Studies of Christianity

The Creed of Christendom

1. The Creed of Christendom; its Foundations and Superstructure. By William Rathbone Greg. London: Chapman. 1851.

2. St. Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians; an Attempt to convey their Spirit and Significance. By John Hamilton Thom. London: Chapman. 1851.

These two books are placed together without the least intention to intimate a resemblance between them, or to represent either author as sharing in the conclusions of the other. They are, indeed, concerned with opposite sides of the same subject; viewed, moreover, from the separate stations of the layman and the divine; and are the expression of strongly contrasted modes of thought. Mr. Greg deals principally with the external vehicle of the primitive Christianity; Mr. Thom with its internal essence. The one seeks in vain for any outward title in the records to suppress the operations of natural reason; the other clears away from the interior every interference with the free action of conscience and affection. The one, in the name of science, demolishes the outworks of ecclesiastical logic with which the shrine of faith has been dangerously guarded: the other, in the name of Christ, expels both priest and dogma from the sanctuary itself. The one, selecting deep truths from the words of Jesus, would construct religion into a philosophy; the other, with eye upon His person as an image of perfect goodness, would develop it from a sentiment. As all opposites, however, are embraced in the circumference of the same circle, so are these works complements of each other. Mr. Greg, in common with the Catholics and the Unitarians, evidently looks for the strength of Christianity in the Gospels; Mr. Thom, with the majority of Protestants, in the Epistles. For want of some mediating harmony between the two, each perhaps requires some correction: the historical picture of Christ saved by the former is but a pale and meagre outline; while the Pauline ideal presented by the latter is a glow of rich but undefined coloring. Mr. Greg, who, in spite of particular errors, manifests a large knowledge and a masterly judgment in his criticism of the Evangelists, appears to have, in his own sympathies, no way of access to a mind like that of Paul, and to be much at fault in estimating the place of the Apostle both as a witness and a power in the organization of Christian tradition and doctrine. Had the acuteness and severity of his understanding been a little more qualified by such reflective depth and moral tenderness as Mr. Thom brings to the work of interpretation, his religion, we fancy, would have retained a less slender remnant of the primitive Christianity.

Measured by the standard of common Protestantism, there can be no doubt that the second of these books would be condemned for heresy, and the first for unbelief. These ugly words, however, have been too often applied to what is fullest of truth and faith, to express more than a departure, which weak men feel to be irritating, from a favorite type of thought. They have lost their effect on all who are competent to meditate on the great problems of religion, and are fast taking their place in the scandalous vocabulary of professional polemics. It is a thing offensive to just men when divines, who have succeeded in smothering, or been too dull to entertain, doubts which rend the soul of genius and faithfulness, and insist on a veracious answer, meet them, not with sympathy, still less with mastery, but with the commonplaces of incompetent pity and holy malediction. And the offence is doubled in the eyes of instructed men, who know the state to which Biblical criticism has brought the theology of the Reformation. It is notorious that, in the revolt from Rome, the Scriptures—like a dictator suddenly created for the perils of a crisis—were forced into a position where it was impossible for them permanently to repose; that they cannot be treated as infallible oracles of either fact or doctrine, and were never meant to bear the weight of such unnatural claims; that the authority once concentrated in them, and held even against the reason and conscience, must now be distributed, and ask their concurrence. These are not questionable positions, but so irresistibly established, that learning of the highest order would no more listen to an argument against them, than Herschel or Airy to a disquisition against the rotation of the earth. When a clergyman, therefore, treats them with horror, and denounces them as infidelity, he produces no conviction, except that he himself is either ill-informed or insincere. Professional reproaches against a book so manly and modest, so evidently truth-loving, so high-minded and devout, as this of Mr. Greg’s, are but a melancholy imbecility. We may hold to many things which he resigns; we may think him wrong in the date of a Gospel or the construction of a miracle; we may even dissent from his estimate of the grounds of immortal hope and the ways of eternal Providence: but we do not envy, and cannot understand, the religion which can feel no thankful communion with thought so elevated, and trust so sound and real. No candid reader of the “Creed of Christendom” can close the book without the secret acknowledgment that it is a model of honest investigation and clear exposition; that it is conceived in the true spirit of serious and faithful research; and that whatever the author wants of being an ecclesiastical Christian is plainly not essential to the noble guidance of life, and the devout earnestness of the affections.

It is highly honorable to an English layman, amid the pressure of affairs, to take up a class of critical inquiries, which the clergy seem to have abandoned for a narrower and more passionate polemic. It is a remarkable characteristic of the present age, that, when the most startling attacks are made upon the very foundations of existing churches, nobody repels them. Nothing is offered to break their effect, except the inertia of the mass that rests upon the base assailed. For every great sceptical work of the last century there was some score of reputable answers; but half a dozen books of the same tendency have appeared within a few years, all of which have been copiously reviewed, have spread excitement over a wide surface, and set an immense amount of theological hair on end, but not one of which has received any adequate reply. Yet the slightest of these productions would favorably compare, in all the requisites for successful persuasion,—in learning, in temper, in acuteness,—with the best of the last age, excepting only the philosophical disquisitions of Hume and the ecclesiastical chapters of Gibbon. The first in time,—Hennell’s “Inquiry into the Origin of Christianity,”—though the most open to refutation, was permitted to pass through an unmolested existence; and its influence, considerable in itself, and increased by the sweet and truthful character of the author, is still traceable in the pages of Mr. Greg. To the effect of Strauss’s extraordinary work, the good Neander’s Leben Jesu offers but a mild resistance, and is itself, through the extent of its concessions, an open proclamation that the problems of theology can never be restored to the state in which all churches assume them to be. Parker was excommunicated by his sect; but his “Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion” has walked the course unchallenged, and displayed the splendor of its gifts, within the entire lines of the English language. Newman, Foxton, and Greg have since entered their names on the index expurgatorius of Orthodoxy; but they also will be simply excluded from the sacred circle of readers bound over not to think; and, beyond this, will make their converts undisturbed, and accumulate fresh charges of threatening power in the intellectual atmosphere which surrounds the Church. Whence this pusillanimous apathy? Is it forgotten that creeds always assailed and never defended are sure to perish? Or is it felt that the defence, to be sound and strong, must be so partial—so limited to points of detail—as to promise a mere diversion, instead of a repulse, and be more dangerous than the attitude of passiveness? Or does the Church resignedly give up her hold on the class of earnest, intellectual men who cannot degrade religion into a second-hand tradition, but must “know what they worship”? Certain it is that her whole activity has long abandoned this class, and addressed itself exclusively to the narrower and lower order of mind, whose vision is bounded by the periphery of a given creed, and whose life is satisfied with the squabbles and the gossip of articles forced into neighborhood, but no longer on speaking terms. If the efficacy of “holy orders” is called in question, streams of sacerdotal refutation flow from the press; but if the inspiration of the twelve Apostles is denied, it is a thing that neither bishop nor priest will care to vindicate. If a word of mistake is uttered about the drops of water on the face of a baptized baby, it conjures up a storm that rolls from diocese to diocese; but if you say that pure religion has no rite or sacrament at all, the ecclesiastic atmosphere remains still as a Quaker’s silent meeting. The deepest interest is felt about the origin of liturgies, and the history of articles, but nobody heeds the most staggering evidence that three of the Gospels are second-hand aggregations of hearsay reports, and the fourth of questionable authenticity. You deny the self-consistency of the Church of England and call it a compromise; and the sudden rustle of gowns and sleeves proclaims a great sensation. You analyze the accounts of Christ’s resurrection; you ask whether they are not discrepant; you point out that, apparently, the oldest record (Mark’s) contained, in its original form, no account of the event at all, and that the others bear seeming traces of distinct and incompatible traditions. You cry aloud for help in this perplexity, and hold yourselves ready to follow any vestiges of truth; and, except that the creeds are still muttered every Sunday, all the oracles are dumb. If you want to find the true magic pass into heaven, scores of rival professors press round you with obtrusive supply: if you ask in your sorrow, Who can tell me whether there be a heaven at all? every soul will keep aloof and leave you alone. All men that bring from God a fresh, deep nature, all in whom religious wants live with eager power, and who yet are too clear of soul to unthink a thought and falsify a truth, receive in these days no help and no response. The Church feels its interest, as an educated corporation, to consist in overlaying and covering up the foundations of faith with huge piles of curious learning, history, and art, which, by affording endless occupation, may detain men from search after the living rock, or notice of the undermining flood. And, as an established corporation, she relies on the lazy conservatism of mental possession; on the dislike felt by the comfortable classes towards the trouble of thought and the disturbance of feeling, and their usual willingness to hand over these operations to the prayer-book and the priest. We are grateful to Mr. Greg for shaking this ignoble and precarious reliance, which he notices in these admirable sentences.

“A more genuine and important objection to the consequences of our views is felt by indolent minds on their own account. They shrink from the toil of working out truth for themselves out of the materials which Providence has placed before them. They long for the precious metal, but loathe the rude ore out of which it has to be extricated by the laborious alchemy of thought. A ready-made creed is the paradise of their lazy dreams. A string of authoritative, dogmatic propositions comprises the whole mental wealth which they desire. The volume of nature—the volume of history—the volume of life—appall and terrify them. Such men are the materials out of whom good catholics of all sects are made. They form the uninquiring and submissive flocks which rejoice the hearts of all priesthoods. Let such cling to the faith of their forefathers, if they can. But men whose minds are cast in a nobler mould, and are instinct with a diviner life,—who love truth more than rest, and the peace of Heaven rather than the peace of Eden,—to whom ’a loftier being brings severer cares,’—

‘Who know man does not live by joy alone,
     But by the presence of the power of God,’—

such must cast behind them the hope of any repose or tranquillity, save that which is the last reward of long agonies of thought; they must relinquish all prospect of any heaven, save that of which tribulation is the avenue and portal; they must gird up their loins and trim their lamp for a work which cannot be put by, and which must not be negligently done. ‘He,’ says Zschokke, ‘who does not like living in the furnished lodgings of tradition, must build his own house, his own system of thought and faith for himself.’”—p. 242.

The work of Mr. Greg derives its interest, not from anything in it that will be new to the studious theologian, but from the freshness and force with which it presents the results of the author’s reading and reflection on both the claims and the contents of Scripture. Adopting the ordinary notion of “inspiration,” as equivalent to a supernaturally provided “infallibility,” he reviews and condemns the reasonings by which this attribute has been associated with the Bible; and decides that the mere discovery of a statement in the Scriptures is no sufficient reason for our implicit reception of it. Having cleared away this obstacle to all intelligent criticism, he pursues his way, chiefly under the guidance of De Wette, through the earlier literature of the Hebrews; and adds another to the many exposures of the humiliating attempts, on the part of English divines, to reconcile the cosmogony of Genesis with modern science; attempts which we should call obsolete, did we not remember that Buckland and Whewell are both living, and have not yet attained the episcopal bench. Mr. Greg adopts the views of which Baur is the best known recent expositor, but which Lessing long ago traced out, as to the gradual formation of the Hebrew monotheism; and shows the striking contrast between the family Jehovah of the Patriarchs and the universal God of the later Prophets. Whatever be the origin of the doctrine of a Messiah, and under whatever varieties it appeared, it never pointed, the author conceives, to such a person as Jesus of Nazareth, or such a product as the Christian Church; and it is only by perverse interpretations, unendurable out of the field of theology, that any passages in the Old Testament can be made out to prefigure the events in the New. In the argument, therefore, between the early missionaries of the Gospel and the unconvinced Jews, Mr. Greg maintains that the latter were the more faithful to their sacred books. The phenomena of the first three Gospels are next examined sufficiently to explain the several hypotheses respecting the order and materials of their composition. The author rests on Schleiermacher’s conclusion, that a number of fragmentary records of incident and discourse formed the groundwork, partly common, partly exclusive, of the triple Evangile. He thus removes us, in this portion of the Scriptures, from first-hand testimony altogether; and throws upon internal criticism the task of discriminating between the original and reliable elements on the one hand, and those on the other which did not escape the accidents of floating tradition and the coloring of later ideas. This delicate task the author attempts; and manifests throughout an acquaintance with the methods and models of the higher criticism, fully qualifying him to form the independent judgment which he sums up in these words:—

“In conclusion, then, it appears certain that in all the synoptical Gospels we have events related that did not really occur, and words ascribed to Jesus which Jesus did not utter; and that many of these words and events are of great significance. In the great majority of these instances, however, this incorrectness does not imply any want of honesty on the part of the Evangelists, but merely indicates that they adopted and embodied, without much scrutiny or critical acumen, whatever probable and honorable narratives they found current in the Christian community.”—p. 137.

The peculiarities of the fourth Gospel are next dealt with: its apparent polemic reference to the gnosis of the first and second centuries; its absence of demoniacs and parables; the length, the mysticism, the dogma of its discourses, and their uniformity of complexion with the historian’s own narrative and reflections; the narrowness of its charity, and the apocryphal appearance of its “first miracle.” Without questioning the probability that within the contents of this Gospel is secreted a nucleus of facts, Mr. Greg thinks the book so clearly imbued throughout with the writer’s idiosyncrasy, as to be inferior in historical value to the Synoptics; and the discourses of Jesus, in particular, must be regarded as free compositions by the Evangelist. In our author’s management of this subject there seems to us to be an unfavorable change. The style of thought peculiar to John, as well as that characteristic of Paul, lies out of the latitude native to him; and with every intention to be just in his appreciation, he fails, we think, to reach the point of sympathy from which the fourth Gospel should be judged. The realism of his mind makes him a better critic of the hard Judaical element of the Christian Scriptures, with its objective distinctness and its moral beauty, than of the more ideal Gentile ingredients, where a subjective dialectic traces forms of thought in the intense fires of spiritual consciousness.

In a separate discussion of the question of miracles they are restored to the subordinate position, as compared with moral evidence, assigned to them by the early Protestant divines. Adopting the position of Locke, that “the miracles are to be judged by the doctrines, and not the doctrines by the miracles,” he can admit with the less pain his conviction, that, even in the instance of the resurrection of Jesus, the historical evidence is too conflicting and uncertain to bear the supernatural weight imposed upon it. He admits, indeed, that Jesus may have risen from the dead; the Apostles manifestly believed it; and that the marked change in their character and conduct, from despair to triumph, affords the strongest evidence of the sustaining energy of this belief. But, in our ignorance of the grounds of this belief, (the Gospels and book of Acts containing no correct or first-hand report of the facts,) it is impossible, he conceives, to form any rational estimate of their adequacy. In Mr. Greg’s decision on this important point, we see the effect of his entrance on the problem of Christianity from the historical end. If, instead of addressing himself first to the Gospels which lie most remote from the source of the religion, and represent the latest and most constituted form of the primitive tradition, he had begun with the earliest remains of Christian literature, and traced the doctrine of the resurrection from the Epistles of Paul into the story of the Evangelists, we think he would have arrived at a different conclusion. In dismissing the testimony of Paul as “of little weight,” he throws away the main evidence of the whole case. We can understand the critic who, having put the miraculous entirely aside, as logically inadmissible, makes light of the Pauline statements on this matter, and appeals to their writer’s openness to impressions of the supernatural in proof of a certain vitiating unsoundness of mind. But one who, like our author, regards this à priori incredulity as an unphilosophical prejudice, and upon whose list of real causes, never precluded from possible action, supernatural power finds a place, cannot consistently condemn another for believing in concrete instances what he himself allows in the general; and put the Apostle out of court, on the plea that we have no evidence but his assertion of his intercourse with the risen Christ. Is not his assertion the only evidence possible of a subjective miracle? and is there any ground for restricting supernatural agency to an objective direction? No doubt, facts presented to external perception have the advantage of being open to more witnesses than one; and if it be deliberately laid down as a canon, that in no case can any anomalous event be admitted on one man’s declaration, we allow the consistency of refusing a hearing to the Apostle. But such a rule would only be an example of the futility of all attempts to reduce moral evidence to mathematical expression. Facts of the most extraordinary nature have always been, and will always be, received on solitary attestation; and if so, it makes no logical difference whether they be called “objective,” or “subjective.” A man has faculties for apprehending what passes within him, as well as what passes without; nor do we know any ground for trusting the latter which does not hold equally good for the former. If it be said that the reporter of a miracle not only announces what he sees or feels,—which we may accept on his veracity,—but proclaims its supernatural source,—which we may repudiate from distrust of his judgment,—the remark is perfectly just, only that it applies alike to all testimony, and not exclusively to miraculous reports. Our disposition to receive the evidence of a witness assumed to be veracious, depends on our having the same preconceptions of causation with himself. In the ordinary affairs of life, this common ground is sure to exist, and therefore remains a mere latent condition of belief. But the slowness to admit a miracle arises from the failure of this common ground; and if the hearer reserved in the background of his mind, and in equal readiness for action, the same supernatural power to which the witness’s assertion refers, he would feel no more temptation to incredulity than in listening to some matter of course. The reluctance to believe, is proof that his store of causation is limited to the natural sphere; and every phenomenon irreducible to this drops away from all hold upon his mind. As there is no such thing as a fact perceived without a judgment formed, so is there no belief in the attestation of a fact without reliance on the soundness of a judgment; and that reliance depends on the hearer having the same list of causes in his mind as the witness. If, then, Mr. Greg holds, with Paul, that the power exists whence a subjective miracle might issue, and if from the nature of the case such miracle must remain a matter of personal consciousness, why reject the Apostle’s report of his experience? In choosing from among the causes which both parties admit, it cannot be denied that Paul alights upon that which, if there, gives the easiest and most certain explanation; and to find a satisfactory origin for his impressions and conduct in natural agencies is so difficult, that critics would never attempt it, but to escape the acknowledgment of miracle. On his own principles we do not see how our author could excuse himself to the Apostle for rejecting his testimony; which does but communicate, in the only conceivable way, that which is allowed to be possible enough, and which best clears up the mystery of an astonishing revolution in personal character, and in the convictions of an earnest and powerful mind.

The whole question of miracles, however, loses its anxious importance with those who, like our author, would still, amid their constant occurrence, look to other sources for the credentials of moral and religious truth. If anything is positively and incontrovertibly known respecting the Apostles,—and in proportion as we trust the synoptical Gospels must we allow Mr. Greg to extend the remark to their Master,—it is this: that whatever powers they exercised, and whatever communications they received, were inadequate to preserve them from serious error; and from delivering to the world, as a substantive part of their message, a most solemn expectation which was not to be fulfilled. This fact, no longer denied by any reputable theologian, alone shows that, even in the presence of the highest Christian authority, the natural criteria of reason and conscience cannot be dispensed with. In the application of these to the teachings and life of Christ, our author finds, if not any truths of supernatural dictation, at least the highest object of veneration and affection yet given to this world.

“Now on this subject,” he says, “we hope our confession of faith will be acceptable to all save the narrowly orthodox. It is difficult, without exhausting superlatives, even to unexpressive and wearisome satiety, to do justice to our intense love, reverence, and admiration for the character and teachings of Jesus. We regard him, not as the perfection of the intellectual or philosophic mind, but as the perfection of the spiritual character,—as surpassing all men of all times in the closeness and depth of his communion with the Father. In reading his sayings, we feel that we are holding converse with the wisest, purest, noblest Being that ever clothed thought in the poor language of humanity. In studying his life, we feel that we are following the footsteps of the highest ideal yet presented to us upon earth. ‘Blessed be God that so much manliness has been lived out, and stands there yet, a lasting monument to mark how high the tides of divine life have risen in the world of man!’”—p. 227.

We differ altogether from our author in his notion of inspiration, and his reduction of Christianity within the limits of human resource. But we must say, that while there is such an estimate as this of what Jesus Christ was, it is a matter of subordinate moment what is thought about the mode in which he became so.

By a process of “Christian Eclecticism,” Mr. Greg draws forth from the Gospels the elements which he regards as characteristic of the religion of Jesus; distinguishing those which make it the purest of faiths from others which appear to him irreconcilable with a just philosophy. The doctrine of a future life is reserved for a separate discussion; the general result of which we know not how to describe, otherwise than by saying that the author discards all the evidence and yet retains the conclusion. All the arguments, metaphysical and moral, for human immortality, he condemns as absolutely worthless; he confesses that he has no new ones to propose; he affirms that all appearances, without exception, proclaim the permanence of death, the absence of any spiritual essence in man, and the absolute sway of the laws of organization; yet, on the report of that very “soul” within him, whose existence nature disowns, he holds the doctrine of a future existence by the irresistible tenure of a first truth. We do not wonder that the rigor with which Mr. Greg has pushed his principles through other subjects of thought should relent at this point, and refuse to cast the sublimest of human hopes over the brink of darkness. We respect, as a holy abstinence, his refusal to silence the pleadings of the inner voice. But we admire his faith more than his philosophy; and are astonished that he does not suspect the soundness of a scientific method which lands him in results he cannot hold. No scepticism is so fatal,—for none has so wide a sweep,—as that which despairs of the self-reconciliation of human nature; which flings among our faculties the reproach of irretrievable contradiction; which sets up first truths against deductions, conscience against science, faith against logic. Ever since Kant balanced his Antinomies, and employed the gravitation of Practical reason to turn the irresolute scales of the Speculative, this unwholesome practice has been spreading, of assuming an ultimate discordance between co-existing powers of the mind. In the language of rhetoric or poetry, in the discussion of popular notions on morals and religion, it would be hypercritical to complain of the antitheses of understanding and feeling,—sense and soul. But to an exact thinker it must be apparent that an ambidextrous intellect is no intellect at all; and that, were this all our endowment, the life of the wisest would be but a chase after mocking shadows of thought. The following words of our author, with all their tranquil appearance, describe a state of things which, were it real, might well strike us with dismay:—

“There are three points especially of religious belief, regarding which intuition (or instinct) and logic are at variance,—the efficacy of prayer, man’s free-will, and a future existence. If believed, they must be believed, the last without the countenance, the two former in spite of the hostility of logic.”—p. 303.

This is absolute Pyrrhonism, and though said in the interest of religion, is subversive alike of knowledge and of faith. The pretended “logic” can be good for very little, which comes out with so suicidal an achievement as the disproof of first truths. The condition under which alone logic can exist as a science is the unity in the human mind of the laws of belief,—a condition which would be violated if any first truth contradicted another in itself, or in its deductions. The moment, therefore, such a contradiction turns up, a consistent thinker will either regard it as a mere semblance, and proceed to re-examine his premises, and test his reasoning; or he will treat it as real; and then it throws contempt on logic altogether, and relegates it into impossibility. In neither case can his reliance incline to the logical side. Mr. Greg, however, sticks to his logic whenever, as in the two cases mentioned in the foregoing extract, it loudly negatives a point of religious belief; and abandons it only where it restricts itself to cold and dumb discouragement. A bolder distrust of his logic, and a firmer faith in the logic of nature, would perhaps have harmonized the differing voices of the intellect and the soul, blending them in a faith neither afraid to think nor ashamed to pray.

Had our author been as familiar with the Catholic and Arminian divines, as with the literature of inductive science and Calvinistic theology, he would have known that there is a philosophy from which the religious intuitions encounter no repugnance; and would, at least, have noticed its offer of mediation between Faith and Reason. He is, however, entirely shut up within the formulas of a different school, which press with their resistance on his religious feeling in every direction, and produce a conflict which he can neither appease nor terminate. With an intellect entirely overridden by the ideas of Law and Necessity, no man can escape the force of the common objections to any doctrine of prayer, or of forgiveness of sin; and if those ideas possess universal validity, the very discussion of such doctrines is, in the last degree, idle and absurd. But what if some mediæval schoolman, or some impugner of the Baconian orthodoxy, were to suggest that, though Law is coextensive with outward nature, Nature is not coextensive with God, and that beyond the range where his agency is bound by the pledge of predetermined rules lies an infinite margin, where his spirit is free? And what if, in aggravation of his heresy, he were to contend that Man also, as counterpart of God, belongs not wholly to the realm of nature, but transcends it by a certain endowment of free power in his spirit? Having made these assumptions, on the ground that they were more agreeable to “intuitive” feeling, and not less so to external evidence, than the one-sidedness of their opposites, might he not suggest that room is now found for a doctrine of prayer? Not that any event bespoken and planted in the sphere of nature can be turned aside by the urgency of desire and devotion; not that the slightest swerving is to be expected from the usages of creation, or of the mind; wherever law is established—without us or within us—there let it be absolute as the everlasting faithfulness. But God has not spent himself wholly in the courses of custom, and mortgaged his infinite resources to nature; nor has he closed up with rules every avenue through which his fresh energy might find entrance into life; but has left in the human soul a theatre whose scenery is not all pre-arranged, and whose drama is ever open to new developments. Between the free centre of the soul in man, and the free margin of the activity of God, what hinders the existence of a real and living communion, the interchange of look and answer, of thought and counterthought? If, in response to human aspiration, a higher mood is infused into the mind; if, in consolation of penitence or sorrow, a gleam of gentle hope steals in; and if these should be themselves the vivifying touch of divine sympathy and pity, what law is prejudiced? what faith is broken? what province of nature has any title to complain? And so, too, (might our mediæval friend continue,) with respect to the doctrine of forgiveness. If men are under moral obligation, and God is a being of moral perfection, he must regard their unfaithfulness with disapproval. Of his sentiments, the clear trace will be found in the various sufferings which constitute the natural punishment of wrong. These are incorporated in the very structure of the world and the constitution of life; and to persistence in their infliction, the Supreme Ruler is committed by the assurance of his constancy. They fasten on the guilty a chain which no pardon will strike off, but which he will drag till it is worn away. Not all the divine sentiment, however, is embodied in the physical consequences. Besides this determinate expression of his thought, written out on the finite world, there is an unexpressed element remaining behind, in his infinite nature: on the visible side of the veil is the suggestive manifestation; on the invisible, is the very affection manifested. There is a personal alienation, a forfeiture of approach and sympathy, which would survive though creation were to perish and carry its punishments away; and would still cast its black shadow into empty space. This reserved sentiment, and this alone, is affected by repentance. But it is no small thing for the heart of shame to know this. The estrangement lasts no longer than the guilty temper and the unsoftened conscience; and when, through its sorrow, the mind is clear and pure, the sunshine of divine affection will burst it again. In this the free Spirit of God is different from his bound action in nature. Long after he himself has forgiven and embraced again, necessity—the creature of his legislation—will continue to wield the lash, and measure out with no relenting the remainder of the penalty incurred; and he that yet drags his burden and visibly limps upon his sin, may all the while have a heart at rest with God. And thus is retribution—the reaping as we have sown—in no contradiction with forgiveness,—the personal restoration.

How far such modes of thought as these would help to reconcile the conflicting claims,—and how they would stand related to Mr. Greg’s terrible friend, “Logic,” we do not pretend to decide. We refer to them only as possible means of escaping—at least of postponing—his desolating doctrine, that intuitions may tell lies; and in support of our statement, that his theoretic view lies entirely within the circle of a particular school,—a school, moreover, so little able to satisfy his aspirations, that he is obliged to patch up a compromise between his nature and his culture. The curious amalgamation which has taken place in England, of the metaphysics of Calvin with the physics of Bacon, has produced, in a large class, a philosophical tendency, with which the distinctive sentiments of Christianity very uneasily combine. The effacing of all lines separating the natural and moral, the limitation of God to the realm of nature, and the subjugation of all things to predestination, are among the chief features of this tendency, and the chief obstacles to any concurrence between the intellectual and the spiritual religion of the age.

If some of the elements in the early Christianity are too hastily cancelled by our author, there is one sentiment whose inapplicability to the present day he exposes with an irresistible force;—that depreciating estimate of life which, however natural to Apostles “impressed with the conviction that the world was falling to pieces,” is wholly misplaced among those for whose office and work this earthly scene is the appointed place. The exhortations of the Apostles, “granting the premises, were natural and wise.”

“But for divines in this day—when the profession of Christianity is attended with no peril, when its practice, even, demands no sacrifice, save that preference of duty to enjoyment which is the first law of cultivated humanity—to repeat the language, profess the feelings, inculcate the notions, of men who lived in daily dread of such awful martyrdom, and under the excitement of such a mighty misconception; to cry down the world, with its profound beauty, its thrilling interests, its glorious works, its noble and holy affections; to exhort their hearers, Sunday after Sunday, to detach their heart from the earthly life, as inane, fleeting, and unworthy, and fix it upon heaven, as the only sphere deserving the love of the loving or the meditation of the wise,—appears to us, we confess, frightful insincerity, the enactment of a wicked and gigantic lie. The exhortation is delivered and listened to as a thing of course; and an hour afterwards the preacher, who has thus usurped and profaned the language of an Apostle who wrote with the fagot and the cross full in view, is sitting comfortably with his hearer over his claret; they are fondling their children, discussing public affairs or private plans in life, with passionate interest, and yet can look at each other without a smile or a blush for the sad and meaningless farce they have been acting!... Everything tends to prove that this life is, not perhaps, not probably, our only sphere, but still an integral one, and the one with which we are here meant to be concerned. The present is our scene of action,—the future is for speculation and for trust. We firmly believe that man was sent upon the earth to live in it, to enjoy it, to study it, to love it, to embellish it,—to make the most of it, in short. It is his country, on which he should lavish his affections and his efforts. Spartam nactus es—hanc exorna. It should be to him a house, not a tent,—a home, not only a school. If, when this house and this home are taken from him, Providence, in its wisdom and its bounty, provides him with another, let him be deeply grateful for the gift,—let him transfer to that future, when it has become his present, his exertions, his researches, and his love. But let him rest assured that he is sent into this world, not to be constantly hankering after, dreaming of, preparing for, another, which may or may not be in store for him, but to do his duty and fulfil his destiny on earth,—to do all that lies in his power to improve it, to render it a scene of elevated happiness to himself, to those around him, to those who are to come after him. So will he avoid those tormenting contests with nature,—those struggles to suppress affections which God has implanted, sanctioned, and endowed with irresistible supremacy,—those agonies of remorse when he finds that God is too strong for him,—which now embitter the lives of so many earnest and sincere souls; so will he best prepare for that future which we hope for, if it come; so will he best have occupied the present, if the present be his all. To demand that we love heaven more than earth, that the unseen should hold a higher place in our affections than the seen and familiar, is to ask that which cannot be obtained without subduing nature, and inducing a morbid condition of the soul. The very law of our being is love of life, and all its interests and adornments.”—pp. 271, 272.

With all that is admirable in our author’s book, he contemplates the whole subject from a point of view which exhibits it in very imperfect lights. He professes to treat of “The Creed of Christendom.” Yet, in examining only the canonical Scriptures and the primitive belief, he totally ignores the “Creed” of the greater part of “Christendom,” namely, of the Catholic Church. For it is only Protestants that identify Christianity with the letter of the New Testament, and settle everything by appeal to its contents. According to the older doctrine, Christianity is not a Divine Philosophy recorded in certain books, but a Divine Institution committed to certain men. The Christian Scriptures are not its source, but its first product; not its charter and definition, but its earliest act and the expression of its incipient thought. They exhibit the young attempts of the new agency, as it was getting to work upon the minds of men and trying to penetrate the resisting mass of terrestrial affairs. They are thus but the beginning of a record which is prolonged through all subsequent times, the opening page in the proceedings of a Church in perpetuity; and are not separated from the continuous sacred literature of Christendom, as insulated fragments of Divine authority. The supernatural element which they contain did not die out with their generation, but has never ceased to flow through succeeding centuries. Nor did the heavenly purpose—precipitated upon earthly materials and media—disclose itself most conspicuously at first; but rather cleared itself as it advanced and enriched its energy with better instruments. The sublimest things would even lie secreted in the unconscious heart of the new influence, and only with the slowness of noble growths push towards the light; for the noise and obtrusiveness of the human is ever apt to overwhelm the retiring silence of the divine. The disciples, who, when events were before their eyes, and great words fell upon their ears, “understood not these things at the time,” are types of all men and all ages; whose religion, coming out in the event, is known to others better than to themselves. A faith, therefore, should be judged less by its first form than by its last; and at all events be studied, not as it once appeared, but in the entire retrospect of its existence.

No doubt this doctrine of development is made subservient, in the Romish system, to monstrous sacerdotal claims. A priestly hierarchy pretends to the exclusive custody, and the gradual unfolding, of God’s sacred gift. But sweep away this holy corporation; throw its treasury open, and let its vested right, of paying out the truth, be flung into the free air of history; gather together no Sacred College but the collected ages; appeal to no high Pontiff but the Providence of God;—and there remains a far juster and sublimer view of the place and function of a pure Gospel in the world, than the narrow Protestant conception. Christianity becomes thus, not the Creed of its Founders, but the Religion of Christendom, to be estimated only in comparison with the faiths of other groups of the great human family; and the superhuman in it will consist in this,—the providential introduction among the affairs of this world of a divine influence, which shall gradually reach to untried depths in the hearts of men, and become the organizing centre of a new moral and spiritual life. It is a power appointed—an inspiration given—to fetch by reverence a true religion out of man, and not, by dictation, to put one into him.

For this end, it would not even be necessary that the bearers of the divine element should be personally initiated into the counsels whose ministers they are. Philosophy must know what it teaches; but Inspiration, in giving the intensest light to others, may have a dark side turned towards itself. There is no irreverence in saying this, and no novelty: on the contrary, the idea has ever been familiar to the most fervent men and ages, of Prophets who prepared a future veiled from their own eyes, and saintly servants of heaven, who drew to themselves a trust, and wielded a power, which their ever-upward look never permitted them to guess. Nay, to no one was this conception less strange, than to the very man who, in his turn, must now have it applied to himself. With the Apostle Paul it was a favorite notion, that the entire plan of the Divine government had been a profound secret during the ages of its progress, and was opening into clear view only at the hour of its catastrophe. Not only was there more in it than had been surmised, but something utterly at variance with all expectation. Its whole conception had remained unsuspected from first to last; undiscerned by the vision of seers, and unapproached by the guesses of the wise. Never absent from the mind of God, and never pausing in its course of execution, it had yet evaded the notice of all observers; and winding its way through the throng of nations and the labyrinth of centuries, the great Thought had passed in disguise, using all men and known of none. Nor was it only the pagan eye that, for want of special revelation, had been detained in darkness, or beguiled with the scenery of dreams. The very people whose life was the main channel of the Divine purpose did not feel the tide of tendency which they conveyed; the patriarchs who fed their flocks near its fountains, the lawgiver who founded a state upon its banks, the priests whose temple poured blood into its waters, and the prophets at whose prayer the clouds of heaven dropped fresh purity into the stream,—all were unconscious of its course; assigning it to regions it should never visit, and missing the point where it should be lost in the sea. Nay, Paul seems to bring down this edge of darkness to a later time; to include within it even the ministry of Christ and the Galilean Apostles; to imply that even they were unconscious instruments of a scheme beyond the range of their immediate thought; and that not till Jesus had passed into the light of heaven did the time come for revealing, through the man of Tarsus, the significance of Messiah’s earthly visit, and its place in the great scheme of things. Paul, in claiming this as his own special function, certainly implies that, previous to his call, no one was in condition to interpret the secret counsels of God in the historic development of his providence. He feels this to be no reflection on his predecessors, no cause of elevation in himself; steward as he is of a mighty mystery, he is less than the least of all saints. He simply stands at the crisis when a conception is permitted to the world, which even “the angels have vainly desired to look into”; and though he may see more, he is infinitely less than the Prophets and the Messiah whose place it is given him to explain. He is but the interpreter, they are the grand agencies interpreted. He is but the discerning eye, they are the glorious objects on which it is fixed.

In seeking, therefore, for the divine element in older dispensations, the Apostle would assuredly not consult the projects and beliefs of their founders and ministers. In his view, the very scheme of God was to work through these without their knowing what they were about; to let them aim at one thing while he was directing them to another; to pour through their life and soul an energy which should indeed fire their will and flow from their lips in their own best purposes, but steal quietly behind them for his; so that what was primary with them was perhaps evanescent with him; while that which was incidental, and dropped from them unawares, was the seed of an eternal good. What Moses planned, what David sung, what Isaiah led the people to expect, was not what Heaven had at heart to execute. Even in quest of God’s thought in the Christian dispensation, Paul does not refer to the doctrines, the precepts, the miracles of Jesus during his ministry in Palestine,—to the memorials of his life, or the testimony of his companions. He assumes that, at so early a date, the time had not yet come for the truth to appear, and that it was vain to look for it in the preconceptions of the uncrucified and unexalted Christ; who was the religion, not in revelation, but in disguise. If, therefore, any one had argued against the Apostle thus: “Why tell us to discard the law? your Master said he came to fulfil it. How do you venture to preach to the Gentiles, when Jesus declared his mission limited to the lost sheep of the house of Israel? No vestiges of your doctrine of free grace can be found in the parables, or of redeeming faith in the Sermon on the Mount”;—he would have boldly replied, that this proves nothing against truths that are newer than the life, because expounded by the death, of Christ; that God reveals by action, not by teaching; that no servant of his can understand his own office till it is past; and that only those who look back upon it through the interpretation of events, can read aright the divine idea which it enfolds.

This view it was that made the Apostle so bold an innovator, and filled his Epistles with a system so different from that of the synoptical Gospels as almost to constitute a different religion. He had seized the profound and sublime idea that, when men are inspired, the inspiration occupies, not their conscious thought and will, but their unconscious nature; laying a silent beauty on their affections, secreting a holy wisdom in their life, and, through the sorrows of faithfulness, tempting their steps to some surprise of glory. That which they deliberately think, that which they anxiously elaborate, that which they propose to do, is ever the product of their human reason and volition, and cannot escape the admixture of personal fallibility. But their free spontaneous nature speaks unawares, like a sweet murmuring from angels’ dreams. What they think without knowing it, what they say without thinking it, what they do without saying it, all the native pressures of their love and aspiration, these are the hiding-place of God, wherein abiding, he leaves their simplicity pure and their liberty untouched. The current of their reasoning and action is determined by human conditions and material resistances; but the fountain in the living rock has waters that are divine. If this be true, then must we search for the heavenly element in the latencies rather than the prominencies of their life; in what they were, rather than in what they thought to do; in the beliefs they felt without announcing; in the objects they accomplished, but never planned. We must wait for their agency in history, and from the fruit return to find the seed.

It is not peculiar to Mr. Greg that, in estimating Christianity, he has neglected, and even reversed, this principle. All who have treated of it from the Protestant point of view have done the same. They have assumed that the religion was to be most clearly discerned at its commencement; that the divine thought it contained would be, not evolved, but obscured by time, and might be better detected in ideal shape at the beginning of the ages, than realized at the end; that its agents and inaugurators must have been fully cognizant of its whole scope and contents, and set them in the open ground of their speech and practical career. In the minds of all Protestants the Christian religion is identified exclusively with the ideas of the first century, with the creed of the Apostles, with the teachings of Christ. The New Testament is its sole depository, in whose books there is nothing for which it is not answerable. The consequence is a perpetual struggle between untenable dogma and unprofitable scepticism. The whole structure of faith becomes precarious. If Luke and Matthew should disagree about a date or a pedigree; if Mark should report a questionable miracle; if John should mingle with his tenderness and depth some words of passionate intolerance; if Peter should misapply a psalm, and Paul indite mistaken prophecies; above all, if Jesus should appear to believe in demonology, and not to have foreseen the futurities of his Church,—these detected specks are felt like a total eclipse; affrighted faith hides its face from them and shrieks; and he who points them out, though only to show how pure the orb that spreads behind, is denounced as a prophet of evil. The peaceful and holy centre of religion is shaken by storms of angry erudition. Devout ingenuity or indevout acuteness spend themselves in vitiating the impartial course of historical criticism; neither of them reflecting, that, if the topics in dispute are open to reasonable doubt, they cannot be matter of revelation, and may be calmly looked at as objects of natural thought. It is a thing alike dangerous and unbecoming that religion should be narrowed to a miserable literary partisanship, bound up with a disputed set of critical conclusions, unable to deliver its title-deeds from a court of perpetual chancery, whose decisions are never final. The time seems to have arrived for freeing the Protestant Christianity from its superstitious adhesion to the mere letter of the Gospel, and trusting more generously to that permanent inspiration, those ever-living sources of truth within the soul, of which Gospel and Epistle, the speeches of Apostles and the insight of Christ, are the pre-eminent, rather than the lonely, examples. The primitive Gospel is not in its form, but only in its spirit, the everlasting Gospel. It is concerned, and, if we look to quantity alone, chiefly concerned, with questions that have ceased to exist, and interests that no longer agitate. It often reasons from principles we do not own, and is tinged with feelings which we cannot share. Often do the most docile and open hearts resort to it with reverent hopes which it does not realize, and close it with a sigh of self-reproach or disappointment. With the deep secrets of the conscience, the sublime hopes, the tender fears, the infinite wonderings of the religious life, it deals less altogether than had been desired; and in touching them does not always glorify and satisfy the heart. We are apt to long for some nearer reflection, some more immediate help, of our existence in this present hour and this English land, where our enemies are not Pharisees and Sadducees, or our controversies about Beelzebub and his demons; but where we would fain know how to train our children, to subdue our sins, to ennoble our lot, to think truly of our dead. The merchant, the scholar, the statesman, the heads of a family, the owner of an estate, occupy a moral sphere, the problems and anxieties of which, it must be owned, Evangelists and Apostles do not approach. Scarcely can it be said that general rules are given, which include these particular cases. For the Christian Scriptures are singularly sparing of general rules. They are eminently personal, national, local. They tell us of Martha and Mary, of Nicodemus and Nathaniel, but give few maxims of human nature, or large formulas of human life: so that their spiritual guidance first becomes available when its essence has been translated from the special to the universal, and again brought down from the universal to the modern application. They are felt to be an inadequate measure of our living Christianity, and to leave untouched many earnest thoughts that aspire and pray within the mind. One divine gift, indeed, they impart to us,—the gracious and holy image of Christ himself. Yet, somehow, even that sacred form appears with more disencumbered beauty, and in clearer light, when regarded at a little distance in the pure spaces of our thought, than when seen close at hand on the historic canvas. It is not that the ideal figure is a subjective fiction of our own, more perfect than the real. Every lineament, every gesture, all the simple majesty, all the deep expressiveness, we conceive to be justified and demanded by the actual portraiture: our least hesitating veneration sees nothing that is not there. But the original artists’ sympathy we feel to have been somewhat different from ours. They have labored to exhibit aspects that move us little; and only faintly marked the traces that to us are most divine. The view is often broken, the official dress turned into a disguise. The local groups are in the way; the possessed and the perverse obtrude themselves in front with too much noise; and the refracting cloud of prophecy and tradition is continually thrown between. So that the image has a distincter glory to the meditating mind than to the reading eye.

All this, oftener perhaps felt than confessed, is perfectly natural and innocent. It betrays the instinctive analysis by which our own affections separate the divine from the human. Paul was right in his principle, that in history the divine element lies hid; is missed at the time, even by those who are its vehicle; and does not parade itself in what they consciously design, but lurks in what they unconsciously execute. It comes forth at “the end of the ages,”—the retrospect of fifty generations instead of the foresight of one. This doctrine is true of individuals, in proportion as they are great and good. They labor at what is most difficult to them, and make it their end; but their appointed power lies in what is easiest. They chiefly prize the beliefs and the virtues most painfully won; but their highest truth dwells in the trusts they cannot help, and their purest influence in the graces they never willed, or knew to be their own. And it is true in history; Paul himself signally illustrating the rule which he had applied to earlier times. He had found, as he supposed, the Providence of the Past, which all had missed, from Moses to Christ; but in his turn he missed, as we perceive, the Providence of the Future, from himself to us. The kind of agency which he anticipated for Christ bears no resemblance to that which his religion has actually exercised. The only fault we can find with Mr. Thom’s admirable exposition is, that he attributes to the Apostle too distinct an apprehension of Christ as an impersonation of moral perfection; and supposes the purpose of the Pauline Christianity to have been the establishment, as sole condition of discipleship, of reverential sympathy with the type of character realized in the Galilean life of Jesus. He says:—

“In contrast with such teachers” (the Ritual and the Dogmatic), “St. Paul, in our present chapter (1 Corinthians ii.), refers both to the matter and the manner of his own ministration of the Gospel. He did not teach it as a Rhetorician, to attract admiration to himself, and give more lively impressions of Paul the Orator than of Christ the Redeemer from sin, nor as a Philosopher, to raise doubtful questions on metaphysical subjects, and become the leader of a speculative school; but as the Apostle of Jesus Christ, he proclaimed to the hearts of men the practical and life-giving Gospel, that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself’; that by the universal Saviour all distinctions were for ever destroyed, and the whole family of God to grow into the common likeness of that well-beloved Son,—for that now neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but the renewal of the affections after the image of the Lord. Where could an entrance be found for party divisions in a doctrine that professed nothing, that aimed at nothing, except to awaken the consciousness of sin within the heart, and, through trust in the God of holiness and love revealed in Jesus, to lead it to repentance and life? All who felt this love of Christ constraining them, cleansing their souls by the divine image that had taken possession of their affections, and, through the mercy it proclaimed, encouraging their penitence to look for pardon from their God, must, of necessity, be one communion; for this Gospel sentiment and hope could create no divisions amongst those who had it,—and those who had it not were outside the Christian pale, and, so far, could make no schisms within it. Now, whence comes this Gospel sentiment, this new principle of life? Were there any who had the exclusive power of communicating it? Did it require to be introduced by any intricate reasonings, by any subtle dialectics, which only the Masters in philosophy had at their command? Not so, says St. Paul;—it is a spiritual feeling, excited by moral sympathy, as soon as Christ is offered to the hearts that are susceptible of the sentiment;—and in whatever bosom there is not enough of the Spirit of God to cause that moral attraction to take place, neither philosophy nor outward forms, nor aught else but the divine image of goodness kept before the heart, can awaken the slumbering sensibilities which are the very faculties of spiritual apprehension, and which, as soon as they are alive, behold in Christ the solution of their own struggling and imperfect existence, their ideal and their rest. In regard to a sentiment so spiritual, a sympathy with the image of God, where is the possibility of introducing party divisions, and violating Christian unity? There can be but two parties,—those that have the sentiment, and those that have it not. All Christians constitute the one,—and as for the other, in relation to Christian unity, they are not in question. Such is the argument of St. Paul in this second chapter.”—p. 30.

It may be quite true that the essential power of Christianity resides in the image, ever present to the heart of Christendom, of a God resembling Christ, and loving those who aspire to approach him through the same resemblance. But we cannot find any traces of such a conception in the writings of Paul. The “faith” on which he exclusively insisted would be very incorrectly defined, we conceive, as a reverence of Christ’s character as morally like God. If we may judge from the negative evidence of his letters, he appears to have had no insight into the interior of his Master’s earthly life, and no great concern about it. There is an entire absence of any moral picture of Jesus, who is presented in the Apostolic writings as an object, not of retrospective veneration, but of expectant reliance; not of admiring trust for personal qualities realized in a past career, but of hope grounded on his official destiny in the future. One beauty of his character is, indeed, appealed to in the Pauline writings, viz. his humility and self-renunciation;54 but even this is recognized, not on historical, but on theocratic grounds; it is illustrated, not by anything in his life, but by the fact of his death, conceived as a voluntary postponement of his theocratic prerogatives, and an abrogation of his exclusive nationality. He was a “spiritual” object to the Apostle of the Gentiles, not from perception of the inner marks and graces of his spirit, but from his being invisible and immortal, reserved in heaven under external escape from the conditions of earthly life. Mr. Thom’s doctrine is a happy development of modern truth from ancient error; but regarded as a mere interpretation, it perhaps sets down to the Apostle’s account a just moral appreciation of the past, instead of an erroneous conception of the Providence of the future. The religion of Christ has assuredly turned out a very different phenomenon from anything that was anticipated at its origin. It was announced as a Kingdom; as the king did not come, it became a Republic. It was conceived as a State; it grew up into a Faith. It was proclaimed as the world’s end; it proved to be a fresh beginning. It was to consummate the Law and the Prophets; and it confounded both. It was to cover Pagan nations with shame and destruction; it embalmed their literature, and was transformed by their philosophy. It was to deliver over the earth to the pure and severe Monotheism of the Hebrews; which, however, it so relaxed as to provoke Islam into existence to proclaim again the monarchy of God. Its subjects were to be gathered from the Jews and half-castes of the Eastern Synagogue; and its most signal glories have been among the Teutonic nations, and the then unsuspected continents of the West. In every element of its internal power, in every direction of its external action, it has burst all the proportions, left behind all the expectations, with which it was born; and how can we continue to try it by the standard of its origin? Are we to say, that, having promised one thing and become another, it is not of God? That might be well, if it had fallen short of its own professions,—disappointed us of dreams it had awakened of glory and delight. But if it has been far better than its word; if, instead of winding up the world’s affairs, it has given them a new career; if for Messiah’s tame millennium we have the grand and struggling life of Christendom, and for his closed books of judgment the yet open page of human history; if for the earthly throne and sceptre of Christ, sweeping away the treasures of past civilization, we have his heavenly image and spirit, presiding over the re-birth of art, the awakening of thought, the direction of law, and the organism of nations; if from the dignity of outward sovereignty he has been raised to that of Lord of the living conscience, not superseding the soul, but exercising it with sorrow and aspiration; then, surely, in so outstripping itself, the religion should win a more exceeding measure of trust and affection. Had it only realized its first assurances, we should have thought it divine; since it has so much surpassed them, we must esteem it diviner. There is no reason for the common assumption that a religion must be purest in its infancy. It is no less surrounded then, than at each subsequent time, with human conditions, and transmitted through human faculties; and when delivered to the world, embodied in action or in speech, necessarily presents itself as a mixed product of divine insight and of human thought,—of the living present and the decaying past; a flash of heavenly fire on the outspread fuel upon the altar of tradition. So it is with the Scriptures of the New Testament; which are not the heavenly source, but the first earthly result and expression of Christianity, and which present the perishable conditions as well as the indestructible life of the religion. Only by the course of time and Providence can these be disengaged from one another, and the accidents of place and nation fall away. If there dwell in the midst a divine productive element, the further it passes from the moment of its nativity, the clearer and more august will it appear. It is like the seed dropped at first on an unprepared and unexpectant ground; which in its earliest development yields but a struggling and scanty growth, but each season, as another generation of leaves falls from the boughs, becomes the source, through richer nutriment, of fuller forms; till at length, when it has spread the foliage of ages, making its own soil, and deepening the luxuriance of its own roots, a forest in all its glory covers the land, and waves in magnificence over continents once bare of life and beauty. So is it with the germ of divine truth cast upon the inhospitable conditions of history; it is small and feeble in its earlier day; but when it has provided the aliment of its own growth, and shed its reproductive treasures on the congenial mind of generations and races, it starts into the proportions of a Christendom, and becomes the shade and shelter of a world.

Much, therefore, as we value all attempts to illustrate the first records of Christianity, and to detach what was purely human and transient in its original form, we think that the religion itself cannot acknowledge the competency of such investigations to decide upon its claims. From a verdict on its first works, it has a right to appeal for judgment upon the whole. It is the religion, not of John and Paul alone, but of Christendom; without a comparative estimate of whose moral and social genius, it can by no means be appreciated. The weakness and inadequacy of all narrower methods of defence will in the end drive the clergy to occupy this larger basis of operations. And the change will be not more favorable to the logic of their cause than to the charity of their disposition. So long as the Scriptures alone are taken as the standard, no more than one creed, at most, can be regarded as concurrent with the Christian faith. But when the entire existence of the religion through eighteen centuries is adopted as the measure, the very interests of advocacy themselves require that the best construction rather than the worst be put upon the errors and eccentricities of all churches within the compass of Christendom. The evidences would, in that case, be destroyed by exclusiveness, and widened in their foundations by comprehensiveness of temper; and the firmness of every disciple’s faith and the energy of his zeal would become assurances, not of his limitation of mind, but of his largeness of heart. Instead of endless divisions, multiplied in the search after unity, we might hope to see the lines of separation become ever fainter; and every test of Christianity withdrawn except that of moral sympathy with the spirit of Christ; a test which, as God alone can apply it, man cannot abuse; and according to which many that, in the ecclesiastic roll, have been first, shall be last, and the last first.