One Gospel in Many Dialects
“And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues, according as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were sojourning at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together; and they were confounded because every one heard them speaking in his own language.”—Acts ii. 4-6.
In that marvellous scene, the anniversary of which coincides on this Whitsunday with our Centenary, a question long pending between the Rabbis and the Holy Spirit came to an open issue. They were Aramæan scholars, and had their Kingdom of Heaven set forth in the best Hebrew, which, true enough, was of no great human currency, and not strictly a living tongue at all; but then had been distinguished by Divine use from the earliest time. Was it not in this that the Call had come to Abram? and the promises been repeated to the Patriarchs? and the music been flung from the harp of David? and the burdens of inspiration been treasured on the Prophet’s scroll? Who could quote a word that God had ever spoken in any other language? It was the one sacred idiom, from which all others are divergent corruptions, and to which, when the world’s confusion is over, they must again return. However few in these decadent ages might understand it still, it was intrinsically fitted to be universal. And who could call that speech provincial, at whose sound the heavens and earth arose? or esteem it temporary, when it persevered through the dispersion at Babel, and was present on the world before the Flood? So there must be nothing else allowed in the liturgies of the Synagogue, in the reading of Scripture, or in any intercourse between man and God. Only when men began to converse with one another, to compare their human thoughts, and descend from prophetic to didactic gifts, might they resort to the media of profaner life. The language of Worship was but one; though the jargons of Opinion were many. And so the Scribes and the Rabbis of the written Word supposed themselves to hold the only key of life.
But the Holy Spirit goes into no one’s keeping, and is no respecter of tongues. Free as the wind to blow where it listeth, it sweeps wherever souls are genial to its breath, and will yield to it their gifts, of love, of lips, of life. It seemed to have had enough of Hebrew, ever since it had gone into the hands of the philologists, and been made a sacred language, and begun to drone. It had long been feeling its way in other directions, tempting men to pray out of the fresh heart, and never mind the words, till now at last the secret broke, that on any native tongue by which souls most freely flow together, may all pass out to God; that the home-sounds are the devoutest too; that the speech into which men are born, and which has become to them as a stringed instrument answering to the faintest touch of their affections, is the true vehicle by which “the Spirit giveth utterance.” The prayer of faith, ascending in the idioms of every latitude, converges into one in heaven. And God’s truth, descending to this world, breaks into all the moulds of expression native to our various race.
One Gospel in many dialects,—that is the great Pentecost lesson, construe the miracle as we may. And there are dialects of Thought as well as speech,—natural differences of temperament and character,—to which the Gospel, still without prejudice to its unity, adapts itself with the same divine flexibility. What private observer—still more what student of history—can doubt that we are not all made in the same mould,—that the proportions of our humanity are variously mixed,—that not only do we individually differ in moral susceptibility and spiritual depth, but fall into permanent groups marked by distinct and ineradicable characters, and reproducing the same religious tendencies from age to age? Transpose the souls of Plato and Pascal into the right place and time, and do you suppose they would turn up as Latitudinarian Divines? Deal as you will with the lot of Priestley and Belsham, and could you ever enroll them among the Christian Mystics? Close in the fires of Augustine’s nature with what damps you may, and could you ever find him peace in a Gospel of Good Works? No; we touch here on differences deeper than accident, and irremovable by culture,—differences that vindicate their reality by crossing the lines of dissimilar religions and reappearing in all times. They necessarily give us differing wants and experiences; they set into differing shapes of faith; and on souls equally faithful they fix very differing expressions. They are so many vernacular idioms of the inner mind: all have divine right to be: no one of them is entitled to call itself the sacred language alone intelligible between man and God; and the pretension of any to supersede the rest, and reign alone, is not less vain than the complaints of ignorance against foreign dialects, and the ambition to exchange the many running waters of local literature into the huge tank of a universal language. They may not be able to understand each other, or even with the key of outward comparison always bear translation into idioms other than their own. But let them speak in their own way, and pray their own prayer. Not only are they all clear to Him that readeth the heart; there will thus be more heart for Him to read: for faith and love, large as they may be, are ever deepest in their special tones; and the prayer, the hymn, which is touched with the spirit’s local coloring, comes to us like the aroma of native fields, and assuages our thirst like the sweet waters of some well given to our fathers and made sacred by a Saviour’s noonday rest.
On this principle,—that different types of natural genius in men cannot but throw their Christianity into different forms,—we may not only justify the divisions of Christendom, but even cease to wish that they should disappear. Unity no doubt there must be: God is one; Truth is one; the Gospel is one; and a mind that could take in the whole, and spread its insight and affections in all dimensions at once, would reach the Divine equilibrium, in which nothing partial preponderates. But from our watch-tower we can look through only one window at once; the blind walls of our mental chamber shut out all the rest; and as we kneel, like Daniel, at the open light, the breeze upon our face seems sacred, because it comes from our Jerusalem. The question is not, whether there is such a thing as truth, rounded off, self-balanced, and complete; in the mind of God,—the final seat of reality,—of course there is. Nor is it a question, whether each individual man can attain a faith consistent in its parts, agreeable to fact, and adequate to his nature. This also is possible. But when he has attained it, on what terms is it to co-exist with other faiths presenting parallel pretensions? Is he in his heart to identify his own with the absolute truth, sufficient for all as for himself? Is he to expect them to come round to it, and altogether throw away their own? Or is he to confess to himself his own limitations, to suspect that he may have his blind sides, and reverently to seek something he has missed in that which others persist in seeing? In which direction is he to seek unity? By antipathy to all beliefs save one?—or by inviting all of them to live their life and show their place in human nature? It is the genius of Romanism to seek unity by suppression; of Protestantism, by free development;—of the former, to protect the consistency it has; of the latter, to press forward to one that it has not. Are we taunted with our “Protestant variations”? Why, the more they are, the richer is our field of experience, the finer our points of comparison; provided, however, that we hold fast to the noble trust in a Gospel of identity at bottom, and seek it rather in the religious heart of all the churches, than in the theologic wisdom of our own. No man can proclaim the principle of “One Gospel in many dialects,” unless he is prepared to admit that his own faith is one of the dialects, and nothing more; to presume a meaning in the others, however hid from him; and while they remain to him a mere inarticulate jargon, to ascribe it sooner to his own incapacity than to their insignificance. When God’s truth, refracted on its entrance into our nature, shall emerge into the white light again, not one of these tinted beams can be spared. Let us for a moment arrest and examine them. Let us look at the chief varieties which Christianity assumes as it penetrates the soul; at once recognizing our own place, and appreciating that of others.
There are three great types of natural mind on which the Spirit of Christ may fall; and each, touched and awakened by him, “utters the wonderful works of God” in a language of its own.
(1.) There is the Ethical mind, calm, level, and clear; chiefly intent on the good-ordering of this life; judging all things by their tendency to this end; and impatient of every oscillation of our nature that swings beyond it. There is nothing low or unworthy in the attachment which keeps this spirit close to the present world, and watchful for its affairs. It is not a selfish feeling, but often one intensely social and humane; not any mean fascination with mere material interests, but a devotion to justice and right, and an assertion of the sacred authority of human duties and affections. A man thus tempered deals chiefly with this visible life and his comrades in it, because, as nearest to him, they are the better known. He plants his standard on the present, as on a vantage-ground, where he can survey his field, and manœuvre all his force, and compute the battle he is to fight. Whatever his bearing towards fervors beyond his range, he has no insensibility to the claims that fall within his acknowledged province, and that appeal to him in the native speech of his humanity. He so reverences veracity, honor, and good faith, as to expect them like the daylight, and hear of their violation with a flush of scorn. His word is a rock, and he expects that yours will not be a quicksand. If you are lax, you cannot hope for his trust; but if you are in trouble, you easily move his pity. And the sight of a real oppression, though the sufferer be no ornamental hero, but black, unsightly, and disreputable, suffices perhaps to set him to work for life, that he may expunge the disgrace from the records of mankind. Such men as he constitute for our world its moral centre of gravity; and whoever would compute the path of improvement that has brought it thus far on its way, or trace its sweep into a brighter future, must take account of their steady mass.
The effect of this style of thought and taste on the religion of its possessor is not difficult to trace. It may, no doubt, stop short of avowed and conscious religion altogether; its basis being simply moral, and its scene temporal, its conditions may be imagined as complete, without any acknowledgment of higher relations. But, practically, this is an exceptional case. A deep and reverential sense of Moral Authority passes irresistibly into Faith in a Moral Governor; and Conscience, as it rises, culminates in Worship. And to such natural religion, the hearty reception of the revealed Gospel is so congenial a sequel, that Christianity has enlisted its chief body-guard—its band of Immortals—from the writers of this school. In the form which they give to the faith, they are true to themselves, still keeping close to the human, and, except to sanction and glorify this, not apt to dwell upon the Divine. The second table of commandment has more reality to them than the first; and the whole of religion presents itself to their mind under the idea of Law. God in Christ teaches us his Will; publishes the punishment and the reward; and requires our obedience; aiding us in it by the perfect example of Christ, and reassuring us under failure by the offer of pardon on repentance. Now this is a true Gospel; not a proposition of it can be gainsaid; and whoever from his heart can repeat this creed;—God is holy; morality, divine; penitence, availing; goodness, immortal; guilt, secure of retribution; and Christ, our pattern for both lives,—is not far from the kingdom of Heaven, and has a faith as much beyond the practice, as it is short of the professions, of the great mass of Christians. If he has an equable, rational, and balanced nature; if he can depend on himself, and reduce his will to the discipline of rules; if he have affections temperate enough to follow reason instead of lead it, and to love God by sense of fitness and word of command; if moral prudence is so strong in him that he can bear the idea of “doing good for the sake of everlasting happiness”; if no wing ever beats in his soul that takes him off his feet;—his wants are provided; he has guidance for the problems that will meet him on his way,—indications of duty,—grounds of trust,—and a path traced through every Gethsemane and Calvary of this world, to the saintly peace of another.
But while this is a true Gospel, is it the whole Gospel? Not so; unless the voice of the Saviour is to reach only a part of our humanity, and in response draw but a “little flock.” For not many of our race are made of this even and unfermenting clay. Who can deny that there abound,—and among the greatest names of Christian history,—
(2.) Passionate natures, that cannot thus work out their own salvation, but ever pray to be taken whither of themselves they cannot go? It is not that they are necessarily weak of will, deficient in self-control, and unequal to the human moralities. Rather is it, that they get through all these, and yet can find no peace. Duty, as men measure it, may be satisfied; but still the face of God does not lift up its light. For want of that answering look, it is all as the tillage of the black desert; digging by night without a heaven above, and sowing in sands which no dew shall fertilize. Intense and effectuating resolve was certainly not wanting in Luther; what his young conscience imposed, his will achieved,—wasting asceticism, persevering devotion, humble charities; yet the shadow of death brooded around his irreproachable obedience. Is it not that the same sorrow which, in more level minds, is brought by a fall of the will, arises in these men from the ascent of their aspirations? Haunted by the image of God’s Holiness, drawn to it, yet fluttering helplessly at immeasurable depths below it, they strain after an obedience they cannot reach, and never lose the sense of infinite failure. Measured by their aims, their power is nothing. Did the law of Christ require nothing but works which the hand could do, its conditions would be finite, and might be satisfied. But its claims sweep through the affections of the soul; and who can make himself love where he is cold? who set himself behind his own thoughts, and keep guilty intruders outside the door of his nature? Impossible! the inner life, which is the special seat of our divine concerns, evades our laboring prudence, and tortures conscience without obeying it. How then do these sufferers find their emancipation? They have a Gospel, according to which Christ is not given as the Teacher of Law, but set up as the personal object of pure Trust and Love. God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, to mitigate the Divine into gentleness, to elevate the Human into holiness, and show how there is one moral perfection for both; surrendered him to humiliation and self-sacrifice; placed him in heaven; and offered to accept pure faith and love towards him as the reconciling term for the human soul,—as the substitute for an unattainable ideal of obedience. Here then is the salvation of these passionate natures. This simple trust, this intense affection, is precisely what they have to give. They cannot direct themselves; but only fix their love, and you may lead them as a child. Self-discipline is impossible; self-escape triumphant. Try from within to hold the struggling winds of their nature with iron bands of law, and you do but stir the sleeping storms. Set in the heavens without an orb of divine attraction,—a new star in the East,—and you carry their whole atmosphere away. Engage their faith; and for the first time they will prevail over their work. Let there be an appeal of Grace to their enthusiasm,—a whispered word, “Lovest thou me?”—and the very burden that was too heavy to be borne loses all its weight; and the drudging mill of habit, that seemed so servile once, they pace with songs and joy. There are men who so need to be thus carried out of themselves, that without it their nature runs to waste, or burns away with self-consuming fires. They are like one who, in a dream, should set himself to climb a far-off mountain-top; if he tries to run, he cannot even creep, and only wakes himself to find that he lies still on the bed of nature. But if the thought of his mind should be, that an overmastering power—chariot of fire and horses of fire—lifts him away, he floats through the clear space, till, without effort, his feet stand upon the visionary hills.
Here then, again,—in this doctrine of Faith,—we have a true Gospel, speaking to many hearts impenetrable by the doctrine of Works. But have we even yet the whole Gospel? Has the Good Shepherd, in these two words, made his voice known to all that are his? Or are there other sheep still to be gathered that are not of these folds? I believe there are. For thus far we have looked only at the moral side of Christian doctrine,—at its different answers to the problem of Sin,—at the conditions of ultimate acceptance with God, notwithstanding deep unworthiness. Whether you say, Patiently obey, and you shall grow into perfection of faith and love; or, Fling yourself on faith and love, and you will find grace for patient obedience;—in either case you are prescribing terms of salvation; you have the future life specially in mind, and are anxious to make ready the soul there to meet her God. But there are persons who cannot fix any particular solicitude upon that crisis, as if all before were probation, and all after were judgment,—as if here were only faith in an absent, and there sight of a present God;—who cannot dramatically divide existence into a two-act piece, first Time, then Eternity, and wait for the Infinite Presence, till the curtain rises between them; but are haunted by the feeling that, as Time is in Eternity, so is Man already shut up in God. This is the indigenous sentiment of another natural type of mind, which may be called,—
(3.) The Spiritual. God is a Spirit; man has a spirit; both, Now; both, Here; and shall they never meet? shall they remain without exchange of looks? shall nothing break the seal of eternal silence? is there really love between them, and thought, and purpose, and yet all recognition dumb? Why tell us of God’s Omniscience, if it only sleeps around us like dead space, or at most lies watching, like a sentinel of the universe, not free to stir? Who could ever pray to this motionless Immensity? who weep his griefs to rest on a Pity so secret and reserved? Surely if He is a Living Mind, he not merely remains over from a Divine Past to appear again in a Divine Future, but moves through the immediate hours, and awakens a thousand sanctities to-day. Urged by such questionings as these, men of meditative piety have thirsted for conscious communion with the All-holy;—communion both ways: appeal and response; a crossing line of light from eye to eye; a quiet walk with God, where all the dust of life turns, at his approach, into the green meadow, and its flat pools into the gliding waters. They have retired within to meet him; have believed that all is not ours that it is ours to feel; that there is Grace of his mingling with the inner fibres of our nature, and flinging in, across the constant warp of our personality, flying tints of deeper beauty, and hints of a pattern more divine. And all have agreed, that, in order to reach this Holy Spirit, and through its vivifying touch be born again, the one thing needful is a stripping off of self, an abandonment of personal desire and will, a return to simplicity, and a docile listening to the whispers spontaneous from God. They find all sin to be a rising up of self; all return to holiness and peace a sinking down from self, a free surrender of the soul,—that asks nothing, possesses nothing, that relaxes every rigid strain, and is pliant to go whither the highest Will may lead. Nature, of her own foolishness, ever goes astray in her quest of divine things; wandering away in flights of laboring Reason to find her God; panting with over-plied resolve to do her work; scheming rules, and artifices, and bonds of union for forming her individuals into a Church. Reverse all this, and fall back on the centre of the Spirit, instead of pressing out in all radii of your own. Let Intellect droop her ambitious wing, and come home; there, in the inmost room of conscience, God seeks you all the while. Lash your wearied strength no more; sit low and weak upon the ground, with loving readiness hitherward or thitherward, and you shall be taken through your work with a sevenfold strength that has no effort in it. Leave yourself awhile in utter solitude, shut out all thoughts of other men, yield up whatever intervenes, though it be the thinnest film, between your soul and God; and in this absolute loneliness, the germ of a holy society will of itself appear, a temper of sympathy and mercy, trustful and gentle, suffuses itself through the whole mind: though you have seen no one, you have met all; and are girt for any errand of service that love may find. So then, if there were twenty or a thousand in this case, their wills would flow together of their own accord, and find themselves in brotherhood without a plan at all.
So speaks this doctrine of the Spirit. It matters not now under which of its many theologic forms we conceive it; simplest perhaps, that the Indwelling God, who in Christ was the Word, is in us the Comforter. But surely, this also is not altogether a false Gospel. It rescues the conception of direct communion between the human spirit and the Divine,—a conception essential to the Christian life,—which an Ethical Gospel does not adequately secure: for communion must be between like and like, while obedience may be from slave to lord, nay, in some sense, from machine to maker. Nor is it a slight thing to take the scales from our eyes that hide from us the sanctities of our immediate life; to abolish the postponement of eternity; and, wayfarers as we are, make us feel, as we rise from our stony pillow and pass on, that here is the abode of God, and here does the angel-ladder touch the ground! Yet this too is not the whole Gospel. It absorbs too much in God. It scarcely saves human personality and responsibility. It does no justice to nature, which it regards as the negative of God. It melts away Law in Love, and hides the rocky structure of this moral world in a sunny haze that confuses earth and air.
What, then, shall we say of these three types of Christian faith? Do you doubt their reality? It is demonstrated within the century which we close this day. For while our forefathers were dedicating this house of prayer to the first, the Gospel of Christian Duty, Wesley had already become the prophet of the last,—the new birth of the Spirit; and erelong Evangelicism started up, and proclaimed the second,—the Salvation by Faith. Do you doubt their durability and permanence? It is proved by eighteen centuries’ experience, for the New Testament is not older. There, within the group of sacred books themselves, do they all lie; the Jewish Gospels represent the first; the Gentile Apostle’s letters, the second; the writings of the beloved disciple, the third. Matthew, as every reader must remark, is for the Law; Paul, for Faith; and John, for the Spirit. And, in every age, the great mass of Christian tendencies break themselves into these three forms:—Ebionite, Pauline, and contemplative Gnostic; Pelagian, Augustinian, and Mystic; Jesuit, Jansenist, and Quietist; Arminian, Lutheran, and Quaker; all proclaim the perseverance of the same essential types, wherever the spirit of Christ alights upon the various heart of man.
Is Christ then divided? Is he not equal to the whole of our humanity? Rather let us say, that we are small and weak for the measure of his heavenly wisdom. Doubtless, if we take what we can hold, and put it to faithful application, we have grace enough for every personal exigency. But there is, surely, an evil inseparable from all partial developments of religion, which only satisfy the immediate cravings of the mind, and leave parts of our nature—asleep perhaps at the moment—liable to wake and thirst again. Such separate growths run out their resources and exhaust themselves in a few generations. At first, they answer to some felt want; they collect a congenial multitude, and open to them a spiritual refuge that ends their wanderings. But the sentiment, once brought into a contented state, ceases to be importunate and prominent; and by its abatement gives opportunity for other feelings to vindicate their existence. When the wound is bound up and has lost its smart, the natural hunger begins to tell. The children grow up other than the fathers, perhaps quite as limited, only in different ways,—with affections pressing into just the vacant places of an earlier age. Meanwhile, the imperfection of the original basis has provoked reactions equally of narrow scope,—equally incapable of permanently filling the capacities of the Christian mind. Hence the danger, if the separate veins of thought be still worked on as they thin away, that the sects should degenerate into poor theological egotisms, and wear themselves insensibly out. It cannot be denied that all the three religious movements of the last century—represented by Taylor, by Wesley, by Cowper—exhibit the symptoms of spent strength, and are little likely to play again the part they have played before.
Yet every one of their Gospels is true at heart; and the tree that holds that pith is a tree of life, which the Eternal husbandman hath planted; and if he prune it, it is only that it may bear more fruit. The weakness of these faiths is in their isolation; and if their sap could but mingle, if no element were lost which they can draw from the root of the vine, a young frondescent life would show itself again. Those who think that the future can only repeat the past, will deem this impossible; though least of all should it appear so to us who profess ourselves “Christians and only Christians,” pledged to nothing but to lie open to all God’s truth. For myself I indulge a joyful hope that the next century of Christendom will be nobler than the last; that the great Faiths which have struggled separately into the light of the one, will flow together on the broader and less broken surface of the other. If, however, this is to be, it will arise from no mere intellectual scrutiny, whose function will ever be to distinguish, and not to unite, and, in proportion as it dominates alone, to trace ever-new lines of critical divergency. When the problem of Christendom is, to deliver the individual mind from the operation of an overwhelming social power, then it is seasonable to insist on the principle of free inquiry; because then you have a dead mass to disintegrate, ere any young and living force can urge its way. But when you have won this victory, and when individualism ceases to be devout and tends to party self-will, the hour comes to proclaim the converse lesson, and break up the vain reliance on mere liberty of thought. Depend upon it, Unity lies in profounder strata of our nature than any tillage of the mere intellect can reach. Sink deeply into the inmost life of any Christian faith, and you will touch the ground of all. Did we do nothing with our religion except live by it; did we forget the presence of doubt and contradiction; did it cease to be a creed about God and become simply an existence in God; did we exchange self-assertion before men for self-surrender to him;—we should find ourselves side by side with unexpected friends, should be astonished at our petulant divisions, and replace the poor charity of mutual forbearance by the free consciousness of inward sympathy. For us especially, who feel the temptations of an exceptional position, is it the prime duty to live and move and have our being in the divine sanctities that hold us, in that which we have not been obliged to throw away; else might our Gospel be no fruit-bearing branch, drinking from the root of the vine, but a dead residuum, withered and hopeless. Remember that, if Sin be not original, all the more must it be actual, and the deeper should its shadow lie upon the Conscience, and touch us with the mood of faithfulness and prayer. If, in reconciling man with God, there is no vicarious sacrifice possible, so much the more remains over for self-sacrifice, as the only path of communion and peace. If you will have it that Christ is only human, so much the more Divine is your humanity to be; you cannot assume that as the type of your nature, without at least owning that its essence lies, and its glory is found, not in the natural man, but in the spiritual man; and by this very confession, you renounce the low aims of the worldly mind, and take on yourself the vows of the saintly. Let believers only be true to the grace they have, and more will be given; and enter where they may the many-gated sanctuary of the Christian life, they will tend ever inwards to the same centre, and meet at last in the holiest of all. Keeping a reverent eye fixed on the person and spirit of Christ, they cannot but find their partial apprehensions corrected and enlarged; for his divine image is complete in its revelation, and rebukes every narrower Gospel. Moral perfectness, divine communion, free self-sacrifice,—all blend in him,—indistinguishable elements of one expression. In that august and holy presence, our divisions sink abashed, and hear, as of old, the word of recall, “Ye know not what spirit ye are of.” Or if, through our infirmities, that gracious form, appearing in the midst as we discourse among ourselves and are perplexed and sad, do not suffice to open our eyes and make us less slow of heart to one another and to him, at least in that higher world, whither our forerunners are gone, his living look will perfect the communion of saints. There at length the guests of his bounty will find that, though at separate tables, they have all been fed by the same bread of life, and touched their lips with the same wine of remembrance: there, the voices of the wise, often discordant here,—of Taylor and Wesley, of Enfield and Cowper, of Heber and Channing,—will blend in harmony;—and the notes of the last age will not be the least in that mighty chorus which crowds the steps of eighteen centuries, and, converging to their immortal Head, sings the solemn strain, “Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are all thy ways, thou King of Saints!”