imputation, until the last man should sink under the
burden of all the crime which had been from the first man to
himself.—We are told that Unitarians make light of sin. But,
I ask, what does orthodoxy make of justice? And I further
ask, what does it make of scripture? If there were a judge
on earth who decided as orthodoxy decides, he would be
scouted as a monster: if there were a code of laws which
contained such a standard, the common moral sense of mankind
would reject it; nay, there is not a tribe of savages
in the habitable world so blind to the idea of justice as not
to repel the dogma of imputed and eternal punishment. And
yet we are gravely told that God thus acts, and that the
Bible thus teaches; we are constantly rebuked as wanting in
faith and humility, because we can find no such principles in
either providence or the Bible. The plain declaration of
the prophet Ezekiel contains the spirit of both. “The soul
that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity
of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the
son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him,
and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” As
certainly as we have a moral sense, as surely as we can discern
between right and wrong, we are compelled to acknowledge
the one and utterly to repudiate the other. Give but
the conscience justice, let common sense have but the slightest
voice in the decision, and you might as easily attempt to
gain a man’s assent to the broadest of contradictions, even to
the admission that a part is equal to the whole, or that two
and two are five, as to feel guilty for another man’s crime, to
feel remorse for another man’s wrong-doing, to be penitent or
humble for that in which we had no participation, or to confess
the justice of punishment by a sentence which made him
criminal before his existence. On the moral injuries of thus
forcing men to contradict the first dictates of their nature, of
destroying the personality of virtue on the one side by an imputed
righteousness, and the personality of sin on the other by
an imputed guilt, I intend not here to enlarge: but one evil I
will just allude to; I mean the wrong it does to truth of sentiment.
Feelings in their real existence which are most excellent
and most beautiful, it distorts and falsifies. There are no
virtues on earth that bring men nearer to heaven than humility
and repentance. To be humble with a true humility is to be in
the likeness of Christ; to be penitent with a true repentance
is to be an object of rejoicing even to the angels of heaven:
but when we hear it said that we are to be of lowly mind on
account of inherited corruption, and penitent for imputed sin;
when we try to force ourselves into emotions which are not
native to the soul, unconsciously we undermine its simplicity
and sincerity, and instead of virtues which must be of spontaneous
growth, or not exist at all, we have sickly abortions
of sentiment that are false, because unnatural; strained efforts
that are at eternal war with experience; and high-sounding
phrases that are as empty as echo and as cold as the frozen
blast. Perversions like these are almost worse than vices,
for vices, though they mar the life, may leave the moral judgment
its integrity. Where there is true conviction there may
be amendment, but when the inward sense is itself diseased,
the case is all but hopeless. Whatever be the evil of sin,
whatever be its punishment; whether the evil be infinite or
limited, whether the punishment be eternal or temporal,
let us at least beware of weakening that sentiment on
which all morality is founded, the deep sense of personal
responsibility. Unitarian views are often described as
being unfavourable to spirituality; but if by spirituality I
am to understand the inward life of man, the activity of his
mental and moral energies, then I think these views eminently
spiritual. The spirit of man is their great subject, and the
spirit of God in the human, their great agency of salvation.
Within the soul itself they place moral salvation or moral
destruction, and within the soul itself they place the elements
which constitute one or the other, the sense of guilt which
makes its hell, the conscious holiness which makes its heaven.
This inward power of conscience is the true distinction of
spiritual life; and the righteous submission to it in our own
hearts, we maintain, is the faith which justifies: a faith which
is an indwelling vitality which consists not in forming propositions
about God and Christ, and in enforcing them or submitting
to them, but in making God and Christ realities in
our secret thoughts; in confidence on the worth of goodness,
in allegiance to duty, and in trust in the power and immortality
of truth.
2. Next I affirm that sin is evil, and that sin is punishable;
and our doctrines make not light of the evil, or disguise the
awfulness of the punishment. Sin is evil: we deny not that;
how could we? It is an eternal truth written on the heart
and life of man, proved with unequivocal and gloomy evidence
in the whole history of the world. Sin is evil to the
individual; evil in the sufferings it prepares for him, and a
still greater evil when it hardens him beyond suffering.
Each one of us will judge this question for himself according
to his degree of moral sensibility, and according to the
circumstances of his moral history; but whatever be that
sensibility, or whatever be that history, our moments of
most profound anguish have ever been those in which we
have felt the shameful consciousness of wrong thoughts or
wrong actions. Not, it is true, when the evil passions or evil
deeds held their tyrannical sway over us, but when the spell
was gone, when the mind’s eye grew clear, and the hour of
reflection came with sorrow, and the sad pale light spread
over the hand-writing on the wall, from which conscience
might shrink but could not fail to read. The worst, the most
hardened, the most degraded of human creatures, those whom
the world may think have bidden farewell to conscience, have
moments in the dark silence of thought when the sword of
remorse with all its poisoned tortures sinks into their wounded
bosoms. And in such hours, it is not outward loss, or outward
suffering, but inward agony that afflicts them most; it
is not that they have sunk into the dregs of poverty; it is not
that they have been reduced to dependence and exposed to
insult; it is not that pride passes them with cold and withering
scorn; it is not that pity and hope seem banished from
their path; that all appear to frown upon them; that externally
for them there is no longer peace on earth or light in
heaven—it is, that the brightness and the freshness of their
own hearts are gone; that sacred affections are a waste; that
conscience, when not silenced into apathy, is enraged into an
accuser; that their own respect is lost beyond recovery, and
no delusion, however self-deceiving, can again restore it. The
heart-consuming grief, the wrath and tribulation treasured up
in a life of sin, the righteous judge of the earth alone can
know. And these are all the more bitter if that life had ever
been blessed with holier associations. There is a courage
which can repel the scowl of others; there is a pride, a madness,
if you will, which can despise their opinions, or feel independent
of their esteem; there is a fortitude which can endure
physical suffering to its last infliction; but there is nothing
in time, in place, or in circumstance, which can fortify
us against our own thoughts, against our own feelings, and
especially the feelings of the divinity within us, that struggle
to the last for empire over evil; that come ever and ever to tell
us of what we had of good or might have had; that haunt us
with reproach and sorrow when we have become traitors to our
better nature. Not to speak of conscience with its stinging
sense of violated conviction; not to speak of wasted time, ruined
power, and a wreck of hopes; to say nothing of alienation
from God, and the fear of a future world, I can conceive of
memory dwelling on spots, which once were spots of light,
becoming the tormentor of a fallen soul, the vindicator of
duty and of God; I can conceive of one looking back from
the bare desolateness of sin to a youth that once had been
pure, full of joy and full of virtue, to homes that had been
glad with every affection that sweetens life, to sabbaths that
had repose for the stainless spirit, and prayer for unpolluted
lips; gazing with breaking hearts and weeping eyes over a
part marked with vice and misery, that had been a future
glorious with promise; all this I can conceive in connection
with even the felon in his cell, or with some wretch whose
cough, like a knell of despair, awakens the midnight silence
of the street, whose latest pang is spent in some hidden retreat
of filth and sorrow, of sin and loathsomeness.
I need not say that sin is a great social evil. The fact is
urged upon us with too painful a pressure, both from history
and observation. Take the history of governments and nations;
wars and bloodshed stain the record over its whole extent.
And whence are these, but from the struggle and
rivalry of selfish and sinful passions? From whence, says
the apostle James, come wars and fightings among you;
come they not hence, even of your lusts? From these we
have had the oppression of strength against right. From
these we have had the tyrannies and cruelties with which they
surrounded their thrones of iron despotism; with which they
made the glory of self the affliction of millions; with which
so far as their power extended, they have been the scourges
and the curses of mankind. From these we had the hatred
one nation against another, men arrayed against each other
to hew each other down, doing all iniquities, when interest or
ambition called for them, enslaving one another, and selling
one another, unmindful of all the claims of fraternity in the
din of faction, and losing the sense of their common humanity
in the difference of clime or the colour of the skin.
Take the history of laws. I shall not allege those of the
criminal code which until very recently made even Christian
and enlightened countries vast arenas of legalised assassination:
which spread a reign of terror over the face of empires,
making the scaffold and the gibbet their principal symbols of
civilization, and multiplying to enormous extent the very
crimes, which, pretending to punish, they only publicly authorized
and exemplified. I speak here more particularly of
the spirit of partiality, injustice, selfishness, and rapacity in
which much of legislation has been conceived and executed:
classes of men turning the laws to their own purposes and
leaving those unprotected who most required protection;
commonly preying most on those who least could bear it.
Except where the general sentiment of human right has been
too strong for narrow passions, we may see in the long course
of ages, principle sacrificed to personal interests, the good of
masses betrayed or despised, the poor scorned, the ignorant
neglected, the privileged orders hedged about with all sorts
of protection, the classification of crime and criminals most
unfairly adjusted, the distribution of penalties most unrighteously
allotted; this I ascribe to selfish and evil passions.
Once more, take the history of religion, and you have all the
anger of faction made more stern with the rivalry of Creeds;
the ambition of earthly dominion more aspiring by the addition
of spiritual rule also; the powers of this world made more
fearful by the powers of the world to come; both the visible
and in visible existence subjected to priestly empire, and made
tributary to priestly aggrandizement; the sword of the civil magistrate
which had been sharp enough with one edge to deal the
vengeance of man, receiving another edge from ecclesiastical
authority, to vindicate the judgments of God. Thus we are
compelled to read history, and thus in all its departments
we are compelled to witness the dark traces which sin has
left upon its pages. When we turn to the world around
us, these evils are not the less glaring. Many sufferings,
no doubt, are to be ascribed to our natural wants and weakness,
but they scarcely deserve to be called evils, when we
compare them with those which spring from moral derangements.
Poverty is not so great an affliction as an
all-devouring love for gain; sickness is not so great a misfortune
as an insatiate desire for pleasure; and the ills of
poverty and pain together, are not as fatal as the irritable
wish for distinction which rules so widely in the world, with
its fierce blood of turbulent passions. To these there are to
be ascribed the worst social miseries that grieve the best
hearts, and to remove or ameliorate which the finest spirits
have ever directed their labours. To these we are to ascribe
the covetousness which closes the hand of bounty, and shuts
up the bowels of compassion; which becomes insensible both
to justice and mercy; to these we are to ascribe all forms of
sensuality, and all the abuses of passion; to these we are to
ascribe all vices, material or malignant: and who, though he
had the capacious mind of an archangel, can count the miseries
which in all shapes spread contagion through society?
Independently of those evils which no human eye can reach,
those which present themselves on the very surface of observation
are sufficiently extensive and fearful; intemperance,
ignorance, grossness, hatred, strifes, with all their gloomy appendages;
of unhappy homes; of loud and laughing and
blushless infamy; of mad licentiousness, and late despair;
of lost health, lost honesty, lost reason, which respectively
close their career in the hospital, the prison, or the lunatic
asylum.
3. As to evidence, then, for the existence of guilt, as to
its extent and its evil, I think I can go as far as any Calvinist.
I see the fact, and I have no wish to disguise it;
it startles, but it does not subvert my faith. I grant sin
to be evil—evil in the inward spirit—evil on the outward
life—evil to the individual—evil to the species—evil in this
world—evil in the next. In a certain sense, I am not prepared
to deny that it leaves injurious consequences, which
may be eternal; that the loss of innocence, that subversion
of moral tastes, may implant habits which, for aught
I know, shall be an everlasting injury to the soul, not utterly
to destroy its happiness, or stop its progression, but to
deprive it of advantages and advancement which a purer moral
state would have given it. The evils of sin I hold to be
terrible; the penalty of sin I hold to be inevitable—to be
removed by no sacrifice, to be washed out by no expiation—to
be escaped only in the criminals rising out of the corruption
by experience and wisdom, to a purer moral state. The
punishment of sin I believe to be not only inevitable, but
also enduring, enduring in proportion to indulgence and malignity.
Thoughts, I admit, which have wrought themselves
into the very texture of the intellectual nature; feelings which
have rooted themselves into the heart; habits that have
grown into instinct, are not speedily to be destroyed. Moral
punishment, in my idea, is identical with moral discipline,
and moral discipline I consider to be such an arrangement of
circumstances in the providence of God as shall lead us to
self-correction; such a process of spiritual training as leave
us the consciousness of our own liberty, but yet accomplish
God’s wise ends by God’s boundless power. In building,
then, the structure of our character, our Creator works not
by miracle, but by experience, and this experience may be
slow and painful. I believe most sincerely and profoundly
in a future punishment; not vindictive, but corrective—for
all wise punishment is, and must be, corrective. That the
dispensations of God are not completed in this life, I think
all the moral aspects of things here below make most manifest,
and all analogies intimate, if Scripture had not expressly
declared, that after death there is to be a more distinct exhibition
of the divine government. That the results of character
formed in the present life are to be carried into the future,
and to influence it, I conceive our whole nature argues. Our
existence, as spiritual beings, is properly connected and continuous;
one state prognosticates another; and no two are
absolutely distinct and separate. Our spiritual life consists
of thought united to thought, and feeling to feeling, one operating
on the other, or producing it, of a mysterious chain of
consciousness, bound from link to link by successive memories,
preserving unbroken the identity of our existence. Manhood
is the growth of our youth, and immortality is the growth
of our manhood; and the impressions of character pass from
one stage to another, along the line of succession and
sequence. There are no extremes, except to our outward observation.
Looking at one stage of life, and then, after a
long interval, seeing in the same person the apparently opposite
characteristics, we take those things to be antagonists
which are bound together by the inevitable connexion of
cause and effect. The dreamer of youth becomes, perhaps,
the misanthropist of age; the prodigal of youth, it may be,
grows into the miser of age; the principle of action may in
each case be the same—vanity or self-love; the passion is identical
in principle, and changed only in form, from a change
in circumstances. If we should meet an honest rustic in his
peaceful fields, innocent and contented; if we should afterwards
by accident behold him on a scaffold, it would be to us a
seeming and terrible incongruity. But why? The two events
are in our minds in naked contrast: could we, however,
pierce the Spirit and trace the life of that unfortunate—watch
it from the first intrusive evil thought successively
dwelt on; from actions slightly wrong, unceasingly reiterated
and darkening with every repetition, until the last deadly volition,
and the last awful deed, we should have an analysis of
sad consistency and of profound interest. There is something
sublime in the reflection, that every human creature who
treads the earth and breathes the air, has an inward history,
a history unread by every eye but God’s; a history of solemn
import, that has definite impression on the concerns of
the universe, and is to live for ever in the annals of eternity.
In ordinary phraseology, we speak of our existence as if
death made a chasm in it; but temporal and eternal are but
distinctions of imagination; our eternal life commences, and
our earthly is but the first stage, the infancy of that awful
and endless existence. If I see in our nature that which can
survive change, I see that also in it which can take materials
of joy and sorrow along with it. The faculties that make
our life here must be those which shall make that which is
to come. Memory then will be there, which is but the resurrection
of our by-gone experience; and whether for good
or evil, it will call up the spirits of buried deeds, and as the life
has been, will be an angel of heaven or a minister of hell;—imagination,
which may have been the nurse of piety or the
slave of passion,—intellect, which may have had the glow of
the seraph or the malice of the demon: accordingly, then, as
these powers have been properly directed or abused, every
instinct of our moral nature tells us must be the joy of a
righteous soul, or the agony of an evil heart. What treasure
will the good man find he has laid up for his immortal life,
when the past arises to him in the lustre of a new world: the
consciousness of good thoughts and good actions, the peace
of assimilation with God, and of union with the best of men:
the immortal love of those with whom he had companioned
in his earthly journey, the gratitude of many from whose eyes
he had banished tears, and from whose bosoms he had plucked
out despair; who has been true to the claims of his nature,
and accomplished the work of a disciple of Christ, and a child
of God, and a brother of man. On the other side, what are
to be his feelings, who awakens in eternity with emotions of
isolation and repulsion, condemned in his own conscience,
who now discovers he has all to learn which can fit him for
the society of noble spirits, whose expanded faculties flash
shame and sorrow on his guilty soul, and show him that his
whole course was folly: the sensualist, who stultified his reason
and profaned his affections: the hypocrite, that toiled but
for the outward, betrayed his convictions, and was a living and
incarnate lie; before his fellows, a whited sepulchre; before his
God, a corrupted mass of falsehood: the profane man, on whose
lips prayer rarely dwelt, but to whom cursing and bitterness were
familiar: the persecutor, who finds at last that he has hated
or tormented others for a falsehood, or a sound: the man of
wild ambition, who, despising the true glory which comes from
God, and consists in doing right, spreads terror around him,
in pursuing a phantom: the worldling, whose spirit was enslaved
to those treasures for which he wasted life, and which
he has left behind him in the dust. The sense of right and
wrong is powerful and eternal; and when bad men resist it,
it may be safely trusted to effect its own work, both of correction
and of punishment.
II. I shall here review some of the arguments pleaded for the
eternal misery of the wicked, and state briefly the grounds on
which I reject it.
When we consider the mild and merciful spirit of the Gospel,—when
we reflect on it as a revelation of divine love
made manifest in the most perfect form of human love,—we
are at first sight astonished that so tremendous an idea as
that of an infinite and eternal hell could ever have been connected
with it, or so wretched a one as a seclusive, and comparatively
all but an unpeopled heaven. And truly this
could have never been, had the doctrine of immortal life
been apprehended in the full spirit of Christianity. But the
fact of man’s immortality made manifest in the Gospel has
not generally been so apprehended, it has had from the
first to contend against darkening and perverting influences.
Converts to the faith of Christ brought with them many of
the prejudices and errors of their former training, and what
in the early ages of the church was the result of ignorance,
in later ones became sanctified into the testimony of faith.
Those who came from heathen superstitions to the religion
of Christ, brought with them minds filled with material
images; their worship or their age left no means for any
others; and their belief in a future existence of necessity
became shaped by these associations. A sacrificial worship
symbolized their gods of wrath, and what they had attributed
to many, they were unable to dissociate from one;
physical pains and pleasures comprehended their whole notion
of retribution and reward, and these their Christianity
made eternal. Their hell and their heaven were therefore
fashioned from the rude conceptions of their previous superstitions,
and from the symbolic language of the Gospel
crudely understood. The everlasting hell which thence grew
out of the mistakes of the vulgar, and the speculations of
the learned, it was too much the interest of priests to maintain,
not to receive the sanction of the church with an earnest
and zealous promulgation. Connected with other doctrines,
what immense power was thus placed in the hands of
ecclesiastics! With what deep and gloomy awe it shrouded
the character of the priest! Once in the place of his ministry,
he stood there not as the simple teacher of his brethren,
and his equals, not as the mere expounder of his master’s
gospel, but as the commisioned delegate of heaven, authorized
by God to denounce his everlasting wrath on the guilty,
to wield the thunder of an eternal vengeance. We cannot
estimate the power with which such a doctrine would invest
the hierarchy, and we are not therefore surprised that it is
the last which any orthodox priesthood would be willing to
resign,—one of those prime doctrines, to deny which has
ever been stamped as heresy, from Origen to Servetus. If
even in these times, when protestantism and other causes
have done so much to take away the reverence with which
the ministry was once surrounded, highly-wrought pictures
of endless misery give men not deemed to have any supernatural
authority such influence over the minds of their
hearers, such despotism over their feelings and their consciences,
what must it have been when superstition bent
down the votaries before the church in prostrate submission,
when the servants of her altar were regarded as the direct messengers
of God,—as those ordained to stand between hell and
heaven, with the key of both; to announce glad tidings, or
empty the vials of indignation; to distribute God’s grace, or
to proclaim his malediction. Many causes have been assigned
for the growth of ecclesiastical supremacy, but this doctrine
I am persuaded was the greatest of all; the priestly throne,
which raised its ambition to the stars, was girded around by
the lightning and tempests of eternal terrors. The doctrine
of eternal torments derives much strength from ecclesiastical
interest; and it is further sustained by all the logic of theological
subtlety. Many writers on divinity seem to find a
strange and morbid pleasure in describing the tortures of the
wicked, both in nature and duration, exhausting all analogies
to illustrate the incomprehensible; and all modes of thought
and expression to explain the infinite. On this doctrine
the transition from Romanism to Protestantism has impressed
no change. If the Reformation broke some bonds that
enslaved the freedom of religion, it removed no cloud which
obscured its heaven: the fierce teachings of Augustine were
only made more complete and systematic by the still fiercer
doctrines of Calvin; and the dark sketch of eternal reprobation
drawn in its outlines by the Carthaginian monk, received
its last touches from the Genevan master: what in
the olden church was broached only in the cautious reasonings
of the schools, has in Protestantism been made the
staple materiel of theological declamation.
These doctrines have not only done much to obscure men’s
minds as to the condition of the wicked in a future state, but
also to mislead them in an equal degree on that of the
righteous. This we observe in many of the popular notions
of heaven. To millions, heaven seems to be for the soul
what the grave is for the body—a place of mere repose. If
something more than this, an elysium for indolence, a kind
of region of complacent idealism, where the faithful and
elect are to enjoy ecstacies and prayer, musings and melodies,
which the coarse struggles of earth forbade, in which
the cares of the world left no time to engage;—the clear
skies and still waters of paradise, the golden harps, the incense,
and the music of angels, to relieve from weariness,
strife, and pain, toil-worn and time-worn spirits. Nor is
such view of heaven ungrateful, tried as we are here with sin
and tired as we are with labour; but this must not exhaust
our thoughts of future bliss. Our highest happiness, even
in heaven, must consist in highest action: no other happiness
can exist for a moral and intellectual being than that
which calls his faculties into energy, and supplies both with
materials and objects on which to engage them. Our ideas
in general of heaven are too much those of negation or contrast.
We are here in sojourn, we think only of home there;
we are here in conflict, we think only of peace there; we
are here in labour, and there we only picture our rest; we
forget that all these are worth nothing but as means to
higher purposes, unsuitable as final conditions to creatures
who bear within them the life that is henceforth to go on
with that of the All-creative God.
I may just observe here, and it is pleasant to be able to do
so, that the opinion against which this Lecture is directed,
is an illustration of the fact that tenets die out practically
before they are renounced theoretically. It is well known to
all who hear recent orthodox preaching, or who read recent
orthodox works on practical piety, how little compared with
former times is the space now occupied in them by Satan
and damnation. The imagination is not tortured as it once
was, with all horrible and hideous representations of human
suffering, which taste and devotion alike reject. Why, even in
the Lecture of my reverend and respected opponent, though
directly on the subject, all the repulsive features are lost in
a most moderate and temporate exposition. Such errors let
alone will gradually of themselves expire.
1. In support of the doctrine of eternal torments, it is in
the first place pleaded that Scripture expressly declares it.
This conclusion is founded principally on the words and
phrases correspondent to our “ever,” “everlasting” “for ever
and ever,” &c. That in numerous passages they imply duration
without end or limit, we readily admit. It is needless
to point them out. We are then told that this must be their
invariable meaning, except some evident fragility in the object
to which they are applied implies the contrary. To
assert that they have the highest force when connected with
future punishment, is to assume what is to be proved; for
the nature of the object is the very question in dispute. If
we can show that the words have not unvarying literal application,
then the subject is at least open to discussion; but if
it be asserted they must mean endless duration, because future
punishment is in its nature endless, the point is dogmatically
decided, and there is no further possibility of argument. If
every phrase of Scripture is to be taken as a rigid definition,
then we are to believe that Christ held himself in his own
hands when he said, “this is my body.” Now the instances
in the Bible, in all parts of it in which phrases disputed between
us and our opponents indicated limited duration, and
only that, are numerous beyond counting:[601]—sometimes, not
longer than a man’s life, as when after certain conditions of
compact, the slave is said to serve his master for ever. In
other cases it is more extended, but still temporary; as when
the land of Judea is called an everlasting possession; the
law an everlasting covenant; the nation a people established
for ever; the hierarchy an everlasting priesthood. As to the
last, the writer to the Hebrews tells us, that “the priesthood
being changed there is made a necessity of change also
of the law; for there is verily a disannulling of the commandment
going before for the weakness and unprofitableness
of it.”
Αιων (the principal word in the Greek original), Mr. Simpson
in his Essay on the duration of future rewards and punishments
(p. 17) asserts, occurs about a hundred times in the
New Testament, in seventy of which at least it is clearly used
for limited duration. In the Septuagint translation of the
Old Testament it is even repeated, and several times it is
repeated twice, and in two instances signifies no longer a
period than the life of one man only. “It is,” says the same
critic, “an observation of the utmost importance, that when
αιων, or αιωνιος, are applied to the future punishment of the
wicked, they are never joined to life, immortality, incorruptibility,
but are always connected with fire, or with that
punishment, pain, or second death, which is effected by
means of fire. Now since fire, which consumes or decomposes
other perishable bodies, is itself of a dissoluble or
perishable nature, this intimates a limitation of the period
of time.” The phrase, “everlasting fire,” is plainly a metaphor,
a metaphor which the Jews would be at no loss to
understand: the associations which they derived from the fire
in the valley of Hinnom would render it sufficiently intelligible.
The phraseology was familiar in the Old Testament. Fire
unquenchable, fire not to be quenched, is used in many places
in which it cannot be literal. Thus Jeremiah (xvii. 27.)
threatens the Jews, in the name of God, for their breach of
the sabbath, “then will I kindle a fire in the gates (of Jerusalem,)
and it shall devour the palaces thereof, and it shall
not be quenched.” So Isaiah (xxxiv. 9, &c.), speaking of
Idumea, “and the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch,
and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof
shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night
nor day: the smoke thereof shall go up for ever.”—While
on this part of the subject, I shall just allude to a remark
made on Mr. Grundy’s view of the text in which it is said of
the wicked that their worm dieth not, and their fire is not
quenched. After quoting a passage from Mr. Grundy’s Discourse,
and making some comment on it, the lecturer went
on to assert, “In a note moreover, we are informed that the
foregoing criticism is founded on the assumption of the passage
really referring to future punishment, which, however,
the preacher affirms it does not. For, he adds, we have before
shown, the worm has been long since dead, and for ages has
the fire been quenched.” The impression which this use of
Mr. Grundy’s language had a tendency to leave, is one wholly
foreign to his meaning; for it would seem to imply that Mr.
Grundy asserted the extension already of retributive penalty
in the future life. The plain import is, that our Lord used
a metaphor taken from perishable things, which have, in fact,
perished—and thence it cannot be proved that he referred to
an eternal state of suffering. The allusion, as is well known,
is taken from the close of Isaiah, where, of the worshippers
going to Jerusalem, it is said, they shall look upon the carcases
of the men that have transgressed, for their worm shall
not die, neither shall their fire be quenched. It is plain that
here it means not eternity, and though applied by Christ to
future punishment, it does not follow from the language that
he means to imply unending punishment. Archbishop Newcome’s
language is as strong as Mr. Grundy’s; for he also
says, “in the valley of Hinnom, the worm died when its
food failed—and the pile on which human sacrifices were
burnt to Moloch was often extinguished.” To the writer of
the lectures which have been referred to, we are all deeply
indebted for an example set us in times and under circumstances
of which we can but little now estimate the difficulty;
we owe him the tribute of our respect for an honest
and fearless advocacy of truth, of mental and religious freedom,
at the expense of painful and personal sacrifices.
Thus, while none of these passages that I have referred to
prove this doctrine, there are many scriptures at utter variance
with it. God is again and again called the father that created
us. We are taught that he is good, and that his tender mercies
are over all his works. God is love. He will not always chide,
we are told, neither will he keep his anger for ever; that he
will not cast off for ever; that he hath not shut up his tender
mercies in anger. Finally, almost in the close of the sacred
volume, we are informed that there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow, neither crying, neither shall they suffer any
more pain; for the former things are passed away. Both these
cannot be true. It is a moral contradiction to conceive a
gracious and merciful God, creating beings with immortal life,
and then rendering them eternally wretched: we have but
one alternative, either we must renounce our faith in these
declarations, or we renounce it in the benevolence of God.
There are but two texts, one in Daniel, and the other in Matthew,
in which there is any remarkable force. In these it is
said that the wicked go away into everlasting punishment, but
the righteous into life eternal, and on these two phrases the
tremendous doctrine is built up. The duration of both are
urged to be equal, and we are told, that if we deny eternal
damnation, we deny eternal life. No such thing. Reason,
feeling, nature, justice, moral sentiment, the belief of a perfect
God, and the force of scriptural evidence, coincide with
the one and are repugnant to the other. There is not a single
proof which can be urged in favour of a future life, which is
not an irrefutable argument against future perdition. If you
deduce the ideas from the goodness of God, from his truth,
from his wisdom, it is essentially subversive of this dark
dogma. If you deduce the idea from the nature of man, it
comes to the same purpose; if you conclude he is to live
for ever, because of his infinite and progressive faculties of
reason and of conscience, you must by the same argument infer
that he is to live to a better end than to be cast eternally into
hell. If he was worth creation, he is worth preserving; if he
is worth preserving, he is worth being made good and happy.
If a great multitude of immortals are to endure infinite pain,
so far as they are concerned, the existence of a soul and the
being of a God are infinite evils.
The spirit and the letter of Scripture is in favour of this
glorious doctrine. Every Scripture which proves that God
is good and not malignant is in favour of it; every Scripture
which proves that God is a restorer and not a destroyer is in
favour of it; every Scripture which proves that God has more
the desire to pardon than to punish proves it. To this effect I
might quote passages to greater extent than the whole of this
lecture occupies; the selection must therefore be limited, not
by the want of matter but by the want of space. “God is
love: and he so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten
son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish,
but have everlasting life: for God sent not his son into the
world to condemn the world, but that the world through him
might be saved.”[602] “Jehovah is full of compassion, slow to
anger and of great mercy. Jehovah is good to all: and his
tender mercies are over all his works. All thy works do
praise thee, O Jehovah: and thy saints shall bless thee.” We
are exhorted to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
“The goodness of God,” we are told, “endureth continually.”
“The Lord God,” we are assured, “is merciful and gracious,
long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping
mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and
sin.” “The Lord your God is gracious and merciful, and
will not turn away his face from you if ye turn to him.”
“The Lord is merciful and gracious; slow to anger and
plenteous in mercy: he hath not dealt with us after our
sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities: for as the
heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy towards
them that fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far
hath he removed our transgressions from us: Like as a father
pitieth his children, so hath the Lord compassion on them
that fear him: for he knoweth our frame; he remembereth
that we are dust.” And from our earliest prayer to our
dying hour, we are taught in the simplest and sublimest of
all supplications to open our address to God thus; “Our
Father who art in heaven.” We read evermore in Scripture
that God’s is not an everlasting anger; as such passages as
the following testify: “His anger endureth but for a moment.”
“He will not always chide, neither will he keep his
anger for ever.” “Hath God forgotten to be gracious; hath
he in anger shut up his tender mercies?” “I will not contend
for ever, neither will I be always wrath: for the spirit
should fail before me, and the souls which I have made.”
Correspondent with the doctrine of these expressions, and
with the spirit of the whole Gospel, is a passage that I quote
from a book which Protestants in general declare not to
be canonical. “Thou hast mercy upon all; for thou canst
do all things, and winkest at the sins of men, because they
should amend. For thou lovest all things that are, and abhorrest
nothing which thou hast made: for never wouldst
thou have made any thing if thou hadst hated it. And how
could any thing have endured, if it had not been thy will; or
been preserved, if not called by thee? But thou sparest
thine, for they are thine, O Lord, thou lover of souls. For
thine incorruptible spirit is in all things; therefore chastenest
thou them, by little and little, that offend, and warnest them
by putting them in remembrance wherein they have offended,
that leaving their wickedness, they may believe on thee, O
Lord. For thy power is the beginning of righteousness;
and because thou art the Lord of all, it maketh Thee to be
gracious unto all. But thou, O God, art gracious and true:
long suffering, and in mercy ordering all things: for if we
sin, we are thine, knowing thy power; but we will not sin,
knowing that we are accounted thine.”[603]
Once more, whatever theoretical view we may happen to
hold on the redemption of man by Christ, the end and glory
of that redemption requires as the only consistent consummation,
the ultimate happiness and virtue of mankind. To this
purport I shall adduce one passage of Scripture and quote a
commentary. The passage is Rom. v. 12-21, and the commentary
is by Dr. S. Smith. “As by one man sin entered
into the world, and death by sin; and thus death hath passed
upon all men, inasmuch as all have sinned: (for until the
law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed, where
there is no law:) nevertheless death reigned from Adam to
Moses, even over those that had not sinned after the similitude
of Adam’s transgressions, who is a figure (a type) of
him that was to come: (yet the free gift likewise is not so,
as was the offence: for if through the offence of one, many
have died, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace,
which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.
Neither is the gift so, as it was by one that sinned; for judgment
was of one offence to condemnation, but the free gift is of
many offences unto justification. For if, by the offence of
one, death reigned by one, much more those who receive the
abounding of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign
in life by one, even Jesus Christ:) so then as by the offence
of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation; so
likewise by the righteousness of one the free gift hath come
upon all men to justification of life. For as by the disobedience
of one many were made sinners, so likewise, by the
obedience of one, many shall be made righteous. Moreover,
the law entered that sin might abound: but where sin
abounded, grace did much more abound. That as sin hath
reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness
unto eternal life by Jesus Christ, our Lord.”
“In this passage all men are said to have been made mortal
by the offence of Adam, and here the phrase ‘all men’ must
necessarily be understood to signify every individual of the human
race. Though the style of the apostle in this passage is remarkably
intricate and perplexed, yet his meaning is clear, and
scarcely to be misunderstood. He affirms that death entered
into the world by Adam, and that in consequence of his offence,
death passed upon all men, or all men became mortal. Thus
many were made sinful or mortal by one. In this sense Adam
was a type of Jesus Christ: for as all mankind became subject
to great privation or suffering in consequence of the offence
of one, namely Adam, so the greatest privileges and blessings
are bestowed on all mankind in consequence of the obedience
of one, namely, Jesus Christ. But it is only in this single
circumstance that all suffer and all are benefited by one, that
there is any analogy between them: for in every other respect
there is the greatest possible difference between Adam and
Christ. The act entailing such important consequences upon
the whole human race, was, on the part of Adam, an act of
transgression, on the part of Christ an act of obedience.
And there is a still further disparity between them; for the
calamities resulting from the act of transgression were the
legal punishment of the offence; but the blessings accruing
from the act of obedience were not such as could be claimed
by law, but were the free, unpurchased unmerited gift of
God. And the consequences of the act of transgression and
the act of obedience may be placed in still more striking
contrast: for the act of transgression was but one, and yet
death, with all the calamities connected with it, passed upon
the whole human race; while the act of obedience provides
justification for many offences: nor is this all; for the blessings
procured for all mankind by the obedience of Christ
are unspeakably greater than the calamities brought upon
them by the offence of Adam.”
“This is undoubtedly the argument of the Apostle. Notwithstanding
all the obscurity and perplexity of his language,
whoever reads the passage with attention, must perceive these
were the ideas which were in his mind. And in the whole compass
of Christian truth, there is no doctrine more important
or more glorious than that which is thus disclosed. It is a direct
and positive declaration, that the blessings, provided by the
obedience of Christ, shall, in number of persons who partake
them, be co-extensive with the calamities produced by the
offence of Adam, and in their magnitude and value greatly
exceed them. This is sufficient; this is decisive; these ideas
were in the mind of the apostle; this is the doctrine which
he plainly and indisputably teaches, and nothing more is
necessary. For, even though it should be proved that he
illustrates his doctrine by a fanciful allusion to what was
itself only an allegory; that his reasoning is not in every
respect complete, and even, that he did not himself fully
comprehend all the glorious consequences of the sublime
truth he disclosed, that truth would be neither the less important
nor the less certain. The great fact itself, the fact
which it was his object and his office to teach, and in which
he could not be mistaken, was, that the blessings produced
by the obedience of Christ shall be as extensive as the evils
occasioned by the offence of Adam; that all who suffer from
the one shall partake of the benefits of the other, while these
benefits themselves shall infinitely exceed and overbalance
the calamities entailed on mankind by the first transgression.
The conclusion is inevitable, that the whole human
race shall ultimately be restored to virtue and happiness.
By one passage of Scripture then, at least, the doctrine
which it is the object of this work to establish, is positively
and expressly affirmed; and this is decisive.”[604]
To sustain this doctrine we hear analogy also pleaded.
Pain, it is said, has no tendency to correct. This is not true.
Pain often does correct—and many are led back to virtue by
means of a sad experience. Pain physically and morally is
the great instrument of warning. But though it were fully
granted that pure pain were not a corrective agency, it may,
in connection with other influences, bring healing to the soul.
We never see it unmixed in this world, and we have no
just ground to conclude it will be so in another. How often
is it the means of drawing forth a mercy and a grace from
others that softens the stony heart of the transgressor. How
often, when the sinner is laid low—yea, and by the very
effect of crimes, will a kind look or word, an instance of
forbearance or forgiveness, work a regeneration on his nature.
How often will the son who plagued his parents’ life, and
whitened their hair with sorrow, when driven by misery to
seek again the shelter of a home, be sweetened into meekness
by a mother’s love, and be raised again to dignity by a father’s
generosity. If pain then, by making us feel the goodness of
others, will so frequently incite us to deserve it, are we to
conceive that an experience, with clearer knowledge of God’s
love, shall be entirely ineffectual? It is said, that men grow
more hardened in sin the longer they continue in it. I
allow it was a generous truth: and yet the thought of a moment—the
visit of one pure memory, may suffice to change a
life of crime. But our argument is, that men will not continue
in sin; and it will not be asserted, that if reformation
is at all possible, God will refuse the means, and make crime
eternal. It is further stated that the wicked, by force of numbers
and society with each other, grow increasingly worse:
it is to be proved, which it is not and cannot, that in a future
existence there is any such distribution either local or moral.
This doctrine is not only unfounded in analogy, but contradicted
by it—there must be either destruction or renovation:
so it is in the natural world, and so it is in the moral.
Nothing can sustain continued existence in a state of extreme
disorganization; a certain amount of consistency and harmony
is an essential condition of every being—without this,
there must be dissolution and destruction. Sin being then confusion
in the soul and in society, an eternal state of progressive
sin is inconceivable. Pain, being in like manner disorganization
in body or mind, an eternity of growing pain is
equally inconceivable. Continued and extreme pain therefore
must either destroy its subject or destroy itself; and
then on this argument alone we perceive that eternal torture
is a theological figment; a nonentity and impossibility.
The belief is further pressed upon us on grounds of moral
influence. This is but an additional argument against it, for
it either has no effect or a bad one. It has no effect, from its
vagueness and its incomprehensibleness. It does not fasten
on the moral feelings—it sinks dead by its own ponderousness.
It has no effect from its inconsistency with human
nature; there is no affinity between a finite being and boundless
torture; and thence from the want of truth there is also a
want of power. It has no effect, because there is an instinctive
abhorrence in the heart against it; and there is an instinctive
justice which repels it; the imagination reels before
it—the mind retreats from it, and finds that it is too odious
even to be looked at. That it has no effect may be seen to
a vast extent: millions in all countries profess to believe it,
and among these have been, and are, many of the most abandoned
that ever brought shame upon their nature; and yet a
faith in hell gave them no fear of vice. So far as it has influence
it is of a bad kind; because it familiarizes the mind
with coarse images; because it breathes into obedience a
spirit of slavish fear; because it makes terror an instrument
of religion; because it throws darkness on the ways of providence;
because it undermines filial confidence in God, and
puts a limit either to his power or his love. The doctrine of
ultimate and universal salvation lowers the sanctions of
righteousness. But what is the true motive to goodness,
what is the spirit of it—that which unites us most to God?
Love, not fear; not fear of hell; and in the sense of terror not
even fear of God himself. Fear is mere submission to force,
not the willing service of heart-felt appreciation; the crouching
of a slave in outward show to the despot whom in his soul
he thoroughly detests. Now as we cannot love by constraint,
what ideas of God are most likely to move our affections,
and consequently produce in us the true spirit of obedience?
Evidently his benevolence, his purity, his disinterested goodness,
his fatherly nature—to be drawn to him with the cords
of our hearts, we see him in the clear light of his moral beauty.
It is rather paradoxical that these doctrines on the power of
fear, the righteousness of vindictive punishment, and the
limits of moral reformation, should be propagated in our
times, when all the practical tendencies of society are in contradiction.
The influence of conviction and not of force, the
influence of mind and not pain, is the growing spirit of the
time, and a faith, which puts no bound to hope; for the love
of man is a motive deepening ever in the great social heart.
This is the blessing of our day,—it has enlightened education,
and softened the rigour of instruction; it is mingling the gentleness
of mercy with the austerity of punishment; it is working
to restore the criminal and not to destroy, tempering discipline
with wisdom, believing that corrective amelioration is most useful
and most just; in the same believing spirit it is sending a
vast spiritual agency into every realm of vice: while thus philosophy
and philanthropy labour in the trust they shall leave
men better than they found them, exploding the errors which
had been the greatest curses to mankind, these are the very errors
which theology sanctifies, which it is heresy to deny: whilst
a moral and merciful civilization is exerted to exalt man, theology
continues to deface the image of God; the one scattering
beauty on mortality, and the other spreading darkness on
eternity; the one removing pain, and the other preaching it.
The doctrine we oppose is further defended on the ground
that sin is an infinite offence, that man is therefore an infinite
offender; and that an infinite offender deserves unending
punishment. The assertion, that man can be an infinite
offender, is wholly inconsistent with the views which the
orthodox themselves present of man. To be a transgressor
in any degree, implies the possession of a noble nature, much
less to be an infinite transgressor; but with the miserable and
contemptible creature which Calvinism describes as man, it is
impossible to associate any idea that is either noble or infinite,
for good or for evil. We may assume another mode
of reasoning. The obedience of the law is righteousness, the
transgression of the law is sin. These are correspondent definitions.
By every rule, therefore, of logical deduction, if a
single act of sin is an infinite evil, a single act of obedience is
an infinite good; and on the same grounds of justice by
which one man is doomed to an everlasting hell, the other
merits an eternal heaven.
But to speak of man at all as an infinite offender, is to set
common sense at defiance. Whence can be the infinitude of
his offence? Not in its origin, not in its effects, not in its
duration: not in its origin, for it is produced in limited faculties;
not in its effects, for the errors of a created nature,
counteracted by an uncreated omnipotence, can never be infinite,
can never be irremediable; not in its duration, for the
life of one man, the lives of all men to the end of human generations,
are but a point in the universe and government of
God. Sin is either a state of mind or a state of action; but
whether as one or the other, it must of necessity be limited.
Were the career of man extended to that of Methusalem, and
his powers as capacious as his years were many; were the
whole of that existence a succession of crime, uncheered by
a solitary virtue; were the energy of the mightiest intellect
devoted to contrive guilt, and the efforts of the most ingenious
sinfulness given to its execution; were every creation
of fancy a vision of impurity, every instinct an impulse to
cruelty, every emotion a movement of malignity, yet even
thus horrible, we could not with truth call man an infinite
offender. Neither in desire nor in action can he be such.
Not in desire, for there is no man that wishes, there never
has been the man that wished, absolute, unmingled, endless
evil; not in action, for there is no man, whatever the malignity
of his intention, has unlimited power of execution. If
sin is an infinite offence, then all sins are equal, for infinity
has no degrees; if sinners are infinite transgressors, then
criminals have no distinctions; transgression has no gradations,
and the whole moral space is annihilated between him
who stands on the very margin of heaven, and him who is
already plunged into hell; the same impassable gulf which
exists between their conditions, exists also between their
characters.
Man is not an infinite offender, nor yet is he an incorrigible
one. There is nothing in his nature or history which
justifies the conclusion. There is no point of moral baseness
so low that we can mark it as a hopeless condition. He is
not immutable; and as change is possible, changes for the
better may be looked for, as well as changes for the worse.
Such changes have been; the painful experience of evil and
wrong-doing, however slow and vacillating, always drives towards
them; all observation, therefore, is in favour of our
expectation. We look not on the deepest, the deadliest, and
the worst instance of human depravity, as beyond correction,
beyond improvement, beyond the power of Almighty God;
we look upon no ignorance that may not be enlightened;
upon no vice that may not be removed; upon no human
countenance so scarred with the traces of depravity, as to
leave nothing visible but the hand-writing of reprobation;
God forbid that we should behold any human being with humanity’s
capacities, destined, beyond amendment, to hopeless
corruption and to incorrigible misery. I deny not the existence
and the delusion of vice. I deny not the abuse of the
noblest faculties, or the perversion of the best affections, but
I do deny that the human soul is ever so wrecked or lost as
to become utterly hopeless. The man of pleasure may turn
from joy to joy, and collect nothing for his home but weariness
and disgust; the man of ambition may sacrifice health
and repose, honour and probity; the covetous man may, during
a long life, drudge away days of labour, and toss through
nights of care, to die in the possession of what he never enjoyed;
the indolent and the prodigal may live as if there were
no tomorrow; the vicious and profane may reel on, reckless of
a future existence and a future judgment. We have all seen
every human passion making havoc upon virtue; but we
have also seen the passions, carrying with them their own
sting and their own punishment, and in that sting and punishment,
to a certain extent at least, they have contained
their own amelioration and amendment. That human beings
have been raised from their lowest debasement, that they
have been emancipated from the worst of moral bondage, that
they have been purified from the deepest of pollutions, we
have many consolatory evidences. In every nation of earth
that now enjoys the blessings of religion, of liberty, of arts, of
moral and social refinement, we have proofs, that by gradual
and progressive improvement, these human beings may be
delivered from the very worst estate of ignorance, vice, destitution,
and brutality. For what are the nations that we now
glory to acknowledge, but instances the most undeniable, that
man is not only an imperishable, but also an improvable creature?
I have seen beings in their thoughtlessness, the victims
of their own vanity, sink miserable and despairing into
the terror which they had prepared for themselves: but must
I say, that they shall never throughout eternity discover the
littleness of the objects they desired, nor abstain from
chasing the phantoms that misled them? I have seen men
insanely and foolishly toil for all that makes life a trifle, at the
loss of all that makes it a glory; I have read in history, and
I can recal by memory, the experience of those who spent all
they had of energy or misused all they had of goodness to
obtain that which at last they felt their torture; I have seen
the turbulent nature soften into peace, the thoughtless
awakened into wisdom and action, the profane elevated into
reverence, the impious bending to pray, the angry subdued
into meekness, the proud converted to the wisdom of humility,
the hard-hearted melted to the goodness of mercy.
Should it be said that this argument is too narrow, and
appeals only to immediate feeling, let us then take a wider
sphere, and try the principle by a larger test. Call to your
attention the varieties of mankind, of their present and
past condition, of their present and past circumstances.
Many millions exist on the wide surface of the globe,
among whom the elements of moral redemption have
never had operation, on whose benighted souls a ray of
Christian light has never dawned, hearts which have never
felt the bliss of holy liberty, and bosoms that have never
burned with heavenly fire. Take up a map of the world;
cast your eye over its boundaries and divisions, from pole to
pole, and from meridian to meridian; conceive the myriads
of rational beings who swarm along that surface; reflect on the
wonderful diversities in their conditions and their training;
pass over the dreary frosts of one country, and the deadening
heat of others; wherever you turn, humanity meets you under
different forms, and in various circumstances—with habits
more or less corrupted, with morals more or less pure, with
religion more or less enlightened or absurd; let me then ask
any enlightened thinker, any one who has studied human nature,
whether all these are to be arranged under one general
classification. Consider the tribes around the arctic, buried
in darkness; pierce into the unexplored regions of
Africa; go over the deserts of Arabia; walk among the
tents of its predatory and pastoral populations; traverse
Persia, India, Tartary, the islands that dimly gleam through
the Southern Ocean, and wherever you go, mankind are
in various moral positions, and consequently under various
terms of moral probation. Shall then that all-seeing Creator,
to whom every heart is open, place all these motley tribes
under one system of judgment? It cannot be. Shall beings
born in regions of darkness be condemned for want of light—beings
who had never breathed but of impurity, for not being
sanctified—beings bred amidst idols, for being idolatrous?
Taking thus into view the populations of the earth, we have before
us an infinity of moral conditions; and yet the differences
are not greater between the extremes of them than those we
might select in a single country or a single city; than those, in
fact, which we know to exist. Respecting the terms of probation,
a New Zealander is not at a greater distance from an
Englishman, than some Englishmen are from others. When
we think then how many are ignorant and suffering by the
very necessity of destiny, and by the same fate vicious and
depraved, if the passage of a breath end all hope of amendment,
our faith must cease in divine justice, as well as divine
wisdom, and our perplexity be turned to despair.
We look on man, not as a member of a sect, but as a child
of God; and once more, we ask, if he is not an infinite offender,
nor yet incorrigible, is he not worth the correction? If his
purity and happiness be within the bounds of possibility, if his
eternal misery by any degree of energy can be averted, are we
to believe that a God who has infinite benevolence wills him to
perish; are we to believe that a God who has infinite power
will exert none of it to save the most glorious of his works
from utter destruction? Can we suppose that God, omnipotent
and most wise, would reverse eternally such capacities
for goodness and happiness, and instead of training them to
be instruments of boundless utility, would condemn them to
be agents of eternal evil? Will not God rather choose to
sow the field of everlasting life with seeds of holiness and
bliss, than to scathe it to a ruin and a wilderness? I would
not strip the future of its awe; no terror can be equal to the
truth; it is the most solemn anticipation that can ever come
upon the mind, and I maintain that nothing the most fearing
imagination conceived in its wildest apprehensions ever
equalled the reality: but, for God’s universe and for God’s
creatures, there is always hope; in God’s power and wisdom
there are limitless means, and at last there will be universal
peace and universal emancipation. If creatures are not ultimately
and universally happy, it must be either from the
want of ability in God, or the want of inclination; and this
difficulty pressing itself on the mind of a powerful and
pious orthodox writer, he chose, in accounting for the
loss of souls, to suppose that theologians had mistaken in
their theories the nature of divine omnipotence; that love
and power have distinct offices; but if he were to circumscribe
either attribute in God, it would be power and not
love. On the ground of an eternal perdition, such attribute
as a moral omnipotence can truly be ascribed to God. The
able writer to whom I have alluded has seen to the bottom
of the difficulty, and believing as he does most sincerely in
eternal suffering, believing also as he does with equal sincerity
in the infinite love of God, he is compelled so far as
the human will is concerned to circumscribe the sphere and
action of divine omnipotence, or rather to deny it altogether.
“The truth is,” he says, “that the only rational conclusion we
can arrive at in the matter, is that in the nature of things no
such attribute can exist. And until the cloud, which its supposed
existence throws on every procedure of divine providence,
is dissipated, we must either not think at all, or think
amiss on that subject in comparison of which all other subjects
are unimportant, namely the character of God: I know
that many may, at first sight, be startled at the assertion, that
the power of God can in any sense be limited. In this, as in
various instances, they will object to the same truth as a distinct
proposition, which they will freely assume and take for
granted in all their reasonings. These very persons will speak
of Providence as devising means and moving by gradual advancement
to the accomplishment of an end. If asked, why
not decree the end without the means? they answer, because
it could not be attained, at least so well, without them.
If then, the term could not, be at all admitted, (and how freely
is this term applied to God in Scripture!) no such thing as
unrestricted omnipotence exists. It is not that there is any
limit in God. God forbid that I should dare to say so. It
is, that power in its own nature is limited. It can act only
on possibilities.... Even power itself is
but a vague and unintelligible notion, unless displayed to us
as triumphing over difficulties, and rising superior to obstacles.
A sweeping omnipotence, which could by one sovereign act
of will, decree that in the nature of things neither impediment
nor resistance should exist, leaves no field even for power
itself to act on. Omnipotence such as this, at least supplies
no materials for man to comprehend or adore. No: we are
constructed otherwise. Our faculties are so framed as to correspond
with the truth and reality of things. The power
that fills the soul with wonder and with praise is that which
the Scripture of truth exhibits: that power in which God
arises that his enemies may be scattered; that omnipotence
by which he produces good out of evil, and subdues the most
unyielding substances and stubborn elements into himself.
But still more, as it respects the wisdom of God, is it necessary
to dismiss the notion of an absolute omnipotence before
the former attribute can shine forth in its true glory. For
surely, according to our conceptions, it would be more wise
to arrive at once, if that were possible, at all that means, and
contrivances, and processes can accomplish, than to prefer
elaborate and circuitous courses, merely for the sake of going
round about to do what could be done as well in the twinkling
of an eye. And yet in what does the divine wisdom as apprehensible
by us consist? What are the views and discoveries
which lead us, with the apostle, to exclaim, ‘Oh, the
depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of
God?’ Is it not in those very procedures which if unbounded
power existed would be folly and not wisdom, that
all the treasures of the infinite mind are manifested? in
adapting means to ends, in pursuing the path of light amidst
surrounding darkness, in harmonizing discordant principles,
and bringing order out of confusion?”
After a few other remarks, the author proceeds to maintain
his position by the testimony of Scripture.—“To quote
Scripture,” he observes, “as fully as I might upon this subject,
would be, in a measure, to transcribe the Bible. I shall
content myself with producing three passages, which, though
not of the directer kind, bear, I think, irresistibly on the
point. The first is Ezek. xxxiii. 11. ‘As I live, saith the
Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked;
but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye,
turn ye, from all your evil ways; for why will ye die, O
house of Israel?’ The second is Isa. v. 3, 4. ‘And now,
O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I
pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard. What could have
been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?
Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes,
brought it forth wild grapes.’ The last which I shall quote
is Matt. xxiii. 37, 38. ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that
killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee,
how often would I have gathered thy children together, even
as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye
would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.’”
“Is this, then, I would ask any fair and candid person,
who looks as if the All-gracious being who employs it,
had any relief or remedy in reserve for those who wilfully
reject the mercies he has freely offered them? Are these
like the expressions of one who could bestow salvation in
any other way, or any other terms? Do they not resemble
rather the tender complaints and anxious warnings of a parent
who had done all he could do, and proposed all that he
had to propose, to rescue his child from ruin, and who must at
last, with agonizing reluctance, give up that child, if he would
still pursue those courses whose end is inevitable destruction?
And if such be the characters in which God has been
pleased to reveal himself; if such be the words which he has
actually spoken, are we to be wise above what is written? Is
it honouring God to say he uses a language to work upon our
feelings, which language is in reality a misrepresentation of
the truth; a misrepresentation, nevertheless, so ill contrived,
that, after all, it does not deceive us? Or is it exalting his
great name, to magnify the mere natural attribute of his
power, above those moral attributes in which consist at once
his essence and his glory? No. If it be indeed reverence
to God, to dismiss him altogether from our minds, then all
such considerations are set at rest for ever. But if it be our
duty, not only to think of him, but to bear him in all our
thoughts, then in all around us we see this truth inscribed,
that there is a limit in power or a limit in love. In which
shall we place it?—In power? Then we place it not in God,
but in his lowest attribute.—In love? Then indeed we place
the limit in God himself—‘God is love.’”[605]
The reasoning of this passage is most cogent, the dilemma
is inevitable. If there be eternal sin and eternal perdition;
if there be not ultimate and universal regeneration, limit
there must be in love or in power: but holding as we do the
doctrine of progressive discipline, we place limit in neither,
and we glorify both. Strange it is, that while thus magnifying
God in the highest of his attributes, in the harmony
and perfection of his nature, while thus trusting him with
the faith of children, notwithstanding many things in his
providence mysterious and inexplicable, in despite of the
sin and misery that surround us, filling the human mind and
human destiny with painful and perplexing problems, we
believe him to be all-powerful as he is all-good; yet in thus
believing we are set down by Trinitarians as rebels against
heaven, and blasphemers of our Creator. If reverence to
God demand us to believe that the smoke of eternal torment
from the depths of an unfathomable hell is an incense
well pleasing in his sight, or an evil which he must endure
but has no power to remove, then that is an honour we do
not and we cannot give: that is not the God we worship;
that is not the God we can love: and if to believe in God be
to think him such as Calvin and others have pictured him,
then at once take not only the name of Christians from us,
but in addition stigmatize us with that of atheists.
III. To limit the power of God in order to justify his love,
is the struggle of a humane and benignant nature against a
dark and stern theology; but writers in orthodox divinity,
whom it would be too tedious to catalogue, have not scrupled
to go the whole length along the line of fearful consequences
to which their system led them. They have not hesitated to
plead for the eternity of hell’s torments the glory of God;
strange idea indeed of the glory of God, to contemplate him
as the author of everlasting pain and everlasting sin. We
think that every attribute of God, in every manifestation, is
directly against this doctrine. His omniscience is against it.
He must have known from all eternity the destiny of the
lost: and with this knowledge, on the orthodox theory, he
made creatures with the direct foresight of their everlasting
misery and everlasting destruction. His omnipotence is
against it. I have shown by the long extract I have before
quoted, that the profound and consistent theological reasoner
who believes in eternal perdition cannot believe in a moral
omnipotence. An all-powerful being must be either infinitely
malignant or infinitely benevolent. If God were the one, he
could find delight only in the suffering of his creatures; and
he wills not to relieve them, because he does not will them to
be happy. But this idea is utterly repugnant to the first
principles of religion. If God be, as we believe he is, the
other, he can have no motive to make his children, the work
of his own hands, endlessly wretched; and having the power,
he has also the will to redeem them. A progressive universe
is, therefore, the only true solution to God’s providence, and
God’s prescience. Divine justice, it is said, demands it.
What, then, is divine justice? Is this divine justice identical
with vengeance? Is it divine justice, to make the everlasting
torture of a race—for the saved are but the gleanings—a
sacrifice to boundless self-glorification? Is it divine justice
to array all the force of infinite attributes against a limited, a
weak, and erring creature? Is it divine justice to meet the
offence of ephemeral mortality with the agony of deathless
torture and of resistless wrath? If this be divine justice, we
have reason to rejoice that it is not human justice. Such
justice is but naked malignity; and this view of it is the more
firmly established when we further consider that, by the orthodox
theology, all is the result of a foregone conclusion, the last
term of a dark progression, the execution of a cause uttered
in the black womb of eternity, for which the wretches are
prepared by the inheritance of a corrupt nature in a corrupt
world, and lest all natural causes should be insufficient, by an
exposure to the unseen snares of a Satan profound in cunning,
mighty in malice, and, by himself and his agents, all but
omnipotent and omnipresent. This argument from divine
justice is urged so frequently and earnestly, that I shall here
transcribe a few remarks from a writer who has treated the
subject with equal force of logic and fervour of eloquence.
“Justice and goodness,” he observes, “are the same. Justice
requires no more punishment for sin than goodness:
goodness requires the same as justice, but the manner in
which benevolence manifests itself under the form of goodness
and of justice is different, and, therefore, requires a
different appellation. A person who forgives an offence
upon repentance and reformation is good: this is one modification
of goodness, which, by way of eminence, is often
called goodness itself, or more strictly mercy: the person
who visits an offence which is neither repented of, nor
amended with a proper degree of pain, is also good: this is
another modification of goodness to which the term justice
is applied. Mercy and justice, therefore, do not differ from
each other in their nature, since they equally arise from benevolence,
and they differ in aspect only according to the
moral condition of the being with regard to whom they
are exemplified. This account of divine justice explains,
in the most satisfactory manner, the principle on which
Deity rewards and punishes mankind. Did men never
violate the laws of rectitude, he would make them invariably
and completely happy. But there is no person who is free
from fault: the moral state of every individual is, in some
respect or at some period, such as it ought not to be.
Every bad disposition, and every improper habit, must be
rectified before happiness can be enjoyed. It is necessary,
therefore, that the moral governor of the world should vary
his conduct according to the character of the person whom
he has to treat; that he should visit the good with favour,
and manifest his disapprobation of the wicked; for, if he
were to make happiness compatible with sin, it could not be
corrected. The effect of pain is to make us dislike and
avoid that which causes it. It is for this reason pain is annexed
to sin. Sin is an evil which it is necessary to remove;
pain is employed as the instrument of its destruction;
and that principle by which Deity has established this
constitution of things, by which he so regulates events
as invariably to secure the ultimate reward of goodness,
and the punishment of wickedness, is distinguished
by the term justice.... Were it necessary
to add any thing more to show that divine justice is not inconsistent
with the attribute of goodness, but a part of it, the
consideration of the design of its inflictions would afford
further evidence of this truth. Every violation of the law of
God involves the transgressor, sooner or later, in suffering;
and of this constitution of things, by which pain is inseparably
connected with deviation from rectitude, the Supreme
Being is the author. Why did he appoint it? Why did he so
dispose the whole tendency of his moral government as to ensure
this consequence? Why does he, who is a being of unerring
wisdom and infinite benevolence, never suffer any
offence which is unrepented of to escape punishment? Since
his very nature is love, and since he created all his intelligent
offspring in order to make them happy, it can be no gratification
to him to involve them in suffering. Their groans
can be no music to his ear. If he afflict them, it must be,
not for his own gratification, but for their benefit....
Viewing then the attribute of justice, which has
been supposed to require the endless misery of the greater
part of the human race, as that very principle which is designed
to prevent this terrible consequence, (a man) feels
himself capable of relying with implicit confidence on the decisions
of the judge, both with regard to himself and all mankind.
He is satisfied that he will treat even the most criminal
with perfect equity; that he will place them in circumstances
the best adapted to their unhappy condition; that
his discipline will ultimately accomplish its end, and extirpate
sin and misery from the creation.”[606] If the doctrine of eternal
torment be contradictory to God’s justice, much more is it to
his wisdom: for surely it is not wise to create only to destroy;—to
perpetuate endless moral conflict—not only to destroy
and confuse, but to destroy and confuse the best and noblest
of his works—to inflict undying anguish on capacities suited
for undying happiness, to ruin every faculty and to blast
every hope. Nor is the doctrine less opposed to his holiness
than to his wisdom. Improved ideas on the philosophy of
our spiritual nature, and on the real purport of moral retribution,
with the penalties of sin, imply the continuance of
sin. A material hell or a material heaven by the thinking
portion of all sects is in general exploded. Sin carries with
it and creates its own punishments: if sin then be eternal
and progressive in its sufferings, it must also be eternal and
progressive in its existence and its evils. Hell is not merely
a region of unutterable horror, where wretches writhe in eternal
torture, but also a region of boundless sin, of malignant
wickedness, of hopeless corruption, of vilest affections, of
basest passions. What shall we then say of an infinite holiness,
enlightened by infinite wisdom, armed with infinite
power, allowing this condition to exist? If the doctrine of
eternal torment be true, no such attribute as divine mercy can
have being: if this doctrine be true, a God of goodness is
a fiction of imagination, the creation of a brain-sick enthusiasm,
the dream of amiable but unfounded hopes. It is of
no purpose to qualify in these things: there is no room in
the same universe for a good God and an eternal hell: if this
doctrine be true, the past is a wreck, and the future a curse.
To such a condition of existence annihilation were a preferable
alternative. It were better the brain should at once
moulder with the thoughtless sod, than be tortured with the
wilderings of everlasting contradictions; it were better the
affections should perish with the last earthly sigh than throb
through an eternity of agonized or selfish existence. On
the orthodox supposition, either man must lose his identity
and go to heaven without remembering whom he knew
and loved in life, or he must lose his sympathy, become
apostate to all his better feelings, and see without pain or
pity many given over to despair with whom on earth he walked
in dearest friendship. Instead of the big tear which would
have burst from his eye in the years of mortality at the
thought even of a partial separation; instead of the affectionate
and instinctive anguish which would have torn his
breast, as he saw the last vision in the sun, and the last flutter
in the breeze of the sail which was wafting his friend to
another clime; he must approve the sentence, nay, some
maintain, he must see its execution with triumph, which may
consign his nearest and dearest to endless damnation.—If the
belief could be habitually and practically realized, that human
souls were every minute over the wide earth dropping into
hell, that amongst the sighs of death with which the world is
filled, the greater number are the knells of infinite perdition,
that the graves on which the mourners weep, which to us
all, at one time or other, make earth a vale of tears, are so
many monuments of irreparable wreck, the silent witnesses
of God’s anger and man’s despair; if any one, I repeat, could
constantly, and in very truth, believe that souls were thus
quitting the present scene, souls with enlarged capacities, but
enlarged for eternal sorrow, and ever smile again, he might
wear the form of his species, but he should have the heart
of a fiend. Faith in such a doctrine should kill at once the
life of joy; every sound should be funereal, brightness or
beauty there should be none. Each of us, like Job, should
curse the day of his birth, but with a more terrible earnestness;
the exclamation of Jeremiah would be in every mouth
an appropriate utterance, “Oh that my head were waters,
and my eyes were fountains of tears!” Is there the human
being that could feel joy in the midst of an hospital, could
laugh in a city of the plague, while death went from couch
to couch, while mirth was banished from each hearth, and
the grass of desolation growing in the streets? But how
much more should all delight be banished from the soul, if
in the Creator’s universe there be a dark and measureless
region, filled with hideous abominations and unexpiring torments!
If thus it be, let there, I repeat, be no look of
happiness, let there be no voice of sweetness; let garment of
praise be changed for the spirit of heaviness; let all heads
be bent in grief, and all eyes dim with weeping, in lamentation
for the sorrows of the universe. But be it not so—leave
us at least a gleam of light from heaven.
“Cease every joy to glimmer o’er my mind,
But leave, oh! leave, the light of hope behind.”
Oh no! God has no pleasure in the death of a sinner, no
glory in the pain or punishment of his creatures: it is the
progress towards universal blessedness, and its final consummation,
that truly shows forth the glory of God, and manifests
the grandeur of his name and nature—more sweetly
than the earth, more majestically than the heavens. It shows
forth his justice: he punishes, terribly, it may be, but not
cruelly or hopelessly; he punishes, but he amends; he chastises,
but he purifies. It shows forth his wisdom: for universal
holiness and universal happiness are the mightiest
objects which infinite wisdom could select, the highest purposes
in which infinite wisdom could be manifested: It shows
forth his power, not in a blasting malediction, but in a creative
and all-dispensing love; not in the thunder of destruction,
but in the hand of a Father full of gifts and full of
blessings:—subduing evil, distributing happiness, drawing
out of apparent confusion order and harmony, more fair and
beautiful than the worlds he has called out of darkness;
“moving upon the face of many a stormy wave, and blending
into calm what seemed only the chaos of contending elements.”
It is marvellous that we can think seriously on existence
or on providence, that we can reflect on human nature or
survey human life, without feeling the need as well as the
truth of the doctrine of the full mercy of God, and of his
universally benignant designs for all his children. True,
creation is fair, and much of existence is happy; but still
there are evils and miseries which ever perplex us for solution.
If the view of God’s government which we receive,
does not solve all the difficulties, at the very least it softens
them; if there are inscrutable things in the providence of
God which it cannot explain, there are atrocities ascribed by
other systems to this character which it does not involve.
We may mourn over the wrongs, sufferings, and sins, which
exist with fatal abundance in our present state; we may
wonder and think why they exist at all; but to what an extent
of perplexity and pain are we driven, if we are to believe
that all these evils are to be for ever, and to have no remedy.
When I see those who bear want and sorrow through
many and heavy years, I rejoice that there is at last a home
and refuge for them in their father’s kingdom where they
who were poor shall be made rich; where those who mourned
shall be comforted: when I hear the sigh of pain, when I
behold the power of death; when I know, as all must, in
how many human dwellings grief sits lonely on the hearth, I
am saved from a fearful and dangerous distrust by the belief,
that in times to come, and in regions which we know not of,
there is a balm for every grief and a remedy for every sin.
None are unaware of the physical and the moral evils that
hang over and around this existence; and both from the felt
experience of our own hearts, and the recorded experience of
many others, we can judge the infinite complexity of moral
struggle, the subtleties of sin, and the miserable consequences
of evil doings; and we cannot think that a good, a holy, a
just, and merciful God can ordain such a state to be perpetual
and eternal. We know, moreover, how many are
in the thick darkness of barbarism, each having within a
universe of infinite and improvable capacities; we know
what millions are in the dens of indigence, of crime, and
ignorance, for whom earth is barren and life a burthen: and
in what thought are we to take comfort, in what sentiment are
we to find hope, if we believe not there is a God who does
not forget his orphan children in their worst estate; that as
here they have received their evil things, there is a heaven
where they have their good? And when we observe in this
life so much of antagonist passions; so much war and strife;
so much of bitter and hopeless alienation, our tired spirits
wish for a retreat of peace; and with the Psalmist we long
for the wings of a dove that we might flee away and be at
rest; for a calm sky after a heated atmosphere; for a union
of heart and charity which no mistakes could again divide.
We have no need to fear that our high aspirations for the
future shall make us proud or presumptuous; for we have
all enough in our present lot to keep us humble. When we
look within, we find a melancholy strife between our nobler
and our higher existence, which we can never entirely overcome:
when we cast our gaze over the face of the world, and
the inequalities of life, and there in the strong-holds of sin
and selfishness see so many causes of wickedness and pain,
which the most believing and the most hoping can never hope
entirely to overcome; when we regard our feeble powers and
our short existence; our desires ever growing and wants ever
deepening, and our passions ever craving; when we think
of the knowledge we longed for, and could not have, the visions
we dreamed of that never came, the good we resolved
on and never did, the felicity we sought and never found,
the wishes that were as empty as the echo in the desert, the
ideas, the plans, the aspirations, and the purposes that vainly
struggled for life, but found in our breasts their prison and
their grave; we shall be in no danger of thinking of ourselves
more highly than we ought to think.
Blessed and beautiful doctrine is this, of universal redemption
and restoration, which pours such a radiance over our
groping obscurity, which gives our troubled hearts such peace,
which softens grief and glorifies affection, which corrects the
perverse and dignifies the lowly, which nourishes whatever
in our nature is great or god-like, renders religion transcendent
and lovely, and opens before the rejoicing eye of faith
the grandeur of a renovated and an emancipated universe.
601. See Ex. xxi. 1-6. Eccles. i. 4. 1 Cor. viii. 13. Gen. xvii. 8, 13, 19.
Numb. xxv. 13.
603. Ps. xcv. 8, 9, 10; Ps. xxxiv. 8; Ps. lii. 1; Exod. xxxiv. 6, 7; 2 Chron. xxx. 9;
Ps. ciii. 8, &c.; Matt. vi. 9; Ps. xxx. 5; Ps. ciii. 9; Ps. lxxxvii. 7; Isa. lxvii. 16;
Wisdom of Solomon, xi. 23-26.
604. Dr. Southwood Smith on the Divine Government.
605. Essays, &c., by the Rev. Henry Woodward: Essay xv. On the Nature of
the Divine Omnipotence.
606. Illustrations of the Divine Government, by T. Southwood Smith.
LECTURE XIII. CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT PRIEST, AND WITHOUT RITUAL. BY REV. JAMES MARTINEAU. — NOTE. — Footnotes for Lecture XIII.
“TO WHOM COMING, AS UNTO A LIVING STONE, DISALLOWED INDEED OF
MEN, BUT CHOSEN OF GOD, AND PRECIOUS; YE ALSO, AS LIVELY
STONES, ARE BUILT UP A SPIRITUAL HOUSE, A HOLY PRIESTHOOD, TO
OFFER UP SPIRITUAL SACRIFICES, ACCEPTABLE TO GOD BY JESUS
CHRIST.”—1 Peter ii. 4, 5.
The formation of human society, and the institution of priesthood,
must be referred to the same causes and the same date.
The earliest communities of the world appear to have had their
origin and their cement, not in any gregarious instinct, nor in
mere social affections, much less in any prudential regard to
the advantages of co-operation, but in a binding religious
sentiment, submitting to the same guidance, and expressing
itself in the same worship. As no tie can be more strong,
so is none more primitive, than this agreement respecting
what is holy and divine. In simple and patriarchal ages indeed,
when the feelings of veneration had not been set aside
by analysis into a little corner of the character, but spread
themselves over the whole of life, and mixed it up with daily
wonder, this bond comprised all the forces that can suppress
the selfish and disorganizing passions, and compact a multitude
of men together. It was not, as at present, to have
simply the same opinions (things of quite modern growth, the
brood of scepticism); but to have the same Fathers, the same
Tradition, the same Speech, the same Land, the same Foes,
the same Priest, the same God. Nothing did man fear,
or trust, or love, or desire, that did not belong, by some
affinity, to his faith. Nor had he any book to keep the precious
deposit for him; and if he had, he would never have
thought of so frail a vehicle for so great a treasure. It was
more natural to put it into structures hollowed in the fast
mountain, or built of transplanted rocks which only a giant
age could stir; and to tenant these with mighty hierarchies,
who should guard their sanctity, and, by an undying memory,
make their mysteries eternal. Hence, the first humanizer of
men was their worship; the first leaders of nations, the
sacerdotal caste; the first triumph of art, the colossal temple;
the first effort to preserve an idea, produced a record of
something sacred; and the first civilization was, as the last
will be, the birth of religion.
The primitive aim of worship undoubtedly was, to act upon
the sentiments of God; at first, by such natural and intelligible
means, as produce favourable impressions on the mind of
a fellow man;—by presents and persuasion, and whatever is
expressive of grateful and reverential affections. Abel, the
first shepherd, offered the produce of his flock; Cain, the
first farmer, the fruits of his land; and while devotion was
so simple in its modes, every one would be his own pontiff,
and have his own altar. But soon, the parent would inevitably
officiate for his family; the patriarch, for his tribe.
With the natural forms dictated by present feelings, traditional
methods would mingle their contributions from the
past; postures and times, gestures and localities, once indifferent,
would become consecrated by venerable habit; and
so long as their origin was unforgotten, they would add to
the significance, while they lessened the simplicity of worship.
Custom, however, being the growth of time, tends to
a tyrannous and bewildering complexity: forms, originally
natural, then symbolical, end in being arbitrary; suggestive
of nothing, except to the initiated; yet, if connected with
religion, so sanctified by the association, that it appears sacrilege
to desist from their employment; and when their meaning
is lost, they assume their place, not among empty gesticulations,
but among the mystical signs by which earth communes
with heaven. The vivid picture-writing of the early
worship, filled with living attitudes, and sketched in the
freshest colours of emotion, explained itself to every eye, and
was open to every hand. To this succeeded a piety, which
expressed itself in symbolical figures, veiling it utterly from
strangers, but intelligible and impressive still to the soul of
national tradition. This, however, passed again into a language
of arbitrary characters, in which the herd of men saw
sacredness without meaning; and the use of which must be
consigned to a class separated for its study. Hence the origin
of the priest and his profession; the conservator of a worship
no longer natural, but legendary and mystical; skilful enactor
of rites that spake with silent gesticulation to the heavens;
interpreter of the wants of men into the divine language of
the gods. Not till the powers above had ceased to hold
familiar converse with the earth, and in their distance had become
deaf and dumb to the common tongue of men, did the
mediating priest arise;—needed then to conduct the finger-speech
of ceremony, whereby the desire of the creature took
shape before the eye of the Creator.
Observe then the true idea of Priest and Ritual. The
Priest is the representative of men before God; commissioned
on behalf of human nature to intercede with the divine. He
bears a message upwards, from earth to heaven; his people
being below, his influence above. He takes the fears of the
weak, and the cries of the perishing, and sets them with availing
supplication before him that is able to help. He takes
the sins and remorse of the guilty, and leaves them with expiating
tribute at the feet of the averted Deity. He guards
the avenues that lead from the mortal to the immortal, and
without his interposition the creature is cut off from his
Creator. Without his mediation, no transaction between
them can take place, and the spirit of a man must live as
an outlaw from the world invisible and holy. There are
means of propitiation which he alone has authority to employ;
powers of persuasion conceded to no other; a mystic
access to the springs of divine benignity, by outward rites
which his manipulation must consecrate, or forms of speech
which his lips must recommend. These ceremonies are the
implements of his office, and the sources of his power; the
magic by which he is thought to gain admission to the will
above, and really wins rule over human counsels below. As
they are supposed to change the relation of God to man, not
by visible or natural operation, not (for example) by suggestion
of new thoughts, and excitement of new dispositions
in the worshipper, but by secret and mysterious agency, they
are simply spells of a dignified order. Were we then to speak
with severe exactitude, we should say, a Ritual is a system
of consecrated charms; and the Priest, the great magician
who dispenses them.
So long as any idea is retained, of mystically efficacious
rites, consigned solely and authoritatively to certain hands,
this definition cannot be escaped. The ceremonies may have
rational instruction and natural worship appended to them;
and these additional elements may give them a title to true
respect. The order of men appointed to administer them,
may have other offices and nobler duties to perform, rendering
them, if faithful, worthy of a just and reverential attachment.
But in so far as, by an exclusive and unnatural efficacy,
they bring about a changed relation between God and
man, the Ritual is an incantation, and the Priest is an enchanter.
To this sacerdotal devotion, there necessarily attach certain
characteristic sentiments, both moral and religious,
which give it a distinctive influence on human character, and
adapt it to particular stages of civilization. It clearly severs
the worshippers by one remove from God. He is a Being,
external to them, distant from them, personally unapproachable
by them; their thought must travel to reach the Almighty;
they must look afar for the Most Holy; they dwell
themselves within the finite, and must ask a foreign introduction
to the Infinite. He is not with them as a private guide,
but in the remoter watch-towers of creation, as the public inspector
of their life; not present for perpetual communion, but
to be visited in absence by stated messages of form and prayer.
And that God dwells in this cold and royal separation, induces
the feeling that man is too mean to touch him; that a
consecrated intervention is required, in order to part Deity
from the defiling contact of humanity. Why else am I restricted
from unlimited personal access to my Creator, and
driven to another in my transactions with him? And so, in
this system, our nature appears in contrast, not in alliance,
with the divine, and those views of it are favoured which
make the opposition strong; its puny dimensions, its swift
decadence, its poor self-flatteries, its degenerate virtues, its
giant guilt, become familiar to the thought and lips; and life,
cut off from sympathy with the godlike, falls towards the
level of melancholy, or the sink of epicurism, or the abjectness
of vicarious reliance on the priest. Worship, too, must
have for its chief aim, to throw off the load of ill; to rid the
mind of sin and shame, and the lot of hardship and sorrow;
for principally to these disburthening offices do priests and
rituals profess themselves adapted:—and who, indeed, could
pour forth the privacy of love, and peace, and trust, through
the cumbrousness of ceremonies, and the pompousness of a
sacred officer? The piety of such a religion is thus a refuge
for the weakness, not an outpouring of the strength of the
soul: it takes away the incubus of darkness, without shedding
the light of heaven; lifts off the nightmare horrors of
earth and hell, without opening the vision of angels and of
God. Nay, for the spiritual bonds which connect men with
the Father above, it substitutes material ties, a genealogy of
sacred fires, a succession of hallowed buildings, or of priests
having consecration by pedigree or by manual transmission;
so that qualities belonging to the soul alone, are likened to
forces mechanical or chemical; sanctity becomes a physical
property: divine acceptance comes by bodily catenation; regeneration
is degraded into a species of electric shock, which
one only method of experiment, and the links of but one conductor,
can convey. And, in fine, a priestly system ever
abjures all aim at any higher perfection; boasts of being immutable
and unimprovable; encourages no ambition, breathes
no desire. It holds the appointed methods of influencing
heaven, on which none may presume to innovate; and its
functions are ever the same, to employ and preserve the ancient
forms and legendary spells committed to its trust.
Hence all its veneration is antiquarian, not sympathetic or
prospective; it turns its back upon the living, and looks
straight into departed ages, bowing the head and bending the
knee; as if all objects of love and devotion were there,
not here; in history, not in life; as if its God were dead, or
otherwise imprisoned in the Past, and had bequeathed to its
keeping such relics as might yield a perpetual benediction.
Thus does the administration of religion, in proportion as it
possesses a sacerdotal character, involve a distant Deity, a
mean humanity, a servile worship, a physical sanctity, and a
retrospective reverence.
Let no one, however, imagine, that there is no other idea
or administration of religion than this; that the priest is the
only person among men, to whom it is given to stand between
heaven and earth. Even the Hebrew Scriptures introduce
us to another class of quite different order; to whom, indeed,
those Scriptures owe their own truth and power, and perpetuity
of beauty; I mean the Prophets; whom we shall very
imperfectly understand, if we suppose them mere historians,
for whom God had turned time round the other way, so that
they spoke of things future as if past, and grew so dizzy in
their use of tenses, as greatly to incommode learned grammarians;
or if we treat their writings as scrap-books of Providence,
with miscellaneous contributions from various parts
of duration, sketches taken indifferently from any point of
view within eternity, and put together at random and without
mark, on adjacent pages, for theological memories to identify;
first, a picture of an Assyrian battle, next, a holy family; now
of the captives sitting by Euphrates, then, of Paul preaching
to the Gentiles; here, a flight of devouring locusts, and there,
the escape of the Christians from the destruction of Jerusalem;
a portrait of Hezekiah, and a view of Calvary; a march
through the desert, and John the Baptist by the Jordan; the
day of Pentecost, and the French Revolution; Nebuchadnezzar
and Mahomet; Caligula and the Pope,—following each
other with picturesque neglect of every relation of time and
place. No, the Prophet and his work always indeed belong
to the future; but far otherwise than thus. Meanwhile, let
us notice how, in Israel, as elsewhere, he takes his natural
station above the priest. It was Moses the prophet who even
made Aaron the priest. And who cares now for the sacerdotal
books of the Old Testament, compared with the rest? Who,
having the strains of David, would pore over Leviticus, or
would weary himself with Chronicles, when he might catch
the inspiration of Isaiah! It was no priest that wrote, “Thou
desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; thou delightest
not in burnt offering: the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”[607]
It was no pontifical spirit that exclaimed, “Bring no more
vain oblations; incense is an abomination to me; the new
moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away
with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting: your new moons
and your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble
unto me: I am weary to bear them.” “Wash you, make you
clean.”[608] Whatever, in these venerable scriptures, awes us
by its grandeur, and pierces us by its truth, comes of the
prophets, not the priests; and from that part of their writings
too, in which they are not concerned with historical prediction,
but with some utterance deeper and greater. I do
not deny them this gift of occasional intellectual foresight of
events. And doubtless it was an honour, to be permitted
to speak thus to a portion of the future, and of local occurrences
unrevealed to seers less privileged. But it is a glory
far higher, to speak that which belongs to all time, and finds
its interpretation in every place; to penetrate to the everlasting
realities of things; to disclose, not when this or that
man will appear, but how and wherefore all men appear and
quickly disappear; to make it felt, not in what nook of duration
such an incident will happen, but from what all-embracing
eternity the images of history emerge and are swallowed
up. In this highest faculty, the Hebrew seers belong
to a class, scattered over every nation and every period;
which Providence keeps ever extant for human good, and
especially to furnish an administration of religion quite anti-sacerdotal.
This class we must proceed to characterize.
The Prophet is the representative of God before men, commissioned
from the Divine nature to sanctify the human.
He bears a message downwards, from heaven to earth; his
inspirer being above, his influence below. He takes of the
holiness of God, enters with it into the souls of men, and
heals therewith the wounds, and purifies the taint, of sin.
He is charged with the peace of God, and gives from it rest
to the weariness, and solace to the griefs of men. Instead of
carrying the foulness of life to be cleansed in Heaven, he
brings the purity of Heaven to make life divine. Instead of
interposing himself and his mediation between humanity and
Deity, he destroys the whole distance between them; and
only fulfils his mission, when he brings the finite mind and
the infinite into immediate and thrilling contact, and leaves
the creature consciously alone with the Creator. He is one
to whom the primitive and everlasting relations between God
and man have revealed themselves, stripped of every disguise,
and bared of all that is conventional; who is possessed by
their simplicity, mastered by their solemnity; who has found
the secret of meeting the Holy Spirit within, rather than
without; and knows, but cannot tell, how in the strife of genuine
duty, or in moments of true meditation, the divine immensity
and love have touched and filled his naked soul; and
taught him by what fathomless Godhead he is folded round,
and on what adamantine manhood he must take his stand.
So far from separating others from the heavenly communion
vouchsafed to himself, he necessarily believes that all may
have the same godlike consciousness; burns to impart it to
them; and by the vivid light of his own faith, speedily creates
it in those who feel his influence; drawing out and freshening
the faded colours of the divine image in their souls, till they
too become visibly the seers and the sons of God. His instruments,
like the objects of his mission, are human; not
mysteries, and mummeries, and such arbitrary things, by
which others may pretend to be talking with the skies;
but the natural language which interprets itself at once to
every genuine man, and goes direct to the living point of
every heart. An earnest speech, a brave and holy life, truth
of sympathy, severity of conscience, freshness and loftiness
of faith,—these natural sanctities are his implements of power:
and if heaven be pleased to add any other gifts, still are they
weapons all,—not the mere tinsel of tradition and custom,—but
forged in the inner workshop of our nature, where the
fire glows beneath the breath of God, framing things of
etherial temper. Thus armed, he lays undoubting siege to
the world’s conscience; tears down every outwork of pretence;
forces its strongholds of delusion; humbles the vanities
at its centre, and proclaims it the citadel of God. The
true prophet of every age is no believer in the temple, but
in the temple’s Deity; trusts, not rites and institutions,
but the heart and soul that fill or ought to fill them; if they
speak the truth, no one so reveres them; if a lie, they meet
with no contempt like his. He sees no indestructible sanctuary
but the mind itself, wherein the Divine Spirit ever loves
to dwell; and whence it will be sure to go forth and build
such outward temple as may suit the season of Providence.
He is conscious that there is no devotion like that which
comes spontaneously from the secret places of our humanity,
no orisons so true as those which rise from the common platform
of our life. He desires only to throw himself in faith
on the natural piety of the heart. Give him but that; and
he will find for man an everlasting worship, and raise for God
a cathedral worthy of his infinitude.
It is evident that one thoroughly possessed with this
spirit could never be, and could never make, a priest: nor
frame a ritual for priests already made. He is destitute of
the ideas, out of which alone these things can be created.
His mission is in the opposite direction: he interprets and
reveals God to men, instead of interceding for men with God.
In this office sacerdotal rites have no function and no place.
I do not say that he must necessarily disapprove and abjure
them, or deny that he may directly sanction them. If he
does however, it is not in his capacity of prophet, but in
conformity with feelings which his proper office has left untouched.
His tendency will be against ceremonialism: and
on his age and position will depend the extent to which this
tendency takes effect. Usually, he will construct nothing
ritual, will destroy much, and leave behind great and growing
ideas, destructive of much more. But ere we quit our general
conception of a prophet, let us notice some characteristic
sentiments, moral and religious, which naturally connect themselves
with his faith; comparing them with those which belong
to the sacerdotal influence.
In this faith, God is separated by nothing from his worshippers.
He is not simply in contact with them, but truly
in the interior of their nature: so that they may not only
meet him in the outward providences of life, but bear his
spirit with them, when they go to toil and conflict, and find it
still, when they sit alone to think and pray. He is not the
far observer, but the very present help, of the faithful will.
No structure made with hands, nay, not even his own architecture
of the heaven of heavens, contains and confines
his presence: were there any dark recess whence these were
hid, the blessed access would be without hindrance still; and
the soul would discern him near as its own identity. No
mean and ignoble conception can be entertained of a mind,
which is thus the residence of Deity;—the shrine of the
Infinite must have somewhat that is infinite itself. Thus, in
this system, does our nature appear in alliance with the Divine,
not in contrast with it; inspired with a portion of its
holiness, and free to help forward the best issues of its Providence.
Human life, blessed by this spirit, becomes a miniature
of the work of the great Ruler: its responsibilities, its difficulties,
its temptations, become dignified as the glorious
theatre whereon we strive, by and with the good Spirit of
God, for the mastery over evil. Worship, issuing from a
nature and existence thus consecrated, is not the casting off
of guilt and terror, but the glad unburthening of love, and
trust, and aspiration, the simple speaking forth, as duty is
the acting forth, of the divine within us; not the prostration
of the slave, but the embrace of the child; not the plaint of
the abject, but the anthem of the free. Is it not private,
individual? And may it not by silence say what it will, and
intimate the precise thing, and that only, which is at heart?—whence
there grows insensibly that firm root of excellence,
truth with one’s own self. The priestly fancy of an hereditary
or lineal sacredness can have no place here. The soul and
God stand directly related, mind with mind, spirit with spirit:
from our moral fidelity to this relation, from the jealousy with
which we guard it from insult or neglect, does the only sanctity
arise; and herein there is none to help us, or give a
vicarious consecration. And finally, the spirit of God’s true
prophet is earnestly prospective; more filled with the conception
of what the Creator will make his world, than of
what he has already made it: detecting great capacities, it
glows with great hopes; knowing that God lives, and will
live, it turns from the past, venerable as that may be, and
reverences rather the promise of the present, and the glories
of the future. It esteems nothing unimproveable, is replete
with vast desires; and amid the shadows and across the wilds
of existence chases, not vainly, a bright image of perfection.
The golden age, which priests with their tradition put into
the past, the prophet, with his faith and truth, transfers into
the future: and while the former pines and muses, the latter
toils and prays. Thus does the administration of religion,
in proportion as it partakes of the prophetic or anti-sacerdotal
character, involve the ideas of an interior Deity, a noble
humanity, a loving worship, an individual holiness, and a prospective
veneration.
We have found, then, two opposite views of religion; that
of the Priest with his Ritual; and that of the Prophet with
his Faith. I propose to show that the Church of England,
in its doctrine of sacraments, coincides with the former of
these, and sanctions all its objectionable sentiments: and
that Christianity, in every relation, even with respect to its
reputed rites, coincides with the latter.
The general conformity of the Church of England with the
ritual conception of religion, will not be denied by her own
members. Their denial will be limited to one point: they
will protest that her formulas of doctrine do not ascribe a
charmed efficacy, or any operation upon God, to the two sacraments.
To avoid verbal disputes, let us consider what we
are to understand by a spell or charm. The name, I apprehend,
denotes any material object or outward act, the possession
or use of which is thought to confer safety or blessing,
not by natural operation, but by occult virtues, inherent in
it, or mystical effects appended to it. A mere commemorative
sign, therefore, is not a charm, nor need there be any
superstition in its employment: it simply stands for certain
ideas and memories in our minds; re-excites and freshens
them, not otherwise than speech audibly records them, except
that it summons them before us by sight and touch, instead
of sound. The effect, whatever it may be, is purely
natural, by sequence of thought on thought, till the complexion
of the mind is changed, and haply suffused with a
noble glow. But in truth it is not fit to speak of commemorations,
as things having efficacy at all; as desirable observances,
under whose action we should put ourselves, in order
to get up certain good dispositions in the heart. As soon as
we see them acquiesced in, with this dutiful submission to a
kind of spiritual operation, we may be sure they are already
empty and dead. An expedient commemoration, deliberately
maintained on utilitarian principles, for the sake of warming
cold affections by artificial heat, is one of the foolish conceptions
of this mechanical and sceptical age. It is quite
true, that such influence is found to belong to rites of remembrance;
but only so long as it is not privately looked
into, or greedily contemplated by the staring eye of prudence,
but simply and unconsciously received. No; commemorations
must be the spontaneous fruit and outburst of
a love already kindled in the soul, not the factitious contrivance
for forcing it into existence. They are not the
lighted match applied to the fuel on an altar cold: but the
shapes in which the living flame aspires, or the fretted lights
thrown by that central love on the dark temple-walls of this
material life.
It is not pretended that the sacraments are mere commemorative
rites. And nothing, I submit, remains, but that
they should be pronounced charms. It is of little purpose
to urge, in denial of this, that the Church insists upon
the necessity of faith on the part of the recipient, without
which no benefit, but rather peril, will accrue. This only
limits the use of the charm to a certain class, and establishes
a pre-requisite to its proper efficacy. It simply conjoins the
outward form with a certain state of mind, and gives to each
of these a participation in the effect. If the faith be insufficient
without the ceremony, then some efficacy is due to the
rite: and this, being neither the natural operation of the
material elements, nor a simple suggestion of ideas and feelings
to the mind, but mystical and preternatural, is no other
than a charmed efficacy.
Nor will the statement, that the effect is not upon God,
but upon man, bear examination. It is very true, that the
ultimate benefit of these rites is a result reputed to fall upon
the worshipper;—regeneration, in the case of baptism; participation
in the atonement, in the case of the Lord’s Supper.
But by what steps do these blessings descend? Not by
those of visible or perceived causation; but through an express
and extraordinary volition of God, induced by the ceremonial
form, or taking occasion from it. The sacerdotal
economy, therefore, is so arranged, that whenever the priest
dispenses the water at the font, the Holy Spirit follows, as
in instantaneous compliance with a suggestion: and whenever
he spreads his hands over the elements at the communion,
God immediately establishes a preternatural relation,
not subsisting the moment before, between the substances
on the table and the souls of the faithful communicants: so
that every partaker receives, either directly or through supernatural
increase of faith, some new share in the merits of
the cross. Whatever subtleties of language then may be
employed, it is evidently conceived that the first consequence
of these forms takes place in heaven; and that on this depends
whatever benediction they may bring: nor can a plain
understanding frame any other idea of them than this; first,
they act upwards, and suggest something to the mind of
God; who then sends down an influence on the mind of the
believer. From this conception no figures of speech, no ingenious
analogies, can deliver us. Do you call the sacraments
“pledges of grace?” A pledge means a promise: and
how a voluntary act of ours, or the priest’s, can be a promise
made to us by the Divine Being, it is not easy to understand.
Do you call them “seals of God’s covenant,”—the
instrument by which he engages to make over its blessings
to the Christian, like the signature and completion of a deed
conveying an estate? It still perplexes us to think of a service
of our own as an assurance received by us from Heaven.
And one would imagine that the Divine promise, once given,
were enough, without this incessant binding by periodical legalities.
If it be said, “the renewal of the obligation is
needful for us, and not for him;” then call the rites at once
and simply, our service of self-dedication, the solemn memorial
of our vows. And in spite of all metaphors, the question
recurs; does the covenant stand without these seals, or
are they essential to give possession of the privileges conveyed?
Are they, by means preternatural, procurers of salvation?
Have they a mystical action towards this end? If
so, we return to the same point; they have a charmed efficacy
on the human soul.
In order to establish this, nothing more is requisite than a
brief reference to the language of the Articles and Liturgical
services of the Church respecting Baptism and the Communion.
Baptism is regarded, throughout the Book of Common
Prayer, as the instrument of regeneration: not simply as its
sign, of which the actual descent of the Holy Spirit is independent;
but as itself and essentially the means or indispensable
occasion of the washing away of sin. That this is
regarded as a mystical and magical, not a natural and spiritual
effect, is evident from the alleged fact of its occurrence
in infants, to whom the rite can suggest nothing, and on
whom, in the course of nature, it can leave no impression.
Yet is it declared of the infant, after the use of the water,
“Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this child is regenerate,”
&c.: at the commencement of the service its aim
is said to be that God may “grant to this child that thing
which by nature he cannot have,”—“would wash him and
sanctify him with the Holy Ghost,” that he may be “delivered
from God’s wrath.” Nothing, indeed, is so striking in
this office of the national church, as its audacious trifling
with solemn names, denoting qualities of the soul and will;
the ascription of spiritual and moral attributes, not only to
the child in whom they can yet have no development, but
even to material substances; the frivolity with which engagements
with God are made by deputy, and without the consent
or even existence of the engaging will. Water is said
to possess sanctity, for “the mystical washing away of sin.”
Infants, destitute of any idea of duty or obligation to be resisted
or obeyed, are said to obtain “remission of their sins;”—to
“renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp
and glory of the world:” “steadfastly to believe” in the
Apostles’ creed, and to be desirous of “baptism into this
faith.” Belief, desire, resolve, are acts of some one’s mind:
the language of this service attributes them to the personality
of the infant (I renounce, I believe, I desire); yet there they
cannot possibly exist. If they are to be understood as affirmed
by the godfathers and godmothers of themselves, the case
is not improved: for how can one person’s state of faith and
conscience be made the condition of the regeneration of another?
What intelligible meaning can be attached to these
phrases of sanctity applied to an age not responsible? In
what sense, and by what indication, are these children holier
than others? And with what reason, if all this be Christianity,
can we blame the Pope for sprinkling holy water on
the horses? The service appears little better than a profane
sacerdotal jugglery, by which material things are impregnated
with divine virtues, moral and spiritual qualities of the mind
are sported with, the holy spirit of God is turned into a
physical mystery, and the solemnity of personal responsibility
is insulted.
That a superstitious value is attributed to the details of
the baptismal form, in the Church of England, appears from
certain parts of the service for the private ministration of the
rite. If a child has been baptized by any other lawful minister
than the minister of the parish, strict inquiries are to
be instituted by the latter respecting the correctness with
which the ceremony has been performed: and should the
prescribed rules have been neglected, the baptism is invalid,
and must be repeated. Yet great solicitude is manifested,
lest danger should be incurred by an unnecessary repetition
of the sacrament: to guard against which, the minister is to
give the following conditional invitation to the Holy Spirit;
saying, in his address to the child, “If thou art not already
baptized, I baptize thee,” &c. It is worthy of remark, that
the Church mentions as one of the essentials of the service,
the omission of which necessitates its repetition, the use of
the formula, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost.” By this rule, every one of the apostolic
baptisms recorded in Scripture must be pronounced invalid;
and the Church of England, were it possible, would
perform them again: for in no instance does it appear that
the apostles employed either this or even any equivalent form
of words.
That this sacrament is regarded as an indispensable channel
of grace, and positively necessary to salvation, is clear from
the provision of a short and private form, to be used in cases
of extreme danger. The prayers, and faith, and obedience,
and patient love, of parents and friends,—the dedication and
heartfelt surrender of their child to God, the profound application
of their anxieties and grief to their conscience and inward
life,—all this, we are told, will be of no avail, without
the water and the priest. Archbishop Laud says, “That
Baptism is necessary to the salvation of infants (in the ordinary
way of the church, without binding God to the use and
means of that sacrament, to which he hath bound us) is expressed
in St. John iii. ‘Except a man be born of water,’ &c.
So, no baptism, no entrance; nor can infants creep in, any
other ordinary way.”[609] Bishop Bramhall says, “Wilful
neglect of baptism we acknowledge to be a damnable sin;
and, without repentance and God’s extraordinary mercy, to
exclude a man from all hope of salvation. But yet, if such
a person, before his death, shall repent and deplore his neglect
of the means of grace, from his heart, and desire with
all his soul to be baptized, but is debarred from it invincibly,
we do not, we dare not, pass sentence of condemnation upon
him; not yet the Roman Catholics themselves. The question
then is, whether the want of baptism, upon invincible
necessity, do evermore infallibly exclude from heaven.”[610]
Singular struggle here, between the merciless ritual of the
priest, and the relenting spirit of the man!
The office of Communion contains even stronger marks of
the same sacerdotal superstitions: and notwithstanding the
Protestant horror entertained of the mass, approaches it so
nearly, that no ingenuity can exhibit them in contrast. Near
doctrines, however, like near neighbours, are known to quarrel
most.
The idea of a physical sanctity, residing in solid and liquid
substances, is encouraged by this service. The priest consecrates
the elements, by laying his hand upon all the bread,
and upon every flagon containing the wine about to be dispensed.
If an additional quantity is required, this too must
be consecrated before its distribution. And the sacredness
thus imparted is represented as surviving the celebration of
the Supper, and residing in the substances as a permanent
quality: for in the disposal of the bread and wine that may
remain at the close of the sacramental feast, a distinction is
made between the consecrated and the unconsecrated portion
of the elements; the former is not permitted to quit the
altar, but is to be reverently consumed by the priest and the
communicants; the latter is given to the curate. What the
particular change may be, which the prayer and manipulation
of the minister are thought to induce, it is by no means easy
to determine; nor would the discovery, perhaps, reward our
pains. It is certainly conceived, that they cease to be any
longer mere bread and wine, and that with them thenceforth
co-exist, really and substantially, the body and blood of
Christ. Respecting this Real Presence with the elements,
there is no dispute between the Romish and the English
church; both unequivocally maintain it: and the only question
is, respecting the Real Absence of the original and culinary
bread and wine: the Roman Catholic believing that
these substantially vanish, and are replaced by the body and
blood of Christ; the English Protestant conceiving that they
remain, but are united with the latter. The Lutheran, no
less than the British Reformed church, has clung tenaciously
to the doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist. Luther
himself declares, “I would rather retain with the Romanists,
only the body and blood, than adopt, with the Swiss, the
bread and wine, without the real body and blood of Christ.”
The catechism of our church affirms, that “the body and
blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by
the faithful in the Lord’s Supper.” And this was not intended
to be figuratively understood, of the spiritual use and
appropriation to which the faith and piety of the receiver
would mentally convert the elements: for although here the
body of Christ is only said to be “taken” (making it the act
of the communicant), yet one of the Articles speaks of it as
“given” (making it the act of the officiating priest), and implying
the real presence before participation. However
anxious indeed the clergy of the “Evangelical” school may
be to disguise the fact, it cannot be doubted that their
church has always maintained a supernatural change in the
elements themselves, as well as in the mind of the receiver.
Cosin, Bishop of Durham, says, “We own the union between
the body and blood of Christ, and the elements, whose
use and office we hold to be changed from what it was before:”
“we confess the necessity of a supernatural and heavenly
change, and that the signs cannot become sacraments
but by the infinite power of God.”[611]
In consistency with this preparatory change, a charmed
efficacy is attributed to the subsequent participation in the
elements. Even the body of the communicant is said to be
under their influence: “Grant us to eat the flesh of thy
dear Son, and drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be
made clean through his body, and our souls washed through
his most precious blood:” and the unworthy recipients are
said “to provoke God to plague them with divers diseases
and sundry kinds of death.” Lest the worshipper, by presenting
himself in an unqualified state, should “do nothing
else than increase his damnation,” the unquiet conscience is
directed to resort to the priest, and receive the benefit of absolution
before communicating. Can we deny to the Oxford
divines the merit (whatever it may be) of consistency with
the theology of their church, when they applaud and recommend,
as they do, the administration of the eucharist to infants,
and to persons dying and insensible? Indeed, it is
difficult to discover, why infant Communion should be
thought more irrational than infant Baptism. If, as I have
endeavoured to show, the primary action of these ceremonies
is conceived to be on God, not on the mind of their object,
why should not the Divine blessing be induced upon the
young and the unconscious, as well as on the mature and
capable soul? And were any further evidence required, than
I have hitherto adduced, to show on whom the Communion
is conceived to operate in the first instance, it would surely
be afforded by this clause in the Service; by not partaking,
“Consider how great an injury ye do unto God!”
The only thing wanted to complete this sacerdotal system,
is to obtain for a certain class of men the corporate possession,
and exclusive administration, of these essential and holy
mysteries. This our Church accomplishes by its doctrine of
Apostolical Succession; claiming for its ministers a lineal
official descent from the Apostles, which invests them, and
them alone within this realm, with divine authority to pronounce
absolution or excommunication, and to administer the
Sacraments. They are thus the sole guardians of the channels
of the Divine Spirit and its grace, and interpose themselves
between a nation and its God. “Receive the Holy
Ghost,” says the Service for Ordination of Priests, “for the
office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed
unto thee by the imposition of hands. Whose sins
thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou
dost retain, they are retained.” “They only,” says the present
Bishop of Exeter, “can claim to rule over the Lord’s
household, whom he has himself placed over it; they only
are able to minister the means of grace,—above all, to present
the great commemorative sacrifice,—whom Christ has
appointed, and whom he has in all generations appointed in
unbroken succession from those, and through those, whom
he first ordained. ‘Ambassadors from Christ’ must, by the
very force of the term, receive credentials from Christ:
‘stewards of the mysteries of God’ must be entrusted with
those mysteries by him. Remind your people, that in the
Church only is the promise of forgiveness of sins; and though,
to all who truly repent, and sincerely believe, Christ mercifully
grants forgiveness; yet he has, in an especial manner,
empowered his ministers to declare and pronounce to his
people the absolution and remission of their sins: ‘whosesoever
sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever
sins ye retain, they are retained.’ This was the awful
authority given to his first ministers, and in them, and
through them, to all their successors. This is the awful authority
we have received, and that we must never be ashamed
nor afraid to tell the people that we have received.
“Having shown to the people your commission, show to
them how our own Church has framed its services in accordance
with that commission. Show this to them not only in
the Ordinal, but also in the Collects, in the Communion Service,
in the Office of the Visitation of the Sick; show it, especially,
in that which continually presents itself to their notice,
but is commonly little regarded by them; show it in
the very commencement of Morning and Evening Prayer, and
make them understand the full blessedness of that service, in
which the Church thus calls on them to join. Let them see
that there the minister authoritatively pronounces God’s
pardon and absolution to all them that truly repent, and unfeignedly
believe Christ’s holy gospel; that he does this, even
as the Apostles did, with the authority and by the appointment
of our Lord himself, who, in commissioning his Apostles,
gave this to be the never-failing assurance of his co-operation
in their ministry, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the
end of the world;’ a promise which, of its very nature, was
not to be fulfilled to the persons of those whom he addressed,
but to their office, to their successors therefore in that office,
‘even unto the end of the world.’ Lastly, remind and warn
them of the awful sanction with which our Lord accompanied
his mission, even of the second order of the ministers whom
he appointed; ‘He that heareth you, heareth me; and he
that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me,
despiseth him that sent me.’” That this high dignity may be
clearly understood to belong in this country only to the
Church of England, the Bishop proposes the question,
“What, then, becomes of those who are not, or continue not,
members of that (visible) Church?” and replies to it by saying,
that though he “judges not them that are without,” yet
“he who wilfully and in despite of due warning, or through
recklessness and worldly-mindedness, sets at nought its ordinances,
and despises its ministers, has no right to promise
to himself any share in the grace which they are appointed
to convey.”[612] “Why,” says one of the Oxford divines, who
here undeniably speaks the genuine doctrine of his Church,
“Why should we talk so much of an Establishment, and so
little of an Apostolic Succession? Why should we not seriously
endeavour to impress our people with this plain truth,
that by separating themselves from our communion, they separate
themselves not only from a decent, orderly, useful society,
but from the only Church in this realm which
has a right to be quite sure that she has the
Lord’s body to give to his people?”[613]
Of course this Divine authority has been received through
the Church of Rome, so abominable in the eyes of all Evangelical
clergymen; and through many an unworthy link in
the unbroken chain. The Holy Spirit, it is acknowledged,
has passed through many, on whom, apparently, it was not
pleased to rest; and the right to forgive sins been conferred
by those who seemed themselves to need forgiveness. A
writer in the Oxford Tracts observes, “Nor even though
we may admit that many of those who formed the connecting
links of this holy chain were themselves unworthy of the
high charge reposed in them, can this furnish us with any
solid ground for doubting or denying their power to exercise
that legitimate authority with which they were duly invested,
of transmitting the sacred gift to worthier followers.”[614]
In its doctrine of Sacraments, then, and in that of Ecclesiastical
authority and succession, the Church of England is
thoroughly imbued with the sacerdotal character. It doubtless
contains far better elements and nobler conceptions than
those which it has been my duty to exhibit now; and solemnly
insists on faith of heart, and truth of conscience, and
Christian devotedness of life, as well as on the observance of
its ritual; with the external it unites the internal condition of
sanctification. But insisting on the theory of a mystic efficacy
in the Christian rites, it necessarily fails to reconcile these with
each other: and hence the opposite parties within its pale;
the one magnifying faith and personal spirituality, the other
exalting the sacraments and ecclesiastical communion. They
represent respectively the two constituent and clashing
powers, which met at the formation of the English Church,
and of which it effected the mere compromise, not the reconciliation;
I mean, the priestliness of Rome, and the prophetic
spirit of the Reformers. Never, since apostolic days, did
heaven bless us with truer prophet than Martin Luther. It
was his mission (no modern man had ever greater,) to substitute
the idea of personal faith for that of sacerdotal reliance.
And gloriously, with bravery and truth of soul amid a thousand
hindrances, did he achieve it. But though, ever since,
the priests have been down, and faith has been up, yet did
the hierarchy unavoidably remain, and insisted that something
should be made of it, and at least some colourable terms proposed.
Hence, every reformed Church exhibits a coalition
between the new and the old ideas: and combined views of
religion, which must ultimately prove incompatible with each
other; the formal with the spiritual; the idea of worship as
a means of propitiating God, with the conception of it as an
expression of love in man; the notion of Church authority
with that of individual freedom; the admission of a licence
to think, with a prohibition of thinking wrong. In our national
Church, the old spirit was ascendant over the new,
though long forced into quiescence by the temper of modern
times. Now it is attempting to re-assert its power, not without
strenuous resistance. Indeed, the present age seems
destined to end the compromise between the two principles,
from the union of which Protestantism assumed its established
forms. The truce seems everywhere breaking up: a
general disintegration of churches is visible; tradition is ransacking
the past for claims and dignities, and canvassing
present timidity for fresh authority, to withstand the wild
forces born at the Reformation, and hurrying us fast into an
unknown future.
Let us now turn to the primitive Christianity; which, I
submit, is throughout wholly anti-sacerdotal.
Surely it must be admitted that the general spirit of our
Lord’s personal life and ministry was that of the Prophet,
not of the Priest; tending directly to the disparagement of
whatever priesthood existed in his country, without visibly
preparing the substitution of anything at all analogous to it.
The sacerdotal order felt it so; and with the infallible instinct
of self-preservation, they watched, they hated, they seized,
they murdered him. The priest in every age has a natural
antipathy to the prophet, dreads him as kings dread revolution,
and is the first to detect his existence. The solemn moment
and the gracious words, of Christ’s first preaching in Nazareth,
struck with fate the temple in Jerusalem. To the old men
of the village, to the neighbours who knew his childhood, and
companions who had shared its rambles and its sports, he
said, with the quiet flush of inspiration; “The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the
gospel to the poor: he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are
bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”[615] The
Spirit of the Lord in Galilee! speaking with the peasantry,
dwelling in villages, and wandering loose and where it listeth
among the hills! This would never do, thought the white-robed
Levites of the Holy City; it would be as a train of wild-fire
in the Temple. And were they not right? When it was revealed
that sanctity is no thing of place and time, that a way
is open from earth to heaven, from every field or mountain
trod by human feet, and through every roof that shelters a
human head; that amid the crowd and crush of life, each
soul is in personal solitude with God, and by speech or silence
(be they but true and loving) may tell its cares and find its
peace; that a divine allegiance might cost nothing, but the
strife of a dutiful will and the patience of a filial heart; how
could any priesthood hope to stand? See how Jesus himself,
when the Temple was close at hand, and the sunshine
dressed it in its splendour, yet withdrew his prayers to the
midnight of Mount Olivet, He entered those courts to teach,
rather than to worship; and when there, he is felt to take no
consecration, but to give it; to bring with him the living
spirit of God, and spread it throughout all the place. When
evening closes his teachings, and he returns late over the Mount
to Bethany, did he not feel that there was more of God in
the night-breeze on his brow, and the heaven above him, and
the sad love within him, than in the place called “Holy” which
he had left? And when he had knocked at the gate of Lazarus
the risen and become his guest; when, after the labours
of the day, he unburthened his spirit to the affections of that
family, and spake of things divine to the sisters listening at
his feet; did they not feel, as they retired at length, that the
whole house was full of God, and that there is no sanctuary
like the shrine, not made with hands, within us all? In childhood,
he had once preferred the temple and its teachings to
his parents’ home: now, to his deeper experience, the temple
has lost its truth; while the cottage and the walks of
Nazareth, the daily voices and constant duties of this life,
seem covered with the purest consecration. True, he vindicated
the sanctity of the temple, when he heard within its
enclosure the hum of traffic and the chink of gain, and would
not have the house of prayer turned into a place of merchandise:
because in this there was imposture and a lie, and
Mammon and the Lord must ever dwell apart. In nothing
must there be mockery and falsehood; and while the temple
stands, it must be a temple true.
Our Lord’s whole ministry then (to which we may add
that of his apostles) was conceived in a spirit quite opposite
to that of priesthood. A missionary life, without fixed locality,
without form, without rites; with teaching free, occasional
and various, with sympathies ever with the people,
and a strain of speech never marked by invective, except
against the ruling sacerdotal influence;—all these characters
proclaim him, purely and emphatically, the Prophet of the
Lord. It deserves notice that, unless as the name of his
enemies, the word “Priest” (ἱερεὺς) never occurs in either
the historical or epistolary writings of the New Testament,
except in the Epistle to the Hebrews. And there its application
is not a little remarkable. It is applied to Christ alone:
it is declared to belong to him, only after his ascension: it is
said that, while on earth, he neither was, nor could be, a
priest: and if it is admitted that he holds the office in heaven,
this is only to satisfy the demand of the Hebrew Christians
for some sacerdotal ideas in their religion, and to reconcile
them to having no priest on earth. The writer acknowledges
one great pontiff in the world above, that the whole race may
be superseded in the world below; and banishes priesthood
into invisibility, that men may never see its shadow more.
All the terms of office which are given to the first preachers of
the gospel and superintendents of churches—as Deacon, Elder
or Presbyter, Overseer or Bishop, are Lay-terms, belonging
previously, not to ecclesiastical, but to civil life; an indication,
surely, that no analogy was thought to exist between the
Apostolic and the Sacerdotal relations.[616] I shall, no doubt, be
reminded of the words, in which our Lord is supposed to have
given their commission to his first representatives; “Whatsoever
ye bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever
ye loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven;”[617] and shall
be asked whether this does not convey to them and their successors
an official authority to forgive sins, and dispense the
decrees of the unseen world. I reply briefly:
1st, That the power here granted does not relate to the
dispensations of the future life, but solely to what would be
termed, in modern language, the allotment of church-membership.
The previous verse proves this, furnishing as it does
a particular case of the general authority here assigned. It
directs the apostles under what circumstances they are to remove
an offender from a Christian society, and treat him as
an unconverted man, as a heathen man and a publican.
Having given them their rule, he freely trusts the application
of it to them: and being about to retire ere long, from personal
intervention in the affairs of his kingdom, he assures
them that their decisions shall be his, and that he may be
considered as adopting in heaven their determinations upon
earth. He simply “consigns to his apostles discretionary
power to direct the affairs of his church, and superintend the
diffusion of the glad tidings: they may bind and loose, that
is, open and shut the door of admission to their community,
as their judgment may determine; employing or rejecting applicants
for the missionary office; dissociating from their assemblies
obstinate delinquents; receiving with openness, or
dismissing with suspicion, each candidate for instruction, according
to their estimate of his qualifications and motives.”
2ndly, It is to be observed, that there is no appearance of
any one being in the contemplation of our Lord, beyond the
persons immediately addressed. Not a word is said of any
official successor or any distant age. No indication is afforded,
that any idea of futurity was present to the mind of Jesus:
and a title of perpetual office, an instrument creating and endowing
an endless priesthood, ought, it will be admitted, to be
somewhat more explicit than this. But where the power has
been successfully claimed, the title is seldom difficult to prove.
The alleged RITUAL of Christianity, consisting of the sacraments
of Baptism and the Communion, will be found no less
destitute of sanction from the Scriptures. The former we
shall see reason to regard as simply an initiatory form, applicable
only to Christian converts, and limited therefore to
adults; the latter as purely a commemoration: neither therefore
having any sacramental or mystical efficacy.
For baptism it is impossible to establish any supernatural
origin. It is admitted to have existed before the Christian
æra; and to have been employed by the Jews on the admission
of proselytes to their religion. It is certain that it is
not an enjoined rite in the Mosaic dispensation; and though
prevalent before the period of the New Testament, is nowhere
enforced or recognised in the writings of the Old. It arose
therefore in the interval between the only two systems which
Christians acknowledged to be supernatural: and must be
considered as of natural and human origin, invested, thus far,
with no higher authority than its own appropriateness may
confer. There seem to have been two modes of construing
the symbol: the one founded on the cleansing effect of the
water on the person of the baptized himself; the other, on
the appearance of his immersion (which was complete) to the
eye of a spectator. The former was an image of the Heathen
convert’s purification from a foul idolatry; and his transition
to a stainless condition under a divine and justifying law.
The latter represented him, when he vanished in the stream,
as interred to this world, sunk utterly from its sight; and
when he re-appeared, as emerging or born again to a better
state; the “old man” was “buried in baptism,” and when
he “rose again,” he had altogether “become new.”[618] The
ceremony then was appropriately used in any case of transition
from a depressed and corrupt state of existence to a
hopeful and blessed one; from a false or imperfect religion to
one true and heavenly.
But it will be said, whatever the origin of Baptism, it was
employed and sanctioned by our Lord, who commissioned
his apostles to go and baptize all nations. True; but is there
no difference between the adoption of a practice already extant,—of
a practice which was as much the mere institutional
dress of the apostles’ nation, as the sandals whose dust they
were to shake off against the faithless, were the customary
clothing of the apostles’ feet,—and the authoritative appointment
of a Sacrament? They were going forth to make converts:
and why should they not have recourse to the form
familiarly associated with the act? Familiar association recommended
its adoption in that age and clime; and the absence
of such association elsewhere and in other times may
be thought to justify its disuse. At all events, a ceremony
thus taken up must be presumed to retain its acquired sense and
its established extent of application: and if so, baptism must
be strictly limited to the admission of proselytes from other
faiths. This accords with the known practice of the apostles,
who cannot be shown to have baptized any but those whom
they had personally, or by their missionaries, persuaded to
become Christians. Not a single case of the use of the rite
with children can be adduced from Scripture: and the only
argument by which such employment of it is ever justified is
this; that a household is said to have been baptized, and all
nations were to receive the offer of it; and that the household
may, the nations must, have contained children. It is
evident that such reasoning could never have been propounded,
unless the practice had existed first, and the defence
had been found afterwards.
With the system of infant baptism, vanish almost all the
ideas which the prevalent theology has put into the rite; and
it becomes as intelligible and expressive to one who believes
in the good capacities of human nature, as to those who esteem
it originally depraved. ‘How unmeaning,’ say our
orthodox opponents, ‘is this ceremony in Unitarian hands;
denying, as they do, the doctrines which it represents! of
what regeneration can they possibly suppose it the symbol, if
not of the washing away of that hereditary sin, which they
refuse to acknowledge? for when the infant is brought to the
font, he can as yet have no other guilt than this.’ I reply;
the objection has no force except against the use of infant
baptism in our churches,—which I am not anxious to defend:
but of course those Unitarians who employ it, conceive it to
be the token, not of any sentiments which they reject, but of
truths and feelings which they hold dear. For myself, I
believe, with our opponents, that the doctrine of original sin
and the practice of infant baptism do belong to each other,
and must stand or fall together: and therefore deem it a fact
very significant of the apostles’ theology, that no infant can
be shown ever to have been “brought to the font” by these
first true missionaries of Christianity. And as to the new-birth
which baptism (i.e. recent and genuine discipleship to Jesus)
may give to the maturely-convinced Christian, he must have a
great deal to learn, not only of the Hebrew conceptions and
language in relation to the Messiah, but of the spirituality
of the gospel, and of the fresh creations of character which
it calls up, who can be much puzzled about its meaning.
In Christian baptism, then, we have no sacrament with
mystic power; but an initiatory form, possibly of consuetudinary
obligation only; but if enjoined, applicable exclusively
to proselytes, and misemployed in the case of infants; a sign
of conversion, not a means of salvation; confided to no sacerdotal
order, but open to every man fitted to give it an appropriate
use.
I turn to the Lord’s Supper; with design to show, what it
is not, and what it is. It is not a mystery, or a sacrament,
any more than it is an expiatory sacrifice. To persuade us
that it has a ritual character, we are first assured that it is
clearly the successor in the Gospel to the Passover under the
Law. Well,—even if it were so, it would still be simply
commemorative, and without any other efficacy than a festival,
filled with great remembrances, and inspired with religious
joy. Such was the Paschal Feast in Jerusalem;—the
annual gathering of families and kindred, a sacred carnival
under the spring sky and in sight of unreaped fields, when
the memory was recalled of national deliverance, and the tale
was told of traditional glories, and the thoughts brought back
of bondage reversed, of the desert pilgrimage ended, of the
promised land possessed. The Jewish festival was no more
than this; unless, with Archbishop Magee and others, we
erroneously conceive it to be a proper sacrifice.[619] So that
those who would interpret the Lord’s Supper by the Passover
have their choice between two views: that it is a simple
commemoration; or that it is an expiatory sacrifice: in the
former case, they quit the Church of England; in the latter,
they fall into the Church of Rome.
But, in truth, there is no propriety in applying the name
‘Christian passover’ to the Communion. The notion rests
entirely on this circumstance; that the first three Evangelists
describe the last Supper as the Paschal Supper. But the institutional
part of that meal was over before the cup was distributed,
and the repetition of the act enjoined. Nor is there
the slightest trace, either in the subsequent scriptures, or in
the earliest history of the Church, that the Communion was
thought to bear relation to the passover. The time, the frequency,
the mode, of the two were altogether different. Indeed,
when we observe that not one of these particulars is
prescribed and determined by our Lord at all, when we notice
the slight and transient manner in which he drops his
wish that they would “do this in remembrance of” him, when
we compare these features of the account with the elaborate
precision of Moses respecting hours, and materials, and dates,
and places, and modes in the establishment of the Hebrew
festivals, it is scarcely possible to avoid the impression, that
we are reading narrative, not law; an utterance of personal
affection, rather than the legislative enactment of an everlasting
institution.[620] However this may be, no importance
can be attached to the reported coincidence in the time of
that meal with the day of passover: for the apostle John,
who gives by far the fullest account of what happened at
that table (yet never mentions the institution of the supper),
states that this was not the paschal meal at all, which did
not occur, he says, till the following day of crucifixion.[621]
‘But,’ it will be said, ‘the gospels are not the only parts of
Scripture, whence the nature of the eucharist may be learned.
Language is employed by St. Paul in reference to it, which
cannot be understood of a mere memorial, and implies that
awful consequences hung on the worthy or unworthy participation
in the rite. Does he not even say, that a man may
“eat and drink damnation to himself, not discerning the
Lord’s body?”’
The passage whence these words are cited certainly throws
great light on the institution of which we treat: but there
must be a total disregard to the whole context and the general
course of the apostle’s reasoning before it can be made
to yield any argument for the mystical character of the rite.[622]
It would appear that the Corinthian church was in the habit
of celebrating the Lord’s Supper in a way which, even if it
had never been disgraced by any indecorum, must have struck
a modern Christian with wonder at its singularity. The
members met together in one room or church, each bringing
his own supper, of such quantity and quality as his opulence
or poverty might allow. To this the apostle does not object,
but apparently considers it a part of the established arrangement.
But these Christians were divided into factions, and
had not learned the true uniting spirit of their faith: nor do
they seem to have acquired that sobriety of habit and sanctity
of mind, which their profession ought to have induced.
When they entered the place of meeting, they broke up into
groups and parties, class apart from class, and rich deserting
poor: each set began its separate meal, some indulging in
luxury and excess, others with scarce the means of keeping
the commemoration at all; and, infamous to tell, the blessed
supper of the Lord was sunk into a tavern meal. So gross
and habitual had the abuse become, that the excesses had
affected the health and life of these guilty and unworthy partakers.
They had made no distinction between the Communion
and an ordinary repast, had lost all perception of the
memorial significance of their meeting, had not discriminated
or “discerned the Lord’s body:” and so they had eaten and
drunk judgment (improperly rendered “damnation” in the
English Version) to themselves; and many were weak and
sickly among them, and many even slept. Well would it be,
if they would look on this as a chastening of the Lord: in
which case they might take warning, and escape being cast
out of the church, and driven to take their chance with the
unbelieving and heathen world. “When we are judged, we
are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned
with the world.”
In order to remedy all this corruption, St. Paul reminds
them, that to eat and drink under the same roof, in the
church, does not constitute proper Communion: that, to this
end, they must not break up into sections, and retain their
property in the food, but all participate seriously together.
He directs that an absolute separation shall be made between
the occasions for satisfying hunger and thirst, and those for
observing this commemorative rite, discriminating carefully
the memorial of the Lord’s body from every thing else. He
refers them all to the original model of the institution, the
parting meal of Christ, before his betrayal; and by this example,
as a criterion, he would have every man examine himself,
and after that pattern eat of the bread and drink of the
cup. Hence it appears,
That the unworthy partaker was the riotous Corinthian,
who made no distinction between the sacred Communion and
a vulgar meal:
That the judgment or damnation which such brought on
themselves, was sickliness, weakness, and premature but natural
death:
That the self-examination which the apostle recommends
to the communicant is, a comparison of his mode of keeping
the rite, with the original model of the Last Supper:
That in the Corinthian Church there was no Priest, or
officiating dispenser of the elements: and that St. Paul did
not contemplate or recommend the appointment of any such
person.
The Lord’s Supper, then, I conclude, was and is a simple
commemoration. Am I asked, ‘of what? Why, according
to Unitarian views, the death on the cross merits the
memorial, more than the remaining features of our Lord’s
history,—more even than the death of many a noble martyr,
who has sealed his testimony to truth by like self-sacrifice?’
The answer will be found at length in the Lecture on the
Atonement, where the Scriptural conceptions of Christ’s
death are expounded in detail. Meanwhile, it is sufficient to
recal an idea, which has more than once been thrown out
during this course: that if Jesus had taken up his Messianic
power without death, he would have remained a Hebrew,
and been limited to the people amid whom he was
born. He quitted his mortal personality, he left this fleshly
tabernacle of existence, and became immortal, that his nationality
might be destroyed, and all men drawn in as subjects
of his reign. It was the cross that opened to the
nations the blessed ways of life, and put us all in relations
not of law, but of love, to him and God. Hence the memorial
of his death celebrates the universality and spirituality of
the gospel; declares the brotherhood of men, the fatherhood
of providence, the personal affinity of every soul with God.
That is no empty rite, which overflows with these conceptions.
Christianity, then, I maintain, is without Priest, and without
Ritual. It altogether coalesces with the prophetic idea
of religion, and repudiates the sacerdotal. Christ himself
was transcendently the Prophet. He brought down God
to this our life, and left his spirit amid its scenes. The
Apostles were prophets; they carried that spirit abroad, revealing
everywhere to men the sanctity of their nature, and
the proximity of their heaven. Nor am I even unwilling to
admit an Apostolic succession, never yet extinct, and never
more to be extinguished. But then it is by no means a rectilinear
regiment of incessant priests; but a broken, scattered,
yet glorious race of prophets; the genealogy of great and
Christian souls, through whom the primitive conceptions of
Jesus have propagated themselves from age to age; mind
producing mind, courage giving birth to courage, truth developing
truth, and love ever nurturing love, so long as one
good and noble spirit shall act upon another. Luther surely
was the child of Paul: and what a noble offspring has risen
to manhood from Luther’s soul; whom to enumerate, were
to tell the best triumphs of the modern world. These are
Christ’s true ambassadors; and never did he mean any follower
of his to be called a priest. He has his genuine messenger,
wherever, in the Church or in the world, there toils
any one of the real prophets of our race; any one who can
create the good and great in other souls, whether by truth of
word or deed, by the inspiration of genuine speech, or the
better power of a life merciful and holy.
And here, my friends, with my subject might my Lecture
close; were it not that we are assembled now to terminate
this controversy: and that a few remarks in reference to its
whole course and spirit seem to be required.
That the recent aggression upon the principles of Unitarian
Christianity, was prompted by no unworthy motive, individual
or political, but by a zeal, Christian so far as its
spirit is disinterested, and unchristian only so far as it is exclusive,
has never been doubted or denied by my brother
ministers or myself. That much personal consideration and
courtesy have been evinced towards us during the controversy,
it is so grateful to us to acknowledge, that we must only regret
the theological obstructions in the way of that mutual
knowledge, which softens the prejudices, and corrects the
errors of the closet. From such errors, the lot of our fallible
nature, we are deeply aware that we cannot be exempt, and
profoundly wish that, by others’ aid or by our own, we could
discover them. Meanwhile, we do not feel that our opponents
have been successful in the offer which they have made,
of help towards this end. They are too little acquainted with
our history and character, and have far too great a horror of
us, to succeed in a design, demanding rather the benevolence
of sympathy and trust, than that of antipathy and
fear. Hence have arisen certain complaints and charges
against our system and its tendencies, which, having been
reiterated again and again in the Christ Church Lectures,
and scarcely noticed in our own, claim a concluding observation
or two now.
1. We are said to be infidels in disguise, and our system
to be drifting fast towards utter unbelief. At all events, it is
said we make great advances that way.
It is by no means unusual to dismiss this charge on a whirlwind
of declamation, designed to send it and the infidel to
the greatest possible distance. My friend who delivered the
first Lecture, noticed it in a far different spirit; and in a discussion
where truth and wisdom had any chance, his reply
would have prevented any recurrence to the statement. Let
me try to imitate him in the testimony which I desire to add
upon this point.
Every one, I presume, who disbelieves any thing, is, with
respect to that thing, an infidel. Departure from any prevalent
and established ideas, is inevitably an approach to infidelity;
the extent of the departure, not the reasonableness
or propriety of it, is the sole measure of the nearness of that
approach; which, however wise and sober, when estimated
by a true and independent criterion, will appear, to persons
strongly possessed by the ascendant notions, nothing less
than alarming, amazing, awful. In short, the average popular
creed of the day, is the mental standard, from which the
stadia are measured off towards that invisible, remote, nay,
even imaginary place, lodged somewhere within chaos, called
utter unbelief. Christianity at first was blank infidelity: and
disciples, being of course the atheists of their day, were
thought a fit prey for the wild beasts of the amphitheatre.
Every rejection of tradition, again, is unbelief with respect
to it; and to those who hold its authority, it is the denial of
an essential. It is too evident to need proof, that the average
popular belief cannot be assumed, by any considerate person,
as a standard of truth. To make it an objection
against any class of men, that they depart from it, is to prove
no error against them; and no one, who is not willing to call
in the passions of the multitude in suffrage on the controversies
of the few, will condescend to enforce the charge.
But only observe how, in the present instance, the matter
stands. In the popular religion we discern, mixed up together,
two constituent portions; certain peculiar doctrines
which characterize the common orthodoxy; and certain universal
Christian truths remaining, when these are subtracted.
The infidel throws away both of these; we throw away the
former only: and thus far, no doubt, we partially agree with
him. But on what grounds do we severally justify this rejection?
In answer to this question, compare the views, with
respect both to the authority and to the interpretation of
Scripture, held by the three parties, the Trinitarian, the
Unbeliever, the Unitarian. The Unbeliever does not usually
find fault with the orthodox interpretation of the Bible, but
allows it to pass, as probably the real meaning of the book,
only he altogether denies the divine character and authority
of the whole religion; he therefore agrees with the Trinitarian
respecting interpretation, disagrees with him respecting authority.
The Unitarian, again, admits the divine character
of Christianity, but understands it differently from the Trinitarian;
he therefore reverses the former case, agrees with
the orthodox on the authority, disagrees respecting interpretation.
It follows, that with the unbeliever he agrees in
neither, and is therefore further from him than his Trinitarian
accuser.
I have given this explanation, from regard simply to logical
truth. I have no desire to join in the outcry against
even the deliberate unbeliever in the Gospel, as if he must
necessarily be a fiend. Profoundly loving and trusting Christianity
myself, I yet feel indignant at the persecution which
theology, policy, and law inflict on the many who, with undeniable
exercise of conscientiousness and patience of research,
are yet unable to satisfy themselves respecting its
evidence. The very word ‘infidel,’ implying not simply an
intellectual judgment, but bad moral qualities, conveys an unmerited
insult, and ought to be repudiated by every generous
disputant. The more deeply we trust Christianity, the more
should we protest against its being defended by a body-guard
of passions, willing to do for it precisely the services which
they might equally render to the vulgarest imposture.
2. We were recently accused, amid acknowledgments of
our honesty, with want of anxiety about spiritual truth: and
the following justification of the charge was offered: “The
Word of God has informed us, that they who seek the truth
shall find it; that they who ask for holy wisdom shall receive
it; but it must be a really anxious inquiry—a heart-felt
desire for the blessing. ‘If thou seekest her as silver, and
searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou understand
the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.’[623]
Such promises are express,—they cannot be broken,—God
will give the blessing to the sincere, anxious inquirer. But
the two qualities must go together. A man may be sincere
in his ignorance and spiritual torpor; but let the full
desire for God’s favour, his pardoning mercy, and his enlightening
grace spring up in the heart, and we may rest
assured that the desire will soon be accomplished. Admitting,
then, the sincerity of Unitarians, we doubt their anxiety,
for we are well persuaded from God’s promises, that if they
possessed both, they would be delivered from their miserable
system, and be brought to the knowledge of the
truth.”[624]
The praise of our “sincerity,” conveyed in these bland
sentences, we are anxious to decline: not that we undervalue
the quality: but because we find, on near inspection, that it
has all been emptied out of the word before its presentation,
and the term comes to us hollow and worthless. It affords a
specimen of the mode in which alone our opponents appear
able to give any credit to heretics: many phrases of approbation
they freely apply to us; but they take care to draw
off the whole meaning first. We must reject these “Greek
presents:” and we are concerned that any Christian divine
can so torture and desecrate the names of virtue, as to make
them instruments of disparagement and injury. This play
with words, which every conscience should hold sacred, and
every lip pronounce with reverence,—this careless and unmeaning
application of them in discourse,—indicates a loose
adhesion to the mind of the ideas denoted by them, which
we regard with unfeigned astonishment and grief. What,
let me ask, can be the “sincerity” of an inquirer, who is not
“anxious” about the truth? How can he be “sincerely” persuaded
that he sees, who voluntarily shuts his eyes? Unless
this word is to be degraded into a synonyme for indolence and
self-complacency, no professed seeker of truth must have the
praise of sincerity, who does not abandon all worship of his
own state of mind as already perfect, who is not ready to
listen to every calm doubt as to the voice of heaven,—to undertake
with gratitude the labour of reaching new knowledge,—to
maintain his faith and his profession in scrupulous
accordance with his perception of evidence; and, at any moment
of awakening, to spring from his most brilliant dreams
into God’s own morning light, with a matin hymn upon his
lips for his new-birth from darkness and from sleep. The
earnestness implied in this state of mind is perhaps not precisely
the same, as that with which our Trinitarian opponents
seem to be familiar. The “anxiety” which they appear to
feel for themselves is, to keep their existing state of belief:
the “anxiety” which they feel for us is, that we should have
it. We are to hold ourselves ready for a change; they are
not to be expected to desire it. If a doubt of our opinions
should occur to us, we are to foster it carefully, and follow it
out as a beckoning of the Holy Spirit: if a doubt of their
sentiments should occur to them, they are to crush it on the
spot, as a reptile-thought sent of Satan to tempt them. “Our
aim,” says the concluding Lecturer again, “has been to
beget a deep spirit of inquiry:”[625] and so has ours, I would
reply: only you and we have severally prosecuted this aim
in different ways. We have personally listened, and personally
inquired, and earnestly recommended all whom our
influence could reach, to do the same: and few indeed will be
the Unitarian libraries containing one of these series of lectures,
that will not exhibit the other by its side. You have
entered this controversy, evidently strange to our literature
and history; and any deficiency in such reading before, has
not been compensated by anxiety to listen now. Your
people have been warned against us, and are taught to regard
the study of our publications as blasphemy at second-hand:
and were they really so simple as to act upon your avowed
wish “to beget a deep spirit of inquiry,” and plunge into
the investigation of Unitarian authors, and judge for themselves
of Unitarian worship, they would speedily hear the
word of recal, and discover that they were practically disappointing
the whole object of this controversy.
Having said thus much respecting the unmeaning use of
language in the Lecturer’s disparaging estimate of Unitarian
“anxiety,” we may profitably direct a moment’s attention to
the reasoning which it involves. It presents us with the
standing fallacy of intolerance, which is sufficiently rebuked
by being simply exhibited. Our opponents reason thus:
God will not permit the really anxious fatally to err:
The Unitarians do fatally err:
Therefore,
The Unitarians are not really anxious.
Now it is clear that we must conceive our opponents to be
no less mistaken than they suppose us to be. They are as
far from us, as we from them; and from either point, taken
as a standard, the measure of error must be the same. Moreover,
we cannot but eagerly assent to the principle of the
Lecturer’s first premiss, that God will never let the truly
anxious fatally miss their way. So that there is nothing, in
the nature of the case, to prevent our turning this same syllogism,
with a change in the names of the parties, against our
opponents. Yet we should shrink, with severe self-reproach,
from drawing any such unfavourable conclusion respecting
them, as they deduce of us. Accordingly, we manage our
reasoning thus:
God will not permit the really anxious fatally to err:
The Trinitarians show themselves to be really anxious:
Therefore,
The Trinitarians do not fatally err.
Our opponents are more sure that their judgment is in the
right, than that their neighbours’ conscience is in earnest.
They sacrifice other men’s characters to their own self-confidence:
we would rather distrust our self-confidence, and
rely on the visible signs of a good and careful mind. We
honour other men’s hearts, rather than our own heads. How
can it be just, to make the agreement between an opponent’s
opinion and our own, the criterion of his proper conduct of
the inquiry? Every man feels the injury, the moment the
rule is turned against himself: and every good man should
be ashamed to direct it against his brother.
3. Our reverend opponents affect to have laboured under
a great disadvantage, from the absence of any recognized
standard of Unitarian belief. ‘We give you,’ they say, ‘our
Articles and Creeds, which we unanimously undertake to
defend, and which expose a definite object to all heretical
attacks. In return, you can furnish us with no authorised
exposition of your system; but leave us to gather our knowledge
of it from individual writers, for whose opinions you
refuse to be responsible, and whose reasonings, when refuted
by us, you can conveniently disown.’
Plausible as this complaint may appear, I venture to affirm,
that it is vastly easier to ascertain the common belief of Unitarians,
than that of the members of the Established Church:
and for this plain reason, that with us there really is such a
thing as a common faith, though defined in no confession; in
the Anglican Church there is not, though articles and creeds
profess it. The characteristic tenets of Unitarian Christianity
are so simple and unambiguous, that little scope exists for
variety in their interpretation: to the propositions expressing
them all their professors attach distinct and the same ideas;—so
far, at least, as such accordance is possible in relation to
subjects inaccessible both to demonstration and to experience.
But the Trinitarian hypothesis, venturing with presumptuous
analysis far into the Divine psychology, presents us with
ideas confessedly inapprehensible; propounded in language
which, if used in its ordinary sense, is self-contradictory, and
if not, is unmeaning, and ready in its emptiness to be filled
by any arbitrary interpretation;—and actually understood so
variously by those who subscribe to them, that the Calvinist
and the Arminian, the Tritheist and the Sabellian, unite to
praise them. Indeed, in the history of the English Church,
so visible is the sweep of the centre of orthodoxy over the
whole space from the confines of Romanism to the verge of
Unitarianism, that our ecclesiastical chronology is measured
by its oscillations. Our respected opponents know full well,
that it is not necessary to search beyond the clergy of this
town, or even beyond the morning and afternoon preaching
in one and the same church, in order to encounter greater
contrasts in theology, than could be found in a whole library
of Unitarian divinity. What mockery then to refer us to
these articles as expositions of clerical belief, when the moment
we pass beyond the words, and address ourselves to the sense,
every shade of contrariety appears: and no one definite conception
can be adopted of such a doctrine as that of the
Trinity, without some church expositor or other starting up
to rebuke it as a misrepresentation! How poor the pride of
uniformity, which contents itself with lip-service to the symbol,
in the midst of heart-burnings about the reality!
In order to test the force of the objection to which I am
referring, let us advert, in detail, to the topics which exhibit
the Unitarian and Trinitarian theology in most direct opposition.
It will appear that the advantage of unity lies, in this
instance, on the side of heresy; and that if multiformity be
a prime characteristic of error, there is a wide difference
between orthodoxy and truth. There are four great subjects
comprised in the controversy between the church and ourselves:
the nature of God; of Christ; of sin; of punishment.
On these several points (which, considered as involving on
our part denials of previous ideas, may be regarded as containing
the negative elements of our belief) all our modern
writers, without material variation or exception, maintain the
following doctrines:
UNITARIAN DOCTRINES, opposed toCHURCH DOCTRINES.
(1.)
The Personal Unity of God.
(1.)
The Trinity in Unity.
(2.)
The Simplicity of Nature in Christ.
(2.)
Two distinct Natures in Christ.
(3.)
The Personal Origin and Identity of Sin.
(3.)
The Transferable Nature and Vicarious Removal of Sin.
(4.)
The Finite Duration of Future Suffering.
(4.)
The Eternity of Hell Torments.
Now no one at all familiar with polemical literature can
deny, that the modes and ambiguities of doctrine comprised
in this Trinitarian list, are more numerous than can be detected
in the parallel “heresies.” I am willing indeed to admit
an exception in respect to the last of the topics, and to
allow that the belief in the finite duration of future punishment
has opposed itself, in two forms, to the single doctrine of
everlasting torments. But when the systems are compared
at their other corresponding points, the boast of orthodox
uniformity instantly vanishes. Since the primitive jealousy
between the Jewish and Gentile Christianity, the rivalry between
the “Monarchy” and the “Economy,” the believers
in the personal Unity of God, though often severed by ages
from each other, have held that majestic truth in one unvaried
form. Never was there an idea so often lost and recovered,
yet so absolutely unchanged: a sublime, but occasional
visitant of the human mind, assuring us of the perpetual
oneness of our own nature, as well as the Divine. We can
point to no unbroken continuity of our great doctrine: and
if we could, we should appeal with no confidence to the
evidence of so dubious a phenomenon; for if a system of
ideas once gains possession of society, and attracts to itself
complicated interests and feelings, many causes may suffice
to ensure its indefinite preservation. But we can point to a
greater phenomenon; to the long and repeated extinction of
our favourite belief, to its submersion beneath a dark and
restless fanaticism; and its invariable resurrection, like a
necessary intuition of the soul, in times of purer light, with
its features still the same; stamped with imperishable identity
of truth, and, like him to whom it refers, without variableness
or shadow of a turning. Meanwhile, who will undertake to
enumerate and define the succession of Trinities by which
this doctrine has been bewildered and banished? Passing by
the Aristotelian, the Platonic, the Ciceronian, the Cartesian
Trinity,—quitting the stormy disputes, and contradictory
decisions of the early councils, shall we find among even the
modern fathers of our national church, any approach to
unanimity? Am I to be content with the doctrine of Bishop
Bull, and subordinate the Son to the Father as the sole fountain
of divinity? Or must I rise to the Tritheism of Waterland
and Sherlock? or, accepting the famous decision of the
University of Oxford, descend with Archbishop Whately,
to the modal Trinity of South and Wallis? Are we to
understand the phrase, three persons, to mean three beings
united by “perichoresis,” three “mutual inexistences,” three
“modes,” three “differences,” three “contemplations,” or
three “somewhats;” or, being told that this is but a vain prying
into a mystery, shall we be satisfied to leave the phrase
without idea at all? It is to the last degree astonishing to hear
from Trinitarian divines, the praises of uniformity of belief;
seeing that it is one of the chief labours of ecclesiastical history
to record the incessant effort, vain to the present day,
to give some stability of meaning to the fundamental doctrines
of their faith.
The same remark applies, with little modification, to the
opposite views respecting the person of the Saviour. It is
true that Unitarians, agreed respecting the singleness of
nature in Christ, differ respecting the natural rank of that
nature, whether his soul were human or angelic. But, for
this solitary variety among these heretics, how many
doctrines of the Logos and the Incarnation does orthodox
literature contain? Can any one affirm, that when the
council of Ephesus had arbitrated between the Eutychian
doctrine of absorption, and the Nestorian doctrine of separation,
all doubt and ambiguity was removed by the magic
phrase “Hypostatic union?” Since the monophysite contest
was at its height, has the Virgin Mary been left in undisputed
possession of her title as “Mother of God?” Has
the Eternal Generation of the Son encountered no orthodox
suspicions, and the Indwelling scheme received no orthodox
support? And if we ask these questions: “What respectively
happened to the two natures on the cross? what has
become of Christ’s human soul now? is it separate from the
Godhead like any other immortal spirit, or is it added to the
Deity, so as to introduce into his nature a new and fourth
element?” shall we receive from the many voices of the
church but one accordant answer? Nay, do the authors of
this controversy suppose that, during its short continuance,
they have been able to maintain their unanimity? If they
do, I believe that any reader who thinks it worth while to
register the varieties of error, would be able to undeceive
them. If the diversities of doctrine cannot easily and often
be shown to amount to palpable inconsistencies, this must be
ascribed, I believe, to the mystic and technical phraseology,
the substitute rather than the expression for precise ideas,—which
has become the vernacular dialect of orthodox divinity.
The jargon of theology affords a field too barren, to bear so
vigorous a weed as an undisputed contradiction.
It is needless to dwell on the numerous forms under which
the doctrine of atonement has been held by those who subscribe
the articles of our national church: while its Unitarian
opponents have taken their fixed station on the personal
character and untransferable nature of sin. One writer tells
us that only the human nature perished on the cross; another
that God himself expired: some say, that Christ suffered no
more intensely, but only more “meritoriously,” than many a
martyr; others, that he endured the whole quantity of torment
due to the wicked whom he redeemed: some, that it is
the spotlessness of his manhood that is imputed to believers;
others, that it is the holiness of his Deity. From the high
doctrine of satisfaction to the very verge of Unitarian heresy,
every variety of interpretation has been given to the language
of the established formularies respecting Christian redemption.
Nor is it yet determined whether, in the lottery of
opinion, the name of Owen, Sykes, or Magee, shall be drawn
for the prize of orthodoxy.
And if from those parts of our belief, to which the accidents
of their historical origin have given a negative character,
we turn to those which are positive, not the slightest reason
will appear for charging them with uncertainty and fluctuation.
All Unitarian writers maintain the Moral Perfection
and Fatherly Providence of the Infinite Ruler; the Messiahship
of Jesus Christ, in whose person and spirit there is a
Revelation of God and a Sanctification for Man; the Responsibility
and Retributive Immortality of men; and the need
of a pure and devout heart of Faith, as the source of all outward
goodness and inward communion with God. These great
and self-luminous points, bound together by natural affinity,
constitute the fixed centre of our religion. And on subjects
beyond this centre, we have no wider divergences than are
found among those who attach themselves to an opposite
system. For example, the relations between Scripture and
Reason, as evidences and guides in questions of doctrine, are
not more unsettled among us, than are the relations between
Scripture and Tradition in the Church. Nor is the perpetual
authority of the “Christian rites” so much in debate among
our ministers, as the efficacy of the Sacraments among the
clergy. In truth, our diversities of sentiment affect far less
what we believe, than the question why we believe it. Different
modes of reasoning, and different results of interpretation,
are no doubt to be found among our several authors.
We all make our appeal to the records of Christianity: but
we have voted no particular commentator into the seat of
authority. And is not this equally true of our opponents’
church? Their articles and creeds furnish no textual expositions
of Scripture, but only results and deductions from its
study. And so variously have these results been elicited
from the sacred writings, that scarcely a text can be adduced
in defence of the Trinitarian scheme, which some witness
unexceptionably orthodox may not be summoned to prove inapplicable.
In fine, we have no greater variety of critical and
exegetical opinion than the divines from whom we dissent:
while the system of Christianity in which our Scriptural labours
have issued, has its leading characteristics better determined
and more apprehensible, than the scheme which
the articles and creeds have vainly laboured to define.
The refusal to embody our sentiments in any authoritative
formula appears to strike observers as a whimsical exception
to the general practice of churches. The peculiarity has had
its origin in hereditary and historical associations: but it has
its defence in the noblest principles of religious freedom and
Christian communion. At present, it must suffice to say,
that our Societies are dedicated, not to theological opinions,
but to religious worship: that they have maintained the
unity of the spirit, without insisting on any unity of doctrine:
that Christian liberty, love, and piety are their essentials
in perpetuity, but their Unitarianism an accident of a
few or many generations;—which has arisen, and might
vanish, without the loss of their identity. We believe in the
mutability of religious systems, but the imperishable character
of the religious affections;—in the progressiveness of
opinion within, as well as without, the limits of Christianity.
Our forefathers cherished the same conviction: and so, not
having been born intellectual bondsmen, we desire to leave
our successors free. Convinced that uniformity of doctrine
can never prevail, we seek to attain its only good,—peace on
earth and communion with heaven,—without it. We aim to
make a true Christendom,—a commonwealth of the faithful,—by
the binding force, not of ecclesiastical creeds, but of spiritual
wants, and Christian sympathies: and indulge the
vision of a Church that “in the latter days shall arise,” like
“the mountain of the Lord,” bearing on its ascent the blossoms
of thought proper to every intellectual clime, and withal
massively rooted in the deep places of our humanity, and
gladly rising to meet the sunshine from on high.
And now, friends and brethren, let us say a glad farewell
to the fretfulness of controversy, and retreat again, with
thanksgiving, into the interior of our own venerated truth.
Having come forth, at the severer call of duty, to do battle
for it, with such force as God vouchsafes to the sincere, let
us go in to live and worship beneath its shelter. They tell
you, it is not the true faith. Perhaps not: but then, you
think it so; and that is enough to make your duty clear, and
to draw from it, as from nothing else, the very peace of God.
May be, we are on our way to something better, unexistent
and unseen as yet; which may penetrate our souls with
nobler affection, and give a fresh spontaneity of love to God
and all immortal things. Perhaps there cannot be the truest
life of faith, except in scattered individuals, till this age of
conflicting doubt and dogmatism shall have passed away.
Dark and leaden clouds of materialism hide the heaven from
us: red gleams of fanaticism pierce through, vainly striving
to reveal it; and not till the weight is heaved from off the
air, and the thunders roll down the horizon, will the serene
light of God flow upon us, and the blue infinite embrace us
again. Meanwhile, we must reverently love the faith we
have: to quit it for one that we have not, were to lose the
breath of life, and die.
The Jewish Passover not a proper Sacrifice.
In an essay on “the one great end of the life and death of Christ,”
Dr. Priestley makes the following observations on the words (occurring
in 1 Cor. v. 7,) “Christ, our passover, is sacrificed for us:”
“This allusion to the paschal lamb makes it also probable, that the
death of Christ is called a sacrifice only by way of figure, because
these two (viz., sacrifice and the paschal lamb) are quite different and
inconsistent ideas. The paschal lamb is never so much as termed a
sacrifice in the Old Testament, except once, Exodus xii. 27, where
it is called ‘the sacrifice of the Lord’s passover.’ However, it could
only be called a sacrifice in this place, in some secondary and partial
sense, and not in the proper and primary sense of the word; for
there was no priest employed upon the occasion, no altar made use
of, no burning, nor any part offered to the Lord; all which circumstances
were essential to every proper sacrifice. The blood indeed
was sprinkled upon the door-posts, but this was originally nothing
more than a token to the destroying angel to pass by that house; for
there is no propitiation or atonement said to be made by it: and the
paschal lamb is very far from having been ever called a sin-offering,
or said to be killed on account of sin.”[626]
Every reader, I apprehend, understands this description of the
manner of celebrating the passover, to refer to the particular “occasion”
spoken of “in this place” (Exod. xii. 27). ‘The writer of
this verse,’ argues Dr. Priestley, ‘could not use the word sacrifice
in its strictest sense; for his own narrative of the very celebration
to which it is applied, describes it as destitute of all the essentials
of a proper sacrifice.’ The allusion to the blood sprinkled upon the
door-posts, as “a token to the destroying angel to pass by that
house,” immediately connects Dr. Priestley’s assertions with the
Egyptian passover. By cutting out this allusion, and otherwise
breaking up the passage in quotation, Archbishop Magee has contrived
to conceal its character as an historical description of a single
occasion, and to give it the air of a general account of the Jewish
paschal ceremony in all ages. Having accomplished this, and obtained
for himself the liberty of travelling for a reply over the whole
Hebrew history and traditions, he says; “Now in answer to these
several assertions, I am obliged to state the direct contradiction of
each; for, 1st, the passage in Exodus xii. 27, is not the only one,
in which the paschal lamb is termed זבח, a sacrifice, it being expressly
so called in no less than four passages in Deuteronomy
(xvi. 2, 4, 5, 6), and also in Exodus xxxv. 25, and its parallel passage
xxiii. 18.—2. A priest was employed.—3. An altar was made use of.—4.
There was a burning, and a part offered to the Lord: the inwards
being burnt upon the altar, and the blood poured out at the
foot thereof.”[627] The last three of these “direct contradictions”
establish nothing but this Prelate’s habit (not adopted, we may presume,
without urgent necessity) of misrepresenting his opponents in
order to confute them: for it is quite needless to observe that,
in the Egyptian passover, of which alone Dr. Priestley speaks, there
was neither priest, altar, nor burning: and though the Archbishop
should be able to detect all these elements in a festival of King
Josiah’s time, he will have proved no error against the passage which
he criticises. In his first contradiction, he would have gained an
advantage over his opponent, had not his eagerness induced him to
strain his evidence too far. A more modest disputant would have
thought it sufficient to reckon three successive verses (Deut. xvi. 4, 5, 6)
in which the same phrase is simply repeated, as a single instead of a
triple authority: the other citation from the same passage is not to
the point, as will presently be shown: and in one of the verses quoted
from Exodus (xxiii. 18) the word זבח does not occur at all in relation
to the passover. So that Dr. Priestley having discovered two
passages too few, the Prelate makes compensation by discovering two
passages too many.
Having said thus much in reference to Archbishop Magee’s fairness
to his opponent, I will add a few strictures on the reasonings by
which he supports his general position, that the passover was a
proper sacrifice. He adduces two arguments from words, and three
from facts. 1. The word זבח, sacrifice, is applied to the passover.—2.
The word קרבן, Corban, a sacred offering, is applied to it.—3.
The slaying of the lamb took place at the tabernacle or temple.—4.
The blood was offered at the foot of the altar.—5. The fat and
entrails were burnt as an offering on the altar fire.
(1.) It has been already stated, that Archbishop Magee has improperly
adduced two passages, as applying the word sacrifice to the
passover. The first of these is Exod. xxiii. 18, where it is said:
“Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread;
neither shall the fat of my sacrifice remain till morning.” The second
clause here undoubtedly refers to the paschal lamb: but the term
“sacrifice” occurring in it is not the proper translation of the original;
nor is the Hebrew word the same that is correctly so rendered
in the first clause. The phrases being not the same, but discriminated,
in the two parts of the verse, the less reason exists for
supposing that both allude to the passover. More probably, the reference
in the former is to the sacrifices appropriate to the feast of
unleavened bread, which being contiguous to the passover in time, is
naturally conjoined with it in the precepts of this verse.
The second irrelevant passage is Deut. xvi. 2: “Thou shalt
therefore sacrifice the passover unto the Lord thy God, of the flock
and of the herd.” Since the paschal lamb could not be taken “from
the herd,” it is evident that the word “passover,” is used here in
a wider sense,[628] to denote the joint eight days’ festival, including that
of unleavened bread, when heifers were offered “from the herd.”
This more comprehensive meaning of the term is frequent, not merely
with Josephus and the later Jewish writers, but in the Hebrew
Scriptures themselves; and renders inconclusive most of the arguments
by which the passover is made to assume the appearance of a
proper sacrifice. An example occurs in the very next verse: “Seven
days thou shalt eat unleavened bread therewith,” that is, with the passover;
and in 2 Chron. xxxv. 9: “Conaniah also (and other persons)
gave unto the priests for the passover offerings, 2,600 small
cattle, and 300 oxen.”
In the remaining places, however, this feast is undoubtedly called
a sacrifice. But then it is clear that the Hebrew word זבח is used
with a latitude, which renders it impossible to draw from it any inference
as to the character of the ceremony to which it is applied.
It denotes slaying of animals for food, without any necessary reference
to a sacred use.[629] Thus, 1 Sam. xxviii. 24. “And the woman
had a fat calf in the house; and she hasted and killed it,” (sacrificed
it, תזבחהו); also 1 Kings, xix. 21. “And he took a yoke of oxen,
and slew them (ויזבחהו), and boiled their flesh with the instruments
of the oxen, and gave unto the people, and they did eat.” And the
substantive occurs thus in Prov. xvii. 1. “Better is a dry morsel,
and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices (evidently
meats,—the luxury of animal food) with strife.”
(2.) The passover is called קרבן, Corban, a sacred offering, in
Numb. ix. 7, 13. Certain men who had been defiled by performing
funeral rites, present themselves to Moses, and say, “Wherefore
are we kept back, that we may not offer the offering of the Lord
in his appointed season among the children of Israel?” And then
follows the law which Moses takes occasion from this incident to announce;
that persons disqualified by absence on a journey, or by
uncleanness, from joining in the celebration at the appointed time,
may observe it at the corresponding period of the next month.
Such disqualifications, if existing at all, would have excluded from
the whole eight days’ festival, including the feast of unleavened bread,
and held the parties away till the following month; “the offering of
the Lord,” therefore, which they were kept back from presenting,
comprised all the sacrifices proper to the “season;” and the word
“offering” is comprehensively applied to the whole set, from its
particular propriety in reference to the most numerous portion of
them, the sacrifices at the feast of unleavened bread. The paschal
lamb, by itself, is never, I believe, designated by this term.
In treating of the actual details of the paschal ceremony, it is necessary
to distinguish between those which were of legal obligation,
and those which were merely consuetudinary or occasional. Nothing
can justly be pronounced an essential of the celebration, which
is not enjoined in the statutes appointing it; and should other customs
present themselves in the historical instances of the commemoration
which we possess, they cannot be received as authoritative
illustrations of its intended character, but as accessaries appended by
convenience, tradition, or sacerdotal influence.[630] With this remark I
proceed to the next argument.
(3.) The slaying of the paschal lamb is said to have been restricted
to the tabernacle or temple.
The only passage from the law, adduced to prove this, is Deut.
xvi. 2, 5, 6, where it is said, “Thou mayest not sacrifice the passover
within any of thy gates, which the Lord thy God giveth thee;
but at the place which the Lord thy God shall choose to place his name
in, there shalt thou sacrifice the passover at even.” The reader
might naturally suppose that Jerusalem was here denoted by the
phrase, “the place which the Lord thy God shall choose,” in contradistinction
from the provincial cities described as “any of thy
gates;” but Archbishop Magee sets aside this interpretation, by
referring us to this very same expression in Deut. xii. 5, 6, 11, 14,
where it evidently means the tabernacle or temple, not the city; for a
multitude of rites are there enumerated, to be performed, “in the
place that the Lord shall choose,” which could be celebrated only at
the sanctuary. It so happens, however, that in this enumeration,
the Passover is precisely the one thing which is not mentioned; from
which we might fairly infer, that it was not among the ceremonies
limited to the sanctuary; and further, that in addition to the vague
description of place common to both passages, there occurs exclusively
in the latter, the additional one, “there shall ye eat, before
the Lord your God,” which is well known to be the usual mode
of designating the tabernacle. And that in the passover-law, the
locality intended was the city, and not the sanctuary, is evident from
a verse which Archbishop Magee has not thought it necessary to
quote, though it is the immediate sequel of his citation; “and thou
shalt roast and eat it (the paschal lamb) in the place which the
Lord thy God shall choose.” Whatever doubt may exist about the
slaying, the roasting and eating could not take place at the tabernacle.
The law, then, nowhere prescribes the slaying of the paschal lamb
at the sanctuary. But neither does it forbid this; and therefore we
are not surprised that the act should take place there, on any particular
occasion rendering such arrangement obviously convenient;
or as a general practice, in concession to any strong interests tending
to draw it thither. When, therefore, a long period of idolatry and
political confusion had obliterated from the minds of the Israelites
the very memory of their religious rites; when new modes of worship
had become habitual, and the annual festival had grown strange;
when, to induce them to come up to the passover at all, their monarch
was obliged to provide for them the whole number of their victims,
and the officiating Levites needed to study again the appointed ceremonies
of the season; it is no wonder that king Josiah thought it
expedient to collect “the whole congregation” at the temple, and
there to let them witness the form of slaying, by well-trained hands,
and receive instruction how to complete the celebration of their
feast. Such was the solemn passover described in 2 Chron. xxxv.
and that in the reign of Hezekiah, mentioned in the thirtieth chapter
of the same book; the circumstances of both which were too peculiar
to afford evidence of a general practice, much less of a legal essential.
That in later times it was the custom to slay the paschal lambs in
the Temple courts, there can be no doubt. The system of ecclesiastical
police, and the operation of sacerdotal interests created the practice.
It was the business of the priests to see to the execution of the
festival-law; to ascertain who incurred the penalty due to neglect of
the prescribed rite: to register the numbers of those who observed it;
and to take care that neither too many nor too few should partake at
the same table. All this required that the heads of families should
present themselves, and report their intended arrangements to the
authorities at the temple. The priests moreover, being the judges of
the qualifications of the animals for the paschal table, availed themselves
of this power, to become graziers and provision-dealers. As
the lambs must be presented for their inspection, and were liable to be
turned back if pronounced imperfect, it became more convenient to
buy the victim at once at the Temple courts: and on the spot where
the purchase was made, the slaying would naturally follow. Lightfoot,
speaking of the law which originally required the lamb to be chosen
four days before it was killed, says, “It is not to be doubted but
every one in after times took up their own lambs as they did in Egypt,
but it is somewhat doubtful whether they did it in the same manner.
It is exceedingly probable, that as the priests took up the lambs for
the daily sacrifice four days before they were to be offered, as we have
observed elsewhere; so also that they provided lambs for the people
at the passover, taking them up in the market four days before,
and picking and culling out those that were fit, and agreeable
to the command. For whereas the law was so punctual that they
should be without blemish, and their traditions had summed up so
large a sum of blemishes, as that they reckon seventy-three, it could
not be but the law and their traditions which they prized above the
law should be endlessly broken, if every one took up his own lamb
in the market at Jerusalem at adventure. The priests had brought
a market of sheep and oxen against such times as these into the temple,
(for if it had not been their doing, they must not have come there,)
where they having before-hand picked out in the market such lambs
and bullocks as were fit for sacrifice or passover, they sold them in
the temple at a dearer rate, and so served the people’s turn and their
own profit: for which, amongst other of their hucksteries, our
Saviour saith, they had made the house of prayer a den of thieves.”[631]
(4.) The blood is said to have been poured out as an offering at
the foot of the altar.
The only legal evidence adduced to prove this, will be found in the
parallel passages, Exod. xxiii. 18, and xxxiv. 25. “Thou shalt
not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven.” I have already
shown that this command probably refers, not to the paschal lamb,
but to the sacrifices at the feast of unleavened bread. There is therefore
no evidence, throughout the law, in favour of the alleged regulation.
Yet in cases of undoubted sacrifice, Moses is usually very
explicit in his directions respecting the sprinkling of the blood upon
the altar: as may be seen from Lev. i. 5, 11, 15; iii. 2, 8, 13;
iv. 5-7, 16-18; vii. 2.
The only historical evidence adduced from Scripture on the point
before us, is from the accounts of Hezekiah’s and Josiah’s solemn
passovers before mentioned; 2 Chron. xxx. 15, 16; xxxv. 11. In
both these instances, it is merely said, that the priests “sprinkled
(or poured out) the blood,” receiving it from the hands of the Levites,
who were employed, for reasons already assigned, to slay the lambs
on these two occasions, instead of the heads of families, on whom
that office properly devolved. The altar is not named: but as the
blood must be disposed of somewhere, and as there was a drain for
that purpose at the foot of the altar, no doubt it was there that the
priests sprinkled or poured it away. The act was simply an act of
cleanliness,—in plain speech, a resort to the sink,—from which theology
can extract nothing profitable. The priests were the parties
to perform the office because no other persons could approach
the altar under penalty of death. In later times, when the sacerdotal
influence had made the temple the scene of the paschal
slaughter, each head of a family killed his own lamb in the court:
the blood, received in a basin, was handed to the first of a row of
priests reaching to the foot of the altar, where it was poured away
at the usual place.[632] In this there is nothing of the nature of an
offering or proper sacrifice.
(5.) But it is said that the fat and entrails were placed on the altar
fire and burned.
Archbishop Magee says, that this “may be collected from the
accounts given of the ceremony of the passover in the passages already
referred to.”[633] It requires perhaps that able controversialist’s
peculiar mode of “managing passages” (to use a favourite phrase
of his own) to elicit this from the authorities named; at least, I am
unable, after careful examination of them, to conjecture what he
means. The passages however are before my readers, and I must
leave the assertion to their judgment. Meanwhile, I must conclude,
that there is absolutely no trace in Scripture of such a practice as is
here pronounced to be one of the essentials of the passover.
I am aware that there is Talmudical authority for considering this
“burning” as a part of the process connected, in later times, with
the killing of the paschal lamb.[634] It was probably one of the modifications
of the rite, introduced by the priests on its transference from
the private homes of the people to the temple. The original law
required, that the lamb should be roasted whole, not even the entrails
being removed; it also enjoined, that whatever was left should be
immediately burned with fire, and every trace of it destroyed before
morning.[635] This private burning was clearly no religious and sacrificial
act, though, perhaps, a provision against any superstitious use
of the remnants: and it is easy to perceive, that the parts thus destroyed
would be the same, which subsequently it was the custom of
the priests to consume on the altar fire. When the killing became a
collective act, and the temple the scene of it, doubtless both people
and priests thought it more cleanly and agreeable to burn the parts
which were sure to be left, before hand on the public fire, than afterwards
on the hearths of their private dwellings: and it would require
a very illiberal interpreter to pronounce this a violation of the original
law, the spirit of which it certainly observed. This view, which
treats the burning on the altar as simply a mode of consumption, substituted
for the destruction of the same worthless parts at home, is
less insulting to the Jewish religion than the opinion which discerns
here an act of worship. The Jews were certainly a very coarse
people, and offered many disagreeable things to God: but really, such
a gift as this is without any parallel. They always,—in obedience to
their law,—presented something valuable (sometimes the whole animal,
sometimes the breast and right shoulder), either to Jehovah on the
altar, or to his ministers the priests:[636] and the pious Jew would have
indignantly resented the idea of quitting the temple courts with the
whole value of his sacrifice on his shoulder, and only the refuse remaining
in the sanctuary.
By law, then, there was nothing of the paschal lamb burned on the
altar: and by custom there was no part offered to Jehovah or given
to the priests: and without these characteristics, there is no proper
sacrifice.
Archbishop Magee admits, that the ceremony of laying the hand
on the head of the victim, which was observed in the undoubted
sacrifices, did not take place in the rite under consideration: and he
notices the statement of Philo, that the animal was slain, not by the
priest, but by the individual presenting it.[637] He considers Philo to
have been mistaken, however, in his assertion that this immolation by
private hand was peculiar to the passover; and cites the language of
Lev. i. 4, 5; iii. 2; iv. 24, to show that the burnt offering, the
peace-offering, the sin-offering, might all be slain by the offerer. Certainly
these passages appear to leave such permission open to the
Israelitish worshipper: but it seems more likely that the sacrifices
here enumerated were intended to be made by the hands of the priest:
nor would it be easy to reconcile the liberty of private sacrifice with
the sacerdotal duties and privileges defined in Num. xviii. 1-7. As
to the actual practice, it cannot be reasonably doubted that Philo
was correct: and his expressions seem to imply that, in the paschal
rite, the priest might be altogether dispensed with, and his intervention
required for no religious act. He says: “On the fourteenth
day of this month, at the coming of the full moon, is celebrated the
public festival of the passover, called in the Chaldee language the
Pascha: when, instead of the private citizen presenting his victim at
the altar to be slain by the priest, the whole nation officiates in sacred
things, every one in turn bringing and immolating his own victim
with his own hands. The whole people is festive and joyous, every
one being entitled to the dignity of priesthood.”[638] He uses similar
expressions in his treatise on the decalogue: The festival, “which
the Hebrews in their language call the Pascha,” is a time “when each
and all of them slay their victim, without waiting for the services of
their priests: the law, on an appointed day of every year, conceding
to the whole people the sacerdotal functions, to the extent of permitting
them to officiate for themselves at a sacrifice.”[639] This language
evidently implies, that every essential part of the passover rites, every
act necessary to constitute and complete its character as a religious
celebration, was performed by private hand: so that the auxiliary
operations of the priests,—the pouring out of the blood and burning
the inwards,—must be regarded as non-essentials and accessaries;
menial contributions to the main act; and in the performance of
which, therefore, the usual law, forbidding to the non-official Jew
all approach to the altar, came into effect again. Had the paschal
celebration required, as an indispensable ingredient in it, any transactions
at the altar, the private Israelite, being temporarily invested
with whatever sacerdotal privileges were needful for the rite, would
have gone himself to make his offering. Philo indeed obviously conceived
of the subsequent part of the ceremony, in which the temple
and the priest had no share,—the domestic meal which took place in
the several homes of the people,—as its peculiarly sacred element:
“Each house,” he says, “at that time put on the form and sanctity
of a temple, the victim that has been slain being made ready for a
suitable meal.”[640] Fond as this writer is of types, it is impossible to
express the retrospective and commemorative character of the passover
more emphatically than in his words: ὑπομνητικὴ τῆς μεγίστης
ἀποικίας ἐστὶν ἡ ἑορτὴ, καὶ χαριστήριος.[641]
In one passage of his note on the Passover, Archbishop Magee
appears to admit that the paschal lamb was not a “sacrifice for sin,”
and affirms that he “would not dispute with Dr. Priestley any conclusion
he might draw from so productive a premiss.”[642] Yet, a few
pages further on, he quotes with apparent approbation the arguments
by which Cudworth sought to prove the rite to be an expiatory sacrifice.[643]
I cannot pretend to reconcile these two portions of his Essay.
But if the passover cannot be shown to be an expiatory sacrifice, I
do not see what the advocates of the doctrine of atonement gain by
proving it a sacrifice at all. If the paschal lamb was not a sin-offering,
to what class did it belong? It must have been either of
the eucharistic kind, or else unique and simply commemorative;
and so far as the death of Christ was analogous to any such offering,
it was destitute of expiatory efficacy: and either was an expression
of thanksgiving, (which seems absurd) or, like the blood of the lamb
sprinkled on the lintel, a mere sign of some deliverance which it was
not instrumental in effecting, but which, simultaneously perhaps, yet
independently occurred. Those, therefore, who are disposed to strain
the resemblance between the passover and the cross, must either
maintain the expiatory nature of the Jewish right, or admit the Lord’s
Supper to be, not even the celebration of a real deliverance, but the
mere commemoration of a sign.
Postscript.
In the notes to the Sixth Lecture of this series (p. 89-92,) I have
adduced an example of Archbishop Magee’s misrepresentation of Mr.
Belsham, and stated that the Prelate had quoted his opponent falsely.
In comparing the two authors, I employed the latest editions of both
their works; not being able to procure a copy of the first edition of
the Calm Enquiry, which has been out of print for twenty-two years.
At the same time, I thought it only just to insert the following note:
“There is a possibility, which I think it right to suggest, of a difference
between the two editions of Mr. B.’s work; as, however, the
accusation is still found in the newest edition of the Archbishop’s
book, I conclude that this is not the case. Indeed, even if the Prelate’s
quotation had been verbally true, it would in spirit have been
no less false; for, at all events, Mr. B. cites the Vulgate, to give evidence
as to the text, not the translation; and had he used the word
renders, it would only have been because the term naturally occurs
when a VERSION is adduced to determine a READING.”
I have since obtained a copy of the first edition of the Calm Enquiry;
and I hasten to acknowledge that the Archbishop’s quotation
is “verbally true,” as far as it goes. But I regret to say that this
makes only a formal difference in his favour; for by stopping short
in his citation, he accomplished the very same object, of leaving an
absolutely false impression, which I had supposed him to have
effected, in this as in other instances, by direct falsification of his
author. He wishes to make it appear, that Mr. Belsham (purposely
mistranslating for the occasion,) appeals to a certain verse in the
Vulgate in evidence, not of a READING, but of a RENDERING; and so
he cites these words from the Calm Enquiry: “The Vulgate renders
the text, the first man was of the earth, earthy; the second man was
from heaven, heavenly;” but he leaves out the very next words, in
which the point intended to be proved by this testimony of the Vulgate
is cited, “This is not improbably the TRUE READING.” Doubtless it
was one of Mr. Belsham’s incuriæ that he did not attend to his italics
in his first edition: but the charge of intentional mistranslation is
simply injurious; except indeed, that it is also absurd, seeing that
Mr. Belsham has put the Latin of his mistranslated passage at the
bottom of the page;—a policy which this heresiarch could scarcely
have thought safe, unless he had taken his Unitarian readers to be
either more “dishonest critics,” or more “defective scholars,” than
even our learned opponents are prepared to think them.
616. Archbishop Whately, speaking of the word ἱερεὺς and its meaning, says;
“This is an office assigned to none under the gospel-scheme, except the ONE
great High Priest, of whom the Jewish Priests were types.”[c] Of the “gospel-scheme,”
this is quite true; of the Church-of-England scheme, it is not. There lies
before me Duport’s Greek version of the Prayer-Book and Offices of the Anglican
Church: and turning to the Communion Service, I find the officiating clergyman
called ἱερεὺς throughout. The absence of this word from the records of the primitive
Gospel, and its presence in the Prayer-Book, is perfectly expressive of the
difference in the spirit of the two systems;—the difference between the Church
with, and the “Christianity without Priest.”
c. Elements of Logic. Appendix: Note on the word “Priest.”
618. See Rom. vi. 2-4. “How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer
therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were
baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death;
that, like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even
so we also should walk in newness of life.” Mr. Locke observes of “St. Paul’s
argument,” that it “is to show into what state of life we ought to be raised out of
baptism, in similitude and conformity to that state of life Christ was raised into
from the grave.” See also Col. ii. 12. “Ye are ... buried with him in baptism,
wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of
God, who hath raised him from the dead.” The force of the image clearly depends
on the sinking and rising in the water.
620. Compare Matt. xxvi. 26-28; Mark xiv. 22-24; Luke xxii. 19, 20, with
Exod. xii. 3-11, 14, 24-27, 43-49; Lev. xxiii. 5; Num. ix. 10-14; xxviii. 16;
Deut. xvi. 1, 4-7.
621. Compare Matt. xxvi. 17-21; Mark xiv. 12-17; Luke xxii. 7-17, with
John xiii. 1, seqq.; xviii. 28; xix. 14, 31, 42. See also 2nd Lecture, pp. 38, 39.
626. Theological Repository, vol. i. p. 215, and Priestley’s Works, by Rutt,
vol. vii. pp. 243, 244.
627. Magee on the Atonement, vol. i. pp. 291, 292, 5th edit.
628. This is admitted by a learned writer, with whose work on sacrifices Archbishop
Magee was familiar, and who had anticipated most of his arguments on
the subject of the passover: “Cum ad Paschale sacrificium etiam pecudes ex
armento lectas in sacris literis imperatas legimus, non designatur illa victima, quæ
פסח proprie appellatur, sed alia quædam sacrificia eidem victimæ adjungenda.”—Outram
de Sacrificiis, lib. i. ch. xiii. § 10.
629. Simonis describes the verbזבח as meaning (1.) in genere mactavit; (2.) in
specie mactavit ad sacrificandum; and the noun, as proprie mactatio; metonym.
(1.) caro mactatorum animalium; (2.) sacrificium.—Lex. Hebr. et Chald. Ed. Eichhorn,
in v.
630. The following passages constitute the whole passover-law: Exod. xii. 3-11,
14, 24-27, 43-49. Lev. xxiii. 5. Num. ix. 10-14; xxviii. 16. Deut. xvi. 1, 4-7.
We have here the original statutes provided for the perpetual regulation of the
rite: and in any discussion respecting its character, the appeal should be to these
alone. The advocates for its sacrificial nature must be aware that this rule would
destroy their whole case.
I subjoin a list of the passages relating to the feast of unleavened bread:
Exod. xii. 15-20; xiii. 6-10; xxiii. 18, first clause; xxxiv. 25, first clause.
Lev. xxiii. 6-14. Num. xxviii. 17-25. Deut. xvi. 2-4, 8.
632. See Lightfoot’s Temple Service, ch. xii. sec. 5. “The Mishna says: Mactat
Israelita, excipit sanguinem sacerdos.”—The Treatise Pesachim, in Surenhus. ii.
153.
641. loc. cit. After the remarks which have been made on the word זבח as an
epithet of the passover, it is hardly necessary to notice the application to the same
rite of the word θυσία by Philo and Josephus. It must be clear to any one who
will open Trommius or Biel at the word, that it will not bear the stress laid upon
it by Archbishop Magee. No one denies that the paschal lamb was slain and
eaten, in observance of a religious celebration, in obedience to a religious law, and
in expression of religious feeling; and this surely is enough to attract to it the
word θυσία. In itself, however, the term, according to Biel, does not necessarily
denote even so much as this. He defines it hostia, sacrificium, etiam epulum ac
profana manducatio: and he exemplifies this latter meaning by reference to Judg.
vi. 18. Biel’s Thesaurus, Ed. Schleusner in v.